After Beth Read online

  Elizabeth Enfield

  * * *

  After Beth

  Contents

  PART ONE Events Unfolding

  Later that Monday

  Then and Now

  Early Evening

  In the Morning

  In the Early Days …

  Here and Now, in the Midst of it All

  Early Afternoon

  Waiting

  Early Evening

  Going Back

  Early Next Morning

  The Morning After the Night Before

  What Hope Remains

  Our World, Collapsing

  What Remains

  Back Now

  15 September 2016

  Later

  PART TWO: Three months later Advent

  The Following Week

  Back Home

  The Morning After

  Fifteen Shopping Days Until Christmas

  Five Days Before Christmas

  A Step Back in Time

  Christmas

  Melting Snow

  Tipping Points

  New Year

  PART THREE: Six months on Trying to Move On

  Back to Work

  Starting to Talk

  Small Steps

  Brief Moments

  After the Almost Affair

  Other People’s Lives …

  … And Other People’s Problems

  Things Turning Out Otherwise

  Meeting Up

  If You Could Turn Back Time

  PART FOUR: Eleven months later Searching for Something

  Doing Something

  Results

  The Following Weekend

  Life, Going On

  A Pleasant Interlude

  Uncertainty

  Someone Else’s Decision

  The Father of my Child

  PART FIVE: Two years on Time. Slowly Healing

  New Beginnings

  Time Flying

  The Next Frame

  A Week Later

  A Step Back in Time

  A New Beginning

  Epilogue: Four Years After

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Elizabeth Enfield worked as a journalist and producer for BBC radio before going freelance. Her short stories have been broadcast on Radio 4 and published in magazines including Woman’s Own and the Sunday Express. She is the author of five books, including the heartbreaking love story Ivy & Abe. Elizabeth may be online at www.elizabethenfield.com and @lizzieenfield on Twitter.

  For my family, in all its forms … With love

  PART ONE

  There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.

  — Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

  Events Unfolding

  ‘I’m off now. See you later, Mum.’ Beth is standing at the back door, a large beach bag over her shoulder, dressed in denim shorts, trainers and the sweater I was looking for earlier.

  ‘Is that my jumper?’ I look up at my eighteen-year-old daughter from my position kneeling on the grass by the back wall of the garden. I am preparing the ground for a blanket-sized wildflower meadow.

  It’s a beautiful late-summer’s day, the kind of day when the world and everything in it feels overwhelmingly magnificent: blue skies, vast horizons, and Beth framed by the doorway about to head off to the beach with Chloe, where low tides will reveal huge swathes of sand.

  Beth, on the cusp of life, her horizons as limitless as the day.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ She tugs at the hem of my jumper. ‘I’ve packed most of mine.’

  It’s a rhetorical question.

  I don’t mind. It’s kind of flattering. When she was too small to borrow my clothes for anything other than dressing up, I remember her asking if, when she was bigger, she could wear them.

  ‘By the time they fit you, you won’t want to!’ It had seemed so unlikely, at the time. I certainly never wanted to borrow any of my mother’s.

  ‘Just make sure you don’t leave it at the beach,’ I say, thinking that the one advantage of Beth’s being away will be that my clothes will remain exactly where I left them.

  Beth’s about to leave home: a year’s Nuffield Research placement at Stamford University before coming back to read physics at Cambridge. A year investigating gravitational lens theory in Connecticut before immersing herself in a world that may be geographically closer but will be a million miles away from mine. Because what do I understand of the light from distant stars and the way matter bends and distorts it?

  ‘I’ll see you later, then,’ Beth says, again.

  ‘Be careful on the roads,’ I say. ‘And don’t forget your helmet.’

  ‘I won’t.’ She turns to go, then adds, ‘By the way, Chloe might come back for supper.’

  ‘Okay, that’ll be lovely.’

  I went back to my weeding, anticipating the tiny wildflower area bursting into bloom next spring, the profusion of betony, toadflax and field scabious that would greet Beth on her return. It was something to look forward to. I busied myself unearthing clods of soil where thicker grasses grew now, pausing briefly when my phone pinged a text alert.

  It was from Beth, already at the beach. Hi Mum ☺ I put a shirt to soak in the sink and forgot to hang it out. Could you please???? Sorry. Forgot and want to take it with me. Love you XXX

  I told her I would and went upstairs to the bathroom, lingering as I ascended, looking at the framed photographs that hung on the walls of the staircase: Patrick holding Beth, wrapped in a hospital blanket, his look slightly anxious but hers steady, meeting the camera lens as if she’d been expecting just this moment throughout the long hours of her delivery.

