The Ophelia Girls

by Jane Healey

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Well, I have,’ Sarah said. ‘And it wasn’t like it usually is – I was the one who wanted it.’

  ‘Didn’t you worry what might happen?’ I asked.

  ‘I started praying again until my period arrived. Dear Lord,’ she recited, clasping her hands together, closing her eyes so that I had to pull her out of the way of a nearby tree, ‘I swear I’ll be good, I swear I’ll never do it again.’ She laughed and opened her eyes. ‘And then I did it again anyway.’

  ‘Are you going to marry him?’ Camille asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to,’ Linda declared with a snort. ‘You don’t have to tie yourself to the first boy you sleep with.’

  ‘Why haven’t you had sex then yet?’

  ‘Because I haven’t been impressed with the calibre of my offers,’ she said with a sniff.

  ‘Would you sleep with Stuart?’ Joan asked me, looking sly.

  ‘No way.’

  ‘You two looked awfully cosy last night.’

  Before dinner, as the families congregated in the garden of Sarah’s cottage, Stuart had sat beside me on the grass as I flicked through a book of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. They were all in black and white except for two pages in the middle. You look like her, he had said, pointing at Ophelia.

  It’s just the hair, I replied, ignoring the soft way he was looking at me.

  I think it’s great what you’re doing, you girls, he said.

  You do?

  It’s art, isn’t it. And recreating paintings in photos, making it modern, I think it’s groovy.

  Thanks, I said, nudging his knee with mine.

  His smile was sweet.

  I haven’t seen you much this summer, I said. He was too busy with my father, with his books. I resented the time he spent in my father’s office. I wanted Stuart’s attention even though I didn’t return his romantic interest. I wanted to be admired, desired; what girl doesn’t?

  I’ve been studying. And you’ve been busy with the girls.

  There was a cry then, one of the children who had fallen over, but when no parent came running, Sarah walked over and picked the little girl up, singing to her, rocking her from side to side.

  I don’t think I ever want to be a mother, I said suddenly.

  Then don’t be, Stuart replied easily.

  Just like that.

  Just like that. He leaned back on his elbows. He was so much more comfortable in his body than I was, I thought, looking at him then, lithe in his tight flares and form-fitting collared top, the furthest thing from a stumbling child.

  You know, if you’re going to apply to art school, you’ll need more than photographs and watercolours, he said.

  Who said I was applying to art school?

  Do they do life drawing at your school?

  No. Still lifes.

  He was right. I knew that any drawing of a vase filled with dry flowers or a bowl of pale apples was unlikely to light any fires in the admissions department. But then, my father wouldn’t let me go to art school anyway.

  I humbly put myself forward for your model then, he said, just as one of the fathers clapped his hands together and announced dinner was ready.

  What, naked? I hissed as we stood up.

  He looked embarrassed. Not necessarily. I mean, you can just draw me in my shorts.

  We reached the table before I could answer, but as I sat in between Sarah and Camille and ate that night’s lentil stew, my only thought was, Why would I draw him when I could draw one of the girls instead?

  When we arrived at the river the next day, the weather was already changing, the clouds growing darker and a wind picking up.

  Linda cupped her hands around her cigarette to light it, passing it to Sarah after she had taken a drag.

  ‘Can I?’ Camille asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  I watched as she tilted her head, as her cheeks sucked in and eyes narrowed. Was it just because I knew she was part French that she looked so cool smoking?

  ‘So who are we today?’ Sarah asked, nodding to the river.

  The water was darker than the sky, murky, green. And yet still so inviting. Maybe even more so.

  ‘Ophelia, of course,’ I declared, standing up.

  I pulled my jumper over my head, leaving me in only the vintage slip.

  Linda wolf-whistled.

  Stepping into the river, I could see the surface prickled by raindrops. I was cold and the water felt sharp, the stones on the riverbed painful on my feet, but the discomfort, the chill I dipped down into, felt welcome, thrilling.

