The Ophelia Girls

by Jane Healey

  ‘Oh my God,’ she breathes when she reaches the scene, ‘it looks incredible’. Stuart has brought in bunches and bunches of meadow flowers – sweet peas, dahlias, cornflowers, zinnias, foxgloves, lavender – and placed them in troughs and pots propped on bricks and stools so that the bath seems to float in the middle of a lush flower garden.

  ‘You look even more incredible.’ He has the sleeves of his shirt rolled above his elbows and there is something black and coiled in his hand. ‘I think the florist thought I was buying them for a wedding. Oh, and the vintage shop said a ribbon would look good around your waist.’

  She stands in front of him as he loops a black velvet ribbon high over her ribcage, tying a bow at the front, the whisper of his fingers there making her shiver. ‘The water should be warm, but you’ll tell me if you get cold?’

  She nods.

  ‘Your bath awaits, madam.’ He holds out a hand so that she can clamber in.

  Her foot slips on the bottom and she laughs nervously. The water is as warm as he’d promised, almost body temperature. Standing in the raised-up bath she is just taller than him.

  ‘Hi,’ he smiles, and she smiles back.

  ‘Do you want my hair to get wet right away?’

  ‘Maybe put it over the side first,’ he says as she sinks down, one hand holding her hair up, the other on the lip of the bath, its rust rough to the touch. She feels the water soak up into her dress and make the fabric heavy, plaster it to her body as Stuart watches.

  ‘Will I do?’ she jokes, but it isn’t really a joke.

  ‘Perfect.’

  The water is cradling her, rocking with every shift as if she is in a shallow sea. He hands her a bouquet to hold and then lifts his camera. He’s closer than in the field and this time she can hear the sound of the shutter, and the clicking sound of one of his wrists – the one that had broken? – as he works.

  At first she poses with her neck on the lip of the bath, but then he has her slip further down so that the water reaches her collarbones. He directs her to splay the fingers of her empty hand over the edge and then by her side, then above her head. The bouquet rests on her middle; her feet meet the end of the long bath. He circles around her, squeezing past flowers, changing lenses, checking the light with a separate light meter.

  The sky is blue today with the occasional small fluffy cloud; the sun is hot on her face. When parts of her emerge from the surface of the water, she feels a prickle as they dry. Glancing down, she can just see the shape of her bra through the dress and the points of her nipples, but can’t see past the bouquet to see if her knickers are also visible. She thinks they are.

  He talks to her more this time, directing her, praising her, narrating what he’s doing. Look at me, he says, now look away. Stay like that, perfect. Relax your mouth, tilt your head.

  When his voice is soft there’s a burr, a hum to it, like the pleasurable disorientation of putting your head against a car window, like the deep throb of an MRI, like the right note in a song. She wants to lay her head on his chest and hear, feel, his words travel through her.

  ‘I want the light to glisten on the water but not blind the lens,’ he is saying, ‘and for the paleness of your skin not to get lost against the white of the bath.’

  Some of the flowers that made up the bouquet are loose around her now; they bob and sink, stick to the sides of the bath and her limbs. He adjusts their position at intervals, and her hair which, wet and darker, lies in strands across her shoulders.

  The water is cooling now too; she feels it against her legs, her arms, her sides when she shifts, feels the slip of it down the inner channel of her ribcage when she breathes, the way it pools in the space between the tendons of her neck and collarbone.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ he asks. His elbows are propped up on the edge of the bath and the sun is just above him, searing bright.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like nothing.’

  She shrugs, creating a wash of water back and forth. She feels drunk, dizzy, with his gaze. Remember this moment, she tells herself. This: her half-naked and wet, him fully clothed and watching, directing.

  ‘I’m struggling to get the right angle of you – I think I’m going to have to join you in there,’ he says.

  ‘OK,’ she replies, without quite understanding what he means.

  He rolls up his jeans and then steps into the bath by her feet. He stands either side of her calves, his ankles pressing hard against her skin in the cramped space, and holds the camera above her, looking down.

