at the back and make up Christmas garlands—some of them very simple, woven from twisted twigs, and more formal, traditional ones with ribbon and berries and greenery; and sometimes I like to use colours and fabrics that nobody else would think of—bows of brown paper, or shimmery Indian ribbon. When I get home, my hands still smell of juniper.
A letter comes, with the Arbours Clinic slogan on the envelope: Helping Families Help Themselves, and a rainbow drawn by a child. I feel a rush of hopefulness. Now someone will come to our rescue, someone will understand. I rip the envelope open. We have an appointment with Dr Strickland at the start of January. I’m pleased—it doesn’t seem too long to wait. I worry that Sylvie’s trainers are scruffy—I don’t want them to think that I am a neglectful parent—and I take her to buy some new shoes for the appointment—pink suede boots with laces that I can’t really afford.
I yearn for Dominic. I ring the house in Newgate Road, hoping to hear him on the voicemail, so hungry for something of him, just for a moment to have his voice vibrating inside me. I choose a time when Claudia should be meeting their children from school, but to my horror it’s Claudia who answers. I put the phone down rapidly, ashamed.
And all the time I wonder about the article I read. Sometimes—most of the time—I tell myself it was nonsense, a deluded, New-Agey fantasy. I remind myself that people need something to cling to—anything to protect ourselves from knowing, really knowing, that we are mortal beings. Sometimes the mind won’t let that knowledge in.
I remember the night my mother died. I’d spent several hours that afternoon at her bedside in the hospital; she’d been doing so well with all her rehabilitation, she was starting to walk again, two months after her stroke. She’d been sitting up in bed, alert and vivid, wearing the bright new bedjacket I’d brought her, and with some lipstick on; and talking about what she’d do when they discharged her—the pelargoniums she was longing to plant. She was worried she’d missed the start of the growing season. The ward sister rang at eleven that night to say she’d died. I just said, ‘No, she hasn’t.’ My voice quite calm and unconcerned. ‘Really. Don’t worry, she’s fine, I was with her this afternoon…’ I simply didn’t believe it. When the nurse persisted, I thought it was a practical joke. I actually said that. ‘This is a joke, isn’t it? You’re having me on…’ She wasn’t thrown. It can’t have been the first time this had happened to her. She kept on talking, her manner gently insistent. ‘Miss Reynolds, I’m really sorry, but you need to listen to me. I’m ringing from Stanton Ward. Your mother had another stroke. This time it was a massive one. It was very sudden. She wouldn’t have felt any pain…’ But I couldn’t take it in. Just couldn’t. As if there were a door in my mind, shut fast—that couldn’t be prised open, wouldn’t let this knowledge through. And mostly I think that’s what all these beliefs are, really: doors in the mind, keeping the dark out.
Yet sometimes I find myself thinking: Perhaps it’s true—perhaps the soul goes on. Perhaps some of us have a memory trace—some imprint of a previous life—or a psychic link with the past… And always, just wondering that—just touching on it so lightly, even for a second or two—there’s a sense of something shifting—the present, certain, obvious world dissolving all around me, as everything I thought I knew begins to fall away.
Sometimes I wonder about Adam Winters, and kick myself that I didn’t manage to note down his e-mail address. At least I’d have a choice then. But I can’t imagine how it would be if I met him, or what on earth he’d make of Sylvie and me. I simply can’t envisage it. I think of him in his university department—his glamorous career, his adulatory students—and me in my flat in Highfields, cooking chicken nuggets, reading old copies of Heat. And what might it do to Sylvie—to give so much weight and attention to all the strange things that she says? Everything might get worse then. There are lots of good reasons to forget all about him. I tell myself it’s as well that I don’t know how to reach him: at least it stops me from doing anything rash.
‘Lavinia,’ I say one morning. We’re working at the back of the shop. It’s a bitter day, with a light sleet thrown on the wind. ‘Lavinia—there was this thing I read. About the paranormal—ghosts and so on. This guy who researches into it. D’you believe in all that?’
She’s wearing a fisherman’s sweater: long cuffs of heavy oiled wool hang over her hands. She pushes her sleeves up, folding them over and over; her gestures are so graceful. She has many silver rings, and a cinnamon staining of nicotine on the insides of her fingers.
Her thoughtful grey eyes rest on me. There’s a question in them.
‘It depends which bit you mean,’ she says then. ‘I do believe in the spirit world—that there’s a spiritual dimension.’ She gives a little self-deprecating shrug. ‘For God’s sake, Gracie, you know me.’
I smile, and think of the house where she lives—the Tarot cards, the crystals in her windows, and in her hall a low black table with beeswax candles on; and when she throws one of her parties, she sticks a notice to it: ‘Buddhist altar: please do not put your glasses here.’
‘Sometimes…’ she says slowly. ‘Sometimes I think—What if we just don’t get it? What if our dying isn’t at all as we’ve always believed it to be?’
She comes across to me, rests her hand for a moment on my shoulder. I’m making tree decorations—diminutive pipe-cleaner angels, with frocks of blackberry silk.
‘Hey—those are yummy. You clever girl…’ She turns from me, spoons coffee into our cups, pours water from the kettle. ‘Why are you asking anyway?’
‘It’s just this thing I read.’
She waits for a while, but I don’t say anything more.
‘Mind you,’ she says then, ‘you have to be a bit careful. People are gullible. It’s easy to start believing all kinds of crazy stuff…’
Out of the window, the sleet is starting to thicken; big feathery flakes of snow sift gently down. I can tell she’s musing on something. I wait for her.
She stirs sugar into her coffee. As her hand moves around her intricate rings give off glints and sparkles of light.
‘When I was a physio student,’ she says, ‘I had a skeleton to study. I kept it under my bed. And I had no end of bad luck—my boyfriend had dumped me and everything seemed to go wrong.’
The warmth of the coffee spreads through me. I drink gratefully. Outside, snow stitches its pattern.
‘And Teresa, my friend—she’s Irish and superstitious as hell, and she said it was the skeleton that was making all this happen. And she marched me off to Brompton Oratory to get the skeleton blessed. We took it in a Top Shop bag.’ She shakes her head slowly. ‘I mean, can you imagine? And we met this priest, he was absolutely ancient, he had this kind of pleased air. I guess he couldn’t believe his luck. Two girls in very short skirts with a carrier bag full of bones…’
She’s staring out of the window, where the snowflakes turn and turn as they fall, and fur the sills with white. Her expression is gentle with nostalgia.
But I’m impatient.
‘And what did he say? Did he give it a blessing? Did better things start happening?’
There are cut-off fronds of juniper on the table; she trails her finger through them, so they release their aromatic resins. Her bracelets make a faint metallic sound.
‘He stood there looking at us,’ she says.
