The Girls in the Garden Page 8

  Cece turned and glanced at Pip. “And who are you? One of the new girls, yes?”

  “I’m Pip.”

  “And which one is Grace?”

  Pip pointed in the direction of her sister.

  “Hi, Grace,” she drawled. “Good to meet you.”

  Grace nodded and said, “Nice to meet you too.”

  Cece’s gaze lingered on Grace a little longer than was entirely normal and Pip wished she had a pair of magic glasses that would let her see beneath all the strange expressions and half-meaningless words.

  “Hi.” Cece held out a long-boned hand to Clare. “I’m Cece. Tyler’s mum.”

  Clare took the hand and squeezed it. “I’m Clare,” she said. “Grace and Pip’s mum.”

  “Gosh,” said Cece, “how did you get those two strapping girls out of that tiny little body? You’re mini!”

  “Ah, well, they were a lot smaller then.” Clare laughed and Cece laughed and Leo laughed and Pip was really happy to see her mum being sharp and funny.

  “You all right over there?” Leo called over to Grace, who was standing by the patio doors looking edgy. “Come and sit down.” He patted the sofa next to him and Grace smiled and accepted the offer.

  “Here,” said Leo, passing her a bowl of nuts, “have some nuts.”

  Pip saw a bolt of color pass through Grace’s cheeks as she pinched some nuts with her fingertips. “Thanks,” she said.

  Pip thought again of Tyler sitting on the bed in Willow’s room with her head on Leo’s shoulder. Now it seemed that Leo had cast some kind of spell over Grace too. She didn’t get it. Leo was an old man. He was nice but he was old. She thought of stories she’d read in the papers about men like Leo, nice men, trusted men, men with children of their own. Men who found vulnerable children and groomed them into submission. And Grace was vulnerable. Even Pip could see that.

  Adele came in then, wafting patterned chiffon and spicy cooking smells behind her. “Cece! How wonderful! I didn’t think you’d come.”

  “Well, this one insisted.” She gestured at her daughter. “Said she wanted me to meet her new friends.”

  Pip felt surprised. She wasn’t aware of being Tyler’s friend. As far as she could tell, Tyler merely tolerated them.

  “Well,” said Adele. “Dinner is served, when you’re all ready.”

  They sat in the kitchen at a long wooden table, battered and worn, covered in graffiti. Leo spent some time selecting the right background music. The sisters laid extra places for Tyler and Cece and lit yet more candles. Adele hefted huge pans from the hob direct to the table and threw serving spoons on the table. A big wad of paper napkins was passed from person to person like notes at a meeting; Catkin filled glasses with wine; Leo dressed a salad in a bright red bamboo bowl. Beyond the kitchen windows the day was fading away; Pip saw a sky bruised violet and gray, the lights coming on in the distant windows of other houses. Her mum was laughing along with all the grown-ups at something funny Leo had just said; for the first time ever, Pip saw Fern laugh out loud and even Grace, sitting between Fern and Catkin, was starting to relax. Pip let her misgivings fade away. This was a happy house. These were happy people. Leo was a good man.

  Adele stirred the biggest of the pans with a large spoon. “It’s chicken curry. No lentils. No beans. No coconut. Just chicken. Hope that’s okay, Pip?” Adele winked at her and Pip smiled and said, “That’s good. Thank you.”

  “Lentil curry here.” She pulled a lid off another pan. “And sag aloo in here. Get stuck in!”

  After dinner Adele told the girls, “Get your instruments and play us something.” Pip watched in amazement as all three girls filed from the living room and then filed back in again clutching various musical instruments: Catkin a flute, Fern an acoustic guitar, Willow a fiddle. Pip had never seen children playing instruments in their own actual homes before and was mesmerized by the spectacle. The three girls played an offbeat version of “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk which made all the grown-ups laugh and then as an encore they played “Blurred Lines” and Leo got up and did the “Blurred Lines” dancing and then so did Adele, and Pip felt that excruciating stab of embarrassment and discomfort that she always felt when she saw adults behaving like that. She turned her head away slightly so that she wouldn’t have to look and sought out her sister to share the pain of the moment, but her sister did not look embarrassed. She looked enraptured, suspended in wonder and delight.