  Her head is floating in the water now, her ears bobbing under the surface where she can hear the strange clicks and gurgles of her body, the squeak of skin against the ceramic. He told her not to drink the water but it keeps running across her cheek and past her lips, brackish.

  ‘Lift your head up,’ he says, motioning with his chin.

  She rests the crown of her head against the bath, tries to focus on that hard point of pressure so that she doesn’t float away, so her eyes don’t close. He crouches down and she stares into the black circle of his lens. He is so close she can see a reflection of herself there, distorted, curved.

  ‘I never asked,’ he murmurs, ‘do you have a boyfriend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’

  It feels as though his words, his breath, are rippling the water around her, but maybe that’s just her trembling.

  ‘Are you cold?’ he asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you lying to me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His eyes are hidden by his camera but she can see his smile as the shutter click-click-clicks in swift succession. ‘Don’t lie to me, Maeve.’

  ‘OK, so I’m cold,’ she says, and lets herself slip right under the water, closing her eyes, holding her breath.

  It feels loud under there; the sounds of her body, maybe even her heart, the muffled thump of her knee knocking against the side. She opens her eyes. The world above is blurry, bright, silver like a mirror, the black smudge of his camera in front of his face. Her chest hurts and she breaches the surface with a gasp, at the same moment his hand curves under her neck to help her.

  ‘Almost lost you there,’ he says and wipes water from her eyes, a callus on his thumb sharp on the delicate skin.

  He leads her, shivering, back to the annexe, telling her to shower, to get herself warm and he’ll make her some of the hot chocolate he got for her.

  In the bathroom her chilled fingers, their tips furrowed by the water, fumble on the first button. She pauses. She could unbutton herself; it would take a little time but she could do it.

  She opens the bathroom door and his head turns sharply towards her.

  ‘I’m having trouble with the buttons,’ she says, and only realizes how childish that might sound after she’s said it and he’s come towards her. Although she doesn’t have a child’s body, does she, she thinks, as his eyes flick down to her breasts.

  ‘They are fiddly things,’ he says, starting at the top. ‘You’re covered with goosebumps. If I’ve given you a chill—’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a chill. There’s hypothermia, but I don’t think I have that.’

  ‘Strangely, that doesn’t make me feel any better.’

  ‘Are you worried about me?’

  ‘Always,’ he confesses, and she feels his answer like a sweet stab in her gut. ‘Lift your arms,’ he says and she does as asked.

  ‘It’s attached to the slip with thread,’ she says, when the top part gets caught over her head.

  ‘Oh.’

  She waits, vision distorted by sodden lace, and then bites her tongue when his hands meet her hips. He tugs the slip up her skin and then her sides, drags it over her head, and she’s finally free.

  She stands still as he studies her.

  He touches a finger to her port scar. ‘It’s crazy that with all you went through, you only really have one scar.’ He turns to put his palm over it. It would tak
e the merest shrug to shift his hand further down. What is he waiting for?

  She thinks about what might come next, what it would feel like, what it would look like, the two of them together, his weathered skin against her pale. Her body twitches.

  ‘You really will get a cold now, get into the shower,’ he insists. ‘And I’ll finish making that hot chocolate.’ He shuts the door of the bathroom behind him. She cranes to look into the small mirror above the sink to see what he saw, to know what she looked like to him. Bedraggled, damp, her bare skin stark under the lightbulb of the windowless room, her eyes feverish. In the shower, she runs a finger across the horrible scar that has been made something lovely by his touch.

  She can hear him on the phone outside the studio when she emerges. She left the dress where it lay in a sodden pile so that, she hopes, it might remind him of her when she’s gone.

  She picks up the hot drink he left her, tastes it briefly before setting it back down. There is a pile of contact sheets on the table, and she peers closer at the tiny faces of lords and ladies emerging from grand rooms of ruby and emerald, so many busts and paintings and polished furniture pieces that at this scale it is almost a puzzle game to find the living. Next to that pile are two black-and-white photography books. His books, she sees, reading his name. The image on the cover of the smaller one is the silhouette of a tree. The other, titled Witness, is heavy when she lifts it up. A man is crying on the cover, the bayonet of a gun a sharp line above him, a small shoe at his knee, and a skeletal ruin cutting off half the sky behind him.

