Drowning Rose (6 page)

‘Of course, you were the bright one.’ His face assumed a familiar look of puzzled irritation.

‘Rose was perfectly bright. You can be bright without being academic. And anyway, it’s what you do with your talents that matters.’ Had I really said that? Had I said something so stupid, so insensitive?

I shook my head. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know how I could have said that.’ I hid my face in my hands.

‘It’s all right.’ I felt a hand on my arm, fleeting, a little awkward, as if it were the wing of a clumsy bird.

I looked up and our eyes met. The kindness in his took me aback.

‘I’m very well aware that after Rose’s mother left, Rose, without you and your mother, would have been a very lonely young girl.’

I swallowed hard and then I flashed him a quick smile. ‘Would you excuse me, I’ll . . . I won’t be a moment.’ I got to my feet, stumbling over a chair leg as I hurried from the room.

In the hallway I ran straight into Katarina. ‘Eliza, are you all right?’

I nodded, avoiding her gaze. ‘Fine. I’m absolutely fine.’

‘You don’t look fine.’

‘It’s just a headache. I get them all the time. I’ll just lie down and shut my eyes for a bit. Would you explain to Uncle Ian, please?’

Katarina brought me a cup of sweet milky tea – she said she knew that was what all English people wanted when they were under the weather, and a plate of plain biscuits that looked like Rich Tea but were actually called Marie. She fetched an extra pillow and made me lean back against them like a poorly child so that I could sip my hot drink.

‘Did you tell Uncle Ian?’

‘I did and he’s just sorry you’re not feeling well. I’ll come and see how you are at lunchtime. Do you want the blinds drawn?’

I shook my head. ‘I like looking out at the snow.’

I finished the tea and as I looked around the little room with its yellow rosebud wallpaper and white lace curtains, as I saw a tiny distorted reflection of my face in the polished brass bed knob at the foot of the bed, I wondered how it was possible to feel so wretched and so comfortable both at once.

Over lunch we spoke politely of not very much until Katarina went through into the kitchen with the dishes, having refused my offer of help. ‘You stay and talk to your godfather.’

‘No, I insist.’ I was halfway to my feet.

‘Really, you have so much to talk about and you’re not over for very long.’ Katarina reminded me of our old housemistress, Miss Philips. At school we had been constantly amazed at the way she managed to get us to do what she wanted without resorting to shouting, threats, bribes or chasing people down corridors, all those methods favoured by other, lesser members of staff. Even Miss Philips’s hair, golden blonde and back-combed, appeared to know better than ever to stray. It was certainty that did it, I thought now, a quiet unshowy conviction that you knew best. There was nothing that gave you as much easy authority. With an inaudible sigh, I sat back in my chair.

‘You never wanted a family?’ Uncle Ian asked.

I was used to people walking around the subject of children with me, especially once I had turned forty and there was an assumption that I was running out of choices. This straight question took me by surprise. Buying time, I shrugged. When he kept his gaze on me I shrugged again. Finally I said, ‘We thought about it but . . . well, we weren’t married very long.’ I took a bigger mouthful of the excellent white wine than I had intended. ‘So it’s all for the best.’

‘You really think that?’

I looked at him over the empty wine glass. ‘Yes, I do. I think.’

‘Can you never be sure of something?’ He was frowning at me.

I wasn’t going to tell him about the way I had looked wistfully at toddlers on reins and babies in Bugaboos, or of the times I’d been loitering outside Baby Gap and Petit Bâteau. Nor was I going to explain that seeing as every time something went wrong in my life it felt like a victory for justice, it followed that it was best I never had what I could not bear to lose.

‘I do find it quite hard,’ I said. ‘To be sure.’

‘So what about your work? You enjoy it?’

‘Oh yes. In fact I am sure about that.’

‘You were very good at drawing and painting when you were at school. I asked your mother if you had done anything with it when we spoke the other day and she told me you turned down a place at art school.’

