by Jane Healey
It was a different apprentice florist today, a girl around my age, with thick glasses and a long blonde plait. She smiled at me encouragingly when I entered and I soon realized why as I watched the man at the counter lean over towards her, heard his chuckle, his overfamiliar tone.
‘Will you be long?’ I said, looking at the apprentice as the man turned around.
I could feel his annoyance like a fleshy thing between us.
‘That’s quite a rude question to ask, young lady,’ he said.
I looked at him and smiled, copying the look of the man outside, a mad kind of cheeriness. ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
He had a moustache that shadowed his mouth and he smelled of beer.
‘I’m done actually,’ the girl piped up, sliding the three red roses in their paper wrap towards him.
He duly paid, but paused at the door to say he’d be in, ‘Next week, same time, my dear.’
‘What a creep,’ I said.
‘He asks me my favourite flower each week,’ she murmured, ‘and he forgets each time so I just choose the most expensive.’ Her eyes were bright with mischief, but her movements as she prepared the bunch of chrysanthemums and baby’s breath that I asked for had the jerkiness of adrenaline.
‘This is for your pictures, right?’ she asked, ringing it up on the till. ‘You and the other girls.’
I didn’t like the thought of people talking about us, of the gaze of the village turning to the woods and the river.
She leaned her elbows on the counter, curious. ‘One of the boys from the cottages – Geoff, I think his name was – was at the hall on Saturday night talking about you lot, said you called yourselves the Ophelia girls.’
I felt a wash of cold, a twitch in my chin. ‘These flowers are for my mother’s gravestone,’ I said.
Her smile dropped. ‘My condolences.’
‘She drowned,’ I lied. I was shaken by the protective barrier of our woodland idyll breaking. It was one thing for the parents to talk about us and another for us to be the subject of broader gossip. ‘They found her body on the shore, bloated and blue,’ I found myself saying, mean and cold. I could feel my face go hot.
‘That sounds horrible,’ she said. She meant that I was horrible as much as the words of my story were.
I left her then, my mouth sour, feeling a nasty bitterness that made me want to kick at stones on the pavement and throw my flowers into a bin.
There was a chunk of flesh taken from her calf where a fish nibbled, I imagined myself continuing, as I broke into a stumbling jog along the path out of the village, and a row of kelp around her waist so tight it could have stopped her breathing again. She was buried with sand still in her hair and tiny pebbles between her toes, her skin so tight with salt that it crackled to the touch, that it crumbled like dust.
I stopped when I entered the wood, leaning against a tree gasping for breath.
My mother died when I was born, but somehow when I was young and didn’t know for sure how things like giving birth worked, how a baby could emerge from a woman’s body, I had heard the term waters broken and imagined that my birth had somehow turned her flesh to water, that I had brought a flood with me that drowned her.
Children are stupid creatures, I thought, wiping my face and weaving in and out of the trees to get to the river.
‘There you are!’ Linda called out when she saw me, and Camille turned around with a start.
‘I brought these.’ I held up my flowers, bedraggled and hot from my run.
‘Perfect,’ Joan said, standing up. She was wearing a white dress and the lace veil thrown back over her head. ‘I need a wedding bouquet.’
‘Who are you then?’ I asked.
‘A jilted bride, of course. My prince has taken off with another.’
‘I don’t know why, when you look so lovely.’
‘Oh, you,’ Joan said, but I could tell she was pleased.
That’s one thing about girlhood I forget: how hungry, desperate we were to be told we were beautiful, lovely, pretty; as if we almost doubted we existed at all without that confirmation.
‘If I was a jilted bride it would be the groom who would drown, not me,’ Linda drawled, smoke furling from her lipsticked mouth. ‘I’d do it with my bare hands.’
‘Maybe I didn’t want to marry him anyway,’ Joan said, wading out through the river, ‘but now I’m spoiled goods, aren’t I? Maybe that’s what I’m mourning.’
