Her Page 18

  ‘We can keep out of their way,’ Ben says, spooning some avocado into Cecily’s mouth. ‘It’ll be fine, Em, don’t worry.’

  But I do. In the run-up to Nina’s arrival, I’m aware of an air of finality and mourning, as if I’m preparing to say goodbye. The last easy breakfast beneath the grape arbour, the last noisy family swim, the last mindless wander around the garden with a coffee cup, pinching and sniffing thyme and rosemary while Christopher rakes the gravel into little piles and drives his cars around them. On the shady grass, Cecily is threatening to crawl: lunging off her bottom and dragging herself up on all fours, trembling a little with the effort. Ben’s foot dangles from the hammock, just keeping the thing in motion. He’s halfway through his second thriller, greedily losing himself in it whenever he can. In a minute, he’ll have to put it down and drive Christopher into town to buy baguettes and salad.

  I go back into the house to make another pot of coffee and while I’m waiting for the water to boil I walk down the corridor and find myself again in the master bedroom, the room that belongs to Nina’s father and his wife, the room that Nina will sleep in tonight. Like the rest of the house, it’s a vaguely monastic space, and pleasantly dim in the mornings, the sun held in check by the wooden ribs of the louvres. The high ceiling, the low broad bed, a cane chair at a writing desk, a long marble-topped table against the far wall. A pair of plain wooden candlesticks and a shallow alabaster bowl containing a few pine cones and stones glinting unevenly with quartz. The pale flags are cold beneath my feet. I switch on the ceiling fan, clicking it to the lowest setting. Overhead, the blades in the air. Wuh-wuh-wuh.

  Thérèse has put out a pair of swimming towels and left a sprig of lavender on both pillows. New soaps by the basins and the big stone bath. I pick up one bar and press it to my nose, inhaling the scent through the thick waxy wrapper. It smells like the rosemary taint on my fingers: stingingly clean, needle-sharp.

  The bedroom windows hold the slope of the pine wood, and beyond that the bright V of the sea. Perhaps I’m wondering if Nina’s view will be the same as mine, and that is why – without quite formulating the desire – I find myself sitting down on the bed, carefully lying back, placing my head on the pillow and lifting my bare feet to rest on the cotton. The pulse in my ears drowns out the quiet rotation of the fan overhead, while I’m straining to listen, straining to hear the sound of Ben’s footsteps in the corridor, appalled at the prospect of being caught here, doing this. What exactly am I doing?

  When I stand up, the bed is wrecked, in disarray, scored and marked by the messy imprint of my body, a body which is so much larger and more awkward than Nina’s. In a panic I tug the linen straight, running my palms over the sheet, trying to smooth and flatten it, and plump up the pillow, replacing the sprig of lavender which has fallen to the floor; but I lack Thérèse’s skill and naturally it all looks wrong, hopeless, a giveaway. I go to the door and hesitate, inspecting the bed from a new angle, then I have one last try, tweaking the pillow and the swimming towels. Fuck’s sake, it’s fine, get a grip. It’ll do.

  On the stove, the coffee pot is burning dry, and I scorch my fingers taking it off the hob.

  Nina

  After the ceremony in a drab little hall off the Euston Road, we congregate for Ursula and Hugh’s wedding reception in a Marylebone garden square. I always appreciate access to these hidden spaces: the black railings and thick banks of shrubs enclosing quiet gravel paths and striped green ovals. It’s a muggy afternoon, warm and overcast, the air hardly moving in the yellow and blue bunting that droops between the plane trees. Ursula’s daughters press through the crowd, offering scones and butterfly cakes. For those who want it, tea comes in mismatching junk-shop china. There’s a Punch and Judy tent near the climbing frame.

  Bridget hurries over the lawn. Thank God it hasn’t rained, she says, the ground’s hard enough for her heels. As I am meant to, I admire her new shoes. ‘Fred bought them for me when he was in Paris – anniversary present,’ she says. ‘I’d sent him the link and the address, not to mention a reminder of my size – but all the same, it was sweet of him.’

  ‘You’re very lucky,’ I say, but she turns to me, laughing. ‘Oh, Nina. Look at him.’