‘I did History of Art instead. I went on to West Dean for my practical training.’

‘You don’t miss being the creator of works?’

I shook my head. ‘As I see it there’s enough mediocre art out there in the world to last for all eternity. Why add to it? I’d rather spend my time saving what’s truly exceptional.’

‘And who decided that what you would have produced would have been mediocre?’

‘I did.’

‘I see. And your mother tells me you’re about to be thrown out of your flat.’

I frowned. ‘For a woman at the other end of the world my mother says an awful lot. And I’m not being thrown out. It was always going to be a reasonably short-term rental. I’ll find somewhere else nice.’

Uncle Ian sat back in his chair, a look on his face as if he were about to solve all my problems. ‘Well, we’ll see.’

It was still only half past one; meals in Sweden were early, so I went for a walk. I had wondered a little at Uncle Ian deciding to live by a lake. Myself, I avoided them whenever I could, lakes, ponds, even reservoirs; all those places more usually connected to sunshine and picnics and family fun. But as I gazed out over the tranquil water just the right blue shade of grey, I thought his might have been a good choice. The lake of my nightmares was a mere, as deep and as dark as despair. The trees did not stand guard as they did here but trailed their branches in the black water like skeletal fingers, the reeds reaching out from the depths as if begging for help. And always there was Rose, Rose being dragged to the bottom, her hair heavy with weeds, her eyes wide open and begging me for help I could, would not give.

But here, in the pale winter sunshine, Rose was dry and safe and seated next to me on the trunk of the fallen tree. She was not Uncle Ian’s visitation nor the vengeful Rose of those nightmares but simply a peaceful presence, my beloved old friend.

‘I wish I knew what Uncle Ian wants from me,’ I said to her. ‘You didn’t really come to see him, did you?’

Of course, I knew I wasn’t actually speaking to Rose so I didn’t expect a reply. I left all that to Uncle Ian. He was so much more convincing at it. But everyone knows that articulating a problem, even if it’s only before an imagined audience of one, could be helpful. And it was, it has to be said, so very quiet in the woods by the lake with every sound muffled by snow or wrapped in cold, still air, that you felt that when you did speak your voice might easily carry through time and space, even beyond life itself.

I couldn’t see to the lake’s end but Uncle Ian had told me that to get to the far shore would take some twenty minutes of rowing or on skates if it were frozen over. I was wearing a heavy quilted jacket and a knitted hat and gloves but the cold was winning and it most certainly drove Rose away. As I said, I didn’t believe in ghosts but someone/some
thing
had been there by my side and now it was gone I felt more alone than I could ever remember feeling before.

I wanted the presence back. I whispered to it to return. When nothing happened I sang ‘Sweet Rose of Allendale’. It was Rose’s favourite song. She’d sing it all the time. We had worked out the harmony, taking turns as to who sang the melody and who joined in on the refrain.

I sang quietly. I only wanted the dead to hear. I sang it twice and then I gave up. The lake stretched out before me, covered with a layer of ice that was just enough to lure the unwary, or stupid, out across, but too thin to carry the weight. I buried my face in my mittens. When I looked up again the setting sun was showing me a path across the ice. As I got to my feet I thought how easy it would be to walk out and never return.

Eight

Sandra/Cassandra

The others were in the sick bay so it was just Eliza and I hanging out. I was perched on the chair in her cubicle; I’d had to move a heap of clothes meant for the laundry to be able to sit. Eliza was on the floor, writing in one of her hundreds of A5 notebooks, her back resting against the bed, long ragdoll legs stretched out, big feet pushing up against the wall opposite. That’s what she looked like, I had decided, a beautiful rag doll. She dressed like one, too. Today she was wearing red and black horizontal striped woollen tights, a floral print summer skirt with different coloured patches sewn on and a long black knitted sweater. Back when I first met her I had thought that she dressed the way she did for effect but I had come to realise that she actually thought those weird combinations looked nice. And on her, to be fair, they usually did.

