But my mother is sitting up in bed, with lipstick on, and a bed jacket. She looks so different from last time, her face more
vivid, defined. I feel a brief, crazy flicker of hopefulness. She sees me coming and smiles.
“Ginnie. How lovely.”
I kiss her.
“I’m so much better,” she says.
“Well, I can see that.”
“They’ve put me on these wonderful drugs. Steroids. They make such a difference,” she says.
“That’s marvelous,” I say.
She smells of Blue Grass, and I see she has painted her nails. But close to her, touching her, I know how fragile she is,
and see that the vividness in her face is an illusion, unreal, like the ruddy outdoor complexion of fever.
The afternoon ward is quiet and full of gluey yellow light. Through the wide windows you can see the shining cityscape, the
silver office blocks and towers, all bright and far and silent.
I give my mother Amber’s card. She runs her finger along the curled feathers, in a gesture like a caress. She props it up
on her locker.
“It’s like the ones Molly used to make,” she says. “Does Molly still do her drawing?”
I tell her about the canvas Molly painted.
“She took it from a photo we had—you and Dad and Ursula and me. It’s huge—the school had to send it round in a van.”
A shadow moves across my mother’s face.
“I’d have loved to have seen it,” she says.
Her face is tight, dark, her eyes on me, just a whisper of grief in her voice. She’s telling me that she knows: that she will
never see Molly’s picture. Ursula is right: We don’t need to tell her anything. She knows what she needs to know.
I put my hand on hers. Her skin is cool, and dry as winter leaves.
“You’d have loved it,” I tell her. “It was in the garden at Bridlington Road, in front of the forsythia.”
She’s entering into this, trying to remember, pushing away the sadness.
“Was it the one your Auntie Carol took?”
“I don’t know. It might have been.”
“Was your father wearing that pinstripe shirt?”
“I think so.”
“I remember the one. It’s good of your father, that photograph. He wore clothes well,” she says.
“I guess so.”
“He was a good-looking man, your father,” she says.
I shrug. “Yes,” I say.
She hears my hesitation.
“Now, Ginnie, you mustn’t judge your father too harshly.”
I don’t say anything. I think she will move on, leave it there, just as Ursula always does. There’s a thread of reticence
and evasion stitched into everything she says. Things weren’t so bad; we mustn’t exaggerate; really we were a perfectly normal
family. … Silence laps at us, a little darkening pool.
“I know that you thought I should just leave him,” she says quietly. Dropping her words like stones into the silence, clear
and precise and astonishing. “You did, didn’t you, Ginnie? That’s what you thought.”
My heart pounds.
“Maybe,” I say carefully.
“I could see that,” she says. “Poor Ursula was terrified we’d divorce, and you really wanted us to. Ursula was so frightened
of being different—she wanted to fit in more than anything in the world. But you—I always felt that you were impatient with
me. That you felt I should have just taken you both and gone.”
“Yes,” I say quietly. “I did think that.”
The easy rhythms of the ward would soothe you into sleep—the rustle of magazines, the footsteps in the corridor, the clink
of cups and murmur of talk where the nurse with the turquoise eye shadow is bringing tea around. The woman in the next bed
snores softly, her head on one side, her face sunk sideways and out of shape, under her sprawl of newspaper. But my mother
is alert, intent.
“I thought about it, believe me,” she says. “I thought about it a lot.”
“I didn’t know,” I say.
“It would have been so difficult, Ginnie,” she says. “We’d have been very hard up. And when you’re young, that may not seem
so terrible. But I knew what it would be like, and I couldn’t face it. I felt you’d have a better life if we managed to stay
together. And I’d say to myself, Well, it doesn’t happen very often. …”
I don’t say anything. I put my hand on hers. Her hands are cold and quiet now: hands that in our childhood were smooth and
quick and busy, keeping us fed and clothed and trying to protect us. Stirring the cake mixture in the yellow glazed bowl;
ironing shirts on a Monday afternoon, with that hot, safe, delicious smell of almost-scorching fabric. Pushing shut the door.
“It’s different today,” she says. “You can get help with these things. There isn’t so much shame. People talk about them.
