The Wildflowers

by Harriet Evans

  The truth for once? I’m not sure if I can.

  5 August

  Ben is back, we go to the Bosky tomorrow. He says he has been “thinking”. He says things have to change. He is insisting on a nanny. He won’t listen to me. I am much better now than the last few weeks. But he says I’m not coping. I thought this would be a relief but it’s not. It’s not because it means it’s real & I am doing it as badly as I thought. Iris was in bed with me when he came back, fast asleep under the duvet – she had wriggled down there in the night, Book, she wouldn’t sleep in her cot so I took her in with me. He shouted at me. He said she could have suffocated. I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s right. He brought the girls back huge dolls in frilly dresses that the studio gave him. One’s all in pink lace and called Pretty Lil Flirt with a pink hairband and the other one’s in a green-and-brown smock and she’s called Lynda and she has a trowel and watering can. I don’t know why but this makes me laugh and laugh and laugh, Ben stares at me, I can see him looking at me. He doesn’t think it’s funny. When they’re grown up, I wonder if they’ll look at the dolls & ask themselves why we gave them each the one we did.

  7 Aug

  When I write, the biro presses through the last three pages on to the back cover of my book. When I turn to the front and read the opening pages I see that 18 yrs ago I said I’d write down things I noticed about the Wildflowers & Book is nearly finished.

  17 Aug

  Something strange is happening to me and it doesn’t work to write it down any more which is good – the book is nearly finished. We got here 3 days ago. Ben is still bossing me about. He has forced Cord to come down too, the first time we’ve seen her for months. He says she must help with the babies too. Cord did help. She can do it, she just knows how to and I don’t. She knows how to hold them, how to stop Iris wriggling and, when no one is around, she sings to them, as she’s putting their night things on. “Stay Awake”, from Mary Poppins. “Little Jesus Sweetly Sleep”. Everything goes on as normal and yet it’s not. I’m leaving this book under the floorboards of the porch. With the strange birdman doll that is buried there. He has a bird face and wings & is very old. Book will be under the porch. It’s where Cord and I spent hours & hours on the steps predicting the waves, making up stories about the clouds, painting our toenails ridiculous colours, doing “Bits & Pieces” from the Radio 1 Roadshow.

  You see, she almost as good as told me I had to end it all myself and I am grateful she has done it that way, it makes it all easier. I saw her – at the beach hut, last night, when I was sitting there trying to work out what to do. Feeling guilty because I had left the babies with Ben and Althea. She knows – I didn’t realise she knows about Tony and me, and the girls. She said such horrible things to me. She said I was a slag – a slag. It’s such a nasty word & it’s what Daddy used to call me for hanging round with them all those years ago. She said I was a twisted, evil person, that I had wormed my way into the family and was eating us away from the inside. That I was the reason everything had gone wrong. She blames me for everything. Book, oh Book, oh Book.

  She said she looked at the girls in the bath that evening and couldn’t stand it any more. She said it’s because they’re so beautiful and pure. That they are marked with a stain, & the stain is all my fault and it will ruin their lives if I’m still around, that I am what will tear them down eventually. She said she kept away because she didn’t ever want to hurt Ben but now he’d practically dragged her down there she couldn’t stay silent, not to me.

  Everything you touch turns rotten,” she said. “I thought you were a good person. But you weren’t. You lied to us and you crept around hoping to be our friend. You lied to Ben and pretended to be all doe-eyed and passive to kiss him when we were young. You made my mother wish she had a daughter like you, all long hair and simpering, instead of the daughter she had. You couldn’t get Ben to give you a baby. I think you must have driven my father mad, mad over the years. I’m not surprised he went along with you.” I SAID to her, Cord, none of that’s true, but the noises hammering in my head, hammering so loud, wouldn’t stop. I said it to her, I said, Cord, I love you more than any of them. You’re my friend. “You’re not my friend,” she said, she was crying. “You’re a snake. You’ve slithered in & poisoned us. We were fine before you. We were just the four of us. We were happy.” She was so pale I could see the blue veins on her forehead & cheeks. Her big big grey eyes, her thick black lashes. Normally there’s a smile lurking deep down there no matter how sad she is. Not now, not any more. She just kept saying it, there on the sofa in the beach hut, and I stood at the door, shivering with the cold. “You poisoned us. Our family. You’re the bad thing. You’re the bad thing.”

  I see it all clearly now in the beach hut, everything hurtful & sharp and real, like Cordy, or Tony, or Ben, or the smell and taste of my little ones, and how awful it is loving someone that much, they all feel very far away. As if I see them through thick, thick glass or plastic. Some material. And it’s easier that way, Book.

  Because when I think about what might happen to my girls. How they might be hurt by horrible girls at school who tease them for their clothes like I was teased. How nasty boys might use them and try and get them to do things they don’t want. How they might hate their bodies and stare at themselves hour after hour in the mirror. How they might fall over & tear their perfect soft skin or have accidents on bikes or skates or get into unsafe cars or worse than anything be unloved, be sad and lonely and broken by their upbringing like I have been . . . . . . . . . . . .

