Fliss
AND WHAT COULD SHE TELL THEM NOW, the ones she has left behind? Does she feel anger or resentment or pain? Does she want revenge? Is there bitterness beating through her airy soul?
No.
There is only love. She is untethered and light and free. The realisation comes to her, creeping across the horizon like the rosy dawn, that this, right here, this place of abundance and bliss, this is the high she was chasing all along. She’d used drugs and alcohol and sex to try and get out of her earthbound self, but the gates had never opened.
Now she passes through.
XVIII.
Serena
SHE GOES BACK TO THE CLINIC. To Wurttensee. It was better than going to her mother’s – God forbid – and better than going to any of her friends who would gossip and ply her with wine until she spilled all the grisly details. The few friendships she had – if you could call them that – were feebly stuck together with the binding glue of gossip and self-revelation. She couldn’t face making everything into an amusing story, to be told wryly at her own expense.
She only knows, after that night at the British Museum, that she wants to get away from Ben, from Cosima, from everything and everyone that has humiliated her. She wants to feel safe and held and looked after. She wants to feel as though someone else is in control of what happens next.
So that’s why she ends up in the clinic by the lake. As soon as she walks through the glass doors, she is soothed by the soft cream of the walls and the daily schedule she knows awaits her, of lymphatic massage appointments and bowls of broth and instructive lectures about the digestive tract. Here, no one will talk to her or expect her to talk back. If she’s recognised by anyone, they will studiously pretend not to have noticed that Serena Fitzmaurice was sitting in the Wurttensee library armchair looking terribly wan, cosseted in a fluffy dressing gown, listlessly staring out of the window trying to make sense of her life.
This, in any case, is her hope as she stares out at the lake, watching as a man and a young boy push out a flat-bottomed canoe into the smooth water. Their paddles make a rhythmic, plopping sound. Shestarts to count each splash and gets to fifty-six when she remembers the book, open on her lap. It’s a trashy novel she picked up from one of the shelves, the cover gold and red and featuring a picture of a woman’s leg sheathed in a seamed stocking. The blurb promised ‘an unputdownable romp’ but Serena couldn’t get past the first dozen pages.
Dr Hans had been surprised to see her.
‘Back again so soon, Lady Fitzmaurice?’
There was accusation in his tone, as if she were too pathetic to be able to cope on her own. Well, she thought, he’s right. He’s absolutely right. And she only had herself to blame, that was the worst of it. She had known what Ben was capable of but had convinced herself that she was the exceptional one; that she wouldn’t be treated in the same disposable way he treated others. She was arrogant enough to have assumed his fascination with her would last forever. If it didn’t, she had thought she would have her children to love her instead. But even there, she had been found wanting. She wishes she could have lived a different life, one in which she’d exercised an easy intimacy with her babies. She wishes she had known how to look after them without the self-doubt she so often felt around children, who seemed to sniff out the disappointing truth of who she was before she even knew it of herself. She wishes, in truth, that her mother could have taught her how. She wishes her mother could have mothered her.
‘What can we do for you on this occasion?’ Dr Hans said, his English as formal and stilted as ever. There he was, sitting on the other side of the same desk, with the same leather-bound notebook, the same gold ring, the same humourless smile. ‘You need some care, do you not? Some – how do you say it – Tee und See?’
Serena nodded.
‘I needed to get away.’
Dr Hans tilted his head, expecting her to elaborate. She didn’t.
‘I see. And your health? Nothing has changed in the interim? No new concerns?’
‘No,’ she said as a tear slid down her face, dropping into her lap.
Dr Hans pretended not to notice.
‘We will have you – as you English like to say – Right As Rain in no time.’
He chuckled, satisfied with this little verbal flourish, and made some notes in a folder with a fat silver pen. The nib scratched against the paper for imponderable minutes.
‘How are the family, your children?’ Dr Hans asked, without looking up from his paperwork.
‘Oh. They’re … well, they’re fine.’
She thought back to her frantic calls to Cosima over the past week. The voicemails she had left. The promises she had made. You’re not in trouble. I’m sorry. I love you – all the sensitive, respectful, emotional guff their family therapists had told them over the years they should provide as parents. It was about giving your children ‘a safe place’ and ‘a sense of unconditional acceptance’. So Serena had sidelined her own anger and tried to repair the snapped threads of her relationship with Cosima with carefully modulated entreaties and proclamations of affection.
Then when the calls had gone unanswered, she had texted, pleading with Cosima just to let her know where she was, that she was safe. Serena’s initial outrage at her daughter’s secrecy had dissipated quickly once the fear set in. She became terrified that Cosima would end up on the streets, outcast and estranged, hooked on drugs, squatting with her fellow activists. The family might never hear from her again until it was too late; until she turned up dead like Fliss.
Finally, three days in, there had been a ping on her phone.
‘I’m fine,’ Cosima texted. ‘I’m with Martin.’
It was so unexpected that Serena’s immediate thought had been, Martin who? But then she’d remembered seeing the two of them huddled together in the kitchen at Tipworth and the more she sat with the idea, the more she saw that it was the perfect hiding place for Cosima. They never would have thought to look for her there. And she was safe – that was the main thing.