  We look. Fred is making conversation with another pink-faced man in a dull tie. Through the clusters of guests, I hear the phrases ‘goat rodeo’, ‘batting average’ and ‘moving forward’; it’s unclear whether they’re talking shop or sport. As we watch, Fred swivels around, reaching out to grab a canapé, a dolly’s cucumber sandwich, popping it into his mouth with uncomplicated greed.

  The glass of champagne the girl gave me as she let me in the gate is already losing its electrifying chill. ‘As you know, I’m very fond of Fred,’ I say, smiling down at my silver sandals.

  Bridget’s just back from the Greek holiday (the villa was a bit of a disappointment: suspect plumbing, and the wi-fi wasn’t working, much to Paddy’s disgust). ‘So, what about your summer?’ Bridget is saying. ‘Of course you’re missing Sophie, but there must be compensations, weekends away when you fancy it, just throwing a bikini and a toothbrush into a bag. Christ, how we travel. Surfboards, golf clubs . . . We look like the Mandarina Duck catalogue.’

  Why shouldn’t Bridget envy me my life, the way it appears to her? My work, my success, my pretty and compliant daughter, the way I look (my flat silver sandals, toenails painted this summer’s blackcurrant)? And Charles. I glance over at him. He’s talking to Hugh’s mother, but raises a glass when he catches my eye.

  ‘And how is Sophie?’ Bridget is asking. ‘Not AS Levels already.’

  So I say I know, isn’t it ridiculous.

  Later, we go home and move in and out of the rooms, never quite catching up with each other, like little peg people rotating stiffly around a cuckoo clock. Perhaps we have less in common with Sophie away. I hear the toilet flush, and then he wanders into the sitting room, sighing as he settles down with the newspaper, and the noises irritate me. Perhaps it’s the heat, and the champagne. I drink a tall glass of cold water and open the laptop.

  The gallery has emailed to say a client who bought one of my paintings a few years ago would like to visit the studio late on Tuesday morning.

  I write back saying I’d be delighted to meet Mr Fisk again, and then I compose a message to Sophie, describing the afternoon and Ursula’s dress – though she won’t be interested – and saying one of us will be there to pick her up at Heathrow when she gets in.

  Some time around eleven, I step outside to collect the chair cushions from the terrace. The sky is muddied with light pollution, orange clouds hanging overhead, the air as warm and still as stewed tea. Henry has made a kill: a small squalid detonation of matter and bloody feathers on the floodlit lawn. Charles pokes the worst of the mess into a bin liner, and then it rains in the night: one of those sudden violent deluges that the city needs every so often. The following morning, there’s nothing much left on the grass, and when I run through the park the air feels rinsed, astringent.

  On the way back I take a detour down Carmody Street and halt outside Emma’s house, bending and stretching as if catching my breath at the end of a sprint. The Nashes haven’t been away for long, but the place already has an air of abandonment: the half-closed curtains in the upstairs rooms, the lid off the dustbin, pizza fliers jammed in the maw of the letterbox. It must be just over a year, I think, since I first saw her in the square: the shock of it, the things I remembered, and the things that were new and striking. Her tiredness. Her distress, low-level but constant, impossible to ignore – like a hum, or a whine.

  Later I think of this as I wait for the arrival of Mr Fisk, as I line them up along the wall of the studio: the white skies and long spits of land, the sense of heat building and building, caught in the smudges of trees. I’m almost too near to the work now, I realise. A break from it will do me good. Mr Fisk, a quiet Canadian, moves around the studio without saying much; but in the afternoon the gallery calls to say he’s intereste
d in two of the most recent pieces, and is thinking about two more.

  Over the following days, as I prepare my packing, as I wait for Sophie to come through customs – an inch taller, new hair, neon vests and violet nail varnish – I’m thinking about getting close to Emma’s distress signal, perhaps getting so close to it that it stops being noticeable.

  To celebrate Sophie’s return, we go out to the retro diner: buttermilk chicken, curly fries, slaw in pleated paper tubs. But she only picks at it. She prefers Japanese now. Or Korean. She’s crazy for kimchee. She wasn’t paying attention earlier in the summer when I told her about inviting the Nashes to France, so she looks pissed off when I remind her, staring at me, twiddling a chip. ‘Why’d you do that?’ she asks. ‘What is it with you and that lot?’

  ‘It’s your mother’s good turn,’ Charles says.

  ‘Celestial brownie points,’ I say lightly. ‘Anyway, they’re leaving on Saturday, when Charles flies out to join us. We’ll only overlap for a day or two.’

