The Ophelia Girls

by Jane Healey

  ‘Yes.’ She shoves him playfully.

  ‘Well, that’s good, we don’t want life to imitate art.’

  He puts his arm around her shoulder and she wishes the field could stretch on forever, that the weeks of his visit could lengthen, this summer never end.

  She feels both of them slow down before the gate and the line of trees and bushes, while they’re still hidden from the front lawn. ‘What were you like when you were younger?’ she asks. She’s been thinking of that photo she found in her grandfather’s office.

  ‘You mean when I stayed here?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He has a rueful smile. ‘A dreamer and a bit of a fool. I had principles then, I was idealistic.’

  ‘And now you’re not?’ she asks, shading her eyes from the sun.

  ‘Now I’m not. But you should be.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can be, not any more.’ Not with what she knows now, about how easily the body decays and meets its end, about pain and suffering.

  ‘OK, but a dreamer then,’ he says, stroking a finger down her arm. ‘You should be a dreamer. You shouldn’t hurry to grow up and leave that behind.’

  If he says she shouldn’t grow up, does that mean he only thinks of her as a child? That he’s letting her down kindly? Are the photos of her the only thing he wants?

  Chapter Ten

  Michael woke us up in the middle of the night and Iza wasn’t far behind. Normally I can get them to go back to sleep in their own beds but Michael was inconsolable, hot-cheeked and sobbing as he described his nightmare of being in hospital. It was Michael whose bone marrow transplant saved Maeve’s life; his was the closest match and, after consultations with the doctors and the team at the hospital, and a conversation in terms that a three-year-old might be able to understand, we had given our permission for the operation. The ethical argument is that the minor pain of a low-risk operation is less than the pain of losing a sibling, of a family imploding, and I accept that, and I wouldn’t have made any other choice, but I still feel so guilty.

  But what’s one more piece of guilt to all the rest? I thought last night, as Michael wriggled and poked me with his sharp feet.

  They are both too tired to get up to much mischief today so I have left them in front of a video, with two fondant fancies each, and have retreated to the attic, my eyes and mouth dry and sore with exhaustion.

  Why try and sort through the attic when I still have the junk room, two bedrooms and many cupboards to work through? Because I had the thought earlier, seeing Michael lying there beside me in the white light of the morning, that maybe I could find something of my mother’s up here.

  But, in the first box I open after clambering over the insulation and beams, it is my history I find and not hers. The soft slide of a silk slip through my fingers and the memory of visiting the village jumble sale with Camille to buy it.

  What did I know about Camille at that point? That the ends of her hair looked neat and thick as a brush, that she liked to read, that she seemed like the kind of girl who should wear glasses but that I had never seen her squint, that all her clothes looked handmade; that, though she was quiet, there was a rootedness to the way she held herself and moved through the world that intrigued me. That sometimes she looked sad and I wanted to be the one who made her smile.

  We went to the library first, and stuffed both the wicker basket I had brought and her satchel with heavy art books. Her well-worn satchel had belonged to her favourite teacher who had given it to her after the shopping bag she was using for her schoolwork fell apart in his class, she told me, looking at me side-on, uncertainly, as though I would tease her.

  In the village I noticed passersby turn to look at us in the way they did with young women in youthful fashions. Leering, fascinated, judgemental. But while I felt my face scowl, Camille gave no indication she had noticed them looking.

  ‘Do you go to church?’ I asked her, as we walked through the graveyard to the village church.

  ‘Only at school. Do you?’

  ‘The same,’ I said, holding out the door for her as we entered the cool of the nave, blinking at the change in light.

  ‘My mother was raised a Catholic,’ she said softly. ‘French Catholic.’ Her placid expression had changed on entering the church, become troubled as she looked towards the crucifix.

  Do you still believe in it, in God? I wanted to ask, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you could say when there were nosy church ladies leaning over their stalls of bric-a-brac. ‘So is that where your name comes from?’

  ‘I think so.’ She shrugged, seemed to come back to herself.

