The Girls in the Garden Read online

  “What do you fancy?” she asked, meeting her daughters at the back door. “I can do spaghetti with peas?”

  The girls dropped their park froideur as they came indoors and said yum, and yes please. Spaghetti and peas. A favorite family staple. And cheap too, which was just as well now that Clare was living off a finite sum of money.

  The girls joined her in the small kitchen, where they sat side by side on stools at the breakfast bar. Hard to tell them apart sometimes, especially when they were seated and you couldn’t see the two-inch difference in height. The same big square faces and almond eyes. The same mass of brown curls and bright hazel irises. They both looked just like him. Just like their dad.

  “So,” said Clare, bunching raw spaghetti into her fist and forcing it down into a pan of boiling water, “did you see anyone out there?”

  “A girl came and talked to us,” said Pip. “She’s called Tyler.”

  “Oh,” said Clare, “was she nice?”

  “Not really,” said Pip.

  “Bit of a bitch,” said Grace.

  “Oh,” said Clare again, prodding stray sticks of spaghetti under the surface of the water with a fork. “That’s a shame. By the way, I forgot to tell you: your onesies came today. From Next. They’re in the hallway. But don’t rip the bag open!” she yelled after Pip, who was already halfway out of the door. “In case we have to send them back!”

  Pip brought the parcel through and together the girls pulled out the clear plastic bags. Pip handed Grace the one in her size and then they both tried them on. Clare watched her girls undressing, absorbed their shapes: broad and strong, already dipping at the waist, Grace in her junior bra, Pip still flat-chested, the pronounced S-bends of their bodies and the small doughy tummies that neither girl was as yet at all concerned about. Their father’s bodies, too. Not Clare’s. Clare had been a painfully skinny child, flat-chested well into her teens, and was still slight and bordering on bony. It would not be long, she mused, until both her girls towered over her, until they could carry her around like a child.

  They zipped up their onesies and stood before her, striking poses to make her laugh. “You both look adorable,” she said, pulling open the freezer door. “Like lovely overgrown babies.”

  The day became dark and Clare began the process of pulling shut the blinds and curtains, of running a bath for the girls, stacking the dishwasher; the girls clean and glowing in their onesies, doing their homework side by side, the sound of the TV going on, a mug of chamomile, and all three of them together, warm and safe in their tiny flat.

  At nine thirty she came to kiss the girls good night. They were reading by the pale light of table lamps, Grace leaning against her bed head, her knees brought up to her chest, Pip curled fetal-style with her book held on its side. Pip glanced up at her and smiled. But there was something brittle about the upturn of her mouth and Clare realized that she was on the verge of tears.

  “When can we see Daddy?” Pip asked.

  Clare sighed and brushed Pip’s forehead with the palm of her hand. “I truly don’t know.”

  “When will he reply to my letters?”

  “I really and truly don’t know.”

  Grace lifted her head from her book and peered disdainfully at Pip over the top of her knees. “Why do you keep going on about it? I mean, seriously, he’s just scary. I don’t care if I never see him again.”

  Clare sighed again. They were treading familiar ground.

  “I want to go see the house,” said Pip.

  “Oh, God.” Clare pushed Pip’s hair off her forehead. “I really don’t think—”

  “Please. Please, Mum. I’ll go on my own . . .”

  “Don’t be silly. You can’t go on your own. You wouldn’t even know how to get there.”

  “Yes I do. I’d get the bus.”

  “I really don’t think you’d want to see the house, Pip. I think it’s too early.”

  “But . . . why?” Pip was crying now. “I want to, Mum! I want to see the house. Please!”

  Clare exhaled deeply and took Pip into her arms. She felt her shuddering and shivering inside her embrace. For days and days on end they could act like everything was normal, like they were on a lovely little adventure together. And then the reality of their situation would crash through the façade and they’d emerge like a straggle of pile-up survivors crawling from the wreckage. “Fine,” she whispered into Pip’s hot ear. “Fine. We’ll go after school tomorrow.”

