Good Girls

by Amanda Brookfield

  Nick had stood a little apart from her, fixing his gaze on the horizon, clearly content for her to take however long she needed. He leant against a fence post, clearly lost in his own thoughts as he stared out across the water. Difficult thoughts, quite probably, Eleanor realised. Such an expanse of water. It was a wonder he could even look. She went to stand next to him, placing a tentative hand on his back, and then, in one swift movement, she had unscrewed the lid of the urn and flung the contents as far as she could into the drop below. Nick did not flinch, or speak.

  For an instant Eleanor had feared the swirl of ash might blow back at them, like some horrible final ironic twist in a film noire; bits of her unknowable, unforgiving and unforgivable father catching in the creases of her clothes, her hair. But, instead, the wind actually seemed to hold its breath for a few instants, providing a pocket of stillness. The ashes floated and dispersed quickly, a gossamer veil merging into the steely backdrop of water and sky.

  When Nick’s hand found hers, she had squeezed it hard. ‘I don’t think he ever loved me. I hate him for what he did to Kat. I’m glad he’s gone.’

  ‘So am I. For you.’

  ‘I miss Kat so much.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Like you miss your dad, maybe,’ she went on, as they turned back down the path, ‘with nothing getting in the way of it, just wanting them back.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose. Though I am not sure my mother would agree. She’s hopeless without my father. The price of love.’ He pulled a face. ‘I can’t wait to get away. I’ve started telling letting agents I’ll take anything with a roof. I’ve not heard back about the Oxford interview, but I’ve applied for a couple more jobs, one in Cheltenham, the other at the Royal Berkshire. I would so like to have something sorted in time for the girls.’

  In the car he had seemed subdued, fighting annoyance with the stick. But the moment they set off he had brightened.

  They were in the thick of the countryside, still an hour off Oxford, when he rapped the empty urn. ‘You know, this might make a fine plant pot. Geraniums or something.’

  ‘Geraniums?’ Eleanor couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘I like it when you laugh. Sort of low and throaty.’

  ‘I suppose you’re going to say you didn’t fully appreciate that either, all those centuries ago.’

  ‘On the contrary, I have no recollection of your laugh whatsoever. In fact, I don’t think you did laugh much in your student days. Maybe that was one of the reasons I didn’t pay you as much attention as I might have.’

  Eleanor let out a small whoop of protest. ‘Still, he tries to rewrite history for his own purposes.’

  ‘You’re mostly very jolly now though, from what I have been able to ascertain,’ Nick went on, ignoring her. ‘Always laughing. Even today, a bit.’ He eyed her shrewdly. ‘Anyone could be forgiven for thinking you were in danger of being happy.’

  ‘Could they? Oh my goodness.’

  ‘By the way, if and when a lay-by comes up, would you mind pulling into it?’

  ‘Of course. A lay-by. No problem. Nature calls, I assume.’

  ‘It does.’

  When a loop of tarmac parallel to the road appeared a few minutes later, Eleanor steered smoothly onto it, pulling up on its grass verge. ‘Will this do?’ She peered through the windscreen. ‘A field and a few handy trees.’

  ‘Very handy.’

  She turned off the engine and folded her arms. ‘No hurry.’

  ‘Good.’ But instead of getting out of the car, he shifted in his seat so he was facing her. ‘Because I don’t like to hurry.’

  ‘Okay. That’s fine.’ Eleanor swallowed, all the confusion of being in his company rushing back at her. He had made a bad day good. She liked having him nearby, especially when he flirted. But the hand on her leg had been withdrawn and the state of suspension between them was starting to wear her down. Maybe he was playing games. Maybe her stupid, ever-hopeful heart was about to get trampled on again.

  ‘I have to tell you something difficult.’ He spoke with sudden gravity, making the confusion no easier to bear.

  ‘Aren’t you going to pee?’ she asked feebly.

  ‘Nope. I lied. I just wanted you to pull over. You asked for honesty and here I am, already disobeying. You can’t trust me for a moment. Trouble, as you have yourself so acutely observed. This thing I have to tell you.’ The seriousness was back in his voice. ‘It may seem premature. But with this… friendship of ours, I want to take nothing for granted. Straight talking, just like you have said.’ He sounded almost cross.

  Apprehension was swamping the excitement again. It was like being on a rollercoaster and she was sick of it. Eleanor fixed her eye on one of the trees, a lone silver birch overshadowed by the pines. It looked small and sickly. The ghostly silver birches of her childhood came back at her, the whisper of danger she had heard in their branches. The world, even when it glowed, contained dark places, shadows. She had always known that, long before she understood it. Nothing good was ever plain sailing, least of all love. And she did love him, she realised. ‘Get it over with,’ she whispered.

  He cupped her face and lifted it so that they were nose to nose. ‘May I kiss you now? That’s the real reason why I asked you to pull over; because of the need to do this.’ He brushed his lips against hers. ‘It was starting to get in the way. It has been for a while now. Even in the hospital.’

  ‘Really? When I was all bloated?’ Eleanor blinked at him.