  ‘Of all the people you could have asked, and you asked them!’ Sophie says, disgusted. ‘Even the Binghams would’ve been better than that lot.’

  ‘I suppose I felt that Emma would appreciate the invitation more than anyone else,’ I say. ‘It’s nice, to be able to help. The children are cute.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ she says, toying with an onion ring. After a few weeks with the half-siblings, Astrid and Otto, she has had it up to here with kids. ‘Oh, my, God. You know one day while I was at the gallery Astrid went into my room and got hold of my makeup? She denied it of course, Trudy took her side and Dad was so unbelievably wet . . . I never found out what she did with my Mac lipstick. It was that special-edition one, too.’ So I don’t mention the potential babysitting. In any case, after a month at Arnold’s – all that guilt money, the sponsored splurges at Hollister – she’ll be feeling flush.

  Two days later, we make the journey that we’ve made so many times before, and yet this time, thinking about Emma going through the same process a week or so earlier, there’s a certain sharpened definition to everything: the strung-out families at check-in, the ennui of the cabin staff as they rehearse various catastrophes, the girl on the Avis counter inspecting her nails while I sign the paperwork. As we pull onto the motorway in the late-afternoon sun, Sophie fiddles with the car radio, tutting at the aerated Europop. But this is part of the ritual, the way it has always been: the best you can hope for is the inevitability of Sade or late Springsteen. It’s the sound of summer, to me, along with the rasp of crickets in the pine wood, the midnight hiss of the sprinklers.

  Dusk is falling by the time we leave the motorway: too dark to see the sunflowers in the surrounding fields, though as the season is ending, their round faces will be blackening and shrivelling, tilting towards the earth. Here it comes. The familiar hairpin bend, the petrol station, a new ‘à vendre’ sign up next to the boulangerie. The village falls away behind us, and as we come to the yellow barn I switch off the radio and the air-con, and wind down the windows, a thing I like to do here when arriving at night. The car fills with the warmth of dust as the headlights catch on the rocks and grasses along the track, the sudden ghostly lurch of trees pale as bone. Above and beyond, everything is black, blacker than black, and yet restlessly alive with tiny reflective flickers of eyes and wings.

  The Nashes’ car, dull with dirt, is parked under the vines; and Ben is there, appearing at the gate, smiling, his teeth very white in his face, offering to help us with our bags. ‘How good to see you,’ I say, and I put my hand on his arm, his crisp blue sleeve, and lean in for the double kiss, getting a hit of aftershave – the soapy citrus of Acqua di Parma, I’m fairly sure – and mosquito repellent. Ben hasn’t met Sophie before, and he doesn’t quite know how to greet her – should he shake hands? Kiss her, too? – and he makes a hash of it, ducking in and out, trying to relieve her of her suitcase. ‘I’m fine, it has wheels,’ she says, sidestepping him.

  ‘You must be dying for a drink,’ he says as we go up through the garden. Supper’ll be ready in a bit, if we’re hungry; they weren’t sure if we’d have stopped to eat on the way. The baby’s already in bed, she’s knackered from all the swimming. And the crawling.

  ‘And Christopher?’ I ask. ‘I hope he’s enjoying the pool. How’s his swimming coming on?’

  Now we’re climbing through the fragrant layers of the garden, crossing the lawn and approaching the house, its interlocking illuminated cubes glowing against the dark hill. Sophie’s bag drags gravel. Below that, the sound of water as it spills into channels and trickles into troughs.

  I think of Charles, the first time I met him: the sketches that he put in front of us, the pen chasing over the yellow tracing paper as he made suggestions and amendments. The confidence of his imagination. That might work, he’d said. Or, how about this? We could try this. How he made it all seem possible.

  We cross the terrace and go inside, and there she is, standing by the long marble counter, holding a bottle of champagne, her face shining with sun and the sudden embarrassment of welcoming us into our own house. She’s wearing a red-striped T-shirt that makes her look like Where’s Wally. Oh, I say, kissing her and feeling the forceful heat of her cheek against mine, it’s so lovely to be back.

  ‘This place is amazing,’ she says, embracing Sophie, who submits with good grace. ‘We can’t believe our luck . . .’ And then the cork is released, and she laughs as she fumbles for the glasses. The foam boils up and over. I see Ben noticing this, and finding it annoying. Christopher steps forward, holding up a bowl of nuts like a chalice.

