Olivia could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t sound insincere; or worse, satirical. The music thudding through the ceiling was giving her a headache, even though she was entirely used to it. She felt suddenly exhausted, weighed down by things too numerous, too nebulous to name. What must it feel like, she wondered, to be at the beginning of something, to have the energy to start afresh?
“So how is Eve?” she asked eventually.
“Older,” said Sarah. “Like all of us.” She laughed, prodding her rice with her fork. “She’s thinking of adopting.”
“A baby?”
Olivia was astonished – too astonished to conceal it – but Sarah was undaunted.
“From China. Apparently you can, on your own.”
“Good Lord.”
“She’s only been back in the country six months,” said Sarah. “Her parents are both dead. Between the first and second divorce, she said. She’s had enough of Australia.”
“Strange, her ending up there,” said Olivia. “Anywhere abroad.” She paused, trying to conjure Eve: a shadowy nineteen-year-old, stretching backwards in time, but not forwards. “I never imagined her with children,” she said. “Or wanting them.”
“It’s been wonderful to see you,” Sarah said on the doorstep.
“You too. Perhaps we’ll meet again before the wedding.”
Sarah looked aghast. “The wedding’s months off,” she said, with her squeaky laugh. “Of course we’ll see you. We haven’t even met Robert yet.”
Guy shook her hand. “Sarah talks a lot about you,” he said. “I’m glad to have met you at last.”
And there it was, Olivia thought, as the door shut behind them and she stood, just for a moment, in the silence of the hall: the reunion effected. The beginning of the rewriting of history.
Chapter 8
It had been unusually hectic at the Wednesday Club for the last couple of weeks. There had been a problem with the lavatories one day, and Olivia had held the fort while Shirley placated the Council plumber, and the following week Rex had been ill. The stand-in driver had failed to collect a couple of clients and upset a couple of others, throwing the whole morning – usually so peaceful, so predictable – into pandemonium.
But the morning after Sarah and Guy’s visit things were back to normal. There was a chill in the air, an early hint of winter, but inside the centre the atmosphere was warm and serene. When she walked in, Olivia saw a giant crossword inscribed on a whiteboard, evidence of a couple of hours calmly occupied.
“Morning, Olivia,” called Shirley, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. “Okay?”
“Fine, thanks.” Olivia looked around the room. “Still no Georgie?”
“Out of hospital,” Shirley said, “so that’s a step forward. Maybe next week.”
“What’s been the matter?”
“Just a touch of pneumonia.”
That first week Georgie was ill, Shirley had talked of the usual. Was pneumonia the usual? Had Georgie been one of those sickly children who stayed fragile into adulthood? Olivia didn’t think so, somehow; you had to be tough to live to ninety. But she let the subject drop. Better to let Shirley choose her moment. Shirley liked having a story to tell; she’d want to make the most of it.
“How about a Scottish theme today?” she said. “Speed Bonny Boat? Loch Lomond?”
“I love Loch Lomond,” said Shirley. “We went on holiday there once. Beautiful place.”
“Everyone seems in good spirits,” Olivia said later, as she and Shirley stood in the kitchen drinking their undrinkable coffee. “Some new faces this week.”
“Marjorie,” said Shirley. “Have to mind our Ps and Qs around Marjorie. She was a lady don.”
“Really?”
Marjorie had early dementia, and had enjoyed the singing with a colourful lack of inhibition. “Bravo!” she’d called, after each song. “Encore!”
“A lady don at St Hilda’s,” Shirley said. “Proper blue-stocking. Seems a shame to me, all that learning and no family, but you pays your money and you takes your choice.”
“Didn’t Elsie work at Somerville too?” asked Olivia. “One of the women’s colleges, I’m sure.”
“Elsie?”
“Not as an academic. Domestic staff, I think.”
Shirley raised her eyebrows. “Who’d’ve thought it,” she said. “Lady dons rubbing shoulders with cleaners. Well, we get all sorts at the Wednesday Club.”
