The Ophelia Girls

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Connect on Social Media

Copyright © 2021 by Jane Healey

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Healey, Jane, 1986—author.

Title: The Ophelia girls / Jane Healey Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021007263 (print) | LCCN 2021007264 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358106418 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358449829 | ISBN 9780358449898 | ISBN 9780358105268 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PR6108.E118 O64 2021 (print) | LCC PR6108.E118 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007263

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007264

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

Cover photograph Nastasia Dusapin/Kintzing

Author photograph Alicia Clarke

v1.0721

So much of my girlhood was fictive. I lived in my mind. I made up the girl I thought I was.

—Jenny Zhang

When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means [. . .] they are anaesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.

—Roland Barthes

Prologue

That summer of ’73 they called us the Ophelia girls because we dressed up like Shakespeare’s ill-fated heroine, or our own teenage versions of her, in silk slips from jumble sales and long floral dresses we ran up with our mother’s sewing machines, and lay out in the frigid waters of the river in the woods, taking turns to stand on the mossy bank and take photos of each other looking beautiful and tragic.

We liked the way we looked and the way we felt in the water, our bodies held up and cradled, skin sharp with the cold; the stones under our backs shifting with the current. We would take the deepest section of the river, sometimes wade over to help each other into the right positions or to plait hair, rearrange the way our dresses lay to make us look as beautiful as possible. Sometimes we would sink a little further under the surface, until the lip of the water met over the end of our noses, and hold our breaths until our cheeks ached. Eyes open or closed, arms curled or stretched, we left our platform shoes, our sandals, on the riverbank.

We were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen then, and our families were summering at the cottages in the hamlet on the hill above the woods in the English countryside. Our parents had been bemused at first with our obsession, the armfuls of flowers we picked or stole from gardens, begged from the startled boy working at the florist, the outfits we sewed feverishly into the night, the damp clothes left in heaps on our floors. But then they grew concerned. We were obsessed, they said, foolish, even hysterical. We laughed at them, at the name they had given us, when we tripped up through the fields after dark with our blue knees and shivering, coltish limbs, our sodden dresses leaving a sticky trail behind us in the dry grass, petals crushed underfoot. We smiled when we huddled together under the shade of a tree to open the packets of developed photographs or watch our bodies bud and bloom on Polaroids held in sweating hands. We quivered with a giddy kind of joy when we lay out in the river, our dresses waterborne, lace and satin and polyester moulding to our skin, rings tugged loose by the gentle current, hair like weeds, flowers slipping from our grasp and floating downstream.

I have run from that summer, tried to forget its hazy pleasures and its tragedies, how it ended, how things fell apart. I have trusted the years to fade my memories and destroyed those photographs, never to be looked at again. But now, twenty-four years later, back in my childhood home in that same hamlet above the woods, and now a mother myself, the memories keep returning, like driftwood washed ashore.

And though I have never since walked far enough through the woods to reach the river, nor stood on its placid banks while the willow trees whisper in the breeze above me, each night I find myself waking gasping for air as if I am breaching its surface, remembering the tug of the waters on my limbs and the loamy smell that lingered for hours afterwards, my chest slicked with a sweat that chills me to the bone.

Chapter One

Maeve is on her bedroom floor remembering what it was like to die. She has arranged her body in a slump, like she has fallen in a faint, and is listening to the muffled noises of the other occupants of the house—her mother corralling her two younger siblings, the six-year-old twins, who are talking loudly about their day at a petting farm, and her father, home early from work. She wonders how long it will take for someone to walk past her door and find her, and whether they will be concerned, whether they will rush to her with a cry and try to wake her, or know that she is only pretending. She would prefer the first, and feels guilty for that, guilty enough to eventually sit up, her hip sore from the thin carpet, her eyes adjusting to the light of the summer afternoon as if she has been buried underground.

