Empty glass bottle (circa 1970s) with handwritten label reading ‘Stella and Harmony’s Blackberry Wine’ in black biro.
That silence, before the line connects. You’re not sure if the words you speak are reaching anyone or just dissipating, unheard through the crackly ether. And so you call out, hello, hello, hello, as the person at the other end does the same in that slightly comical way, until finally the sounds from your mouth and the vibrating of your eardrums converge, and vice versa. Breakthrough.
All I said, when she answered, was one word: ‘Mama’. I hadn’t called her that for years; she was always Stella, even when I was really little, because that is how she asked me to refer to her (one of those parents). When friends at school said, ‘my mum’ or ‘my mummy’ I felt envious of the loving closeness it implied, like being tucked in. To say ‘my mother’ or ‘Stella’ conveyed not only an obvious distance, but a precociousness that mystified children and scorned adults.
‘Mama,’ I said, and then took one of those awful rasping breaths that make you sound as though you have been drowning.
The fear in her voice was almost a balm. ‘Harmony, my darling. Tell me what’s happened.’
Without going into detail about how the flashback came about, I told her in a hysterical staccato that I remembered everything.
‘I suppose I always knew this would happen eventually,’ said my mother. ‘Please, breathe for a moment. Take a deep breath. There. Another one. I had better come and explain.’
‘I’m at Longhope. Have been for a couple of months. I didn’t want to tell you because I thought it might set you off.’
‘You must hate me. You’d be right to hate me.’
‘I don’t hate you. I mean, the whole thing is completely messed up, but I don’t hate you. I don’t understand. Coral’s been filling me in a bit . . . she still lives here, downstairs, though she’s a complete mess.’
Stella swore, was quiet for a moment, then said, in a businesslike tone that was barely familiar, that she would be there soon. If there was a hint of defensiveness in her voice then I didn’t notice it; for my part, I felt too grief-stricken to be angry that she had lied to me. All I felt was that I needed her, in a way that I hadn’t since I was a child.
I had left the academic’s house in a state of extreme distress, deaf to his pleas that I stay with him a while until I became calm again (for his part, having a girl start screaming in terror while you are in bed together would leave anyone shaken, his poorly-signposted experiments in sexual strangulation notwithstanding).
‘You could at least have fucking warned me,’ I shouted, as I bent over the bed hyperventilating.
I didn’t start crying until I was several hundred feet clear of his flat, but once I did it was in that ugly, insuppressible way that never seems to afflict female characters in Hollywood movies: huge, guttural honks of sheer despair that pay no heed to decorum or attractiveness. I sobbed like this standing up on a busy, bendy 29 bus all the way home, and, it being London and not some other city, no one cared to bother me or to enquire after my well-being. I have female friends who have cried all over town, in tube trains and restaurants and under the bright lights of the supermarket, and they say to me in bitter tones that not once, not once did anyone approach them to offer sympathy or assistance. One friend sat sobbing on the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus for an entire Saturday afternoon, and no one even thought to stare. The indifference of Londoners was infamous, but that afternoon I felt meekly thankful for it.
The word ‘trauma’, in Japanese, takes the form of two characters, one meaning ‘outside’ and one meaning ‘injury’. To be traumatised is to sport a visible wound, a pain that can be seen and perceived by others. But this was not the case for me. The trauma that I had suffered when, aged five, I had found myself shut in a house with the hanging corpse of a young woman was apparent, in hindsight, in a million barely perceptible ways. By coming back to the house I had forced a reckoning, had worried at the scab in the same way as I had with the childhood flea bites on my legs, the scars now bleached white against the tan of my shins.
Stella got the first train up from Cornwall, and turned up on the doorstep at around 9pm that evening with her arms spread outwards in preparation for our emotional embrace. I sidestepped this and beckoned her inside, where she stood in the hall for a moment with her face tilted upwards, inhaling the house and all its histories. ‘The old place still smells the same,’ she said. ‘Like a church.’
I tried to smile.
‘Christ. I never thought I’d be back here. So which one’s Coral’s?’
I gestured towards the door. ‘We can go and say hello if you like, I’m sure you both have a lot of catching up to do.’
‘Perhaps not quite yet.’
We went up to the kitchen, where I immediately poured us two large gins, in that way you do when there’s a crisis, like someone dying, and your grief grants you permission, tells you, ‘You may smoke all twenty of those cigarettes.’
I had been crying for hours, but now I sat quietly at the table, my sorrow having given way to something more dense and simmering. I was struggling with the guilty anger I felt towards her, a legacy borne from years of tiptoeing around her vulnerability as though I was its captive. That’s what happens when you’re a child but there’s an adult competing with you for the role, pre-empting all your lines so that, instead of being the precious thing they worry about, your fear for them becomes a familiar hum, as prosaic and unnoticed as the drone of the fridge. It was perverse, after everything that had happened, but my main concern was for her well-being.
‘Are you sure you feel strong enough to talk about this?’ I said, but to my surprise instead of picking up this familiar, extenuating thread, she put down her glass and looked me in the face.
‘I want you to know, Harmony, that the consensus at the time was that if you forgot completely about what had happened, then so much the better.’ She reached a hand across the table, and to my surprise her eyes were wet. ‘Though we weren’t sure how much you had understood about what you saw, you wouldn’t sleep alone for months afterwards, and you had real separation anxiety. It was as though suddenly the world was set with traps that would take me away from you as well. You would follow me around the house – you and I moved to that place in Bristol, do you remember? – from room to room, because you were frightened, and you kept asking where she was, and why she had looked so poorly, and why we had come away. But then one day you stopped asking, and we thought it best to not remind you.’