  ‘You need flowers in your hair,’ Sarah called out after she had taken a few photographs. I wondered if you would even be able to see me on film in today’s dim light or if I would melt into the river.

  Camille clambered into the water, clutching a few branches of white sweet peas. I could feel her approach by the wave she pushed before her, the crest of it breaking over my side.

  I stood up, my slip plastering to me and the hairs on my skin standing up at the chill. The rain was still falling, sparse thick drops on the top of my head as Camille wove the flowers into my hair, her mouth crowded with pins to fix them in place, a hand steadying me when I found myself slipping on a large smooth stone.

  I thought about what we might look like if someone was taking a photo right now, and flinched from her hands.

  ‘You OK?’ she asked.

  She was looking at me intently. It felt like something had changed between us since I bought her that dress.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, a cold wash trickling through my arms and legs. I wanted Camille to step away from me, to ignore me. I wanted the other girls to leave Camille and me here alone.

  The rain was getting harder now, the leaves of the trees around the river shaking and twitching, the girls holding arms and scarves above them.

  I lay down in the water, pushed my arms back and forth, feeling the strength in my muscles, imagining I could swim for miles down the river and find myself somewhere new. I had never lain on my back and stared up at a raining sky, and as I blinked and jerked with each drop on my eyes and the delicate skin beneath them, I gasped. And when the rain lashed down in sheets, I let out a kind of scream, delighted, deranged, feeling as if I was lying in the middle of a storm, surrounded on all sides by nature’s fury.

  I heard voices calling for me and half swam, half crawled towards the bank.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Linda said, holding out her hand for me to climb onto the grass.

  ‘Did you get any photos?’ I asked, out of breath, swiping the rain from my face as the flowers from my hair stuck to my skin.

  Sarah nodded. ‘Before we hid the camera from the rain.’

  ‘Are we going to stick it out here?’ I asked the group, carefully avoiding looking at Camille although I could feel her looking at me.

  The rain was slicking my arms and legs, coming down hard through the leaves and trees across the clearing where we sheltered. We were all drenched. Then there was a bright flash of light and I blinked, the negative image of the trees seared into my eyelids, white and blazing.

  ‘Is it better to stay in a forest with trees or be out in the fields when it thunders?’ Linda asked Camille, her voice rising as the thunder rolled its way through the woods.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied.

  ‘I think we go back,’ Sarah said after another lightning strike.

  ‘We’ll be sitting ducks!’ I called out as she gathered her scarf around her head and fled, Linda following and then Joan, who let out a gleeful scream at the next clap of thunder.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, and then ran after them too.

  My bare feet were unsteady on the wet ground, my sodden slip hobbling me until I hiked it up my thighs. I could hear Camille right behind me, could hear both of our breaths, the slap of our feet on earth and fallen leaves.

  Another lightning strike cracked down and a roar of wind came straight towa
rds us, every branch creaking and the leaves heaving like rough seas.

  Camille gasped as the thunder hit, but she didn’t sound afraid. I looked back, stumbling over a root. She had stopped and was looking up at the sky through the tumultuous treetops, her eyes shining wildly.

  ‘Come on,’ I called, ‘we need to get back.’

  She gave no sign that she had heard me. Her chest was heaving like she was taking breaths before diving into deep water.

  I grabbed for her hand and tugged, feeling the taut resistance of her muscles, thinking in the panic of the storm that she wasn’t going to move, that I couldn’t get her to leave and the storm would take her. Then she met my eyes and gave in. Her fingers were slippery and cold, and as we left the boundary of the woods for the open fields, the rain driving in sheets across them, I held tighter.

  We used the stile to cross into my father’s field and bent low towards the hill as we climbed through the long grass. The storm was further away now, the sky a lighter grey, and I could see the tiny figures of the other girls waiting in the shelter of the barrier of trees.