  After the music, Pip touched her mum’s arm and whispered, “Can we go now?”

  Five minutes later they were being hugged and squeezed at the kitchen door by Leo and Adele. We must do this again. It’s been wonderful. Thank you. No. Thank you.

  Grace, as planned, stayed behind. We’ll walk her back at eleven? Er, maybe ten? How about ten thirty? Okay. Ten thirty. Are you sure you don’t want to stay, Pip? Sure? Okay!

  As they left via the patio, Pip turned, just once, and peered through the living room window. She saw Grace, sitting between Leo and Fern on the sofa. She was holding Fern’s guitar and Leo was showing her how to place her fingers on the strings. She saw a look pass across her sister’s face as Leo leaned into her, unpicked her fingers from the strings, and gently rearranged them. It was a look of what Pip could only describe as sheer bliss.

  She turned desperately to her mother, hoping she’d seen it too, but her mother was already on the path, waiting for her. “Come on, angel.”

  She turned again. She saw Grace look into Leo’s eyes and smile.

  She almost said something to her mother but she couldn’t find any words.

  “Coming,” she said. “Coming.”

  Dear Daddy,

  I miss you so much. I’m lying in bed writing this to you and Grace is not here. She’s at their house, the sisters’. We just had dinner there and it was nice but I wished you were there so much. The you from before, when you used to put me and Grace on your knees and bump us up and down so our voices went all wobbly. Or when you’d open up that big brown coat you used to have and we’d both hide inside it and pretend we were camping inside daddy :). And I wish you were here now, lying on the floor like you used to do with your knees up and your hands clasped over your tummy, listening to me read to you. But the hardest thing about you not being there tonight was not even being able to TALK about you. I wanted to say, My daddy makes films! My daddy won awards! My daddy is six foot three! My daddy went to Oxford! My daddy can speak five languages! My daddy is really, really clever and really, really interesting! But I couldn’t say anything, I just had to sit there and watch everyone make a big fuss over their daddy, who’s not as great as he thinks he is but everyone acts like he’s just, oh, the greatest man out there.

  And Grace was being all weird. You know, she wore loads of makeup and tight jeans and she was acting all cool like she didn’t want to be there even though it was HER who really wanted to go. And then the minute Leo started paying her some attention she was fine. I feel a bit strange about it all. I don’t know if Leo is a bad person or a good person, I just think Grace is desperate for a dad. She’s over there right now. It’s nearly ten thirty. Mum’s waiting up for her but I needed to come to bed and cry and write this letter to you. This letter that you’ll probably never read. Tyler’s mum came tonight, you know, the one whose sister died in the park when she was fifteen, and I wanted so badly to ask her about what happened. But obviously I couldn’t.

  When are you going to get better and come home?

  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  10

  Adele appraised Leo over the top of her reading glasses. “What took you so long?”

  He pulled off his T-shirt and draped it across the back of a chair.

  “I wasn’t long,” he said.

  “Yes you were,” said Adele. “You’ve been gone for twenty minutes. I even called you, but you left your phone behind.”

  “I just had a cigarette,” he said. “On the terrace.”

  “I looked on the terrace. About five m
inutes ago.”

  “Look, I took Grace home. I chatted to her mum for a few minutes . . .”

  “Did you go in?” This came out more inquisitorially than she’d meant it to.

  “No, I did not go in. We just chatted at the door.”

  “And then?”

  “I came back. I had a cigarette on the terrace. I took some things through to the kitchen. I went for a pee. I checked on the girls. I came into my bedroom to be verbally abused by my wife.”

  Adele frowned at him and then smiled. “Sorry,” she said. “I just didn’t understand where you could be. I looked everywhere.”

  “Well, clearly not, my dear.”

