Greenwich Park(22)

I watch her cross the park, keeping my eyes on her slim outline as she walks past the playground, where schoolchildren in brand-new uniforms are dropping reading folders as they race towards the swings.

‘She seems nice,’ Katie says.

I cringe. ‘She’s a bit full-on. I’m sorry. I didn’t know she would be here. Obviously.’

‘It’s fine. It was nice to meet her.’

Both Katie and I are still staring after her, as her figure disappears into the park. For some reason, I feel I want to be sure she is really gone.





HELEN





In the end, I stop trying to arrange to meet my work friends. After one lunch is cancelled at the last minute, then another, I get the message. People are busy, too busy for me, anyway. I’ve already been forgotten.

My appointments are more frequent now, my blood pressure causing concern. Midwives bend to check my ankles for signs of swelling, ask frowning questions about dizziness, shortness of breath. On the way home, I feel the anxiety ebb away a little. Then, day by day, it edges up, and up, until the next time.

I find myself stretching out mundane activities into hours, sometimes whole afternoons, in order to fill up my time, try to take my mind off the baby, off the endless nag of doubt. If the sky is clear, the sun shining, I might go out into the garden and peg sheets to the washing line, radio on, trying to ignore the drilling, the builders traipsing through the kitchen. Some days, if the noise is bad, I walk across the park just so I can sit in a cafe, read my book, have a cup of tea in peace, and walk back again. I take time preparing elaborate evening meals, chopping vegetables into neat multicoloured piles.

Today rain is hammering at the rooftops, staining the slate tiles a dark, slippery grey. I decide to spend the morning tidying the upstairs of the house, the parts the builders aren’t attacking – an attempt, I suppose, to re-establish some vague sense of order, of control. I tackle the wardrobes first, bagging up old clothes in bin liners to take to the charity shop to make space for the baby. Then I start to sort through drawers and cupboards. I am starting to quite enjoy tasks like this, the hypnotic nature of them. I sit on the bedroom rug, a mug of camomile tea at my side, listening to Woman’s Hour on the radio, an old box from the top of Daniel’s wardrobe wedged between my knees, the sound of the rain lashing at the window glass.

At first I think it’s just a box of Daniel’s old university stuff – course notes, essays, architecture textbooks – most of that can go in the bin, I think. I linger over the pages, trace my finger over his notes in the handwriting I know as well as my own. The rows and rows of words in blue fountain pen, the only thing his father ever gave him. I smile as I remember how, when we were at university, he always had a smudgy tideline of blue fountain pen ink from his little finger to the heel of his palm.

I remember the first time I climbed the winding staircase up to Daniel’s room, a tiny attic overlooking King’s Parade. Knocked, shyly, tried to sound casual as I asked if he wanted to come to the bar. How he looked up from his textbook, the evening light from the window on his face, and pushed his glasses up his nose and smiled, as if it was the first time he had ever seen me. As if he knew what I was really asking. And he said, ‘Sure,’ and I remember how it made me catch my breath, how easy it had been, after all that time.

I try to think back to those days, two students in an attic room. How I used to watch him sleep, just to drink him in, like a drug. His breath going up and down in his chest. His curled hand resting on the pillow. Are we really the same two people? Is it possible to be? I think of how we used to laugh, at everything. How we used to talk until the early hours. How we used to touch each other, even when there was no need to, just because of the way it felt. It used to make me gasp to look at him, the lines of his eyebrows, the hardness of his body, the smile that came only when he really meant it. I mean, I still love him. We love each other. But sometimes I struggle to remember when we last touched just for the sake of touching. When I last looked at him, when we last really looked at each other. Is that normal? I wonder. Or is it not?

Under the essays, I find a load of documents to do with the inquest. There’s even a copy of Mummy and Daddy’s will. I wonder how all that got into his university stuff? I sort the papers into piles quickly, trying not to look too closely at anything, to think about the nightmare of all that – the will, the probate, the life insurance, the endless paperwork that felt like it was going to consume us all forever.

Shoved down one side, though, I find something else. An old photograph of me, Serena, Rory and Daniel at Cambridge. Serena is in the centre. She is wearing a scarlet-hooded cape, hair tumbling down one side. I recognise it immediately – it is the outfit she wore in our college play, in which Serena had the leading role. The play had been odd – a surrealist retelling of some old fairy tales. Serena had gone in for all this am-dram stuff at university. I’d never really understood it. She’d even talked the boys into taking part. Both of them are in costume, too – costumes I helped to make: Daniel in his tall, pointed wolf ears, Rory with a tinfoil axe swinging from his hip. He’d been the woodcutter – the hero. And then there’s me, leaning in from the sidelines, the only one without a speaking part.



I pick up the photograph carefully. It is lined with deep creases, as if it’s been screwed up into a ball, and then flattened out again. In fact, when I turn it over, I see that is has actually been torn up, then stuck painstakingly back together. On the back, there are four oily pale blue marks, one in each corner. And it’s this that makes me realise where it is from. It must be the photo I ripped from the wall at Serena’s hen weekend. How on earth did it get here?