And again and again Vanessa, so quixotic, so slightly removed, presiding over them all like a queen. I picture her; I can feel her, see her, smell her. And now I can hear her, too; laughing, putting her arm around my shoulder and whispering, ‘God, Rachel, how bad you must think we all are!’
But I didn’t think they were bad. I thought they were wonderful, like butterflies flying close to the sun.
I never saw any of them again, but I did hear about them, for a while, from Leanne.
I heard that Dominic got too heavily into drugs and was expelled from school, and drifted away. Annabel went the same way till at eighteen she shot herself up with a dirty needle and died of blood-poisoning in her boyfriend’s Notting Hill flat. That one made the papers:
Record Producer’s Daughter in Heroin OD.
Only it wasn’t an overdose, it was a stupid, careless infection.
Tristram got no further than sniffing the gas from aerosols. I do not know what became of Fay, or any of the others.
Not long after Vanessa died, Leanne sat sobbing on my bed. ‘I feel like I’m losing everything,’ she cried. ‘I don’t know what to do.’ She had hold of my hands in hers, clinging on like she never wanted to let go. He skin slid against mine, damp and clammy and hot. ‘We’ll always be friends, you and me, won’t we?’ she said. ‘We’ll always be friends.’
But our lives took very different paths, and Leanne drifted away, too, moving from job to job and town to town.
And now I do not even know where she lives.
A movement behind me catches my eye in the mirror; it is that man, the one who was watching me earlier. He must have seen me drive around again and park up. As I have been watching Mrs Reiber’s house he has been watching me, and now here he is, wrapping his coat around his body as he approaches my car. Before I can do anything he’s tapping on the window and peering in, suspicion on his face.
I open the window just a crack. I force my face into a smile.
‘Can I help you, miss?’ he asks.
And I say, ‘No, no, I’m fine, thank you,’ and I start up the car. He waits for me to say something more, but I don’t and he stands there, watching after me, as I drive away.
It is a half-hour drive back to Surbiton. I flick through the radio channels searching for distraction, but then there are too many voices, crowding out my head, and too much music that I don’t want to hear. So I switch the radio off again and I focus on the sounds of the car. Houses, cars, street lights pass me by, and I wish that I could drive forever, on and on, never arriving, never finishing anywhere. I wish that I could empty my head into silence.
I did not lose Leanne; she lost me. I tried to keep her. Through university, through my first job in Paris, my second job in London. I did not see her much, but I kept in touch. Her parents moved away from Ashcroft long ago, and Leanne moved around from flat to flat, but I managed to keep track of her for a while. The last time I saw her was at my wedding, to which she came drunk and angry. I kissed her on the cheek and she smelled of bitterness and decay.
‘Well, that’s you sold out, then,’ she said.
A lifetime has passed since then.
I drive on home, but the ghosts come with me, clamouring inside my head.
I had this notion, this secret promise that I made to myself. I thought that if ever I had a daughter I would name her Vanessa. It would be my gift, secretly given. No one need know why, but me. And it is such a beautiful name, Vanessa; see how it rolls across the tongue.
But my daughter died inside me, at seven months. Exactly three years, three months and two days after Jono was born.
By then we knew her; we’d named her, too. At three months, and at four months, we saw her moving on the scan. Andrew held my hand and squeezed it, and to little Jono, who wriggled and kicked in his daddy’s arms, he said, ‘Look, Jonny-boy, there’s your baby sister.’
But at seven months she wasn’t moving. No one knew why. I had to push her out with the gas-and-air mask clamped to my face and the midwife saying over and over, ‘Come on now, there’s a good girl, push now, nearly over.’
I remember the pain, punishing its way through my body, and then the silence. I remember Andrew crying, and trying not to let me see.
It filled me with revulsion that I could give birth to something dead. It is such an oxymoron, so very wrong. I took home my cheated and empty body, and my breasts cruelly leaking their unwanted milk, and I tried to forget. And Andrew and I, we moved around each other carefully, so very, very numb. And one tentative month moved into another, and then into a year and another year. How can you grieve for something that wasn’t wholly real? And how can you move on, if you cannot even grieve?