  “I’m not going!” said Grace. “I never want to see that place again. I never even want to think about it.”

  Clare dropped her face onto the crown of Pip’s head. She kissed her hard, breathed her in. What was worse? Denial or fascination? She didn’t know.

  “Do you promise?” said Pip, looking up at Clare through wet eyelashes.

  “Yes. I promise. We’ll go straight from school. But, Pip, be prepared for a nasty shock.”

  Pip nodded her head against Clare’s chest, tightened her arms around her waist, whispered thank you.

  The house was still shrouded in scaffolding and plastic sheeting. It looked monstrous between the immaculate houses on either side. The insurers still hadn’t settled and, given the circumstances, it was possible they never would. It was possible in fact that their beautiful house might sit shamefully like this forever.

  Pip’s hold on her hand tightened. “It looks scary,” she said.

  “It is scary,” said Grace.

  She’d come, in the end. At breakfast time she’d said, “It would be weird if you two had seen it and I hadn’t. I don’t want to. But I think I have to.”

  “Do you remember . . . ?” Pip began. But she didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. Because they all remembered—painfully, clearly. The late autumn night when the three of them had walked home from dinner at a local restaurant and found their house ablaze, their father standing on the pavement in his scuba-diving suit, waving his arms toward the flames, shouting out profanities and nonsense, his eyes wild with madness.

  Clare pushed open the metal gate and the girls followed her up the path toward what used to be the front hallway. She pulled back the plastic sheeting and swallowed hard. There it was, her home. A charred, buckled, disfigured nightmare.

  Luckily they’d had a joint account, she and Chris. Luckily everything Chris earned as an independent documentary maker was paid straight into their bank account and was easily accessible. But it wasn’t infinite. It would run out one day. And then what? Clare had no skills. No work experience. She could get a job at the school like some of the other mums, but that wouldn’t cover rent in central London. That wouldn’t keep the three of them fed and clothed. So she eked it out. Pound by pound. And hoped that at some point before it ran out Chris would be well enough to work again.

  The girls pushed open the front door. The ceilings were propped up here and there by long scaffolding poles. Clare could barely remember what they’d lost now. She saw blackened lumps of furniture that meant nothing to her anymore.

  “I hate this, Mum,” said Grace. “Can we go now?”

  “No,” said Pip, “not yet. I want to see it. Properly.” She walked ahead purposefully, looking this way and that as though evaluating the situation, as though preparing a report.

  Grace turned sharply toward Clare when Pip was out of earshot and said, “Why did you marry someone who was mad, Mum?”

  Clare swallowed. Neither of her girls had ever used the M-word before to talk about their father. She’d told them it was politically incorrect. That their father was mentally ill. She resisted the urge to reprimand Grace for the transgression and said, “I didn’t know he was.”

  “Yeah you did.”

  “Well, I didn’t know how deep it ran. I didn’t know how bad it would get. I thought it was a phase.”

  “You thought you could save him.”

  “What?”

  “You thought you could save him,” she repeated.

  Clare blinked at her elder
daughter. “Where on earth did you get that from?”

  Grace shrugged. “Nowhere,” she said. “I just think it.”

  What did a twelve-year-old girl know about the intricacies of adult relationships? Clare wondered. And was she right?

  “I wish I had a different dad,” Grace said.

  “Oh, Grace, that’s so unfair . . .”

  “No. It’s not unfair. It’s true. I wish I had a normal dad.”

  “But then you wouldn’t exist. You and Pip. You wouldn’t be here.”

  “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know, would I? So it wouldn’t matter.”

  Pip appeared then, looking pale and shaken. She turned to face the door. “Can we go now? I’ve seen enough.”

  Clare watched as her daughter strode past her and through the front door. She and Grace followed behind. Pip did not speak the whole way back down Fitzjohn’s Avenue, and when they got home she headed straight into her bedroom without saying a word.

