‘Yes…’
She told him about it then. She didn’t know what words she used, since none of them sat well on her tongue. And the story was all mixed up with feelings and responses he prodded out of her so that somehow she was living them as if for the first time through words. There hadn’t been words before, nor for a long time any thought. There had been silence or the flat phrases which go into making announcements. ‘My father died when I turned fourteen.’
It was indeed just before her fourteenth birthday. She was at the school in Cambridge. It was her second year there. The autumn was beautiful. In the gardens the hydrangea wore burnished red, the chrysanthemums gold and russet. The girls waved their Lacrosse sticks at them as they strode in jagged files across the lawns. She had been ill for a few days with a bug of some kind, but Matron had taken care of her. And now half-term was coming up. It was to be a special half-term. Both her parents were flying over and taking her off to Paris for a whole week. She had never been to Paris before, though she had been to Bali and Jakarta and Goa and even lived briefly in India, not that she remembered much of the last. Paris was to be her birthday present.
She had seen her mother just before the school year began, but she hadn’t been with her father since the first week of the summer holidays. It felt like a long time. She missed her father, her mother, too, of course, but her father most, though she knew that was wrong and they should be equal in her missing of them. Her father was special. He was tall and lean and tanned and her friends had whispered to her that he looked like an actor. In her mind he was an adventurer, like the hero of Lost Horizon who had found his Shangri-La in the Tibetan hills.
Her father didn’t speak much, her mother did all that, but she knew from the way he looked at her that he understood her, and thought she was special too. The last time they had met, he had said to her he felt a little shy with her now that she was turning into a woman. That had made her blush. It was a pleasant blush.
Her travel bag was neatly packed for a week before the planned departure. She tucked it under her bed and every night she would secretly peak at it, just to make sure it was still there and to count down the days.
On the day before the anticipated arrival of her parents, she had been called to the headmistress’s office. She had walked nervously down the corridor and wondered what she could, unknowingly, have done wrong. There had only been one prior interview with Dr Brody and that had been at the very beginning of her first year. Dr Brody was large and bony and always wore plaid skirts and stiff woollen jackets with a long flower-shaped pin stuck in the lapel. But her voice was nice. It had a soft, Scottish burr, even when it pointed out that a skirt had been turned over a few too many times at the waist to reveal a greater than permissible extent of leg.
Dr. Brody had smiled at her affably, so she knew she hadn’t done anything terribly wrong, and had urged her into the chair on the other side of her impeccably tidy desk. ‘Now, Leonora,’ she had begun, ‘I’m afraid I have some sad news to convey to you. Your mother telephoned me earlier to say that, unfortunately, she won’t be here to pick you up tomorrow. Arrangements have been made for you to spend your break here. I hope it won’t be too unpleasant for you. Miss. Henderson will be in charge and will look after things.’
The tears had crept into Leo’s eyes. She had forced them back. Dr Brody must have seen them because she came round to pat her on the shoulder with a ‘There, there, now. Your mother will be here soon. She told me to tell you that.’
In her room that night, Leo unpacked her bag slowly and then with a kick sent it flying back under the bed. She had cried herself to sleep, all the while telling herself there was no reason for the tears. But at the same time it came clear to her in a jumbled way that her parents didn’t love her, didn’t love her enough to keep their promises, maybe didn’t love her enough because she was no longer a sweet little dimpled girl to be paraded before cooing acquaintances. The world felt smaller than her grief.
The next day or maybe it was a few days after that, she was walking through grounds made desolate by her schoolmates’ absence, when she came across one of the youths who helped with the gardening. She didn’t know what led her to the boldness, but she started to chat to him. Two days later and for the rest of that fleeting week, they made love in one of the isolated sheds. She didn’t enjoy it or not enjoy it, but it made her feel better about things.
It was the first time she slept with the boy, Pete was his name, that the intuition came to her. It was like a knife piercing her rib cage, looking for the soft flesh beneath. What she saw was an avalanche of snow toppling from a peak and covering her father in a feathery vastness so thick and smooth and white that no trace of him remained. The vision passed in an instant, leaving behind it only a sense of a profound absence and a lingering anxiety.
