The Ophelia Girls

by Jane Healey

  ‘I’ll have to think about that,’ he says, and then takes a sip of his beer with a smack of his lips. ‘I can’t believe it’s still so hot at this hour. It’s like we’re in the Mediterranean or something. Like we could walk to the end of the path,’ he points his arm, ‘and the beach would be right there. We should go on holiday, you and I. Where would you like to go?’

  She sighs and stretches her toes. ‘Florence? Venice?’

  ‘Good choices. For a start,’ he says, and then he tells her all the places he will take her, the villages and beaches, the temples and museums and art galleries where he will take her picture in front of gorgeous backdrops, the hotels they will sleep in and the campsites they will rock up to at midnight, the food he’ll cook over a fire, or the restaurant where he’ll ply her with so much wine and ice cream he’ll have to carry her home.

  In the car she feels achingly sad, gripping the edge of the seat with her fingers as if she can slow them down.

  ‘Was I an accident?’ she asks, resting her cheek on her knees again. ‘Mum getting pregnant with me?’ Her parents had pushed her grandfather away and Stuart, and now they’re pushing each other away too. Maybe they only ever stayed together because of Maeve.

  ‘If you were, it was a happy one. They were devoted to you. Your mother didn’t want kids when she was a teenager, but then lots of people think that when they’re young.’

  ‘It’s ironic,’ she says, ‘because I can’t have children.’ Tears leak from her cheeks onto her legs.

  ‘Are the doctors sure?’

  ‘Very sure.’ She wipes her eyes with the back of her wrists. One of Stuart’s hands is woven in her hair. ‘It’s fine if you’re a boy, a man, you can freeze stuff. But there wasn’t enough time to take my eggs. I don’t even want children.’ She’s still a child herself, she feels, still wants to be looked after. ‘I just feel like this is the end, this drive, this day with you,’ she sobs, ‘I feel like everything is going to disappear and be over.’

  He jerks the car to a stop that rocks her forward, her knees and palms hitting the dashboard hard. They’re on a quiet countryside lane but another car could drive behind them at any time.

  ‘The car—’

  ‘I’ll start it again when you believe me that I’m not going to leave you, that we’ll figure something out. Even if we have to wait until you’re eighteen. OK?’

  ‘OK.’ She nods quickly.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, as he starts the car again. ‘Shit, sorry.’ He rubs one hand over her knee, glances back and forth between her and the road.

  She circles her sore wrists. ‘It’s fine, I’m fine.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I scared you.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘You were scaring me, you sounded so hollow and sad. I hate the thought that I’ve ruined this summer for you, made you upset.’

  ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘God, I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘You were crying this morning in my car and again now. Maybe we’ll just take trains from now on, it’ll be safer.’

  ‘I’m only crying because of them,’ she says, waving her hands at the dark outside the window, the beams of the lights low and mesmerizing, as if the road is rushing towards them as the car weaves around tight corners. ‘Not because of you.’

  On the lane to the hamlet, he brings the car to a stop again, slowly this time, turning in his seat to take her face in his hands and kiss her for so long she finds it hard to catch her breath, her lips feel bruised and swollen, her tongue sore.

  ‘Better?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says with a laugh. ‘Thoroughly mauled.’

  ‘Right, let’s compose ourselves.’ He straightens his shoulders, cracks open a pack of gum and hands her a piece. ‘Good to go?’

  ‘Good to go.’

  Her mother is a silhouette in the doorway as they approach the house. When Stuart leaves the car he doesn’t look back at Maeve or put an arm around her, and even though Maeve knows he can’t now, she misses it, blames her mother for it.

  ‘I was going to send out a search party,’ Ruth says. She looks anxious, peeved.

  ‘So sorry, Ruth,’ Stuart says, hoisting his heavy bag back on his shoulder. ‘It was my fault – I got caught up in my work and then we had to stop at a petrol station on the way back and I got completely turned around. Maeve here was a faultless navigator though, it was all me.’

