The Ophelia Girls

by Jane Healey

  ‘I think I was a little in love with all of you,’ he says, hacking at the cheese with a table knife. ‘Even though none of you would have deigned to give me the time of day—’

  ‘I always talked to you, and I drew you.’

  ‘. . . except Joan Summers actually.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I had a thing with her that summer.’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘It was nothing serious.’

  Joan and Stuart, I think with confusion, trying to remember any time I might have seen the two of them interact.

  ‘That dinner though,’ he says, holding up a finger as he drains his wine, ‘when you arrived in a swirl of lace and dresses and girly chatter.’

  ‘Girly chatter.’

  ‘It was like you’d all appeared mysteriously from the woods. As though, after dinner was over, you’d vanish just the same. I remember the adults didn’t know what to think. They were doing their hippy thing but here you were, young and properly carefree. They wanted to be like you, I think, they were jealous.’

  ‘They were scared,’ I offer, too honest.

  ‘Teenage girls can be very scary. Intense.’ He picks up the newest bottle from the fridge. ‘Like Camille . . .’ he says carefully. My body pulses at her name spoken out loud, a spasm of icy fear. ‘When she lectured us that evening, do you remember?’

  Sarah’s mother had been watching as we cavorted at one end of the jumbled dinner tables, giggling and whispering, lost in our own dizzy worlds, eating with our mouths open, sharing the same cups.

  ‘Why Ophelia anyway?’ she had asked, leaning into our space. She tapped her long nails on the table. ‘Of all of Shakespeare’s women, why her, girls? Why not, I don’t know, Lady Macbeth, Beatrice? Someone with bite, someone with more words.’

  ‘She’s closest to our age,’ Sarah replied, after her mother made no move to sit back in her seat.

  The rest of the table had quietened now too. I could feel a bristling pass through us.

  ‘Would you rather we be Juliet?’ Joan asked. We had actually played at being Juliet too, but the families only saw the river and our damp dresses, our waterlogged hair, and narrowed us down to one archetype.

  ‘Yeah,’ Geoff piped up. ‘Why Ophelia? It’s a bit pathetic.’ Geoff was sitting at the far end of the table, with Stuart and the other boy whose name I always forget – Peter, Peter with the curling blond hair. Geoff was bronzed by the sun, his brown hair feathered down his neck. He was the kind of boy you’d call handsome and he was, I knew, frustrated that us girls were busy with each other and not fawning over him that summer.

  ‘Have you studied Hamlet properly? Or just read the back of your book?’ Camille said. She leaned forward in her seat. ‘When Ophelia steps onto the stage with her flowers, she stops everything.’ Her hand cut through the air. ‘She ruptures the story. The royal court is silenced, dumbstruck by her, a girl. They look at her and they are overcome by grief and shame. That’s the power she has, Ophelia.’ She blushed then; I could see her breath coming quickly.

  ‘But she’s still dead at the end, isn’t she?’ Geoff said with a little laugh.

  ‘So’s Hamlet,’ Linda drawled. ‘That’s the point of Shakespeare, that they all die at the end. That everyone dies.’

  ‘All right, Nostradamus,’ he mocked.

  ‘You’ve got your whole lives ahead of you, girls,’ Joan’s father called out, ‘and take it from me, no boy is going to want a dead girl as his girlfriend.’

  One of the men made a muttered joke and they laughed.

  ‘Live a little,’ he continued, and Joan mimed vomiting. ‘Grow up.’

  ‘You grow up!’ Linda told him, with a drunken snort of laughter. ‘And get a haircut, you look ridiculous.’

  ‘Linda,’ her mother said sharply.

  ‘What?’ she shrugged, eyes wide.

  I held a hand over my mouth to muffle my laugh as Joan pinched my leg.

  ‘That’s enough wine,’ her mother said, reaching over to snatch the bottle away. It was empty and she rocked back awkwardly.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Linda said and then stood up quickly, her chair falling with a crash as her mother lunged for her. ‘Grow up, Anne,’ she said to her, dancing back.

