by Karen Clarke
I looked up to see her smile, revealing her slightly crooked front teeth. ‘I bet your paintings are way better than theirs.’
‘I doubt that very much.’ Back on firmer ground, I slid the book into my bag while Katya headed to her usual spot by the window. As I reviewed my previous session notes, trying to marshal my thoughts, I could feel the weight of her gaze. I glanced up, but she was facing the window, her expression unreadable.
*
I managed to push everything out of my mind during my session with Katya, guiltily glad when she became too absorbed in her work to talk. Once she’d left – unusually swiftly – I was kept busy with Tom, an ex-soldier with PTSD who talked non-stop as he pushed great blocks of paint across his canvas, the action of moving his brush seeming to unlock his emotions.
After typing up my notes on both sessions, I went to find Marianne, hoping she’d be free for lunch, but when I nudged open the door to the creative writing room she was deep in discussion with two of her students and gave a discreet shake of her head. She never minded if her sessions ran over, was happy to grab a quick sandwich at her desk, but I liked to get out for some air.
I emerged into bright sunlight, my rumbling stomach reminding me I’d left the house that morning without breakfast. I headed to Nell’s, aware of Katya’s book in my bag as it bumped against my hip. Nodding to Nell through the café window, I sat at a table outside, trying to keep my mind fixed in the present. Across the road was a church, and a gift shop displaying framed prints in the window. It reminded me I’d had a voicemail from a gallery near Christchurch, which had sold my paintings in the past, about an upcoming exhibition. I pulled out my phone to call them back, relieved to see I hadn’t had any new texts.
Tabitha, the gallery owner, sounded delighted to hear from me. When I told her I had several seascapes I’d like her to consider, she suggested I send her some photos.
‘We can take about ten,’ she said.
I thought of all the canvases stored at my parents’ house, which I’d never intended to exhibit or sell. ‘I’ve got plenty,’ I told her. ‘I’ll pick a few of my favourites.’
‘Do you have a title? It would be good to start a social media campaign and of course there’ll be a press release.’
‘Making Waves.’ I hadn’t known I was going to say it until the words popped out, but it was as good a title as any. Better than ‘Drowning’, which had been my first thought.
‘Great.’ I could hear the smile in her voice. ‘I can’t wait to see them.’
As I ended the call, I was hit with a horrible thought.
Will I still be alive then?
‘Carrot and coriander,’ Nell said, making me jump as she placed a bowl in front of me, her fragrant soups too good to resist, even during summer. ‘You look serious.’
‘I do?’ I returned her smile, which was also hard to resist. She was small, with a round face and spiky white hair, her short frame clad in an apron with the café’s name on the front. Pushing seventy, she showed no signs of slowing down, the café her life as well as her livelihood. Nell was distantly related to Hugo Stanning, who’d donated Fernley House – but without his wealth, she often joked.
‘I was thinking about work,’ I said.
‘You lot do a good job up there.’ She nodded in the direction of the house, which was as much a fixture of the landscape in this part of Oxford as the café. ‘Helping those poor souls. You never know what people are going through, do you?’ She dipped her head to the left, where a middle-aged couple at the next table were chatting quietly over glasses of iced tea. ‘They were at each other’s throats before you got here,’ she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. ‘Now, they look like butter wouldn’t melt.’ She pointed to the soup. ‘Eat up, before it goes cold,’ she said in her normal voice, distracted by the arrival of a group of teenage girls, loudly deciding what flavour of ice-cream they were going to choose – a recent addition at the café.
‘Ew, soup,’ I heard one of them say as they passed. ‘Gross.’
Nell threw her hands up in mock despair before following them inside. My smile faded as I watched her retreating back. I picked up my spoon and began to eat, but Nell’s words rang loudly in my ears.
You never really know what people are going through, do you?
I picked up the freshly baked roll that accompanied the soup, but my stomach had twisted into a knot and there was no way I could eat. I felt suddenly exposed out there on the pavement, in full view of anyone passing – or watching.
