Flora had pulled her hand from her father’s. “They’re wrong, Daddy,” she said.
“It’s difficult to live with both hope and grief.” He spoke to her in the adult way he always had. “To keep imagining that we might come home one day and she’ll be waiting for us on the veranda, and at the same time living with the idea that she’s dead. A balancing act. It’s OK if you believe your mother’s gone; you can tell me and no one will blame you.”
“Do you do the balancing act?” Flora asked.
“I do,” her father said.
“Then I will, too.”
Gil had taken her hand again and squeezed it.
It was the thought that Nan might have brought her father back early and that her mother could be at home that kept Flora walking up the chine, her bare feet knowing the way even in the dark, but when she reached the lane the idea that Ingrid might be around the corner made her hesitate. For years she had practised what she would say to her mother when she saw her again. There were plenty of choices—“Where have you been?” “How could you leave us?”—but mostly she came back to “Why?” Flora wasn’t certain she wanted to go on, and yet she found herself running along the short stretch of tarmac, clasping the suitcase to her front, and holding her breath when she reached the drive. But as soon as she came around the corner she saw there were no cars beside the house, not even Nan’s, and there were no lights on. There were just the silhouettes of the unrestrained bushes and trees in the neglected garden, and the low shape of the house.
Flora’s feet also recognised the three steps up to the veranda—the depth of each tread, where the wood was smooth, how the top step was never quite as high as expected. Her right hand reached out to the square pillar and beside it the railing; even in the dark her fingers knowing the heart-shaped chip in the paint; touching it for luck. Two paces took her to the front door. She put down her shoes and suitcase and fumbled inside her satchel for her keys. She put the key in the lock but it wouldn’t turn. She tried the handle and the door opened.
Inside, the house smelled the same as always: old books, damp in the bathroom, fried eggs; home was the colour of toasted fennel seeds—a warm, speckled brown.
“Hello?” Flora whispered into the unlit hall. “Daddy? Nan?” She stretched a hand forwards and called out, “Mum?” The house was silent. She flicked the light switch and the overhead bulb came on.
“My God,” she said.
Chapter 8
THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 5TH JUNE 1992, 4:20 AM
Dear Gil,
Yesterday afternoon I decided to do some clearing. I went through the wardrobes and the chest of drawers in the girls’ room to collect clothes they’d outgrown. On Flora’s side, I found your old dressing gown, a formal shirt you’d spilled red wine over, which I thought had been thrown away, and that pair of reading glasses that went missing about a year ago. When Flora came in and saw me, she clutched the things to her, saying I was throwing away her “hair-looms.” We fought and I slapped her calf hard enough to leave the red print of my fingers on her skin. She didn’t cry; instead her face became stony, an expression I recognised in myself, and she strode outside. I was the one who ran to my room and wept into my pillow. Later, I turned out that suitcase of old papers kept under the bed. I was meant to be sorting, but each out-of-date passport, hand-drawn Mother’s Day card, and photo delayed me. They gave an impression of the perfect family: picnics on the beach, children digging in their flower patch, doting parents—like a photograph album flicked through by a distant relative, oohing and aahing at the happy times without knowing about the hundreds of pictures that had been discarded.
And then, at the bottom of the suitcase, your letter.
I sat on the floor with everything spread around me and imagined you all those years ago in your writing room at the end of the scrubby, gorse-filled field you called the garden, bashing out the letter on your typewriter. You might have been wearing those old shorts you loved so much and flip-flops with sand between your toes, and your hair standing stiff from the salt water after a swim. I reread the letter and felt again the presumptuousness that you could write about love when we hadn’t declared it, the absurdity of mapping out our whole lives when we’d only just met, the shock of you mentioning ageing when I wasn’t ever going to grow old, and laughing at how wrong you were about children. And I remembered too my secret pleasure that you’d chosen me. I was twenty then, a different woman from the one I am now.
I read that letter so many times, wondering what you hoped your reader’s reaction would be. Rereading it yesterday made me cry for when we were starting out, before I’d come to this house, and because nothing turned out like you said it would. Well, maybe one thing—perhaps I shouldn’t have laughed so readily at the idea of children.
Flora came in while I was sitting on the floor.