The Drowning Girl

CHAPTER 2

When I get to Jonah and the Whale on Monday morning, Lavinia is already busy. She’s taken down the pumpkins from the Hallowe’en display, and she’s potting up autumn gentians on a table of curled wrought iron; the table is rusting but elegant, one of her flea-market finds. She has lots of bracelets on her wrists, and she’s fixed back her hair with a sweep of magenta muslin, a tie-dyed scarf from Gujerat, which has a long silky fringe and a gold thread woven through. The thick, sweet smells of the flower shop wrap themselves around me—wet earth and mingled pollens.

Lavinia is a widow, her husband was an orthopaedic surgeon and I always feel he was a difficult man—though she only ever speaks of him with affection. He died ten years ago, of cirrhosis of the liver. She’d been a physiotherapist and opened the flower shop after his death with the insurance money, wanting to make a fresh start. ‘Why “Jonah and the Whale”?’ I asked once, expecting something deep about loss and new beginnings, but she smiled in that way she has—enigmatic, a little self-mocking—and said that she just liked the way it sounds. She lives alone, but she never seems lonely, she knows so many people—Buddhists, artists, performance poets, from her hippy days. On Sunday, she tells me, she had three rather decrepit musicians round for paella, and they played Cole Porter in her living room.

I tell her about the party, about what happened with Sylvie. She turns to me and listens till I’ve finished, her quiet eyes taking me in.

‘Poor kid,’ she says then. ‘Poor you.’

Her eyes linger on me. There’s a little crease pencilled between her brows. She never gives me advice, and I’m grateful for that.

I put flowers out on the pavement at the front of the shop—buckets of lilies with reddish pollen that stains your skin like turmeric; hydrangeas of the richest, densest blue. I’ve planted the hydrangeas into azure metal pots, choosing the containers with care. I love the way the clashing colours seem to shimmer and sing. There’s a winter rawness in the air, the cold scrapes at my skin. My hands are always chapped, working here. I own numerous pairs of fingerless gloves that I dry out on the hotwater pipes in the back room near the boiler, and I change them during the day and yet, whatever I do, in winter I’m never quite warm.

It’s a slow morning, as Mondays usually are, and Lavinia sends me off in my car to do the deliveries. First a big traditional bouquet, roses and carnations, for a silver wedding. The woman who answers the doorbell has stiff, curled hair and a ready smile, and behind her an orderly house that smells of lavender polish and detergent. This fascinates me always, the glimpses of people’s houses, these slivers of other lives. Next, there’s a planted arrangement, some winter cyclamen, for a nervous young woman whose hair falls over her face. The cyclamen seem so right for her—these fragile, pale, self-deprecating flowers. She stands on her doorstep and looks at me with an uncertain, surprised air—as though this is all a mistake, as though she feels she’s not the kind of woman people would buy flowers for. As she talks she keeps touching the side of her face, in a little self-comforting gesture. I drive away, feeling a loneliness that might be hers or mine.

The last call is to one of those modern estates where the numbering doesn’t make sense. I need number 43, but 37 seems to lead straight to 51. I stop the car and get out, walk down the road and peer into all the alleyways, trying to find the right house.

It’s how I met Dominic, delivering flowers. I was eighteen. I’d only just begun working for Lavinia. I was thrilled with the job after temping in tedious offices ever since I’d left school.

It was a planted arrangement—the most expensive we do—in a wicker basket. I’d written out the card myself; I’d been the one to take the call. An older woman, a privileged voice, with cool, immaculate vowels. Happy Birthday, dearest Claudia, with all my love, Mama. A spiky bit of wicker from the basket had worked loose, and as I took the flowers out of the car I snagged my finger. The cut was surprisingly deep. I wrapped a tissue round it. The blood soaked rapidly through, but I only noticed after I’d rung the bell.

He was a big man, forty-something, and wearing a linen shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He looked at me as though I amused him. I was wearing my usual kind of outfit: a little cord skirt and stripy tights and boots with high, spindly heels—too high to drive in, really. I was suddenly very aware how short my skirt was.

‘Flowers for Claudia Runcie,’ I said.

He was looking at me; he didn’t look at the flowers. He still had that pleased, amused air.

‘Well,’ he said.

He took the basket from me and noticed my hand.

‘Whatever happened?’ he said.

‘I cut it,’ I said.

‘OK. Stupid question,’ he said. ‘You’d better come in. You’re dripping on my doorstep.’

He thrust a huge handkerchief at me. I wrapped it round my hand.