“Funny the lives they’ve all led. The stories they could tell.”
Olivia let the phrase hang; felt it picked up by a current of air and wafted forwards.
Shirley reached for the biscuit tin and offered Olivia a custard cream.
“I was going to tell you about Georgie, wasn’t I?”
Olivia shook her head at the proffered tin, then thought better of it. You never saw custard creams now, she thought, except in places like this. For some reason they reminded her of feeling sick. Dismal tea parties, as a child.
“Might as well, before they all go,” said Shirley approvingly. She settled her ample bottom on the edge of the worktop. “Georgie’s social worker told me the story when she first came here. She never mentions it herself. You’d never know.” She paused, peered round the door. Rex had gone outside for a smoke and there was a peaceful hum of conversation in the big room. “She was one of those girls locked up in an asylum because they got pregnant.”
“Locked up?” Olivia was startled: whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t this.
Shirley nodded. “She was a student at Oxford, but her family disowned her. They thought it was madness, didn’t they? Nymphomania or whatever. Awful.”
“Good God. How long was she in the asylum?”
“Nearly fifty years, the social worker said. Didn’t get out ‘til she was in her sixties. Too late to make anything of your life by then. You’d be institutionalised, wouldn’t you? She’s been in sheltered accommodation ever since, poor old Georgie.”
Olivia said nothing. The custard cream cloyed on her tongue; she longed for a party napkin to spit it into. Shirley sipped her coffee, savouring the effect she’d produced.
“I’ve heard about that happening,” Olivia said eventually, “but you don’t think about it – well, so close to home.”
“Terrible thing, in a civilised society,” Shirley agreed.
“So that’s how she lost her baby? They took it away?”
Shirley nodded. “Anyone would go mad after a while, shut up in a place like that.” She shook her head, eloquently mournful. “Hard not to, wouldn’t it?”
“Georgie’s never seemed mad to me.” Far from it, Olivia thought, though it was hard to think about Georgie now without this extraordinary revelation; hard to make an assessment. “Introverted, perhaps, but not mad.”
“Well,” said Shirley. “Let’s hope we’ve cheered up the last few years of her life a bit, eh? Better have a look at this shepherd’s pie. And apple crumble, this week. I told you we’d be on to hot puddings before we knew it.”
Since the day of the attack on the bridge, Olivia had made a point of cycling home along the tow-path every Wednesday. She imagined herself as some kind of suburban vigilante, but in truth it was more a test of her nerve. She hadn’t seen the lad in the hoodie again, nor James, or the man she’d taken for James. Every week a little more space opened between her and that morning, but the memory could still make her heart skip a beat. This was partly, she knew, because she hadn’t told anyone else what had happened: she’d hidden the bruise on her arm even from Robert. The possibility of meeting the men again – either of them – gave the path, the canal, an exaggerated significance. It was as if she could hear the soundtrack to her own life playing in her head, overlaying the scene with suspense.
But today there was a different theme tune, another kind of emotion. Olivia steered carefully between the holes that pocked the tow-path. The ground was wet after overnight rain: mud flew up from her tyres, spattering the brambles with grey-brown flecks.
It was hard to imagine, now, the scandal Georgie’s pregnancy must have caused seventy years ago. Schoolboy fathers had a kind of celebrity these days; women in their thirties were blasé about the next grandchild, and no one talked about sanctions, just about breaking the cycle of disadvantage. But two or three generations ago, it was enough to ruin a whole life. Enough to justify locking someone away, out of sight, until they were well past any risk of pregnancy.
Had Georgie been a wild teenager, Olivia wondered, as she ducked beneath an overhanging branch, or naïve and unworldly? Had she been seduced by a tutor at Oxford, or broken bounds to conduct an affair with a fellow student? And what had she done with her time all those years, confined to an institution? It was unimaginable. Impossible to understand how life could go on, after so much of it had been wiped out: how someone young and hopeful, taking for granted the years ahead of them, could lose so much in a single slip.
