Part 4. Gretchen

CHAPTER 8

“The river was low today,” Harry said. He slipped in beside me under the duvet, which puffed the scent of an aggressively floral detergent as it settled.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

His hollow in the mattress blended with mine. A tiny bead of birdseed rolled up against my thigh.

“They dredged the Cam. They didn’t find anything,” he explained.

Anything. A body. They hadn’t found a body. “I wouldn’t expect them to.”

“Why? Where is he? A drowning would make as much sense as anything else-”

“It would make no sense whatever. Why are you telling me this?”

He didn’t answer immediately. “I thought you’d want to know.” He opened the book so hard that its spine cracked. I winced. “I thought you’d want to know if he was dead.”

“But you don’t know if he’s dead. You only know he’s not drowned.”

“Yes, he’s not drowned! Good news, I thought.”

“I never thought he was drowned in the first place.”

Was that a sunflower seed? I kicked my legs and brushed at the sheet under my knees.

“What?” he asked.

I threw back the duvet and sat up, legs over the side. There was no explaining it to him. He was inured to the hard little specks all over the house.

He put his hand between my shoulder blades and rubbed.

“Would you please just read the book,” I finally said.

“No.” Both of his hands were on my shoulders now. The book slid off his lap and a corner of it poked me.

“No,” I said too.

He dropped his hands. He slapped the book onto his nightstand.

Oh, for Heaven’s sake. “Don’t pout,” I said.

“I’m going to sleep.”

I brought my legs back up onto the bed. I leaned across to his side. “Please.”

I hadn’t told him why the books mattered. He only knew that one of my avenues of research for the biography had been to track the effect of Linda Paul’s series character, Susan Maud Madison. Homage to her, with her three names, was obvious to spot. I’d written to several women of that name, to find out whether they’d been given it on purpose, and what it was their mothers had wished for them by doing so.

One of those, S. M. Madison, was a writer. Not famous, but reliably mid-list. This was one of S. M. Madison’s books. It wasn’t available in audio.

“Please, Harry,” I said again. I tried to wheedle with my voice, but I’ve never been much good at that.

“Gretchen,” he said, “it’s late.”

“No.” It’s not too late. That’s what I was discovering: It wasn’t too late.

The dust jacket crinkled as he opened it.

He read aloud with a fervour more suited to an undergraduate auditioning for a drama society. It was useless to direct him otherwise. I filtered out his tone and emphases to get at the words, the raw words:

“‘Gloria was swarmed by children: hot, fat, sticky ones, that had been eating with their fingers and clawing into garden soil. They nuzzled at every bend of her body: one in the crook of her arm, another behind the knees, a small neck slipped into the narrow of her waist. She put her fingers through the hair of that one, the one at her hip. They all breathed on her. It was overwhelming. This happened every afternoon, at the end of their trek home from school-’ Good God, that’s unpleasant.”

I tensed. “Please don’t comment.” It wrenched me out of the story.

He sighed.

This is exactly why I’d had to hire a student to work with the photographs.

He read on. A later scene put the protagonist on her front steps, while her neighbour, Gloria, was out.

“‘Lily, the smallest one, came to me when her mother didn’t answer the door. She wanted a drink. I denied having water, which made her laugh. The sound was frail and breathy and high; her fragility terrified me. Where was Gloria? Lily ran off; she grabbed a branch and swung herself up onto it. Where was her mother? I didn’t want to be responsible for this. These small creatures, so fast and so needy. So empty all the time. They consume the adults around them. That’s how they become adults themselves. They eat their parents up.’”

He stopped. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I assured him. “For God’s sake, get on with it!” But I had gripped the duvet tightly in my fists. I let it go and smoothed it out.

I’d already listened to others of her books that were more current. This one was her first. It was the only one of them that had a mother in it, any mother at all.

I suddenly remembered myself as a child, lying half-asleep on a kind of sofa bed, pressed against a warm female body: leftover perfume, a brushed cotton nightgown over free breasts. We were asleep together, and suddenly the light flashed on. It woke me; I can still see very bright light even today. Clicking heels against the wood floor, a vaporous smell of drink. I clambered out from under the smooth sheet and itchy blanket to fling myself at the woman who’d just walked in the door. I reached up as high as I could, so high I felt the beads in her necklace. I was between her and a man. The purse hanging off her wrist was at just the height to bounce hard into my head.

Behind me, the cotton sleeves pulled me back. That’s all I remember, being sucked into a suffocation of warm brushed cotton, under a cool sheet and itchy blanket. The woman in beads with the handbag walked through to the bedroom. I don’t know what happened to the man.

That was Linda Paul, my mother. The woman in the nightgown was my nanny. She raised me. She raised me when she was with Linda, and then she raised me without her.

Nick had discovered that my recently deceased mother wasn’t Linda Paul, and assumed that Linda Paul had never been my mother at all. But I knew, from research, that she had two relatives blind in the same way that I am. I was certain that Linda Paul had given birth to me.

Then she had given me away.

Nick hadn’t realised that’s what he’d shown me. I’d had to make him stop before he got that far himself. There’s a difference between a noise downstairs in the night and someone suddenly standing over your bed. They may amount to the same thing, they may both be the same intruder, but the moment it might be and the moment it undeniably is are different.

I didn’t notice that Nick had gone, truly gone, until the police came to talk to me. I was angry. This wasn’t my fault. What had he done to himself? I told the Inspector that he’d informally assisted with a research project; that was all. That he seemed to be a generally untroubled person. The Inspector asked me if I was worried about him. What kind of question is that? What would my answer matter in the investigation? I didn’t know if I was. Polly and her mother disturbed me more.

Most distracting of all, I knew who S. M. Madison must be. After Linda Paul abandoned me, where did she go? She wouldn’t stop writing, would she? She wouldn’t. That fantasy of sacrifice came from the nanny, a woman who’d never written anything. S. M. Madison had written a book every two years since 1963.

So I’ve known since the day Nick was gone.

I didn’t tell anyone, not even Harry. I didn’t know what he’d do if I did. He might try to protect me. He might close the book permanently. I couldn’t let him do that.

“Harry,” I said, truly begging, “please read it to me.” Unthinkingly, I rested my hand on his forearm. A static charge jolted us both, reminding me how long it had been since I’d touched him. “Please,” I said again. I meant it desperately.

So Harry read on.

In the end, Gloria died. The children moved. I’d made Harry read the entire book, every word, one by one. A review on the back of the jacket congratulated S. M. Madison’s bravery and originality in depicting an alternative to the self-sacrificing mother figure that society has colluded to perpetuate. Suddenly I, one of the first female Fellows at Magdalene and the first blind graduate of my college, was put on the defensive as a party to woman-stifling, antifeminist society. My eagerness to accept the fantasy concocted by the one who raised me, to see myself and the mothering of me as more valuable than anything else she might have done, made me an accomplice. Some feminists think men are the enemy, but I knew myself for what I was. Children are the enemy here. It’s not men who demand a woman’s undivided attention, it’s children. It’s the children who wake her up, and the children who come to her for everything, every little thing. It’s the children who can’t dress themselves or feed themselves or go on without her attention and approval. My anger was tempered into pity for my mother, and guilt. What had I done to her? What had my existence done?