The Ophelia Girls

by Jane Healey

  ‘Anyway,’ he continues, catching her wrist gently and turning her arm as she tries not to make her own sound. ‘I saw this shape in the street and I thought it was a young child. The others were trying to call me back but I was feeling heroic and stupid, and I slipped on rubble and broke the bones here,’ he says, stroking across the thin skin of her inner wrist, making her stomach clench. For a moment, she feels the same queasy flush as she did when a gloved nurse searched for a vein, a zap going through her blood vessels, before he slides his grip to the base of her hand, before she breathes in the smell of his aftershave.

  He studies her palm. Her fingers have reflexively curled in, like the petals of a flower in a rainstorm. He brushes a fingertip along the inside of her index finger to straighten it out, a twitch of movement at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘What happened to the child?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh, it was only a coat or something,’ he says, meeting her eyes now and relaxing his grip on her wrist so she has no choice but to take her arm back. ‘I was an idiot.’

  ‘How can you be an idiot for trying to help someone?’

  ‘You’re not meant to get involved as a photographer, you’re meant to be an impartial observer.’ The keys in his other fist jostle. ‘But we’re not robots, you know. Everyone reaches their limit,’ he says, looking at her as the sun heats her legs to molten warmth, turns the top of her head hot like a halo; the flowers bright against the green around them, the grass tickling her feet.

  ‘Did you know my grandfather?’ she asks.

  ‘I did.’ He looks away from her.

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Clever, self-contained, old-fashioned.’

  None of those descriptions help her much.

  ‘He was mentoring me, as the Americans would say. I wanted to be a lawyer, and the last two summers I was here I spent a lot of time in his office, or the drawing room as he called it, listening as he recited letters and documents to his secretary over the phone, discussing law with him and other things, history, philosophy.’

  ‘I’m jealous of you, I don’t remember him at all.’

  ‘Really?’

  She shakes her head. ‘We didn’t see him at all after the twins were born.’

  ‘That’s strange.’

  ‘Yeah. I was looking through his things today and found these birthday cards from him but he never sent them.’

  ‘I was at your christening, you know.’ He rubs his fingers across his mouth, smiles wryly. ‘I arrived late once you were already down for a nap, but everyone there talked about how proud he was, how he had carried you around the garden of the hall.’

  ‘I wish I could remember.’

  ‘Well, you were only tiny then, no one remembers that far back. He would have been a good grandfather to you, I think. You should ask your parents what happened.’

  ‘You think they’re to blame.’ She’s never had a conversation like this with an adult who wasn’t a teacher or a doctor, whose care she wasn’t under.

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ He smiles as he gathers his bag and stands up.

  ‘Hmm,’ she says, narrowing her eyes playfully. ‘I think you know something. Just you wait, I’ll wear you down.’

  ‘I bet you will,’ he says, head tipped to the side.

  When he’s left her, she replays the look on his face, the tone of his last words. She’s not just imagining it, she’s sure.

  Chapter Six

  In the garden, I pin laundry to the line, wrestling with the clothes pegs and the slack line, missing the cosy rumbling space of the laundromat in London, the familiar faces I used to see, the daytime television that we watched and commented upon as we waited for our loads to finish, the air fusty with fabric conditioner.

  It’s the company I miss from London, from my working years in offices and then afterwards when I was a mother full time; the mostly anonymous kind, the press of other people’s lives that made mine seem smaller and more manageable. Like those little moments of grace in the hospital waiting room amongst so much fear and horror – a mother taking her own mother’s wrinkled hand, a child’s cries halting after the fifth iteration of a mumbled nursery rhyme from a tired father who barked a hysterical laugh that almost set him going again, or the lost teenage visitor who plucked up the courage to ask the receptionist where he was as the waiting room silently cheered him on. I don’t like the quiet here. The open, lonely spaces.

  As I turn to the sun I sigh and close my tired eyes, feel the animal pleasure of warmth on my face, see the blush of my eyelid, the threads of capillaries. I imagine that when I open them again I will see the dry earth of the path through the field towards the woods and be holding a hot fistful of cornflowers. Breathing in the warm smell of the grass, I picture Sarah Lithlingow on the path beside me, fumbling the French words of a song she had once seen Bowie sing, her chin rising and falling with the slide of notes from high to low, holding the long skirt of her coveted Laura Ashley dress with its tiny blue flowers above her knees so she could hop from patch to patch of grass.