It was a large airy kitchen, with that pale, distressed kitchen furniture that looks as though it’s been sourced from some Provençal street market. I thought, If I had a proper kitchen, this is exactly how I’d like it to look. There were photos on the mantelpiece, of a boy and a girl, black and white, in silver frames. The photos were rather beautiful, soft focus, cleverly lit. There were masses of birthday cards and a silver helium balloon, for Claudia presumably.

‘I’m Dominic,’ he said.

I told him my name.

He hunted in the drawers of the cabinets for an Elastoplast.

‘Where the hell does she keep them?’ he said.

I had an immediate sense of his wife, of Claudia, as the centre of things, the heart of the home, the one who held it together: who knew the best photographers and where to find exquisite kitchen units and whose Elastoplasts had their allotted place in her drawer. I sensed his absolute dependency on her. What I didn’t know then, but was soon to learn, was that they never made love: it was a comfortable, prosperous marriage but with no sex or closeness. At least, that’s how he told it.

He found the packet of plasters. I put out my hand, but he’d taken one out and was peeling off the backing.

‘Give me your finger,’ he told me.

Right from the beginning, I did just what he said.

He stuck the plaster in place with rather excessive thoroughness, but I wasn’t going to move away. He had a faint scent of leather and cigars, a very male scent. His closeness felt extraordinary, thrilling with a shiver of sex, yet somehow safe too, as though he were familiar to me, as though I knew him already. I felt how much bigger he was than me. I liked that.

‘Better now?’ he said.

‘Yes. Thank you.’

He stood back a pace and smiled at me. A sudden smile of startling candour, with on one side of his mouth a little crease. It’s weird thinking about this now. It’s Sylvie’s smile exactly. Where his hair was starting to recede, the skin had a vulnerable look—I wanted to reach up and touch it. The thought sent a clear bright line of sensation through me.

‘So. Grace. I think you should have a coffee. After losing all that blood.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘You do drink coffee, don’t you?’

I nodded.

‘That’s a relief. Claudia’s into this foul herbal stuff. Camomile. It’s like hay. Why would anyone drink hay?’

I felt he was telling me too much, giving too much away—that he shouldn’t be criticising her like this to me, a stranger, even about such a very trivial thing.

While the kettle was boiling, he found a place for the flowers on the mantelpiece.

‘Good flowers. Did you do them?’

‘Yes.’

‘They’re rather lovely,’ he said. ‘Well, you look the arty type. I can tell from the stripes.’ He gave my legs an appraising look.

We drank our coffee. Somehow he learnt a lot about me.

When I left he asked would I be OK to drive, and I said I was fine, I didn’t feel faint in the least—though that wasn’t true exactly. Two days later, he rang the shop and asked me out to the Alouette for a meal, where he effortlessly seduced me.

Eventually I find number 43, down an alleyway. The man who opens the door is unshaven and in his pyjamas. Hot air from a sick room brushes against me, with a smell of camphor and stale sheets. He’s embarrassed, seeing me there. It must all have been going on for a while: the house is rearranged to accommodate his illness. I can see the living room behind him, with the sofa made up as a bed. There’s opera on the stereo, a vigorous soprano, her voice pulsating with passion. The contrast is saddening—the music with its fabulous energy and emotion, and his wasted, restricted life.

For lunch I buy baguettes from Just-A-Crust. On the way back, as always, I linger outside the patisserie on the corner. They sell the most wonderful cakes there, all decorated with jewelled marzipan fruit, and with names that sound like the names of beautiful women. We eat our baguettes in turn in the back room.

The afternoon passes slowly. At three Lavinia goes out for a walk and a smoke.

Just after she’s gone I see a woman approaching the shop. She’s in her seventies perhaps. She’s wearing a crisply cut jacket, her hair is a lacquered grey helmet, her eyebrows are plucked and thinly pencilled in. Everything about her is polished and exact. Seeing her, it enters my mind that this grooming has a defensive purpose for her—as though this slick, varnished surface will somehow keep her safe. I watch as she draws nearer, tapping along the pavement on her pointy shiny shoes. At the door she hesitates, just for a heartbeat, then clears her throat, walks determinedly in. I know what she’s come for. I feel a brief apprehension. I wish Lavinia were here.

The flowers are for her husband, she says.

‘The funeral director said he’d take care of it all, but I wanted to choose them myself. It seemed important somehow.’

Her hands are clasped tight in front of her. I can feel the tension in her, her fear that she might come undone.

I bring her a chair and show her our catalogue. But she can’t choose. The decision has too much importance: it’s as though she believes that if only she can choose with absolute precision, everything will be mended and she’ll somehow bring him back. I understand: I’ve felt that.

