I smile at him, but it is a wonky, watery smile. Carefully I put my own glass down next to his. He is looking at me so seriously, so anxiously, and my heart is stretched tight inside my chest. I cannot think what to say, except, ‘You’re Vanessa’s brother. I am hardly going to let you go.’ And then my eyes are welling up with tears again, and slowly, very slowly, he reaches out an arm and puts it around my shoulders. A little awkwardly I move closer to him, and he puts his other arm out so that I am held there, within the circle of his embrace. He holds me gently, tentatively, and I hear the restrained sigh of his breathing. At first I am not sure what I ought to do, but gradually I ease towards him; I put my arms around his back and rest my head against his chest. His arms tighten around me. I feel the soft cotton of his shirt against my cheek, and I can smell his aftershave, warm and vaguely familiar, like the scent of expensive leather. His heart is thumping under my ear. I feel him dip his head and kiss my hair, and I close my eyes.
We stand there like that for ages, as if neither of us can bear to move, for fear of breaking the moment. I feel the gentle rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, and the warmth of his mouth, still pressed against my hair. I open my eyes, and my eyelashes catch on his shirt; I close them again. Vaguely, in some distant part of my mind, I am thinking,
What now? What next?
But I cannot answer. I do not dare to answer.
Eventually he says, ‘I want to show you something.’ And he moves just fractionally, and as he does so I drop my arms and pull away a little, aware suddenly that I had been clinging to him. He loosens his own hold more slowly, leaving his hands on my arms for a moment longer, as if reluctant to let me go. ‘Please,’ he says then. ‘Sit down. Make yourself at home. I won’t be a moment.’
The room is open-plan. Apart from the door we came in by, there is only one other door, across the far side of the room. This is where Simon goes now, and for a few minutes I am alone. I wander into the centre of the room, all the while looking out of that window. You could look at that view forever. If you lived here, that’s what you would do; you’d spend your whole time looking out. For some reason I think of that claustrophobic and poky room at the back of Mrs Reiber’s house; I think of the contrast. And as I sit myself down on one of the two soft leather sofas, I think of myself sitting down on her cracked old sofa, and again I have that feeling that I am little more than an impostor, inching in on their lives.
Just go
, Mrs Reiber said.
Who are you?
I sit on Simon’s sofa, and I wait for him to reappear. I am facing the window, and I look at all those lights, hazy against the night sky. Between me and the window is a long, low table, on which are what I take to be work papers, roughly stacked, and the sports section of the weekend paper. I look around now; the wall on which there is neither window nor door is lined with asymmetrical shelves, most of which are piled with ring binders and box files and loose, dog-eared sheets of paper, untidily shoved in. The hi-fi is there too, and a pile of CDs, and there is a glass box-shaped photo holder, one of those ones that holds a picture on each of its sides and you can turn it over and turn it around; the picture facing the front at the moment is of a couple of small children playing outside somewhere: his children, I assume. For some reason I don’t want to see these photos, and anyway I don’t like those photo frames. They remind me of a toy Jono had when he was small, a sort of Rubik’s cube for toddlers with pictures of animals on, and you could twist it and move the picture around. Jono hated it because whenever he put it down, he was putting it down on some animal’s face. He couldn’t put it down without picking a loser. I wonder whose photo is on the underneath side of Simon’s picture box, and if, like Jono, he can’t sleep unless he religiously turns it around each day.
This is very much a man’s flat. I wonder how long he has lived here, if ‘lived’ is the word you would use, for a place you stay in half the week. More than half. He must spend most of his life here, but there is nothing like a home about it. I wonder how it feels for him to be here while his wife and children are somewhere else. I wonder if his wife visits when she is in town. I picture her, breezing in, dumping her shopping on the floor and collapsing down onto the very sofa on which I am sitting now. I imagine her, somewhat cold-hearted, somewhat aloof, preferring her horses to her children.
Ghastly view
, she might say, looking out as I am now across the skyscape of concrete and brick and steel, the Thames down below a dirty, inky streak.
How do you stand it up here? Can’t wait to get back home. Pull the blinds, won’t you, darling? And fix me a drink?