  Sarah was my second favourite photo subject. A curvy girl who shrugged at the era’s lust for trimness, looking bemused any time dieting was brought up in conversation. Where did that inner confidence come from, that absolute ease with her body? And is she still like that, or have the years changed her? I hope not.

  ‘I want to look homespun,’ she said, that day at the beginning of the second week of summer as we entered the woods on our way to the river. ‘Like I’m on the American prairies, like I’ve been waiting for my soldier beau to come home. Like there’s a river nearby where I go to sit and feel anguished.’

  ‘Are there rivers in the prairie?’ I asked, clambering over the branch of a fallen tree.

  ‘There are rivers everywhere, Ruth.’

  ‘We should get a photo of you standing on the bank then, and one with the water at your knees before you swoon into it, overcome by the letter that says he’s never coming back—’

  ‘Because he’s died in the war. Oh, or he’s wedded someone else.’ She clutched a hand to the ruffles on her chest. ‘Or maybe I could be a milkmaid . . .’

  ‘Is it a cow she mourns then? One gifted by her sweetheart?’

  She pushed at me and laughed, and we tumbled into the clearing by the river where Joan and Linda Harvey were waiting.

  Linda was the oldest of us at seventeen and would be off to university after the summer. She ringed her eyes with heavy mascara that melted in the river, making dark tears smear down her cheeks that looked all the more tragic on film. Her hair always started off straight but when she emerged from the water it would curl and puff up as it dried, while she used a hand mirror that flashed the sun’s light in a neat searing circle to reapply an orangey lipstick worn almost to the nub.

  ‘Did you bring the camera?’ she asked.

  I lifted it up. It was a Pentax with an adjustable lens and a black and silver casing that shone in the sun. I had borrowed it from my father – without asking him because I thought it likely he would say no.

  ‘I brought the flowers,’ Linda said, nodding towards the pile of foliage as she inhaled the last of her cigarette. ‘Some from the meadow, some from our garden. My dad said, if he knew spending the summer in the countryside would get me flower arranging, he would have done it earlier.’ She rolled her eyes.

  I crouched by the flowers, snapping thinner stems to make them shorter, sawing with the golden sewing scissors I had brought with me, which were really not sharp enough to deal with tough fibrous stems. My fingers were soon sore and sticky with sap. Joan had borrowed Linda’s mirror and was frowning at a blemish on her chin.

  Camille entered the clearing then, waving with that shy dip of her head, her battered satchel thumping against her bare thighs. With her presence, the five Ophelia girls were complete. Camille Prudence, a swot who probably wouldn’t have been friends with girls like Joan and Linda at school but who had been welcomed into their confidence here on summer holiday, an
d here at the river.

  ‘I got distracted,’ she said, sitting down cross-legged.

  ‘By a boy?’ Linda asked.

  ‘By books.’ She nudged her satchel.

  ‘Books,’ Linda replied with a put-upon sigh. ‘Are you going first then, Sarah?’ she called out.

  Sarah kicked off her shoes and edged down the riverbank, her breath punching out at the cold of the water. She laughed when she waded further in, showing us how the water had made her dress billow out like a circus tent around her. ‘Glamorous enough?’ she asked, posing a hand by her head like a model.

  ‘You make an excellent milkmaid,’ I told her, snapping a photo of her as she was.

  She stuck her finger up at me and I took a photo of that too.

  When she sank back into the water, her giddiness turned into something quieter. Her face creasing with that now-familiar fusion of ecstasy and pain at the cold and the concentration needed to float and not be pulled away down the river, the concentration to look serene. When you’re that close to the surface of the water, it can blind you if you don’t pick something to stare at – the blue of the sky, the willow trees, a camera lens.

  ‘She’s forgotten the flowers,’ Camille said by my side, with a touch to my waist that made me twitch. ‘Here.’ She passed them to me. She had tied them into a neat bouquet with string.