  ‘I know, bonkers.’ He shook his head and started to kiss her.

  ‘The handbrake is sticking into my ribs,’ she mumbled.

  ‘That’s too bad,’ he said, kissing her harder.

  A shout outside – loud as a gunshot – made them pull apart, how many minutes later neither could have said.

  ‘Kissing in a car – whatever next,’ Eleanor murmured, nestling against Nick, the brake having somehow found a comfortable niche between her thigh and hipbone.

  ‘We should be locked up,’ Nick agreed cheerfully, trying and failing to flatten all the wild wisps of her hair tickling his chin. After a moment, he added, ‘I may have to start believing in God. Would you be okay with that?’

  ‘Sure.’ Eleanor giggled. ‘God, Martians, believe what you like.’ She wrested herself upright, defeated by the handbrake at last.

  ‘I can’t think how to explain it otherwise.’

  ‘Explain what?’

  ‘This. Us. You and me. Now.’ He ran a finger down her cheek.

  ‘I don’t want to understand it,’ Eleanor said quietly, starting the car.

  ‘I’d invite you back to my place if I had one,’ said Nick as they re-joined the road. ‘Unless you want to meet my mother of course?’

  Eleanor shot him a look. ‘I would definitely like to meet your mother. But not this afternoon… if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Ah. What did you have in mind for this afternoon?’

  ‘My place? A cup of tea?’

  ‘Tea. Fantastic.’ He settled back into his seat, folding his arms. ‘That sounds ideal.’

  At her front-door Eleanor found her capacity to manage the situation in danger of dissolving. There was such anticipation, such joy, but also pressure. Two decades of it. The dashed hopes and dead ends, the shadows of Kat, all the complicated sorrows, for a moment it felt as if the walls of their pasts might cave in on them. Her house keys jumped in her hands as she tried to use them.

  ‘You’re not rushing, are you,’ Nick murmured, pressing against her and slipping his arms round her waist. ‘It would be a shame, would it not, to rush after twenty years.’ He shuffled closer, kissing the back of her neck. ‘I’d carry you if I could. Over the threshold. But I can’t. So you’ll have to consider yourself metaphorically carried instead. Will that do?’

  ‘Metaphorically carried?’ A laugh of pure joy escaped her. It would have been hard to think of anything she wanted more.

  33

  Trevor settled deeper into the deckchair, rais
ing the rim of his panama so that the sun could find all of his face and linking his hands across the swell in his belly, the one that contained Eleanor’s splendid Sunday lunch and the tumour he had recently been told would kill him. Three months, the oncologist had said. Six at most.

  Through half-closed eyes, he let his gaze travel round Eleanor’s fine garden, with its high enclosure of greenery and lower tiers of colour. White, yellow, pink, blue, he wasn’t good on names, Latin or otherwise, but the colours were a feast, even with autumn getting into its stride at last. The weekend was to offer the last gasp of temperate weather for months, the pundits had warned, news much discussed during the course of Eleanor’s delicious lamb tagine and spiced rhubarb crumble, and deployed afterwards by her, quite fiercely, as the reason her guests were to enjoy their coffee and chocolate in the garden. She had opened the kitchen door and shooed them outside, directing Nick and Billy to the lopsided shed that stowed a hotchpotch of rickety folding chairs, leftover from her Russian lover’s days, she had explained merrily, and summoning Megan’s assistance in fetching a stack of fleeces and blankets to cover their knees and shoulders.

  As a result, Trevor was as warm and wrapped as a parcel. At his feet were a cluster of earthenware pots, among them a doughty geranium he didn’t remember seeing before, sprouting out of a grey ceramic urn in clusters of such vibrant polished red that he blinked in wonder every time it caught his eye. All the colours of the world were brighter to him now. It was one of the upsides of the diagnosis.

  Not unlike being in love, Trevor decided, watching Eleanor and Nick, whose sense of each other was palpable, even when they were many yards apart. They were, as the adage so aptly put it, falling in love. They talked and listened to other people, but really they were only talking and listening to each other. Their hearts were open and forgiving. No obstacle was too high or wide to be overcome. They chattered about each other at every opportunity. He was job-hunting and flat-hunting. She was teaching and writing. He was soon to meet her nephew and nieces. In a couple of days she would meet his girls. Their lives had been stepping stones to each other, Eleanor had gushed during one rare private moment before lunch, a zig-zag path towards what was meant to be.

  There was no right or wrong to such sentiments. Trevor knew that from Larry. You found someone and it felt like they had found you. Then it was a matter of working through whatever came next, none of it easy, none of it guaranteed.

  ‘Sleepyhead.’ He opened his eyes as Eleanor tweaked up the brim of his hat.

  ‘Too much pud.’ He grinned.

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ She tapped her index finger against the new bulge of his belly.

  ‘I am glad you are happy, sweetie. I want to say be careful, but there’s no point.’

