by Tanya Moir
The vegetable patch is mostly weeds these days, but something of the spirit of self-sufficiency lives on. Despite years of benign neglect, odd things continue to spread and seed, rogue marrows and feral carrots popping up in the unlikeliest of places. You have to admire their perseverance. I clear the ground around those I find, give them a bit of space and light. Water them, if I remember. You could hardly call it gardening — I don’t have the discipline for that. I suppose I could get someone in to restore the whole thing, but I know perfectly well I’d never look after it, so really, there’s not much point in starting.
There’s a rustle up ahead and Ella’s off, a bolt of blue, into the fennel. She backs out a second later, wet and disappointed, and starts heading for the boatshed.
‘No,’ I tell her firmly. We’ve been down there once today already.
I think I’ll make lunch for Jake. Just to say welcome back. And thank him for the whisky.
‘You know,’ he says, ‘I’m never going to finish this job if you keep feeding me like this.’
I spear my last two fusilli and wonder if he’s joking. Maybe he’s sick of all the interruptions. Finishing the boatshed does seem to be taking a long time. I’m glad, now I come to think of it, that he’s not getting paid by the hour.
‘This silverbeet’s good. You grow it?’
I shrug. ‘It sort of grew itself.’
He grins at me. ‘Feral silverbeet, eh? Who knew?’
‘I’ll make us a coffee.’ I stop. ‘Unless you’re in a hurry to get back?’
‘Nah.’ He stretches back in his chair, arms over his head, eyes closed, his face turned up to the slanting sun. Lean as Ella, and just as laid-back. I wouldn’t be surprised if I came back to find him draped elegantly over my outdoor sofa, dozing in a patch of sun.
I turn the coffee machine on, and think it’s a nice feeling, knowing a builder I trust. That if something needs doing, I’ve got just the guy. I should really try to hold onto him if I can. Never let a good tradesman go. It’s just common sense. Every developer knows that.
But I think it’s too late. The house is done. I needed to find Jake four years ago, when it was all cubicles and prayer rooms. There’s nothing for him to do now, unless I start over again. Rearrange the plan, pull down old walls and put up new ones.
I look around at my house, and I don’t want to do that. There’s nothing, really, I want to change. Not that there aren’t mistakes, but they don’t seem worth undoing. I like what I’ve made here.
We’re going to tell Grandpa William. Of course we are. He has a right to know. Maggie just wants to wait until we know a bit more, so we can tell him the whole thing at once. All of Vivien’s story.
Which turns up on a Saturday afternoon in May that can’t be mistaken for anything but winter. It must be after Opening Weekend, because the lake in Queens Park is rowdy with hiding mallards — I’ve been hanging out there with Annabel after netball, smoking and striking Madonna-esque poses on the bronze seals, trackpants under our skirts.
When I get home, I find that Maggie, caught up in the yoke of a tricky Fair Isle, hasn’t been out to check the mail.
‘Two letters from England,’ I tell her, nonchalantly putting them down on the dining room table.
‘Two?’ The big circular needle hesitates. ‘Does it say who they’re from?’
I shake my head.
Maggie’s fingers pick up the pace. ‘I’ll just finish this row.’
One of the envelopes looks official — A4, heavy and white and franked, with our address typed on it. The other is small and thin and blue and says par avion, and the handwriting looks a little bit like Nanny Biggs’, if you use your imagination.
Maggie, stickler for duty that she is, opens the boring one first. I watch her eyes move over the page. ‘What is it?’
She hands it across.
Dear Madam, I read. I am sorry to inform you that Miss Vivien Anderson is no longer a patient at this hospital. Please be advised that, in accordance with hospital policy, your letter has been forwarded to Miss Anderson’s last known address.
I look up at the letterhead. KENTON HALL. An elegant, classical font. Above is a line drawing of a familiar-looking old stone house. Below, the words Private Psychiatric Hospital are set in smaller type.
Together, Maggie and I stare at the second envelope. Gingerly, as if it’s a faulty jack-in-a-box, my mother turns it over. All there is on the back is a stationer’s brand. Pandora.