  Dear Daddy,

  Mum took us to see the house yesterday. It was my idea. I thought it would make me feel better. But it didn’t. All I could think was that it was like a nightmare. All of it was like a nightmare. I try not to think about it. Try to pretend that that wasn’t you on the pavement that night. Just some crazy man we don’t know. Usually that works. But yesterday it all felt really real again. Like it had only just happened.

  At the house I went into the kitchen. The table and chairs were still there. They looked like they’d been painted black. There was a vase of flowers on the table. The vase was black and so were the flowers. Everything was black. It looked like it had all been cut out of black paper. Like one of those silhouette books. Except for one thing—the calendar on the wall, the one with the photos of me and Grace on all the months. It was just hanging there. Like nothing had ever happened. And it was stuck on November. It was a photo of me and Grace on the terrace in that house we stayed at in Turkey last year. In our pajamas. And we looked so happy. And there was stuff written on it, stuff that was going to happen that week. And one of the things was that we were going to go to the animal-­rescue center to look at kittens. And I know it’s not like everything was perfect before that night. I do know that. But things can’t have been so bad if we’d been thinking about getting a kitten. And now I don’t suppose we’ll ever get a kitten. Because only normal families get kittens. And we’re not one of those anymore.

  I can’t write any more today because I’m feeling too weird.

  I still love you though,

  Pipsqueak

  xxxx

  4

  “Do you want the bad news or the really bad news?”

  Leo stood in front of her by the hob, his mobile phone in his hand, looking sheepish.

  Adele tapped a lump of mashed potato off the masher and stared at him. “Oh God.” It was going to be something to do with his father. She had guessed by the tone of his voice. The very particular flatness of it, as though he was talking in his sleep.

  “He’s coming. To stay.”

  “Oh. God.” She poured more milk into the mashed potatoes and stirred them hard. “When?”

  “Well, that’s the first installment of bad news. The second is, he’s on his way. Now.”

  “What!”

  “He’s just landed at Heathrow. He said he’d been trying to call for days. I reckon he’ll be here in about an hour and a half. Maybe less.”

  “You are kidding me! Why!”

  “Urgh, Christ, something to do with a hospital appointment. Some kind of operation. I didn’t really catch the detail.”

  Adele envisaged her spare room full of Gordon and his things, and not just that but an ill Gordon, a Gordon with dressings and medications and tiresome requirements around the clock. “Tell me Affie’s coming. Please!”

  “It doesn’t sound like it.”

  “Oh. Jesus Christ. Why not!”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say. There were loudspeakers going off in the background and I just wanted to get him off the phone before he asked me to come and pick him up.”

  It was 6:48. The girls were in the living room with their new friends from the park, the tall sisters with the curly hair. Dinner was almost ready. She’d intended to invite the two sisters to stay. The five girls seemed to be getting on so well together and it was the first night of the May half-term and the evening air was warm around the edges and the sky was still blue and she’d been going to suggest they could put on a movie after dinner and have a kind of sleepover without the sleepover. But now she’d have to ask the sisters to leave, they’d all have to scoff down their supper and then be on best behavior for the arrival of the man the girls called Puppy, although he was far from adorable. She’d have to clear out the spare room of all her teaching stuff and find fresh towels and, oh God, send someone out for cows’ milk because he wouldn’t countenance the almond milk they drank at home, and some white bread because he claimed bread with bits in it was a pneumonia risk.

  Gordon Howes.

  Horrible old pervert.

  His first words to her had been, “Your cups runneth over, young lady,” as he peered down her dress and into her cleavage. He was a handsome man, taller then than Leo with the same head of thick dark hair and chocolatey eyes. But even back then, when he was still only in his fifties, he’d had the porous red nose and rheumy eyes of the heavy spirit drinker and the swollen overhanging belly of a man who enjoyed rich late-night suppers in fabled London restaurants where the staff knew him by name. He had diabetes now and apparently his feet looked like rotten cauliflowers. But in his time he had been a force of nature, a sex-fueled party animal and carouser. His reputation still lived on in the park. “Oh, Gordon,” people would say, and then regale her with some terrible tale of breast fumbling or skirt lifting or bum cupping. And according to this reportage, age hadn’t been much of a barrier to Gordon’s attentions. Fifteen or fifty. It didn’t seem to matter as long as there was something to grab hold of.