It was difficult to know if she meant what she was saying or if it was just part of the game.
‘You know, the abandoned women in folk songs and myths, the coded way they’re described and the iconography in paintings of them, like the choice of flowers – it usually means that they were pregnant,’ Camille said.
‘Luckily, I’m on the blob right now,’ Joan said, sinking down until only her head remained above water.
I looked towards Camille, and though I had been expecting to feel repulsed today, to feel terrified, I was only fond, wanting, as she stood there in her own little world, frowning and biting her lip. When she noticed me looking she smiled shyly and it made me feel warm. She was beautiful that day, flowers in a ringlet around her head and wearing the dress I had bought her. I wanted to buy her more things, I thought, I wanted to dress her like a doll.
‘You all right?’ she asked, dropping down beside me.
‘Fine.’ I nudged her with my shoulder.
‘Guess who I am?’ she asked.
When I first met her I had thought her shy, but now when we talked she would hold my gaze and barely blink. Maybe it wasn’t that she was shy, but that she was waiting for something, for someone, to focus on. I shouldn’t find that flattering, I thought, I shouldn’t be encouraging whatever this is.
‘Ophelia?’
‘No.’
‘Eve?’ I ventured.
‘Hardly, in these clothes.’
‘A princess? A lady of the manor? A Roman goddess?’
‘Close. I’m Persephone. Who are you today?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, dragging my fingers along the dry ground until a small pebble caught under my nail and I winced.
‘What did you do?’ she asked, catching my hand.
‘It’s just a stone.’
She took a pin from her hair and the flower garland drooped down one side of her face. ‘There,’ she said, scooping the pebble out before I could use my teeth to do it.
‘Thanks,’ I said, as she re-pinned her garland. ‘What are you reading at the moment?’ I still felt I knew so little about her.
‘A book of classical myths.’
‘Hence Persephone.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You don’t read modern novels?’
‘Not usually. The older the better, I think.’
Linda was in the river now with Joan, crooning and sprinkling petals around her as she lay there, a blur of white.
‘Why?’
She twisted a piece of her hair and frowned thoughtfully. ‘Older stories can be more dramatic, I think. Everything is fraught and terrible and wonderful. Everything means something. Modern stuff feels so quiet and dull, so lazy, so ironic. When I read a poem or a play or a tragedy I want to feel my heart race, I want to cry and ache. That probably sounds stupid,’ she added quickly.
My own heart was racing now. ‘I don’t think it does.’
‘This, what we’re doing now,’ she nodded her head towards the river, the girl on the bank with a camera, ‘it’s wonderful.’ Her voice was hushed as if she were telling a secret; her big eyes sheened bright like she might cry. ‘It feels like we’re making something that might last beyond us, you know? Or that we’re snatching a summer of beauty from the world, stealing it. It’s like living in a dream. You won’t laugh at me for saying that?’
‘Never, I’ll never laugh at you,’ I swore.
‘At school the other girls call me a swot, they say I’m boring, but they don’t know me really.’ She tugged a flower loose from her garland, stu
died it. ‘They don’t know my secrets,’ she said and caught my eye.
Tell me your secrets, I thought, even though I was pretty sure I knew what they were, that she and I shared the same one.
‘And they see me quietly reading,’ she said, ‘but they don’t know that in my head I’m dancing with satyrs or following Achilles on the battlefield as he cuts down men left and right in violent revenge for Patroclus, or that I’m the Sphinx in Thebes demanding Oedipus answer my riddles.’
‘I wish reading was like that for me.’
‘But your art is, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ I nodded and we shared a sympathetic smile.
Sarah called out that the roll of film had ended, holding up the camera, and Joan clambered out of the river. She was laughing under her veil, weighed down by her sodden wedding dress that bled its own small tributaries on the hard summer ground.
Home from the river before dinner I searched through my wardrobe for a dress or a top, for something I could give Camille, who seemed to have only brought three summer outfits with her to wear, unlike her mother who had a rainbow of scarves and dresses.