  One of the fathers clapped his hands loudly. ‘All right, all right, calm down everybody.’ Linda’s mother was rigid with rage, a strand of her hair stuck to her wine-red mouth. ‘And girls, why don’t you make yourselves scarce for now, hmm?’

  ‘Gladly,’ Joan murmured, hooking her elbow into mine as we left the table, the group of us trailing napkins, a cup strewn on the grass, river weeds and petals fluttering loose from our legs.

  Later, in the present, Stuart is peeling our last mandarin over the sink. ‘I’m eating you out of house and home, sorry about this.’

  ‘I mean, a contribution to your feeding costs might be welcome,’ I say as I fiddle with the latest cork, squeezing it between my fingers.

  ‘Oh shit, you mean that.’ He wipes his mouth with his hand. ‘Alex was so adamant when I offered him rent for the annexe. I was worried I’d pissed him off enough he wouldn’t even let me stay.’

  ‘It wasn’t up to him, we both made the decision. If it had been up to me, I would have swallowed my pride and said sure, if you’re solvent then we could do with some help. Does that make me a terrible friend? Have I dashed your opinion of me as host?’

  ‘Depends what the rates are,’ he says messily, around the slice of fruit in his mouth.

  ‘Very reasonable.’

  ‘You’ve always been reasonable.’

  ‘I need a nap.’ I stretch my arms, pretending to be dozy and not tense with anxiety, and then carry the detritus of our al fresco meal to the sink.

  ‘Hey, I’ll write you a cheque, OK?’ He puts a hand on my side. He’s still in front of the sink so we jostle against one another as I place my load under the running water. He touches my hair. ‘Why’d you cut it and dye it?’

  ‘To cover the grey.’ And because I didn’t want to look in a mirror and see her, see Ophelia, and what I had begun that summer when I took the first photograph.

  ‘I miss how it used to look,’ he says, tugging at the ends. His hand lands heavy on my shoulder.

  ‘You really do need a shower.’

  He drops his voice. ‘Is that an invitation, Mrs Hawkins?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve sent my husband out for the day so I can have my way with you here in his kitchen.’

  This flirting, the drawing session – it would be so easy to take it as an expression of interest and not just boredom, convenience. He doesn’t want me, not really, and I don’t want him. But it would be so simple to give in, to do something wrong. To observe yourself kissing another man and think, See, I knew I was a terrible person, I knew I was always rotten inside.

  ‘No,’ he says, pulling my hands away from the plates in the sink, ‘you’re not allowed to wash up. I’m the guest, you go outside. Enjoy the garden.’

  I do as ordered. I stand on the warm stones of the patio breathing in the lavender, the hot grass, the summer. My head is tight, as if it’s been wrung out and left to dry in the heat.

  Stuart opens the window above the sink with a squeak of hinges. The pane below, in front of him, catches the light, turns from window to blazing mirror of the sun. I stare at it and blink, searing the image on my eyelids, testing myself like a child with her hand over a candle flame.

  ‘You know, I lied to you,’ he calls out suddenly, ‘when I said I left because of the money, because war was a young man’s game.’

  I shift to the side so I can see his face swimming in the blue square in my eyes.

  ‘And it wasn’t only the corruption either, that if you dug even shallowly you’d find old British interests, oil, business. It was because it was getting to me, eating away at me. Seeing the worst of humanity. I was starting to care less and less for the people I photographed, giving pieces of my soul away with each shot. It scared
me.’ I can see his face more clearly now, his dipped head, his rounded shoulders. When did we get so old?

  ‘Maybe it was just a protective instinct,’ I say, ‘maybe it’s just what happens to people.’

  ‘But feelings are never divorced from actions, are they? I worried that my apathy would seep into my decisions – to take a photo or not, to help someone or not, to risk myself or turn my back. Or that it already had. Do you ever feel, Ruth,’ he says, putting his hands on the window frame, ‘like the boundary between you and some other version of you is paper-thin? Like you’d just have to sneeze – to, I don’t know, turn on the spot – and you’d give in to something you know you shouldn’t? That we’re all just one decision away from being the worst version of ourselves?’

