The Snakes

by Sadie Jones

  ‘Nice,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Bea. She turned to go.

  ‘Babe.’

  She stopped.

  ‘We should talk. About the money. Get it out the way.’

  She nodded. ‘Whenever you like.’ She left the room.

  They didn’t talk that day. He was waiting for her to broach the subject. She meant to, but found she couldn’t speak. It was enough managing being home, and spending as little time in the evening with her parents as she could. It wasn’t hard to avoid Liv, who was on the phone constantly, enlisting party planners and friends, and Griff retreated to his study. They all went to bed early.

  ‘Are you sad, babe?’ said Dan, in the face of her quietness.

  It was wrong to use grief as an excuse for the distance between them. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Goodnight.’

  At five o’clock in the morning she snapped awake. The dawn light made the bedroom dreamlike, with no shadows, an umber rendering of a room that she was not part of, as if she were observing it from another place. She knew why she had woken like that. Like someone had pushed her. It was Monday; seven days exactly since Alex had died. The police had come to Paligny a week ago to tell them. They must have found Alex’s body at about the time she had woken. She lay wakefully, staring, and seeing only the white road, and the car wreck, and thinking it was as if a new life had started then, in a new landscape. She turned to look at Dan. She didn’t want to risk waking him by getting up, and have to speak, if only to say, Go back to sleep, so she lay still. She felt each second of each minute of the three hours until he woke, at eight o’clock. It was a meditation on loss, marking it. Seven days to the moment. There was no possibility of company in that feeling; it wasn’t her choice to be alone with it.

  She pretended to be asleep when Dan got up. She didn’t think he believed her. When he had gone downstairs she sat up, and found Capitaine Vincent’s card in her bag, and called him. He did not answer, and she left a message.

  ‘Capitaine Vincent, it’s Beatrice Adamson. Please call me, if you need anything.’

  She said something else, about wanting to help, but that wasn’t really why she’d called him. Her thoughts weren’t clear and she knew she sounded emotional. She wished she could delete the message. He wasn’t her friend, but he felt like an ally, and she couldn’t separate herself. She would have liked to see him.

  Later that day, her brother Ed and his wife Elizabeth arrived from Tokyo. They were staying in a hotel, and came by Holford Road to say hello. Elizabeth was a cool, correct person, whose expression became intent whenever she looked at her husband. Efficiently affectionate in public, their private lives were unguessable. They had left their children in Tokyo, but showed pictures on their phones. Ed’s feelings were put aside in his mother’s presence, as they had always been. He shadowed her politely. He looked very like his father; as tall, but not so broad, and wore a handmade suit. He and Bea hugged. They had never known one another well.

  ‘We still can’t believe it’s happened,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Are the papers still snooping around?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Griff. ‘Arun told them to fuck off, but I don’t know if it made any difference. They might not know we’re here.’

  They sat in the sitting room, drinking coffee, except Liv, who opened a bottle of champagne and walked in and out with her glass, on the phone, busy making plans. Her voice rang out from room to room.

  In the afternoon, Alex’s friend Will came over for band practice. There was something of Alex about him. They’d been at school together, and both loved art and music, and had been rebels. He brought his daughter, Nell, who was four. She sat on one of the stools at the island unit and watched from a distance as he tuned his guitar. Like his father, he worked at Merrill Lynch now. The other guys in the band walked about the garden with Liv, deciding where the stage should go. Across the room, Dan was making a sandwich with Blessica, pretending he couldn’t find the fridge behind the spring-loaded cupboard doors. She was giggling. Will was sitting on the leather sofa near the garden, and Bea was holding his iPad, where he could see the tuning app.

  ‘Your daughter’s lovely,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Will. ‘You have kids? I guess you’re way younger than us.’

  ‘Not way. But not yet.’

  ‘Daddy! Play,’ said Nell, swinging her feet.

  He played a Beatles song, ‘Blackbird’, halfway through, with a few false starts.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked when he stopped. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Bea nodded. ‘It’s OK, I cry a lot.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry about Alex. It’s just shit. It’s such a shit thing to happen.’

  She appreciated his nerve in not letting it be too huge and terrible to name.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Do the police know anything yet?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Your mum is being amazing. I don’t know how she does it.’

  He paused for her to agree, but she didn’t.

  ‘She’s given me a whole specific set list,’ said Will. ‘“Blackbird” we always play, but most Beatles songs not so much. She’s got loads of those, and loads of Oasis, but I’m pretty sure Alex hated everything after “Definitely Maybe” – pretended to, anyway. We thought we were so cool.’

  ‘You were,’ Bea smiled. ‘So cool. Just play what you want to play. You were his friend.’

  ‘She’s his mother. They were so close, weren’t they?’

  When she didn’t answer he said, ‘She was always the mother all the guys – I mean,’ he corrected himself, ‘she was so good-looking, we were all totally in awe of her.’

  Bea made some sound, she didn’t know, something non-committal.

  ‘It’s got to be tough for a girl to have a mum like that,’ he said. ‘She looked about fifteen.’

  ‘Daddy!’ shouted Nell from her stool. ‘I’m bored.’

