“Bless you,” she says when she goes.
Her grief hangs around in the shop for a while, pressing down, a heaviness. I think of my mother’s death, of sitting in the crematorium chapel feeling that empty swing of sickness through me, thinking about her life and all its limitations—the bitterness that had never left her after my father walked out—and that now it would never get better, now she was out of time. The bleakness of that.
We close at five-thirty. We mop and tidy up, and I peel off my soggy gloves and hang them by the boiler.
“You get yourself an early night,” says Lavinia as we leave.
“I’m all right,” I tell her.
Her eyes rest on me a moment, but she doesn’t say anything more.
3
THERE ARE SEVERAL different routes to Sylvie’s nursery. I take the one that goes down Newgate Road. I know I shouldn’t do this. The decision is made somewhere deep inside me, almost without conscious thought.
I park a few yards from the house. The darkness is thickening, no one will see. I’m invisible here, a faceless person, a shadow in the street. I wind my window down an inch. There’s a cold scent of autumn, a tang of smoke and rotten leaves, and the high, sharp bark of a fox. I tell myself I’ll only stay a moment.
The blinds are still up in the drawing room that faces onto the street, and tawny lamplight spills across the paving in the garden. Tonight I’m lucky. Dominic’s car is here, so he must be at home. In the room, you can see all the things that Claudia has chosen—the subtle gray shades of the walls, the sketches in thin metal frames, on the mantelpiece a single orchid of a cool, watery green. The room seems so enticing in the mellowness of the light. I suddenly feel how cold I am sitting here, still chilled from the day. I wrap my arms tight around myself to try to stop myself shivering. I feel a deep, dangerous loneliness.
As I watch the drawing room, Charlie, their son, saunters in. He’s still in his school uniform, but it’s rumpled, his shirt hanging out. He’s tall now, visibly taller every time I see him, coltish, his hands and feet too big for him, a pale thatch of hair on his head. He looks around vaguely for something, then ambles out of the room.
I feel the quick fever of excitement that always comes over me here. I wonder if I will see Dominic.
But it’s Claudia who comes in. She walks right up to the window, which is a little open, and leans out, her arms on the sill. If she looked really hard, she might see me now, but I’m sitting quite still in the shadow, and anyway, would she even know who I am? Does she know about me and Sylvie? Dominic never told me. There’s so much he never said. She lingers there for a moment. Maybe like me she’s just breathing in the scent of rot and bonfires, the smell of approaching cold that paradoxically seems so full of promise. Then she closes the window and reaches up to pull on the cord of the blind. Her head is back, and briefly the lamplight catches on the arch of her throat and the bright blond fall of her hair. She’s thin, she has a figure that speaks of Pilates classes and always being a little hungry. Her arm looks angular, stretching up, the amber brightness gleaming on the bony curve of her wrist. Then the blind slides down.
I watch for a moment longer. There’s another shape in the room now, a shadow choreography behind the blinds. But the shapes are vague, indeterminate—it’s Charlie again, perhaps, or Maud, their daughter. I can’t tell whether Dominic is there. I think of this life of his that I am excluded from—that I was always excluded from, even when we were closest. The everydayness of him that I know nothing about. What he’s like at family mealtimes or at dinner parties with friends or kicking a football around with Charlie in the garden. I never knew him doing any of these things. I knew him only as a lover—tender, passionate, curious, in those lavish afternoons we’d spend together in my bed, when I’d feel a complete, exact pleasure in his insistent fingers, his easy, deep slide into me, the sweet, assiduous movement of his mouth. Or cool, closed-off, rejecting, in that terrible moment at the Alouette, the moment we couldn’t get back from. I’d been taking antibiotics for cystitis, but I hadn’t known that they could interfere with the pill. I told him I was pregnant, saw the instant retreat in his eyes. Cold crept through me. His look told me everything: his narrowed eyes, the way he stared at me as though I were his enemy. I knew the whole thing was fractured before he started to speak—explaining in his measured voice that of course I’d want to get it done privately, that he knew a good gynecologist, that naturally he’d pay.
