London, the Eighties
Clive had lived in the house alone since his father’s death. He had suffered a heart attack within a year of losing Clive’s mother, Elisabeth, who had fled to this pocket of North London from Austria during the war. She and Bernard had met at nearby Keats House library not long after she’d arrived and together they had bought this house in the early Fifties.
Artemis knew she was lucky to be here – Clive had already impressed on her Hampstead’s cultural and geographical significance – and yet the terraced houses, so many lives wedged in against one another in the midst of the city, the lack of sky, made her feel hemmed in.
Sometimes, when she looked out through the kitchen window, she would blink and imagine the ghost-like silhouette of a woman hunched over a sketchbook. In that moment she couldn’t be sure if it was Elisabeth she was imagining, or herself.
Clive took that first week in London off work. Arm in arm, they spent their days walking the streets he had described – puffs of smoke wafting in front of them as they navigated the towpath beside the canal lined with grubby, multicoloured boats, past the zoo and on to Little Venice.
They spent the Friday walking over the Heath, the tips of the leaves turning from green to orange, giving the illusion of a fire burning somewhere in the distance. They stopped for a drink on the way home, at the Magdala pub. It was an institution, apparently – this was a word Clive used a lot, as if to pre-empt her inability to understand the importance of some seemingly insignificant place or bizarre custom – and the place where Ruth Ellis famously shot her lover before becoming the last woman in the country to be hanged.
Looking around her, Artemis lifted her fingers to her throat as a cloud of cigarette smoke rose up from the table next to theirs.
‘We better hurry up with these,’ Clive said as he drained his glass. ‘People will be arriving soon.’
Artemis sighed, inwardly. She couldn’t think of anything she less wanted to do than have Clive’s friend’s over. She was so tired.
Since arriving in London, her sleep had been broken. It was partly the growing bump in her belly that was preventing her from getting comfortable, but mostly it was the dreams that came for her as soon as she drifted off, the cracking sound, like something inside her breaking, and then the scream …
She pictured Jeff and May, him with his overly personal manner and wandering eyes; her with the impenetrable gaze, her entire being shrouded behind layers of fake tan and an excess of perfume. May had been friendly enough the couple of times they had met, but there was a tartness about her, something almost untrustworthy, though Artemis would have struggled to say exactly what, or why this woman made her feel so uneasy. A mother to a baby herself, May should have been just the person Artemis wanted to talk to, the kind of friend that might have become a kindred spirit, but it seemed impossible to connect; besides, May never brought her own child with her when they came out. She didn’t know much about Clive’s best friends, but what she had understood immediately was how little she had in common with them.
From a distance, through Clive’s stories, this world of his had seemed dreamlike and inviting. Up close, she felt like she had been catapulted into someone else’s life. Surely when his friends looked at her, they too would see, with all their shared history, that she was not one of them. They would be within their rights to assume that she, a small-town girl from a remote island with nothing to contribute to the relationship other than her womb, was a gold-digger, but she wasn’t. For all its initial allure, Clive’s relative wealth was something she had come to resent for the imbalance of power it created between them. Even without it, she was already in a position of weakness: in another country, without any friends or family, pregnant, her body transforming into a version of itself she didn’t yet understand.
She wished she could speak to Athena. Athena would know what to say, even if her comfort came laced with back-handed compliments and coated in expletives. Artemis had arrived with no autonomy, no real sway in any aspect of their lives. In order for their relationship to work, it was she who had to mould herself to Clive’s world, without asking him to adjust in the slightest. His money only added a further layer of dependency – not that he made her feel guilty when she asked for cash for groceries or whatever it was she needed.
And yet, she had never fitted in back on the island either, had she? When she thought of it, she pictured the sun brushing against the path meandering behind her house, the sea glistening at the edge. The horizon filled with a familiar sky that had watched over so many traumas and done nothing to stop them. The truth was, she had never fitted in anywhere.
Although that wasn’t strictly true. She had felt a sense of belonging, for a while, she and Clive hemmed in their own little world in that pocket of land just beyond the old village, during those long, intimate summers on the island, before anyone found out. They may not have known each other in the way that only time would allow, but she felt right with him, back then. Together, alone, she and Clive had made sense; she understood then how their disparate worlds folded into one another’s. But everything had changed so quickly. Once the circle opened up, everything had poured in – the friends, the new city – so that she felt like she might drown.
‘Artemis?’
When she looked up, she saw Clive regarding her with an expression she couldn’t quite fathom.
‘Sorry,’ she said, blushing, as though she had been caught out.
‘What are you sorry for? Is everything OK?’
She smiled tightly. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Good,’ he replied, picking up her wine glass and knocking it back. ‘We better get a wriggle on; the guests will be here before we know it. You’ll need to make a start on lunch.’