Eleanor sometimes thought she might have found a way to live with her illness, if it hadn’t been for Rosie and Isobel. She’d long since given up on the idea of doing anything properly or well – her health was just something else, like the dishwasher or the bin lid, which would never work properly and never get fixed. And she had nearly got used to it – the way every day felt suppressed, not quite right, not quite there. And while there were times when she thought, This is intolerable, I cannot do this, there were days when she calibrated things perfectly: spent enough time out of the house, vomited neatly, distracted herself, talked over the headache. It was almost satisfying.
She could manage what the house was doing to her, but she couldn’t bear the thought of it doing something to Rosie. She was still biting and kicking and pinching, and Eleanor wondered when something stopped being a phase and just became character. Rosie still woke up in the night, howling and shaking. Once, she got out of bed and ran to the window, pummelling the glass until Eleanor pulled her away, terrified it would shatter and hurt her. In the mornings, she tried to ask Rosie, tentatively, trying not to scare her, if she remembered getting up in the night, if she’d had a nightmare, if she’d seen anything in the room. Rosie had no idea what she was talking about.
In the last few weeks, Rosie had invented an imaginary friend, who she called ‘Girl’ or ‘Little Girl’. Eleanor had consulted the books and the internet and again, it was perfectly normal behaviour. She was company for Rosie and occasionally Rosie would use Girl as a foil, blaming anything naughty she did on her. But sometimes, Rosie was so convincing, Eleanor found herself believing there was another person in the house. She came to half believe in Girl, resenting her when Rosie said Girl had stolen Isobel’s toy or thrown her food on the floor. She noticed that Girl never followed them outside the house, that Rosie never spoke to her in the car or in the shops. She tried not to think about it.
*
On Saturday, Eleanor spent the day preparing for Richard’s parents. Her head raged and her stomach grew increasingly unsettled. She’d hoped to get out, even just for half an hour or so, but Richard was already tense and she knew it would make things worse if she tried to leave.
She put Rosie and Isobel to bed, praying they would go to sleep before Hugh and Lorna arrived. She couldn’t countenance the idea of Rosie having a night terror if Richard’s parents were there; how exposing it would be. She finished the story and put the book down.
‘OK, time to go to sleep now, Rosie.’
‘Is it nursery tomorrow?’
‘No, tomorrow’s Sunday. Tomorrow you’re going swimming with Daddy.’
‘No, I’m not, Girl says I’m not allowed. I’m going to stay here and play with her.’
‘Well, we’ll see, OK? But it’s time to go to sleep now.’
‘I can’t sleep.’
‘You haven’t tried, darling.’
‘Girl keeps me awake.’
‘Well, she shouldn’t!’ Eleanor said, immediately regretting how panicked she sounded. She put her hand on the duvet and tried to speak more calmly. ‘Girl’s going to sleep now too, Rosie. Come on, you can both go to sleep together.’
Rosie pointed at the ceiling. ‘That’s where Little Girl sleeps,’ she said. ‘She lives upstairs.’
‘No, she doesn’t!’ Eleanor said, pulling her hand away from the bedcover. Genuine hurt crossed Rosie’s face.
‘Sorry, Rosie, sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to snap.’ She stroked Rosie’s hair and tried to stop her hand trembling.
She was still rattled when Lorna and Hugh arrived. Lorna had only got more imposing with age; her hair was a perfect, even silver now and she wore it in a thick crop. Her skin creased beautifully, as though it was intended to, like textured silk, and even the deep hollows in her neck formed a refined landscape. Hugh got rounder and redder every time she saw him and showed no signs of minding. She sometimes wondered if they still had sex – it seemed almost physically impossible – and whether Lorna had sex with anyone else, and then stopped herself. They embraced her formally, as they always did, and she took their coats upstairs, while Richard showed them into the living room. As she walked past the bathroom, she wondered if she ought to make herself sick now, to get it out of the way, so she could have a brief period of relief before they ate. She wasn’t sure if she could do it without anyone hearing, but she didn’t know if she would be able to stomach the meal if she didn’t.
‘How’s Jessica?’ Richard was saying as she came back in.
‘Bloody miles away,’ Hugh said. ‘You’d have thought you two could have worked it out so we didn’t have to spend over an hour on the tube every time we come.’
‘It’s just beastly. I don’t know how you can live in London,’ Lorna said.
‘Crazy place,’ Hugh confirmed. He looked around. ‘Not much point in having a four-bedroom house if we can’t stay with you, is there.’
Eleanor smiled. ‘We just haven’t had time to do up the spare room, I’m afraid. But when we do . . .’
‘Hugh, darling, I think this house is in need of rather more pressing things than a spare room, don’t you?’ Lorna cast her eye over the room. It was unchanged, apart from five small squares of paint on the living-room walls. Richard wanted them to live with the colours for a while before choosing one. ‘I suppose you’re no further on with the basement?’
They talked more about the amount of work they needed to do on the house, how much it would cost, how long it would take, how they could possibly manage to save while they lived in London, whether they would have to move out when the major work was taking place, where on earth they would move to, whether that would unsettle the children. Eleanor could feel Richard getting tighter and tenser, while she tried to suppress quick, sudden surges of nausea.
When it was time to eat, Eleanor led them through into the kitchen. It was still as a showroom and the table was laid. She’d prepared everything during the day, compulsively tidying as she went along. The last time she had cooked in front of Richard’s parents, Lorna had come up behind her, looked in the pan and said, ‘Gosh, how interesting.’
‘I don’t know how you do it, Eleanor,’ Lorna said. ‘Putting all this on when you’ve been working all week.’
‘Well, I’m part-time.’