A familiar nausea rises in me. I sicken myself. I cannot live like this—parking near his house, ringing him just to hear him on his voice mail. Looking in on another life that isn’t mine, that can never be mine. This is wrong, I know that. I’m bitterly ashamed of it. I’d never admit to anyone—Karen, Lavinia—that I do this. I try to move on, but nothing seems to work for me—the introduction bureau, the speed-dating evening at Crystals nightclub—none of it gets me anywhere. No other man seems quite real. They’re too young, too insubstantial; they don’t overwhelm me as he did. I have to make myself like them, check off their good points. Like with a man I met at Crystals, who seemed to have an interest in me: I spelled it all out in my head—his perfectly ironed white shirt, his floppy Hugh Grant hair, his smell of soap and cologne. Trying to convince myself.
I resolve that this is the last time. I promise myself I will never do this again—never, never. I drive off rapidly, but the nausea doesn’t leave me.
At the nursery it’s Beth who lets me in. She’s arranging the children’s artwork on a table ready for going home. She’s Sylvie’s favorite assistant. She has curly hair haphazardly pinned up, and warm brown eyes.
She smiles at me.
“Sylvie’s in the story corner,” she says. “Oh—and I think Mrs. PB wanted a word—she told me to tell you.”
There’s a scurry of anxiety at the edges of my mind. “Has Sylvie been okay?”
Beth makes a little rocking movement with her hand.
“So-so,” she says. “You know—most of the time.”
I know she’s trying to smooth something over.
I go into the garden room. There are alphabet posters and trays of toys in gorgeous fruit-gum colors, and the warmth is welcome after the chill of the streets. I always love to come to Little Acorns. Our life may not be perfect, but in sending Sylvie here, I know I have done my best for her.
The children who haven’t yet been picked up are on cushions in the story corner: one of the assistants is reading them Where the Wild Things Are. It’s a favorite book of Sylvie’s, with its fabulous monsters at once predatory and amiable, but she isn’t paying attention. She’s hoping for me, she keeps looking toward the door. As I go in, she comes running across the floor toward me. But she doesn’t fling herself on me the way another child might. She stops just in front of me and I kneel and she reaches her hands to my face. She gives a theatrical shiver.
“You’re cold, Grace.”
I wrap her in my arms. She smells so good, of lemon, gingersnaps, warm wool. I breathe her in: for a moment I am completely happy. I tell myself, This is where I should be living—in the present, with Sylvie, not always looking behind me and longing for what I can’t have.
“Ah. Ms. Reynolds. Just who I wanted to see.”
Mrs. Pace-Barden is at her office door. She has cropped, graying hair and dark, conservative clothes. There’s something wholesome and vigorous about her. I always imagine her as a hockey coach, urging recalcitrant young women to keep their minds on the game.
She bends to Sylvie.
“Now, Sylvie, I need to have a word with your mum. Would you go and get your coat, please?”
Sylvie’s fingers are wrapped like bandages around my hand. I sense her reluctance to let go after a whole day without me. I don’t know what will happen—whether she’ll do as she’s told or instead just stand here, mute and clinging, with her opaque, closed face and her fingers clenched around mine. Karen once said to me, explaining why she likes to stay at home with her children, “The thing is
, you know your own children inside out, like nobody else does—you know just what their triggers are. I mean, Lennie hates having her food mixed up and is horrible after chocolate, and Josh used to have this thing about heads apart from bodies . . . You always know how they’re going to react . . .” Saying it with the certainty that I’d nod and say I agreed. And I thought, But I don’t, I don’t know, not with Sylvie.
But this time it’s okay. She holds on just for a moment, then heads off to the cloakroom. She must have been using pastels: her fingers have left a staining like ash on my hands.
“Now, why I wanted to see you,” says Mrs. Pace-Barden. “I’m afraid we had a bit of a scene with Sylvie again today.” She’s lowered her voice, as though anxious to save me from embarrassment. “It was when the water play came out. Unfortunately, Sylvie can be rather aggressive when she gets upset—”
I feel a hot little surge of anger. I’ve told them over and over.