  Adele gazed at Leo for a moment. She watched him unbutton the fly on his trousers, wriggle them down his hips, pull off his cotton boxer shorts, drop them in the linen basket. He was naked now, pulling clean pajama bottoms from a drawer and talking about his father, how he was going to visit him in the morning and maybe one of the girls might like to come with him, it would make the old git happy, but Adele wasn’t really listening. She was reading and rereading a paragraph in Rhea’s memoir. The words were swimming about in front of her eyes, in part because she’d drunk an awful lot of wine tonight, but also because she didn’t quite believe what she was reading.

  “Leo,” she said. “Is it possible that you used to go out with Cecelia and you never told me?”

  He stopped, one leg in his pajamas, one leg out. “What?”

  “Listen.” She pushed her reading glasses back up her nose and began:

  It is the hottest day of the summer and there is more flesh on view in the park than grass. The Howes boys are all topless, flaunting their skinny boy bodies with their griddle chests and hairless stomachs; they tuck their hands down their waistbands and swagger about; they smoke behind trees and listen to loud music on their oversized stereos as though they are fresh from the Bronx. But they are fooling nobody apart perhaps from the Rednough girls, tiny blond things with backcombed hair and hoop earrings who have been hanging about like lost puppies all summer, hoping for some fuss. The younger one, Cecelia, has in recent days been seen wearing a heavy gold chain that apparently belongs to Leo. And earlier today I watched her climb into his lap and hang herself around his neck and he did not seem surprised. And now they are walking together, hand in hand across the lawn, and she looks like the puppy that got the bone and he looks like he’s wondering which girl he’ll go for next.

  She lowered her glasses and stared up at her husband, questioningly.

  “My God,” he said. “I’d forgotten about that. Ha!”

  “What do you mean you’d forgotten about it? How could you forget going out with someone who you’re still friends with?”

  “Oh, God, I mean, it wasn’t really going out. It was kid stuff.”

  “But she wrote this in 1992. You were eighteen! And she was only thirteen!”

  “Well, actually I was still only seventeen.”

  “Only just, Leo!”

  “Del. Nothing happened between us. I just sort of let her hang about with me. She was cute.”

  Adele’s heart hammered in her chest. She’d been expecting Leo to say that Rhea was mistaken: that there’d been nothing going on between him and Cecelia all those years ago. She already knew about his fling with Phoebe that summer, she knew that his younger brother had been going out with her and that at some point, after a row with Patrick, Phoebe had made a beeline for Leo. She knew they’d done some clandestine things in the dark of night. She knew that Leo and Patrick had fallen out about it for a long time after, especially in the wake of Phoebe’s death. She’d always found the whole scenario quite bizarre, something far from her own youthful experiences. But Phoebe had been fifteen. Only a few months short of the age of consent. She’d already slept with Patrick, and she hadn’t, apparently, been a virgin when she slept with Leo. It was wrong, certainly, for an eighteen-year-old to sleep with his little ­brother’s girlfriend, but it wasn’t weird.

  “We didn’t do anything. We just cuddled and stuff.”

  “Cuddled?”

  “Yes. And kissed.”

  “You kissed a thirteen-year-old?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “But that would be like an eighteen-year-old kissing Fern. Do you not see how weird that is?”

  Leo shrugged and pulled on a T-shirt. “Never really thought about it. It was summer. I was young. She was pretty.”

  “Did anyone know?” she asked. “Did anyone know about the two of you?”

  “There was no two of us. It was a week, maybe less, a bit of hand-holding, a snog or two. There was no ‘us.’ ”

  “She was wearing your chain!”

  “Oh, my God.” He groaned. “She asked. I think she’d watched too many American high school movies. So I said yes.”

  “Who else knew about this? Apart from Rhea?”

  Leo pulled back the duvet on his side of the futon and lay down. “My brothers. Obviously. Phoebe. That’s about it. It ­really wasn’t that interesting.”

  “Did your parents know?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Her parents?”

  “Jeez, Del! Can we drop this now?”

  But Adele was suddenly filled with adrenaline. “What did she do when you broke it off?”

  “Cece?”

  “Yes! Cece! Was she upset?”

  “I guess. For about five minutes. And then her sister died, so, you know . . .”