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Can’t think straight. It hurts so much to think of them hurt. I have hurt them already. I am afraid I will make things much worse if I stay.

  I have to close the gaping hole. I have to cover it over. I am not a good mother to them. I am not a good wife or sister, the pain of being like this comes in waves and at the moment I think the wave is too strong for me. It’s crashing now.

  2 pages left & I wanted to finish the whole book but it’s not that neat, is it? That’s all really. Thank you, Book.

  One more list. To use the space.

  Cord wore: A blue shantung silk halter-neck dress and cork-soled wedge heel shoes. Sunglasses. She bites her nails, they are chewed to bits. She has an expensive watch. She is reading My Family and Other Animals. She brought Althea a pile of Rosamunde Pilcher & Mary Wesley books. Althea is delighted. She bought Ben a neck thing to wear on flights that you blow up and it stops your neck hurting – a little thing but it has already helped as he gets a sore neck all the time, it cricks and freezes. She is thoughtful. And kind. But so different in her smart dress and sunglasses. Her passport is always in her handbag. She pinches her throat all the time when she’s talking, she says it does her good. Pinches it really hard. She has left us behind and now I see why, I see why.

  Keep on.

  Tony: Yesterday he was wearing a navy polo shirt and some blue twill trousers. He had a red spotted handkerchief in his linen jacket, he wipes his face with it. He shakes a lot. I think he is ill. They all hated Hamlet, it knocked him for six. He has a book with all the reviews in. “Appallingly ill-judged”. “Unbelievably offensive”. He reads it every day I see him.

  Althea is in a jersey silk dress from Jaeger in wine red / brown tiger print and she has sandals on, and her sunglasses, & her legs are slim and brown as ever, and all she does all day is lie on the porch reading her books, smoking and drinking camomile tea or gin. She grows the camomile here and collects it up and dries it and makes it into tea. She is totally oblivious to everything. I realised that long ago. She only wants to see what’s nice. She will do anything for the babies. She will do anything for Ben.

  Ben . . . Ben is in his old Kate Bush “Hounds of Love” T-shirt that we bought together one each from Kensington Market on that trip to London. We thought we were so cool, didn’t we, so in love, oh my gosh, I loved him and his shorts from the market in Provence that summer afte
r we were married. His chest is fuzzy with blonde hair. He picks the girls up and swings them over his head. He is reading Truffaut on Hitchcock and he is writing a screenplay about his childhood . . . I know this, they don’t . . . Yesterday he cut his finger cleaning up a glass I smashed and has an elastoplast on it. I put it on him. It will still be there afterwards. His hair needs a cut but it suits him, so shaggy and ruffled. Help me, darling, help me, please. That’s what she sings. Help me, darling, help me, please. I love him so much but he has to clean all the broken pieces up after me and he’s tired. I’m tired. It will actually be a relief.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  January 1993

  Mads had few clothes; as a child she had been dressed in either school uniform or outfits cobbled together from charity shops and presents from Aunt Julia. Being a young girl concerned with science and experiments and not with her own appearance she had never acquired an interest in fashion herself, which Ben always thought was strange, as she’d always noticed what his mother and sister wore. Still, he told himself, clearing out her wardrobe would be straightforward.

  The bedroom was at the front of the house; Ben could hear the faint noise of cars in the distance, and his daughters downstairs with Elsa, the nanny. Otherwise it was very quiet. He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. In a couple of hours a group of friends were taking him out to lunch to say farewell – a table for ten at Le Caprice. Movie friends, whom he’d see in Los Angeles anyway. Movie friends who’d never known her and who didn’t have children and who had no idea about his life but the gesture was kindly meant and one of them was a producer on the upcoming Robot Master 3: Robots Attack. Tragedy didn’t spare you from work, nor would he have wanted it to, but it made everything harder to negotiate, made you a leper. He remembered this from when he’d run away and had his accident, with an ache of recognition, that people were terrified of you if you were different in some way. Sometimes over the previous six months he’d just wanted to give people a card, with a series of instructions on it.

  Please call my wife by her name. She was called Madeleine. Don’t call her ‘the tragic event’.

  Please ask me about my children. Just because their mother killed herself doesn’t mean they’re dead or ill. Don’t call them ‘the poor children’.

  Please look me in the eye. I’m not infectious. You can’t catch what I’ve got.

  Please return my calls. I need to work. I have two children. (See point 2.)

  The wardrobe was a vast mahogany thing that had come from Ben and Cord’s old room in the Bosky. Ben squared his shoulders, and drew in his breath, slowly, as he had seen his father do sometimes, before he went on stage. Then he opened the great mahogany door and, feeling like Lucy Pevensie, leaned as far in as he could go.