‘Shall I take your stuff to the laundry?’ I asked her.

She glanced up as if she were surprised to hear from me, then she threw me a warm smile. ‘Would you? That’s really kind.’

As I went down to the basement I thought of Gillian Taylor saying that I should be careful not to let Eliza treat me like some kind of servant. ‘She doesn’t mean to,’ Gillian had said. ‘She just thinks it’s completely natural that other people should run around doing things for her.’

So what? Gillian was jealous. Everyone knew she had the biggest crush on Eliza. She said she was over it but it didn’t seem like it to me.

I returned to the cubicle. ‘I’ll hang it up later,’ I said.

‘Gosh, no, I’ll do that,’ Eliza said. I knew she wouldn’t, though. She would forget about it until someone did it for her, either as a favour or because they needed the washing machine themselves.

‘What are you writing?’

Without looking up, she said, ‘I’m re-working one of Grandmother Eva’s stories.’

Grandmother Eva wasn’t actually Eliza’s grandmother at all, she was Rose’s, but because Eliza’s grandmothers were both dead she was allowed to borrow this one. ‘Can I look?’ I asked her.

Eliza passed me the notebook. She had framed the writing with her drawings. She was a good artist but I didn’t personally go for all that fairy tale stuff, although the huge ugly trolls were cool and the boy who played the violin by the lake.

‘I wish I could draw,’ I said.

‘I’d love to be able to sing like you.’ She smiled up at me. I don’t know how she did it but she had a way, when she was paying attention, to make you feel special, chosen somehow.

‘You would?’

But her attention had already wandered back to her notebook. The others wouldn’t be staying in the San for ever and then who knows when I would get her to myself again. I was sure that if I could only spend enough time with her, just the two of us, we would become real friends. I reckoned she and I actually had a lot more in common than she had with the other two. Like art and music, for example.

She was absorbed in her drawing once more. I knew she didn’t mean to be rude. She just loved what she was doing. I was like that myself, passionate.

‘It’s funny how you got your artistic skill from Grandmother Eva,’ I said. ‘Because I’ve got the singing from
my
grandmother,’ I said, kind of implying that I had forgotten Grandmother Eva wasn’t actually Eliza’s grandmother. She’d like that. I knew because a friend of Jessica’s, a girl who was adopted, completely loved it when anyone forgot her parents weren’t her real parents.

‘Really,’ Eliza said, but she still wasn’t paying full attention.

‘She was an opera singer.’ That just slipped out but as it happens it worked because now she looked at me, actually looked at me and without those longing glances at her notebook. I didn’t want that to end.

‘Really? You never said.’

I shrugged. ‘It never came up, I suppose.’

‘Where did she sing?’

‘Oh everywhere, all the big places. Covent Garden, The Metropolitan, La Scala, all of them.’ I listened to myself say those things and I thought how right it sounded. It was how it should have been, my grandmother in a long velvet gown receiving a standing ovation, not standing behind the counter at Henson’s department store in the regulation blue uniform. ‘We were the first to use terylene, as it was called back then.’ I remember her saying that as if it were an event. An achievement. And my parents had nodded and my father had said, ‘My, is that so’ and my mother had asked about the exact shade of blue. I didn’t belong with them, with people like that. I belonged here, at LAGs with Eliza and the others.

And Eliza was looking at me with big starry eyes. ‘Gosh. How exciting. I love opera. What’s her name? Is she Mitchum too? I might have heard her. My mum certainly will have. She’s a complete opera freak.’

I had to think fast. ‘She died really young.’

‘And she still sang at all the big opera houses. That’s amazing.’

I felt my eyes flickering and I bent down pretending to do up my laces. Straightening up, I said, ‘Sorry, what I meant was she was supposed to sing in those places if she hadn’t died. It was really tragic. She was studying. In Italy.’ I was able to look her straight in the eyes as I continued, ‘In Florence. She was about to debut and she drowned.’