This is her first summer free of hospital for many years, her first summer being well after the infections and complications from her bone marrow transplant two years ago. She is an ordinary seventeen-year-old girl now, not a sickly creature bound to bed, not punctured by needles and ports, not observed and watched and studied.

It is sick of her to miss it sometimes, her sickness, to miss the attention, the love, the care, the doting. Perhaps she came back wrong when they brought her back from the brink that day, perhaps the core of her is spoiled, like a book that fell in the bath whose pages are swollen and gummed together.

Death makes you glad to be alive, makes you take stock of all the things you have, the blessings, her father said a few months ago, after her grandfather’s funeral, when he had slumped three glasses of wine down at the kitchen table in the poky flat in London where Maeve’s family had lived so she could be closer to the hospital, the one they left for her grandfather’s house in the countryside and its twenty-seven rooms and rambling gardens. But death didn’t do that for Maeve, it only made life feel more fragile, tenuous. Every death scene in every film and show she had watched and book she had read, where the dying said their piece, where they felt comforted by the loved ones around them, where they fought the coming darkness, was replaced by a whirl of noise and pain and confusion that tumbled into an anonymous nothingness, a welcoming blackness. It frightened her how easy it was to die, and she kept wanting to return to that day in the hospital bed, her body weak from the cancers, her lungs liquid with pneumonia, and do it differently, feel something more than tiredness, than a body coming to its conclusion. How was she supposed to face the world now, or look forward to her future when she knew how it would one day end?

A summer here will be good for you, her father had said, when he helped unpack her belongings in the bedroom at the back of the house with the bay window looking out over the walled garden, the fields beyond and, in the distance, the woods down below in the valley. You’ll get colour in your cheeks—you’ll remember what it’s like to live again, to be wild and free like a teenager should be, he added with a wink, before hurrying to his phone to answer a work call.

A week into said summer and Maeve is unconvinced, as she stares sombrely at her reflection in the mirror on her dressing table: her mother’s old chipped dressing table in her mother’s old room, with the fading rose-printed sixties wallpaper behind her. She makes herself smile, rearranges the mass of red curls around her shoulders, noticing all the imperfections of her skin, her face, in the streaming sunlight. In some ways she looks like how she feels inside, peaky, like one of those sickly Victorian characters from her favourite childhood books, but in others—the flush on her cheeks, her lips sucked red—she looks healthy and sometimes she hates that, looking well again like everything is fine. She taps her bitten nails against the tabletop, poses her head like one of those languid models in Vogue or Elle, tired and surly in their beauty. But a sudden cry in the house makes her freeze, her eyes wide in her reflection, and she stands up and hurries on unsteady legs towards the sound.

‘Don’t baby him, Maeve,’ her mother says from the hob, as Maeve holds the squirmy mass of her little brother in her lap in the den connected to the kitchen. ‘He’s fine, there isn’t even a bump.’

‘He was crying,’ Maeve replies, and her mother sighs.

Maeve can’t bear it when children cry, when they wail, even if the reason is something trivial, like a biscuit snapped in two, or a cat running away. She knows how it is to feel wretched, inconsolable, and how the world can be so bright and painful. She understands the need to be spoiled and petted. And besides, her brother saved her life with the transplant of his bone marrow, so if she’s going to baby anyone it will be him.

Michael—not Mike, never Mike, he corrects new adults of his acquaintance with a scowl—is staring up at her beatifically as she strokes his hot head.

‘Am I brave?’ he asks her, in a small-boy voice.

‘The bravest,’ she declares. ‘So brave that Mum will give you an extra chocolate mousse after dinner.’

‘Maeve,’ her mother says.

‘You said he needed fattening up,’ she replies, as Michael wriggles free and runs across the kitchen tiles towards his sister, Iza—never Isabella—to show off his newest war-wound. ‘Why are we having chocolate mousse anyway?’ she asks, with a nod to the fridge. Pudding is normally ice cream, or bourbon biscuits from the tin; her mother never likes spending too much time in the kitchen.