  ‘No point,’ she echoed gleefully, skipping over to flop next to Megan, who was sitting on a blanket she had laid out as a picnic rug, one arm slung over Billy, parked in a deckchair alongside. They had announced during the course of lunch that they were expecting their fourth child, prompting hoots of congratulations and much cheerful speculation about how highland cattle, pets, siblings and busy jobs would be stretched to accommodate taking care of the new arrival. At one point Billy had left his seat and walked round the table to hug his wife, saying she was a marvel and he didn’t know where he would be without her. Trevor had caught Eleanor and Nick exchanging a glance, sharing some hint of extra knowledge.

  Life went on, that was the thing, Trevor mused. His tumour huge, metastasised, would reap its obvious end. The horrors of pointless, prolonging treatment had been discussed and abandoned. He was doing what Eleanor’s dear sister had done; recognising his time was almost done. Soon it would be painkillers and difficult conversations. But not that day. That day was lunch and joy and babies and love. The geranium was blinding. Bloody. Beautiful. Bloody beautiful. Trevor closed his eyes.

  ‘Don’t move, there’s a butterfly on your back.’

  ‘So long as it’s not a wasp.’

  ‘It’s definitely not a wasp. It’s small and blue. I think it likes your fleece.’

  ‘Everyone’s gone.’

  ‘Except me.’

  ‘Except you.’

  ‘It was a great lunch. Great food. Great friends.’

  They were lying on the blanket, the afternoon sun flaming intermittently through the branches of the weeping ash. Eleanor was on her stomach, one cheek resting sideways on the pillow of her hands, facing Nick. He was alongside, leaning back on his elbows, his legs straight out.

  ‘I always liked this garden,’ she said, ‘even with Igor. I like the way it is enclosed. It makes me feel safe. I know the big bad and wonderful world is out there, but it is nice sometimes, not to have to look at it. When we were little I was happier in London. Broughton had such open views, the sea lurking just behind; I knew it was beautiful but it made me afraid. So huge, so exposed. It was like anything could happen.’

  ‘Which it can.’ Nick plucked a blade of grass and tickled her ear. ‘The strangest things.’

  They smiled at each other.

  ‘Why did you write to Kat after all those years? Was it really just about turning forty, like you said? Don’t answer if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I do want to. I have wondered myself sometimes. Approaching such a great age was definitely part of it – I got back in touch with several old friends at the same time. But with Kat…’ Nick scowled, trying and failing to take himself back to the mindset of soul-searching that had gradually got the better of him. Unhappiness was like being ill, he decided, impossible truly to recollect; a memory of fact rather than feeling. ‘Maybe it was also partly to do with wanting to remember what it was like to love someone. I mean, really to love someone. I wrote to Tilly too, as it happens, perhaps for the same reason, but she didn’t reply.’

  ‘And instead of Kat or Tilly you got me.’

  ‘I got you’, he said softly.

  ‘Is the butterfly still there?’

  ‘Yes. It’s such a delicate dusty blue. Why would anyone want to catch such a thing?’

  ‘Like your Nabokov and Fowles,’ she teased.

  ‘I love how clever you are.’

  ‘That’s good. Personally, I am only after your body.’ She edged nearer him, doing her best to shake her shoulders. ‘Fly away, Mr Butterfly, I need to kiss this man.’ She shook and shimmied harder, making Nick laugh because she looked funny and because the insect stayed where it was.

  ‘Hang on.’ He leant over her and cupped the creature gently between his palms before throwing it at the sky. It fluttered for an instant, regrouping, and then took off, a dark dot merging with the flames of the sunlit ash.

  Acknowedgements

  With huge thanks to Amanda Ridout and Boldwood Books for making ‘Good Girls’ part of its inaugural fiction list, and to Sarah Ritherdon, whose immense editing skills helped me shape the story of sister love that is the heart of the book.

  Book Club Questions

  What is the real love story at the heart of the book?

  Whose voice did Eleanor hear by the railway line and how was it a turning point in her life?

  Why did Kat really make Eleanor write to Nick for her?

  Was Vincent a thoroughly bad man or a flawed good one?

  What did Connie teach Kat about motherhood?

  What do Kat and Eleanor show us about sister relationships?

  What ultimately troubles Eleanor most about Kat?

  What does the title of the book mean to you in the context of the novel?

  Was Connie a ‘good girl’ too?

  What would have been different if Kat had told Eleanor her secret?

  How do the men in the book compare to the women?

  Are Nick and Connie both abused spouses?

  Do you think Nick and Eleanor will live happily ever after?

  More from Amanda Brookfield

  We hope you enjoyed reading Good Girls. If you did, please leave a review.

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  About the Author

  Amanda Brookfield is the bestselling author of 15 novels including Relative Love and Before I Knew You, and a memoir, For the Love of a Dog starring her Golden Doodle Mabel. She lives in London and is currently a Visiting Fellow at Univ College Oxford.

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  Boldwood Books is a fiction publishing company seeking out the best stories from around the world.

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  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Boldwood Books Ltd.

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  Copyright © Amanda Brookfield, 2019

  Cover Design by The Brewster Project

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  The moral right of Amanda Brookfield to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.