Back then—there was nothing. Though I did try, once, you know, Ginnie.” Defensive, as though she thinks I may blame her. “I
want you to know that. I tried to get help. We went to this psychiatrist, Dr. Ellis. D’you remember? Your Auntie Carol had
to pick you up from school.”
I nod. Remembering the afternoon: my mother wearing the blouse with all the little pearl buttons, and tea in Auntie Carol’s
kitchen—the tinned peach in Carnation that looked like a poached egg and tasted far too sweet.
“Well, he wasn’t very sympathetic really, darling. He said I provoked your father. He said I obviously knew what wound your
father up. That I made it happen with my provocative behavior.”
Rage slams into me.
“No, Mum.”
My voice is too loud for the ward. The nurse glances sharply across at me.
But my mother just shrugs.
“Your father was wearing that Burton’s suit he had. As you know, he could be very charming. Dr. Ellis took a real shine to
your father.”
I shake my head. This appalls me.
“To give him his due, I think in his saner moments your father knew that wasn’t right. It was confusing—we both felt so confused.
It’s hard when someone says something is true, and you know in your heart it isn’t. You don’t know what to think then.”
Her face looks tired suddenly, blurred. All her brittle energy has gone. Saying these things has drained away whatever vigor
she had.
“I gave up then,” she says. Quietly, so I have to lean forward to hear. “I knew there was no one to help me. I just decided—this
was my bed, and I had to lie on it. … I hope you don’t mind me saying all these things. I didn’t want to bother Ursula—I know
she finds it upsetting.”
I stroke her hand.
“It helps to know,” I tell her. “What it was like for you, why you did what you did. What you went through.”
We sit there for a moment. Light from the long windows falls across the floor. “When you’re stuck here with nothing to do,”
she says, “these things do prey on your mind. And you think, Did I do the right thing? It’s difficult to know, sometimes,
just what the right thing is. It’s hard to be really sure.”
The nurse with the trolley stops by my mother’s bed. She smiles her white, professional smile and gives us tea and ginger
nuts. She lingers for a moment, looking at Amber’s card.
“Is that from one of your granddaughters, Jacquie?”
My mother nods.
The nurse picks up the card.
“When I was a kid, we lived by the river,” she says. Her face is suddenly serious. “You see something and suddenly you’re
back there. All these years later. Just the smallest thing. It’s weird, that, isn’t it?” She props the card up on the locker.
She switches her bland smile back on. “Well, ladies, enjoy your tea.”
My mother sips at her tea as the nurse moves away.
“You feel so lonely,” she says then.
At first I think she means here, ill, in hospital.
“Oh, Mum. I’ll get down again just as soon as I can. And Ursula comes often, doesn’t she?”
“Oh, not here, Ginnie. I’m all right here. I’m very well looked after. You can see how nice the nurses are. No, I meant, when
you’re in, you know, that situation—that I was in with your father.”
She tries to put her cup down on the locker, but her hands are shaky and uncontrolled, and tea spills into her saucer. I put
a tissue between the saucer and cup.
“There’s no one to help you, Ginnie, you see. No one to take your side or hear your story. You think you’re completely alone.
… Sorry to go on, darling. I guess this isn’t really what you came to hear.”
The journey back is slow, especially once I reach the outskirts of London. There’s a race meeting at Kempton Park, and the
traffic is stuck for miles. I’m tired and hungry and longing to be home. But when I come to the convent, on impulse I stop
the car and go in through the gateway.
There are petunia seedlings on the table today, where in autumn there were apples. A handwritten notice invites passersby
to help themselves to the seedlings: The ink has run in the rain. There’s an old Cadbury biscuit tin for donations. My feet
make an obtrusive crunch in the gravel that leads up to the door. I realize I’ve forgotten to change out of my driving shoes—the
ugly, clumpy lace-ups I keep for motorway journeys. I must look like I’m off on a trek. My body feels clumsy and hot. I don’t
know if I have any right to do this: I half expect that someone rather stern and holy will come and ask what I’m doing, or
explain that this is a private and consecrated place and I really shouldn’t be here.
The door is in a conservatory that has white tiles and lots of ferns in wicker potholders. Another handwritten notice advises
you to ring the doorbell twice. I ring; a woman comes. She seems very down-to-earth for a nun, and unexpectedly stylish, a
pashmina draped over her shoulders. She smiles at me through the glass as she unbolts the door.
