For Clem, with all my love
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Mothers and Other Lovers
Skin
Sleep with Me
You
Touched
You have the face that suits a woman
For her soul’s screen –
The sort of beauty that’s called human
In hell, Faustine.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Faustine’
She had always had a fear of something wild in her own nature which she kept tightly controlled.
Margaret Forster, Daphne du Maurier
I have drunk the wine of life at last, I have known the best thing worth knowing.
Edith Wharton, diary
CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE
Danger wore a sweet face.
That was why she had travelled through the night to be there. There in someone else’s home, lying like a fool on a hard couch and staring through the first grains of dawn, while those she really loved were quite elsewhere. She waited on that makeshift bed, willing the house’s inhabitants to wake as she tracked tentacles of sound up the stairs and through rooms. Disbelief at what she had done drove into her.
Everything in this house was different from Beth’s own home: the screaming of birdsong, the loitering of taxis instead of the canal traffic that had lined her existence for so long. She rolled on to her front, attempting to decipher a human presence beneath the scents of the bed linen. The fabric conditioner itself seemed exciting: comforting, ineffably alien.
She would text her family soon. She didn’t know what. She had no idea. Nothing about this act of self-sabotage could be explained. Yet she knew it was an undertow of wildness that had hooked her and brought her to this room; it was that promise of life as life was meant to be led, at its rawest and most frightening and most beautiful.
TWO
The previous summer, before the chaos had begun, there were too many visitors at Beth and Sol’s house on Little Canal Street. There were, as always, artists who turned up, Beth’s childhood best friend who lived nearby, and now a group of twelve-year-old girls, the chemical shock of their deodorant overlaying new hormones raining down the stairs. It was hard to keep the house tidy, to have enough milk for tea, to hear the doorbell. The rackety appeal, the candles, paintings, giggling, arguments, charged their home with life, the only half-dead thing out there on the canal that backed the house, because water brought up the ghost.
‘Can you get them all to fuck off so I can fuck you?’ Sol said in the kitchen.
Beth paused, smiled. ‘I might not want to.’
‘Let’s see.’
‘It might be that I want to do a few things to you,’ she said in a self-conscious tone, making an effort to manufacture lust. She turned as she left the room and laughed at the sight of him watching her. ‘That got you, didn’t it?’
He hesitated. ‘Praise be the Lord,’ he muttered.
Their daughter Fern skedaddled through the sitting room trailed by other girls, and bulleted into her mother, flung her arms around her, kissed her, causing Beth’s childless best friend to throw a smile touched with yearning that made Beth’s throat tighten in empathy. Was it meant to be as good as this? The candles flattened, and the house’s rooms melted into one another, its levels and terraces water-suspended. This home was precious, but it was theirs, Beth’s and Sol’s and Fern’s, after so much longing and working. A poster for Beth’s last show hung in a corner; an increasingly famous artist she had known since school held court by the fire; Sol winked at her and rubbed Fern’s shoulder as he passed, and Beth swallowed and felt a flicker of fear, of guilt.
The changes were coming, though, with Fern; Beth could see them more clearly later. The beginning was there: the slight lateness from school, the distraction, the tension with Sol, even if it could barely yet be defined. It was the very end of summer then, August drying and dying, a glare of duckweed still on the canal. Fern would be thirteen in a few weeks’ time.
***
‘Your phone just rang,’ said Sol, coming into the bedroom that night and sending Beth’s mobile spinning into the air. She caught it neatly with one hand.
‘Impressive …? Who was it?’
The promise of sex hovered over them. The sounds of the owners of the houseboat on the other side of the canal arriving home drunk floated through the open windows.
‘No Caller ID,’ he said. ‘No Caller ID was calling you. I couldn’t get it in time.’
The phone rang again. No Caller ID.
‘Hello?’ she said.
There was a silence.
‘Hello?’ said Beth again.
A pause was followed by a whisper of throat clearing. ‘Hello. I—’
A moment of paralysis, of panic, delayed Beth, and then her finger moved reflexively and jabbed the Off button. She looked again at the phone, then pushed it away.
‘Hon,’ said Sol. ‘Who was it?’
She shook her head.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
He raised one eyebrow. He touched her shoulder, his stubble brushing her temple, and went to the bathroom.
She began to sort her clothes for the morning, and the ghost was at large again, but this time creased in an underwear drawer. Beth made a slight mewling sound out loud. She thought she had cleared the house of the last possessions of her mother’s that she had treasured as a girl; but here, as she searched for some thin tights, was an object that faintly smelled of Lizzie Penn in its creases: a flimsy camisole, laddered, a suggestion of perfume and human life in the grain of the fabric. How had it got into the back of this drawer? Beth dragged items from where they were jammed. She breathed in her mother’s DNA again, close to her nose, hesitated over the wastepaper bin, then slammed the pile in the washing basket.
And yet what was this ghost? A tumour of past regrets. Absence. Guilt. Beth had not seen her mother for many years.