‘We’ve got guests coming, did your father not tell you?’ her mother says with a slight frown, and then winces as she burns her finger on the tray she takes out of the Aga. That bloody Aga, her mother has already taken to calling it.

‘No.’

Her mother is running her finger under the cold tap, staring out at the garden vacantly. She’s lost in her head so much these days.

‘Guests?’

‘Judy and her husband, the Shaws, Mrs Quinn from down the lane, and Stuart.’

‘Who’s Stuart?’ she asks, fearing that someone might be bringing their horrible teenage son that Maeve will have to entertain. She’d rather miss the dinner entirely and hide in her room.

‘Stuart’s an old friend,’ her mother says, turning off the tap. ‘He lived with your dad and me at university, and I knew him growing up. His father was the gardener for the hamlet, back when the old Abbey estate still owned all the buildings except for this house and rented them out, the barn and oast house and all the cottages. Stuart used to spend his summers here.’

‘Here, in Grandad’s house?’

‘No,’ her mother looks bemused, ‘in the cottage where his father lived. Although he was hardly there really—he spent most of his time outside, we all did.’

Maeve keeps forgetting that her mother had a whole life here before she left for London, before she was a mother. And the idea that both of them, Maeve and her mother, are spending their adolescence in the same place, that those neat slices of life might be held up and compared to one another, makes her uneasy. Her mother looks so wholesome in photos from her youth, her smile natural, and whenever she’s mentioned those years there’s been such a vast cast of characters that Maeve feels like a sad loner in comparison. It’s not easy to make friends when you’re in and out of hospital, when you’re too tired to keep up the pretence that you care about so-and-so getting off with so-and-so, or so-and-so getting caught smuggling vodka into school.

‘I hadn’t seen him for years before we crossed paths this spring, neither of us had, because he was off abroad,’ her mother continues. ‘He was a war photographer, that was how he made his name, but he doesn’t do that any more; he takes other pictures, for magazines. He might stay in the annexe here for a month or so,’ she adds distractedly now, looking out of the window. ‘He’s doing a project across the south-east.’

‘Do I have to come to dinner?’

‘For a little bit at least, yes,’ Ruth says, hurrying to the oven again. ‘But I’m sorry there’s no one your age coming tonight. Next time we’ll invite the Langfords over, or maybe one of the girls from your new school?’

For so long, school to Maeve meant hospital school, the two cramped rooms at the far end of one wing, their walls plastered with colourful posters about history and maths that were childish and yet a welcome break from the posters of medical information, the cartoons and fake fairytale forests and jungles painted on the walls of the children’s wards.

But hospital school makes her think of so many things—the smell of disinfectant, the squeaky shuffle of nurses’ shoes down corridors, the bleep of monitors that bled into fitful dreams—that she doesn’t want to remember. So she hurriedly offers to help with dinner, hoping that the warm glow of her mother’s appreciation might cover up the sick tremble inside her chest, as she cuts the fleshy roasted peppers into slices and plucks slippery olives from their cold brine.

The dining table has been moved to the large front lawn. The wasps hover lazily over the plates and the shade of the umbrella shifts away in the early evening sun. It’s always awkward meeting her parents’ friends, and it only seems to be more awkward as she gets older. They look nervous when they make half-hearted jokes at how grown-up she looks, as if she has muscled her way out of her proper place, as if she is some strange interloper. It makes her want to hunch her shoulders, it makes her want to scowl, but, having been a patient for so many years, she is good at being still, placid, pleasant, as they eat the starter of too-t art gazpacho and she helps the twins with the heavy silver spoons that her mother has brought out for company.

Stuart is late to dinner. They watch his car speed down the drive that curves around the lawn, and when he gets out, he folds his sunglasses on the collar of his t-shirt and walks over with a bottle of white wine in one fist, waving the other hand. He looks younger, cooler, than the other guests despite the grey flecks in his dark hair, and not grizzled as she thought a war photographer should look. He looks interesting, she thinks, pulling her hair over her shoulder.

