by Jane Healey
It was useless to say that Maeve was only trying to save her friend’s life, that Georgia’s furred arms were so thin it made her want to weep. To give up control, Georgia believed, was a fate worse than death, even as she careened towards it.
Maeve wants control of her body now; she doesn’t want to be ill, though she still wants to be cared for, only not by her parents or doctors. She doesn’t want to be sick, to die, and when she thinks of the hospital she feels such a panic inside that her heart rocks loose in her chest.
She opens more of the boxes to distract herself. There are more photos – faded line-ups of schoolboys in cricket gear and with felt caps, besuited young men in front of grand collegiate buildings. And more antiques – oval miniatures, wine-stoppers, medals.
She lifts a box down to get to the one underneath, whose corner has been bashed as if it’s been kicked in. She tugs it open, old tape tearing with the force. Inside is a quilt of pale pink flowers and lying atop it is a piece of lace trim curled into a spiral, and a photograph.
Maeve holds the photograph up to the light. It’s of the river again, the same one as the photo she found downstairs in his office, but the image is blurry and over-exposed. She can just about see the trees at the other side of the bank, the bleached grass on this side. In the river itself, bright and yellow with sun, there’s a hazy outline, a whirling, like the splash from something large thrown into it, or the churn as something breaches, and a thin white shape emerging – a branch stripped of its bark? Or a streak of light on the photo?
The photograph unsettles Maeve. She can’t understand it, nor why it has been kept with her grandfather’s things, but her mother is out in the hallway calling for her, her voice tight from the argument with her father, so she drops the photo back in the box and leaves the room.
‘There you are,’ her mother says. She’s wearing a large striped jumper even though the evening is warm, and has pulled her hair back into a small ponytail. It’s the opposite of how she’ll dress when they have company, feminine, dressy. ‘What were you doing in there?’
‘Just looking.’ Maeve shrugs.
‘Well, be careful.’
‘I’ll try not to cut my finger on the edge of a cardboard box,’ she retorts.
Her mother’s smile is brittle. ‘I meant more be careful of your grandfather’s things – there’s probably some valuable stuff in there.’
‘What are you going to do with it all?’
‘Have some of it valued, clear the rest away.’
‘Wouldn’t he have wanted you to keep it?’
Her mother starts moving towards the stairs. ‘He’s not here, so it’s not up to him any more.’
‘That’s cruel.’
Her mother pauses with a hand on the banister. ‘Don’t talk about things you don’t understand, Maeve.’ She gathers a breath, softens her expression. ‘But if you want anything from that room or the boxes around the house, you can have it, OK? Are you coming for dinner now?’
‘Yeah,’ Maeve says.
Stuart and her father are already at the dinner table on the patio. Stuart gives her a quick wink while her father is bent over Michael’s plate, cutting up his sausages and listening to Iza relate the film they watched with breathless intensity.
‘It’s just pasta tonight,’ her mother declares as she brings out the serving dish.
‘That’s lovely, Ruth,’ Stuart replies.
Maeve feels like she’s in some kind of dream; not a nightmare, not exactly, but everything feels woozy, as if the world is filmed with glass, and though her breath is tight, her body feels strangely untethered.
She had sex with the man across from her, an old friend of her parents’ who are sitting around the very same table, this afternoon. She can still feel what he did, inside, a slight sting as she shifts in her seat – only this time what’s inside her body, what’s different about her, isn’t an illness to be discovered and displayed on lightboxes and monitors for her doctors and parents to discuss, it’s a secret for her to keep.
‘Not hungry?’ her father asks sometime later, as she drags a spiralled piece of pasta back and forth over her plate. The sauce is made from sundried tomatoes, which Iza declared tasted funny, and Maeve stained her fingertips with its bright red oil when she retrieved pasta that she had clumsily spilled onto the table.
‘No, I am,’ she says, and eats a mouthful she cannot even taste as Stuart meets her eyes, rubbing a thumb at a patch of stubble on his cheek.
