Chapter 20
Twenty
I TRIED TO KEEP in touch with Victoria over the summer.
I wanted to know what she was doing at all times, who she was meeting, her every action, her every thought.
I wanted to climb inside her brain and unlock the glittering mysteries at the heart of her.
But it was impossible. She flew to Cape Cod two days after term ended.
V
I’m so sorry, I’d love to hang out, but you know, it’s like a family thing x
Instead, I made do with scrolling through picture after picture of her on Facebook.
Victoria with her arm around a tanned, shirtless youth on the beach at sunset.
Victoria and her nieces squeezed together on the deck of a yacht.
Her grinning face hovering above a foot-long lobster roll.
Playing cards with a group of effortlessly attractive young people I didn’t recognize.
Her feet buried, a heart in the sand.
I always liked the pictures, always tried to leave a cute or witty comment for her to return to. Sometimes she responded. Sometimes not.
Then, after a few weeks, the landscape changed.
She was in New York. The wholesome all-American pictures were replaced by grainy images of her stumbling out of bars, smoke curling around her face as she sat with friends in Central Park, hip popped in a trendy bathroom, tiled pink, a flash in the mirror, the ghost of her image repeated.
I tried writing to her. I told her about what I was up to, making efforts to embellish, to string out my dull summer into something altogether more enchanting.
I described the fields around my home, the waving ears of corn, the rapeseed, its malodorous yellow carpeting the landscape.
I told her about the people who populated the estate that wound up the hill, the rusty playground at the top and canisters of laughing gas that littered the ground.
I took a picture of myself lying in the long grass.
I imagined her seeing it, maybe at night.
I imagined her thinking about me, missing me.
I invented a summer romance, a boy I’d known in college, a boy who in reality had never looked at me twice.
We made love, I told her, over and over and over again.
It was wonderful, I said, but I couldn’t be held down, my spirit was too restless; she knew, she understood, she was the same.
I told her about my grandma, about the sadness I felt going through box after box of bric-a-brac, a life left behind.
The porcelain dove with a chipped wing. The sun-bleached packet of courgette seeds.
A receipt taped to a box of shoes, like new.
Christmas cards, birthday cards, orders of service, kept for years in a wicker hamper beneath the bed. A necklace, the gem missing. Odd socks.
I described the moors above Grandma’s house, trying to remind Victoria of the windswept morning we had spent there.
I said she should come and visit me if she got the chance, that it would be great to have her here again.
Or maybe if not this summer, at New Year’s again, like she’d once promised.
Anyway, I’d say, stay in touch. I miss you, I’d say. I love you, always.
She never replied – well, not properly. Occasionally she’d respond with a few scratchy lines to my prompts, but there were no insights, no confidences, nothing really but the uneven weight of my devotion.
But then, out of the blue, two weeks before term started and long after I’d given up on a surprise visit like in Rome, an email arrived in my inbox.
To: Shannon Bell
Subject: An invitation
Hello darling, sorry for being an absolute horror at replying. Hope you’ve had a fabulous summer. Wondered if you wanted to finish it with a bang? I’m dying to see you. Come to Godwin.