Nothing in my wardrobe was right; it was too babyish or too current. What I wanted to give Camille was a faded velvet gown, a real 1920s slip, something to go with her timelessness, to match her interest in history. I imagined myself sewing her something through the small hours by the light of a lamp, my fingertips raw from the prick of a needle, but I knew I wasn’t the kind of person who could do that. Instead, I went up to the attic, where my mother’s things were kept in trunks and boxes.
She was a stranger to me, my mother; I only had a few pictures and the taciturn memories of others. My father did not speak of her at all. No your mother would have done this, or you looked just like your mother then, or have I ever told you how we met?
She was beautiful, I knew that from the photos, but of her inner self, of who she was besides her looks, I knew so little. I had trawled through her things before once, when I was around eight years old, searching for the letter I just knew she would have written to me before she died, a foolish thought indeed, but the objects in the boxes – the silver brush set, the old-fashioned perfume bottles, the shoes – made me so sad that I never returned to them.
That afternoon, at sixteen years old and presuming that I had more mental fortitude, that I was no longer a child (and with the burning motivation to make Camille happy, to have her smile at me), I opened the dusty boxes again.
I lifted out the stack of children’s books – from her childhood and presumably saved for mine too – without stopping to study them, holding my breath as if I could catch tears from their musty smell. I lifted the pile of records and shifted aside a hat box, a silver filigree pen dropping to the floor with a clink. She had a fine wooden jewellery box that still smelled of polish, its insides a blood-red velvet. I pressed my finger into the sharp gem of a ring that sat in a row with others, until I could feel it make a mark in my skin. I rubbed a thumb along the links of a bracelet. But I didn’t dare pick any of them up nor try them on.
There weren’t many of her clothes – someone must have thrown them out; my father? one of her relatives? – a cashmere jumper, a pair of trousers, a tartan skirt, and a black tulle dress that I didn’t want to take out of its tissue paper. There was a lone sock too in the corner of one box that made me want to weep, and a silky pale peach nightgown trimmed with lace.
I picked up the nightgown, standing up to hold it against me. It had cap sleeves and the frilled hem reached my shins. It smelled of the attic, of close air and old boxes. No other perfume remained when I put it to my nose.
I pulled it on over my t-shirt, feeling the zip of static in my hair from the silk, feeling a shiver at the cool catch of it on my bare arms. I twisted from side to side to watch the hem billow and swirl. There was no mirror up here so I left the attic, scaling the steep steps carefully in case I tripped on the fabric.
It was a Saturday but I was in the haze of summer and didn’t realize that, watching the way the skirt floated and hid my feet, not until I was halfway to my bedroom and noticed my father in front of the hall window, looking out over the lawn.
He startled as I did. ‘Ruth,’ he said, and his face looked pinched.
Look, I’m wearing a dress, I thought of saying spitefully, but I felt utterly ridiculous all of a sudden, in a way I never did at the river with the girls. Like a child play-acting at being a woman.
‘That’s nice,’ he said of my outfit, glancing out of the window again and then back.
‘It’s Mum’s,’ I said, because I wanted to push for more of a response, even if it was a negative one, to have him care. It was like I was a ghost, I thought, some unwelcome spirit haunting his house.
‘Where did you get it?’ he asked, voice clipped.
‘In the attic.’
‘You shouldn’t be up there,’ he said. ‘And you shouldn’t be messing around with those things.’
I took the disappointment I had asked for, read the reminder that I couldn’t hope to measure up to her, for him, for anyone.
‘Why not? She was my mother. Don’t I get them now?’ She was my mother and these were the only things I had left of her. He had memories, he knew what her voice sounded like, what her hand felt like in his, he had been loved by her.
‘You’ll put it back where you found it,’ he stated.
‘Yes. I’m sorry, Dad,’ I said, voice breaking then, not because he was being harsh but because his face was blank, his voice cold.