A few days after the end of the half-term break, her mother arrived. She looked strained, her lipstick jagged. And she didn’t speak much, which added to the oddness. She was staying in a hotel near the centre of town and she took Leo there for dinner. They sat not quite looking at each other, Leo answering desultory questions about her school work. Until the soup came, at which point her mother burst into tears. She wiped them away with the starched white napkin. Mascara smudged her cheeks, left dark stains on white cloth.
‘I wasn’t going to tell you until we had finished,’ she sobbed. ‘Your father’s dead, Leonora. Killed.’
More tears flowed as she reached into her bag and brought out a crumpled and folded sheet of newsprint. ‘There,’ she passed it to her. ‘A helicopter crash.’
She was blubbering and it was hard for Leo to make out her words - or maybe it was the sudden pounding in her own head. Her mother said something about how long it had taken for her to hear about it, how long it had taken to make her way there only to see the charred ruins of the wretched machine. The bodies, what remained of the three of them, had already been buried by local villagers. It didn’t make sense to unearth them, but she had managed to arrange for some kind of grave marking and…
Leo had stopped listening. She watched her mother weep. It was as if she were usurping the entire world’s quotient of tears. Leo didn’t cry. Methodically she ate what was put in front of her. Her lips felt numb. Her mouth felt numb. Only her jaw ached as if it had grown rigid with biting at food and news.
Her mother wanted her to go straight back to New York with her. Tomorrow. The next day at the latest. It would do them both good to be at home, amidst friends.
‘Home?’ Leo had queried. ‘I don’t think so.’
She had refused to go. She had barely managed to give her mother a good-night hug.
When she left for New York, her mother handed her the newspaper clipping. Leo was glad she was gone. She was angry at her - angry at her for not telling her sooner, for not filling in the facts so all she was left with was an image as vague and blurry as the photograph, not even a date or a precise place. Angry at her for not having the strength to keep Leo’s father alive. If Leo had been there, it wouldn’t have happened. No, she wouldn’t have allowed him to go off like that. No.
Part of her also felt a kind of guilty embarrassment at not having complied with her mother’s wish to accompany her. But the guilt was only a low thrumming. What she felt, above all, was cold and listless and numb. She must have gone to classes and done her prep and played games and spoken to friends, but she couldn’t remember anything about those days. She was absent, frozen.
What she remembered were the nights. She would go to her room and stare at the photograph, trying to conjure sense out of dense trees and undergrowth and a few hazy figures bent over an invisible object. When she closed her eyes, she would see giant helicopters whipping through air heavy with a viscous jungle mugginess. Sometimes the ‘copter crashed into a treetop and burst into flame only to plummet slowly to the ground amidst curdling screams and a thrashing of blades. Sometimes her father jumped from the tumbling craft and whirring blades lopped off his head and limb
s, only to cut through neighbouring trees and plunge to the ground in an explosion of fire. She would try to imagine him, his handsome face gaunt with sudden fear. Did he think of her at that moment? No, no, she had already betrayed him and now she could never make it up to him.
Her periods stopped. She thought she was pregnant. She didn’t dare tell anyone. It didn’t matter anyhow. Nothing felt real. Neither the kindness of friends, nor the sympathy of teachers who complimented her on her mature behaviour. Nothing felt real except at night in her dreams. Then the helicopters came back, whirring, thrashing, plummeting, curdling her blood.
***
Leo stopped. Her hair was moist. Her cheeks were wet with tears. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,’ she murmured.
Silence fell.
‘Curdling your blood.’ The words floated towards her softly, as if she were still in a dream.
‘Curdling my blood,’ she repeated, then after a moment, saw his sense. ‘No. I wasn’t pregnant. Just shock, I guess. A shock to the system.’
‘The turning-into-a-woman system.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your father said that to you.’
‘It came back. The periods came back.’
‘When?’
‘After I went to New York.’
‘Back to your mother.’
‘Back to my mother and my new stepfather.’ Leo spat the sentence out.