She brushed away some crumbs on the sheet in case Sol commented on her oatcakes-in-bed habit. Lizzie Penn. The thought of her mother made Beth go and see Fern, to say goodnight again. Fern’s bedroom was a tongue-and-groove-clad sloping square that led straight into a box room used for storing Sol’s photography equipment, with no space for a corridor between. There were Fern’s objects crammed into papier mâché bowls, into wasabi dishes, Ikea and Tiger containers: the scented erasers, highlighters, tiny monkeys, Barbapapas. Fern lay in a rumpled spread of limbs.
Beth felt a ferocious desire to protect that stalky girl in a T-shirt with her fair colouring and mousy hair, one leg scissored over her duvet. The skin between her nose freckles was pinpricked with pimples, and her scents familiar: her cheap lip balms and her teddy, flattened and faintly urinous after a lifetime of love. Her fetishistic hoarding of tissues was in evidence, a pile stuffed between the mattress and the end of the bed. Beth leaned towards her, skimmed her lips over her hair, so she stirred. Her own love felt, at times, cannibalistic. A barely perceptible odour of scented smoke, or something fragrant, like eucalyptus, hung about Fern’s body, and Beth breathed in again, more deeply, but lost track of it. Fern opened her eyes very suddenly, looked straight at Beth with a glazed
expression, broke into a smile. ‘Love you, Mum,’ she murmured. ‘I …’ she said, tailing off.
‘I love you,’ whispered Beth, and left.
***
Back in her bedroom, the expectation of sex still lingered in the air: that slightly unpleasant, primitive hunger, and Beth knew that Sol was guiding her to keep her on track, and in that moment, there was something defenceless and irritating about his male needs.
Her phone vibrated once on the pillow, then stopped. Beth picked it up, her hand shaking. No Caller ID again.
‘Hon,’ said Sol, turning to her with an abrupt sloping of the mattress. ‘I can see you’re agitated. Did No ID call back?’
Beth pressed her nails into her arm superstitiously. She said nothing.
‘Put whatever it is – put it aside till the morning, or you won’t sleep. I know you. You’re going to be angsting. Listen to you,’ said Sol.
‘What?’
‘Your breathing. I think you suffer sometimes. But you don’t let on.’
Beth sighed, and let out her breath. ‘I’m really OK. Just a bit of a worrier.’
‘Look at you. Your pulse is crazy. What is it?’
‘Sorry,’ she said. She was pressing so hard into the sheets that a nail broke. ‘My breathing just feels a bit funny.’
‘Bet. Who was it?’
She shook her head slowly. She took a deep breath. ‘I’m pretty sure it was Lizzie.’
‘What?’ He slapped the bedhead. ‘Jesus H. Christ. You certain?’ He pulled her into his arms.
‘No,’ she muttered. ‘I think so.’
‘That woman is not permitted back into your life. If she contacts you again in any way, you put her straight on to me.’
She nodded. ‘My fierce protector.’
‘Always. But Jesus, Bet. Look at you. You’re all in a panic. You are going to that fucking appointment.’
‘What appointment?’
Sol was silent. His mouth twitched behind his beard.
‘Uh?’ said Beth. ‘Oh, you’re banging on about that shrink referral again? I don’t know if I want one.’
‘Psychologist,’ he said.
‘We don’t even know when I’ll get one. I only kind of asked the doctor because you told me to.’
‘It’s not really your way, is it, Bet?’ he said. ‘To do something because I’ve “told” you to.’
He put his arm round her and bear-hugged her, easing her spine, and she leaned against his shoulder. He stroked his beard, as was his habit. It echoed his hair, its former curls close-cropped so that they undulated like wave-ridged sand, his brows darker. As his beard’s edges became grey-frosted, he reminded Beth of some taloned yet benign bird of prey, his nose lightly curved. His eyes had an alertness to their black-brownness. His body was strong in his determination to stay fit and defeat family heart problems.
‘Even though you bloody annoy me, I love you,’ she said into his shoulder. ‘Extremely dearly.’
‘I think I heard that, but whatever you said, I love you very much.’
She stretched out on the bed.
‘Take advantage,’ she said suddenly into his ear, laughing.
He turned and propped himself on his elbow, his eyes’ charcoal impenetrability without glasses lending him a nakedness.
‘Really?’ he said eventually.
‘Yes!’
‘Music to my ears.’
‘Unusual music,’ she said in an attempt to diffuse tension with acknowledgement.
He reached over to kiss her, and an old fantasy bobbed through the reality, turning, as it occasionally did, to the boyfriend before Sol, Jack Dorian, who had since married and divorced. She barely saw him, but they had had sex whose salient details still played through her mind, and from time to time in bed with Sol, she summoned figures for speed and arousal, saving Jack Dorian for the end.
He kissed her further, but he was clearly uncertain of her desire. She lifted her hips, pressed her nails into his back, and suddenly they were fucking, fast and urgent, and it was all she wanted, to grab at life and block out the darkness: that moment of mating, that mobile knot of flesh.
THREE
The morning was a thin blaze, a scrawl of light through trees on the walls; sex was done and out of the way for the week, and made them closer, and they touched in passing, that bond a secret from the world, from Fern.
