‘What’s your name?’
He mumbled.
I made him say it louder. ‘Speak up.’
‘William, I said.’
‘So you like my daughter, do you, William?’
‘Yeah.’ He lifted his hand and tugged at his hair where it hung over his ears.
‘Well, then, you need to have some respect for her—’
I stopped and looked at his face and I remembered that he was just a kid, and that he was just as humiliated as me, and that all he wanted was to get out of here and go home.
‘Get out of my house. Stay away from Edie.’
He rose, left, closed the front door quietly. I composed myself, lit a cigarette. I had thought I was liberated, easy with my daughter’s burgeoning sexual desires. I tried to remember myself at that age but it was like catching water in a sieve. Edie had turned her music up to screaming pitch.
We didn’t speak for a few weeks or so after that, kept our distance from each other. In September, Edie went back to school and I hoped she would forget about him, this William with the shifty eyes and fleeting, half-felt smile. Then, one bright morning barely a month later, she left for school and I never saw her again.
Don’t talk to me about triggers. I know all about triggers.
Frances – Now
William’s mother has forgotten who I am. At least, that’s how it seems. Alex has told us we are to expect some mental ‘hiccups’ caused by the brain injury. They’re temporary, the doctor has reassured him, but it doesn’t make it any less difficult.
She peers at me with watery, Arctic eyes. ‘Which one are you married to?’
‘The handsome one,’ William cuts in, and his brother groans in the background.
I’m sitting beside her bed, my hand on hers, the skin paper-thin and stitched with blue veins. She is propped up on pillows, facing the French windows which lead into the walled garden. Alex has moved her into the study, setting up a bed among the polished teak and musty old books.
‘She likes to watch the birds,’ he said, filling her hot-water bottle from the kettle, steaming up his glasses. ‘They’ve always given her so much joy.’
His voice cracked then, and William stood awkwardly while I held him, running my palm up and down his back. It’s okay, I told him, it’s all right.
Later we are together in Mimi’s room, Alex, William and I. The television plays in the corner. Her respiration is wet and noisy.
‘You want me to brush your hair, Mum?’ Alex has her hairbrush in his hands; old-fashioned, silver-handled, porcelain-backed and decorated with roses. It’s an oddly intimate moment, his hand so large on her bony shoulder, turning her towards him. As she turns her head I catch sight of the bruising she suffered in the fall. It’s a livid inkblot crawling over her temple. Along the side of her skull, about seven inches or so, there is a row of ugly black stitching, raw-looking.
I wince, and Alex nods. ‘Beat yourself up pretty good, didn’t you, Ma? You want me to get the photos back out?’
She doesn’t respond, and William asks, ‘What photos?’
‘The doctor said she’s going to have some short-term memory issues. I thought it might help her to look through some photos so I got some out the attic.’
‘Which ones?’
‘The whole box. You don’t know what’ll get through to her so I thought I’d cast a wide net.’ He turns back to Mimi, who stares vacantly ahead, mouth hanging slightly open. ‘I’ll go and get them, shall I, Mum? You stay here with Will and Frances.’
‘Where’s your father? Is he in the greenhouse?’
William and Alex exchange a concerned glance. The silence drips, drips, drips into the space until William turns away from Mimi to look out the window as he says, ‘That’s right, Mum. He’s just checking the tomatoes.’
Mimi says nothing. Her eyes are sunk deep into her narrow skull. She is wearing a dressing gown over her nightdress but she still seems to be shivering and when I touch her arm it is as cold as marble.
‘Maybe get another blanket for her, Alex?’ I say, and he calls back, okay, sure.
William and I drove the three hundred or so miles from Swindon beneath a gleaming cerulean sky laced with clouds as thick as whipped cream. Lewes is a small market town surrounded by the richly rolling Sussex Downs and backboned by the River Ouse. Sculpted white cliffs rise up over the tile-hung cottages and flint walls, while the smell of hops from the brewery permeates the air. Thorn House is set a couple of miles outside town, a large Georgian building of oak floors and draughty casement windows surrounded by overgrown allotment gardens and clipped hedges. Just beyond those is a meadow of wild clover and yarrow and the broad sweep of woodland descending into a valley thick with shadow. William once told me that when they were boys they’d discovered an old dry well in the forest there, partially concealed with ferns and nettles and brambles heavy with fruit. The two boys had taken their torches and shone them inside, and at the bottom, lying in the dark and the dirt, they’d found a dead sheep, partially rotted away. Twelve-year-old William had nightmares about their grisly discovery for months afterwards, but Alex, then only seven years old, had visited again and again, fascinated by the decomposition, the slow revealing of dark, spoiled flesh and yellowed bone, the low droning buzz of flies. When Mimi had found out she’d been horrified and had immediately instructed their father, Edward, to board the old well up. Her words, according to William, had been, ‘A fall like that will snap their necks.’ Edward had done as his wife requested, despite Alex’s weeping protests, but that night he had presented Alex with a souvenir he had excavated from inside the well itself – the sheep’s skull, bleached and cleaned to a bright white. Alex had put it in pride of place on his bookshelf over his bed, and William would avoid its dread, blank-eyed gaze for years afterwards. As far as I know, it’s still there.
William takes his phone from his pocket and examines it, frowning. One of the advantages of being down here is the limited phone reception. If you need to make a call you have to walk to the top end of the garden where the bench sits beneath the old apple trees, arthritic boughs bent and heavily knuckled. An old rope swing still hangs there, the rope grey and frayed, moving gently in the ghosts of a breeze.
‘I need to call work,’ William tells me. ‘Stay here with Mum, I’ll be back in a minute.’
I watch him leave the room, ducking his head beneath the small doorway. My anger curls and uncurls inside me, burrowing deep into my chest, glowing ember-bright between my ribs. I still haven’t told him I know about Kim, the photos, the payments, the transactions making the erotic beige and mundane. He will know something’s wrong, though. Sooner or later. It comes from me in waves of cold, like a hoar frost.
‘Which one are you?’
I look up at Mimi. Her head is turned towards me again. White hair floats about her patched skull in wisps of cobweb. Her skin is thin and as creased as crêpe paper.
‘I’m Frances, Mimi. William’s wife. Remember?’
‘Are you off the telly?’
I shake my head. It’s frightening how vulnerable she looks in the big white day bed.
‘I’m afraid not,’ I say.