  She opens the book at random, turns the page quickly when the heaped shape on it becomes a pile of bodies. On the next page a soldier laughs, pale cigarettes tucked into each strap of his armour, behind his ears, fisted in his hands. On the next, a group of people in work clothes stand in front of a pockmarked building, staring at something behind the camera, their bodies tensed to flee. She flicks forward and pauses, turning the book around. A black-and-white image, a woman of indeterminate age lying on a dark ground surrounded by pools of light from recent rain. It is difficult to tell if she is alive or dead; her left arm lies outstretched, hand cupped. Fabric of some kind, maybe plastic, is caught on a pile of rubble behind her, lending the image a painterly feel, like the rich folds of a silk dress belonging to a Georgian noblewoman.

  ‘How’s the chocolate?’ Stuart asks, entering and setting down his mobile phone.

  She closes the book quickly. ‘It’s good.’ She feels the slide of the cover of the book under her hand. ‘I hadn’t seen any of your war photographs. My mum said you’d won awards.’

  ‘You asked your mother about me?’

  ‘Just about your work.’

  ‘What do you think?’ He looks at the book.

  ‘I wouldn’t know how to judge them.’ She feels stupid for bringing in the topic of war photography now, of souring such a glorious day. He’s standing over the other side of the room and she can’t read his face.

  ‘What makes a photograph good is a question that some of the best theorists have tried, but mostly failed, to answer,’ he states. ‘It’s a gut feeling a lot of the time. You can learn all about light and perspective and shape and the golden ratio, but often it comes down to feeling. People talk about truth a lot with photography, especially reportage. Does this image show the truth? How much is manipulated by the biases, unconscious and otherwise, of the photographer?’ He moves to her side. ‘The images in that book. People have asked me, are they real, are they posed, did that really happen? They want me to say no, it’s fake, it’s not real, things like this don’t happen anywhere in the world and certainly not here in Britain.’ There is a bitterness in his voice, something sardonic.

  ‘When you look at each photo do you remember taking them?’

  ‘Not all of them. But sometimes, yes. I remember the exact aperture, the shutter speed, the film I had just loaded with a fumbling hand while crouching behind a tank. And the mayhem, the noise and the gunshots and my breath always so loud as I ran, my throat tight from smoke and fire. Sorry,’ he says and touches her arm, ‘I shouldn’t talk about this.’

  ‘I want to hear, you can tell me anything.’

  ‘Can I tell you that you’re beautiful, Maeve?’ he says, hand rising to cradle the back of her head. She’s disorientated by the sudden shift in mood. ‘And that sometimes it makes me sad.’

  ‘Sad?’

  He follows a lock of her hair down the side of her face to her shoulder. ‘Isn’t beauty always a little sad? How fleeting it is?’

  ‘You mean I’ll grow out of it soon, I’ll get old.’

  ‘No, the other way around. I’ll get old, I am old. And you’ll always be younger than me.’

  Is that his excuse, she thinks, for not taking things further? Is her image the only thing he wants, an untouchable kind of beauty?

  ‘I don’t think you’re too old.’

  ‘I’m as old as your dad,’ he says in a pointed kind of way. His eyes are kind but she doesn’t want that kind of pitying kindness.

  She breaks his soft grip, feeling a sharp spike of loathing for her father, for ruining this with his friendship with Stuart.

  ‘Maeve—’

  ‘What do you want from me?’ she asks, hating that it comes out plaintive.

  ‘Nothing.’

  If she were someone else she would make a move on him, she would kiss him. But she doesn’t want to, she wants him to want her, to be a beautiful object in his hands.

  ‘You don’t want to take my photo?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ he says. ‘And taking photos is safe.’