  Yes. ‘No, I don’t know. I think war throws up so much shit that we regular people don’t have to deal with. Human minds, human morals, aren’t made for that. And isn’t that what a conscience is, thinking you could do something bad and then not doing it after all?’

  ‘You might be right.’

  He finishes drying up and comes outside, bringing a wine glass. He takes a long sip and then hands it to me. ‘Seems mad not to finish the whole bottle.’

  ‘Our third bottle, you mean.’

  ‘Second and a half, technically.’

  Why not add to the headache, the hangover? Why not?

  ‘Do you ever think of her?’ he asks softly, taking his cigarettes from his pocket. ‘Camille?’

  ‘Occasionally.’ I stare at the back of the garden, the leaves a dizzying distraction, the puffs of flower blooms and darting butterflies. I could cry now, I think. I pick at the dry skin of my lips, tasting blood.

  ‘Do you think it was just her getting carried away, just a teenager messing around?’

  ‘I think . . . I think we were playing with fire. Don’t you? That it was inevitable. That’s what some people said.’

  ‘You were just kids. We were just kids.’

  Kids weaving flowers in our hair, sewing wedding dresses and princess gowns and mourning veils.

  ‘You were beautiful. As, like, a collective. Not just in a teenage-boy-fancies-girls-in-pretty-dresses way, but ethereal, mythical. I was jealous of you,’ he says, lighting a cigarette. ‘You were making art, you know, you had an aesthetic vision. Maybe that’s one way you’re like your father.’ He waves a hand back at the house to encompass the prints and antiques and wallpaper.

  ‘Was I responsible for your career then?’ I tease.

  ‘What, the photography?’ he laughs. ‘No, I fell into that by accident. Travelled out, picked up a camera, learned it as I went.’

  I wrap my arms around my shoulders. ‘Yeah, I guess our photos and yours couldn’t be more different.’

  He blows smoke in a thin stream away from him, but I can still smell it and know that it will settle into my clothes and hair.

  ‘We were young. I think of that now when I look at Maeve,’ I say, ‘that we weren’t as grown-up as we imagined. Hindsight, one of the few perks of adulthood.’

  ‘Twins though,’ he says, after a pause. ‘I bet your dad was pleased. Have you got one of those classic photos of him holding one in each arm?’

  ‘I don’t. We didn’t— We fell out, my father and I.’

  He shields his face from the sun with his hand. ‘I know you weren’t that close but I didn’t know it got that bad.’

  ‘You looked up to him, you two had a bond’ – does my voice still sound jealous when I say that? – ‘but as a father, he was . . . difficult.’

  ‘I bet he didn’t thrash you with a belt though, or knock your teeth out.’

  I think of what Stuart said about anger and a boy running away to the mayhem of war, choosing to live surrounded by such violence, of the scars I saw on his body.

  I put my hand on his shoulder and slide my fingers across the fabric of his t-shirt as he stares at me, close, my eyes catching the nicks and silvered stubble of his face in the afternoon light, the uncertain twitch of his mouth. I trace the scar I drew. ‘Brave boy,’ I murmur. ‘Brave, foolhardy boy.’

  He looks away and covers my hand with his, and I feel the pulse of his heartbeat beneath my palm, the tight clutch of his fingers over mine.

  I remember one summer afternoon back then, sitting next to him on the front lawn, close enough to smell boy sweat above the smoke from his father’s bonfire out back, and how I had pondered it, our possible future. Of marrying this boy who my father seemed to prefer as a son to me as a daughter, of having his approval, the two of us moving into the house behind us later, filling it with grandchildren for him. It made me go cold, it made my stomach shake. I didn’t want it.

  Is Stuart jealous of Alex? Not because he still holds a torch for me but because of the house? He doesn’t treat him with quite the same fondness as he did at university. But are any of us that free any more with our affections?

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ I ask, slipping my arm from him. My lips feel swollen with wine.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Being friends again, acting like—’ I shake my head. ‘When you leave again, will you even pick up the phone?’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  I miss friends, I miss companions who aren’t co-parents, but I don’t know if I can trust him.

  ‘You know, you’re not stuck here, Ruth. You act like you’re shut away but you’ll be back to work this autumn, you’ll find a job again, won’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I nod, the sun wincingly bright through my eyelids.