  And now here was Adele, forcing a five-pound note into her eldest daughter’s hand, saying, “Go, quickly, you need to get Puppy some milk and some bread. And, oh”—even though he didn’t need it, did not deserve it—“one of those Mr. Kipling chocolate-cake things he likes, you know, with all the layers.” She’d seen him devour a whole one of those in an evening last time he was here. Every ten minutes or so, stretching himself from the sofa, as if about to go somewhere; Adele or Leo saying, “Everything okay? Can I get you something?” And Gordon, crumbs of cake still embedded in the cracks around his mouth, saying, “Thought I might just sneak another bit of that delicious cake.”

  “We’re killing him,” Adele had whispered loudly to Leo in the kitchen as they slid the last slice of cake off its cardboard bottom and onto Gordon’s plate.

  “Yes,” Leo had whispered back. “I know.”

  A taxi drew up to the curb beyond their front door exactly an hour from Gordon’s phone call. They all glanced at each other in panic, all apart from Willow, who’d had no truck with her Puppy and couldn’t understand why everyone else was getting so worked up. The taxi’s engine rattled and banged, matching Adele’s heart rate, then there was the sound of the taxi door being slammed shut, a cheery farewell from the taxi driver (for all his many faults Gordon was an excellent tipper), and the ominous rumble of suitcase wheels up the front path. Nobody moved until the doorbell rang.

  “Hello, Dad.”

  “Hello, hello. Christ. Hello.”

  Adele pasted on a smile and popped her head around the kitchen door into the hallway. “Hello, Gordon,” she said, smoothly.

  “Yes,” said Gordon, “hello.”

  He looked worse than ever. He was bursting out of a red linen blazer and a mint-green shirt splattered with whatever he’d had to eat on the plane. In one hand was his stick, a gnarled African thing carved from wood with a bird’s head on the top. In the other was the handle of his case, a vast, battered affair, held together in places with parcel tape, and a bulging bag of
duty free that clattered together like a milk truck. His awful feet were encased in oversized green rubber Crocs. And he was wearing a peaked leather cap on his head of the type favored by men in 1970s gay bars.

  “Christ,” he muttered, “I need to sit down. Dear Christ, let me sit down.”

  Leo snatched his suitcase and his duty free and Adele held open the door to the living room. He lumbered past her and landed on the nearest chair, not noticing the dog asleep on it. “What the bloody hell?” He peered behind his bulky self at the animal he’d almost killed and said, “Was this here last time I came?”

  The dog leaped from the back of the chair and ran to the kitchen to soothe itself with food.

  “We’ve had him for eight years.”

  “Have you? Good grief.”

  He pulled off his odd leather cap and stroked his dyed brown hair back into place. He grimaced and then seemed to remember himself. He smiled from granddaughter to granddaughter and said, “Now. Let me see. You all look so similar and you’ve all got those blooming flower fairy names but I’m pretty sure that this is . . . Fern.” He pointed at Willow and winked.

  Willow shook her head.

  “Then you must be Willow? And you—my goodness, look at the size of you—you must be Fern.”

  Fern nodded shyly.

  “Good grief. You were a child last time I saw you and now you’re, well . . . remarkable. And Catkin. Taller than your mother now. Taller than your father too probably.” He turned and chuckled over his shoulder at Leo, who at five feet ten had historically been the smallest of the Howes men. Nobody had yet been brave enough to point out to Gordon that he had shrunk substantially and Leo was now a good inch taller than him.

  “Extraordinary.” He nodded, smiling blandly at the three girls. “Like trees. Like bloody trees.”

  Adele fetched Gordon a mug of tea and a slice of the chocolate cake.

  “This hasn’t got that god-awful fake milk in it, has it?” he asked in his raspy Big Bad Wolf voice as she passed him the mug.