  ‘Is it?’ She thinks of him standing over her in the bath, her dress see-through, thinks of lying there under the water as he took photos of her about to drown. A mean part of her thinks about how she might coerce him – I’ll show someone else the pictures, I’ll tell my parents – but that would only make him run away and she doesn’t want that.

  Her eyes are burning.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you, when you’ve already been hurt so much,’ he says, pained. ‘I only want good things for you, Maeve.’

  ‘And you’re not good?’

  Maybe Maeve isn’t good either, maybe that’s why they fit so well together, she thinks, staring up at him as his eyes fall to her mouth.

  ‘Maeve,’ he says again, but it sounds apologetic, and so she leaves him and the annexe and runs back across the sharp gravel to her house.

  That night she can’t sleep. She feels hot, reckless. Not reckless enough to do what she should do, to knock on Stuart’s door and push her way inside, but enough to leave her bedroom and walk along the dark hall, to touch the black line of the banister as she slowly walks downstairs, breath tight, listening to the creaks her footsteps make, the settling of the house, the rumble of her father’s snoring.

  There’s something terrifying about being awake alone in a dark house, something thrilling. No one watching you but the walls and the empty rooms and the pictures, the mirrors reflecting a shadowy second self.

  She leaves the house by the front door. The night air feels soft and damp on her skin. When she looks back at the open door she thinks it looks like a mouth, like a dark cavern. She skirts the annexe, the security light not switching on like it should, as if she isn’t here at all, as if she’s truly invisible. The flowers aren’t arranged around the bath any more; they’re stacked in a heap by a wall and she has to search for them by smell, by feel, because the colours are bleached by the night. Would her mother think anything if she found them here, question Stuart? Or would he just say they were for his house project? Maeve doesn’t have a neat lie to use – her mother would be curious, or might offer to buy her more if she liked them, which would be horrible. It’s not the flowers Maeve wants, she thinks, plucking the blossoms from some of them, creating a pile of silk-soft petals at her feet – it’s the memory of Stuart and her, of being watched and desired, being beautiful.

  Maeve gathers her bounty up in he
r arms, her bare feet damp from the dew, and walks over to the bath through the scrub and weeds. She has the strange thought, brought on by the strangeness of lurking in the gardens alone in the middle of the velvet night, that there might be a girl still there now, some ghostly version of her, like an after-image, but when she leans over she finds nothing but a shallow pool of water and the trembling reflection of the moon.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The day after the rainstorm, I delayed my journey to the river by stopping at the village florist. I had some thought that the moment I came upon the girls, they would know – know the name of the slippery feelings inside me, how I was different from other girls, the thoughts I sometimes had when I looked at them.

  People knew me by sight in the village and I disliked it immensely. I walked along the street that morning telling myself like a mantra, Soon. Soon I’ll be gone, I’ll be far away where no one knows me, where I can start again with no watchful eyes and no expectations.

  There was a strange sound above the usual noise of the bell of the shop doors opening and closing, the hawk of a market trader, or the bark of a dog being tugged away from the butcher’s, and when the path in front of me on the pavement cleared, I saw where it was coming from. A man with long hair, wearing a waistcoat beaded with mirrors and pale trousers that looked like long johns, sitting on the kerb. He was hitting a tambourine and warbling along with the beat in a thin voice, his face beatific with a vicious kind of joy, as mothers hurried their children quickly by and men sneered. This wasn’t San Francisco, I saw them think, and there was nothing for this man here, surely, no hippie denizen to join.

  A woman crouched down next to him and said hello and he paused, turning his smile on her.

  It was Camille’s mother, her dark hair pinned up loosely, a row of necklaces heavy down the front of her thin dress. She was smoking and she passed him her cigarette with an artful hand.

  I had the sudden horrifying thought that she might invite this man to dinner. That he might play his stupid tambourine and get all of us to sing and dance round the table. Camille’s parents only came to our meals sometimes; they were usually off on drives through the countryside, visiting antique bookshops and ruins and castles, Camille had told us when we asked where they were. Maybe they would take this man with them on one of those trips, I thought, as I walked past.