  Gratefully, Bea left him, and went over to her. ‘Bored?’ she said. ‘Oh no, that’s awful!’

  Nell giggled. ‘Please may you spin me?’ she said.

  Standing nearby, Dan watched Bea spin the stool. The little girl tipped her head back. Will played some more chords and sequences, and then sang ‘The Man Who Sold the World’, from start to finish, perfectly.

  ‘We didn’t know it was David Bowie’s song,’ he said, as the kitchen clapped. ‘We thought it was Kurt Cobain.’

  Liv came from the terrace to the threshold of the garden door, commanding attention.

  ‘Oh, Will! That was gorgeous. Thank you so much. We’re going to have the tables in the garden, if the weather holds. Would you rather play on the terrace, or shall we put the stage at the end?’

  ‘Hey, whatever suits you, Liv,’ said Will.

  She sat next to him, and touched the neck of his guitar. ‘Isn’t it lovely? Could you bear to show me a chord? Do you mind?’

  ‘No, sure,’ he said. ‘Here, like this.’

  When the caterers and decorators came and started to lay the dust sheets to protect the floors, Will left. Griff withdrew to his study, and Bea to her room. Dan stayed downstairs, at the island unit with a cup of tea and a croissant, watching Liv and the party planner talking to the workmen in the garden. Blessica had put a slice of butter on a saucer in case he wanted it, and a glass dish of honey. Now she was wiping inside a cupboard. Dan wondered if her apparent adoration for the family was genuine, or if it was like a salaried form of Stockolm syndrome; her own family were in the Philippines. His phone buzzed with a text from Bea.

  Come up?

  She was summoning him. She was ready to talk. Blessica wouldn’t let him clear his plate, she took it from him, and thanked him like he was doing her a favour. He went upstairs.

  ‘So … shall we sort this out?’ said Bea, when he came into the bedroom. She was on the floor, with her back against the bed.

  ‘You want to?’ said Dan.

  She nodded. He sa
t down beside her on the floor.

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  ‘OK?’ His forearms rested on his knees, his hands were clasped, his head bowed, waiting.

  ‘This thing,’ she said, then stalled.

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘The money.’

  ‘Yes.’ His heart beat fast, quickening at the mention of it, along with a kick of shame.

  ‘We have to control it,’ she said. ‘We have to be distant enough from it. It’s very important.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘We have to decide what we want, and stick to it.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘The rest can be put into a trust, and not accessible.’

  He felt the thrill, the danger of the taboo. Her trust, her fortune, in all this talk of death, like treasure in a fairy tale.

  ‘I don’t want to suddenly find I’m sharing stuff with Ed.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Like this house. Deciding whether to sell, what to do with it and all the other places.’

  He’d never heard her voice shake. ‘What other places?’ he said.

  ‘The apartment in New York. Hampshire. The house on St Barts.’

  He had been tantalised by these words before, but hearing her say them now made him breathless.

  ‘Ed can have all that stuff,’ she said, ‘and worry about what to do with it all – he likes it.’

  He put his hand on her knee, to steady himself. He felt almost dizzy.

  ‘I just want it clean,’ she was saying. ‘So whatever comes to me is controllable. Otherwise it’s our whole lives. It’s a recipe for madness.’

  ‘We don’t need to be rich,’ he said. ‘You’ll never be like them.’

  He kept his hand on her knee and waited.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘Have you thought?’

  ‘Yes.’ It was time to put a number on it. He tried not to sound as though he’d planned it. ‘If we sell our flat, we won’t walk away with much.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘So, what if we get a better flat?’

  ‘With a mortgage,’ said Bea.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Who doesn’t have a mortgage?’ She was scandalised.

  ‘Who, Bea? Very lucky people, that’s who,’ he said. ‘All right. A mortgage. But small.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Agreed.’

  He tried not to rush. ‘And, like you said, I need to take some time out. I’ve only got my foundation, I was thinking I could do a degree, maybe. But then, that’s three years. I’ll be thirty-three. So maybe not. Maybe I could just take a few months to think about it.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘And that will cost money.’

  ‘How much money?’ she said.

  ‘Like … twenty-five grand?’

  ‘Twenty-five, OK.’ She sounded relieved.

  ‘Or thirty,’ he said. ‘Thirty – say, thirty-five grand for a year. That’s a salary, right?’

  ‘It’s more than mine.’

  ‘Which is not much, living in London. So. Thirty-five, to live for a year. And not go back to fucking Foundations of fucking Holloway ever again.’ He gave her a flash of a smile.

  ‘A year, from September,’ she confirmed.

  ‘Yes.’

  She relaxed, a little. She smiled.

  ‘Oh.’ His face fell. ‘Shit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We won’t get a mortgage, will we? If I’m not working.’ He put his other hand onto her knee, for emphasis, talking straight into her face. ‘We should buy the new flat without one.’

  As she felt the walls close in, he felt them dissolve – the ceiling, blown clear off, to open sky.

  ‘Go on,’ she said, looking into his eyes.

  His pupils were dilated, his hands were warm. ‘OK, well, say … we get a flat with no mortgage.’