  Adele had met Leo when he was twenty-two. Hard to believe that a mere four years earlier he had been snogging a thirteen-year-old girl. She rolled onto her side, so she wouldn’t have to look at him. “It’s made me feel all discombobulated,” she said.

  Leo groaned. “Oh, come on. You’re not going to sulk about something that happened over twenty years ago, are you?”

  Adele breathed out. She put the manuscript on the floor by the bed. She couldn’t process any of this right now. For a few moments she and Leo lay silently side by side. She listened to the sound of blood pulsing through her eardrums. She felt the warmth of Leo’s skin. She heard cars slowing at the speed bump outside the flat, then quickening again. She heard the dishwasher in the kitchen click and rumble as it neared the end of its cycle. She saw her husband kissing Cecelia.

  “You okay?” said Leo, reaching to touch her arm.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “Good.”

  He reached behind him to turn on the bedside lights and turn off the overhead light. Then he picked up his Kindle and began to read.

  Adele lay wakefully, watching shadows move across the walls.

  Clare lay wakefully, watching shadows move across the walls. Leo had brought Grace home half an hour ago. The girls had all had a wonderful time, he’d said. Fern had taught Grace some basic chords. Willow had made some fudge. They’d had quite a bit. He hoped she didn’t mind. A little bit of sugar’s fine from time to time, isn’t it?

  He’d stood at her back door in the glare of a security light, his face soft and animated, his body relaxed and springy. He was a ball of energy. Like a teenager. She couldn’t help but feel good around him.

  She’d wanted to ask him in, but wasn’t sure if that was a strange thing to do. So instead they’d continued their conversation at the back door until the security light had gone off and they were in sudden darkness and he’d said, “Well, better get back. Adele will be wondering where I got to.”

  She’d locked the door behind him. Drawn the curtains. But his energy had remained, like soft embers in a grate. She’d held it within her, wrapped her own arms around her body to preserve it. It had been a pleasant evening. She felt better about the choices Grace was making, having spent some time with her “alternative family.” Adele was wonderful: warm and vibrant and grounded. Her children were unusual and unconventional. Their flat was lovely. The informal style of the evening had been natural and unforced. But it was Leo who had made the evening for her.

  She heard Grace
in the en suite bathroom, brushing her teeth. She appeared a moment later, scrubbed and fresh. All the makeup was gone. Her hair was tied up into a neat bun. She was wearing loose pink pajamas. She looked at Clare and for a moment Clare couldn’t predict in which direction her mood was blowing. But then Grace smiled and climbed onto Clare’s bed, curled herself up next to her, tucked her face into Clare’s shoulder, minty breath and young scalp. She hooked one leg over Clare’s body and nestled even closer. Clare grasped the arm that Grace had flung across her chest and kissed the crown of her head.

  “Did you have a good time?”

  Grace nodded.

  “So did I.”

  “Good,” said Grace.

  “Not sure what to make of Tyler and her mum, though.”

  She felt Grace’s head move up and down in the crook of her neck. “They’re strange.”

  “Yes,” said Clare. “They are. Edgy.”

  “I know.”

  “Like they’re hiding something.”

  “Exactly.”

  They lay in silence for a moment or two. Then Grace stretched herself away from Clare and leaned down to kiss her on the cheek. “Night, Mumsy.” She rolled herself off the bed and stood in the doorway.

  “Night, baby.”

  “Thank you for coming tonight.”

  “My pleasure,” said Clare, thinking once more of Leo’s dark eyes, his slow smile, his easy manner. “My pleasure.”

  11

  Chris had been released from the psychiatric hospital two weeks ago. The discharge meeting had unanimously decided that he was fit to face the world again and discharged him into the care of an unnamed person. Clare had asked who it was but the hospital told her that Chris had requested that she not be told. She’d spoken to people from their past, the small handful of friends they’d had back in the days when things were normal, but none of them had heard anything from Chris. She’d spoken to his mother in Switzerland, who said she had had a call from him and wired him a large sum of money but that he had not told her where he was staying or with whom.