The Lives of Women (26 page)

‘You're twenty-two years old, sweetheart. It's your mother we're talking about here. You're going to have to do whatever it is your heart tells you to do.'

‘Oh, Serena,' I said, ‘I don't even know what that
means
.'

 

I told my room mate, a beautiful and enthusiastic Dutch girl called Mina, whose robust good humour often wore me out. ‘That's wonderful!' she cried. ‘I'm so happy for you. You must cook for her. Then show her all the sights. She will come to the ceremony! I will take photographs of you! We can put the best one in a frame. Later you will go to dinner. You must feel wonderful, after all!'

‘Yes. Wonderful.'

‘How long has it been?'

‘Oh, about five months,' I lied.

For once Mina looked sad. ‘A long time so.'

‘Yes, a long time,' I agreed, half-wishing that I'd told her the truth was more like five years – just to see her reaction.

 

Serena was to call me back at the end of the week; I would let her know my decision; then she would call my mother and in turn let her know if I wanted to see her. But of course, my mother got there first.

A few days later, there was a note in my post box written on hotel notepaper.

I called Serena.

‘It's like one of those fucking notes she used to leave on the kitchen table,' I whined. ‘After five years, this is what I get. And I still don't know what to do.'

‘If you don't go, you could regret it. But on the other hand…'

‘Serena, that is no help to me. No help at all.'

‘I know. I'm sorry. I truly am. But if you do decide to go—'

‘What?'

‘Be careful.'

‘What do you mean be careful?' I asked her.

‘Just be careful. Protect yourself. Before you leave your room, I want you to imagine yourself putting on your invisible armour.'

‘Jesus, Serena!'

‘And remember I love you.'

‘Please, you know how I hate you saying that.'

‘I know, sweetie, I know. But I do.'

 

I had one sleepless night: I would go. I wouldn't go. But then, why wouldn't I go? No big deal. And just why the fuck should I go anyway? Of course, I would go, even if it was just to let her know
exactly
what I thought of her. Go? How could she even have the nerve to ask? I certainly would not!

And even if I could bring myself to go, how could I face her after the terrible thing I had done?

The night was halfway through when I realised I was simply terrified of my mother. Terrified, as if she was going to take out a big stick and beat me. Terrified that I would start crying and disgrace
myself. That it would turn into one of those early phone calls, with me pleading to go home and her coldly telling me to pull myself together.

An hour before I was due to get up, I finally fell asleep. I had a dream we were in a big bed together, the bed in the middle of the lobby of her hotel. She kept squeezing my face and trying to make me eat sweets. I'm not opening my mouth, I kept saying, and she answered, Yes you are, otherwise, how would we all be able to hear you? Everyone in the lobby looking at us. Patty's father waddling across the floor. ‘For Chrissake, give your mother a kiss…'

 

I woke up crying and when I eventually managed to get out of the bed, I don't know what got into me, but everything had somehow changed. I had erased the past five years from my mind. And here I was now, making plans for our few days together. We could do the whole tourist thing – if that's what she wanted. We could retrace her steps from that holiday she had before she was married, when she'd bought her
le chat qui fume
ashtray. We could walk from her hotel to Notre Dame – she would want to go to Notre Dame, I was certain. We would stroll down the leafy quayside – stop to look at the books in the stalls. ‘They are called
bouquinistes
,' I would tell her, ‘here since the sixteenth century. The only city in the world that has bookshelves for river walls,' I would jauntily add.

She would tell me a little about that holiday she had when she was maybe my age – what she had seen, and what had changed, who she was with. I would take her to dinner every night, small,
discreet little bistros, where we would be the only ones speaking English. I would show off my French, my knowledge of food. She would be impressed, proud even. At college I asked my tutors for advice and even made a list of suitable bistros. Beyond all that, I could see nothing.

 

In the lobby of the Hotel du Louvre, there were other women sitting alone, on sofas and soft chairs, women waiting on taxis, women waiting on men. There were other women smoking. In fact, there were two or three other women who fitted more with the image in my memory. She had shrunk to about half her former size. She wore trousers – I had never seen her in trousers before – and heels. Her hair was a different colour. She looked nothing like the woman I remembered, and yet I would have known her anywhere.

From across the lobby she had seemed so much younger. Up close – when I finally brought myself to look at her – her face, without its plumpness, was wrinkled, her neck had begun to yield.

We didn't embrace. She waited for me to come right over and stand before her, and then she half-stood as if she'd only that second seen me. But she must have seen me – I was the only one of my age in the lobby. We barely looked at each other. This awkwardness will pass, I told myself, we'll settle down, everything will become normal. She had been shopping: carrier bags at her feet from department stores on Boulevard Haussman; a large stiff bag at her back bearing the Lafayette logo. ‘Oh, just a little gift to
myself,' she said and patted it, but made no attempt to explain or show me this little gift. I asked her if she'd like a drink before dinner.

‘Oh, I don't drink any more,' she said.

I ordered tea and we talked about Paris. She asked me which area I lived in and if I was enjoying the ‘cookery course'. She said she'd been to the Louvre that morning but had been a little disappointed in the
Mona Lisa
. ‘The size of it, for one thing,' she said. ‘And sly looking, I thought. Not beautiful at all.'

It was a conversation between strangers. No, it was less than that – strangers will offer a little glimpse to one another: something from their past, the name of a family member, a neighbour. There was none of that. She did ask after Patty once and I told her Patty had moved to California four years ago, as soon as she'd graduated from secretarial college.

‘Oh yes, of course, I knew that.'

And I did ask after my father, once.

‘Oh, busy as ever, you know. Busy.'

I longed to ask her about so much else: the Hanleys, the Townsends, the Shillmans, the Caudwells. I longed to know what had happened to Karl and Paul. Mr Slater even. Anyone at all. But I knew better. Instead I told her about the bistro that had been recommended to me.