Olivia turned her bike onto the steep slope leading up to the bridge, the flicker of apprehension it induced less sharp today, and sailed down the other side towards home with a guilty sense of freedom.
At night the memory of birth returns. They held you down so you wouldn’t see the baby, and you held your tongue so they wouldn’t see your suffering. No cries, through that forcing and splitting, that slipping away from the light. All the evidence they had was your blood, pouring onto the floor as if it wanted to drain you dry, and the fever that racked you afterwards, conjured by your body to cauterise the pain.
The baby torments your dreams: the baby that was gone so soon that you never knew if it breathed. Its screams are silent, its head deformed by the passage it was forced through against your will, by your desperate desire never to let it be born. It lies discarded on a white slab, or suspended from a wooden cross, remnant of the faith you have no right to any more.
But some nights the seed of it is there, deep inside, the sweet secret promise they couldn’t take away. The flower blooming slowly within your swelling body; the tiny fish skittering and dancing among the coral. On those mornings you wake with the pillow wet, as though your waters have broken again, and you know it is gone. You could never have held on to it; you were not fit. But when you feel it inside you again, the hidden life you were not allowed, its possibility sustains you.
You never tell them, but they know what it means, your serenity. When you don’t bleed they lock you in the dark. They will not let you win.
Chapter 9
Galloway, July 1983
Olivia and Eve reached Scotland towards the end of July. The days were long and the light thin and clear: later, Olivia would remember the sky as pure white. The colours of the landscape were simple, too. Green, grey, brown; splashes of purple heather and huge patriotic thistles by the roadside.
They were going to the Highlands, that was the plan, but someone they’d met in Wales had told Eve there were wonderful prehistoric sites in Dumfriesshire, and it didn’t look far on the map. Along the A75, following the southern Scottish coastline west towards Stranraer. The Solway Firth, Eve said knowledgeably. She had a way of giving romance to place names. We must see the Solway Firth. There are poems about it.
“Really?” asked Olivia.
“Young Lochinvar,” said Eve. “Love swells like the Solway, but ebbs like its tide.”
“Uh-huh.” Olivia was tired; she’d driven all day. Somehow they’d forgotten to swap over after lunch. But she caught Eve’s glance and asked, “Who was Young Lochinvar, then?”
“So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war, there never was knight like the young Lochinvar,” Eve recited. “We learnt it at primary school. Sort of a Romeo and Juliet scenario, with a happy ending. He turns up at the wedding of his true love and spirits her away on his horse.”
“Across the Solway Firth.”
“I’m not sure the route is specified.” Eve sighed. “God, it’s further than I thought.”
They were heading for Torhousekie Stone Circle. You must see it at sunset, the Welshman had said. Something about the solstice, though it was well past that now. The road veered close to the coast at times and they had a view of a wide stretch of water and the irregular outline of land beyond. The slant of the sun added a metallic glaze to the sea and the sky, disguising blue and green as silver and grey. Olivia had read somewhere that it was seven miles to the horizon, across the sea: an impossible distance to judge, unless you knew.
As the road swept up towards Newton Stewart they turned left down the side of the Esk estuary to Wigtown.
“Nearly there,” said Eve, looking down at the map. “Just a few more miles.”
“Shall we stop?” Olivia suggested. “Buy some food?”
It was a camping night tonight. Last night they’d stayed in a bed and breakfast, so tonight it was the tent.
“Later,” said Eve.
Olivia knew what was on Eve’s mind. If the shops were shut, they’d have to go to a pub. But her budget was smaller than Eve’s; she flicked the indicator and turned off the main road into the town. Eve said nothing.
Even at four o’clock there was little sign of life in Wigtown. Olivia parked on the broad expanse of the main street outside a shop with small dirty windows and a dilapidated sign.
“What shall I get?”
“I’ll come with you,” said Eve.
