She had a pain somewhere: was it in her heart? In her spleen, more like; or, no, between her ears, curved like one of those rigid Alice bands she had once worn to school. Or a dim poisonous fog connecting and attacking all the organs of her body.
She thought about Helly.
She imagined a morning for Helly, a parallel place in the world where Helly moved with lightness between free choices, taking a long shower, picking out clothes from her wardrobe, drinking filter coffee, eating a croissant and then a peach from a shallow ceramic fruit bowl on a glass table, looking over a script for a rehearsal she was going to in the afternoon. She knew enough about Helly’s life, of course, to picture her surroundings accurately and fill in some authenticating detail. The flat was not tidy — Helly was notoriously slovenly — there were clothes dropped over the backs of chairs and on the floor, the duvet in its yellow cover with red poppies was heaped on the bed where she’d climbed out from under it, and Sunday supplements and magazines were strewn all over the place. But it was clean, she could afford a cleaner these days, after the ice-cream contract and now the work for the TV series about a special-needs teacher (Helly was not the special-needs teacher but the French teacher the special-needs teacher’s partner was having an affair with). Sunlight struck in through its open sash windows across the polished wood floor, there were flowers in a vase drinking up the light, unusual cut flowers, delphiniums or something that you could only buy in good florists in London. Blue delphiniums and yellow goldenrod. Not in season: but Clare allowed herself this one little cheat.
David, Helly’s boyfriend, was not part of Clare’s picture.
Partly, it was precisely the singleness of Helly’s life that Clare most envied. She and David kept their separate flats and didn’t see one another for days at a time. The idea of such empty acres of solitude was a cooling balm against the promiscuous itch of Clare and Bram’s crowded little house, where every surface was greasy with touching and there was no lock on the toilet door and at night the children wandered from bed to bed.
Partly, it was better not to think about David’s life with Helly, because of what was going on between him and Clare: not an affair exactly, not yet, but some kind of promise of one. This promise occupied a very particular space in Clare’s thoughts at the moment. It was buried deep under all the casual daily material of her life and the deliberate thought of it was mostly avoided by her; and yet at the same time she never for a single fraction of a moment was unconscious of it wrapping her around and changing her like an alien skin fitted indistinguishably over her real one.
She was going to meet him in London in ten days.
* * *
FOR A LONG TIME Clare Menges hadn’t distinguished Helly Parkin from the alien crowd at school. Helly didn’t practice the moody dark withdrawal that was standard for those who chose not to belong: she was even good at netball, and loud and exuberant, with light brown hair braided onto her head like Angie in East Enders, protuberant ears, a husky voice, a grin so wide her laughter was a red gulf. Clare inclined toward the ones who wore their hair like Annie Lennox, short and spiky, and didn’t grin.
One lunch break toward the end of their second year, when the games and lessons to come were casting their deep shadows across the sunshine and the crowds of green-clad girls in it, foolishly-innocently French skipping across knotted elastic bands, Helly claimed her. Clare was sitting on the grass with her back to the wall of the biology lab, devouring a book, holding it open with her elbows, with her hands over her ears and her forehead screwed up in what was meant to be an all-excluding frown. She and a couple of friends were in a phase of passing around dreadful historical novels: in irony, knowing they would be disappoved of, but also genuinely addicted to the ripe lurid matter inside, which fed some hunger left over by the long pale schooldays. (She never had any trouble later in life remembering the marriages and adulteries and sticky ends of the royal families of Europe.)
Helly, who as far as Clare could remember had never talked to her before, crouched on the grass in front of her, forcing her to look up from the book and speaking in an absurdly portentous artificial voice.
— Come forth with me to witness the secret sacrifice. Speak to none else of it.
Clare was dizzy from being dragged out of her story in too much of a rush: Ferdinand and Isabella had just made a messenger who brought unfortunate news eat his own boiled shoe leather. Helly’s words seemed an extravagance from the book spilled out into the thin real air; otherwise she might simply have ignored her. She certainly felt embarrassed for her: by the end of the second year it was not the thing to play imaginary games, you were supposed to have graduated to games with rules.
— I don’t want to, I’m reading.
Helly put a finger to her lips in convincingly real dismay. Speak not: ‘tis deadly dangerous, if they but knew. Come forth at once, utter no further word.
With a darting surreptitious glance around at the crowds of tranquilly idling girls, she walked off; after an exasperated moment’s hesitation, Clare followed. They wound through the knot garden beside Old House, through the door onto the terrace, then down the terrace steps and past the tennis courts and around the huge trunk of the old cedar to a gap in the tall thick shrubs that grew around the boundary wall. Clare felt apologetic and ridiculous, following — she shrugged at an inquiring friend who passed going the other way — but at the same time she was half excited, susceptible to the suggestion that under the banal surface of school life there must be reserves of possibility, untapped.
Behind the gap in the shrubs was a space big enough for a den; Clare had been in there before. The earth was worn shiny, the bushes in their interior were twiggy and dusty and leafless; you could sit on the wide top of the wall. The wall overlooked a suburban street whose empty ordinariness was mysterious and desirable because it was outside and free. Helly had two other acolytes already squeezed into the space, girls Clare didn’t know well. They couldn’t keep up the unfaltering seriousness Helly managed; they giggled and looked as if they felt exposed in foolishness when Clare joined them.
— What’s all this about?
Helly closed her eyes, waited for silence.
— Clare Menges, you have been chosen.
— For what, exactly?
— To join the sacred sisterhood of the stump.
There was a sawn-off stump of some kind of shrub at the back of the den, beside the walclass="underline" when Clare looked closely she could see it was studded with thumbtacks; there were hair clips and scraps of cloth and bits of jewelry stuffed behind its bark and into its crevices. They looked wet and dirty and rather dismal.
— You have to give something, Helly said. In return for our sacrifices the guardian of the stump protects us with his powers and brings misfortune to our enemies.
— The thumbtacks are the curses, one of the others said. They really work.
— I don’t know if I want to belong to the sisterhood of the stump, said Clare.
— Too late, intoned Helly, who could sustain her portentous intonation without collapse or irony. You’ve seen his mysteries. If you betray them, may you rot in torment.