Of course we open it. Who wouldn’t?
‘What does she say?’
‘Shhh,’ Maggie snaps. ‘Just wait. Anyway, it isn’t from her. It’s from her mother.’ She frowns. ‘Her adopted mother, I mean. She says …’
She says that Vivien took her own life twelve years ago. In the man-made lake beside Sainsbury’s. Serendipity Water.
I’m so sorry, Mrs Anderson writes, that you never had the chance to know your sister. I wish we could tell you why.
It’s a very nice letter, warm and generous and kind.
Maggie puts it back on the table between us. And we sink past it, through the brown smoked glass and into the weed. Swans’ feet moving above our heads. Down into the mud, with the shopping trolleys and lager cans, not dead yet but getting there. Hearts still beating. Holding our breath. Down and down. Until we come out here. The swirling Axminster of the other side of the world. A decade later.
Maggie gets up and walks out. I hear the bathroom door lock.
After a while, I turn the TV on. M*A*S*H is just starting, green and orange people running, faded but full of care. Quietly, I sing along to the theme tune. We’re learning it in music.
I’m halfway through the chorus when Maggie comes out again. She stares at me. I stop singing and pick at a hole in my trackpant knee, and she carries on into the kitchen.
It’ll be a long time before she knits that next row.
We don’t ring Grandpa William. What’s the point? It would just be cruel. Old men should hear only happy stories. And Grandpa William doesn’t ring us. His duty is done — there’s nothing to report now.
Maggie is free to make dinner in peace, if she remembers. Most days, she’s in her room with the door shut when I get home from school — asleep, I presume, from the silence. If she’s not out by five, I take her a cup of tea. It’s meant to make her get up, and some evenings it works — the pill bottle rattles and out she comes. Other nights, the room is dark and the tea is still sitting there untouched when I go back an hour later.
I take it away and tip it down the sink. Finish watching Gilligan’s Island with no one to tell me to turn on the news. Cover her share of whatever home ec. horror I’ve managed to whip up with plastic wrap and put it away in the fridge and do the dishes. Make tomorrow’s school lunch. Take last week’s leftovers out and feed them through the Cousins’ fence to Hector.
I have a lot of time to think about Vivien. Slipping out of life much the same way she slipped in, without anyone noticing, without anyone jumping in. My sinking aunt tangled up in an oversized hand-me-down life, unable to kick off the weight of all that invisible Harding baggage.
Or maybe that’s just what she did. Exhaled them, Sarah and Ted, Harry and Babs and Beth and the rest, with her last breath. Her oxygen-starved cells finally getting round to throwing out that old rubbish.
What if Vivien did pop back up? If a passing shopper grabbed her by the scruff of the neck, breathed a second chance into her nostrils? Would she learn from her mistakes? Choose a darker night? Go back to college? She’d nearly finished her master’s degree, Mrs Anderson wrote. When she wasn’t planning to die, she wanted to be a research chemist.
It would be nice if we wrote back to Mrs Anderson. We don’t. Because what can you say? There was nothing you could do. Bad blood will out. (Or in our case, sink, most likely.) I’m sorry we got it all over your life. Someone should have warned you.
(Seven years later, in the middle of Waterloo Bridge, I’ll think of her. When I lay my hand on a stranger�
��s arm and wish him a merry Christmas. And he looks at me, a hunted, haunted, horrible look, full of fear and need and the tumble of brown water.
‘You wouldn’t come near me,’ he’ll say, ‘if you knew what I’ve done.’
And I’ll take my Big Issue and walk on. Ignore the clatter of ghosts behind me.)
Back in 1984, I pack my lunch and wonder what we were doing, here in this house, while Vivien died. My own options were limited, since I was only three — eating, crying, sleeping, clinging to Daddy’s knee. But what about Maggie? Did she feel anything? A ripple? A truncation of blood? I don’t know how it feels to have a sister. Neither did Maggie, she would say. And yet she did, because she had one.
