The Seduction Read online

  Sol nodded, slowly. ‘Honey, she’s helped you. I’ll give you that.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘So I’m being too cynical here?’ he said, stroking his beard. ‘She’s calmed you down, made you happier, so maybe now I’ll shut the hell up.’

  ‘Never shut the hell up. I find you fascinating.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  Beth bit her lip. ‘Is she – Tamara – going to get into trouble?’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘He won’t say anything,’ said Sol dismissively. ‘He’s not interested in her, and anyway, he’d protect Sofia. It’s only concern for you that made him raise this.’

  ‘You’re such good boys.’ She smiled at him.

  Sol shook his head. ‘And good boys are not fun, right?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. Of course not. You’re my beloved good-boy-not-always-good.’

  ‘Go back to the Jackass or his replacement if you want flowers every day and never knowing if your boyfriend’ll show up.’

  Her phone beeped in her pocket. She smiled again. ‘You’re right. That’s exactly it. Not in a century would I go back to the Jackass or any man like him.’

  ***

  Nights were disrupted. Beth was a sick woman, a creature of nerves and daydreams. Fantasies proliferated: Tamara in the Little Canal Street kitchen, implausibly sipping tea in work hours before Fern returned from school; Tamara kissing her in her office in her lunch break; Tamara in a boat with her, rowing to the tangled half-islands on the canal shore and lying there together; Tamara in the small room used for storage and guests, sneaking in after Fern’s bedtime.

  Beth pictured the books, paints and neglect up there and hastily cleaned it all in her mind, washing white curtains so that they danced in the wind over the canal light, the flight of swans, and all love was in there, high sky, wet bodies. The room had only a single bed – she tucked in the sweetest sheets she had, innocent and sprigged – and they made love together, however that happened, her legs weakening even as Fern was hissing some new accusation.

  ‘Sleeping,’ Fern said when Beth went to her room.

  Beth backed away. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t even kiss you. But I love you.’

  She had recently written Fern postcards and a letter stating her love, acknowledging Fern’s anger, expressing a desire to understand any mistakes she had made and carefully refraining from asking questions. There was no sign Fern even read them. Fern’s back was hunched against her, her face turned to the wall and covered with hair.

  ‘Goodnight, anyway,’ said Beth softly. ‘I love you,’ she said again, before she could stop herself.

  ***

  Winter sunlight grazed the walls in the morning, ballooning with the canal’s movement. The boy who wore a hoodie was out there, and Beth stared down at him from the window, but this time he passed by without turning. She looked around for a note from Sol, his X or scrawled heart on the back of an envelope, but there was nothing, and no text. Fern had gone with him. The restrictions on Fern were being gradually lifted, and she was permitted brief holiday outings with friends, though her apparent fury was growing rather than abating. Tamara was with Beth, day and night. But two days passed, and where was she? Her last words at Moro came to her: ‘Me too … so much.’ Beth rang her and leaped straight on to voicemail, every breath and tonal undulation pouring amplified into her ear.

  She walked to the bus stop, to work in her studio. The light shone in the rare angle that allowed a glimpse of the canal bottom, only visible on early winter mornings, sun now illuminating a trolley, a car wheel, sediment-draped objects that were less definable. A fish silvered through a glare of weed, a disturbance of mud, and suddenly there was Lizzie. A memory of her in Hackney that made Beth’s stomach plunge.

  ***

  Beth had feared that Lizzie Penn would make another attempt after her approach on Beck Road. Her baby was so newly minted, with her precise little features beneath a slant of hair, her brows pen marks; and Lizzie had always, Beth later realised, been a determined person.

  It was winter when she saw her again. Beth was on her own, enjoying the novelty of a walk with unencumbered arms, and mentally preparing Fern’s supper, a backdrop of work ideas just beginning to stir, and there was Lizzie Penn, not back in the North, but at the top end of London Fields.

  Beth turned sharply, but Lizzie was already calling. Beth carried on walking, her head down, though the voice of her mother made her heart a sagging organ.

  ‘Please, Bethy. Can I – can I see her?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Beth loudly, walking faster, but Lizzie had caught up.