  ‘Thanks.’

  She sat next to me on the bank, the both of our feet trailing in the water. Perhaps it was wrong to describe Camille as shy; it was more that she often seemed in her own world, that she was quiet.

  Sarah rearranged her own hair and the flowers, and her dress whose volume and weight was difficult to control. She kneeled on the riverbed and frowned.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, ‘just like that,’ and I took a photo of her. Her head was above the surface, ropes of her hair pulled taut around her as if she were holding the weight of the water, the reflection of the sun making her face golden, and the billow of her dress underneath her pale and ghostly.

  Then she turned onto her back and rolled over and over in the water, laughing, her body churning up silt, the skirt of her dress hoisting up around her waist as her legs kicked. I took a photo of her then too, and I remember that when it was developed the only thing you could see amidst the maelstrom of choppy water and bright sun was a pale arm grasping upwards.

  Afterwards, once Sarah had taken photos of Joan and Linda of Camille, we sat in a circle in the sun, the clink of Joan’s bangles joining the sparkling sound of the river behind us, passing around a flask of sun-warm water as if it were a libation.

  ‘Geoff asked what we’ve been doing, at dinner last night,’ Sarah said, speaking of one of the two teenage boys who were also staying with their families at the cottages. I wasn’t a fan of Geoff – he was brash and had, I thought, the makings of a bully, especially when compared to someone innately considerate like Stuart.

  Most of the families had dinner together, with the wives taking it in turns to cook. It would have been convenient, no doubt, for us to use the long table in the garden of my house and not the three odd tables that were shoved together near the chestnut tree in the cottage Joan’s family took. But my father, when he was not busy at work, did not socialize with the temporary residents, as he once called them. I think he was disappointed that the previous owner of our house hadn’t been able to buy the rest of the estate at the same time, that he wished he owned the whole hamlet, although he would hardly have been able to afford all of the different buildings just on a lawyer’s salary. But if he had an opinion on my taking dinner with the guests, he didn’t share it; as a child I ate dinner with the housekeeper before he got home, and the pattern continued when I was a teenager.

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘I said we were doing girl things, and he sneered and said, oh, women’s lib nonsense?’

  ‘Geoff is a twat,’ Linda pronounced.

  ‘I told Stuart we were doing an art project,’ I said. ‘I think he must have seen me looking at the photos.’

  I had wanted desperately to be an artist back then, and to study art at university, but I hadn’t worked my way up to telling my father that yet. My bedroom had been full of sketchbooks and large art tomes from the library, the inside doors of my wardrobe pinned with collages I had made using magazines and newspapers. I had spent the previous summer outside with watercolours, trying and mostly failing to paint the fields and the valley. If Van Gogh could make a field something spectacular then so could I, I told myself stubbornly, but the yellow of the rapeseed always came out jarring, as though it had been painted by a toddler who didn’t know his colours. Now I was starting to think that photography might be my thing, and portraiture.

  ‘It is an art project,’ Joan said. ‘And they wouldn’t understand, would they?’ She looked around the circle.

  ‘I think they’d just laugh,’ I said.

  ‘Or want to see our clothes go see-through.’ Joan rolled her eyes. ‘Let’s take a vote then. Should we let the boys join us, let them watch?’

  ‘No way,’ I said, surprising myself with the vehemence of my reply.

  ‘Agreed,’ Joan said. ‘Sarah?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Oh, me too, I agree,’ Camille said quickly when Joan looked at her, as if she had not expected to be given a vote.

  ‘Linda?’ Joan asked.

  ‘Agreed,’ Linda said, combing out her hair with her sky-blue fingernails.

  We returned to the river, the cold lick of water on our skin like an oath, unaware that this rule, this promise, would be broken before the end of the summer on the same night our world splintered and fell apart.

