The Undertow (43 page)

“God,” Billie says, after a moment. “What about that Petra?”

“What about her?”

“Well, she didn’t really … gel, did she?”

She’d spoken only to Ciaran, and then so quietly that no-one else could hear. Refused everything but the wine she’d brought. She’d clearly been missing something rather better to be there.

They walk on. Their breath plumes in front of them in the cold air. But then Luke hadn’t gelled either. He’d really gone for Ciaran. It had started out sounding friendly, but soon the questions about his work became questions about how badly paid it was, its precariousness. Ciaran had taken it pretty well, considering. He’d laughed it off, made a joke of it. But she can’t figure out what it was that had made Luke so angry. What did it matter, Ciaran’s hand-to-mouth existence? What difference did it make?

“I just thought she was a bit, you know, difficult,” she says. “Bit high-maintenance.”

“Well,” he says. “She’s beautiful. She can get away with it.”

Billie laughs.

He smiles back at her, faintly puzzled. She realizes that it’s not a joke. He means it. And he is, of course, right. Petra is beautiful. Sullenly, smokily beautiful. And she did get away with it. They kept on being nice—she and Norah and Daniel did anyway—and Petra kept on being sulky, and Luke kept on not looking at Petra, and grilling Ciaran in that high-handed way, and at the first chance he got Ciaran steered Petra off into the crowds to save everyone the effort of keeping up the niceness and the sulking and the looking-the-other-way.

And the point is, of course—why didn’t she see it before?—Luke could be with Petra. Or at least, someone like Petra. Someone with that gloss, that patina, that self-containment. This is why Luke is annoyed: Ciaran, with his scruffy coat and his Timex watch, doesn’t deserve to have that kind of beauty at his disposal.

So why is Luke with her? Billie wonders: because she’s easy-going, no trouble to him? She makes an effort, tries hard with his friends, is
grateful
?

She bites her inner lip. “So.”

“So what?”

“So what’s this then?”

“What?”

“This?” She squeezes his hand, raises the pair of them up in front of them—the joinedness of them.

“You and me?”

“Yeah,” she says. This is it, she thinks; this is the collapse.

He stops dead and draws her round to face him. The tarmac glints. A cat crosses the street behind him, right to left, its tail held low. He takes up both her hands. She looks down at the smooth wool of his coat, his neatly tucked scarf. A burglar alarm starts screeching a few
streets off, is silenced. She wonders what he sees when he looks at her. An ordinary kind of asymmetry.

The crystals crumble away into darkness. Norah and Daniel, Ciaran and Petra, they’ve already drifted off in pairs into the night. And now Luke, any moment, peeling off from her, to go and find someone beautiful, leaving her to float away.

“You’re jealous,” he says.

“No.”

“Well it sounds like it.”

She shrugs. She can’t frame her anger in any way that makes it reasonable. It’s fine that he thinks Petra is beautiful. It’s fine that he said it. It’s fine that beauty brings privileges. It should be fine. It’s true.

“Don’t be.”

She glances up. He’s still looking at her. She sets her jaw. She catches a ghost of his scent, of cinnamon and woody notes. She thinks, this is it; this is what I’ll remember of him. The scent of him will linger as he walks away.

His eyes are shadowed; his cheekbones catch the light. He says, “I love you.”

She smiles, despite herself.

“I was saving this,” he says. “I thought, maybe tonight, but there was never the right moment.”

“What? Saving what?”

He shrugs. “Marry me?”

She blinks up at him, eyes cool and wet in the night. She nods, her chin dimpling. It is, more than anything, a relief.

THE RAIN PLUMMETS
down outside, soaks the earth. He can hear it falling from the guttering, streaming down into the flowerbeds. He can hear the Cherwell too, usually such a slug of a river—rushing now, churning, hammering past the College.

Knock at the door. He clicks “save,” closes the document. “Come in.”

Hannah Moriarty is all kinky yellow hair that frizzes out around her head like a blonde Afro. She has the button nose and blinky blue eyes of a doll. And if it hadn’t been for her catching his eye and holding it while she gave him a slow smile in that first tutorial, he wouldn’t have looked at her twice, so to speak—not in any out of the ordinary way. But he’d looked at her every week for eight weeks now, and has to admit that there is something about her. He can’t quite put his finger on it. Those slobby jeans that hang half off her backside. That accent that’s so affectedly rough. When she leaves at the end of the tutorial, she leaves in a strange lingering way, jabbering away with her tutorial partner, that meaty boy, about some mutual acquaintance, as if Professor Hastings weren’t there. But somehow still alert to him, as though her awareness stretches back and includes him, obliges him to notice that he is being excluded.

