Desire Line (38 page)

Josh followed her direction. ‘A buoy?'

‘A buoy wouldn't move. Wouldn't blink either. That… person has come
along
parallel to us.' She jumped to her feet but the swimmer was so far out, a new position offered no better information. ‘Buoys are fixed.'

Grudgingly, a hand above furrowed brows, he said, ‘Just seems to be treading water— if it's a swimmer.'

‘Perhaps in trouble?' She could make out an erratic motion of both head and neck now. This was not someone at ease, this was distress. They were witnessing a desperate bid to stay afloat. And how cold would it be today, out there, every wave threatening to fill the mouth, the arms and legs of ice and near useless, the beach never getting any closer? Some other perverse current was taking this person out, keeping him or her back from where she and Josh stood safely deliberating. And then Josh laughed and he stooped to slip an arm around her shoulders with a reflex he would surely have quelled if stronger feelings were not in charge. ‘You know what that is?' he said, grinning. ‘That's a seal!'

The ‘swimmer' seemed to raise an elongated face to the sky, in despair, it could almost be despair as though the battle was too much… he, she was about to surrender. And then the gleaming dome of the skull slid under and was gone. ‘Are you
absolutely
certain? Someone could be drowning—'

‘It's a seal,' he said.

‘A seal. Are they common?'

‘No.'

‘So why—?'

‘Wait.' He refused to take his eyes from the piece of sea he had set watch on.

‘But there aren't any! You said so. It's more likely to be a—'

‘There!'

For a second she failed to locate it, the distance moved coming as a shock: eastwards, very markedly.

‘It's moving away from the town.'

‘Yes…
yes
.'

‘But when it gets to a quiet stretch, it'll follow the tide right in… after fish.'

Just a seal, then. The arched cranium became inhuman and recognisable. ‘But have you seen one before? Here, I mean.' she persisted.

‘Only once. I'd be six or seven. She— Mam, brought me and our Rosie down after school. There was a seal fishing off the Point that day. We watched it half an hour… or it seemed that long to a kid.'

‘And you remember.'

His arm still encircled her shoulders, but she was forgotten. Childhood lit up his face. ‘Christ— that's getting on for forty years back.' And then he seemed to recognise the woman he held. When he detached himself it was to brush the backs of jacket and jeans and to initiate their return. ‘I'll probably be dead before I see another,' he said.

Josh was easy. Cruise Control offered a hundred sightings of him through the second half of 2008, a dozen for November. One afternoon he can be seen hammering on the door of a house not far from the Westminster Hotel which gives me a stupid thrill for no reason. Anyway the lack of response from inside makes him saunter out of shot talking into his phone. Late one night he carries off a drunk, dripping,
living
wife. And on 16
th
– an afternoon Sara described – he took some exercise on the beach. Or I assume he did. The camera has just a slim chance and almost misses him. Obstacles are everywhere, too many people and vehicles, a massive kite with a child's legs from under it. Like an idiot you expand the image and get madder still when the van or the clot of broad bodies expands with it. But Josh's face and shoulders are just visible as the rest of him follows ‘the first set of steps down'. I try to hang on to him. Fail. And again.

For a second, no, more like a fraction. Maybe it's for those three frames the old

movie makers found the eye likes to run on. Enough to persuade me Josh is speaking. To
her.
It has to be. He's let Sara go ahead of him as she would expect, putting her first but too low down on the steps. For me. And they're intending now to have a walk and talk. They're going to mistake a seal for a drowning swimmer and be easy with each other for the last time.

I ought to leave. Apart from on that first occasion, shocked by my appearing from nowhere, Josh has told me no such thing though he wishes it.
He's more charitable than I deserve.
I should go home
; in what seems another age, Nora Meredith will have wrestled with the same conclusion and thought, back to the farm for me… She disapproved of Josh's choice as vehemently as Daddy ever did, old snobs both. Hence my failure to research her teenage spree while the opportunity existed.

But Eurwen has accomplished it for us both, it seems.

The longing for Eurwen intensifies in a way I could never have imagined. Deliberate hurt is its theme… and these are the incidents memory keeps choosing to convey her with. The view I take: a fellow student at Eurwen's school used to cut herself and one day, waiting outside for my dilatory daughter, here comes the self-victim, small, trembling, a faun in school colours being hustled into a car by a stricken parent. The blood that taints the girl's white shirt also runs freely across the back of one little hand but it's Eurwen's expression that is the more vivid now: disgust. ‘Is she a friend?' I ask.

‘Her? No, of course she isn't!'

‘Poor creature.'

‘Don't think so.'

Other, skilfully selected scenes round her out, this semi-stranger, this changeling: they pave the way for June and the day of her history exam. ‘You're not dressed, Eurwen.'

‘Neither are you.'

‘But Mrs Fortun won't be picking me up in fifteen minutes.'

Her lazy expression was turned, very slowly, in my direction. That slight push of the full lower lip preceded, ‘Nor me.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘No point, Mum. May as well go in for the afternoon. Or not bother.'

‘What?'

‘Haven't done the work. Not even the course work. You know I can't stand it. A total snooze.' And she giggled, inviting me to join in.

‘Get dressed! However badly you do, you must go and try.'

‘No.'

‘Eurwen! I won't have you give up school and… and all the opportunities that go with it. I want you out of this house. By the time I come down. Out.'

Did we explore other possibilities, the results of one course of action as opposed to another? I seem to remember we did. I am almost certain I stayed calm in the face of unreason, pettishness, rudeness of a type only a mother feels she must accept.

I experience again the breathlessness that overtook me when she called me a particular word.

‘You have five minutes to make yourself presentable. We'll talk when you come home,' I said.

‘Fine.'

