by Adele Geras
Usually, Beth kept her feelings for him locked away inside herself, and tried to ignore them. Efe was filed away in her heart. She was vaguely ashamed at how childish she was about everything to do with him. Anyone who knew that she printed out and kept every single email he sent her would realize how very immature she was. It wasn’t as though they actually said anything interesting. Five words was normal: Hi, Beth! How’s kicks? Efe was the kind of thing he usually wrote, unless the message was an arrangement like Don’t forget Friday supper chez nous. Ciao. His indiscriminate scattering of foreign phrases was the sort of thing that led his sister to call him ‘a prize wanker’, but Beth found it endearing. There was also the rare note which ended love, Efe, and these she treasured more than the others, which was seriously pathetic.
Beth felt her heart gripped by a physical pain. The day that Efe told her he was marrying Fiona McVie was the first time she’d admitted it to herself. Stupidly, she had never quite realized before that she loved Efe in an altogether uncousinly way. Efe had decided to give a dinner party.
‘I want everything to be perfect,’ he said. ‘You didn’t mind me asking you, did you, Beth?’
‘Not at all,’ Beth said, considering the available vases and wondering how the flowers Efe wanted arranged all round his flat could possibly be fitted into them. She’d met Fiona McVie a couple of times and didn’t think that much of her. She was nice enough, and very pretty too, but somehow it was hard to imagine Efe madly in love with someone who was so … she couldn’t think of the proper word to describe Fiona. She wasn’t stupid, not at all, but she was, or seemed to be, completely unsophisticated, and so besotted with Efe that you felt her mouth was going to drop open with sheer adoration and awe at any moment – in fact, she naturally had a sort of open-mouthed air about her, even when she wasn’t gazing at Efe.
Beth stabbed another tulip into a small forest of the greenery that you never saw in nature but only in a florist’s shop, and wondered what Efe saw in Fiona. She was rich. She adored him. She would be biddable. All of this was true, but did his heart sing when he looked at her? Maybe it did. Efe was never one to show his feelings too much and he’d been going out with Fiona for a few months, which was something of a record for him. I’m being unfair, she thought. It’s just that he’s my cousin, practically my brother, and he deserves someone exceptional. Marvellous. Unusual.
‘They’re here, Beth. Are you ready?’
‘Yes, Efe. Everything’s looking great. Go and open the door.’
She stood in the living room and welcomed everyone into Efe’s flat. Look at me, she thought. The perfect hostess. Fiona and the others, whose names Beth caught briefly only to forget them at once, sat down and Efe handed round the drinks. They went to the table at last, and the food came and went and everyone said it was delicious, but it could have been made of cardboard for all the pleasure Beth took from it. She sat across the table from Fiona, next to Efe, and the conversation drifted past her like smoke – Fiona’s high, rather drawling voice; Efe sounding uncharacteristically gentle; all the others, making a kind of tapestry of noise all around her.
Something had happened to her. It felt like an earthquake of some kind; a profound shift in her feelings, in her, her body, her blood, every bit of her. She’d intercepted a look that passed between Efe and Fiona and something like a wave of pain washed over her. In that moment, during the seconds that it took for Efe to purse his lips in a silent kiss across the table in Fiona’s direction, Beth knew that she wanted him. Cousins, blood brothers, that was all nonsense. She wanted him all to herself in every possible way there was to want a man. She wanted to lie down next to him at night and wake up beside him in the morning. She wanted him to kiss her. To touch her. The thought of him and Fiona together was so ghastly that she felt suddenly sick and began to push her chair away from the table, longing desperately to lock herself in the lavatory and weep.
‘You okay, Beth?’ Efe was looking at her now. She wasn’t, but how could she say so?
‘Fine, just a bit hot, that’s all. Thought I’d just go …’
‘No, wait a minute, please. I have an announcement to make, everyone. Fill your glasses. Go on. I’m going to propose a toast.’