Hers is the ghost that cries loudest. Hers is the ghost that will not let me go.
‘You’re late,’ Andrew says when I get home.
He is in bed, with the duvet tucked up under his arms, reading the review section of the paper. I thought he would be asleep.
‘Were you worried?’ I ask, and slowly, discreetly, I start to undress.
He doesn’t look up. ‘No,’ he says, and then, ‘How was your evening?’
‘Hell,’ I say.
‘Why’s that?’ he asks, and he turns the page on his paper. ‘Were they not your sort?’
‘I don’t have a sort,’ I snap back. Somehow, he makes me feel that it’s me who is at fault. And I don’t know, maybe it is.
He doesn’t say anything else, and I disappear into the bathroom. When I come out he has turned off the light, and I slip in beside him in the dark. I long for comfort. I long for him to touch me. Surprisingly, then, he does. He rolls towards me and places his hand on my stomach. I feel it there, warm and heavy, the dry touch of his skin. I do not move, I do not speak. There is a lump in my throat the size of a grapefruit and I can barely breathe. His fingers start to creep upwards, towards my breast, but it is a slow, uncertain journey and his hesitation fills me with rage. I pull away. I turn over. And I hear him sigh.
I pretend that I am asleep. I squeeze shut my eyes and cry silent, angry tears. What I want – what I want more than anything – is for him just to grab me and fuck me. To really fuck me until I can’t think any more, until the ghosts in my head are left mute and silent. Not this. Not this timid hand upon my skin, touching me like I might break. I am so angry I could kick and scream and rip him apart. I cannot stand it. This constant apology, going on and on, torturing me.
I decide to go and see Mrs Reiber. To visit her properly, and knock on her door and introduce myself.
I decide this in a rare moment of rational clarity. I do not need to stalk and creep and crowd out the shadows of my head with haunting speculation. I can take control. I can go up to her front door with the confidence and purposefulness of any other woman, and when she opens the door I can smile assuredly and simply ask her.
Excuse me, are you Mrs Reiber? Mrs Yolande Reiber?
I can do it.
And then she will answer, and then I will know.
I think I will wait until Jonathan is next invited to Oliver’s house, but the invitation doesn’t come soon enough. It is our turn to have Oliver next, and we do, the following Saturday, and when his mother comes to collect him I have coffee brewing, the house is tidy, there are flowers in a vase in the hall. See me, I want to say; see me and see how much you could make me one of your friends.
But Amy is too busy to stop. She waits impatiently by the front door with the key to her Mercedes dangling from her finger while I call the boys down.
‘They’ve had a great time,’ I say. ‘Let’s get them together again soon.’
She smiles politely. ‘It’ll have to be after Christmas now,’ she says. ‘We don’t have a minute until then.’
And I know I have been too keen.
‘Are you going away?’ I ask.
And she says, ‘Oh, no, we’re at home. How about you?’
‘We’re at home too,’ I say, and I try not to feel hurt that her family will be at home, and my family will be at home, yet there still isn’t time for her son to see mine. ‘Just us and the grandparents.’ How dull that sounds. ‘And hopefully we’ll see my sister sometime, too.’
‘We’re having sixteen for Christmas lunch,’ Amy says casually as the boys finally drag themselves down the stairs. ‘And ten of those are staying.’
‘Goodness,’ I say and feel the familiar mean tug of inadequacy. I cannot imagine cooking for sixteen. Eight is my maximum. Apart from anything else, where would you sit them all? Where would you find the cupboard space for all those plates?
We say our goodbyes, and I watch them drive away in Amy’s black Mercedes, and when I close the door there is that sinking feeling in my stomach. I catch a glimpse of Jonathan’s face before he disappears back upstairs again, and I realize that he feels the same. Our house is so quiet. I picture Amy’s house on Christmas Day. I picture an endless, solid oak table laid up for sixteen, with gleaming silverware and polished glasses, beautiful white and gold china layered up in each place and linen napkins. I picture candles lit and glowing, and holly leaves and berries, artfully strewn. Do they have crackers, people like Amy? I think not, somehow. They’d have something else in place of crackers, but I can’t think what, because I do not know.