He walked away. I listened to his heavy footsteps going down the stairs and then the sharp closing of his office door.
I went into my bedroom and stripped off the dress in front of the mirror, watching myself cry, feeling sadder for it, like an endless loop. Why was it that sometimes it wasn’t enough to be sad – you had to see yourself be sad too, to wallow in it?
I folded the nightdress into a tight wad.
Instead of returning it to the attic, I hid it under the sheets of my bed. I would give it to Camille. My mother’s attic boxes were thick with dust, untouched, and he would never know it was gone.
Camille was as pleased with the gift as I had imagined, her eyes filmy, stroking a reverent hand down the silk of the nightgown.
Joan was jealous. ‘Why does she get it?’ she joked.
‘I can share, it’s fine,’ Camille said.
‘No, it’s yours. But I bagsie the next one Ruth finds lying around.’
Was there an undertone in what she was saying? My smile grew strained. Did she see my preference for Camille and think it meant something more?
Linda arrived then carrying the newest developed photos, and we spread out around her on the grass handling each photo carefully. We laughed at the ones with strange facial expressions, a frozen sneeze or yawn, and called out ones we liked – but only of the other girls and not ourselves. The photos of ourselves we scrutinized, tilting them in the light, not quite knowing which of our internal opinions to trust – that we were beautiful, or that we weren’t. We praised each other as we could not often praise ourselves. You look amazing here, like an actress, we’d say, and the other girl would say, Really? You’re sure? And we would insist, press our certainty on her and wait for it to be returned. Well, you look really pretty here, they’d say. It was best when we spread them all out on the grass, when we could see how we looked together, like a bouquet of flowers rather than a spindly bloom on its own.
‘The Ophelia girls,’ Sarah said that day, hands on her hips, as we looked at what we had created.
There was a breeze, the willow trees quivering above us, the river surface ridged.
‘Beautiful and tragic and ever-young,’ Linda declared, tapping her foot next to the close-up picture of her upper half, the silver of the water and the blue of the reflected sky dazzling, her eyes shut as if she was in pain.
‘Waterlogged and damp and smelling of mud,’ I added.
‘We’ll never be this beautiful again,
will we?’ Camille said ruefully.
She touched my arm and I felt my face go hot. My eyes tripped across the pictures of her that I knew I had taken, the ones where she wasn’t looking at the camera and the ones where she was, her searching gaze preserved, the ghost of mine there in the framing.
‘I need to go help my father with something,’ I said suddenly. ‘Here, take the camera.’ I pushed it into Sarah’s hands. ‘I’ll see you at dinner.’
I left without looking at Camille, or answering the muffled question Linda called out.
The housekeeper had left a plate of shortbread on the kitchen table. I ate two without tasting them, the grit of sugar scraping the top of my mouth. I could hear my father’s low murmur from the drawing room. I stared through the kitchen doorway at the dark hall beyond and the front door, my eyes unfocused, thinking of the river, of the girls, wishing I was there and not here in this dark, close house.
A well-oiled door opened, a wry dismissal sounded, and then a shadow filled the hall.
‘Hi,’ Stuart said.
‘Hi,’ I replied, my heart pulsing fast.
He leaned against the doorway. He had a couple of heavy law tomes in his arms. ‘You all right?’ he asked, studying me closely.
‘I’m fine.’ My voice was gummy. I poured two glasses of water and handed him one of them.
We faced the back garden. I gulped the entirety of the glass, turning when he nudged my shoulder so I could see him copy me.
‘You been at the river with the girls?’ he asked, wiping his mouth with his arm.
My eyes followed the blue line of the vein down his inner arm. ‘Yeah. Came up here for a break.’
‘And have you given my proposal any thought?’ He dipped his head, smiled that sideways smile.
‘I have. It would be good, it would help with my applications. If you still want to?’
‘Of course. Where should we go?’