‘We?’
‘Me and Bryn.’
Towards the end of the summer, my father had followed us back to London, turning up on the doorstep in the middle of the night, begging for us to try again.
‘It was Harmony who answered the door,’ said Stella. ‘And I think she knew we would patch things up. In fact, the day . . . it . . . happened, we had gone out for crisis talks. He said he would do anything; give me the monogamy I wanted, be a better father, live like a normal family. Grow vegetables to make perfect salads. And I probably would have gone, had it not been for her death.’
‘So you left him for good?’
‘It wasn’t easy,’ Stella downed the dregs of her glass. ‘After Harmony died, I just couldn’t cope any more. I’d been feeling down for months, but this was different. I was helpless. I thought about ending things myself. But I had you to think about.’
Stella, poured herself another gin. And so we sat in the fading light, and she told me all the things I had never asked but always subtly known: how young she had been when she had met my father at the protest, and the fascinating lure of his charisma and intelligence to an unschooled teenager from an all-girls grammar who had barely left the manicured enclosures of the London suburbs. ‘I romanticised him, of course, as only a girl can. And his desire for me felt like a stamp of approval, like getting the little row of As on my school report.’
She became, in some ways, his follower, or at least that is how her parents would have put it. They saw his radical politics and his Eastern-influenced philosophies, his strange girlish clothes, and essentially came to the conclusion that their young daughter had joined a cult. Where others were revelling in Thatcherism, the delights of marketing and money, Longhope remained steeped in the gauzy residue of the hippie era, a house in which barely anyone worked, and when they did the cash was pooled. They had come once or twice to try and get her back, but Stella was resolute. She had found her place.
‘I never imagined myself in an open relationship, and we never really described it in those terms,’ she said. ‘It was just a natural consequence of our stance on ownership. Why should another human being belong to you? Who are you to limit their bodily pleasures? That’s what your dad said anyway, and I wasn’t sophisticated enough to contradict him, until I got involved with the women’s movement, that is. And then I started putting my foot down.’
She had joined a women’s group, which I already knew, though I didn’t know the role it was to play in their relationship. By the time Harmony moved into the house, she had started to assert herself about Bryn’s other women. His extracurricular activities had dwindled to one or two a year, and Stella had begun to dream of having a child. Then Harmony arrived.
‘Coral said you got on well with her, that you didn’t mind her sleeping with Dad.’
‘I didn’t really, at first. It was quite nice to have a break. He could drone on for hours, Bryn, as you well know. Having her there allowed me to focus on myself for a bit. And she was a lovely girl, a great friend, so caring and generous, which is why I felt so guilty about my jealousy of her. She never meant anyone any harm, and was so fragile. I was closer in age to her than I was to Bryn, and I felt a need to protect her. In this I failed, obviously. Sometimes I wonder if she might have been as much in love with me; we were very close, always cooking and drinking together. Would wear each other’s clothes and sometimes all shared a bed. She was very attractive in a striking sort of way, you know, that beauty that you want to bask in, regardless of whether you like men or women.’
They had only kissed once, Stella said. One autumn they had made blackberry wine from the brambles in the garden, and the following August it was ready to drink. ‘I’m not sure where your father was,’ said Stella. ‘We were in the house alone.’ They had sunk several bottles while listening to soul records, she said. ‘Harmony used to roll these incredibly thin, elegant little joints, but they were very potent.’
They were both dreamily high and very drunk when they stood up from where they had been sitting on the rug to dance, and that was when it had happened. Just one small, soft kiss that was open to interpretation: a declaration of intent, or nothing at all.
‘There were never any threesomes or anything like that,’ she said, and I believed her, though it didn’t really matter to me either way.
‘Why does Coral blame you for Harmony’s death?’
Stella exhaled slowly. ‘Did she say that?’
‘Not in so many words. She’s very cagey, she wouldn’t tell me everything. She liked Harmony, didn’t she? I could tell she was fond of her. She told me about the miscarriage.’
‘I handled that badly.’
‘How could you do that to someone?’
Stella gave a shamefaced shrug.
‘And I was happy for her. I was. Though I did worry how it would all pan out for our unconventional little family. To be honest, I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t think I gave it much thought. Perhaps on some level I thought I was saving her. From us, from her attachment to you. You could see it was hurting her. She had her whole life ahead of her. There was so much she could have done. I imagine Coral feels like we sucked a young, relatively naïve girl into our fucked-up relationship, and there was an element of that, yes.’
‘She seems fairly fucked up herself.’ I was in the process of explaining about the screams when, as if it had been engineered from above, Coral’s bizarre, feline wailing forced itself through the open window.
‘What on earth?’
‘It’s her,’ I said, and explained how Josh had told me what was happening to Coral.
‘And you’ve just sat by and listened? None of you has thought to knock on the door, or call the police?’
I shrugged. Coral had never seemed exactly balanced, but neither had I been overly concerned. Coral had never given the impression that she needed my help and made it quite apparent that, had she been in trouble, the last person she would have asked for assistance was the daughter of a woman she hated who lived in the upstairs flat. Or perhaps I am being disingenuous, a selfish child caught up so much in finding the truth of her own story that she failed to take notice of someone else’s.
‘She seemed ok to me,’ I said. Stella was already heading out of the door.