‘Far?' she said in a dreamy way and it occurred to me that she may have been on tranquillisers.

‘About a twenty-minute walk, but a nice walk, along the river where the bookstalls are, we could—'

‘Well, I'd better change my shoes so.'

She didn't invite me up to her room, just gathered her bags and said, ‘I won't be long.'

 

As I waited, I thought about an evening a long time ago when I was a child, shortly after Brenda Caudwell had broken the news and sent it flying through the school that, at nine years of age, Elaine Nichols slept in the same bed as her mother, while her father slept in another room on the opposite side of the house. I had been simmering about it for days and then one evening had marched into the sitting room and made the announcement that, in future, I wanted to sleep on my own.

‘Your own bed do you mean?'

‘My own room.'

‘Oh, now, don't be silly.'

‘I'm not being silly. I want my own room. We have enough of them. And if you won't let me, then I'll just have to ask Daddy about it, that's all.'

Abruptly she had turned away from me and said, ‘Shhhhh. I'm watching this.'

And for the next few minutes, she pretended to be engrossed in a television programme. I stayed standing right by her armchair and waited until she spoke again.

‘Well now – where were we? Oh yes. You can certainly have your own room. Of course you can have your own room. That's no problem at all. If you're sure you won't be frightened of monsters and murderers and ghosts and witches and all the other scary things that come in the night.'

‘I won't be frightened.'

‘Are you certain about that now? Because once we make the move, there is no going back.'

She looked at me carefully and I carefully looked back.

‘I want. My.
Own
. Room,' I growled.

She slept on the sofa for a couple of nights then quietly moved into the spare room at the back of the house. Gradually she began to speak to me again. My clothes were washed and ironed, my room made spotlessly clean. My meals were always on the table. Snacks continued to be offered in between. But it would never be the same between us.

The first day I started school, my mother had taken me there by the hand. By the time I was nine, nothing had changed: every morning, I walked tall in the midst of the herd of mothers and infants and occasional senior infants, while children my own age ran loose around us or maybe held the hand of younger siblings they themselves had been entrusted to take to school. And at the end of each day, when I came through the gate, I would find my mother standing under the trees across the road.

But after she moved into her own room, I would go to school on my own, and the space that she had for so long made her own, across the road under the trees, would remain obstinately vacant.

 

12

Summer Past

August

THE FIRST TIME ELAINE
gets drunk, she gets sick all over Karl Donegan. She remembers:

Sitting by the river on a midsummer's evening. Patty showing Jonathan how to roll a joint. Rachel and Paul arguing over who owns which bottles and how many should be left in the haversack. Brenda Caudwell standing with her face scrunched up, angrily squirting a can of fly spray at the midges. A voice saying, ‘I can't believe you actually brought a can of fly spray down here…'

Karl lying on his stomach, arms stretched into the river, holding a big brown bottle in each hand into the water to cool them down. His T-shirt slipped up his back. Somebody saying: ‘What's that bruise on your side?'

‘Nothing,' Karl says quickly, pulling the bottles back out of the water.

Elaine cranes to see it. ‘It looks like a map of Australia,' she says and then vomits on top of it.

The vomit stinks of rotten apples; a sour fizzy liquid pours into her nostrils and down the back of her throat; she feels she might be drowning in it.

‘Oh, I'm sorry, sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, oh.' She can hear her own voice some way behind her, gulping out the apology.

Karl taking off his T-shirt. His back embroidered with acne, some of it already melted into his skin. He wipes her mouth with the clean side of the T-shirt then leans into the river and swishes it around. He pulls out the T-shirt and bangs it off the stones,

‘This is the way they wash clothes in India,' he says.

Jonathan nodding as if he's agreeing with everyone, even when no one is saying anything. Then he takes the joint off Patty and sucks on it.

‘That's it,' Patty says, ‘hold it in, hold it in. Now, you've got it. Now.'

She remembers:

Karl coming back from the river in his belly, making a pillow of his jacket in the long grass, telling her to sleep it off and that when it's dark he'll bring her home.

Karl sitting close by her, leaning forward; he is holding a bottle by its neck. A picture of a woodpecker on the bottle's label. The woodpecker swinging to and fro. The sky beginning to spin; the long blades of grass swaying. The skin on Karl's back: yellow red, purple. The scars in between, little fishes.

*

When she wakes up, her brain is throbbing and her throat is raw. Karl is lying down beside her now, counting the stars. Everyone else has gone home. It's late, he tells her. The middle of the night.

‘Oh no! I have no key,' she says. ‘I'll have to wake my mother. Oh no!'

‘Do they lock the back door?' Karl says.

‘My father does, but he's away.'

He stands up and holds out his hand.

 

Karl takes her around the back of the cul-de-sac through a grassy patch and behind a few bushes. He makes a stirrup of his hands and helps her climb over a high wall. And now she finds herself crouching in a gap between two high walls: the Caudwells' and the Shillmans'.

‘How did you know this was even here?' she says.

‘You're not the only one who knows how to sneak around,' Karl says.

Her mother is still up. They can see over the wall, all the way up the back garden, right in through the kitchen window. Her mother and Mrs Shillman and another woman Elaine recognises as a golfing friend of Mrs Shillman's. The two visitors move towards the door as if they are leaving, then they change their minds and move back again. They sit down, stand up. Light a cigarette. Drink something. Sit down again. Drink again.

‘They'll be a while yet,' Karl says.

‘Oh God,' she says, ‘I'm so thirsty I could die…'

Before she has even finished her complaint, Karl has climbed the wall and disappeared into the Shillmans' garden.

‘Karl!' she whispers. ‘What are you doing!'

He makes a long shhhhh at her, through the wall.