Beth smiled and held her glass out for the champagne. Where did that come from? How typical of Efe! He wanted a toast this very minute, so any trips to the loo would have to be delayed. Never mind, she was feeling a little stronger now and wondered what it was he had to celebrate. Perhaps he’d been promoted at work. He stood up and beamed his smile all round the table.
‘Right, everyone, here it is. Tonight’s toast is to Fiona, who’s just agreed to be my wife. We’ll be married at Christmas. I’m the happiest man in the whole world. To Fiona!’
His words echoed in the room. Everyone crowded round the bride-to-be and Efe went to her side of the table to embrace her. Beth had just time to think that she’d never, ever be happy again when she fainted for the first time in her life and the darkness closed over her head.
*
At first she felt guilt, as though the emotion she felt for Efe might have been in some way incestuous, but it wasn’t. She was unrelated to him. She was allowed to love him. And he loved her, didn’t he? For one wild moment, she’d nearly said it. Nearly blurted out the words that would have spoiled everything: Don’t marry Fiona. Look at me. Look at how much I love you. Look at how well we get on.
‘Getting on’ was not what love was about, though, was it? Beth knew that. Efe didn’t fancy her and that was that. Fiona was so pretty, like a blonde doll, with long legs and even longer eyelashes and a voice like silver bells, beautiful, but slightly irritating too. Metallic. Rather too high-pitched. There was nothing about her that one could dislike, except perhaps her complete and utter adoration of Efe and the way she always did exactly what she thought he’d like, almost obliterating her own desires and opinions. Still, Beth felt a sour emotion not far removed from hatred whenever she saw her. Even thinking about Fiona with Efe was enough to fill her with anguish. In her wallet, she kept a copy of one of the photographs that Alex, Efe’s brother, had taken at the wedding. It comforted her and tortured her in equal measure and she hardly ever took it out, but she knew it was there, herself and Efe together at the wedding reception.
Efe looked glorious. He was almost too good-looking; tall, dark, with long-lashed eyes that changed colour from green to grey to almost blue, depending on what he wore. In this photograph, he could have been advertising Ralph Lauren, and she looked ridiculous. All that frilly nonsense she’d had to wear as a bridesmaid had nearly killed her, quite apart from what she was feeling about Fiona. Her hair had been pulled away from her forehead and tied back. She was standing against a wall, and Efe was looking down at her with something like love in his eyes. That was what she liked to think, anyway. Whenever she took the photo out and examined it carefully, though, she could see the truth. He was looking normal – affectionate and friendly, but no more. All the love was in her eyes, turned to look up at him. Love, and something like desperation. There were times when she felt like tearing up the photo, but something always stopped her, a vain hope that the next time she looked, magically, Efe’s expression would be different – filled with passion, seeing her as the person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.
Sometimes she chided herself for her ridiculous fantasies. There was no reason on earth why Efe should make those come true and leave Fiona for her. He liked beautiful women and Beth knew that no one could call her that.
She was slim, and her dark hair fell almost to her shoulders in a well-cut bob. She wore little make-up, and what she did wear was very expensive. But you’re a good-looking girl. You don’t make enough of yourself. I could show you. Rilla said that all the time and would have liked nothing better than to manage her stepdaughter’s ‘look’ as she called it. Poor old Rilla! Beth realized how frustrating it must be for her that she had a daughter whose style was understated and elegant. No one would have guessed sh
e was the offspring of a rock star. Beth was neither shy nor self-effacing, but she hated clothes that called attention to themselves. You’re like a funeral mute, Gwen’s daughter Chloë often told her, in despair at her eternal plain colours, and it was probably true. Her clothes were safe. She simply put them on and forgot about them, and that left her free to devote her energies to more important things.
Beth was personal assistant to Jack Eldridge, the senior partner in a firm of architects where dark trouser suits and silver earrings were something like a uniform. Eight years ago, when she’d started working there, Jack had been impressed by the fact that she was related to the Walsh family of Willow Court.
‘It’s a most magnificent house, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You’re very lucky to have partly grown up there.’
