Greenwich Park(15)

Helen says she is fine but pulls her grey cardigan closer, like a life jacket. Daniel starts to take his jacket off, and I motion him to leave it on.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll fetch you a blanket,’ I tell her. I pull myself up out of the hammock and head to the kitchen. There, after a backward glance at Rory, I slide the laptop out from under the papers on the table where I put it when he came in earlier. Positioning myself so I can’t be seen, I delete the search history. It only takes a second.

I look back at the three of them, through the French doors. From inside the house, the veranda looks like a little raft on a calm, dark sea. Behind the swing seat, the scattered lights of the city blink and flicker, like a civilisation on a faraway shore. Sometimes Greenwich can feel a long way from anywhere.

It was Rory who wanted to live on Maze Hill. Our house is the one with the huge sycamore tree. Rory loves to point out the blue plaque on the house next door, tell people about the famous architect who once lived there. From the way he tells the story, you can tell he wants a plaque like that on our house too, one day, talking about him.

I don’t care about the plaque, but I love the view from the balcony in our top bedroom. You can see the whole city stretched out like a silver platter, the cranes against the metal sky dotted with red lights. The shot-silk sunsets, the leaden shimmer of the Thames. I was up there earlier, trying to take a photograph for Instagram. But I can never get it quite right – the low light makes the sky seem duller, the little lights bleed into one another.

I pick up the cashmere blanket and step outside, closing the doors behind me carefully. I step over Daniel’s legs to reach Helen. He hardly seems to notice. He is eating a handful of pistachios, without much apparent pleasure. He holds them in his lap in one cupped hand, using the other to rub off the shells before transferring them mechanically, one by one, into his mouth, staring expressionless into the distance.

‘At least it’s due to get cooler now,’ Helen is saying. ‘It was so hot in the park the other day, when I was going to meet Rachel, that I had to stop and sit down in the memorial garden. I thought I was going to faint!’

I’m almost as far gone as Helen is, but I just don’t seem to be experiencing the same thing at all – this heaviness she talks about, this loss of energy. I feel charged, fortified by the baby. I love to feel her, sitting firm under my clothes, snug as a weapon. She feels powerful to me, her kicking feet, her racing heart. I feel stronger and stronger, suffused with her energy. She floods me with blood. I can feel myself growing new tissues. I walk and walk, my headphones in. My libido is high. I can feel my small breasts are swelling, my hair thickening. The muscles in my legs growing hard and firm.

Helen and Daniel live at the bottom of the park, in the house she and Rory grew up in. That was the deal, when their parents died: the company went to Rory, Helen got the house, and Charlie retains a small slice of each, and got the rest of his inheritance in cash – cash that, word has it, he has mostly squandered.

When people admire Helen’s house, as they often do, Helen always tells them that Daniel only married her so he could get his grubby architect’s hands on it. She is joking, of course. She always squeezes his hand as she says it, I have noticed, and he always smiles, fondly, back at her. And yet, I have sometimes wondered whether there is a scratchy little grain of truth in there, somewhere. Not much, but enough to make Helen’s little joke not very funny.

‘It was packed in the park when I was there the other day, with Rachel,’ Helen is saying now. Rachel has been mentioned twice now. I haven’t heard her mention a Rachel before, and the statement feels designed to entice me to ask who she is, but somehow, I can’t bring myself to bite. Helen tries another line of attack.

‘It always gets me thinking of summers in Cambridge, when the park is full like that,’ she says. ‘You know, all the picnics everywhere. Everyone sitting on the grass.’



‘I thought the grass was all dead,’ Rory mutters.

‘Not all of it,’ Helen mumbles, stung by the sharpness in his tone.

We left Cambridge ten years ago. Yet Helen seems to lean on the memory of those summer days like a crutch. I don’t know why she must talk about it so endlessly, why it seems to matter so much more to her than it does to us.

‘God, it doesn’t feel like ten years ago, does it?’ Helen sighs wistfully. She prods at her brother. ‘Do you remember the time you stole that punt?’

Rory throws a final log into the fire pit then hauls himself up, brushing his hands on his jeans.

‘Borrowed,’ he corrects. ‘And I think you’ll find Daniel here was my accomplice.’ Rory slaps Daniel on the shoulder as he passes to sit back in his seat. Daniel’s blank expression is unchanged.

‘I don’t remember,’ Daniel says, after a pause, throwing the last of his nutshells into the bowl. ‘We went punting loads of times.’ The fire crackles in the silence.

I study Daniel’s face. This is an odd thing to say. It’s not unusual for Helen to remember things that some of us don’t. All kinds of flotsam seem to live in her memory. She embroiders things a bit sometimes, too, adding all sorts of pretty details that weren’t there before. But Daniel remembers that day, I’m sure of it. It had been like one of those perfect summer days – so perfect that you can’t be sure whether you trust your own memory, or whether you’ve mixed it up with a photo, or a film, and made the colours more brilliant than they really were.