  I let go of her hand and sped up, holding my slip down so it wouldn’t ride up above my knickers. I felt burning cold now; the thrill of the storm was bleeding away and the image of Camille standing still in the maelstrom, wild and beautiful, was left in its wake.

  ‘I have your jumper,’ she said when we came to a stop.

  ‘Thanks.’ I bent over, catching my breath. My chilled feet were flecked by grass and dirt.

  ‘We thought we lost you two,’ Linda said. ‘Thought you’d drowned in the storm for real.’

  Their clothes, meagre as they were, were plastered to the skin, translucent or slipping off shoulders, skin flushed from the run and beaded with water. Here, out of the shade of the trees, all I could see was our – their – nakedness.

  I pulled the jumper over my head.

  ‘Tea at mine?’ Sarah offered.

  ‘I’m going back to the house,’ I said, feeling exposed, as though the rain had washed away some barrier of protection and bared some secret held deep in my body.

  The gravel of the pathway hurt as I ran along it away from the girls, and I thought it was good that it hurt, that my cold skin felt sore, my ribs aching with a stitch.

  Back in my bedroom, I stripped without looking at myself, putting on a different jumper and pyjama trousers, and burrowed under the blankets of my bed, pulling them around my head so that the air I breathed became wet and thin.

  Maybe Stuart was right, I thought, maybe I should draw him. Maybe spending so much time with the girls, photographing them, considering their bodies and mine, was confusing me.

  *

  I’m staring down at the white of the ceramic sink in the kitchen, at the way the water of the tap eddies over the teaspoons I dropped in, their brown coffee residue smearing towards the plughole.

  The stairs creak and I pick up the sponge to wipe the spoons clean.

  ‘Raspberries?’ I offer, turning to see Maeve enter the room. Maeve who looks both lethargic and wary, her shoulders raised.

  She shrugs.

  ‘More for me then. What have you been up to today?’

  ‘Just resting.’

  ‘That’s good.’ I open the fridge and look at nothing. I used to know everything she did, and now I don’t know how to reach her, what tone to use, what to say. ‘Dad said you’ve been thinking about university.’

  ‘No,’ she says sharply.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Dad brought it up, I wasn’t thinking about it. I’m too tired.’

  ‘Are you having any symptoms?’ I check, picking up raspberries one by one from the plastic carton.

  ‘No. I’m just tired.’

  ‘They said exercise might help to build energy. If you ever want company for a longer walk—’

  ‘Mum, I’ve just said I’m tired.’

  ‘I know, darling. I just don’t want you to get stuck.’ I don’t want you to step away from the world before your life has even begun. ‘I’m sure some summer sun will do the trick.’

  Her quick smile is fleeting as a hummingbird.

  It’s when she passes me towards the back door that I smell it. ‘Have you been smoking?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can smell smoke.’

  ‘I was wearing Dad’s fleece earlier – I was cold – it must have transferred from that.’ She looks betrayed.

  ‘That must be it,’ I say, and she slinks off and I know I have lost even more of her goodwill.

  The light switch in the pantry blows a fuse, and as I climb the rickety ladder to the fuse box under the stairs, I think that Maeve and I were so close when she was ill. I knew what every shift of her body, every twitch of her face meant. I knew, because she told me, the catalogue of her body’s pain and discomfort.

  I knock on her bedroom door and wait, hearing a shuffle – the sound of something being put away? – and then her voice, slow in the way only a teenager’s can be. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s me, can I come in?’

  Another pause. ‘OK.’

  She’s sitting on her bed, hands clutched in the sheets to either side of her. The wallpaper is still the same, the one I used to stare at as I lay on my floor listening to records. I could blink and the other girls would be here too, painting their nails, sewing beads and sequins onto the hems of skirts.

  ‘I just wanted to come and say hi,’ I say.

  She looks at me balefully.

  ‘Are you worried about next week?’

  ‘Next week?’

  ‘Hospital, the check-up.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I sit next to her gingerly, reach out to brush her hair back over her shoulder. ‘Were you trying on perfumes?’ I ask. There’s a strange smell in here, like perfumes or flowers.

