‘Oh, that’s wonderful, honey,’ said Barbara. ‘Have you done that before?’
Elise glanced at Connie, who refused to look at her. Elise’s experience at the Royal College of Art had been discussed with Barbara more than once previously. ‘Yes I have,’ she said.
‘I’d love to see the finished picture,’ Barbara said.
‘Shara works slowly,’ said Connie.
‘I’m having a party,’ Elise said. ‘To celebrate my birthday.’
‘Oh! When’s your birthday?’
‘It was last month. Connie forgot, so we’re doing it now.’
Barbara looked between the two women, clearly unsure of what to say. Connie stared at Elise, an awkward smile on her face. ‘I said I was sorry, darling.’
‘You did. And it’s forgiven.’
‘Can I come?’ said Barbara.
‘Of course,’ said Elise. ‘That’s why I mentioned it. You’ll be guest of honour.’
‘Make it fancy dress for me? I’ll come as an Egyptian mummy.’
‘We can wait,’ said Elise. ‘I mean, my birthday’s already been and gone, so what’s another month?’
*
That night, Barbara stayed over. They put her in one of Elise’s nightgowns, tucked her in the spare bed and gave her another sleeping pill. She drifted away quite quickly. As night fell and the cicadas started up, Connie sat by the pool under the stars, nursing a tumbler with a small tot of whisky in it. Elise came and sat next to her.
‘Are you OK?’ Connie said. ‘You made your point to Barbara about your birthday.’
‘I was angry,’ said Elise. She sat down next to Connie and put her head on Connie’s shoulder.
‘I know,’ said Connie. ‘Quite rightly. I deserve to be embarrassed.’
‘Barbara’ll wake up tomorrow still thinking you’re the best thing ever.’
Connie sighed. ‘She’s lost, El. I’m just helping her.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s awful. All that money, all that status, and she’s still vulnerable. I wonder if that ever changes?’
‘I doubt it.’ Elise took the glass from Connie’s hand and sipped. ‘You find it hard, seeing her like this.’
‘Of course I do.’
‘I mean, she’ll never be the movie star for us again. She’ll never have the same mystique. She’s a battered woman.’
‘Hey,’ said Connie sharply. ‘She’s not a “movie star”, or a “battered woman”.’
‘She’s both.’
‘You’re being deliberately reductive. You know better than that.’
‘Don’t you think it’s weird, the way she’s ended up here? Doesn’t she have other friends? People she can trust? She barely knows us.’
Connie shrugged. ‘I don’t think she really trusts anyone, and I don’t blame her. There’s a connection. There was from the start.’
‘You don’t think it’s just because you’re on the outside, so you’re not as problematic?’
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’
‘I wasn’t—’
‘I don’t think she thinks of me as “on the outside”,’ said Connie.
Elise hesitated. ‘Do you – are you – attracted to her, Con?’
‘Am I attracted to her?’
‘Well, you just talked about a connection.’
‘She’s a beautiful woman, I’d be blind if I said otherwise, but no. No, no. I don’t think of her like that.’
‘OK.’
‘You are the most beautiful of them all. Come here,’ said Connie.
Elise came near, and a tingle ran down her middle into her groin as Connie touched the side of her face with her delicate fingers. She lifted Elise’s mouth to hers and kissed it slowly. Their lips held together for a long while, before they broke apart. Then they sat side by side for a time in silence, staring at the neon stillness of the water.
2017
22
Every day, I sat at Connie’s kitchen table and typed up her story on my laptop. I had no idea how it ended, because she would hand it over in stages, five or six yellow rectangular pages at a time, the writing large and scrawled but still legible, each sentence requiring two lines of the paper. I was diligent, at times awestruck. Her prose was still as good as it had been thirty years ago. There were similar cadences that had appeared in the previous two novels, images repeated, and the themes of learning how to be alone, to manage loss, to enjoy freedom.
As I typed, I began to be convinced that Connie had cast herself in the role of Margaret Gillespie. This was because Margaret Gillespie was a woman with agency. She was a woman who did things to other women – in this case, her daughter, barely out of girlhood, trapped by her circumstances. It was an ambivalent novel because it was not clear – or at least, not yet – as to whether Margaret wanted to hurt her daughter, to punish her for something.
It tantalized me that Connie had set this novel on the east coast of America, albeit in the years of the pilgrim fathers rather than when, according to my father, she was there in the early 1980s. The otherworldliness of the place, the elements of sea and woodland, and the harsh conditions seemed to appeal to her. Her colonists were deaf to the fact that this was not virgin land, that there had been natives living on these shores and in these forests for thousands of years, in harmony with their surroundings. Margaret’s discomfort in being there, the patriarchal erasure of natural justice as embodied by Davy Roper and his cronies, and the women around them who cleaved themselves to power in order to maintain an illusion of dominance, provided evidence to me that Connie was critical of colonization, in whatever form it took. Margaret was a progressive, potentially an anachronism, as much as she was an outsider. She didn’t fit into this society Connie had created, and I think Christina did, which was why Margaret felt so desperate.
Christina herself was an enigma: she could be seen as pragmatic in one light, spineless in another. She wanted an easy life, to submit to its vicissitudes and hope for the best. But Margaret wouldn’t let her. We’ve come too far, she told her daughter, for you to shrink back down to a tiny size.
I’m not a mad dreamer, usually. If I do dream, it will be that strange, unrecoverable symphony of weirdness and banality, which dissipates in the morning, soon to be forgotten. But at night, Margaret Gillespie began to carry me off until her twisted capabilities might have been mine. I would stand on the beach where Margaret stood in Connie’s imagination, the shore a curved white blade with a line of firs from where the barks of hunting dogs emerged. I knew the woody glory of Margaret’s foraged cooking. I saw minnows turn pink in the water from a character’s blood – though whose it was had not yet been revealed to me in Connie’s pages. Davy’s charisma had been revealed by now – as well as his fists, his misogyny and insecurity, stalking my night times. Christina’s belly swelled, but death was dormant in that symbol of hope, and I would wake up with a jolt.
Since overhearing her and Deborah’s conversation on the night of the pizza, I had become hungrier for more clues about my mother, yet simultaneously more fearful of what I might discover. So far, Connie had proven prickly when questioned about her life, and only liked to talk about things when she could control the information she imparted. And yet, here she was, handing over her innermost thoughts and workings. All I could do was hope that these pages would give me an understanding of who Connie really was, and through that, who my mother had been. I believed that writers wrote themselves into their fictions, that however they twisted the original idea into a new shape, there was some truth inside it, still. If it was true that Connie had known my mother as closely as my father claimed she had, then surely she was somewhere in these pages? So as I typed, I read, and as I read, I saw my mother as Christina, cowed by the dominance of Margaret, trapped in a marriage she didn’t want but which at least offered her some independence. But how could I be that selective? If I was assigning my mother a role in Connie’s fictions, then I had to give my father one too. And I could not see him in Davy Roper. My father was a caring man, not a monster. I rejected the idea that I was dipping into Connie’s box of letters and spelling any word I pleased, but maybe it was true.