  ‘I’d like to see little Fern,’ said Lizzie in a voice carrying an edge of ownership.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Beth. She glimpsed Lizzie’s face with its wobble of indignation, the tears marbling her eyes. ‘No. You didn’t want— Why should you?’ she said, anger giving her strength.

  Lizzie recoiled as if slapped. The tears welled, hesitated, then spilled over.

  ‘I’m her grandmother,’ she said in a voice that expected a response.

  ***

  And yet, all those years earlier in Sefton Park, Lizzie had been there. Her mother had been there at a certain point, back in Liverpool. Beth had rung those doorbells, her school companions calling, and there was no answer, and the face had disappeared. She knew she would go back the next day, or even that night if she could escape her father.

  ***

  In the studio, the new space heaters Beth and her colleagues had succumbed to barely dented the sun-hazed cold, and they still clustered around the old stoves, even warming their hands by the bare light bulbs. Jack Dorian, no longer invoked to generate arousal for marital sex, was affable, cheerfully flirtatious, and part of the daily scenery. She ignored the chat. She wanted to fly through the smeared skylights to soar in the sun above Finsbury Park. Tamara must be only three or four miles away, breathing and moving so close to her.

  Where was Tamara? Where were her texts in answer to Beth’s?

  And Beth was back to being Bethy, with the heartbreak of other people’s mothers’ kindness; back to relying on Ellie for tampons, to having an embarrassing home containing a man and adolescent girl, to love so strong for her father it made her insides plunge. She was a girl who had started to throw her misery into painting.

  She had begun to choose all her own clothes by necessity, and so she had gradually invented herself without maternal guidance, although Ellie’s mother occasionally tempered her odder choices as she stretched her small budget in second-hand shops, the interesting and the surprising used to disguise her awkwardness, and she was teased at school and admired at art college. Although her brother Bill had cut himself off from Lizzie after her departure, when he returned to Liverpool from Brighton, he was an armoured hunger of spiky hair. It turned out later that he had been starving himself.

  Gordon Penn paid a neighbour, an old widow, to sit with his daughter after school until she was fourteen; yet in the first months, Beth still believed that Lizzie was coming back. She looked through the trees and detected her face in the sky; or she saw messages in the clouds. They were symbols. If she kept up the search, then Lizzie hadn’t gone, and the light would be on in the kitchen when she got home after school, her mother’s hair blurring past the window, and everything back, back to what it was, the overwhelming happiness of her return. The truth dawning in the mornings was a repeated shock.

  ***

  And where was Tamara? Two more days went by, and in the frequent absence of Fern and Sol, Beth worked on the Metropolitan Mice during The Dairy’s Christmas holidays, and painted in a fever. Sol had begun to keep his distance in a way that was objectively worrying but afforded Beth mental freedom, a new technicoloured life flowing above the problems of reality.

  On December the twenty-second, Beth picked up a call from an unknown number and jumped at the voice of Tamara Bywater. ‘I have been so longing to hear you,’ said Tamara. Beth made a small sound. ‘I�
�m using someone else’s phone … oh, hello, just a moment …’ A background of people talking, of work, of static, Tamara in a hurry yet soft, the voice travelling through and down Beth. ‘Oh, darling. I’m in terrible trouble … Tried to explain, but then a colleague came in … my boss Ann Penrose is after me, would love to get rid of me. We were spotted …’

  ‘Spotted?’

  Tamara greeted a probable patient in the background. ‘At Moro. Someone who knows Penrose spotted you, from the Standard or something, Penrose worked out it was me from my handbag … her menopausal rampages … Christ, I have to go. I love you. I don’t think we can see each other. It’s awful. I’ve been crying—’

  ‘Can’t see each other?’

  ‘Of course not. I’ll be struck off … Just coming, so sorry … Need to lie low … If I’m caught again, there goes my career. Got to go. We are for life, you and I, in whatever form.’

  The line went dead.

  ‘Tamara,’ said Beth into nothing, only now absorbing a fraction of the loss that would then follow, and tears that she hadn’t noticed trickled down her face into her ears.