Mrs Anderson sent us another picture. Funnily enough, it’s almost the same as the one that Vivien sent herself, except that Mrs Anderson is in it too. They’re huddled together in front of Kenton House, smiling, leaning into each other in that easy way that Maggie and I can never manage. Mrs Anderson is appley-round and nicely permed and lovely. Perhaps, if I’m honest, she looks a little bit sad — as if she might have begun to suspect her spotless life will be required to clean up someone else’s nosebleed — but you can tell it’s not her usual expression.
Vivien looks like she knows she’s forgotten to do something — put the cat out, take her lithium, get over herself? — and is trying to think what. It’s a look I know. She and Maggie could be peas in adjacent pods, withered on the same stem. They have the same eyes, the same hands, and even — despite the intervening decade — the same haircut. (I have all those things as well. There’s really only one way to cut our hair, one length that suits us. Unless you want to get it set every week, as Maggie used to do until a year or two after that look went out of fashion.)
I wonder how much else they had in common. If they stirred their tea, crossed their ankles, swallowed their pills the same way (three at a time, without any water). If Vivien, too, spent a number of years considering duck ponds.
And about now, I start doing it too. Dilly-dallying on my way home from school, throwing my uneaten sandwiches (why do I even bother making them?) to the mallards. Watching them swarm across the water, every duck for itself. Back-biting, darting, snapping. Stirring up God knows what with their paddling feet.
In time, Maggie does pick up her knitting again. In 1986, she even finishes that Fair Isle. By then, I’ve moved out of Bradbury Street and am flatting in Strathern — a five-minute drive away, but my mother packs the jumper up and sends it to me in the mail. I try it on once to give my flatmate a laugh, but I never wear it.
I’ve started work as an office junior for a firm of solicitors. Not the commerce degree I’d planned, but it’s a nice office — solid and oak-warm and discreet — and the job pays well, and the thought of another year in my mother’s house was more than I could stand.
Here on the other side of town, time flies like the wind, and before you know it Annabel and I have saved up enough for backpacks and round-the-world fares and we’re off on a southerly gale, the flat grey grid of familiar streets below and behind us. Retracing my grandparents’ flight.
Not that I think of it as going back. I just want to put all the distance in the world between me and Bradbury Street, where Maggie is adding the final stitches to her history, weaving in loose ends, cross-stitching tight little asterisks over and over the same sore spot so that her threads can never pull free.
And it doesn’t occur to me, as we take off, that there’s only one direction you can go from the end of a story.
Sure enough, in a few months more we’re circling London. You can barely see the scars. Down there, under office blocks and housing estates, ornamental lakes and carparks, are V2 craters and fire-blackened bricks, but you wouldn’t know it. Shattered attics have been reglazed. There’s a new roof over the terrace where Aunt May lit her last match. Pear trees are blossoming down in Kings Close, where there’s no sign of the day Evelyn Harding, exhausted by outliving everyone, shut the Examiner on her daughter’s face, closed the windows and doors and neglected to light the gas.
Then again, I’m not looking that hard. Annabel has the window. I’ve seen the Atlantic before, after all. And I believe, back then, that nothing good can come of staring into water.
High above Jake’s boat, a solitary passenger jet makes its way over the Hauraki Gulf, heading for open ocean.
We used to play a game in London, Annabel and I, on those days we could see the sky. Look up and count the planes. Without turning round, we could always find at least three. And all around them a lattice of jet-trails mapping the currents, melting in the breeze. So many lives there — in the skies, on the streets — flowing in and out, slipping over and around each other, doing their best not to collide.
Just as Annabel and I slide apart, in time, making our own ways out through the press of bodies in an Edinburgh bar. She to a party at some Swedish guy’s flat, I to catch our train. And we say we’ll meet up back in London, but I’ve moved out of the big old Twickenham house with its comings and goings and labelled shelves, gone east to be closer to work, and with the whole city between us we can’t make our schedules click, and we never do. (She’s married to a Danish investment banker now. Two kids and a lakefront villa in Geneva.)
There were so many different lives to be lived back then, loosely looped as the end of a ball of wool. You could dig your hand in, open your fingers, spread the strands apart. Follow them one at a time, not making anything yet. Never crossing over.