‘So your mother was a woman again and you could dare to be one too?’
‘Nonsense. It’s not that simple.’ Her words carried a conviction she suddenly didn’t altogether feel. She was seeing herself in those first weeks in Manhattan, the muddled state of her emotions. Her mother had a glow about her which Leo felt sat grotesquely on what should have been widow’s weeds, whereas she, she was an ugly duckling. For the wedding she had gone and had all her hair lopped off, a forest of childhood growth. To her astonishment, it looked good. Her stepfather had commented on it in his unctuous way. ‘You look beautiful, Leonora, now that we can see your face.’
‘No, never that simple.’ She heard his voice. ‘And the repeated whirring and thrashing of the helicopter, that must be hard to bear.’
‘Like killing my father over and over again.’ She said it so softly that she wasn’t certain she had spoken out loud.
‘And keeping him present.’
‘Keeping him present?’
‘Alive, perhaps. Still powerful.’
‘But dead.’
‘The dead are very demanding. We keep in touch with them. We can keep them alive by imagining they still want something from us. Does your father still want something from you, Leonora?’
She didn’t know whether she translated it into words, but she suddenly had an image of her father and herself. They were walking in some exotic park. The leaves on the trees were very thick and shiny. And then came the orchids, an infinite variety of them, a little scary with their forked tongues emerging from lustrous mouths, brashly pink or magenta or a blushing fragile white. They stopped to wonder at one of these. They were so happy. Her father’s large hand stroked her hair. She turned to look up at him. ‘Almost as lovely as my little girl,’ he said and his arm encompassed her narrow shoulders. She felt so small and so safe. Very small and very safe.
‘He wants his little girl.’ Her voice echoed through stillness. Its piping childish sound confused her.
‘She’s still there, though grown-up,’ Daniel said softly. ‘And the helicopter with its thrashing and whirring, like all those feelings you must have had, fear, loss, despair, rage, at your father too, for abandoning you, does it want something from you?’
Leo didn’t answer. She was very tired. She could sleep now, she felt. Sleep for a long time. She curled into the sofa.
Daniel watched her. She had taken on the posture of a slip of a girl, her legs slightly awkward, feet pointed out. She was chewing at her fingernail. He hesitated. They had covered so much ground already. He sensed the moment wasn’t altogether right. But she had forewarned him there wouldn’t be many sessions and she was an intelligent patient. He took the risk and plunged. ‘The child in your dream, the one who wasn’t able to move forward, who could only walk round in circles, was that you?’
‘The child…?’ Leo roused herself. ‘No, no. Not me.’
‘Your daughter then, whom you’re worried about, whom you’d like to tie to you, stake close to yourself.’
‘Of course not,’ Leo leapt angrily to her feet. How had she let him embroil her in herself so much? That wasn’t what she was here for.
‘Don’t you know anything?’ She waved her arms at him. ‘Don’t you even remember what your patients say to you? That child was my friend. Isabel.’
‘You’re certain, of that?’
‘Certain? What do you mean?’
Leo had a sudden dream-like sense of figures melting into one another as they went round and round that stake, taking on each others gestures in a kaleidoscope of fusing and splintering shapes. Isabel, Becca, herself, her father, round and round. For a split second the kaleidoscope paused at a new distillation: a girl, not Isabel, yet with a mass of honey-gold hair. A wild girl with long limbs and yellow-green eyes. Laura, yes Laura. The name leapt before her. Laura who had been her most intimate friend at that Cambridge school. She hadn’t thought of her for so long.
Leo flopped back onto the couch.
Laura who had secretly tucked up next to her in bed so that they could whisper into the early hours. Laura who had suddenly and unexpectedly vanished after that break. That dismal break in which Leo hadn’t gone to Paris. And then had never returned. Rumours flew about her disappearance. Teachers offered no reasons, only said, ‘Laura won’t be back with us this term.’
In her state of numbness, Leo had registered the loss only to bury it with the greater one. Laura was gone. Her father was gone. Both had entered the shadowy realm of the unsayable.