When he spots Maeve, his easy smile drops. Poleaxed, she thinks, as he looks at her with shock, her toes curling in her sandals, a twisting cramp of delight in her stomach.

She watches the nervous swipe of his tongue across his lip and then she glances down at her plate, blushing, and he greets her parents with affable apologies for being late.

He accompanies her father, who has placed an eager arm around his shoulder, into the house with his bottle of wine as Maeve watches their backs and wonders at what just happened, at his reaction. She glances at her mother to see if she noticed, but she’s busy waving flies away and laughing at something Mrs Quinn—whose advanced age belies her dirty jokes—has said.

Maybe it was nothing, Maeve thinks as dinner continues, as Stuart barely looks at her after the first brief introduction from her parents, as she studies him. Maybe it was just the sun in his eyes, her own wishful thinking.

‘God, it’s been an age since I’ve been back here,’ he says, leaning an elbow over the back of his seat as he surveys the house and the lawn, the pampas grass lining its edges, the trees that hide the house next door.

Sometimes when he talks his mouth quirks to the side, and when he blinks it’s slow, thoughtful. His voice is softer than she first thought, his movements—the swing of his head, the twitch of his wrist on his knife—less confident. She’s fascinated.

‘Tell us about Ruth as a girl then,’ Mr Shaw says.

‘Oh, she was wild,’ Stuart drawls, with a hint of something that makes her father laugh.

‘I was perfectly proper,’ her mother insists. Her cheeks are ruddy with wine and her blonde bob is sticking up on one side where she’s tucked it behind her ear.

‘Well, we were all wild back in those days,’ Judy’s husband says with a snort, and when he catches Maeve’s eye he looks suddenly embarrassed.

They should really have these dinners with adults only, Maeve thinks, as she waves away his awkward offer of wine. Iza and Michael are busy with a game of their own invention, whispering sleepily to one another as they share the same bench on the end, but Maeve feels like she’s just in the way, like the adults are children and she’s the parent looking down on their fun.

‘It was paradise here, really,’ Stuart says, smiling down at his plate.

‘Paradise,’ her mother repeats, and lifts her glass so fast it clips her teeth.

Later, as the fabled chocolate mousses are brought out, sweating in their crystal bowls, and the twins are dozing off on a rug in the long shadows of the trees, her mother rests a hot hand on Maeve’s shoulder.

‘Can you take Mrs Quinn’s flowers back inside, darling? I think they’re drooping out here in the heat.’ Her mother is using the voice she uses in company; posher, warmer, with a slight quiver at the end of sentences that Maeve thinks she’s the only one who notices.

Maeve takes the large porcelain vase in her arms, clutching it to her middle, and walks carefully across the lawn towards the shingle path to the front door. When she’s back at the table she’ll say she wants to go to bed, that she’s tired. No one has mentioned her illness, beyond an initial comment from a couple of the guests to her parents that she’s looking well. If she says she’s tired, her mother’s face might drop, she might apologize, or she might just wave her off to bed.

Stuart has paused on his way back from the kitchen, the chilled bottle of wine at his foot as he crouches over the lavender bush, bruising purple flowers between his fingers. When he sees her coming, he puts his hands in his pockets.

‘You don’t have a lighter, do you?’ he asks, taking out a cigarette from a battered pack.

‘No.’ Her face brushes against the flowers, a petal smearing across her chin. She wishes she did have a lighter, that she could pass it over to him and he could nod a thanks around the cigarette, that she could watch his stubbled cheeks suck in with the first sharp inhale. ‘My dad might have one, although he’s not supposed to.’ Her father gave up smoking when she was born, but the stress of her time in hospital turned him back to the habit. Another thing to feel guilty for.