I have her voice, I have her eyes, I have everything about her inside my head.
The door in the wall opens now and Simon comes back in, carrying something small and protected in his hands, much like you might carry a small animal, a bird maybe, something delicate and precious.
‘Sorry to be so long,’ he says, and I watch as he walks towards me. I watch the way he walks, the studied ease, the smooth movement of his body inside his well-cut, expensive clothes. I notice the way the hems of his trousers perfectly cover the laces on his hand-made shoes, even as he walks. Yet as he sits down beside me I immediately sense his tension again. ‘Look,’ he says, and very carefully, apprehensively almost, he opens one hand to reveal what he is holding in the other: a photograph. Three photographs; he gently spreads them, fan-like, to show me there are three, and then closes them back together. He holds them out now, so that I can see that first one.
I move closer, and I say, ‘Simon, oh my
God
!’
We sit there, side by side, looking down at that photo, which he grips tight between his fingers and his thumb. My hand is on his arm, also gripping tight.
‘Oh my God,’ I whisper again.
For there is Vanessa, smiling at us, her hair tied back in a one-sided ponytail, the length of it cascading down over one shoulder. She’s wearing a red and white checked shirt and beside her on one side are Tristram, Leanne and Fay. On the other side of her are Annabel and Dominic. They’re all there, all squashed together, grinning for the camera. Annabel has two fingers up behind Dominic’s head, sticking up like mini rabbit’s ears – how dated that gesture seems now – and Leanne’s eyes are half-shut. Leanne, who I have not seen for years and years: here she is, wearing her old yellow sweatshirt and that stripy scarf around her neck that I remember so well. They’re in the living room in that house in Oakley – I recognize the background. They’re all there. They’re all there except me.
‘It was my birthday,’ Simon says. ‘I got the camera for a present.’ Slowly, he moves that photo to the back, and shows me the next one. It’s much the same, only he’s in it this time and Dominic isn’t; Dominic must have taken the picture. But there is Simon, squeezed in between Vanessa and Fay, his cheek pressed up against his sister’s, the two of them so very, painfully alike. I see him and I remember him instantly, his boyish face, his wavy, soft blond hair. I see them side by side like this, I see the blue of their eyes and how very, very young they are, and my heart twists and buckles into a raw, tight knot.
‘And this one,’ Simon says, and he turns the photos again. This last one is just of Vanessa and Tristram, and it’s the most poignant of them all. They’re falling together in a hug, their faces lit with laughter, Vanessa so fair and ethereal, Tristram so much bolder in his features, his hair and his eyes so dark. I want to stare and stare. I cannot stop staring. I never thought I would see Vanessa again, ever, in any shape or form. She lives with the others inside my head, a ghostly dream of a person, but I never thought I would see her again like this, so real.
How can the dead be dead when you see them laughing like this, so human, so alive? I look at this picture and I can smell Vanessa’s hair; I can smell her perfume and the peppermint of her chewing gum. I hear the breath of her laughter and the plastic chink of her bangles clattering together as she throws her arm around Tristram’s shoulder. I hear the brush of their clothes and feel the warmth of their bodies; Vanessa’s sharp, china boniness against the gentle, fallible strength of Tristram. I hear Tristram calling out to Simon, ‘Go on, boy, let the camera roll.’ And Vanessa laughing again, the sound of it deep and easy and free.
I move my hand from Simon’s arm to his hand. I clutch the fingers with which he is holding the photo; I move his hand and the photo closer to my face. I lean down; I look harder, as though I might see more of Vanessa somehow, and of Tristram. As though I might see the pores of their skin and the flecks in their eyes. I stare and I stare.
‘Rachel,’ Simon says eventually. He is holding the photos with the hand that is nearest to me; he has to turn now in his seat to touch me with his other hand. Gently he brushes the hair back from my face. ‘Rachel,’ he says again.
I struggle to raise my eyes. Vanessa’s face is a magnet, drawing me down. I look at Simon; I look at the paleness of his face and the intense sadness in his eyes, and I look down again at Vanessa, so happy, so without fear.
‘How can you bear it?’ I say.
‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘This is all I have.’
I look at him again. His hand is still on my hair; again he strokes it back from my face, carefully, gently. Absently, he takes a strand and runs it through his fingers. ‘I took these photos with my camera. They are mine. I kept them in my bedroom, in a drawer.’ His eyes move from mine to that piece of hair that he is twisting now through his fingers. He frowns at what he is doing; he concentrates. I watch his face and I see him swallow, hard. ‘I came home from school one day and my mother had got rid of all Vanessa’s things.’ He pauses and the frown on his face deepens. Again, he swallows.
I dare not speak. I dare not breathe.
Eventually he says, ‘I was just a boy. It didn’t occur to me that she would do this.’ His voice is thin and fragile and so very precisely controlled. ‘I thought Vanessa’s room would always be there, with all her things, waiting for her to come home.’
‘What about your father?’ I ask. ‘Why didn’t he stop her?’
‘He didn’t live with us any more.’
‘Well, what did she do with all her stuff?’
Simon’s eyes move from my hair to my face now, and I realize that I must be gawping at him in horror. I blink, and try to soften my stare.
‘I do not know,’ he says simply. ‘I just came home and it had all gone. She wouldn’t talk about it. Rachel, I went mad, shouting at her, pleading with her. She would not talk about it. Soon after we moved house.’
‘To Kew?’
‘No, no. I never lived in Kew. My mother moved to Kew when she married again, though that marriage didn’t last, either. No, we lived in Dorking for a while, in a horrible, horrible little house, just the two of us.’
‘Oh, Simon.’
‘It was a very bad time. Fay was the only thing that helped me through it, but in the end she went, too.’ His hand moves from my hair to my face now; very gently, he touches my cheek. ‘But I’m sorry,’ he says now. ‘You don’t need to hear all this.’
‘Simon, I do.’
‘Rachel, you are so kind,’ he says. He smiles at me so sadly, and he lowers his hand from my face now, so that he is holding the photos in both hands again, as if he might put them away. ‘I wanted you to see these photos,’ he says. ‘They are all that is left of my sister.’
‘But your mother would still have some photos of Vanessa, surely.’
‘They’re all gone. Everything’s gone. She wiped my sister right out of our lives.’ He fans the photos apart and snaps them shut, like a hand of cards.
There is something like panic rising up inside my heart. ‘But your father, then?’ I persist.
‘I haven’t seen my father for years.’
‘But it’s just so wrong.’ I put my hand on his. I stop him taking those photos away. I look down and there is Vanessa laughing up at me, so beautiful, so real. I want to keep looking at her. I want to look at her forever and ever, and never stop looking at her. I don’t want her just to be gone, cast out, as if she never existed. ‘I can’t stand it,’ I say. ‘I just can’t stand it. Your mother . . . she can’t do this. She can’t just
forget
her . . .’ I’m breathing so hard I can barely talk now and I have to force the words past the hard lump in my throat. ‘Simon, you don’t just forget your
child
. You
can’t
.’
You can’t. No matter how hard you try. No matter how much you pretend that you’ve forgotten. I close my eyes to stop the tears, but all can see is myself in that delivery room, half-lying, half-sitting on that bed, with my knees bent and that hideous hospital gown pushed up, and the midwife peering down between my open thighs as if delivering dead babies was what she did every day, while the contractions rolled like waves, one on top of another. It felt as if my baby was dragging her nails down my insides, trying to claw herself a grip, clinging, clinging against the tide.
‘Not long now,’ piped the midwife in her cheery nurse’s voice. ‘Nearly over.’ I wanted to snap my legs shut on her face.
It wasn’t nearly over. It would never be over, never.
And then I think of Andrew. I see his face, after they’d wheeled me back down to the ward and drawn the curtains around my bed, as if somehow that would shield me from the fact that the other women in the room still had their babies, their real live babies, still safely inside them. I see his face as he stood there beside the bed, staring at me, useless, the skin on his cheeks pale and drawn and sickly. I see him searching for the words with which to convince me somehow that he had the first idea of what I was going through. I see his mouth moving on a silent wobble, I see the reddening of his eyes.