‘Oh, four days a week isn’t part-time!’
‘You worked too, Mum,’ Richard said.
‘Not when you were as little as this! I had ten years at home and I wouldn’t have given it up for anything. Of course, I was terribly lucky – I know some mothers don’t have a choice.’
‘Perhaps if you worked full-time, Richard, Eleanor wouldn’t need to work,’ Hugh said. ‘And perhaps you wouldn’t need to have a lodger. I don’t see how this Master’s of yours is going to pay the bills.’
Eleanor hated the way Richard was demolished by his parents; she wished he would fight back. Instead, he turned away from them and muttered sulkily, ‘Yes, I’m sure Simon Schama has a lot of trouble paying his bills.’
‘Oh well, if you’re going to be Simon Schama . . . !’ Lorna hooted. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’
They ate the meal Eleanor cooked, goodwill draining out of the room. Just as she’d got up to clear the plates, Isobel woke up and tinny howling came through the baby monitor. As Eleanor ran up the stairs, she remembered how naively delighted she was when she’d first heard Rosie cry: light and delicate little squalls, barely more than exclaiming. In the first few weeks, she was easily soothed and Eleanor wondered, privately, why people complained. It was only as Rosie got bigger and her capacity grew that the crying turned to bellowing and became distressing, debilitating, and suddenly she understood what people meant when they said it could fray your nerves to the point of destruction.
The noise Isobel was making was painful. Eleanor picked her up and she wrenched away. Eleanor felt her grip loosen. She knew, rationally, that all babies cried, and yet it still felt personal. Why are you doing this to me? What have I done? She took Isobel into their bedroom, while she struggled and bawled. Eleanor rocked and soothed, conscious that every minute away from the table revealed her incompetence. Eventually Richard appeared; they spoke in tense, low voices.
‘Bring her down – that sometimes works.’
‘I can’t, not when she’s like this.’
‘It’ll look stranger if you stay up here all night. And we don’t want Rosie to wake up properly.’
‘Could I take her to your study?’ Eleanor said weakly, although she knew that there would be nothing bleaker than being alone with a crying baby on the top floor of the house.
‘Come on, just bring her down. It’ll be OK.’
‘Ah, my delightful granddaughter!’ Hugh said, when she appeared with Isobel roaring. ‘This isn’t very ladylike behaviour, Isobel.’
‘Oh poor child, she’s clearly overtired,’ Lorna said. ‘Give her to me.’
Eleanor handed her over. She felt a mixture of satisfaction and embarrassment as Isobel howled in Lorna’s arms, pressing her little hands into her neck.
‘Of course, we would never have brought children to the table when they were this young, would we,’ Hugh said. ‘We kept that sort of thing private. I don’t agree with all this modern parenting, nappy-changing on the sofa, breastfeeding in public.’
Eleanor took Isobel back from Lorna. She screamed even louder. ‘Ah, the mother’s touch,’ Hugh said drily and Eleanor really hated him. She sat down at the table with Isobel on her lap. Richard put the cafetière and mugs on the table and poured the coffee. He put a mug in front of Eleanor and added some milk for her. It was slightly too much; she thought about saying something and then changed her mind.
Eleanor didn’t know what happened next except that she was too fast and then too slow: too fast reaching across the table, while Isobel struggled in her arms, sending her off balance, and too slow to stop the mug tipping and scalding liquid gushing. ‘My God!’ Hugh shouted and Isobel shrieked. It was the worst sound Eleanor had ever heard. Then slow again: too slow to get off Isobel’s sodden hot babygrow and the utter horror of her arm, the skin peeling off in great white sheets, revealing scarlet below. Reaching for her phone, only to have her hand covered by Lorna’s, too slow to realize that Richard was already saying ‘ambulance’ and giving their address. Everyone in the room became active and busy: Hugh took Isobel away, wrapped her in a tea towel and held her arm under the tap, Lorna was asking Richard where they kept the clingfilm. All she could do was watch and listen to Isobel making anguished sounds that she’d never heard before, and listen to herself crying, saying, ‘My baby, my baby, I’ve hurt my baby,’ over and over again as if it would make any difference. Lorna gripped her shoulder, telling her it would be all right: ‘It’s worse for you than it is for her.’
She remembered the first few weeks of Rosie’s life, when she was half crazed with fear, every object in the house taking on a new sinister shape, enlarging and expanding, as she imagined the ways it could do harm. Eleanor had realized that she would have to learn to manage this intolerable anxiety because if she didn’t, she would never do anything ever again, just spend every waking moment holding Rosie and staring at her. She had to tell herself it would never happen, to pretend that they would somehow always be all right, but now it had happened and it was as if she’d always known it would. The reality was far, far worse than she could ever have imagined.
The madness was not the hypervigilance – it was thinking that they would be OK. She should have given up everything, devoted her entire life, every waking minute, to preventing this. And then, shamefully, the headache pressed into her, and the sickness rose and she couldn’t bear the fact that even here, even now, she was remembering herself, brought back to her body, when all she wanted to be was lost.
Then the siren, the doorbell, and although all Eleanor wanted was to make Isobel safe, she could hear Jamie’s voice in her head too, crowding everything out. Didn’t he think there’d been some kind of accident there? Didn’t he say he saw an ambulance? Hugh speaking to the paramedics in a voice she’d never heard before, quiet and competent, and still she couldn’t do anything, except grip Isobel and uselessly try to comfort her. And Luke was all like, oh my God, the house is definitely haunted, the girl’s spirit is coming back. She climbed in the ambulance and a thought of her own formed, perfectly clear and intact: If we survive this, I’ll do something. I’ll do something about the house.