  ‘No,’ she said, to her phone, to herself.

  ***

  There was a purity to it. Her daughter would no longer speak to her. Sol was absent. She had driven her mother away. ‘It was not your fault,’ came Tamara’s voice of old. ‘You have internalised this, Beth.’ Christmas was a numb echo of Christmases past, the rituals sustaining any semblance of levity, Boxing Day sagging into relief.

  Sol spent the school holidays working, taking Fern on safer freelance jobs when he could, and he bought her YA novels with blocky fluorescent jackets that she read as he worked, and bubble tea in shops she led him to. They went off to ice-skate when Sol had time, eating at the Lock, and shooting a film together with Fern’s friend Soraya, the ‘rushes’ viewed with shrieks of hilarity or disgust each evening.

  As late December and then January progressed, it was only work that brought Beth back to the absent Tamara, to Lizzie, to thoughts of death, the tar and silt clogging the underlayers, so at times the paint was built to a depth of several millimetres in bulbous swirls beneath a translucency of wash. Memory after memory in unwanted flashes: Lizzie almost unrecognisable in her Liverpool hospital bed, face pulled into rubber distortions. A maw of need. The Tartar features plumped and skewed, covered in tubes.

  After some hours of plein-air work in which she studied the river, Beth hurried along the north bank and, like an animal into its pen, walked straight into the hospital.

  She stood in the rattling lift in a fug of heat, her hands thawing, and she was back there, back in the place she had found deliverance. There were the double doors; the disinfectant fumes of salvation. She wanted to live there, crouch in a day room with her own Thermos, a row of plastic padded chairs to sleep on, a river view in all its moods. Scarcely needed at home, she would be quite happy, waiting for Tamara to finish work and then bandage her mind.

  There was no one there. Already, the department had gone. The receptionists’ area was closed, the window shut over their booth. Their stacked post and leaflets, their computers, the filing cabinet behind which they had stored Beth’s wet painting carrier, were all gone, a few notices still stuck there, a pile of magazines left on a chair. She spun around. A light flickered with a neuralgic buzzing, but no one emerged, and she ran through doors to the corridors to where Dr Bywater worked, every detail so known, so loved, it felt almost owned by her. She stormed along, names, familiar to her now as a forgotten dream, emerging thick with loss. She got to their room. Dr Tamara Bywater, Consultant Clinical Psychologist. She tried it, but the handle wouldn’t even twist. She rapped on it, its varnished wood dulling the force into a feeble tap. She sobbed against it. Dr Tamara Bywater.

  She ran back along the corridors, her mouth a strained rhombus, her feet slapping on the floor with no one to hear. A cleaner was out there, shunting round an industrial-sized machine with the indifference of a mule.

  ‘Where are they?’ she said.

  He gazed blankly and said something Beth didn’t understand, and she nodded then burst back out through the doors.

  ‘Where did they go?’ she said to a doctor who was walking in the other direction.

  He glanced back. ‘Psychology’s moved,’ he said. ‘Out to the Wilton Centre.’ He paused. ‘Do you need some help?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Beth too loudly.

  ***

  The dawn was to be got through. She was thirteen again and she was vermin. She was one of the rats that, if she stayed through dusk to paint at the river, she saw running up the sidings. She lay in bed. She still checked her phone, then again. The self-loathing possessed the calmness of snow-sleep. She was where Lizzie had left her.

  Fern’s banked-down disgust now turned to fury. She would barely speak to Beth, giving her assessing gazes before she turned, or casting her baleful glances that were so exaggerated, they verged on the comic, and Beth did not comment but forced herself, with an effort of will, to wait for her to reveal further sources of abhorrence.

  ***

  The weeks without Tamara were muffled. Signs of life in February were now only there to torment: the alder catkins, wild arum leaves, sudden gulls in evenings, blackbirds pecking on the terrace.

  ‘You are completely distracted,’ said Sol.

  Beth hesitated. ‘I know,’ she said in misery.

  ‘Are you having an affair?’

  Beth paused. ‘No,’ she said in a staccato voice. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Of course not. An emotional affair?’