I turn a page of the catalogue. A photo catches her eye.

‘Maybe something with cornflowers,’ she says. ‘They were his favourites. He always loved that blue.’

She looks away then, her eyes fill up, the tears spill down her face. The massive grief washes through her; there’s nothing she can do. She’s embarrassed but can’t stop it happening. Tears make glossy streaks in her thick cake make-up. I’m relieved for her that the shop is empty. She’s a private person; I know how she hates this extravagant public display.

‘I’m going to bring you a drink,’ I tell her. ‘You just sit there till you’re ready. We’ve got all the time in the world.’

I go to the back room and make her a coffee. Her grief has got inside me; my hand shakes, holding the spoonful of coffee, the soft brown powder sifts down.

She’s grateful. She wraps both her hands around the mug, as though needing something to cling to, as though the world seems insubstantial to her. She tells me about her husband. He was diabetic, he’d been taken into this nursing home—it was just for a week, she’d felt she needed a rest—how could she have been so selfish? They didn’t do his blood sugars properly, not as she’d have done. It’s all her fault he died…

I listen, not saying much, not comforting her, or telling her that everything’s OK: I know that wouldn’t help. And when we’ve chosen the wreath, I take her to the back room so she can tidy her face, because I can feel that matters to her.

‘Bless you,’ she says when she goes.

Her grief hangs around in the shop for a while, pressing down, a heaviness. I think of my mother’s death, of sitting in the crematorium chapel, feeling that empty swing of sickness through me, thinking about her life and all its limitations—the bitterness that had never left her after my father walked out: and that now it would never get better, now she was out of time. The bleakness of that.

We close at five-thirty. We mop and tidy up, and I peel off my soggy gloves and hang them by the boiler.

‘You get yourself an early night,’ says Lavinia as we leave.

‘I’m all right,’ I tell her.

Her eyes rest on me a moment, but she doesn’t say anything more.

CHAPTER 3

There are several different routes to Sylvie’s nursery. I take the one that goes down Newgate Road. I know I shouldn’t do this. The decision is made somewhere deep inside me, almost without conscious thought.

I park a few yards from the house. The darkness is thickening; no one will see. I’m invisible here, a faceless person, a shadow in the street. I wind my window down an inch; there’s a cold scent of autumn, a tang of smoke and rotten leaves, and the high, sharp bark of a fox. I tell myself I’ll only stay a moment.

The blinds are still up in the drawing room that faces onto the street, and tawny lamplight spills across the paving in the garden. Tonight I’m lucky: Dominic’s car is here; he must be at home. In the room, you can see all the things that Claudia has chosen—the subtle grey shades of the walls, the sketches in thin metal frames, on the mantelpiece a single orchid, of a cool watery green. The room seems so enticing in the mellowness of the light. I suddenly feel how cold I am, sitting here, still chilled from the day. I wrap my arms tight around myself to try and stop myself shivering. I feel a deep, dangerous loneliness.

As I watch the drawing room, Charlie, their son, saunters in. He’s still in his school uniform, but rumpled, his shirt hanging out. He’s tall now, visibly taller every time I see him, coltish, his hands and feet too big for him, a pale thatch of hair on his head. He looks around vaguely for something, then ambles out of the room.

I feel the quick fever of excitement that always comes over me here. I wonder if I will see Dominic.

But it’s Claudia who comes in. She walks right up to the window, which is a little open, and leans out, her arms on the sill. If she looked really hard she might see me now, but I’m sitting quite still in the shadow—and anyway, would she even know who I am? Does she know about me and Sylvie? Dominic never told me, there’s so much he never said. She lingers there for a moment. Maybe like me she’s just breathing in the scent of rot and bonfires, the smell of approaching cold that paradoxically seems so full of promise. Then she closes the window and reaches up to pull on the cord of the blind. Her head is back, and briefly the lamplight catches on the arch of her throat and the bright blonde fall of her hair. She’s thin; she has a figure that speaks of Pilates classes and always being a little hungry: her arm looks angular, stretching up, the amber brightness gleaming on the bony curve of her wrist. Then the blind slides down.