And now Isabel…
The noise of the helicopter was back, whirring and thrashing. Death.
‘Are you certain that child in your dream was Isabel?’ Daniel repeated
‘Stop mixing everything up. Stop it,’ Leo shouted, jumping up again, glaring at him.
If she could, Daniel thought, she would hit him now. She was incandescent. That was good.
‘Your time is up, Ms Gould,’ he said softly. ‘I’ll see you on Friday.’
He rose, put a distance between them. He watched her look awkwardly round, then scramble for her bag and take out an envelope. ‘I’ve brought your fee.’
‘Just leave it on the table over there.’
She whipped the envelope onto the table, like the slap that hadn’t been delivered, and marched down the stairs.
Daniel closed the door behind her and went to jot down a few notes. It took a few moments for him to realize that he hadn’t heard the expected slam of the front door. She had certainly been angry enough for that.
He listened. Nothing. Had he overdone it? Was she sitting in a heap on the stairs unable to open the door onto the world. He ran down the flights. No sign of her. Odd. She must have slipped out as silently as a ghost. Only Eva had ever had that kind of quiet consideration. He was about to make his way back up the stairs when a sound from the living room alerted him. He pushed open the door. Leonora Gould was bent over the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet, oblivious to anything but its contents.
‘You won’t find anything of interest in there, Ms Gould, I can assure you.’
Leo veered round. Her pupils were as round and black as a trapped animal’s. ‘I …’
‘You were looking for a file on Isabel Morgan. I know.’ Daniel’s tone was caustic. ‘There’s nothing in there. Unless you’re interested in my accounts.’
‘Well, if you won’t talk to me like an ordinary human being…’ Leo justified herself. Her cheeks were hot. ‘I’m desperate. There’s been no word from Isabel. Nothing.’
‘I told you. I haven’t seen her for some
months.’ Daniel restrained a sudden rush of anger. ‘I think you’d better leave now.’
‘But if only you would tell me something of what went on between you, it might provide a clue. For example, did Isabel talk to you about her work, a project to do with genetic engineering?
‘Isabel talked to me about many things. If I thought there was anything of use within that for the present situation, I would communicate it to the police.’ Daniel’s choice of phrasing sounded pompous to his own ears. He added, ‘I have communicated with the police.’
‘But they don’t understand her as I do. She may have had some kind of breakdown. She may be…’
A loud voice interrupted her protests, stopped her from saying what was tumbling off her tongue. Isabel dead. She tried to collect herself.
‘Dad. I’m home.’ A small boy burst into the room and stopped in his tracks as he saw Leo. ‘Hello.’ He peered up at her in evident curiosity.
‘Hello.’ Leo gave him what she hoped wasn’t too nervous a smile. Behind him stood the young blonde woman she had seen before. She had a protective hand on the boy’s shoulder. Could this be the boy’s mother? Daniel’s wife? Leo’s discomfiture mounted.
‘Have you come to look to look at my mummy’s pictures?’ the child asked. ‘That’s my favourite.’ He pointed at a canvas which was a swirl of forest greens. ‘Can you see the owl? He’s called Hooter.’
‘Hooter. That’s a good name.’ Leo looked at the painting. Amidst the darkly vibrant greens, she made out a white hieratic bird with staring eyes of molten yellow. ‘A very good name. Mine’s Leo. Leonora,’ she corrected herself and glanced quickly at Daniel Lukas as she bent to give the boy her hand.
‘I’m Robbie,’ he said with solemn emphasis. ‘And this is my nanny, Martina. Are you staying for tea?’
Daniel shook himself out of the raptness with which he had watched the scene. ‘Ms Gould was just leaving. Weren’t you, Ms Gould?’
For a moment, as she nodded, he was tempted to ask her to stay. But given her status as patient, let alone her questionable motives, that would hardly do. Yet his son rarely manifested such instant interest in adults. But was that his doing rather more than Robbie’s? Over this last year, he had been so intent on shielding the boy that apart from the close circle of friends, he had never let anyone in.
Sanctuary Page 17