As planned, Stuart brings up the house he’s visiting next – the library, the terribly nouveau riche swimming pool, the story of the writer who worked in its attic bedroom and used to take midnight strolls across the estate, the folly that the lord had built, and the minor collection of modernist paintings rumoured to be in one of the private family rooms. And as planned, Maeve asks questions about it, acts interested (which isn’t hard when the house does genuinely sound like somewhere she’d like to visit), praying her cheeks aren’t as red as she thinks they might be.
‘I could take her with me,’ Stuart says, turning to Ruth as though it’s her decision. ‘If that wouldn’t be too boring for a teenager like yourself,’ he adds to Maeve. ‘You’ve probably got better things to do.’
‘Sure,’ Maeve says with a nod.
‘Any opportunity to get away from her parents for a day,’ her father says.
‘You sure?’ her mother checks with her. ‘We can visit it another time, you and I?’
‘I’d like to see the behind-the-scenes stuff,’ she says.
‘It won’t be a long day, Ruth. My shoot is spread out over three, so I’ll bring her back early.’
‘I’m really fine, guys, I’m not a child.’
‘As long as it’s not tomorrow,’ her father says, picking up the plates to stack them. ‘Tomorrow I’d like you to help me wrangle the twins while your mother has a break.’ This is supposed to be a treat for her mother, a favour, but by his tone and the sour atmosphere between them it reads more like a martyred punishment. ‘We’re going to the farm. Will you come, Maeve?’
‘OK,’ she says, even though she’d rather not, but she doesn’t want to wade into the tension between her parents.
‘And then you can come with me on Sunday,’ Stuart says.
‘Great, I look forward to it,’ she says with a smile, and when she sees the pride of her parents at her being so polite and courteous to an adult, to Stuart, she has to cough to hide a startled laugh.
After dinner, she plays with the twins in the living room. They have transformed an upturned chair and blanket into a horse-drawn carriage careening through the desert towards an oasis, and she is ordered to be the magical prince they meet once they arrive. They delight in her snooty accent, her declaration that their offering of gold (a plastic truck) is paltry, and the tasks she makes them do to win the jewel (an empty Kinder Egg) from her.
It’s late by the time she retreats upstairs. But when she goes back to the junk room to retrieve the photograph, the entire box is gone.
Chapter Eighteen
‘So, where do you want me?’ Stuart asks after Alex’s car drives away, dashing my hopes that he would say he was too busy doing other things today.
‘In the shade outside?’ A chance to enjoy the garden without supervising the twins, and a less intimate setting than a room.
I drag a dining chair in front of the bench under one of the apple trees where Stuart sits in just his shorts, slouching comfortably as if he’s the one who lives here and I’m the visitor. I’m flustered as I try to get comfortable. He smiles at me as I snap the lead of the pencil in the sharpener and drop the rubber in the too-long grass that Alex is yet to trim. ‘You know I hate you and Alex for suggesting this,’ I say. ‘Like a parent giving their child a biscuit and a piece of paper and telling her to draw a little picture. I’m so glad you two have decided that the housewife needs a hobby.’
‘Are you done?’ he laughs. ‘I don’t see why I’m lumped in with your husband though,
you’re not my housewife.’
‘Thank God,’ I say, as I arc my wrist to draw the first line, the curve of his shoulder against the cracked wood of the bench.
‘Why, because I’m poorly house-trained? If you recall, I was the only one to ever remember to take the bins out in digs.’
‘Maybe it’s because you’re a bad influence.’
‘Oh, really?’ He tilts his head.
‘Don’t move your head.’
‘Sorry.’
How many opportunities does a woman have to tell a man how to stand, how to sit, that they must keep still? Maybe I could sell other women on this, have an all-female class with a male model. Although thinking about it, there’s a horrible whiff of the Chippendales about that proposal, and really, if the women are middle-aged they might have been up close and personal enough with male bodies not to want to sit and draw one.