Got on his nerves. Got on his wick. Got on his mind, and he couldn’t shake her. So when she emailed to make the appointment, and suggested six thirty, it loosened up his thoughts. Made them slippery. Lubricious.

She slips into her usual tutorial seat—the deep leather armchair. She shifts the cushions around and settles herself in with a wriggle that makes her jumper slip, exposing a curve of creamy shoulder. She doesn’t tug it back.

“I love this chair,” she says.

“Family heirloom,” he says, as he always says, though he bought it at auction in Banbury.

He knows it’s a cliché, but he offers her a sherry anyway.

“Mmm.”

When he leans closer to give it to her, he detects a whiff of marijuana. Her eyes have that big glassy look too. Interesting.

“I’m going to miss all this,” Hannah says.

He limps over to his own seat—an upright bentwood chair. He’s forbidden the deep floral recesses of the sofa nowadays. Since the hip replacement. Not worth the risk of dislocation. Not that he has been tempted, not recently, by the pleasures of the office sofa. Not until Hannah Moriarty shoved and elbowed her way into his thoughts.

“So,” he says, neutrally. “What can I do for you?”

Outside, on the rose garden, the rain batters the leaves, the first buds, soaks into the earth.

“Well, I’ve been thinking.” She pulls out a cushion, squeezes it, stuffs it down beside her. “About the future.”

“Good idea.”

“And you know, final year and everything. I mean—” She nods out at the rain. “I mean, just starting out in life.”

“Yes,” he says. “An exciting time.”

She smiles, pleased with herself, and with the adventure of it all. She sips her sherry. Leans over the arm of the chair to put her glass down. And he remembers the girl, the one with the brown eyes and the blue bike, who used to hesitate outside his study door. She had left him, and Oxford, in September nearly thirty years ago, and it had been both a heartbreak and a liberation. She went off to do an MA in Birmingham, for which he’d written her a glowing reference; then a PhD, and then, after a few years’ silence, she wrote to tell him she was getting married, to that Early Modernist from Sheffield, and he’d written back, wishing her happiness and good luck. He’d heard she’d moved to Belfast, taught at Queen’s. He saw her, years later, at that conference in Stirling. Her hair badly dyed; she’d put on weight. Her paper—Aphra Behn read through a Foucauldian lens. God, what was her name?

“I’ve always thought I’d like to work in TV.”

When she was a girl, though. With her brown eyes, and her blue bike. She’d been so lovely.

“Mmm.” He gets up from his chair, goes to refill his glass.

“And this internship has come up, no money of course, but I can live
at home, and Dad knows the execs, he’ll put a good word in for me, but you know, you have to go through the process.”

“Of course.”

“So, that means references. And I was wondering …”

He drinks his sherry still looking at the wall. The soft green stripe. Edwardian, he’s often thought. The girl with the brown eyes, who turned into the heavy-looking woman, who spoke so briskly, who seemed somehow cross.

“So would that be okay? I can put you down as a referee?”

“No problem.”

“Cool.”

He turns back, to be polite. She gets up from the armchair, her jeans half hanging off, her jumper slumped down over her shoulder. She comes up to him, brings the waft of marijuana and perfume. Then she leans in and kisses him on the cheek.

“You’re a poppet.”

Oblivious, she turns away, hitching her jeans up onto her hips. “There’s a few of us over in the bar,” she says. “If you fancy it?”

“I’m, I’ve got to work.”

He leans on the desk, moves himself round the edge, back to the computer. It traces a pattern idly across its screen.

She leaves. He sits down, clicks open his document. His paper appears, unfinished. He reads back over his final paragraph. This had been going somewhere, but now, he’s not so sure. His chest hurts.

BILLIE HELPS HER MOTHER
across the threshold. Luke lingers on the doorstep, clutching mobile phone in one hand, a bunch of paper-wrapped daffodils in the other.

“Look,” he says, gesturing to the street with his mobile phone, “I’ve got to …”

Make a call. Again. “Right now?”