“I’m sorry to disturb you. I just need to be somewhere quiet. I wondered if I could come in and sit for a while. I mean, d’you
have a chapel or somewhere?”
She leans toward me a little, as though listening with care. My request sounds weird to me, but she doesn’t seem surprised.
It enters my mind that people like me come knocking here quite often—apologetic people, tired and puzzled and on a difficult
journey, still in their driving shoes.
“I’ll show you the way,” she says. She takes me down a corridor.
I hoped for something old, a shadowy, sacred space like a cave, with gold-encrusted icons and votive candles that dance in
the dark with a secret, numinous glimmer. But it looks quite unexceptional: contemporary, with too much concrete, and chairs
with wicker seats arranged in a semicircle, some with cushions, perhaps for the older women, and a plain cloth on the altar,
and the whole place full of the ordinary light of day. But as soon as I sit there I feel the silence wrap itself around me,
a silence that soothes and contains me, as real as an arm around your shoulder or the touch of a hand. There’s a faint polleny
scent, where the windows are open onto the gardens at the back of the convent. I hear noises in the distance—planes going
over, and people tending the garden, feet on gravel, raking, the insect drone of a mower. Now and then there are footsteps
in the corridor—the pashmina-wearing nun, perhaps, going about her business, doing whatever nuns do. But these things all
sound so far away: as though the stillness of this place encompasses and protects me.
I sit there for a long time, like someone who has to come to a decision: though maybe the decision has already been made.
I
’VE KEPT THE NUMBER
; it’s on a scrap of paper in one of the drawers in my apothecary cabinet. I poke around in the drawer, pushing aside the
plasticine figures and Molly’s vague pink knitting. It doesn’t seem to be there. I feel a surge of relief, that perhaps I
can postpone this: I have a perfect reason now for leaving it ’til tomorrow. But then I find it, under a box of fuses.
I take the scrap of paper and go back to the car. Greg and Amber aren’t home yet, but I still don’t want to make the call
from here. I drive around the corner and park on a side street, beside a squat gray church with a poster up that says “Come
4 a Miracle.” The writing is faded and pale. You can hear the distant roar of rush-hour traffic. There’s a low sun in a saffron
sky, and intricate tree shadows reach across the street. A boy in a fur-trimmed parka is delivering free papers from a fluorescent-green
trolley. Two pigeons scuffle, fighting or mating, on the ridge of a roof. A builder with a wheelbarrow moves in and out of
a front door, taking cement from a mixer. I see these things acutely, vividly, as if someone has turned up the definition,
every detail clear.
My phone is in my hand. I set myself targets. When one of the pigeons moves from that rooftop, I shall do it. When the builder
comes back, I shall make the call. The pigeons fly away, the builder reappears on the porch of the house, and still I don’t
move. And then find myself pressing the keys on my phone, almost without thinking. I watch my hand on the phone, as though
this has nothing to do with me. It’s the easiest thing in the world, just a little step: as though there isn’t a rift here,
a crack between before and after.
“Incident Room.” A female voice, young, a South London accent.
“There’s something I wanted to tell you. About Maria Faulkner.”
“Right,” she says. “Now, would it be OK if I took your name?”
“I’d rather not give it,” I tell her. “I hope that’s all right.”
“Of course,” she says, but there’s a sag in her voice. “Now, my name’s Kim, OK? So if you ever want to ring again, you ask
for Kim.” I imagine her bored already, playing with a Biro or examining her nails. “Now, what do you want to tell us?”
“Well, it may be nothing.”
Suddenly I’m full of doubt. Perhaps Will was right, perhaps it doesn’t mean anything. I watch as the builder shovels cement
into his wheelbarrow, slowly, as though each shovelful is unutterably heavy: the whole world slowed, but inexorable.
“Could you just tell me?” she says.
I tell her. That I was on the river path, the day after Maria disappeared, the week before her body was recovered. That there
was a man I noticed because he kept on looking around. I feel unreal, as though I’m outside the whole scene, watching myself
do this: as though everything around me is a hallucination—the car, the boy with the parka, the flaming saffron sky.