Stuart watches me while I draw, having chosen my face as his focal point, and when I look up it’s as though he’s the one dissecting me, the one turning me into shape and line and shadow. ‘So are you going to tell me about them, your scars?’ I ask, waving a hand to encompass his chest and arms, the scatter of new marks that my artist-self noted as interesting shapes to break up the planes of his muscles.
‘Not if I don’t have to.’
‘Tell me about one of them.’
‘I owe you stories as well as my body now? Fine, my shoulder,’ he lifts it, ‘the gunshot.’ He shuts his eyes tightly, like a boy remembering where he has left a favourite stick. ‘Kiseljak, Bosnia. We were running on a tip, a photographer friend and I. I hadn’t sold anything in a week and I needed the money. We had a fixer with us – he was young, had a full beard even though his voice was hardly broken. They’re always young. Fervent, brave, foolish. It’s the same in every war. Maybe because older men have more to lose, maybe because when you’re young you think you can’t possibly die, or maybe that your death will mean something. I don’t know.’ He scratches his neck and folds his arms, and I let him.
They remind Stuart of himself, these boys, I think. Their sincerity, their youthful daring. Maybe he is as stuck in his teenage past as I am, leashed to it.
‘So what happened?’
‘Oh, the road we were on was too quiet, and then it wasn’t quiet and the bullets were flying through the car, through the both of us.’
‘Jesus.’
‘It was mayhem. I was trying to tourniquet his arm and he was trying to dig the bullet out of my shoulder. We made a mess of each other,’ he says with a snort. ‘But we survived, all three of us. A lucky day.’
He returns to his pose. The sun has shifted the shadows and now the bottom of his legs are bright.
My neck is hot; my legs stick to the seat when I shift them as I draw on, as I make lines and then erase them, as the body in front of me fails to appear on the paper.
I shake out my hand.
‘Cramp?’
‘I’m not used to this. I hope you’re not expecting anything good.’
‘You’ve really never drawn since you were a teenager?’
‘Never.’ I swat away a lingering wasp.
‘I find that remarkable.’
‘I was busy doing other things. I’m sure there’s things you haven’t done since you were a child – played conkers, skipped, I don’t know.’
He makes a considering noise. The light dips as the smallest of clouds cross the sun.
‘What are your plans for the future anyway?’
‘Spoken like a parent.’
‘I mean, does photography pay OK?’
He squints at me. ‘I do all right. I came into some money last year and bought a flat.’
‘From who?’
‘That’s quite a personal question,’ he says, with a smile that creases lines into his cheeks. ‘A relative, Ruth. I guess they felt guilty for not doing more for me after my parents died.’
‘You know, Alex and I took out life insurance when Maeve got sick, not that we could afford it, really. It just gets to you, the idea that you could die and leave them, the kids.’
‘I don’t think any broker would have given me life insurance. You can’t get any kind of insurance if you go charging into warzones.’
‘So why did you?’ I set the drawing down. It’s terrible. I should have expected it, but a part of me was arrogant enough to assume that any latent artistic ability I once had would re-emerge untouched. ‘Why did you risk yourself like that?’
‘Because I thought that if I took photos, if I showed people what war was really like, the wars would be shorter. I had given up on anything else, on stopping them before they even began, changing the status quo. Because I was angry. I think that’s what drove all of us out there. We were angry – at the world, at ourselves, at other people.’
The pencil sweats in my hand. It’s too hot in the sun. ‘Were you angry at Alex and me?’
‘What?’
‘The way you left without telling us, after Maeve was born. Did we do something wrong?’
‘Ruth, I mean this in the kindest way possible, but not everything is about you. I didn’t run off to war because you’d broken my heart by staying with Alex. Did you really think that? That I was pining after you all these years?’ There is something pitying about his smile and I hate it.
‘No, of course not. I guess I just felt responsible, guilty.’
‘You’ve got enough guilt already without adding to it.’
My chest goes tight. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean motherhood, isn’t guilt a mother’s central tenet? A good mother, that is, not mine.’