  ‘Did you have a good time?’ Ruth asks her, reaching out to cup the back of her head.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve seduced her to the dark side of a job in the arts yet, but I’m working on it,’ Stuart says, and Maeve chokes on a cough.

  ‘Well, you’re the first ones home – Alex is still at work, apparently,’ her mother says with a tight smile. ‘Thought I was going to be left to raise the twins myself,’ she adds as they follow her into the kitchen. ‘It’s a cold dinner, I’m afraid, I just didn’t know what time anyone would be back.’

  ‘It’s fine, Mum—’

  ‘That’s fine, Ruth—’

  They share a look as her mother sighs in front of the open fridge.

  ‘So, tell me all about it, darling,’ she says, brightening her face. ‘How was the maze, did it have a maze? I can’t remember, sorry.’

  ‘It had a folly,’ Maeve said, ‘but we didn’t walk that far in the heat.’

  Stuart slips away to take his camera bags back to the annexe and Maeve tells her mother what she did that day, besides the obvious. She’s a good liar, she thinks, or maybe her mother is just too distracted to see that she’s lying. Ruth keeps checking her watch and peering out at the dark of the garden as though it might tell her something about her husband’s journey back from London.

  Maeve humours her mother right up until the point when she remembers that her father had an affair, that he’s late from work. Then she feels anxious, a bitter twist to her gut that she had to return here at all, to have to be a spectator to the charade of her parents’ marriage.

  But she doesn’t have to stay here, she reminds herself – as she rolls a bruised apple from the fruit bowl noisily back and forth across the table until her mother tells her to stop, that she’s got a headache – because Stuart is going to take her away from here, help her start again somewhere new, be someone new.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Three days into the heatwave and the twins have turned feral. Running around the garden in their underwear, demanding the sprinkler be turned on and that they be given enough ice lollies to turn their tongues blue, lying in warm piles and bemoaning that they are too hot, Mummy, too hot, like little aristocratic lords sojourning in the jungles.

  ‘It’s hot for everyone,’ I tell them, as they moan, ‘everyone experiences the same weather.’ But they are unconvinced; their pain and discomfort is unique.

  Every teenager thinks their angst is unique too, and though it’s true there are variations and gradations, youths who are beaten, who live in appalling poverty, who are severely unwell, I tell myself that underneath, what Maeve is going through is just a flavour of the norm. I tell myself this to try and understand her, this sullen almost-adult who looks so much like me from the corner of my eye, with her red hair and floral summer dresses, that it makes me nervous.

  Yesterday, the doctor called with the good news, that her results were all clear, that she was still in remission.

  I wanted to run and hug her, to spin her around in my arms like I did when she was little, before she got ill, but her bedroom door was closed and she kept saying she would be just a minute, Mum, so I had to tell her the news through the door and wait for her to shuffle out and stand there awkwardly while I hugged her.

  ‘It’s good news,’ I said. ‘I’ll phone your dad and tell him too, he’ll be delighted.’

  Her smile was strained and it frustrated me.

  ‘What’s wrong? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘Are you sad you’re not ill, is that it?�
�� I said. It was a joke but I meant it too. Children who have been invalids can get stuck, the family therapist we consulted said. They fear the unknown, even if the unknown is good health and a future without a dark shadow over it.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have your whole life ahead of you, your whole life. You can choose anything, go anywhere, be anyone. You can meet someone, get married—’

  ‘I can’t have children though,’ Maeve replied. It felt like she was trying to hurt me; there was something about the bitter edge to her voice that seemed like a dig.

  ‘There’s lots of ways to have children, remember what the doctors told you? There’s surrogates and adoption.’

  ‘I just want to rest.’

  ‘You’ve been resting all summer!’ I had become one of those mothers I hate, the ones with bright voices and chivvying smiles.

  ‘Can I go back in my room now?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure. We’ll celebrate the news at dinner, OK? I can make the chocolate torte for you, or maybe some wine?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said, and closed the door slowly.

