Her (25 page)

I say, ‘Oh, but I don’t suppose you know how to play Grandmother’s Footsteps, do you?’ and he’s unable to resist it, he needs to correct me and put the record straight. He does know that game, he plays it with Billy and George and George’s nanny, only George calls it Dinnertime for Mr Wolf.

‘Are the rules the same? Will you show me?’ I say. ‘Before your bath?’

‘OK,’ he says, sliding off the chair.

Together, we walk to the end of the lawn, by the hammock. The golden light is cut through with long sharp shadows. Out in the bay, there’s the flash of a white sail. ‘You stand there,’ he says, pointing. ‘Shut your eyes. And you have to say: one, two, three, four, five jam tarts.’

‘I’m it?’

‘Yes, and I’m creeping up on you.’

We give it a try.

‘One jam tart, two jam tarts, three jam tarts,’ I chant, but he shouts: ‘No, you count
in your head
, silly!’

‘Oh, right. Sorry,’ I say. ‘I’d forgotten. It’s a while since I played this. When Sophie was little, maybe. Can you imagine Sophie as a little girl?’

He giggles at the idea, taken with its preposterousness. ‘She’s bigger than me,’ he says.

‘She is now. OK, let’s try again. I’ll count to myself, up to five jam tarts, and then I’ll turn around, and you freeze, and if I see you moving . . .’

I turn my back and look out to sea, the sun so low and molten that my eyes fill with tears, and yet I can feel it: a cooler wind is coming in, the edge of evening approaching. Dusk is gathering along the coast, in the coves and quaysides and marinas, where in an hour or so the long strings of coloured bulbs will twinkle and sway; and then it will pass over us – like a visitation: a plague or a blessing – on its way inland, sweeping inkily over the grand tiered villas and fortified ruins and blue-shuttered cottages with Arum lilies growing in olive-oil tins, the hot little bars where old men gather to watch football.

The hammock yawns to my left, moved by the breeze, spilling cushions into the grass.

Silently, I count:
one, two, three, four, five jam tarts.

I spin round, teeth bared. He has hardly moved. He’s standing very still, trying not to laugh, his fists clenched.

‘Oh, you’re too good at this,’ I say. And then I turn my back again.

One, two
—

This time, I catch him mid-step, his face puckering into outrage. ‘That wasn’t
time
!’ he shouts, and I say, ‘Oh dear, talking
and
moving, I’ll have to catch you now—’ and I begin to move towards him, my arms outstretched, like wings, and he holds still for a moment, as if we haven’t quite resolved the issue, and then his eyes widen at my expression and he turns and starts to run, stumbling a little, heading for the terrace, the house, his mother. As I gain on him, as he starts to scream, I find myself wondering if this, after all, will be his first memory: a sunny lawn, a blue sky, and the horror of being chased by an unsmiling stranger, a woman you barely know, although already you know her to be a cheat.

‘Oh no, we’re fine, it’s just a game,’ I say to Emma when she comes out with the baby on her hip.

‘For heaven’s sake, don’t make that noise again, Christopher,’ she says. ‘Cuts through me like a knife.’

He doesn’t want to play anymore and when Ben comes back from the pool and says it’s bathtime, Christopher goes off without protest, not looking back.

I kick off my sandals, climb into the hammock and lie there as the sky darkens and the pinpricks of stars come out, listening to the sounds of the house (water running in the sink, someone whistling ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’, the clatter of saucepan lids and oven doors). She is quite preoccupied in there, doing the usual things in the usual order, as if that is enough to keep her safe. I watch her move through the illuminated cubes, and I think of the first time, all those years ago.

I knew she was coming. We hadn’t been in Jassop long (and would be moving away just as soon, though of course I did not know that then) but my mother was on cordial terms with Mrs Pugh, and indeed had gone to Donald Pugh’s funeral, feeling she should, though my father thought it ludicrous, to attend the funeral of a stranger. Over the months that followed, I’d overheard my parents talking about the farm sliding out of service: the livestock sold, the machinery auctioned off or allowed to rust in the outbuildings. The fields tenanted to local farmers.