  ‘No one’s ever totally stuck, there’s always a way out.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  At the farm with her dad and the twins, Maeve drags her feet through the stalls of sheep and cows, the petting pen of rabbits and guinea pigs. She has worn a watch for the first time in months and is checking it obsessively, counting down in increments of five minutes to the time when she’ll be home and can see Stuart.

  ‘Are we boring you, Maeve?’ her dad asks, as she leans over a fence to the side of the sandpit where the twins play.

  ‘I’m just tired.’

  ‘You know when you go off to university, you’ll miss them growing up. You’ll come home for holidays and they’ll have shot up. You should soak up all the time you get with them,’ he says. ‘Just my advice,’ he adds mildly.

  ‘Do you feel the same way with you working all the time?’ she retorts.

  ‘Maeve.’

  ‘What? It’s a genuine question. Do you miss us when you’re away?’

  ‘Fine, I’ll take it at face value then. But you’re becoming rude recently, Maeve, and it’s not an attractive thing.’

  ‘Attractive?’ she repeats incredulously.

  ‘Come on, a figure of speech.’

  ‘Would you tell that to a boy, to Michael when he grows up? That he mustn’t be rude because it would make him unattractive?’

  ‘This is exactly what I’m talking about,’ he says, digging in. ‘You, lashing out. Your mother and I aren’t the enemy, Maeve. The world isn’t your enemy.’

  ‘Who said it was?’

  He sighs wearily and she hates him.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she spits out.

  Right now, she thinks as she strides across the too-soft bark pathway, what she’d really like is to smoke, to have something to do with her hands that isn’t punching a wall. Or to jump into a cold pool and scream underwater, to thrash her limbs.

  If only she had a phone and could call Stuart to pick her up. Maybe she could ask him to buy her one and that way they can talk whenever they want? But then she’d have to hide it somewhere her parents wouldn’t find it.

  She lingers at the back of the reptile hut as long as she can, until she’s had enough of parents peering at her, a lone sullen teenager, like she’s something dangerous. Returning towards the sandpit, she sees her dad leaning on the fence just as she was. He glances at his watch as if he’s trying to calculate how much longer he’ll have to stay here, and she sno
rts. Then she sees him look up and watch a woman, a mother, walk past, his eyes sliding down her body and back up before he turns around to face the twins again.

  Maeve feels a little sick. Does he always do this? Check out other women? Is she only noticing it now? He’s a hypocrite, she thinks; he talks about family but all the while he throws himself into his work, his business trips, and perves on women who aren’t his wife.

  ‘I was just about to go looking for you, Maeve,’ he says when she approaches.

  ‘Can we go yet?’ she asks, loud enough for Iza and Michael – who have escaped from the pen – to hear.

  He checks his watch again. ‘Yes, I think we’ve given her long enough.’ Long enough, as if it’s his job to parcel it out, as if they’re all on his schedule. ‘Are you feeling better now?’

  ‘Yeah, my headache’s gone,’ she says with a sarcastic smile. But he’s looking down at the twins and misses it.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Can we get a toy?’ Iza asks as they leave by the gift shop.

  ‘Please, Dad?’ Michael begs.

  ‘No,’ he says, peering to find the car in the car park.

  It’s just where you left it, Maeve wants to say. ‘They deserve a toy for being good today.’

  ‘They already have enough toys. Come on, you two.’

  ‘Not even a pencil or something?’ Maeve asks. ‘You always used to let me buy me a pencil.’

  ‘We’re tightening our belts at the moment. Come on, you two,’ he repeats, as the thunderous look on Iza’s face threatens a tantrum.

  ‘Why? Is something wrong with your job?’ Maeve asks as they weave through the cars.

  ‘No,’ he says, frowning. ‘The house is expensive to run, Maeve. And your mother isn’t working at the moment.’

  ‘That’s not her fault. She stayed home for me.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was anyone’s fault,’ he says, as he leans into the back seat to help Iza pick up a book from the floor.

  Yeah, right, she thinks, getting into the front passenger seat.