  There was a table full of old metal tins and signs, their edges rusted, and a box of miscellaneous tools; another of cakes and dry biscuits, the dregs of last year’s bitter jams. On the table underneath a church plaque to the fallen of the First World War, there was a pile of knitted baby clothes, booties and hats and cardigans, in soft yellows and greens and pinks. We found what we were looking for near the back, a rack of second-hand dresses and coats and a cardboard box of Victorian underthings – faded camisoles, bloomers and slips.

  I tried not to show how excited I was so that the hawkish woman manning the stall didn’t overcharge us, and acted as if I didn’t really want the mauve slip with the delicate lace edging, or the ivory camisole with its ribbon hem and slender straps.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ Camille whispered at my shoulder as we looked through the rack. She glanced back at the box and its silken treasures. This close to her I could see a single white hair growing from her widow’s peak.

  ‘Are you going to get this?’ I asked, touching the tea dress with its delicate floral print that she had been studying intensely.

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t have any money,’ she said.

  When I asked the stallholder how much the slip and camisole were, Camille pointed out that the slip had been dyed mauve at a later date, that Edwardian silk didn’t come in that shade, and the price duly dropped. I bought a lace shawl too and a roll of floral fabric, and when I unhooked the tea dress from the rack and placed it on the pile, I felt Camille grow still beside me.

  ‘And this too,’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ Camille said, as we walked home with our bounty. She had asked the stallholder for tissue paper to fold her dress in, slid it carefully between the library books.

  ‘If you went back later someone else might have bought it.’

  ‘I can’t pay you back,’ she said, looking away from me as she hoisted the strap of her bag higher.

  ‘It was a gift, it’s fine. You make most of your own clothes, right?’ I said, to change the subject.

  She nodded. ‘I sew them by hand,’ she said, as if it were a secret. ‘I haven’t saved up for a sewing machine yet.’

  The idea that a sewing machine might be beyond someone’s reach surprised me, made me think I had really been living in a bubble.

  ‘Even zips? That’s impressive.’

  ‘Buttons are cheaper.’

  ‘I let our housekeeper take my hems up,’ I said, feeling chastened. I should be as self-sufficient, as clever as Camille was. Both she and Stuart were studying hard, they were thinking seriously of their futures, while I was still hedging bets or avoiding thoughts of choosing a university subject. I vowed that I would tell my father I wanted to study art, or at least art history.

  That evening, my father found me in the room our housekeeper called the scullery, hand-washing the slips and the floral fabric along with the two dresses I had been using to pose in the river. It was rather pointless to wash them when they would just be getting wet again, but the things from the church smelled like fusty old woman’s perfume, and I’d noticed that my dresses from the river, which I usually hung to dry hooked over my wardrobe, were making my room smell of mud.

  I looked up when he entered holding a tin of boot polish and felt embarrassed, wishing he would turn back before he saw what I was doing.

&nb
sp; ‘It’s good to see you wearing dresses again,’ he said. He looked at the plain shorts and t-shirt I was wearing, a marked contrast with the dress dripping dry next to me. You look like an urchin, he would sometimes say of my corduroy trousers and jumble sale woollen jumpers, like a grubby boy.

  ‘It’s just a costume,’ I said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘The girls were talking about putting on a play.’

  ‘A play?’

  ‘It probably won’t happen. It’s just a game.’

  ‘Well, you should think about looking smart, being ladylike.’ He seemed a touch embarrassed by that word. ‘You’re not a child any more, you have to think about the future, your future.’

  What dresses had to do with my future, I didn’t know, I thought sourly. He would have liked an elegant daughter, a feminine one – although how was I supposed to know what ladylike was when the only female company at home was the housekeeper, and the teachers at the village school were mumsy and plain? It wasn’t that I didn’t like dresses or skirts; it was that I liked them just for me, that I didn’t want to be put inside a box labelled ‘girl’ and have all the expectations that came with it placed upon me. But in the river I could pretend to be some tragic heroine, some beautiful creature outside time and space, with only other girls who knew what I meant to see me. In the river I was in control.