They’d become experts on shops like this. There must be whole stretches of Britain, Eve said, where people lived on the same five things. They bought sliced bread, a tin of sardines, a packet of biscuits. Then, at the till, Eve spotted a bottle of whisky on the shelf behind the boy (surely no older than twelve?) who served them.
“I’ll pay,” she said, before Olivia could object. “Keep out the chill tonight.”
She smiled, and for a moment Olivia could taste woodsmoke and salt air, the tang of friendship. Two weeks was a long time to spend with one person, she thought. They’d done pretty well.
The B road to Torhousekie was lined by fields of cattle, most of them black and thick-coated, some with a distinctive white band around their middles as though they’d been assembled from unmatched pieces by a child. Here and there outcrops of grey stone could be seen, and shapely trees scattered across the pasture land.
“Here we are,” said Eve, and Olivia pulled over onto a wide section of verge.
There was something, Olivia thought, both remarkable and disappointing about sites like this. After all just a collection of stones in a field, placed on uneven ground with a view of the placid countryside receding into the distance, and sheep’s wool snagged in the barbed wire that ran around the top of the dry stone wall. But unmistakably a circle, nineteen hefty boulders dragged here and positioned with some mysterious ancient intent, and still here three or four thousand years later.
It was always Eve who had a sense of occasion. Without speaking she set off slowly, clockwise, around the outside of the circle, and after a moment Olivia followed. Hocum, she thought, but perhaps no different from the urge to look upwards in a church, or to be awed by the sight of fire. There must be a reason for the potency of circles.
There were three stones in the centre of this one, two of them bigger than the rest. When she’d finished processing around the perimeter, Eve made for the largest and climbed up onto it.
“Come up,” she called. “There’s a view.”
There wasn’t, much, but Olivia obeyed, and they settled back to back on the flat summit and gazed out at the unbroken sweep of green.
“It’s called the Machars, this peninsula,” said Eve. “The bit that hangs down towards England.”
“Into the Solway Firth,” said Olivia, and Eve tried to jab her with her elbow, then lost her balance and slithered down to the ground.
“Right,” said Eve, as she picked herself up, “watch out.”
She grabbed Olivia’s legs and pulled hard. Olivia screamed, feeling herself slipping, sliding down, the stone cold and smooth against her back as her T shirt rode up. A moment later they were both rolling around on th
e grass laughing and shrieking, all arms and legs, the taste of turf in their mouths. A group of cows in the adjacent field turned their heads to watch, with the startled expressions of old men disturbed from their newspapers.
“Race you,” said Olivia, scrambling to her feet.
“Catch you,” Eve countered, and they chased each other around the outside of the circle, gathering speed until they were running full tilt, Olivia’s heart pounding as though she was being pursued by a wild beast. Roused from their sleepy grazing, the cows began to jostle each other with unease or excitement, and within a few minutes they were charging along the fence, more as if they were trying to join in the fun than to give chase or run away. They were too cumbersome to stampede, Olivia thought: a great mass of black with a slippery purple sheen in the sun, heaving and rolling like a landslide, impossibly comic.
By the time she and Eve circled round to meet the cows again, they were both laughing too hard to run. They collapsed on the ground as dozens of hooves thundered past, and the stones stood still, still, unmoved by this display as they had been by all they’d witnessed in their long lives.
“Oh,” said Olivia, as she recovered her breath. “I’ve got such a stitch.”
Eve rolled over and pushed Olivia’s knees up towards her chest. “Better?”
Olivia groaned.
“Good place, eh?” Eve said. “Worth a detour?”
“Mmm.”
Eve propped herself on one elbow. “Let’s camp here tonight.”
“In the circle?”
“Wouldn’t that be great? We could watch the sun set and then rise again. We could lie on that stone and watch the stars.”
“Like sacrificial virgins,” said Olivia.
But Eve was already heading for the car.
“The cows might come and trample us,” Olivia shouted after her, but then she got to her feet and followed. It was a long time until sunset, but she was hungry, and there was already a slight dampness to the ground.
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