The back of my neck went cold. I turned, but apart from a pair of mums with toddlers in pushchairs coming slowly up the street, and an elderly man with a dog on a lead, there was no one there.
But how would I know, if they were hiding?
My eyes skimmed the pavement opposite. Someone was coming out of the gift shop; a man, tall and dark-haired, wearing business clothes. He paused and looked over at me, waited for a car to pass, then crossed the road.
Gripped by sudden panic, I rose, bumping the table so that everything jumped and my spoon clattered to the ground.
‘Sorry I’m late, I wanted to get this,’ the man said. He wasn’t even looking at me. I turned to see a woman, waiting outside the café, her face lit up in a smile. She exclaimed with pleasure when he held out the bag he was carrying and opened it for her to peer inside.
‘Oh, it’s gorgeous,’ she said, pressing a kiss on his cheek. ‘Mum will love it.’
Heart thumping, I bent to pick up the fallen spoon, meeting the curious gaze of the middle-aged woman who’d been chatting to her partner. It seemed to say, What’s going on with her? I gripped the back of the chair, but was too on edge to sit down again.
‘Sorry, it was delicious, but I have to go,’ I said to Nell, thrusting a ten-pound note across the counter, ignoring her cry of, ‘What about your change?’ as I hurried out.
I practically jogged back to Fernley House, glancing over my shoulder as if I was being chased. When I reached my car, I threw myself inside and locked the doors, panting like a dog. Catching sight of myself in the mirror was a shock. I looked out of control; wild-eyed, with strands of hair escaping my topknot, my face sweaty and red.
Making myself breathe deeply, I pushed air out of my lungs – in, out, in, out – until my heart had stopped racing and my cheeks had cooled down. I had to think clearly, and stop looking for connections that didn’t exist. I couldn’t – mustn’t – let myself fall apart. That was exactly what someone wanted me to do.
What I should be doing, was trying to find out who.
Chapter 9
Normally, after work, I’d go home and work on a painting until it was time to pick Hayley up from school, but I found myself driving to my parents’ house, overtaken by the urge to do something besides cower in my car feeling powerless.
They lived in Headington in the same bay-fronted, red-brick semi I’d grown up in, away from the spires, books and bicycles people associated with Oxford, but close to another famous landmark: the huge fibreglass shark that looked to be diving through the roof of a house opposite the football ground. There’d been talk of us moving after my accident, and making a new start, but Mum wanted to stay close to her parents, and Dad thought the upheaval might be too much, so it came to nothing in the end. The house hadn’t changed much, mine and Jamie’s bedrooms trapped in time, the adjoining garage in need of updating.
I entered the kitchen through the side door, which still had a dent in the frame where Jamie once threw a cricket ball that veered off course. ‘Only me!’
‘Beth, what are you doing here?’ Mum got up from the scrubbed pine table that had seen years of dinners and homework, looking delighted but anxious.
‘I want to have a look through my canvases,’ I said. ‘I’m preparing some work for an exhibition at the Whitehaven gallery.’
‘Oh, Beth, that’s fantastic.’ She extricated herself from a swathe of curtain material. She’d been making soft furnishings for friends and neighbours,
and supplying a local interiors company since Jamie and I were little. It was rare to see her away from her sewing machine. ‘Couldn’t it have waited until Saturday?’ she said, casually. ‘You were coming for lunch anyway.’
She was subtly probing, wanting to know the real reason behind my visit, and a mix of frustration, love and irritation rose in my chest. If I hadn’t nearly drowned – if that man hadn’t died – how different would our lives have been? It was an age-old question, and one I’d never have the answer to. I couldn’t turn back time, as my counsellor had pointed out more than once, and I couldn’t change the past. Everything happens for a reason, Matt used to say – Emma too – but it never rang true for me. There was no reason I could fathom why a man had to die so I could live. Life was random, beyond my control, and that was what scared me so much. Survivor’s guilt was my official diagnosis – irrational but real, though naming it hadn’t helped much. I sometimes felt as if I was grieving for the relationships I could have had with my family, even though reason dictated I was lucky to have them at all.