  ‘Oh, Christopher: pistachios! My favourite. And I’d love a drink,’ I say, though really I’d prefer Evian at this precise moment. ‘I’ll just dump my bags.’ I catch Emma’s anxious look and remind Sophie that we need to keep the noise down because of the baby.

  Down the corridor in my father’s room – which I prefer to think of as the master bedroom – the ceiling fan is rotating, drowsily stirring the air, as thick and sweet as syrup. When I turn on the bedside lamp, something immediately bangs into the screen at the window and whirrs off again into the night. I unzip my bag and stand looking down at the thin layers of cotton and linen, the black and pale grey and off-white, the paperbacks and shoes tucked in around the edges, and then I take my wash bag out and carry it into the bathroom. I let the water run very cold and cup my palms under the tap and splash my face. Straightening up, I examine myself in the mirror: dark strands of hair stuck to my wet cheeks, the beads of water clinging to my eyelashes. I dry my face on one of the thick towels and while I’m digging around in the wash bag for mosquito repellent my fingers find the bracelet, its greying fibres starting to loosen into individual strands: the pineapple, the star and the Evil Eye. I slide it back into the side pocket, and go back to join the rest of them.

  ‘Are you close to your dad?’ Emma asks me, once Christopher is in bed. We’re sitting outside, encircled by the tiny red embers of mosquito coils. The sweet smell of burning threads through the vines, drifts over the lawn and towards the sea. Over on the other side of the hill, there’s a sudden silver flash as a car takes the turning onto the coast road. It’s a very sharp bend.

  I say, not particularly. I say, He’s a bit of a handful, my dad. As we eat salad and langoustines, I give them the fun, potted version, the award-winning Hollywood version, the one they’d like best. The one that will ring some bells, but not others. When I mention the Oscar nominations for Crazy Paving and Ampersand, Ben’s fork goes down. ‘Seriously? I knew the name was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.’ Emma sits tight, drinking her wine. This means nothing to her.

  ‘He’s semi-retired now, though he still does the occasional thing, if he likes the set-up. Lives in Paris, mostly, with his third wife. They have a little girl, Clara. Bit older than Christopher.’

  ‘My aunt Clara’, says Sophie, as she pulls the head and carapace off, ‘is a brat.’

  ‘Oh, Sophie, steady on,’
I say, with a laugh, passing the mayonnaise. ‘But it’s fair to say my father’s more indulgent this time around. Clara gets lots of attention.’

  While Sophie tells them about the Ladurée birthday cake (‘All the macaroons were bubble-gum flavoured. It was as tall as she was!’) I see Emma glancing at me surreptitiously, and I know she’s feeling sorry for me. Poor Nina. Whatever, I think, raking my fork through the salad.

  Oh, we moved around a lot, I say, when she asks me where I grew up. ‘He and my mother were always buying up rundown places and doing them up, then moving on. Oxfordshire, the south coast. After they split up, my mother settled in Sussex and he got a place in London, and that was the point at which his career really took off. I don’t think he was really cut out for country life. Can you imagine him in wellies, Soph?’

  She agrees that it’s a bit of a stretch. She can’t imagine him with my mother, either, come to that. Sophie’s always fairly rude about Paul, though when BBC4 screened that profile of him she made sure everyone at school knew about it.

  ‘He’s weird,’ she says. And then she tells a story about the last time she saw him, when he came for supper at the house in London a year or so ago. ‘And Mum was in the kitchen, and Charles had wandered off somewhere, and I was stuck in the sitting room alone with him, and he just had no idea what to say to me, no idea at all, and he just looked at my shoes, perfectly ordinary Converse, and said: Great shoes! Where’d you get them? It was the only thing he could think of to say to me. Like, duh.’

  We all laugh at this, quite merrily, as if it’s the funniest thing; but I sense Ben and Emma’s unease, their realisation that they might easily make the same mistake. It’s very hard, finding the right thing to say to teenagers. I see Emma starting to identify with my father, and I don’t like that much.

  I know she’ll come back to the subject of Paul. She’ll want to draw me out, bond with me, show me how empathetic she is. There was a chance – a slim chance – that she’d remember his name. But she has seen it written down on envelopes; she has heard me say it aloud. Nothing. It means nothing to her. I’m quite safe.