I watch for a moment longer. There’s another shape in the room now, a shadow choreography behind the blinds. But the shapes are vague, indeterminate—it’s Charlie again, perhaps, or Maud, their daughter: I can’t tell whether Dominic is there. I think of this life of his that I am excluded from—that I was always excluded from, even when we were closest. The everydayness of him that I know nothing about. What he’s like at family mealtimes, or at dinner parties with friends, or kicking a football around with Charlie in the garden. I never knew him doing any of these things. I knew him only as a lover: tender, passionate, curious, in those lavish afternoons we’d spend together in my bed, when I’d feel a complete, exact pleasure in his insistent fingers, his easy, deep slide into me, the sweet assiduous movement of his mouth. Or cool, closed-off, rejecting, in that terrible moment at the Alouette, the moment we couldn’t get back from. I’d been taking antibiotics for cystitis, but I hadn’t known that antibiotics could interfere with the pill. I told him I was pregnant, saw the instant retreat in his eyes. Cold crept through me. His look told me everything: his narrowed eyes, the way he stared at me as though I were his enemy. I knew the whole thing was fractured before he started to speak—explaining in his measured voice that of course I’d want to get it done privately, that he knew a good gynaecologist, that naturally he’d pay.

A familiar nausea rises in me. I sicken myself. I cannot live like this—parking near his house, ringing him just to hear him on his voicemail. Looking in on another life that isn’t mine, that can never be mine. This is wrong, I know that. I’m bitterly ashamed of it. I’d never admit to anyone—Karen, Lavinia—that I do this. I try to move on but nothing seems to work for me—the introduction bureau, the speed-dating evening at Crystals nightclub—none of it gets me anywhere: no other man seems quite real. They’re too young, too insubstantial, they don’t overwhelm me as he did. I have to make myself like them, check off their good points. Like with a man I met at Crystals, who seemed to have an interest in me, I spelt it all out in my head—his perfectly ironed white shirt, his floppy Hugh Grant hair, his smell of soap and cologne. Trying to convince myself.

I resolve that this is the last time. I promise myself I will never do this again—never, never. I drive off rapidly, but the nausea doesn’t leave me.

At the nursery it’s Beth who lets me in. She’s arranging the children’s artwork on a table ready for home time. She’s Sylvie’s favourite assistant: she has curly hair haphazardly pinned up, and warm brown eyes.

She smiles at me.

‘Sylvie’s in the story corner,’ she says. ‘Oh—and I think Mrs PB wanted a word—she told me to tell you.’

There’s a scurry of anxiety at the edges of my mind.

‘Has Sylvie been OK?’

Beth makes a little rocking movement with her hand.

‘So-so,’ she says. ‘You know—most of the time.’

I know she’s trying to smooth something over.

I go into the Garden Room. There are alphabet posters, and trays of toys in gorgeous fruit-gum colours, and the warmth is welcome after the chill of the streets. I always love to come to Little Acorns. Our life may not be perfect, but in sending Sylvie here I know I have done my best for her.

The children who haven’t yet been picked up are on cushions in the story corner: one of the assistants is reading them Where the Wild Things Are. It’s a favourite book of Sylvie’s, with its fabulous monsters at once predatory and amiable, but she isn’t paying attention. She’s hoping for me; she keeps looking towards the door. As I go in, she comes running across the floor towards me. But she doesn’t fling herself on me, the way another child might. She stops just in front of me and I kneel and she reaches her hands to my face. She gives a theatrical shiver.

‘You’re cold, Grace.’

I wrap her in my arms. She smells so good, of lemon, gingernuts, warm wool. I breathe her in and for a moment I am completely happy. I tell myself, This is where I should be living—in the present, with Sylvie—not always looking behind me and longing for what I can’t have.

‘Ah. Ms Reynolds. Just who I wanted to see.’

Mrs Pace-Barden is at her office door. She has cropped, greying hair and dark conservative clothes. There’s something wholesome and vigorous about her; I always imagine her as a hockey teacher, urging recalcitrant young women to keep their minds on the game.

She bends to Sylvie.

‘Now, Sylvie, I need to have a word with your mum. Would you go and get your coat, please?’

Sylvie’s fingers are wrapped like bandages around my hand. I sense her reluctance to let go, after a whole day without me. I don’t know what will happen—whether she’ll do as she’s told, or instead just stand here, mute and clinging, with her opaque, closed face and her fingers clenched around mine. Karen once said to me—explaining why she likes to stay at home with her children: ‘The thing is, you know your own children inside out, like nobody else does—you know just what their triggers are. I mean, Lennie hates having her food mixed up and is horrible after chocolate—and Josh used to have this thing about heads apart from bodies… You always know how they’re going to react…’ Saying it with the certainty that I’d nod and say I agreed. And I thought, But I don’t, I don’t know, not with Sylvie.

But this time it’s OK, she holds on just for a moment, then heads off to the cloakroom. She must have been using pastels; her fingers have left a staining like ash on my hands.