‘That man’s family,’ I said, surprising us both. ‘They must be still furious with me, don’t you think?’
‘Oh, Beth, not this again.’ Her face slack with dismay, Mum sank back onto the bench where she’d been working, clutching at the fabric. ‘I thought you’d come to terms with it.’
Sucking in a tiny breath, I fought to keep my composure. ‘I have, it’s just …’ My gaze strayed to the old-fashioned wildlife calendar by the fridge, Mum’s neat handwriting marking out appointments and reminders. ‘It’s coming up to the date when it happened,’ I said slowly, shifting a couple of crafting magazines as I sat down opposite her. ‘It reminds me, that’s all.’
‘I know it does.’ She reached across the table and gave my fingers a brief, comforting clasp. ‘But it was so long ago, love; it’s in the past.’ Hearing the plea in her voice – don’t rake it up again, please – I knew I couldn’t tell her about the messages and start her worrying again.
Years ago, just after I turned thirteen, I’d been half-listening to a TV drama about a man seeking revenge on the woman who’d killed his mother in a drink-driving accident, when Jamie had said carelessly, ‘I bet his family feel like that about you.’
‘Whose family?’ I’d looked up from my sketchpad where I’d been drawing our black and white cat Bella, trying to get the tail right as she kept swishing it about.
‘That bloke who died saving your life.’ He’d given me a look of withering disbelief. ‘Who did you think I meant?’
His words had felt like blades across my skin. Until that moment, thanks to my parents’ efforts to shield me, my fears had been focused solely on being around water, on drowning, on falling asleep and reliving the ordeal in my dreams. My feelings about the man who saved me had reduced to an abstract sense of gratitude that he’d seen I was in trouble from the cliff path and swum out to rescue me. Initially, when I left hospital and asked who he was, demanding to meet him so I could thank him, Mum suggested I write a letter because he lived a long way away. So, I had, accompanying my words with a drawing of him as a cartoon Superman, captioned ‘My Hero’ surrounded by pink love hearts. I can never thank you enough for what you did, I’d written in my best script, with the fountain pen my grandmother had given me for Christmas.
Mum wept when she read it, but I hadn’t really understood why. It didn’t occur to me to ask his name then, or where exactly he lived, and I’d trusted her when she said she’d send the letter for me. I remembered watching out for the postman for a while after that, in case the man replied, and being vaguely disappointed when he didn’t. Dad said he probably didn’t want to make a fuss and that I shouldn’t worry about it.
Only after Jamie’s bombshell – deliberately dropped I understood later – did I confront my parents and learn the truth. That the man, whose name was withheld by the police when his body was found, had drowned.
My parents had wanted to make contact with his family through the police, to offer their condolences and to offer to help in some way, but the message had come back that they wanted no further communication and that was that. The letter I’d written was never posted.
It explained so much about the depth of my parents’ devastation and guilt, which I’d thought was about almost losing me, but turned out to be so much more.
‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ I’d raged – horrified they’d kept it from me – that finding out so bluntly, so much later, had reopened a wound that became deeper and more painful than I could have imagined. ‘He DIED,’ I’d yelled, unable to take it in. ‘He died, because of me.’
Nothing anyone could say could console me. I wanted to know everything: who he was, whether he’d had children, a wife, a mum and dad, brothers and sisters, but no one knew anything, not even his name, and my suggestion we contact the police again had been rebuffed. ‘It would cause more harm than good to bring it all up now. Just leave it, Beth, please.’
Jamie, shocked by the ferocity of my anger and guilt, had apologised for telling me, but with the edge of resentment I’d started to recognise – and dread. ‘You’d have found out one day, and it would have been the same,’ he muttered, the rash of spots around his jaw seeming to pulse with misery. ‘I know you’d have tried to find out about him.’
He was right, I would have, and maybe Mum and Dad would have told me eventually anyway, but the timing had been awful, the truth too great a shock, and knowing my brother had told me to hurt me had been hard to bear.