  ‘No,’ she said, stiffening against the heat that began to rise.

  ‘Where’s the therapist?’

  Beth’s back tensed. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well.’ Sol shrugged. ‘Something. A – a breakdown?’

  ‘No. I’m happier,’ she said dully.

  ‘What, then?’

  She paused. She pressed her big toe hard into the bottom of her shoe. Sol’s mouth was ominously tense. Beth shrugged and pulled a face, and he remained motionless.

  ‘You think I will just carry on, like this?’

  Her phone rang. Tamara B.

  ‘Take the call,’ he said, and walked out of the room.

  SIXTEEN

  As the weather started to become warmer, the mayflies and coltsfoot emerging, there were more walkers on the Regent’s Canal towpath, their shapes moving blots in the night. Dusk was best for those apparitions whose outlines were blurry with gold that dipped into shadow. The one time Tamara had rung Beth, the line had gone dead, Beth had gone straight to voicemail when she called back, and then Tamara hadn’t answered her text of enquiry.

  Beth now attempted not to ask Fern questions, making suggestions and dredging her mind for anecdotes or quirky facts instead as Fern shrugged.

  ‘No touching,’ she said as Beth approached, then hesitated, in preparation for a hug before work. ‘No touch,’ said Fern. She held her palms up.

  Beth lowered her chin. ‘OK,’ she said, and lifted her bag without turning to say goodbye.

  ‘Like, she’s not even saying bye to me now?’ Fern spat out. ‘Such dumb shit.’

  ‘Don’t be so rude to your mother,’ Sol snapped.

  Fern blushed. ‘Sorry,’ she said, and as Beth was leaving, she flung herself at her father and they hugged. ‘You smell of teddy bears and the clothes dryer,’ she said to him.

  ***

  Beth had tried to return to Sefton Park the night after she had seen her mother in a first-floor window, but Gordon Penn was watching TV all evening, and it was impossible for her to sneak past him from her bedroom. Then when she had gone through the park again, shaking off the girls who walked home with her, she was uncertain which was the right house. There was the vast terrace scabbed with gull excrement crusting soot and rain, and there was house after house, divided into flats.

  She saw a boot kicking her, and it was her own foot slamming into her own shin in self-loathing for not
remembering. How? What idiot would fail to notice the number of the house that seemed, inexplicably, to contain her mother? Had it been the one with a bird barrier, one with a ribbon tied to the railings, one with cat food flaking in a pool of rain in its basement area?

  ‘Mum,’ she said out loud. ‘Lizzie,’ she tried hesitantly.

  ***

  The evenings were longer now that the clocks had changed. Bird sound bled its mechanical chirruping. Could that be Tamara? There on the towpath in April at dusk when the flickering of rose and black was like a photograph of the long-gone past. Beth saw her in all places: Tamara Bywater, as unreal as a geisha; as absent as the dead. Any possible sighting by the canal was a chimera on which to pin hope. The sop of the substitute was better than nothing.

  Now, on Saturday morning, the tourists and cyclists were already filling the towpath, mallards calling, and there among them she was; there she was. Tamara Bywater.

  Beth kept looking. She felt sick. There was the buzz of a text.

  Sol found his phone. He wandered over. He looked out, seemed not to notice.

  Beth took hers out. Tamara B. She dropped her hand as Sol came back, and it shook.

  She couldn’t look yet. She put the phone on Silent mode. She glanced round the kitchen. They were to have a family day out, Fern persuading her parents to view Camden Lock as the focus of all their activities. Fern now sat reading and mindlessly eating yoghurt in her sleeping shorts, her washed hair in several plaits for crimping purposes.

  The phone vibrated. Beth sneaked it out, watching Sol. His hand rested on Fern’s shoulder while he shook a frying pan to cook her egg as she liked it, addressing her as ‘sweetcakes’. The night before, he had made Beth a hot-water bottle as she bent over with period pains.

  He gave Fern her egg to a mutter of thanks, scrawled through photos on his phone in a towel and began to do his usual back exercises stretched against the doorframe, still frowning at his work.