chapter seventy-one
It was because of the rain.
If only the rain had stopped, then Erika wouldn’t be standing here right now on a Saturday morning in her living room with the sound of her heart thumping in her ears, feeling like she’d been arrested, except the policeman was her own husband.
Oliver didn’t really look like a policeman. He looked sad and confused. She wondered if that was the same expression he’d got on his face as a child when he found the bottles of vodka and gin his parents had hidden around the house, before he stopped believing their excited promises about giving up. (They still made extravagant promises. ‘We’re doing Dry July!’ ‘We’re doing Sober November!’)
It had happened when she was out renewing her licence. She’d been in a good mood when she came home. She liked starting her weekend by ticking off those kind of day-to-day administrative tasks her mother had so often left undone: bills left unpaid, disconnection notices ignored, unsigned permission slips immediately lost in the maelstrom.
But then Oliver met her at the door. ‘We’ve got a leak,’ he said. ‘A roof leak. In the storeroom.’
They had a small storeroom where they kept their suitcases and camping gear and skis.
‘Well, that’s not the end of the world, is it?’ she asked, but her heart started to beat double-time. She had an inkling.
Oliver being Oliver, he’d got right onto it and had begun moving things into the hallway, and he’d come upon this old locked suitcase under a blanket. The suitcase was full, and he couldn’t think what would be in there. It only took him a second to find the only unmarked key in the drawer where they kept the keys.
See. If she really was her mother’s daughter, he would never have found the key.
‘So I opened it,’ he said, and then he took her gently by the hand and led her into the dining room where he’d laid out the entire contents of the suitcase in orderly rows, as if he were an investigator laying out evidence from a crime scene. Exhibit one. Exhibit two.
‘It’s just a silly habit,’ she said defensively, and to her horror she felt an expression like her mother’s creep across her face: a furtive, sneaky look. ‘It’s not hoarding if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘At first it just seemed like random stuff,’ said Oliver. ‘But then I recognised Ruby’s sneaker.’ He lifted up the runner and banged it against the palm of his hand so that the coloured lights flashed. ‘And I remembered how Clementine and Sam said they’d lost one of her flashing shoes. It’s Ruby’s shoe, isn’t it?’
Erika nodded, unable to speak.
‘And this bracelet.’ He held up the chain. ‘It’s Clementine’s, right? It’s the one you bought for her in Greece.’
‘Yes,’ said Erika. She felt a hot, itchy flush creep up her neck as if she were having an allergic reaction. ‘She didn’t like it. I could tell she didn’t like it.’
‘Everything here belongs to Clementine, doesn’t it?’ He picked up a pair of scissors. They were Clementine’s grandmother’s pearl-handled scissors. Erika couldn’t even remember the day she’d taken them.
She pressed her finger to Holly’s long-sleeved T-shirt with the strawberry on the front. Next to it was a tote bag with a picture of a treble clef: Clementine’s first boyfriend, the French horn player, had given it to her for her twentieth birthday.
‘Why?’ said Oliver. ‘Can you tell me why?’
‘It’s just a habit,’ said Erika. She had no words to explain why. ‘A sort of … um, compulsion. There’s nothing of actual value there.’
Compulsion: one of those solid, respectable, psychological-sounding words to nicely wrap the truth: she was as mad as a hatter, as crazy as a bedbug.
Oh, she’d slept with enough crazy bedbugs in her time!
She scratched the side of her neck.
‘Don’t make me throw it away,’ she said suddenly.
‘Throw it away?’ said Oliver. ‘Are you kidding? You have to give it all back! You have to tell her that you’ve been … what? Pilfering her stuff? Is that what it is? Are you a kleptomaniac? Do you … dear God, Erika, do you shoplift?’
‘Of course I don’t shoplift!’ She would never do anything illegal.
‘Clementine must think she’s going mad.’
‘Well, she really needs to be tidier, more organised,’ began Erika, but for some reason that really tipped Oliver over a precipice she hadn’t realised he was balancing upon.
‘What in God’s name are you talking about? She needs a friend who doesn’t steal her stuff!’ shouted Oliver. He actually shouted. He’d never shouted at her before. He’d always been on her side.
She understood, of course, that what she did wasn’t perhaps ordinary. It was a strange, unsavoury habit, like gnawing her cuticles or picking her nose, and she knew she needed to keep it at a manageable level, but part of her had always assumed that Oliver would somehow understand, or at least accept it, the way he’d accepted everything else about her. He’d seen her mother’s house and he still loved her. He never criticised her the way she knew some husbands criticised tiny things about their wives. ‘The woman is incapable of closing a cupboard door,’ Sam would say about Clementine. Oliver was too loyal to ever say anything like that about Erika in public, but right now he didn’t just look mildly aggravated, he looked truly appalled.
The room went blurry as Erika’s eyes filled with tears. He was going to leave her. She’d tried to keep her craziness confined to just one small suitcase, but deep down she’d always suspected that his leaving one day was a foregone conclusion, and now the sight of those items laid out in all their useless, shabby glory confirmed it: She was her mother.
She felt a burst of fury and for some reason it was directed at Clementine.
‘Yeah, well, she’s not that great. Clementine isn’t that great,’ she said shakily, idiotically, childishly, but she couldn’t seem to quell the flood of words. ‘You should have heard the things I heard her say to Sam at the barbeque. When I went upstairs! She was talking about how she felt “repulsed” at the idea of donating her eggs to us. That’s the word she used. Repulsed.’
Oliver didn’t look at her. He picked up an ice-cream scoop from the table and fiddled with the mechanism. It had a picture of a polar bear on the handle. Erika had put it in her handbag one hot day last summer, after they’d had ice-creams in the backyard at Clementine’s house, after she’d performed at Symphony Under the Stars. Erika had just got the call about another unsuccessful IVF round, but it was nothing to do with the IVF. She’d taken the first item for her collection, a shell necklace Clementine had brought back from a holiday to Fiji, when she was only thirteen years old. Where was it? There it was. Erika had to pull back her own right arm because she so badly wanted to reach over and feel its chunky, rough-edged texture in the palm of her hand.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said.
‘About this? Because I know it’s weird and wrong and –’
‘No. Why didn’t you tell me what you overheard Clementine say?’
‘I don’t know.’ She paused. ‘I guess I felt embarrassed … I didn’t want you to know that my best friend feels that way about me.’
Oliver put down the ice-cream scoop. There was an infinitesimal softening around his mouth, but it was enough to make Erika’s legs go weak and wobbly with relief. She pulled out a chair and sat down and looked up at him, studying the faint stubble along his jawline. She remembered when they’d first sat down together to do the draw for the squash comp all those years ago. He was the clean-shaven nerd with the glasses and the pin-striped shirt frowning over the spreadsheet, taking it far too seriously, just like her, wanting it done right and done fairly. She’d looked at the stubble along his jawline, and the thought had crossed her mind, He looks like Clark Kent, but maybe he’s really Superman.
Oliver sat down at the table in front of her, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
‘I’m your best friend, Erika,’ he said sadly. ‘Don’t you know that?’