“You know she’s scared of water play,” I say.
“Of course we do,” says Mrs. Pace-Barden. “And we took that into account. We were careful to see she was on the other side of the room. But as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, we can’t stop the other children from enjoying a full range of activities—not just for one child. I’m sure you can see that, Ms. Reynolds.”
“Yes, of course.” Shame moves through me.
“To be honest, I just can’t figure her out. I’m not often defeated by children, but this . . .” Some unreadable emotion flickers across her face. “We need to talk about it. Wouldn’t you agree?”
It isn’t a question.
“Yes, of course,” I tell her.
“I’d like to make an appointment for you to come in,” she says.
“But I’m not in a hurry. We could talk about it now.”
“I’d really rather have a proper discussion,” she says. “I think we owe that to Sylvie.”
Her seriousness unnerves me.
“Perhaps a fortnight today?” she says.
I know this isn’t negotiable.
We fix the time. She goes off to her room.
Sylvie comes back with her coat and slips her hand into mine, and we go out into the foyer.
“Now don’t go forgetting your picture, Sylvie,” says Beth. She turns toward us, holding out the drawing. “It’s one of her houses,” she tells me.
I glance at it—a house in pastel crayons, precisely placed in the middle of the page. Just the same as every day. She’s been drawing houses for several months, and she draws them over and over. They’re neat, exactly symmetrical—four windows, a chimney, a door—and they’re always bare and unadorned. Never any people—though she knows how to draw stick people now, with triangle skirts for the women and clumpy big boots for the men—and never any flowers in the garden. Sometimes she draws blue around the house, not just for the sky, but all around, a whole bright border of blue, so the house looks like it’s floating. I said to her once, “It’s such a nice house in your picture. Does anybody live there?” But she had her closed look, she didn’t tell me anything.
I hold the picture by its corner; pastel smudges so easily. We say goodbye to Beth and go out into the evening.
In the middle of the night I wake, hearing the click of my bedroom door. I’m afraid. Just for an instant, a heartbeat, taking in the shadow in my doorway, dark against the crack of yellow light from the hall, I think that someone has broken in, that someone is looking in at me—a stranger. I can’t make out her face, she’s just a silhouette against the hall light, but I can see the shaking of her shoulders as she sobs.
I’m drenched with sleep. I can’t get up for a moment.
“Oh sweetheart—come here.”
She doesn’t come.
I put on my bedside light and drag myself out of bed. My body feels heavy, lumbering. I go to her, put my arms all around her. Her skin is chilly. She doesn’t feel like a child who’s just tumbled out of a warm bed. Sometimes in the night she’ll kick off all her covers, however securely I tuck her duvet in around her, as though her dreams are a struggle.
She lets me hold her, but she doesn’t move in to me. She’s clutching Big Ted to her. Her face is desolate. She has a look like grief.
“What did you dream about, sweetheart?”
She won’t tell me.
She moves away from me, makes to get into my bed. I slip in beside her, wrap her in my arms.
“It’s all over,” I tell her. “The nightmare’s over. You’re here with me now. Everything’s okay.”
But she’s still shuddering.
“It’s not real, Sylvie,” I tell her. “Whatever you saw, whatever happened in your dream. It didn’t really happen, it was only a dream.”
Her eyes are on me, the pupils hugely dilated by the dark. In the dim light of my bedside lamp they’re a deeper color than usual, the elusive blue-gray of shaded water. The terror is still on her. When she looks at me, it’s as though she isn’t seeing me. Nothing I say makes sense to her.
I try again, needing to say something, anything, hoping my voice will soothe her.
“That’s what a dream is,” I tell her. “It’s something your mind makes up—like a picture show in your head. Sometimes a horrible one. But it’s gone now, it’s over. It doesn’t mean anything.”
The front of her pajama top is damp from all the crying. I feel I ought to change it, but she’s starting to quiet. I don’t want to rouse her again. I stroke her hair.
“This is the real world, sweetheart. You and me and Big Ted and our home and everything . . .”