  My smile dropped. Maybe this was why my father parented at one remove, maybe any rejection hurts less then. I rubbed a hand across my forehead and felt the smarting of my eyes, before the twins called for me and I returned to the kitchen, finding them splattering water from the sink onto the floor because they couldn’t fit their bucket under the tap.

  ‘There’s a tap outside,’ I snapped, as I grabbed for something to mop up the water and got down on my knees. ‘You used it this morning.’

  Is there anything that makes a person want to cry more than spilled liquid? The way it creeps slow and yet faster than you can react to, rolling along a sloped floor or slopping down a table, soaking into tea towels and your shorts and ruining everything.

  I let myself have a short cry, a few sobs, a pitiful sniff, there on my knees in the kitchen while the tap outside made the pipes under the sink bang and hiss and I counted down the hours until dinner, until bed.

  Stuart left yesterday afternoon for a week, called away on a favour for a friend, and the house is quieter. I miss him and dislike him for missing him, for coming back and offering a friendship that somehow doesn’t feel equal, and for our last conversation which left me feeling sore.

  The twins certainly missed his usual tricks last night at dinner, the juggling he does with the cork mats and the stories he makes up about the fantastical beasts he’s seen on his travels, and had to be shouted at to sit still. It felt awkward between me and Alex too, with no other adult to look to, no one to smooth the sharp edges of our conversation – when Alex eventually came home, that is. He has an important project, he says, and he’ll be needed late at work for the next little while. Is the important project a brunette in a tight blouse? I want to ask, but I know that would just start another fight.

  ‘Do you think Alex hates me?’ I asked Stuart two nights ago, when we sat at the bottom of the garden with the sherries I had poured from my dad’s old stash. Alex had gone to bed at eleven but I didn’t want to lie awake for an hour next to him, feeling the yawning cavern of things not said.

  ‘Ruth,’ he admonished sadly, putting an arm around my shoulder. ‘Alex doesn’t hate you.’

  It felt good to be held. How long had it been since Alex and I had touched one another so easily?

  ‘Marriage is hard,’ Stuart declared.

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘Relationships are hard and marriages are only long relationships with some extra legalities. Why do you think I’m still single? Staying with one person, growing at different speeds, hoping that your feelings will stay the same through time. Impossible.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be encouraging me.’

  ‘Am I?’ he asked a little pointedly. He took his cigarette pack out of his pocket and I drew back.

  ‘Of course you are.’ I wrapped my arms around my shoulders.

  ‘At dinner,’ he said, putting his cigarette behind his ear, ‘you said you didn’t swim.’

  We had been talking about holidays. Alex had been musing about our next destination and how there was no point in getting a villa because I couldn’t swim. Then I said that it was silly to think about holidays anyway, when the upkeep on this house meant we wouldn’t be able to afford one in the near future.

  ‘I don’t swim, I didn’t say I can’t.’ When I turned my head towards him I felt dizzy. Too much sun, too many drinks.

  ‘Because of what happened?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But do you want to know a secret?’ I added, as if we were children again and testing our friendship by the stories we spilled – and ignoring the part of me that remarked that Stuart had only really shared the one story with me, that long day when I drew him, that I seemed to be the only one giving parts of myself away.

  ‘Always,’ he said and tucked my hair behind my ear, and I felt reassured.

  If I had married Stuart, would things be different now? Would he be devoted to me or would he have run away from me when I couldn’t give him what he wanted, my devotion in return?

  ‘In London, Alex made me get a therapist,’ I confessed. ‘Well, he didn’t make me, but he was worried, he felt helpless and got frustrated with it. You know how he is with things, how he wants a rational answer. I was struggling too; Maeve was so ill and the twins were such a handful. So I called up some woman and booked an initial appointment, a consultation. She was in Hampstead – I don’t know why I didn’t go with someone closer, I must have been given a recommendation from someone, I don’t know. Anyway,’ I continued. Stuart was watching me closely, bent over with his hands clasped in his lap, mirroring my forward hunch, my arms thrust through the hollow of my thighs like I was a girl again. ‘I got to her house and stood outside looking at her front garden, looking at her front door. I was picturing the whole thing. Saying Hi, walking in, polite chit-chat and then us sitting down so I could spill everything out, so I could sob in a beige-carpeted room in some stranger’s house.’

