ONE SATURDAY, WHEN Leo and Josh have gone sailing, we take the girls to the zoo. It’s a beautiful afternoon—pellucid sunlight, razor-sharp shadows, a keen chill out of the sun. We buy ice creams, though really it’s too cold for them. The girls run on ahead of us.
“Sylvie seems great today,” says Karen.
“Yes. I hope so.”
I tell her about Dr. Strickland, about being referred for counseling myself. Karen listens intently.
“Don’t just dismiss it, Grace,” she tells me when I’ve finished. “Maybe it would be good for you to see someone on your own. You’ve been under such a lot of stress. You never know, it might be useful.”
“But it isn’t my problem, it’s Sylvie’s.”
“I know that’s how it must seem. But problems aren’t always all that clear-cut in families,” she tells me.
The girls have finished their ices and come to drop their cones in the bin. Sylvie gives me a quick, light hug. I bend to her, and she kisses me with sticky, scented lips. I bury my face in her hair. The sun has brought out its musk.
“You smell of the sun,” I tell her.
“Really, Grace. How can I smell of the sun?” she says. “Really.”
It’s her sensible voice, showing she knows how the world works. She rushes off, laughing, with Lennie.
We pass the gibbon enclosure, where the fence throws a crisp black patterning over the grass, an immaculate shadowy stenciling. The girls make monkey faces and pretend to hunt for fleas in each other’s clothes. We’re walking straight into the sun, which is sinking already, red as flame and dazzling. It hurts your eyes to look at it. We pass the tigers, two great animals sprawled in a pool of florid light, their bright coats rippling with their lazy, sleepy breath. We come to the llamas and camels.
“I really love camels,” says Karen. “They’re funny. I love their snooty expressions. You look at all these animals and you’ve got to think God really had some very odd ideas.”
On impulse, I turn to her.
“Karen, d’you believe in reincarnation?”
She grins. “Coming back as a monkey and all that?”
There’s a red glaze on my vision, the afterimage of the sun.
“Well, yes. Or as another person . . .”
“Tell you what,” she says. “I’ve always thought I’d like to come back as a cat. Ideally an indolent pedigree cat with a truly besotted owner. Lots of smoked salmon and lying around by the fire.” She turns to smile at me; then stares, eyes widening, suddenly appalled. “Grace, my God, you’re serious, aren’t you? You mean it.”
“I read this article,” I tell her, “about kids with problems like Sylvie’s. And someone had this theory that they were remembering a past life . . .”
There’s a moment of heavy quiet between us. Her lipsticked mouth is a thin, red gash in her face. She shakes her head a little.
“Grace. This life is the one we’ve got, the only one we’ll get.” She makes an expansive gesture, her arms opening outward as though to take everything in—the animals and grass and trees, our laughing children, the wide, bright arch of the sky. “This is it, Grace. This is it, this is all we’ll get, and we just have to make the best of it.”
Sylvie has a bad day. When I pick her up from the nursery, her face is blank and stretched.
“We had trouble again today,” Mrs. Pace-Barden tells me. She’s stern, a little distant. “This time it wasn’t the water play, just one of the boys who was being rather boisterous. He’d made something with the LEGO that he was pretending to use as a gun. We scolded him, of course, but Sylvie couldn’t cope at all. I’m really very worried, Ms. Reynolds.”
“We had our appointment with Dr. Strickland,” I tell her.
“That’s excellent,” she says. “I just hope he’ll be able to produce some kind of miracle.”
It shocks me, the way she thinks that Sylvie needs a miracle. I murmur something noncommittal. I don’t want to tell her what happened at the clinic.
In the night Sylvie wakes and comes to my room. I’m sunk in sleep, in some yearning dream of Dominic, and the sound of her sobbing tugs at me, hauling me up to the surface of my dream. As I hold her tight against me, I can feel her heart pound.
“It was just a nightmare,” I tell her, as I always do.
I lead her into my bed, leaving the bedside lamp on so the dark won’t frighten her if she wakes again. She presses into me. Her breathing slows.
It’s a very still night, very cold. When I’m certain she’s completely asleep, I go to fetch the duvet and coats from her bed. At the window in the hallway, which doesn’t have a curtain, I can see where frost has scribbled on the pane. I heap the extra bedding on top of her—gently, so I won’t disturb her—and ease myself in beside her. She doesn’t stir. Though she’s so close, I can’t hear the sound of her breathing, but where her arm rests against mine, I feel the tentative pulsing in her wrist, the vibration of it passing into my body.
I lie awake for a long time. I think about the frost out in my garden—about its attention to detail, its white grip on everything, its silver calligraphy on the branches of my mulberry, and how it will crisp the fallen leaves that have gathered in the gutters, and how each blade of grass will be held in a separate steely sheath. I imagine I can hear it—like the faintest metallic whisper in the stillness.
I’m almost asleep again when I’m jolted awake by footsteps in the alley by my window. My pulse quickens. I worry as I always do that someone will break in, but then hear their voices and know it’s just one of the prostitutes and her client. You’d think they’d want to find somewhere more sheltered on a night this cold. There’s a bit of low conversation: a male voice, suddenly loud, distorted, a rushed volley of Catholic expletives, then the quiet talk again and footsteps going away. She’ll be glad it was over so quickly. I hear the high, lonely bark of a fox, rapidly receding as it runs through the wasteland along the backs of the houses, the untended gardens and empty lots. Then that too fades into silence.
Sylvie shifts in her sleep, moving into me so I feel her warmth against me. When she’s sleeping, her face softens; she loses that strained look she has. I stare at her in the light of the lamp, and her scent of musk and lemon wraps around me. I lie there gazing at her, my little stranger. Physically, I have her by heart—all the detail of her face, the sweet, precise curve of her cheekbones—yet in some other, deeper sense, I scarcely know her at all.
We have an important commission at Jonah and the Whale—a funeral, a big one, a flamboyant send-off for a local patriarch who ran a chain of pharmacies and gave a lot to charity. He has died at eighty-five with all his family around.
“That’s a good death,” says Lavinia. “To have spent your life doing something respected and useful and to have lots of children and die in your bed when you’re old. That’s pretty bloody enviable.”
The dead man’s wife is exacting about the detail of everything. Her flowers will be all white, a heap of marguerites.
On the afternoon of the service, Lavinia shuts the shop and we go to watch the cortege. The hearse is a Victorian carriage, jet black and lovingly polished, and there are two black horses with elegant, feathery plumes, and on the coffin in the carriage the marguerites we’ve done. It’s the loveliest contrast—the formality of the horses and carriage, a picture from another time, like something in sepia from a Victorian album, and the flowers, casual, almost wildflowers, like an armful of daisies just picked and flung down there, creamy white like buttermilk. There’s a cold, rough wind that catches at the manes and tails of the horses; their black plumes shake and shiver. The horses are restive, pawing at the pavement. As they move, you can see the ripple of their muscles, the wiry sinews gliding under the skin. Everyone stops. There’s a knot of people gathered on the pavement, mostly mothers and children, and the children love the horses. Everyone is smiling. You feel so blessed, so grateful in that moment on the pavement, everything blown and swirling, the tossing of the horses’ manes, the aliveness of the wind.