I feel the sting of adrenaline and of bruised pride. ‘Let’s have lunch,’ I suggest, standing up. ‘And a drink, I need a drink after this failure.’
‘I wish I had the other one to compare it with, to see how terribly I’ve aged.’ He holds out his hand and I give him the picture. ‘I remember looking slightly more symmetrical, I think.’
‘Fuck off.’ I try to take it back.
He gasps. ‘Language.’
‘You didn’t keep the other one then, my drawing of you?’
‘Your juvenilia?’ he says, putting a hot arm around my shoulder as we walk back. He hasn’t put his shirt on and I can smell his sweat, different from Alex, but equally unappealing.
‘You need a shower.’
‘Do you remember when Alex went on strike that time? When you said unless he showered after rugby he wasn’t allowed to share a bed with you, and then he didn’t wash for a week.’
‘Nine days, he didn’t wash for nine days,’ I say, as I get a bottle of white wine from the fridge and a tub of fancy, too-expensive olives that Alex brought back from the last farmer’s market, to give this the illusion of lunch and not just a drinking session. ‘I think it impressed me actually, his quiet stubbornness. Impressed me, and irritated me.’ I wince as I turn the tight corkscrew, appreciating that Stuart doesn’t offer to do it for me as Alex would have. What a boring life I lead that I can’t make comparisons between Alex and anyone except the man sitting across from me, with how little adult company I have these days. I’m trying not to think of all the female company Alex has – on his commute, at work, at after-work drinks, at the sandwich shop.
I take two chilled gulps from the wine as Stuart sniffs his own glass.
‘It’s all we’ve got, I’m afraid,’ I say.
‘Wine is wine,’ he says, plucking an olive from the tub. ‘Some of the people I came across on my travels were terrible snobs about booze, and food. There was this whole cabal of journalists and cameramen who all went to boarding school and Sandringham and lived in these vast old houses. And talked of Kin-ya and Rhodesia. They used to get special orders from Fortnum’s shipped out, silver cutlery and real Christmas pudding. They’d travel with these big entourages and each time I’d expect a man in a butler’s uniform to step out.’
‘I bet you took them down a peg.’
‘Well, I certainly tried. Funny that yo
u can travel half the world away, and rock up in a village in the Afghan desert and bump into a little English lord.’
‘And now you’re taking fashion photos and rubbing shoulders with the glamorous set.’
He picks up the bottle and motions to me, and I hold out my glass for him to fill even though I haven’t finished yet. ‘It pays the bills.’
‘This wine is awful.’ I pucker my mouth, squash two olives between my teeth, but their sour taste doesn’t help.
‘Have you got any biscuits?’
‘Not crackers. I’ve got custard creams?’ I jokingly offer.
‘Perfect,’ he declares, and I direct him to the tin. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘do you remember . . .’ He trails off as he peels his biscuit apart and then mashes it back together to eat.
‘What?’
‘Can I talk about it? That last summer?’ He watches me closely.
My mouth feels chalky.
‘It’s just, the wine,’ he says, nodding to the glasses on the table. ‘I was remembering one of our dinners. Drinking that terrible stuff, and waiting for you and the girls to come back from the river, and that day you were all already bladdered on gin.’
‘I think I remember that,’ I say, feigning nonchalance.
He lifts his feet onto the chair next to him, the legs screeching loudly on the flagstones. ‘You five running up, pink with sun and booze, in your floral dresses and wild hair.’ He sounds wistful.
‘I need some more food to sop this up,’ I say and go to the fridge. I stand there without looking at anything, the chill air against my front doing nothing for the heat that wraps around my neck.
‘You don’t mind me mentioning it? It’s just, being here again brings up so many memories.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Have you got any cheese in there?’
I bring out a block of cheddar, hard at the corner because it’s not been wrapped properly, and another half-bottle of wine from two weeks ago I meant to throw out. If I just keep drinking, I think, with the stubbornness of a teenager, then the memories will stay murky and I will stay pleasantly numb.