‘Marian’s granddaughters are coming to stay,’ my mother said one day at the start of the summer holidays. ‘One of them is your age. I should invite them round for tea.’ My mother was still trying to engineer friendships for me, leaving me in rooms with the teenaged children of her new acquaintances, not understanding that this approach now guaranteed failure. I didn’t need any more friends. I had Della and Louise, serious girls I’d recently fallen in step with at school, girls who drank black coffee and read poetry during study breaks, and who took the train up to London with me on occasional Saturdays, to visit the National Gallery; but they were both going away over the summer, Della doing a French exchange near Orange, Louise visiting cousins in Dorset.

‘Oh, please don’t,’ I said, and for once she listened to me.

My mother came back from the village one hot quiet afternoon and said the Pugh granddaughters had arrived, she’d seen them buying ice-creams and magazines in the shop. Really, I said, turning the page of my book. Later, when she was safely indoors, when I could hear my father working on the piano – playing the same passage over and over, refining it in some imperceptible way, or maybe just enjoying the accumulating sound of it – I put down my novel and stood up, stretching and yawning a little in the shade of the apple tree, as if someone might be looking.

Into the green ‘o’ of the overgrown lane, dodging the stinging nettles and the long arms of brambles, and across the stile with its loose treacherous plank. The footpath was snarled and rutted with old dried mud; I watched where I placed my feet. My shadow a small dogged presence, dancing and bobbing as I lifted up the barbed wire and squeezed underneath and climbed into the field. Closer, but keeping out of sight of the low house and its dark little windows.

The hedgerow, healthily dense on the outside, but within – yes, just here – dry and hollow. I pressed my way in, twigs scraping my arms and neck and dragging at my hair, unsure of what I’d be able to see. Not much, it turned out: a partial view of the farmyard, Mrs Pugh’s boxy burgundy car (the doors left open for coolness), the water tank, some rubber doughnuts pitted with teethmarks scattered close to me on the grass verge. The burble of chickens, some pop on a distant radio, but otherwise nothing. I rubbed my arm, the burn of the graze, and then a girl stepped into the sun, very tall and straight. Gold all over.

Now I lie in the hammock, watching, and waiting quite patiently for the moment when Christopher realises it’s missing.

She comes out with two glasses of wine, worrying her way down the steps, raising an arm to shield her eyes from the spotlights hidden in the urns and behind the trees. Looking along the floodlit paths, checking by the deck chairs.

‘Christopher’s lost his bloody rabbit,’ she says, passing me a glass. ‘Don’t suppose you remember when you saw it last? He can’t sleep without it.’

‘He took it out in the car this morning, didn’t he?’ I say, efficiently reviving the disagreement and the surrender, the look on Ben’s face. ‘Did he have it when we stopped for lunch? At the market?’

She can’t remember. Perhaps he dropped it when he was looking at those toy cars. ‘Oh, bloody hell. Anyway – not your problem,’ although, as Christopher’s howls start to spill out of the house, I’m not so sure about that. ‘Poor little chap,’ I say. The sound builds and then fades, and then there’s a silence.

‘He’ll be OK, it’ll turn up,’ I say. Then I twist sideways and shimmy along, making space for her. ‘Hop in,’ I say.

She should be indoors, helping put everyone to bed; but she would so much rather be out here, with me. ‘Do you think it’ll take us both? I’m such a heffalump . . . Oh, what the hell,’ she says, and then the hammock lifts and strains and we’re locked together in its embarrassing, compelling intimacy, thigh against thigh, bare arm against bare arm. She giggles and pushes at the ground with a toe, setting up a gentle pendulum swing. She smells of sun lotion and, when she lifts the glass to her mouth, there’s raw garlic on her fingers. I’ve never been this close to her before. She coughs and says, ‘You’ll be glad to see the back of us.’

‘Not at all,’ I say. ‘It’s fun having you here. I do think Christopher’s a sweetie. He spooked himself during that game we were playing earlier, I should have realised that was going to happen.’

‘Everything spooks him,’ she says. ‘He’s at that age. It’s all extremes. The highs, the lows.’

‘And for you, too,’ I say. ‘I remember what it’s like. That stage . . . fantastic, of course, but it’s such hard work. God, I remember Sophie . . .’