‘A terrible example to make,’ Stuart teases. He folds the cigarette into his palm. ‘You know, you look just like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, with the flowers and your hair,’ he says, and she feels dazed, thrilled, and hopes it doesn’t show on her face.

He blinks and looks down at his feet like he might be secretly shy. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I bet that comparison gets old.’

‘No,’ she says, her body hot now as if it’s midday. No one has ever noticed the resemblance except her, gazing at the postcards of paintings pinned to her wall, the girls with their ruddy red hair and plaintive expressions.

‘Like the Lady of Shalott. Or Ophelia,’ he says, eyes meeting hers again, a small smile on his lips as his voice trails off.

The vase is getting heavier, like her arms are being tugged out of their sockets, but she doesn’t want to leave. She doesn’t want Stuart to go back to the table either. Then someone calls for the wine and he bends to pick it up.

‘I think I’ll stay inside now, can you tell my mother?’ she says, feeling embarrassed by that word, mother.

‘Sure. But you’re all right?’ he checks, looking at her carefully.

No, she thinks of saying. ‘I’m fine.’

In the cool of the house, which is always dark, no matter the weather or the time of day outside, the wood a dark Victorian stain, the wallpaper in the hall a faded striped yellow, her foot slips on the worn-down tiles. Water slops on her feet from the vase and she wants to cry.

Chapter Two

Even dosed with wine, I still wake up from another nightmare, my t-shirt stuck to my chest with sweat, the feeling of watery weeds slipping over my ankles making me kick at the covers with a panicked moan.

Sheets shoved down to my hips, I stare at the ceiling as my breathing slows, trying to think of something other than water, than the river.

Alex is still asleep, his body ripe, his dreams peaceful. He’s never woken easily. I used to have to plonk the twins right on him to get him to help them settle when they were crying and I was despairing of not having enough arms or leaking breasts or motherly reserves left to care for them. Twins. I love them but I would never do that again, I’m not sure now how I even survived those first years. If Maeve had been sick in that first year, and not later when they could be farmed out to nurseries for a portion of the day, I might well have gone mad.

Now that I’m awake, I can hear it. A drip somewhere in the house, soft and echoing. I picture a pool forming in a basin, picture it rising and rising and slipping over the edge onto the floor below, crawling out towards other rooms, wet and thick.

This house has five bathrooms. Our ensuite, the upstairs family bathroom, the smaller guest bathroom, the downstairs loo, and the outside toilet which the gardener used to use. Five bathrooms with leaky taps, with mildewed tiles and splotches of rusty mould, with ageing groaning pipes that need to be replaced as a matter of urgency. Alex sees the excesses of this house—all the rooms that a family of five don’t actually need —as something to be proud of, to revel in. I see them as extra work, as caverns where money will get flung and lost in an attempt to keep this old house, my father’s house, from crumbling.

I go in search of the sound, pausing outside my children’s rooms, waiting to hear their easy breaths. I always feel a low panic that something might have happened to them, that they might have slipped away as I slept. When Maeve was sick and home from hospital, it wasn’t enough to stand outside her door; I used to crouch by her bed and watch her, note the shadows under her eyes and her laboured breaths. Sometimes Alex found me there in the morning, slumped on the floor in a restless doze. You’ll tire yourself out, he used to say, she’s fine.

She’s fine —a phrase meant to comfort but one that only ever made me want to protest that she’s not, she’s not fine, and I didn’t notice it when it first began, I didn’t listen when she said she was tired and breathless. I called it growing pains and told her she was fine.

The leaking tap is in the guest bathroom, the one so narrow that you can sit on the toilet and reach the sink and the bath at the same time. Now, as I stand in front of the sink in the dark, I cup a hand under each tap to find the culprit, or as if I am waiting for some kind of blessing, I think. For a moment, nothing, and then a cold drop in my right palm that rolls down the inside of my wrist.