  ‘Mum,’ she says.

  ‘Am I only going to get one-word answers from you this summer?’ I tease.

  She blows out a breath. ‘I don’t want to think about hospital.’

  ‘I’m sure it’ll go fine.’

  She gives me a look as if to say, How can you know, don’t you remember that I wasn’t fine? But it’s my role as parent to lie optimistically, to tell my children that their futures are only rosy.

  At the door I step over two pink petals lying on the carpet.

  Later, trailing the twins around the back garden, I try to find the plant she must have picked the petals from but I can’t remember the shade. None of the flowers here are really all that pink.

  After that summer, I had never looked at bouquets of flowers the same way again. When Alex once bought me a bunch of roses at university, in a fumbling attempt at high romance, I had to tell him that I was a girl who didn’t like flowers, that they had always reminded me of funerals.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The wait for the next photoshoot with Stuart feels torturous. Maeve tries to roam the gardens, to read books in the sun and pluck tiny petals from the lavish blooms of the hydrangeas, to sit on the grass making daisy chains. But she can’t settle out there, can’t relax with the echoing voices of the twins playing near the patio, so she gives up and retreats to her room with its locked door, where she can listen to CDs on loop as she lies on her bed with her feet propped up on the wall; where she can try all her clothes on and study herself in her mirror.

  When she looks at her reflection now, after seeing the photos he took, she looks different. The angles of her face, the plush give of her mouth, the freckles across her cheeks. Like she has been made something new, transformed by his camera.

  On Friday, she ventures down for breakfast and sits at the kitchen table, peeling an orange slowly and watching the clock. ‘It’s good to see you up and about so early for once,’ her mother says, as she attempts to corral the twins out for the day. When they’re finally ready to leave, Maeve stands at the door to wave them off so she can be sure they’ve gone.

  The door to the annexe is open when she arrives there, ready to become Ophelia fo
r him.

  ‘I’ve filled the bath with a hose,’ Stuart says, his warm smile making up for her wait. ‘I wouldn’t drink from it, but aside from that I’d say it’s safe.’ He winks. ‘Oh, and I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve got a dress for you.’

  She glances down at the dress she’s currently wearing, the same pale one from the field photoshoot. The rest of her clothes are too modern to pretend to be some Pre-Raphaelite heroine; it would be a strange kind of horrible to wear a t-shirt and a denim skirt in a bath and be photographed like that, as if she had just been dumped in it.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asks, bringing it out from a bag. ‘I got it from a vintage shop although I don’t know if it is actually all that old.’

  ‘Oh, it’s gorgeous.’ The dress has two layers – a cream-coloured silk slip underneath a gauzy short-sleeved overlayer embroidered with lace and tiny beads, and with pearl buttons from the waist to the neckline. It has something of Victorian underthings about it, she thinks, or the faded glamour of an opera house.

  The silk and the lace might be see-through in the water but that isn’t a surprise. Deciding what underwear to put on beneath a wet dress has been a decision that took many hours, which was embarrassing perhaps, but she had realized halfway through, as she flung an old bra down at her feet, that thinking about the photoshoots, and Stuart, means she has hardly had a chance to think about her future, nor to feel the deadening weight of her past.

  ‘I’ll check the bath if you get changed,’ he says, and then slips out of the Dutch door to the old vegetable patch.

  She peels her own dress over her head, and steps across the room to pick up his gift in her white lace bra and knickers which are pink and frilled and were part of her Christmas present from her mother, along with a pack of thongs which made her feel awkward, as if she were somehow pushing Maeve to be a proper teenager, to have someone – a teenage boy naturally – to show them to, because she certainly couldn’t wear them to hospital.

  The slip feels almost wet against her legs, the pearl of the buttons hard little nubs underneath her fingertips. She feels a similar nervous flutter in her stomach that she did before each operation, until she steps outside and feels the warmth of the sun on her body.