  I remembered my earlier decision. ‘I’ve been thinking about applying for art history, at university,’ I said. My hands were itching as they dried, as they clutched the edge of the sink.

  ‘Art history,’ he repeated.

  ‘You can go on to work in auction houses afterwards, in antique appraisal,’ I said, trying to appeal to his interests. But I should have known that though he might be interested in buying old prints and gilded letter-openers, jewelled snuff boxes and marble figurines, the idea of his own daughter being involved in anything to do with sales was unsatisfactory.

  ‘What’s wrong with English or History, or Classics?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  He placed the boot polish onto the shelf next to the brushes. I could tell by his mannerisms, by his stiffness, that he was disappointed in me, that my idea was to him ridiculous. My face was hot.

  ‘Art history,’ he repeated again. ‘Is that even a proper subject?’

  ‘It’s a new department at Cambridge.’

  ‘You only get one shot at university, Ruth,’ he said. He wasn’t looking at me; he was looking at the dress dripping onto the draining board.

  ‘It was just an idea,’ I said.

  ‘If you need more money for clothes, let me know,’ he said and left the room.

  I plunged my hand into the water of the sink and fumbled for the plug, watching the water ebb down and down, listening to the creaking suck of the pipes and imagining my shame gurgling away too.

  After dinner, we retreated to Linda’s cottage bedroom with two bottles of wine, the sewing machine and our finds – shawls, fabric, a lace curtain and an old floral bedsheet. It was stifling even with the small window open, and when we stood to dance and pose and sing along with my record player, we had to duck under the beams of the ceiling, catch ourselves on the narrow walls with our hands as we spun.

  ‘What do you think?’ Linda asked, smearing eyeliner down her cheeks. ‘Do I look sad enough?’

  ‘Pretty enough,’ Sarah said, kissing her cheek as Linda swatted her away laughing.

  Joan had got me to lie down on the floor swathed in a sheet, arms crossed over my chest. Camille was crouching over me applying blusher, her swaying motions betraying her drunkenness.

  ‘Well?’ I asked with my eyes closed, trying to look serene. ‘Do I make a pretty corpse?’

  ‘A suntanned one maybe,’ Linda said with a snort, and I tried to kick her.

  ‘Or a vampire,’ Camille said, looking down at me, her small hands on my hot cheeks.

  ‘I’d need blood-red lipstick for that,’ I said, thinking of how she might tilt my chin up and apply it slowly and carefully, concentrating as if she were reading a book. But Sarah declared that it was her turn with the sheet and I was pulled up and unwound like a mummy, four pairs of hands tugging and twisting until I was free.

  Linda’s father looked in on us at midnight, his smile indulgent, and declared we were all mad. But when we didn’t laugh in response, when Joan, in her froth of lace and a veil made from a curtain covering her face, bowed and said, Thank you, good sir, he looked for a moment deeply unnerved.

  *

  In the night, I wake slick with sweat, shivering, a cry caught in my mouth. I stumble out of the bed – in the bedroom that used to belong to my father, to him and my mother before she died – and away from Alex who sleeps on oblivious.

  Switching on the light of the hall bathroom, I wince and peel my nightie away from my damp chest. In the hot shower I glance down the pale flesh of my body, watching rivulets of water, the drops that fall from my chin to the floor; I try to grasp the liquid edges of my nightmare, try to cup it in my thoughts. I was drowning, and it wasn’t for show. I was somewhere narrow, dark, and the water was rising up from my toes. Someone else was there – in the water? Outside it?

  Tipping my head up, I let the water beat hard on my face. I know already that although the imagery of my dream is fading, the sensation will stay with me for the day at least, and maybe longer.

  The sudden screech of the shower door opening has me yelping, my feet slipping before a hand catches my arm.

  ‘That hurts,’ I hiss with embarrassment, wiping the water out of my eyes as Alex lets me go.

