By day, Diana was calm. Her lips did not jabber; her nose did not twitch; her voice was level; her eyes were straight. She moved carefully around the house, sitting in chairs to read books rather than lying on rugs, joining her father to listen to the wireless in his studio rather than sprawling in the garden to sunbathe. And when her fingertips touched Geenie’s hand at dinnertime, while passing the salt or the water jug, they were cool and dry. Wherever she went, Diana seldom left a mark.
But one night Geenie heard a groaning quite different from her mother’s usual nocturnal noises, and she knew it must be coming from Diana’s room.
The noise sounded like a ‘whoa’, as if Diana were riding an out-of-control horse. Geenie imagined the creature bucking in Diana’s bed, trampling the mattress so the girl flew in the air, rolling the sheets to rags at her feet.
When Geenie found her, Diana’s room was lit a blue-grey by the moon, and she could see the sheet was stuck to the girl’s stomach like a wet curtain. Diana’s nightgown was wrapped around her thighs. A strip of dark hair clung to her forehead, and she made the noise again, a long and wavering whoooah.
Geenie stood in the doorway, watching the other girl’s nightmare. Her own nightgown was dry and heavy, the lace prickly at her neck. Diana thrashed again. She was trying, Geenie realised, to speak: her mouth was working frantically, the muscles around her eyes quivering, but no sound – other than the whoa noise, which happened once more – would come out.
She’d have to go in and rescue her friend from this damp hell.
She stole into Diana’s bedroom. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she put a hand on Diana’s ankle. It was very hot, but not wet. The sweat had yet to reach all the way down there. Slowly, Geenie applied a gentle pressure to the ankle. She wasn’t sure if this was the right thing to do, but she’d heard Jimmy say that waking sleepwalkers was dangerous, so she thought this careful, doctorly approach was best. Doctors always sat on the edge of a bed and applied gentle pressure. That’s what they did when Jimmy broke his ankle falling from his horse, before his operation, and that’s what they did when she herself had caught pneumonia after he’d died.
She decided she should work her way up: a touch on the ankle, the knee, the side, the wrist. There would be no sudden moves or noises.
Very slowly, she began to increase the pressure on Diana’s ankle, staring at her damp face all the while. The girl’s nose twitched and her arm swung out and above her head so suddenly that Geenie ducked. But there was no whoa. Geenie put a hand on Diana’s other ankle and gently squeezed there, too. As she increased the pressure, the girl stopped thrashing and her face fell still. Diana’s eyes half opened, showing flickering whites, which made Geenie start back and release her grip. She wondered how she could explain her presence on the edge of the other girl’s bed. But then Diana turned, gave a long sigh, and began to breathe easily.
Geenie sat on the bed, looking at the side of Diana’s calm face in the moonlight, until her toes felt frozen together and her back was stiff.
. . . .
Every night after that, Geenie lay awake in her own double bed waiting for the whoa. She’d never slept in a small bed (her mother didn’t believe in them) and for as long as she could remember she’d spent hours trying out different positions on the wide mattress before sleep. There was room for four Geenies in that bed. The headboard was a complicated grid of iron, twisted and hammered into swirls, from which her mother had hung a few pairs of old earrings which rattled each time Geenie moved. The hoops clanked, the drops clacked. Her eiderdown was lilac silk and stained in one corner with a banana-shaped blob of ink. Geenie didn’t remember where that had come from.
She thought of the mattress as something like the huge map of the world which Jimmy had kept on his study wall. Each of its corners, its dips and lumps, were countries in which she could try to sleep. The far left was rocky terrain, with good breezes: ideal for hot nights. The mid-right was flat and firm, comfortless but solid; it offered a long night if you managed to drift off there. And the very centre, where the mattress gave out and yielded to her every move, was deep water where dreams were guaranteed. Lying there was like rocking in a ship at sea; waves of sleep came up to meet you, then pitched you back into wakefulness.
When waiting for Diana’s nightmares, Geenie favoured the flat, unsurprising middle-right plane. Sleep was least likely to grasp her there.
She waited, thinking of how Jimmy had once come into her bedroom at night and looked over her. She was six years old, and had listened to another long row for what seemed like hours. She could never quite make out the thread of the argument, only occasional words, such as your money (Jimmy) or not fair (her mother), or, once, better writer than you (her mother again). It had been quiet for a while when the door handle shook and turned. She could smell him immediately: whisky, tobacco, glue, sandalwood talcum powder.
As Jimmy opened the door, and the light from the landing brightened her room, Geenie lifted her eyelids a fraction of an inch so she could spy on him. She wished she looked deeply, sweetly asleep, with her blonde waves chasing across the pillow, so Jimmy could stand and admire her and think about how much he’d lose if he left her mother. But instead she was curled in this tight ball, her fist clenching the sheet, her hair caught behind her neck, both feet tucked up below her bottom, and her eyelids fluttering with the effort of remaining slightly lifted.
She didn’t move. She listened to Jimmy’s breathing, which was slightly laboured, as if he’d run up the stairs. His hand would be on his hip, as it always was when he was watching something – her mother dancing on a tabletop, or Geenie riding her horse. He might be smiling his bright, sudden smile that made his cheeks wrinkle, the way he had when she’d shown him the drawings she’d done on the paving stones outside their London house. ‘Ellen will never forgive you,’ he’d said, smiling.
She waited for him to retreat. She thought perhaps he’d come to calm himself. She hoped the sight of his sleeping Flossy – even in this strangled position – did that.
But instead he sat on the chair by her bed. She closed her eyes in case he saw her lids flickering. The smell of whisky grew warmer. His breathing was steadier now. Perhaps he would sleep there tonight. Perhaps Ellen had locked him out of their bedroom and he had nowhere else to go. Geenie’s bedroom was the only place he could rest. That wasn’t true of course. There were plenty of guest rooms and a huge chaise longue downstairs in his study.
Her limbs were stiff from staying in one position for so long, curled in this tight ball. Her toes started to itch with heat. How long would he sit there? She opened her eyes a crack. Jimmy had his face in his hands and was rubbing at his cheeks. Then he looked at her and she clamped her eyes shut again. Perhaps she should do heavy breathing to make her sleep more convincing.
‘Geenie,’ he said, in a soft voice. ‘Are you awake?’
Her legs not moving, her arms not moving. Just the air in her lungs, out of her lungs, in her lungs, out of her lungs.
It was silent for a long moment before the sob. And even then, she couldn’t be sure it was a sob, because she couldn’t open her eyes again. Was that thin rasp of air the sound of Jimmy crying? That sudden rush of breath, was that the sound of Jimmy’s sadness? She couldn’t be sure. There was no way to be sure of that.