  This afternoon, in the domestic present, I’m in the living room with a headache, two baskets of laundry to be put away at my feet, and a lapful of post from the last fortnight that I’ve mustered the courage to sort through. Bills and stray condolence letters, all the admin that needs to take place after a person dies. There’s dozens of memberships to professional organizations and golf clubs and members’ clubs that I need to cancel, all with their own particular idiosyncratic cancellation processes and unnamed secretaries to write to. I wonder how many widows or children let their dead fathers stay members, how many dead men pay fees to still belong to old boys’ clubs, to have newspapers ironed and set out for them, crisp invitations to Captains’ Dinners and drinks at the House of Lords arrive through letterboxes and lie unopened on the mat.

  The world goes on. On the television in front of me, firebombs are lighting up the streets of Northern Ireland, police huddle behind riot shields, masked men stand on corners of brown streets holding guns.

  ‘I kept thinking it would be over each time I came back from an assignment,’ Stuart remarks, standing in the doorway. ‘But look at this shit.’

  ‘Language,’ I murmur, because I know it will amuse him.

  ‘You don’t even say “shit” in this house?’ he asks sotto voce, coming to sit beside me.

  ‘Not when the twins are around. We try anyway.’

  ‘Wow,’ he says, ‘Ruth Sinclair as a mother, who would have believed it.’

  ‘Ruth Hawkins.’

  ‘Mea culpa.’ He holds up his hands.

  ‘Should I take offence at that?’ I ask, turning to face him. When he was young his face was narrow and fey, but with age it’s broadened to be handsome. I always think that unfair; that men are supposed to get better looking with age and women lose their bloom.

  ‘Well, you were always saying you didn’t want to be a mother.’

  ‘Mum,’ a voice calls from the hall, ‘where’s my—’

  Maeve pauses in the doorway. There’s something accusatory about the way she looks at us – because she doesn’t like my attention not being on her and the twins, or because she thinks I look too cosy with Stuart? There’s a proprietariness to my children that I don’t remember ever having for my father. Maybe I would have had it for my mother. Maybe, I thought often, with bruising self-recrimination, I didn�
�t know how to be a parent at all, that being motherless had made me defective.

  ‘Where’s your what?’ I ask.

  ‘Never mind,’ she says, and turns on her heel.

  ‘I’m not sure I ever pictured myself as a mother to a teenager, that’s true,’ I tell Stuart.

  ‘Yeah?’ he says, but his attention has drifted to the television. I can’t compete with firebombs, with the nervy commentator and his clipped consonants.

  ‘I worry about her – Maeve. She’s had all our attention and I think it’s an adjustment for her to be a normal teenager,’ I say, watching the side of his face and glancing at the cityscape of Hong Kong on the screen as the news continues. ‘One of her doctors said it was important not to smother her now, to let her be. It’s hard though, not to worry about her every minute of every day.’

  ‘She seems well adjusted from what I’ve seen,’ he says, reaching for the TV controller and turning it off, focusing on me with a concern that reminds me of how he was when he was a boy. Back then, I knew that I could say something offhand about anything bothering me, pretending it didn’t mean anything, and have him catch my hand and say, Hey, what did you mean, or, Are you all right, what can I do to help? There had been something intoxicating about his friendship then, almost devotional.

  ‘She’s probably far more sensible than we were at her age,’ he adds, as if he too is reminiscing.

  ‘She’ll be off to university before I know it. It’s mad. Where the hell have the years gone?’

  ‘Don’t tell me that,’ he groans, rubbing a hand over his chin.

  At university the three of us – Alex, Stuart and I – had been thick as thieves in our shared student digs, with late-night conversations about politics fuelled by alcohol and, if we could scrounge it up, pot, where everything felt so urgent and vital, as if we could solve the world’s problems at 3 a.m. in a Cambridge bedsit, and lazy hungover mornings when we sprawled in the kitchen listening to the tinny sounds of the radio, making fry-ups with cheap squashed vegetables from the market and laughing at the gossip of our circle. I know friendships come and go at that age, that people change as they get older, but I had been friends with him since we were children and had thought he would always be there in the background of my life. Then he vanished soon after Maeve was born – at least that’s what it felt like. He went abroad and gave no forwarding details, never replied to any letters or calls. To have him back, to have him look at me with kindness, have him joke across the dinner table on a warm summer evening, feels like I have been forgiven for some crime I did not know I had committed.