  ‘I was only trying to stop you from braining yourself,’ he says, bemused, his voice creaky with sleep. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine, just a bad dream, sorry,’ I say as I turn off the shower.

  I step out, wind a towel around me as he drinks from the tap. One morning, not long after the twins were born, I was so sleep-deprived that the sound of the tap running, his quiet gulps, was enough to sear me with fury, and I remember shouting, Why don’t you ever bring a glass to bed like a normal person! and then bursting into tears as he led me back to bed and took the baby monitor with him to the living room.

  Back in bed, my hair wet on the pillow but the night warm now, my legs and arms throbbing with heat, I feel Alex turn his head towards me.

  ‘Was it the hospital?’

  ‘Was what?’

  ‘Your dream?’ he asks.

  ‘No, I can’t remember what it was.’

  ‘You’re sure you don’t want to see someone again?’

  ‘One nightmare doesn’t require a course of therapy.’

  ‘I just don’t want it to get like it was before, when you weren’t sleeping, when you were running yourself ragged.’

  ‘It won’t, I’m fine. Maeve is better now.’ I push my heels into the bed, flex my knees until they ache. I lie so easily to him and it’s horrible. I’ve never told him about the girls and what happened that summer. By some mutual unspoken agreement, Stuart never brought it up at university either.

  ‘That night in London,’ Alex says, ‘when you vanished, when I found you outside in the rain . . .’ His hand strokes my shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry I scared you.’

  ‘It was a scary time. But we got through it.’ He turns on his back. ‘And we’ll get through the next thing,’ he says sleepily.

  Alex slept with someone else once, while Maeve was hospitalized. He was on a business trip, had had too many sambucas on an empty stomach after a day in the blazing sun; as he explained to me later, penitent, cheeks red with shame. He had called me crying right afterwards, incoherent, in the middle of the night, and I remember my only fury being that I had thought it was the hospital ringing to say that she was dead, that I had had to put the phone to my ear knowing that my daughter was dead, that this was it, that the world had shattered apart. That it was only my husband having sex with a woman whose face and identity he couldn’t even recall felt so much less painful
, important, compared to that.

  Later I wondered if I hadn’t deserved it. I haven’t been fair to Alex, I haven’t been the easy uncomplicated wife he could have had. And could I judge him for how he dealt with everything, after what I did a few months after that phone call?

  It was the rain that hid my sins that night in London when he found me in the communal gardens of our flat, because if it hadn’t started bucketing down I would have had to explain why I was soaked to the skin, why I smelled of silt and pondwater, why there were weeds still caught in my hair.

  Chapter Eleven

  Maeve has felt in a daze since her morning with Stuart in the field. It is as if, she thinks as she lies on the sofa in the sitting room one afternoon, her legs dangling over the arm, her head tipped so far back she can feel the pulse in her neck, she has walked into the world of his camera and has yet to return.

  Stuart is away shooting at one of his stately homes, but he promised her he would have the photos to show her soon. She hopes that the spell won’t be broken when she sees her image, that it won’t ruin her memories of those perfect hours in the middle of the grasses with the tick of crickets throbbing, the heat of the sun warming every inch of her, Stuart’s unblinking focus on her.

  ‘Nothing on TV?’ her father asks and she sits up quickly, embarrassed to be lying like that, languid and wanting.

  ‘Nope,’ she says, looking at the black screen in the corner of the room as he sits beside her.

  He tugs one of her curls, and she drops her shoulder so his hand doesn’t brush against it. Suddenly it feels wrong to have him touch her like he usually does – not because he’s doing something wrong, but because she is— No, that isn’t right, she hasn’t done anything wrong either, not really, she just feels – she feels that right now she only wants to be touched by one person and him alone.

  ‘Are you OK? You’ve been quiet lately,’ her father asks.

  ‘Am I usually gregarious?’

  ‘You can be, with the twins.’

  ‘That’s because I feel outnumbered.’