I picture happy children dressed in velvet, playing hide-and-seek. I picture beautiful women in beautiful dresses sipping champagne by the fireplace, and men setting up train tracks, and laughing. There’s a huge tree of course, and someone is playing Christmassy tunes on the piano. Everyone is wrapped in a warm, muted glow. No one is harassed. No one is pink and frazzled from the cooking. I picture Amy’s husband – in my imagination he is tall, square-jawed and blonde, like the men you see in catalogues advertising cufflinks and ties – looping a relaxed and lazy arm around her slim waist, pulling her to him, kissing her on the neck, around which is draped her Christmas present, something gold, something diamond.
I walk the length of my house and I am tormented by my imaginings. I stop in the conservatory, at the back of the house, and I stand there and look out. It is dark outside, but Andrew has all the outdoor lights on. He has his toolkit out on the patio table, and a variety of items that need his attention; Jono’s football boots that need restudding, golf clubs that need cleaning, and parts of the lawn mower that need I do not know what. And there he is, frowning over some dirty piece of metal that he rubs and scrubs as though to bring it back to life. My husband. It startles me to see him looking so old; in less than five years he will be fifty and the lines of our marriage are etched heavily on his face. You think you have forever. You think you have forever, and yet there is Andrew, out there in the cold and the dark, looking for things to fix.
At what point does your life reach crisis? At what point do you realize that you will never go anywhere, never see anything, never be anything other than this, the appendage and extension of others?
I see Andrew out there and I feel the chains clamping me down. Never will I spontaneously hop on a train to Edinburgh or Paris, or a plane to Berlin or Milan – never will I go anywhere, just on a whim. There is Jono to think about, Andrew to think about. I am like a child, having to ask. And should I ask, then like a child I will face the madness of rhetorical questions:
Is that really what you want? Do you think that’s a good idea?
The holidays that we do go on are a compromise. They are about Jono, and about us and Jono. Will he be bored? Will there be enough for him to do? I am what I always am, but in another place. I am a body with no arms, no legs, no wings. My right to my own life was cut short, the day that I gave birth.
Sometimes I think what it would be like if there was just me and Jono. Sometimes I think life would be a whole lot easier without Andrew here to police us. We could eat what we want, when we want. I need not seem to care so much if Jono hasn’t eaten enough vegetables, or cleaned his teeth. It would be like the few times when Andrew goes away on business; Jono and I, we stay up past his bedtime watching films when there’s just us. We don’t argue when we are alone; there’s no need. Without Andrew, Jono’s need to punish me is diminished. Without Andrew, my need to suffer, too, is gone.
But I stand here now and I look at Andrew out there in his own isolation, and I am sure that he feels just the same way about me.
My decision to visit Mrs Reiber eats away at me. I cannot wait until Jonathan is next invited to Oliver’s; I need to visit her soon, before I change my mind.
So on Monday morning, when Andrew is at work and Jono is at school and I have the expanse of the week ahead of me to fill with a million trivial chores and errands, I stand in my bedroom and consider my reflection in the mirror. My stomach is alive with nerves, but my eyes are bright with determination. I have taken a lot of care over my clothes, and my make-up. I am wearing a dark-green woollen dress that brings out the green of my eyes, and grey woollen tights. Over this I will wear my best coat, and high-heeled boots. I do not normally wear heels in the daytime, but I feel the need to impress. I do not want to feel dowdy and insignificant, and dowdy and insignificant is, regrettably, how I have come to feel.
It is a damp day, so I have left my hair to go wavy. I stare at myself and take a deep breath. I look okay. But Vanessa was stunning. Had she lived, she would never have let herself fade into domesticity, I’m sure of it. She would be living somewhere amazing: Chelsea maybe, or a big house in the country. She would have a handsome husband, several beautiful children; she would be adored. I picture her as I think she would have been, dressed in expensively cut jeans and a loose white shirt, with that incredible hair flowing down her back. I picture her in a gorgeous blue and green woven coat, and genuine Louboutin shoes, with a large, soft bag over her arm, shopping in New Bond Street, or marching up Sloane Street to Harvey Nichols.