Beth agreed. She loved every inch of Willow Court. It had been built in the early days of the nineteenth century, in imitation of a classical style. The E-shaped building was surrounded by gardens. There were terraces of flowerbeds in front of the house, edged with low-growing lavender bushes, and full of blooms all year round, it seemed. Winter pansies grew before the tulips appeared in the spring, and later, drifts of Busy Lizzies in white and pale pink blossomed in their turn and, of course, roses in profusion. You could walk down the steps between them and make a soft crunching noise on the tiny gravelstones. The formal garden (white wrought-iron gazebo and hedges clipped into neat shapes) gave way to a smooth lawn, which fell in a curve of green to the wild garden, where poppies and cornflowers flourished alongside wild flowers whose names Beth didn’t know. The tall grasses planted down there, set with occasional decorative boulders, made an organized jungle that was always busy with butterflies and dragonflies and the hum of bees when the sun shone. And beyond the wilderness, there was the lake. This was where the willows that gave the house its name wept their leaves into the water, and where the swans congregated. Beyond the lake, shadowy trees sloped up the hill to the village church, whose spire was just visible above a rolling ocean of a green that was nearly black in the evening and when the clouds were thick in the sky.
Beth liked the back of the house best of all, though. There, the kitchen garden had rows of vegetables laid out ‘like in Peter Rabbit’. She’d said that when she was not much more than a baby, and the name had stuck. It was now known as the Peter Rabbit garden. You had to walk through it to reach the Quiet Garden, which had an enormous magnolia tree in the middle of the lawn with a bench built round it that you could sit on for picnics. No bright flowers grew here. According to family legend, this was by order of Ethan Walsh’s wife, Maude, who couldn’t abide the startling yellow of daffodils, or the vulgar scarlet of certain roses. The border was filled with delphiniums, lupins, phlox, foxgloves and hollyhocks in muted shades of pink and blue and mauve. Rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias were white. The roses twined around the trunk of every tree were peach, buff, cream and palest pink, and on the far wall fruit trees grew in fan shapes against the rosy bricks. Espaliered, Rilla told her. They’re espaliered fruit trees, she’d said, and little Beth rolled the word round in her mouth and fell in love with the music of it on her tongue.
Adult Beth smiled to remember this. She really ought to go and pick up Alex. Efe’s younger brother had no car and she always gave him lifts when she could. He would, she knew, be waiting for her outside his flat with his rucksack and assorted carrier bags on the ground beside him, looking like a student. His wavy dark hair would be flopping over his forehead, and he’d have flung his clothes on anyhow with no thought about how he appeared to other people. Efe called his style shambolic, but Beth found it rather touching. Before she left, though, there was still the ritual to perform. She sat down with her hands folded on her lap, feeling a little foolish, as always when she gave in to this ridiculous superstition. The Russians, according to Rilla, always sat down for a few minutes before making a journey. It was considered lucky. Beth didn’t know if it really was a Russian tradition or if her mother had lifted it from some production of The Cherry Orchard she’d been in thousands of years ago. It didn’t really matter, because Beth wouldn’t have considered going anywhere for a few days without first sitting with her knees together and her hands folded, in the hard chair at the kitchen table. An armchair didn’t count, for reasons which had never been explained.
Beth smiled, as she often did when she thought of Rilla. She’s batty, she said to herself, but fun, which is more than most people can say for their parents. And we get on, which is also a bonus. She often wondered whether it had something to do with the fact that Rilla wasn’t her real mother, but someone her father had married before she knew about things like wicked stepmothers. Maybe that was why she had no trouble at all loving her. Chloë claimed to hate her mother, and Beth remonstrated feebly with her from time to time. It was difficult to see how anyone could hate Gwen, who was a mild, gentle sort of person, but Chloë, who was spiky and aggressive and rather boringly rude these days, seemed to have a positive talent for disliking people. Beth realized that she’d been lucky, ending up with Rilla out of all her father’s girlfriends. She was warm and affectionate and funny and forever flinging together unexpected ingredients and exotic spices and making wonderful smells – and a dreadful mess – in the kitchen. Also, she was self-absorbed, which Beth never minded, because it meant that she herself had been allowed to do more or less what she’d wanted to all her life. But from quite an early age, Beth realized that Rilla needed looking after, and organizing. She was untidy, not only in her cupboards and drawers but also in her head. She’d gone down to Willow Court yesterday, and Beth imagined what her packing must have been like, imagined her stuffing garments haphazardly into some bag that had seen better days. She smiled as she stood up and went to fetch her suitcase. Then she locked the flat and made her way down to the street.