He nods, holds out the flowers: Billie has to set her mother’s case down to take them off him.

She’s going to say,
Please be quick
, but she swallows it. He’s only away from the office because of her. He has to check in, keep an eye on things. He can’t be held responsible for how long it takes.

“I’ll come back for you when I’m finished,” he says.

Then they’ll head back to London. He’s got work tomorrow.

“Okay,” she says. Then, “Sorry.”

She follows her mum through the sitting room, hears the front door click shut behind them. Madeline sits down on the sofa. She is pale, sweating.

“Put your feet up,” Billie says.

Her mother looks around her, remains still. “It’s so stuffy.”

“I’ll let some air in.”

Billie drops the daffodils on the coffee table, goes into the bay window. Close up, she can see through the blinds: the houses opposite with their clean front steps and painted brickwork, above them a brisk spring sky, and off to the left Luke’s retreating back as he walks away, staring down at his mobile, tapping at it.

It was good of him to come at all.

Billie shoves the window open and lets in the soft spring air, the
street noise. She turns back to her mum. Her mother looks so fragile, so slight. Billie had been focused on this, on just getting her mum back home; she hadn’t thought beyond it.

“Better?”

“Mmm.”

Billie sinks down on the end of the sofa, lifts her mum’s feet into her lap, and slips off her shoes. Her mother’s feet are smooth in nylon tights. Billie strokes them.

“That’s nice,” her mother says. And after a while, “I’m sorry, love.”

She means, for being ill. For making you race up from London again. For making things more difficult than they are already.

“Don’t be silly.”

And anyway, it will be fine. Her mother will be fine. They’ve caught it early, and have tackled it, it seems to Billie, with exhausting thoroughness: first surgery and then chemo have left her mum wiped out, looking sicker than she did before. What she needs now is rest, and good food, and the chance to build herself back up. That’s what matters. How Billie feels is irrelevant. She just has to get her mother through it, and out the other side, to a point at which they can pause, and realise it’s in the past, and say to each other,
God, that was awful, thank goodness it’s over
.

Her mum swallows. Maybe she needs one of those tablets, the ones they gave her for the nausea. They’re in her case. The nurse recommended ginger too. Billie sets her mother’s feet down on the cushion, tugs the rug over her. She stands up, lifts the bunch of flowers from the tabletop.

“I’ll get you a drink.”

Her mum nods.

Billie fetches the case from the hallway, and in the kitchen loads the dirty washing into the machine: pyjamas and nightshirts and underwear and a dressing gown; smelling sour, of hospital and sweat and sickness. She washes her hands, flinches at the soap. Her skin is cracked with weeks of scrubbing away the taint of outdoor germs, rubbing on disinfectant gel, soaping off clinging smell of hospital.

She fills the kettle, peels a chunk of ginger, crushes it beneath the blade of the knife, then lifts a lemon from the fruit bowl and cuts a slice. The knife is blunt and mangles the fruit, making juice spurt and spread. It stings her skin. She puts her hands down flat on the counter, either side of the board. She breathes in lemon, ginger, the first trails
of steam. The kettle begins to rattle. The washing machine fills itself with water. Weekends with Luke, Christmas at Luke’s parents, bank holidays with his friends: time has just trickled through her fingers; she hasn’t been here enough. Once things are back to normal, she’ll make a point of coming home every other weekend; birthdays and Christmases will be spent here. Luke will just have to get used to it.

She lifts a vase out from underneath the sink, fills it from the tap. She unwraps the daffodils.

The cup is white and rimmed with silver; one of the three still remaining from the good china set. A wedding present; but from whom, Madeline can’t recall. Billie sets it down on a coaster, lays the blister pack of pills beside it.

“Thank you, love.”

“No problem.”

Billie puts her mug of coffee down too, then goes round to place the vase on the windowsill. The flowers seem almost to glow in the spring light. All these little things, these kindnesses that Billie does for her: it’s an odd reversal, being looked after like this. Madeline catches the scent of ginger and lemon, and the flowers’ sharp musk, and beneath that the warm oiliness of her daughter’s coffee, and then under it all the rank whiff of wool from the rug over her knees, and it makes her stomach churn. She swallows, raises her face to the breeze from the window. She feels a wash of love and gratitude, and after it an undertow of grief. Deep in her flesh, she knows what’s coming. What she’s going to put Billie through.