  The scent of his dead wife hung in the black air inside: sweet, musky, a faintly sour note at the edges. As his vision sharpened in the dark, so did the knot of pain around his heart and he blinked, his eyes sharp with tears at the smell of her again. It was chaos inside, clothes shoved in anyhow, jumpers rolled up inside out, T-shirts and plaid shirts balled up in crumpled heaps. Gently, he began dropping each item on to the floor in separate piles. Here was the Kate Bush T-shirt, which they had bought in duplicate, and those loose plaid shirts she liked, which drew no attention to her and her extraordinary, impish beauty, and the battered 501s, and shapeless maternity smocks and there was the baggy, faded blue sweater she used to hunch her entire body into, knees pulled up under her chin, until it became her favourite item to wear in the last stages of her pregnancy. All of it his Maddy’s, uniquely hers. The task of going through her clothes had seemed like a chore; now he understood why he had avoided it. It was the closest to her he’d felt since she’d died. It was painful, so painful it actually hurt. He found the green silk shirt-dress she had worn to the girls’ christening right at the back, shoved into a plastic bag; he pulled it out, and it was stiff with breast-milk and blood. She had bled for weeks after the birth. Methodically, Ben began sorting the clothes out, but the majority were either missing a button or dirty or torn beyond repair, and still the faint scent of her hung over them all and if he put the soft fleece of the inside of the sweater to his cheek it was like smelling her, touching her again.

  So when his mother appeared, five minutes later, Ben was sitting on the floor, surrounded by Mads’s clothes, his head in his hands, sobbing in wheezing gulps he could not control.

  Althea sank to her knees. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said. She wrapped her arms around him. ‘I know, darling. I know.’

  Ben wiped his eyes. He didn’t want to stop crying. When he was crying, keening, he was acknowledging how black and final it really was, facing up to it. It was getting on with living, day by day, that was what was so hard. ‘They’re all filthy,’ he said. ‘There’s blood on most of the jeans and in the T-shirts.’ Althea winced.

  ‘Awful.’

  ‘She was in so much pain. And I didn’t know,’ he whispered, for what must have been the hundredth time since he lost her. ‘I knew it was tough for her but I had no idea. I didn’t try hard enough to find out.’

  ‘You did. You’d hired Elsa,’ said Althea patiently. She sat back down on the floor carefully and, with a jolt, Ben noticed for the first time the stiffness of her movements.

  Grief absorbed everything. It was like a blob of black ink, always there, wobbling slightly in front of him in his mind’s eye, and then something would happen and it’d suddenly spread through him, as though on blotting paper, like tea leaves, colour swirling through the water. Emily and Iris would never know their mother, wouldn’t see her grow old. He would never know her change; she was fixed as she had been the last time he’d seen her: a pale, hollow-eyed wraith, almost ghost-like already even before death, moving slowly about, crippled with some kind of pain that bent her forwards, almost double. The more the babies thrived, the older they became: the more it seemed to eat at her. He’d thought he’d understood her better than any of the other Wildes, but he’d been wrong.

  Althea began putting the clothes into a plastic bag in forceful, punching movements. ‘No,’ he said, stopping her. ‘They need to be washed, or mended.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, carrying on. ‘That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? I said I’d help you sort her things out, and I will. I’ve got the car and I’ll take them to the charity shop – is that all right?’ She put her hand on his arm. ‘Darling. It’s best to do this, you know. You’re leaving in three weeks. You must clear her things out.’ She looked down at a soft cream silk shirt. ‘Look at it. So small. She was just a little thing, wasn’t she?’

  Ben was just beginning to get used to the idea that Mads was gone for ever, though it sounded stupid when you said it like that, as if he couldn’t understand she was dead. But she had been such a vital person, so alive and so very unlike anyone else, with her solemn face, half monkey-like, half beautiful, her quick movements and yet her great capacity for stillness. She had slept a great deal before she killed herself, sometimes with the babies, curled up in the bed when he was away, and her sleep was deeper than theirs – she did everything totally, utterly – when he had first found her that morning he hadn’t believed she was dead, because so often before he had had to shake her awake from the deepest sleep.

  That last time – the curled, hunched figure, the hands tightly clenched, the hair that spilled over the coverlet and almost to the floor . . . her soft, pale face, the dark gold lashes resting on the cheek . . .

  She had been buried in her wedding dress. It was Cord’s idea. She was quite insistent about it. ‘She didn’t have nice things for so long,’ she’d said, standing in the doorway of the sitting room biting her nails. ‘Her wedding dress was awfully expensive, for her. She paid for it herself.’

  ‘Did she?’ Ben hadn’t really known, hadn’t asked. He remembered it – a simple cream taffeta dress with a long skirt and a velvet bolero jacket, tightly tailored, in leaden silver. He remembered her shining hair around her face, her pink
cheeks, her heart-stopping smile as she reached him at the front of the church . . . It’s just us, she’d seemed to say, just us now . . .