Right at the top of the bookcase there’s a shelf of Ursula’s books. Leaves and tendrils from her drawings decorate the spines. Ursula draws such wonderful plants—extravagant, Italianate—that she sometimes gets letters from fans—Ursula, I would so love to see your garden. But the plot at her Southampton home is a few square yards of decking and a cactus: the enchanted gardens she draws are all from her imagination.I run my finger along the spines, feeling a flicker of envy; it must be good to have achieved something as solid as this whole shelf of books. The one that made all the difference for her is there—the volume of Hans Anderson fairy tales she illustrated.
She wasn’t always successful. She’d been struggling for years, largely living off Paul, her husband, wondering if it was worth it, or whether she should perhaps go back to primary teaching, when she did this book. I remember when she showed it to me—hesitant, self-deprecating—she used to be hesitant then. I could see at once it was special. There was something about these stories that suited her wayward imagination—these white-fleshed girls with their voluptuous deprivations: the mermaid trying to walk on her beautiful legs that cut her, the curve of Gerda’s white throat and the scratch of the robber girl’s knife. Everything was animate, full of sex or threat, every petal, every tree-root; tendrils of ivy clutched like greedy caressing fingers, the flowers had lascivious smiles.
Nothing much happened to start with—she sold the usual few thousand copies; and then it was chosen by children’s BBC, to illustrate a series of fairy tales read by celebrities—and suddenly everyone was buying it. Not just children either, for her books inhabited that sought-after terrain—books for children that adults also enjoy. One drawing was even reproduced in Vogue, in a piece on the New Romantics—the picture of the Little Mermaid that I have in my kitchen, that Molly found so troubling as a little girl. I remember when Ursula visited, just after the arrival of her first fat royalty cheque. She looked different. Still hardly any make-up, and her hair severely tied back, but with a new coat of the softest buttery suede. Though it wasn’t just the money. There was a new certainty about her: she knew what she was for.
My phone rings. It’s Molly.
‘Sweetheart, how are you?’
‘Well…my pimp beat me and then I got raped and I’ve started shooting up.’ She can’t quite suppress a giggle. ‘Fine otherwise.’
‘Tell me what’s happening.’
The Freshers’ Fair was great, she says, she’s joined at least thirty societies. Even the Blonde Society—you don’t have to be blonde, they just go round all the cocktail bars. And can she have a long denim skirt and some shots glasses for Christmas? And thanks for the alarm clock, but she didn’t really need it, she’s using the clock on her mobile.
‘Molly, are you eating OK? Can you manage all right with the cooker?’
‘I don’t cook much really,’ she says. ‘If I miss a meal I have Pringles.’
I question whether Pringles are a satisfactory meal.
Molly sighs extravagantly over the phone.
‘Mum, d’you ever listen to yourself? You been on one of those parenting courses or something? Look,I’m fine, OK? I’ve just joined thirty societies and I’m fine.’
‘Have you got everything you need? D’you want me to send you anything? I could send you some echinacea.’
‘OK, Mum, if you want to…’
‘Are you making plenty of friends? ‘
‘They’re really nice in my corridor. We’re going out for corridor curry tomorrow.’
‘Any men you like the look of? ’ I say tentatively.
‘Just don’t go there, Mum, OK? Anyway, half the guys in my college are gay—that’s why they have such nice trainers. Look, my phone needs recharging,’ she says. ‘I’ve really got to go.’
I finish the room. I box up the books and dust everywhere. I strip the bed and heap up the linen to take to the kitchen to wash.
It’s raining more heavily now: there’s a thick brown light in my kitchen. I make a coffee and sit at my kitchen table. Suddenly, after talking to Molly, I feel ashamed; the things I’ve been thinking astound me. All the desire has left me. I can’t believe I considered getting involved with this man, this stranger: took it seriously, half imagining it would actually happen. My family and their needs are all that seem real to me now: Amber, struggling with school work, needing stability: Molly just starting out, eager but brittle, tense with the newness of everything, joining thirty societies: Greg and the Celtic anthology that he works on with such diligence, for which he has such hopes. How could I have imagined I would put this life at risk?
I make plans. I shall put more energy into my home, my family. I shall get a private tutor to help with Amber’s Maths and one of those French courses she can do on the computer. I shall hold a dinner party; if Greg won’t take me out to dinner, then I shall ask people here: Clem and Max, perhaps—they might get on well together. I shall redecorate my kitchen, which looks so gloomy in this dull brown light. These colours I’ve loved—deep russet red, and the sort of green that has a lot of blue in it—are all too dark, too dreary. I shall paint this room a brisk cheerful colour, cream, or the yellow of marigolds. I shall have a lot of effect in my life.
I sip my coffee, hearing the rain on the gravel, like many people walking outside my window.
My phone rings and I jump. I take it out of my pocket, expecting Molly again.
‘Ginnie, it’s Will.’
My body changes when I hear his voice, something opening out in me.
‘Oh. I mean, I wasn’t expecting you.’
‘It was good to see you,’ he says.
‘Yes, it was good,’ I say.
There are moments when we choose. Maybe this is the moment: here in the silence, waiting, hearing his breathing the other end of the line.
‘Will.’ I hear how my voice is hushed now. ‘Look, I’m at home at the moment, so.’
I leave the rest of the sentence unsaid. In that moment we become conspirators.
‘OK,’ he says evenly. ‘We won’t talk long. I only wanted to ask if you’d like to have lunch some time? There’s a bar in Sheffield Street—it’s a little further from where I work, we shouldn’t be interrupted.’
He says we could meet at twelve-thirty. He tells me how to get there. We both know I have said yes already.
CHAPTER 12
The bar is empty. It has cream walls and big mirrors on the walls with elaborate gilt frames, like in an old-fashioned ballroom. As I walk in I am surrounded by reflections of reflections. There are hanging baskets full of ivies that curl and reach out like hands. The back wall is all glass, wide French windows that look out into the garden, letting in lots of light: but today the light is dull, thick, like in an old photograph. Soon it will rain again.
A barmaid is wiping glasses at a sink behind the bar: she’s young, with sharp, pretty features, her hair tied up with string. There are baguettes in a glass case. I order a whisky and go to sit by the windows on a flimsy bentwood chair. There are only one or two other people drinking here. Outside there’s a wet grey sky and eddies of starlings, and the lawn is covered in drifts of fallen leaves, soaked through and shiny as mahogany, everything fading, sifting down, except in the flowerbed where a random rose still clings to