‘Do you mind me asking,’ she says, very hesitantly, very delicately, so I know she has been longing to ask this, ‘what happened with you and Sophie’s dad?’ So – mindful that we may at any time be interrupted – I tell her a little about Arnold, the neat tailored narrative I trot out for acquaintances and the odd analyst, wondering if anyone will ever challenge me on it, make me dig a little deeper. How young I was, what he seemed to represent. How he and Sophie gave me an identity, I suppose, just when I needed a new one, and how I’ll always be grateful to them both for that. ‘My dad . . .’ I say. ‘He’s a charming man, too charming, probably. My mother was a casualty of all that. She never really got over it. Arnold showed me a way out.’

She listens very carefully, conscious that she’s going up a level. Every so often there’s a lurch as she stretches a toe to the grass, trying to keep the momentum going. I can feel her willing me on, willing Ben to contain whatever’s happening in the house.

‘By the end, my parents were pretty ill-suited,’ I say. ‘They did that thing, they grew apart. Although there was a bit more to it than that.’

She swings and sips. She’s feasting on this moment. Loving it.

‘He had a bit of an eye,’ I say, all understatement, all bravery. ‘For most of the time, he was fairly discreet. But right at the end, he made a bit of a fool of himself. There was this girl . . . someone I knew. That was enough.’

Her face. She’s appalled. ‘No. Seriously? He went off with a friend of yours?’

‘Oh, no. It wasn’t like that. Nothing
happened
. No one did anything, exactly. No one said anything. It was just the last straw.’

A light comes on in Sophie’s bedroom, and I watch the fluid shape on the fly screen as she moves towards the window and pulls the curtain across.

‘And she wasn’t a friend. I hardly knew her,’ I say with a little laugh. Emma doesn’t know whether to look at me or not; for now, she keeps her eyes fixed on the house, eager not to spoil the moment of delicious frankness, of confession. ‘My father . . . well, he was very taken with her. He made a bit of a fool of himself. I don’t think she was even aware of the effect she’d had on him. She was that sort of girl.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know. Beautiful . . . a bit careless.’

We think about these girls, how dangerous they can be.

She asks, ‘And you were how old?’

‘Oh, sixteen or seventeen. Around Sophie’s age. My mother – well, she’d had enough.’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Christ.’

‘Well, it was a long time ago,’ I tell Emma, as if I’ve been wise enough to let it all go; or most of it, at any rate. As if I’ve made my peace with it. As if I have no memory of hearing her in the field late one afternoon, shouting for the little dog – whose name I cannot remember – and how I called to her and introduced myself and said I’d look out for him; of returning to the empty house and reading another chapter and then going round the back to the woodstore and unlatching the door, whispering for him to hush, and tying a piece of twine to his collar and walking him through the lanes to the Pugh farm. Staying for a glass of bitter lemon, not saying much, just watching and listening, absorbing it all, the offhand way she spoke, the
um
s and
yeah
s and
kind of
s that showed she was sure her opinions were worth waiting for.

As if I have no memory of saying, ‘Well, if you haven’t got anything better to do . . .’

Of my mother a day or so later, her hands glossy with oil as she tumbled the watercress in the shallow wooden bowl with the butter lettuce, the red-deckled alabaster slivers of radish, while Emma moved a pile of mail from the kitchen chair. Of my father lowering the piano lid and coming through from the sitting room in a bit of a mood, expecting just another lunch. Of Emma – the colour of her hair, her eyes, her skin – allowing herself to be drawn out, submitting to his attentions as if this sharp approving interest was nothing unusual for her; answering questions about A levels and Greece (where her family had recently holidayed) as if she was the one making a concession.

Noticing the blue glass eye on her bracelet, he told us that the Greeks believed you could bring a curse by praising with envy.

After lunch, she wandered around my yellow bedroom, looking at my pinboard and sketchbooks and the family of owls in a desultory fashion: a little bored, not quite knowing why she was here. I wasn’t sure what to do with her, or with myself, so I stood at the dresser and ran a comb through my hair, aware that it needed a wash. Furtively comparing myself with her in the mirror: the toothmarks left in my slightly greasy hair, the streaky fragrant tangle of hers.

And later, when she said
thank you
and
see you soon
and walked off into the hazy afternoon, into the clouds of golden pollen hanging in the lane, my father stood behind me at the door and watched her go, as if something was being taken from him. He said nothing, not then. But later he couldn’t help himself, the old fool. ‘I’ll drive you,’ he said the following afternoon, when I mentioned that I was planning to cycle into town to collect my photographs from Boot’s. ‘And then I’ll take you for tea somewhere.’