In the shadowed mirror, I am ageless, unrecognizable. I could be her, my teen self, awake at night with giddy thoughts, restless with sadness, wishing to be anywhere but here. It could be the start of that summer, and I might be able to stop it happening before it did.

I was the one who took the first photograph of a girl in the river, and sometimes I think this means I am to blame for everything. It was a picture of Joan Summers. Joan Summers, with her straight black hair and watery blue eyes that looked eerie and old in some of the washed-out photographs.

She used to wear a particular stripy halterneck dress she’d bought on the King’s Road that she had shrunk in a hot wash to show off her knickers, and had a reputation for being a good-time girl. If my mother had been alive, she might have called her ‘trouble’; although maybe she wouldn’t—not having any memories of my mother, not even the press of my baby cheek against her woollen jumper, or the touch of her soft palm on my forehead, I do not know what she was really like.

Joan’s parents were drama teachers and later we would use their theatre programmes, the covers and illustrations in their books on Hamlet, along with the reproductions of Millais’s Ophelia in my art books, to align our own visions with that of Shakespeare’s heroine, but before that our inspiration had been more primal, innate, as if a drowning girl lived inside each of us waiting to be discovered.

It was me and Joan and one of the other girls that day - though who exactly I forget, maybe because by the end of our time in the river we became in some ways interchangeable, as if the water had softened the delineations between us—and we were walking along the riverbank in the sun, singing a James Taylor song with drooping daisy chains around our thin wrists. We threw sticks in the river to race, and when hers got stuck under a mossy root, I dared Joan to go in and get it. That day she was wearing a white, frothy peasant’s blouse, and as she swore at us and clambered into the water to get to the other side of the river, the water made it billow out, turned it see-t hrough so we could see the much-envied lacy brassiere she wore underneath.

I had a camera with me. I remember thinking that that year was important, worth recording, as if our small teenage lives could be set against the whirlwind happening in London, New York, San Francisco, Vietnam.

She turned around triumphantly when she had retrieved the stick and saw me unclipping the camera case.

Take a picture of this! she called. Of me drowning in the river. And then she swooned back with a laugh, with a theatrical wave of her arm, and I thought, Yes, yes, this, and something inside me trembled, bloomed. I crouched on the bank and Joan tipped her head back, stick forgotten and floating further downstream, her blouse borne up around her, her legs pale in the glittering green waters, the daisy chain joined by a fern frond that tangled around her throat.

Afterwards, I pushed the camera into Joan’s hands to take my turn. And oh, that first step into the river, the cold of the water, the stones sore on my toes—could anything ever be sweeter than that?

It looked calm from the bank but a river isn’t like a swimming pool, you don’t slip easily into it and then lie placid; there’s a current that wants to nudge you onwards, weeds and leaves and flotsam, stones and rocks underneath you, branches and roots like outstretched arms reaching towards you. The light on river water on a hot summer’s day is blinding, brilliant in its patterns, the branches of the willows above dizzying in their detail as the lip of the water dances across your skin and the gurgling underwater world washes into your ears.

It was then, I think, that I understood baptism, and it was then that my body first felt alive, my own.

We didn’t leave the river until we started chattering with the cold, until the sky grew dark with heavy clouds, and as we clambered through the woods, our clothes slapping against our prickling skin, we felt washed ashore on some strange new land. And when the photos were developed, when I cycled back from the village with the sealed packet, and the four of us sat underneath a tree with our mouths sticky from toffees twisted out of shiny wrappers, our legs criss-crossed over one another’s, and we saw ourselves transformed by the lens and the film, the leaking light of the old camera like the golden light in the painting of a saint, like the summer sun blinding us, we felt a new thrum of power, of possibility.

Where did that possibility go? I think now, my hand aching as I try in vain to turn the cold tap tighter to stop the drip, as if fixing this one thing will prove I have some small modicum of control over this house. Where did the hopes and dreams of that girl go,