Quite suddenly the tension leaves her. Her hand that’s clasping the teddy bear eases open, her fingers are lax and fluid, her eyelids flutter and close. I want to say, Why do you do this, Sylvie? Why are you so unhappy? But she’s asleep already.
4
ON SATURDAY SOMETHING cheering happens. Even the timing is perfect—because Sylvie and I are about to set off for Karen’s. If he’d rung a moment later, we’d have been gone. This timing is a good omen.
“Now, am I speaking to Grace Reynolds?”
A man’s voice, light, pleasant, with a smile in it.
“Yes,” I tell him, a fragile hopefulness flaring up in me.
“Grace, it’s Matt. We met at that weird evening at Crystals, remember?”
“Of course I remember.”
“Grace, to get to the point, I’d love to take you out to dinner. If you’d like that.”
“I’d like it a lot,” I tell him.
“Great.” He sounds relieved, as though it matters.
We fix the time, the place—next Thursday, and we will go to Welford Place. It’s a restaurant by the river I’ve sometimes driven past. It used to be a gentlemen’s club. Quite different from the Alouette, I guess—no red-checked cloths or accordion music or menus scrawled on a board. I imagine silkily ingratiating waiters and a silver trolley that’s heaped with indulgent desserts.
I can’t recall if I told him about Sylvie. It’s probably best to make sure.
“I’ll have to fix a babysitter. For my little girl,” I tell him.
“Of course, Grace. Look, just ring if there’s a problem.”
I put down the phone and stand there for a moment. I remind myself of his white linen shirt and the hair falling into his eyes: I remind myself I liked him. I have a distinct, thrilled sense of newness. This is all so easy, so straightforward—both of us unattached—and I told him about Sylvie and he didn’t seem to mind.
It’s a gorgeous afternoon, honeyed sunlight mellowing everything. I decide we will walk to Karen’s. It isn’t that far. Sylvie brings her Shaun the Sheep rucksack with some of her Barbies inside. We talk about the things we pass: a glove that someone has dropped in the road, which looks from a distance like a small dead animal; a caterpillar that Sylvie spots on the pavement, no longer than her thumbnail and the fresh, bright green of limes.
“We must be very careful when we come back,” says Sylvie. “We mustn’t tread on the ca
terpillar.”
In the tree-lined road where Karen lives, there’s a cat that sits in a circle of sun.
“The cat has yellow eyes,” says Sylvie. “Look, Grace.”
She strokes the cat with a gentle, scrupulous touch, and it rubs against her, purring hugely.
“He likes me, Grace,” she says.
I watch her as she pets the cat: just like a normal child.
At Karen’s, the girls go up to Lennie’s room. They’ll probably play their favorite hospital game with Lennie’s Barbies. This always seems to involve a lot of amputation and bandaging. We sit in the kitchen, where there’s a scent of baking and citrus, and Karen’s Aga gives out a welcome warmth. Leo and Josh have gone sailing today, as they usually do on Saturdays. You can hear the liquid sound of chatter and laughter from Lennie’s room—Karen has left the kitchen door open. I notice this, and briefly wonder whether she leaves the door ajar when other, more predictable children come to play.
Karen complains about homework. Josh has been given an alarming math project to finish by Monday morning.
“It’s the poor old parents who have to do it, as usual,” she says. “Why can’t they just give us a break for once?”
She puts the coffeepot to perk on the stove.
During the half-term holiday, she tells me, Josh’s homework project was to make a model castle. Karen found cereal boxes and paint, and he put together something with a vaguely medieval look, though the turrets kept collapsing. But when she dropped him off at school at the end of the holiday, there were far more fathers than usual accompanying their children, all of them carrying the most complicated constructions, one complete with a miniature canon that fired.
“All Josh’s mates laughed at him and said his castle was crap,” she says. “What’s the point? It’s nothing to do with kids actually learning stuff, it’s just competitive parenting . . .”
Karen’s coffee has a kick to it. I drink gratefully. She takes muffins out of the Aga and puts them to cool on a rack.
Yes, My Darling Daughter Page 3