Why did I come back?
I’ve had twenty years to wonder.
Because the market crashed, and the estate agency no longer needed a pretty face to help brokers spend their bonuses. Because I’d met Greg (such a long way to go to meet a boy from Winton), and his two-year visa was running out, and he was sick of bar work. Because in the four years I’d been there, London had never once felt like home. And at twenty-two, that still seemed like a bad thing.
‘So, you doing anything tonight?’ asks Jake, whose questions are never about the past.
I shake my head. Like Ella pulling out of a wet rose bush. ‘Nothing. Why?’
The three of us are out in unfamiliar water. Jake’s anchored off Whangaparaoa somewhere, in one of those glossy bays I’ve never needed to learn the names of.
Jake nods at the fish bin. ‘Shame not to eat those while they’re fresh.’
A gull screams overhead.
‘Dinner at my place, eh?’ he continues. ‘What do you say? I make a mean ceviche.’
I laugh. ‘You learn that in the jungle?’
‘Nah, mate. Peter Gordon.’
‘What about Ella?’
He pauses. ‘We could sneak her in.’
‘Why don’t we just do it at my place?’ Familiar territory — it’s safer all round. We all know how to behave there.
‘Done,’ says Jake.
We look around, at sun and blue water. Sedate volcanoes studding the sea.
‘You in a hurry to get back?’
I stretch my legs out. ‘No.’ There’s nowhere I’d rather be right now. I like this slow drift out here, where everything seems fluid.
I don’t know much about Jake’s past, either. And I like it that way. But it’s hard to maintain. There’s such a lot of the past. We have more of it now than future, he and I, the imbalance worsening by the day. All that weight gathering behind us. You have to manoeuvre carefully — no sudden stops or turns — if you’re going to keep it back.
For instance — Greg hated fish. Of all kinds. It was one of the few things he felt strongly about. Ceviche would have been his worst nightmare.
It wasn’t true, what Maggie said about him, all those years ago. He wasn’t like my father. Greg was an accountant. He could never have sold anything. He couldn’t see what people needed — the chinks in their armour, their wishes and fears — let alone believe, in his heart and soul, that he had it, right there in his briefcase, waiting for them to sign. Greg didn’t believe in anything much. Exce
pt maybe me, for a while.
I watch Jake clean the snapper, slide his knife in, flick the guts to the gulls, chuck it back in the bin, still flapping. Maybe if you don’t stop and think about it, it isn’t cruel. It’s just what everybody does.
He wipes the blood off the knife. ‘Got any limes?’ he asks me.
Jake does make a good ceviche, it turns out, although by the time we get back to the island the sun’s dipped over the hills and the weather has changed and it’s more the sort of night for whisky by the fire. After we’ve had a couple of those and the rain’s settled in, I figure I’d better do the decent thing and offer Jake a bed.
‘You’ve changed the sheets,’ he says.
‘I do that between guests.’
He pats the Egyptian cotton. ‘I liked the old ones.’
We’re careful not to look at each other, standing here with the night ahead and a bed between us. Or at least, I don’t look at Jake. So I don’t know if he’s looking at me.
‘Well,’ I say brightly. ‘Goodnight.’
But shut safely behind my bedroom door, I find myself giving far too much thought to how I take off my clothes. I climb under the duvet, expecting the sort of restless night I always have with guests in the house. Only worse. But it must be the sea air. Because if I think at all, in the seconds between closing my eyes and falling asleep, of Jake’s naked biceps across the hall, I don’t remember it in the morning — just a kind of warm-milk drift, a soothing heaviness settling down, as if I’d pulled up an extra blanket.
When I get up, so oddly refreshed, I find the kitchen I left in a terrible mess is neat as a pin and Jake’s gone. I’m impressed. It’s a trick I wouldn’t mind seeing again. He’s left the coffee machine on for me, and for the rest of the morning I half expect him to come back, loping up from the jetty in that easy way of his, clutching a bag of brioches and the Sunday paper. And I wonder how I’d feel about it — really — if he did.