  ‘You didn’t go.’

  ‘I didn’t go. I went to the Heath instead. It was late spring, a warm day but not a summer’s day, not yet. I realized I was following someone walking through the wooded path, matching my stride to theirs, and then they arrived at the ponds, holding the gate open so I could follow them. The swimming ponds, you know. Have you heard of them?’

  ‘I have, yeah. Never been.’

  ‘I didn’t have a swimming costume but the lifeguard must have seen how desperate I was, must have wanted to soothe this crazy lady who just turned up with her handbag, and said there was a spare in lost property. So I got changed and then I stood at the top of the ladder, staring down at the murky water, wondering what the hell I was doing. It was icy cold, I’ve never felt something that cold. I slipped off one of the rungs of the ladder and went under and it was like – like a hundred icy needles in my skull, like I had thrown myself into a fire. When I breached the surface I was gasping and laughing. It was incredible.’ I shook my head.

  ‘Cold water shock.’

  ‘Yeah. I only managed five minutes or so that day and my hands were still claws when I got out. My skin was humming for the rest of the day, I had this glorious shivering feeling in my chest. I went back once a week, sometimes more, built up my exposure as the water got warmer, swam full lengths, got stronger. It was my little slice of paradise, my hour snatched from the world. I kept waiting for someone to notice. I had to keep my swimsuit hanging on the balcony where Alex never went, but I still thought he’d notice that I smelled like pond, that my hair was damp, that I had leaves from the park stuck to my shoes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell him? Why don’t you tell him now that you can swim?’

  ‘I lied to him for too long, it would sound so strange. He would be hurt.’ Maybe when you tell one lie, hide one truth, you get used to it, it becomes a habit. I clinked the lip of the sherry glass against my teeth, wishing I had brought the bottle with us too.

/>   ‘He still doesn’t know about the girls, does he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Jesus.’ I heard the rasp of his hand across his chin.

  ‘I’m sure he doesn’t tell me everything about his childhood.’

  ‘I’m sure he’d tell you if he was there when someone drowned in front of him.’

  My breath caught. The garden around us felt very still, bright somehow, hyper-real. ‘Don’t—’

  ‘What? Don’t say it?’

  ‘You’ve never talked about it either, you never mentioned it to me.’

  ‘Because I knew it would make you upset.’

  ‘It does, so don’t.’

  He scoffed. ‘So we can only talk about what you want to talk about?’

  ‘That’s not what I said.’

  ‘I was there too, you know. I dream of it, don’t you?’

  ‘Don’t—’ I shook my head.

  ‘Fine, whatever you want,’ he said, and got up and left.

  The gate to the annexe creaked in the thin air and a bird skittered away unseen in the sky.

  *

  Maybe the river has dried up in the heat, or will do soon, if it doesn’t rain again. Maybe it will never rain again.

  In my memories of that summer, it’s always hot – blazing perfect summer days – but if I think hard I can remember the rainy days too, the overcast skies that turned the river pale with cloud, dulled the dizzy sparkle of its surface, how we got cold so quickly in the water and then huddled for warmth with a blanket if we remembered or a scarf, elbows linked tightly together and legs jammed up against one another. Because our cameras were cheap and over-sensitive, the photographs we took on cloudy days had more detail in them – ribbon trim, the floral pattern of a dress, the shade of eye colour and the sheen of lipstick – whereas the ones taken on sunny days were often bleached by it, or came out almost black if the strong shadow of the trees hit the river right.

  It was sunny, but not hot, that afternoon when Linda and Joan had their argument, when Camille and I had swum beside one another for so long our skin went blue and the skin on the bottoms of our feet furrowed, our fingerprints lost inside pale topography. It was sunny even when we left the river, and in the woods the light broke through the leaves and shone irregular shapes before us.