I was taken out of school for a week and put into counselling, having weekly sessions for the rest of the year, and occasionally after that for a couple more years, whenever the guilt threatened to overwhelm me.
‘The best thing you can do is embrace life, make the most of the chance you were given and live it to the full, don’t waste it,’ had been the gentle advice, but even that brought its own pressure. How should I live my life to the full, make it count, make it worthwhile? How was I supposed to justify my existence?
‘Imagine how awful our lives would have been if we’d lost you,’ Mum had pleaded, in tears of helplessness. ‘Isn’t that enough?’
‘Our lives are awful now anyway,’ Jamie said, but so quietly only I could hear. I knew he’d have preferred me not to exist if it meant our parents would notice him again, and stop being angry with him for telling me the truth. I couldn’t find the words to tell him I’d give anything to go back to before, when he used to make me giggle by doing impressions of the teachers at school, and let me draw him in silly poses.
Immersing myself in painting had helped, and so had escaping to London to study at the Royal College of Art. Qualifying as an art therapist had eventually allowed me to feel I was making a difference – that maybe I’d justified my existence after all. With each year that passed I’d let myself off the hook a little more, but it didn’t take much for guilt to dig its claws in once again.
‘You have to keep looking forward, not back, for Hayley’s sake as much as yours.’ Mum’s voice snapped me back to the moment, to the kitchen filled with sunlight reflecting off an army of photos on the cluttered dresser; Jamie and me, taken before the accident, grinning innocently and gap-toothed at the camera, and several taken in the years afterwards, carefully staged to portray us as a happy family, no visible undercurrents evident to an outsider.
We’d all had counselling for a while, when it became obvious our family dynamic had fractured – when I didn’t know the full story – but Jamie had remained silent throughout and Mum and Dad, always a tight unit, had each other to lean on.
I found myself wanting to say something now, about how awful it must have been for Jamie, keeping the man’s death a secret all that time, but looking at Mum’s face and remembering how hard she’d worked to help us all move on, my courage failed. Talking to Dad was out of the question too. He’d recoil at the mere hint of revisiting the past he’d mostly managed to bury.
‘Beth?’
I met M
um’s querying gaze and adopted a breezy tone. ‘How’s Dad?’
Her face softened. ‘Busy,’ she said, her shoulders dropping. ‘He’s working on an antique table at an old rectory near the canal in Marston.’
I smiled. ‘He’ll be in his element.’ Dad’s reputation as a furniture restorer took him to some interesting places – interesting to him, at least. If he wasn’t on site, he’d be in his repair shop a few streets away with his small team of employees.
‘It’s down to that BBC programme The Repair Shop,’ Mum said. ‘People are turning up with things for fixing, instead of throwing them out.’
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘It’s good for your dad – you know he’ll never retire.’ Mum rose and crossed to the fridge. She was wearing a coral-coloured knee-length dress she’d made herself and she’d varnished her toenails to match. ‘So, this exhibition,’ she said, clearly keen to move on. ‘Are you painting something new?’
‘I have some here that I want to use.’
‘Why don’t you pop out to the studio and have a look while I make us something to eat?’
‘Not for me, thanks,’ I said, rising. ‘I’ll need to get back soon for Hayley.’
She turned. ‘I expect she’s looking forward to seeing her other grandparents.’
The hint of animosity in her voice wasn’t to do with Matt’s parents. She liked them. It was about them going to France without me, and she was far from happy about my upcoming trip to Cornwall with Vic. I nearly hadn’t told her and Dad, but knew they’d find out somehow and then it would be worse.
‘I’m sure she’ll have a lovely time,’ I said, firmly. ‘It’s only for a few days, Mum. Dan and Gayle haven’t seen her for ages.’
Mum looked at me, a jug of freshly squeezed orange juice in one hand. ‘And are you looking forward to going away?’
I felt sick suddenly. ‘I’m sure it won’t be that bad.’
Relenting, Mum switched to her soothing tone. ‘Of course it won’t. I think you’re really brave to even try it.’ She opened her mouth then closed it again.