Beth looked at the canal, smelling its sluggish plant drift and overfed duck excrement from Camden Lock, and at the towpath opposite, where she had recently noticed a boy or young man standing. She was now uncertain of what she’d seen, the late August sun with its show of high summer flaring over such worries. Anemones, purple in a yellow French jug, held the same papery transience as the dying summer. The voice from the night was there in her ear, a revolting worm, but bleached by the day.
They drank tea, chatted over the Saturday paper, pottered, Sol clearing some of his piles of paperwork, picking out chords with his left hand as he passed the piano. Fern’s music vibrated through the ceiling. The scent of the eggs and pancakes he cooked at weekends greased and sugared the air, and he had already laid in logs for the wood burner, bought from one of the longboat travellers who cut them illegally on their cross-country journeys.
‘You think you’re in the backwoods still,’ said Beth, and inaccurate banter about lumberjacks and beatniks in Vermont, where he had never lived, followed.
‘You doofus, missus,’ he said.
She reached for him before Fern emerged from the shower, and pulled at her cotton nightie that was sour with chilling night sweat. Why was chest sweat always different? She wrinkled her nose in disgusted fascination.
‘Want to smell me?’ she said, leaning over Sol.
‘Mmm, I like it,’ he said, as she had known he would.
She laughed. ‘I stink. Your doing.’
Soon he might take out the rubbish before she would have done it, listening to his Nu Country as he worked in the kitchen. He would pick out tunes on the piano familiar from his earlier listening. He might heat the Folgers coffee she teased him about, gargle with warm water.
Here, then, was her husband, this one she made her life partner. How odd; how grown up; how prosaic; how astonishing. She told him the thought, laughing, and he understood.
‘I think your habits are almost like breathing to me now,’ she said.
She looked at her phone as a text arrived. She tried to brush the call from the previous night away: that cracked in-breath, self-righteousness in half a word.
Fern’s voice rose with her music from upstairs. Beth made more tea and handed a mug to Sol. There was the usual weekend chaos, the appeal of laziness over paperwork, of nesting over outdoor activity. Sol had been someone else’s, a young husband and father in an unhappy marriage; Fern had been hard to conceive; their existence seemed halfway inexplicable, the comparison with Beth’s own childhood making her strained and superstitious with appreciation. At other times, she took it all for granted.
‘Has the mortgage gone through yet?’ said Sol.
‘I dread to think. Can you check? The weekend might throw the date.’ She made a shuddering sound. ‘Just the mention of that is going to make me get on with Mice in … precisely five minutes.’
Fern was coming down, her speaker booming on the stairs. She stood there, dripping water from strands of hair like ink marks over her shoulders, her curves more apparent beneath her towel. This was what Beth called her Amish look, hair a headscarf of modesty over pale skin.
‘Hey, oldies,’ she said, carrying a notebook in her mouth. She dipped her head to let it drop on the table, and bared her teeth into a silly grin at Beth.
‘Hello, darling,’ said Beth. Her phone was beside her and she glanced at it.
She adjusted a board on her easel, the wobbles of canal light making mobile surfaces of plaster there. From that corner, their jigsaw of a home with its low ceilings and narrowness, its added spiral staircase and mezzanine, appeared as a doll’s house that
reached to the sky. Sounds of discord floated up from outside. Change was clearly imminent: King’s Cross money would come creeping even further along, regenerating the masonry, ousting the hippies’ canal boats and the drug dealers. But it was still as it had always been in this ratty tree-shaded section beyond the Lock. She stretched, to try to clear her neck and shoulder pain. The post clattered through the door and she went downstairs to fetch it, to delay working a few seconds longer.
It was an image that flickered through her mind later. How accurately? She couldn’t be certain. She looked back at that post on a mat, Fern’s name in writing that appeared uneducated, pizza flyers and airport taxi cards pushed to the corner with a leaf stuck to a rolled-up cobweb, and one of Fern’s hairbands caught in the mat’s bristles. But there were other events around that time that could have signified the start of the trouble, blurring what was later seen as a clear trajectory.
‘Look at this,’ said Beth, showing Sol the envelope addressed to Fern.
‘Huh,’ he said.
‘I bet it’s from a boy. Look at that inarticulate writing.’
‘She’s going to be into boys,’ he said in his steady voice. ‘Any minute.’
‘Yes. But she’s twelve.’
‘Almost thirteen. And, hon … I’m aware you’re going to find that difficult.’
‘What?’
‘Thirteen. The age.’
‘Why? Oh—’
‘Likely.’
‘God, you’re perceptive. For a man.’
She ripped open a letter from St Peter’s Hospital offering her an initial therapy assessment. ‘Oh no, they had a cancellation.’ Her shoulders dropped.
‘Good,’ said Sol, not looking up.
‘I’ve only got this at all because you bamboozled – harassed – me, you beardy sadist – to get referred.’
His mouth twitched. ‘No exaggeration or anything,’ he said, studying the letter. ‘OK, Bet. You’ll do this, right? Think how you were last night …’
She marched to her easel.
‘I suppose—’ She shrugged.
She turned to her sketch for the children’s books she illustrated on the side as E. E. Brierley, the deadline approaching. The Metropolitan Mice series was popular in Japan.
The Seduction Page 1