‘Now, why I wanted to see you,’ says Mrs Pace-Barden. ‘I’m afraid we had a bit of a scene with Sylvie again today.’ She’s lowered her voice, as though anxious to save me from embarrassment. ‘It was when the water-play came out. Unfortunately Sylvie can be rather aggressive when she gets upset…’

I feel a hot little surge of anger. I’ve told them over and over.

‘You know she’s scared of water-play,’ I say.

‘Of course we do,’ says Mrs Pace-Barden. ‘And we took that into account, we were careful to see she was on the other side of the room. But, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, we can’t stop the other children from enjoying a full range of activities—not just for one child. I’m sure you can see that, Ms Reynolds.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Shame moves through me.

‘To be honest, I just can’t figure her out. I’m not often defeated by children, but this…’ Some unreadable emotion flickers across her face. ‘We need to talk about it. Wouldn’t you agree?’

It isn’t a question.

‘Yes, of course,’ I tell her.

‘I’d like to make an appointment for you to come in,’ she says.

‘But I’m not in a hurry. We could talk about it now.’

‘I’d really rather have a proper discussion,’ she says. ‘I think we owe that to Sylvie.’

Her seriousness unnerves me.

‘Perhaps a fortnight today?’ she says.

I know this isn’t negotiable.

We fix the time. She goes off to her room.

Sylvie comes back with her coat and slips her hand into mine, and we go out into the foyer.

‘Now don’t go forgetting your picture, Sylvie,’ says Beth. She turns towards us, holding out the drawing. ‘It’s one of her houses,’ she tells me.

I glance at it—a house in pastel crayons, precisely placed in the middle of the page. Just the same as every day. She’s been drawing houses for several months, and she draws them over and over. They’re neat, exactly symmetrical—four windows, a chimney, a door—and they’re always bare and unadorned. Never any people—though she knows how to draw stick people now, with triangle skirts for the women and clumpy big boots for the men—and never any flowers in the garden. Sometimes she draws blue around the house, not just for the sky, but all around, a whole bright border of blue, so the house looks like it’s floating. I said to her once, ‘It’s such a nice house in your picture. Does anybody live there?’ But she had her closed look, she didn’t tell me anything.

I hold the picture by its corner: pastel smudges so easily. We say goodbye to Beth and go out into the night.

In the middle of the night I wake, hearing the click of my bedroom door. I’m afraid. Just for an instant, a heartbeat, taking in the shadow in my doorway, dark against the crack of yellow light from the hall, I think that someone has broken in, that someone is looking in at me—a stranger. I can’t make out her face, she’s just a silhouette against the hall-light—but I can see the shaking of her shoulders as she sobs.

I’m drenched with sleep; I can’t get up for a moment.

‘Oh, sweetheart—come here.’

She doesn’t come.

I put on my bedside light and drag myself out of bed. My body feels heavy, lumbering. I go to her, put my arms all around her. Her skin is chilly; she doesn’t feel like a child who’s just tumbled out of a warm bed. Sometimes in the night she’ll kick off all her covers, however securely I tuck her duvet in around her, as though her dreams are a struggle.

She lets me hold her, but she doesn’t move in to me. She’s clutching Big Ted to her. Her face is desolate; she has a look like grief.

‘What did you dream about, sweetheart?’

She won’t tell me.

She moves away from me, makes to get into my bed. I slip in beside her, wrap her in my arms.

‘It’s all over,’ I tell her. ‘The nightmare’s over. You’re here with me now. Everything’s OK.’

But she’s still shuddering.

‘It’s not real, Sylvie,’ I tell her. ‘Whatever you saw, whatever happened in your dream… It didn’t really happen, it was only a dream.’

Her eyes are on me, the pupils hugely dilated by the dark. In the dim light of my bedside lamp, they’re a deeper colour than usual, the elusive blue-grey of shaded water. The terror is still on her. When she looks at me, it’s as though she isn’t seeing me. Nothing I say makes sense to her.

I try again, needing to say something, anything; hoping my voice will soothe her.

‘That’s what a dream is,’ I tell her. ‘It’s something your mind makes up—like a picture-show in your head. Sometimes a horrible one. But it’s gone now, it’s over. It doesn’t mean anything.’

The front of her pyjama jacket is damp from all the crying. I feel I ought to change it, but she’s starting to quiet; I don’t want to rouse her again. I stroke her hair.

‘This is the real world, sweetheart. You and me and Big Ted and our home and everything…’

Quite suddenly the tension leaves her. Her hand that’s clasping the teddy bear eases open, her fingers are lax and fluid; her eyelids flutter and close. I want to say, Why do you do this, Sylvie? Why are you so unhappy? But she’s asleep already.