  ‘Everybody wants a home,’ she said. ‘Everybody needs to own something. Simone Weil calls ownership one of the “needs of the soul”. You’re right, I’m sorry.’

  ‘No mortgage, then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Great,’ said Dan. ‘Then we should get a house.’

  ‘A house?’

  ‘Then we don’t have to move, when we have a baby.’

  He said it easily, but the silence that followed was like the hush after a bomb blast. She lost her bearings.

  ‘I saw you with that little girl,’ said Dan.

  ‘Nell?’

  ‘You want one. A baby. We want one.’

  ‘I know –’

  ‘So, let’s get a house.’

  ‘But I don’t –’

  ‘Just that, OK? Bea, a house, come on. Nothing massive. Three bedrooms.’ His voice sounded restricted, his fingers stroking the sensitive skin behind her knee. ‘So the house, and the money for the year. This is good, but what about now?’

  ‘Now?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘For travelling. We don’t have a tenant now.’

  ‘No, but we’ve got the Cushion.’

  ‘The Cushion.’ He laughed, dismissing it.

  ‘What? It’s fine. We worked it out. We’ve got nearly four grand.’

  He made a noise, derisive. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Be a lot less stressful if we top it up. We could put a few grand in there – maybe, ten?’

  ‘We’re only away three months.’

  ‘We could stay in places with, like, clean bathrooms?’

  ‘No, we’ve decided on a house.’

  ‘Babe –’

  ‘A house!’ she said.

  ‘Puritan.’ He smiled, his hand moving on her thigh.

  ‘So is that it?’

  ‘We’ll need to work it out properly,’ he said.

  ‘But that’s enough?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s not extreme,’ he said.

  ‘No. You’re right. It’s a house.’

  ‘And a baby.’

  ‘A baby,’ she said.

  He kissed her again. She loved the taste of him. She had missed it. He was kissing her. He wanted her. His need was urgent. It caught like touchpaper. His fingers pressed into her thighs. A house. And money. A three-bedroom house and a year to breathe. Thirty-five thousand pounds, in a house without a mortgage. He fucked her on the floor while caterers and electricians passed through the rooms below, and afterwards lay sweating by her side.

  ‘Christ, it’s hot up here,’ he said.

  He got up and put on the air conditioning. He flicked the temperature arrow down; twenty-one, twenty, nineteen.

  ‘D’you mind?’ he said. ‘It’s all over the house, one more room isn’t going to make any difference.’

  Linen beanbags, mismatched chairs; lavender, cornflowers, roses. Decorations filled the house. Tea lights in silver glass hanging from the trees. Fattoush, baba ganoush, labneh, samboussek, batata harra. Food for North Africa because Alex had loved it. Broderie anglaise cloths for France, because he had loved it there, too. A stage for his friends’ band, draped with white, and a white backdrop. White amps and speakers.

  ‘I love it,’ said Liv. ‘It looks like that John Lennon video. It’s gorgeous. No black, anywhere. I don’t want black.’

  And that night, Bea dreamed she was holding Dan’s hand, leading him. She saw an enormous snake ahead of them. She looked at it and thought how funny it was to dream something so obvious and Freudian as a snake. Commenting on it she felt safe, but the snake was in front of them on the road. It was standing upright, as tall as a tree, with many body parts, but it was still a snake. It’s like a tree but not like a tree, she thought. She looked down, for Dan’s hand, but it wasn’t in hers. Her hand was severed at the wrist. The paralysis of a nightmare crept over her body. She tried to search for Dan, holding the stump of her wrist in front of her. The snake was huge and tall above her. There was bark on its body, which clicked and creaked as it swayed. Dan was looking down at her from the branches now, saying, Stop, and she was hanging from the tree, choking. Sh
e felt the weight of her body, swinging.

  ‘Stop it!’ said Dan.

  She opened her eyes. The snake was towering behind him. He couldn’t see it. She woke up. His hand was clamped over her mouth like a kidnapping. She struggled, crushed under his body. He took his hand away.

  ‘You were yelling,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  22

  Bea tiptoed out of the house while the sun was still hidden by haze and walked to the station, the streets she’d walked every day in childhood. The morning was chilly. She was sore from the sex the day before, she felt it when she walked. She remembered the feel of him in her arms, and how soft his neck was against her face, the velvet roughness of the back of his head, where his hair started, and his lips pressed softly on her collarbone. She thought of throwing away her birth control pills, and what it would be like to feel him come inside her, knowing they could make a baby. They could have a baby in a house. It was miraculous. They’d be a family. She tried to believe that he loved her, but she couldn’t believe it. She could only think he’d wanted her so badly because of the money, that he’d been fucking her money, and doing it quickly, feeling passionately about her body because of that. She remembered she’d read somewhere you shouldn’t flush your birth control pills away, because of the hormones in the water. She wondered what they would call their child. She would like a girl, so she could give a girl unending, easy love, and never have her daughter feel like she had felt. A boy might make her think of her mother. She mustn’t be frightened of that. Her mother was nothing to do with her. And Dan might want a son. She didn’t care if it was a boy or a girl. A baby was a baby. A baby and Dan. She pushed the other thoughts away. It was vain to worry about how much she was loved all the time. She must try not to be so vain.