As she drove to Alex’s flat, she reflected on family secrets. No one knew about her feelings for Efe. They had given up, most of them, worrying about her being so firmly unattached. I bet they’ve decided I’m a virgin, she thought. Well, let them! Beth never spoke about her sex life. They, Leonora and Gwen and even darling Rilla, thought she was on the shelf. Beth smiled to think of their reaction if they knew. Just because you were suffering from unrequited love didn’t mean you had to do without sex. It was just that you never committed. Never got involved. Wouldn’t let yourself. She was exactly like many of the men she knew.
These days in Efe’s company would be a test. She couldn’t wait. Quite apart from curiosity about his news, she was longing to see him, to talk to him, to be near him, to smell his smell when they kissed ‘hello’ and at the same time she dreaded it. It would be an ordeal. Fiona would be with him, and so would Douggie, and every time she looked at them she’d feel like the little mermaid in the story, as though she were walking on knives.
*
‘You drive, Alex, go on,’ said Beth. ‘You know you’re longing to.’
‘Sure you don’t mind?’ Alex grinned at her. They’d piled his belongings on to the back seat with Beth taking great care to see that everything was tidily stacked.
‘No, go on. I’m exhausted. I’ll probably be rotten company. I might even fall asleep.’
‘I’m used to that,’ said Alex. ‘You being rotten company. Go to sleep and see if I care. I’d rather listen to whatever crappy stuff you’ve got in the tapedeck.’
Beth slapped him with a newspaper that he’d somehow managed, in spite of her best efforts, to keep about his person. She pulled it out of a pocket and batted him over the head with it. Then she turned round and tucked it into one of the carrier bags on the back seat.
‘You’re not touching that till we get there,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust you not to drive and read at the same time. And don’t think I’m ignoring your dig at my music. It’s the Buena Vista Social Club. Take it or leave it.’
‘No, that’s okay. Quite civilized for you. Branching out, are you?’
‘Shut up and drive, Alex. I’m going t
o sleep.’
‘Right,’ Alex said, and pressed some buttons. The music filled the car, and he saw Beth relaxing into her seat and closing her eyes.
*
There were very few people in the world Alex felt comfortable with and Beth was one of them. He was two years younger than she was, and he’d always known how much she liked looking after him. By rights, she should be married with lots of children of her own, but as she wasn’t, Alex enjoyed watching her mother everyone who came into her orbit. She tried as hard as she could to organize Rilla; she took an interest in his love life and all his attempts to be evasive counted for nothing. She had a gift for making him speak, and he confessed things to her that he wouldn’t have dreamed of telling anyone else, not even Efe. Worries he had, like, why didn’t he feel what he was supposed to feel for all the various women he’d had short and unsatisfactory relationships with? Beth had patience and never minded listening to him mumbling and muttering. She also, very comfortingly, did it while feeding him delicious meals because she believed he never ate properly.
Alex was on the staff of a good newspaper and photographed beautiful women much of the time. He got sent around all over the place to take shots of this starlet and that pop singer and the other society person for one or other page, and sometimes he even got lucky and pulled somebody, but one-night stands were what they always turned out to be. Love never seemed even to be a possibility.
It wasn’t just he who made confessions, though. Alex was willing to bet he was the only person who knew that Beth was in love with someone. She’d made him swear not to tell a soul, and he never had. She’d told him about it at Efe’s wedding, and fair enough, she’d had a bit to drink, but no one could have called her pissed. She knew what she was saying. It wasn’t a very long conversation, but he remembered it well.
