The Girl Who Passed for Normal by Hugh Fleetwood

Author:Hugh Fleetwood [Hugh Fleetwood]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571304820
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

6

Barbara woke with a hangover, and — she thought grimly as she lay in bed — almost nothing else. A hangover and a commitment.

She lay in bed and remembered Mary Emerson lying back on her big sofa, drunk and asleep, with her big jaw hanging down; Barbara had wanted to wake her and tell her she looked like her daughter’s mother. Mary Emerson beached on a sand-colored sofa; a stranded whale with red hair.

Barbara had stared at her as she slept; at the brown silk dress, at the heavy ringed hands, at the shoes that didn’t fall off the surprisingly small feet; and she wondered whether David had ever made love to this carcass, this heavy, handsome lump of flesh. She wondered what the woman was like nude, and pictured David lying on top of her, with his long fair hair falling straight into her thick red hair. She could see them together, and could imagine Mary Emerson saying something like, “David, are you most in love with me?” She could imagine David laughing, and not saying anything — and then she could hear them, lightly, confidently, amusingly, starting to talk about her, to pull her to pieces, and to pity her.

She could hear them, and she knew it was her they were talking about. Staring at the great Southern whale stranded on the sofa, she wished it were dead; she wished that if she got up and walked across the room and touched it, it would fall to the floor with its mouth open; its rings would bang on the wooden floor, its neck would twist back, its little shoes would drop off to reveal red-painted toenails; it would make no sound, and it would be dead.

But Barbara had left her there, called a taxi, and gone home. In the taxi she had wondered what would happen to Catherine if Mary Emerson died. She presumed that Luke Emerson would come over from America, ask her if she was prepared to continue looking after his sister, and make the same deal with her as his mother had made; then he would return to America and Catherine would be hers forever. If Mary Emerson were to die, she wondered, where did that put David; but she supposed it didn’t matter very much. She remembered the deep Southern voice: “You know as well as I do he’ll never come back.” Sitting in the back of the taxi, she shivered, and wished Mary Emerson were dead.

She remembered all this later in bed, and thought that if Mary Emerson were dead, Catherine would be hers forever, or for as long as she wanted her; Catherine and the villa and Iva and a more or less inexhaustible supply of money; and with that money — she smiled bitterly as she thought of it — she would justify her mother’s years of hard work, her years of deprivation and self-denial. She would be making use of the education her mother, with such sacrifice, had bought for her; making use of it beyond her mother’s wildest dreams.

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