Not long after the arrival of P, another girl, D, joins the group. Now they are four, a family. D is much more to my tastes. She is observant, polite, interesting. She has a discipline about her that I like, an outward-looking beady kind of attentiveness that seems respectful of life. D does not gaze at screens. Her fingernails are unvarnished. I tell my daughter that I like her. I want to show my approval, and D has given me the opportunity.
Yes, my daughter says coolly, she’s nice.
I ask my children what their father feeds them. Takeaways, they say. Pizza. Chicken curry from the supermarket. The tree is dead for him too, then. He was once an extravagant cook, a person who made pastry and boeuf bourguignon, who made his own mincemeat at Christmas, who made little parcels of ravioli and crimped them all around the edges. Where has it gone, that food? And where did it come from, if not from him?
I go to bed hungry and when I wake I feel a degree safer. The hunted creature, hiding, tries to make itself small. The less of me there is, the less likely it is that the arrow will find me. I cook my daughters their supper but I can’t eat with them: I fear that if I do I’ll forget, come out of my hiding place, expose myself to danger. I fear something terrible will happen. Increasingly, to eat seems to be to open the body: the fight-or-flight responses are disabled. It is impossible to eat and stay vigilant. Sometimes, over supper, my daughters argue and upset themselves. If I, too, were eating I might get angry with them. As it is, I spring to their aid. One Sunday evening, when I am expecting them back, the phone rings. I have made a chocolate cake for their return: it stands on a plate in the kitchen, beautifully iced. The phone call is to tell me that my daughter has had an accident at her grandparents’ house, where they were staying the weekend: she is on her way to casualty, has a gash in her leg that will need stitches, so they won’t be back until late. There is nothing I can do and so I stand in the kitchen, waiting. I look at the cake on its plate. It strikes me that while I was making it, my daughter was slipping on the wet path at the back of her grandparents’ house and opening her knee from one side to the other on an edging stone. She returns with six stitches, and a scar that makes my heart jump into my mouth. I saw my own bone, she says. She eats a piece of cake, a small one: the shock has taken away her appetite. It’s nice, she says, resting her head against my arm. Aren’t you having any?
Days and nights of hunger, white and abstract, hunger and the feeling of excitement that is in fact its opposite, dread: I wonder whether the dying get caught up in something of this black romance, whether the courtship of death likewise feels for an instant like thrilling life. Sometimes, looking at my daughters, I remember that once I was pregnant with them, and the memory is too strange to tolerate for long. My body is far away now from that thickening, motionless state, is drifting and fading toward a blank vision of its own autonomy.
I sit and watch a war documentary with my daughters. We watch the old black-and-white footage of men coming across the Channel waters in their strange snub-nosed boats. We see them discharged on the beaches, watch them running up the sands like scuttling crabs. They are conveyed in squat trucks to a village just inland from the French coast, where the British are holding the line. The men huddle in ditches, their hands resting on the flanks of big guns all webbed in camouflage. Their faces are besmirched with mud, their tin hats strewn with leaves: they crouch like savages, grinning at the camera. The village can be seen in the near distance, a pretty place with the spire of the village church rising up through the summer trees. Back in the ditches the guns are being loaded with rounds of mortar: we watch as they fire, the men holding the kicking flanks like the thighs of a lusty woman. We watch the rounds begin to fall, puncturing the sides of buildings, shearing the tiles from the roofs, smashing street signs and windows, opening up great ragged cavities in the walls. We watch, finally, the church spire in its last moments of tranquillity: the camera lingers there on its stillness amid the treetops for what seems like an eternity, until at last the mortar strikes; and though we are expecting it, it is still shocking, still surprising to see something so blameless be destroyed. A hole is blown through its centre and its slender top bows gracefully and then topples to the earth.
A friend comes to visit, someone I’ve known for a while though not well. But lately she has come forward. She has stepped out from the background and come towards me. She brings not food but a lavender plant, a scented girlish delicate-coloured thing whose smell reminds me of childhood.
I say to her, all my memories are being taken away. Nothing belongs to me any more. I have become an exile from my own history. I say to her, I no longer have a life. It’s an afterlife; it’s all aftermath.
My friend has a history of her own. She too was once married; she too experienced the breaking up of that image, saw it become a pile of broken-edged pieces like the ones I carry everywhere in my hands. For a long time she lived the virginal life with her young daughter that I am living now. She was so thin you could have threaded a needle with her, had coffee flowing in her veins instead of blood, never slept because it was only when her daughter was asleep that she could live and breathe. Yet she would spend her evenings brooding and weeping instead of living. Friendship, she says, was what sustained her in that time. In Greek drama, the community shares the pain of war with the returning warriors. They come out, out into the streets to offer their love and their solicitude to those who have suffered the pain of battle. Marriage keeps other people outside, my friend says. In marriage you go away from other people, but at the end of marriage they come out to welcome you back. This is civilisation, she says. The worst thing that happened to you has brought out the best in them.
My daughters like this friend of mine. Whenever I say she’s coming to visit, their faces show pleasure instead of apprehension. They don’t fear her as they fear other people. When they look at her and her daughter, I suppose, they see the new reflection of themselves. Recently she got married again: my daughters and I went to her wedding and sat in the front row. My friend admits that she cried when she left the little house she shared with her daughter. She had recreated her own innocence there, washed away the bloodshed of relationship, rewound herself, spat out the fruit of the tree of knowledge. She clung, a little, to that recovered innocence; she stood at the altar for the second time in her wedding dress, trembling like a girl. I want to ask her whether it feels like real life yet, whether the feeling of aftermath can encompass even events of whose nature it is the consequence, but I don’t.
My daughter’s friend D has a birthday party. S and P, of course, are there. But when I turn up at the appointed time to collect her, it becomes clear that my daughter is the only one being sent home. S and P are staying the night at D’s house: the three of them are discussing the film that has been rented for their entertainment, and that will be put on as soon as my daughter leaves.
On the way home my daughter is rigid, white, silent, but eventually she can bear it no longer and I pull the car over while she sobs against my shoulder.