On the stairs, my heart is pounding well before I reach the top and I sit on the huge French bed I once shared and drink just a single, out of a tooth-mug. The door below has banged. I shower, have another drink, still modestly sized. I seek out clothes but find I am sitting again. Time passes. The final drink provides three things to juggle with, an empty bottle, the mug, the top off the bottle which falls and rolls under the bed never to be recovered… Mrs Ali is so slipshod these days. At six the phone rings. Eurwen has arrived in Rhyl. This begins, whatever this is. I have a word for it: the interregnum.

Of course wanting Eurwen home is the main requirement… but Fleur, Fleur I need you desperately. Unruffled Fleur, no one ever looked less flower-like. Eurwen, now, she brings on a mood that deepens from frustration, to agony to… why not admit it? A sort of ferocity. I want her this moment, safe, so I can scream ‘I love you more than anything, more than Josh even because I lost him and I had you and I was still alive!' Then my anger fizzles out as though already enacted and exorcised and I say, ‘It was a history exam. The world doesn't end with a history exam.' And I hold her and shake her until finally something comes into those eyes that I can recognise. I would be content with that. But ‘Books, books, books,' as the poet says and, ‘Your life's all shattered into smithereens' takes over somehow, repeating itself until I think I'll go insane.

Monday's child is fair of face. I often think fair of face
and
full of grace, Eurwen. She is both. Not even certain I wanted a child, I let Josh's unquestioning, simplistic (I have said it) enthusiasm sweep me along and for a time the future was as promised. The husband, my work at its pinnacle, the child. She never cried, this genial self-sufficient baby… but no, even further back, was an easy, cycle-riding, proof-reading pregnancy that culminated in… Fair and Grace.

Once (she was walking now) I attempted to chivvy her along St Giles to where Fleur waited. Eurwen refused my chosen direction. Her fragile legs sped her away without a trace of wobble or indecision and, being in a hurry, I swept her up. And a woman who had that moment stepped out of Balliol, I think, a rather aggressive-looking woman, a positive Madame Defarge in full sub fusc, paused and said, ‘She is ridiculously beautiful.' We stared at each for the briefest instant in our separate progress, I realising that this woman was the more surprised by an observation ripped from her.

I should never have had a child.

Instead of grown Eurwen, all my mind fastens on today is the lovely girl who played young Thomasina in the Tom Swift film. Her slight asymmetry of features was captured by the camera but never punished; just out of RADA when she landed the part, she passed easily for sixteen. We had tea at the Randolph. She was very shy of me and strange, surrounded by all the hotel stuffiness, ordering cake which she cancelled immediately as though caught out in some way by her choice… disappointingly not quite tall enough but then film is the least truthful medium. Virginia Madsen, was it? …no, not her. She was the Hollywood actress, already famous, stunning, who played the mature Thomasina. Having had absolutely no hand in the writing of the screenplay, my annoyance was uncontained. ‘An American! How on earth can it work?' I asked my editor and old friend from Pythian.

‘Don't rush to judge. The film needs a name. Look at all those Austens, full of Americans. They train them with voice coaching. You'd never guess.'

‘I would, I think.'

‘Don't decide to hate it, Sara. Anyway, the rights are sold. You may as well just lie back and enjoy.'

Excellent advice since Virginia Madsen proved ideal: poised, quick, elegant and with just a tinge of Wiltshire about the vowels… which reminds me of Virginia Woolf and how welcome those slips of diphthongs would have been to her. How vindicating upon the Nawabess of Bloomsbury's ear.

No image of Thomasina has ever been authenticated; the pastel sketch that once hung in Heystrete's Yellow Room long discredited. So, in visualising the face of the actress who played the young Thomasina, I'm not capable of recalling a name. Virginia Madsen's is available but not her image. Smithereens. And I have lost the sight, the sound and almost the touch of my real daughter so I run my fingers over the silk scarf again and again as though it comes warm from her throat. I prick my finger on a sharp detail of broken jewellery before it drops into the envelope. And I raise a glass to her. Today is your birthday, darling Eurwen!

Chapter 27

Seen it all and read it all— I thought. Like a fool I re-checked Glenn's gift but the phone rang in an empty house at every search of the Parades, Blue Bridge to Splash Point, doubling back to the town centre. What happened to Sara at the last wasn't there to be found and I came out of my lost weekend unrelieved. From her own hand, Sara was clear-headed and more or less sober (she does say
a
glass) on the day she went missing and there's no sign of my grandfather after he drives away at eight a.m. He returned to Avondale late evening according to the reports— Charity Weiksner repeated them as verified— to no Sara. Of course Josh had kept
the stuff
, moved it with him from home to home and passed it on to his grandson, knowing the small part he was playing that day, just a couple of mentions while Eurwen runs riot through the end pages. Thomasina Swift gets twice his allocation. Josh was an innocent man or at least not a guilty one, a good result resting on fact. A good man. Once the chase is over and I'm not in pursuit mode, I come to my senses. Every vestige of Sara in my possession has been someone else's first and examined, taken apart and put together by Josh. Or by Geoffrey or agents of Geoffrey which meant time and resources on free issue and an unslackening will. No one who'd met Emeritus Professor Severing could escape the power of
that
. Yet Sara had slipped away from the two huge male figures that overshadowed my life and on Eurwen's sixteenth birthday she'd abandoned her father's indulgence of a car outside her husband's house. And walked off along her own path.

Back in my office on a filthy soaking Monday, Glenn Hughes is wearing a polychrome sweatshirt so harsh on the eyes the pattern actually strobed. But my quick nod is well below his due. He followed me to my workstation, he leaned in front of my screen looking super alert— and intimidating with the bobbing apple throat and that ask-me-anything expression. Why, when I'd first been put in post, didn't I established the proper relationship with Glenn?