It is the arrival of her things that pushes me over the edge – our flat, which he is renting out, needs to be emptied for new tenants. Daniel hires movers to pack up the contents, they carry boxes into his house in pairs, build walls of them around his study, and though he is careful to shut the door, it weighs on my mind. The bulwark fact of it, the entire room of our things that I must pass every day, punctures all my pretending that Mama is still in Italy, travelling for a season, about to walk through the front door.
I stop speaking. There is a place inside me where I feel nothing at all; if I lie on the bed which isn’t mine, in a house which isn’t mine, and stare at one single thing for a long time, I can get to it. I hear Daniel speaking to me sometimes, cajoling me to eat, watch television, go for a walk, but it is very distant. He seems more like the flicker of my own thoughts, the electrical impulses between the neurons of my brain.
Slowly, though, his voice grows louder, his presence more real. When I tune in, I realise he is talking not about Mama and what will happen to me, but about flowers.
‘There’s a patch under the horse chestnuts.’ He sets a single flower down on my bedside table. A primrose. I stare at the lemon petals, the succulent crinkle-edged leaves.
‘Look at these,’ he says a few days later. This time, he’s brought a pair. ‘They’re different. This one has this greenish disc at its centre but this one—’ he separates the petals to show me its heart, ‘has a cluster of anthers.’
Primroses are heterostylous,I think. One ispinthe other isthrum.
He tells me that when he walked in the park, he’d been lifting up the furry undersides of the leaves to check for brimstone eggs. ‘They’re great butterfly nurseries,’ he says, pressing a jar into my palm, ‘the colour’s a perfect camouflage.’ The eggs are pale green and luminous. The casing is ridged like the inside of a shell.
So, when he tells me that primroses have appeared along the banks of the North Lawn, the single patch turned to drift, when he says, ‘Let’s go see them,’ he’s already spent weeks tilling my mind, planting seeds. I get up.
He walks his palms over the bench as if to test its solidity. He searches the ground for the primroses but there are only bluebells, pushing through the alkanet. ‘I’ve thought about this place a thousand times.’
‘Did you think about what would happen if we met again?’
‘Always. That and the summer I had with you. Nothing else seemed real, not my life before, or the trial, or . . .’ He breaks off. That silence again around prison. ‘And you? Did you think of this place?’ He doesn’t dare look at me. His dream of us is so fragile, I could kill it or give it life.
I nod.
He takes a long drag of air in and out. My admission has quelled something in him. He straightens up. ‘What you were saying at the museum . . .’ his words are hesitant, he is gesturing,‘about our ages . . .’ He stops. How strange. For a taxonomist obsessed with naming, describing, categorising, he hasn’t realised that his refusal to name something gives it power.
‘What I’m trying to say is, at the museum, I was worried you’d changed how you saw our time together.’ He pauses. ‘That you’re seeing things differently now to how they really were.’
A seam of rage unravels. I force myself to watch the junior football club practising on the lawn, follow the ball’s jagged route from boot to boot until I’m certain my voice is level. ‘Hindsight is twenty-twenty.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means things are clearer now as a thirty-two-year-old woman than as a fourteen-year-old girl.’
‘I don’t know if that’s true.’
‘You think the judgement of a fourteen-year-old girl isn’t impaired by her age, her understanding?’
‘I don’t know anything about fourteen-year-old girls. I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about you.’ He steps towards me. ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Things have changed.’ A striker takes aim, misses. The ball catapults off the goal post, the boys roar chasing it down the pitch. ‘So many scandals. We know so much more about people like you—’
‘—People like me?’ he repeats slowly.
‘—There’s a playbook.’ The words come out with a lightness I don’t feel. Under my clothes, I’m trembling.
‘How does that go?’
‘You choose a vulnerable girl—’
‘—Youchose me.’
‘You turn her from her friends—’
‘—You never had any friends.’
‘Her family—’
‘—Your mother was dead!’