Into the Water(79)

When Tracey told me where the house was, where I would have to go, I felt moved. I felt guilty. I felt the way I had when I thought about my mother’s promise of a birthday treat, the one I’d rejected in favour of the Tower of London. If I hadn’t been so ungrateful, if I’d said I wanted to go with her to the beach, to the castle, would she have stayed? Would things have turned out differently?

That never-to-be-taken trip was one of many subjects that occupied me after my mother died, when my whole being was consumed with constructing a new world, an alternate reality in which she did not have to die. If we had taken the trip to Craster, if I had cleaned my room when I was told, if I hadn’t muddied my new school satchel when I went swimming downriver, if I’d listened to my father and hadn’t disobeyed him so often. Or, later, I wondered whether perhaps I shouldn’t have listened to my father, perhaps I should have disobeyed him, perhaps I should have stayed up late that night instead of going to bed. Perhaps then I might have been able to persuade her not to go.

None of my alternative scenarios did the trick, and eventually, some years later, I came to understand that there was nothing I could have done. What my mother wanted was not for me to do something, it was for someone else to do something – or not do something: what she wanted was for the man she loved, the man she met in secret, the man with whom she’d been betraying my father, not to leave her. This man was unseen, unnamed. He was a phantom, our phantom – mine and my father’s. He gave us the why, he gave us some measure of relief: it wasn’t our fault. (It was his, or it was hers, theirs together, my traitorous mother and her lover. We couldn’t have done any better, she just didn’t love us enough.) He gave us a way to get up in the morning, a way to go on.

And then Nel came along.

When she first came to the house, she asked for my father. She wanted to talk to him about my mother’s death. He wasn’t there that day and neither was I, so she spoke to Helen, who gave her short shrift. Not only will Patrick not speak to you, Helen told her, but he won’t appreciate the intrusion. Nor will Sean, nor any of us. It is private, Helen said, and it is past.

Nel ignored her and approached Dad anyway. His reaction intrigued her. He wasn’t angry, as she might have expected him to be; he didn’t tell her it was too painful to talk about, that he couldn’t bear to go over all that again. He said there was nothing to talk about. Nothing happened. That’s what he said to her. Nothing happened.

So, finally, she came to me. It was the middle of summer. I’d had a meeting at the station in Beckford and when I came out I found her leaning against my car. She was wearing a dress so long it swept the floor, leather sandals on suntanned feet, bright-blue polish on her toes. I’d seen her around before then, I’d noticed her – she was beautiful, hard not to notice. But I’d never until then seen her up close. I’d never realized how green her eyes were, how they gave her this look of otherness. Like she was not quite of this world, certainly not of this place. She was too exotic by half.

She told me what my father had said to her, that nothing happened, and she asked me, ‘Is that how you feel, too?’ I told her he didn’t mean that, he didn’t really mean nothing happened. He just meant that we don’t talk about it, that it was behind us. We’d put it behind us.

‘Well, of course you have,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘And I understand, but I’m working on this project, you see, a book, and maybe an exhibition, too, and I—’

‘No,’ I told her. ‘I mean, I know what you’re doing but I – we – can’t be a part of all that. It’s shameful.’

She drew back slightly, but her smile remained. ‘Shameful? What an odd word to use. What is it that’s shameful?’

‘It’s shameful to us,’ I said. ‘To him.’ (To us or to him, I don’t remember which of these I said.)

‘Oh.’ The smile fell from her face then, she looked troubled, concerned. ‘No. It’s not … no. It’s not shameful. I don’t think anyone thinks like that any longer, do they?’

‘He does.’

‘Please,’ she said, ‘won’t you talk to me?’

I think I must have turned away from her, because she put her hand on my arm. I looked down and I saw the silver rings on her fingers and the bracelet on her arm and the chipped blue polish on her fingers. ‘Please, Mr Townsend. Sean. I’ve wanted to talk to you about this for such a long time.’

She was smiling again. Her way of addressing me, direct and intimate, made it impossible for me to refuse her. I knew then that I was in trouble, that she was trouble, the sort of trouble I’d been waiting for my whole adult life.

I agreed to tell her what I remembered about the night of my mother’s death. I said I would meet her at her home, at the Mill House. I asked her to keep this meeting private, because it would upset my father, it would upset my wife. She flinched at wife, and smiled again, and we both knew then where it was going. The first time I went to talk to her we didn’t talk at all.

So I had to go back. I kept going back to her and we kept not talking. I would spend an hour with her, or two, but when I left her it felt as though it had been days. I worried sometimes that I had drifted and lost time. I do that, occasionally. My father calls it absenting myself, as though it’s something I do on purpose, something I can control, but it isn’t. I’ve always done it, ever since childhood: one moment I’m there, and then I’m not. I don’t mean for it to happen. Sometimes, when I’ve drifted away, I become aware of it, and sometimes I can bring myself back – I taught myself a long time ago: I touch the scar on my wrist. It usually works. Not always.