  ‘This one’s an old soul,’ my mother had said, with an air of authority, when she saw her. ‘She’s been here before.’

  It’s hard to work out how much of what my mother says she actually believes: old souls, angels, Heaven and Hell are all part of her vernacular.

  Beneath that picture is a similar shot but this time it’s Beth, aged three, holding baby Alfie, my brother’s younger son, the cousin who’s almost a little brother to her. He’s resting on her lap and she has one hand on his head and the other holding his hand but she’s looking questioningly at whoever took the photo, as if afraid she might not be doing this baby-holding thing quite right.

  Two stairs up, Beth’s sitting in her high chair prodding curiously at the cake in front of her. Her first birthday. Patrick was away. I’d taken the photograph so he wouldn’t miss the occasion, or any of the other moments IKEA-clip-framed beside the stairs: the look of delight when she took her first steps and one of slight trepidation on her first day at school.

  Towards the top of the stairs, she’s feeding geese, unafraid of their honking upfrontery. And, in another photo, she’s dressed as a Moomin for World Book Day – a papier-mâché feat that I cursed during its production. Most of the photos were taken before she was eight, when she became self-conscious and began to turn away from the camera or pull such faces the images weren’t worth framing.

  This was about the same time as Patrick and I began to lose sight of each other. A pang of regret. It never quite goes away.

  At the top of the stairs there’s one of her at the beach, about six now, emerging from the sea, wet hair and a huge smile. It was taken not long after we moved here from London when the beach was still the ‘best thing ever in the whole wide world!’

  Where had the time gone, I wonder, as I walk across the landing, remembering how, earlier this week, Beth tried to explain Einstein’s theory that time is an illusion, that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously.

  But how can that be?

  I’d nodded, not really comprehending. What more evidence of time’s relentless march forward do you need than the speed at which children grow up and move on?

  I go into Beth’s room, trying to remember what I came upstairs for in the first place, taking in the contents of her wardrobe, lying in haphazard piles on the floor. I sit on the edge of her bed and no sooner have I done so than Tiger, who’d been curled up on her pillow, gets up, stretches and resettles on my lap.

  I hadn’t wanted a cat but after her father left I’d given in to Beth’s insistence that we get a kitten and call it Tiger. ‘It’s ironic.’

  ‘It’s just going to be the two of us for a bit,’ I say, stroking him, feeling grateful to him for being here now.

  Beth’s E = mc² wash-bag is in the middle of the floor, stuffed with toiletries. It was a birthday present from Evan, her first proper boyfriend.

  I know she’ll miss him more than she does me when she goes away, that trying to sustain the relationship over the next year with the Atlantic Ocean between them will be difficult.

  I’ll miss him too and her other friends: the comings and goings, the tales from college, the unwashed coffee cups clustered by the sink in the mornings, the bread disappearing overnight. I’m missing it all already: missing Beth and the past eighteen years and wondering at the speed of them.

  Beth’s hairbrush is lying on the floor beside her suitcase. I pick it up and pluck out the strands of caramel-blonde hairs trapped between its bristles. Her hair is wavy, a softer version of Patrick’s defined curls, and golden, like his hair when I first met him, but a shade or two darker.

  I remember then that
I came up to retrieve Beth’s shirt from the basin in the bathroom, but as I leave her room, the doorbell rings and instead I go downstairs to answer it, slipping the strands of hair absently into the pocket of my cardigan.

  It’s Martin, Chloe’s father, unshaven, wearing a polo shirt and pinkish shorts. It must be a working-from-home day.

  I’m not expecting him.

  ‘They’re not back from the beach yet,’ is my slightly unfriendly greeting.

  ‘Can I come in?’ he asks.

  And from the way he says it, I know that something is wrong.

  Later that Monday

  Hospital corridors are always endless and white. Martin chaperones me along them with a nervous running commentary.

  ‘Just along here. Here we go.’

  The waiting area outside A and E is surprisingly quiet, not the Dante’s Inferno one expects from watching hospital TV dramas. There’s a mother with a toddler in a pushchair, holding an ice pack to his forehead. An old man sits slumped in a chair, his shirt unbuttoned, as if he arrived in a hurry, but is showing no obvious signs of distress, and a younger man in a smart suit is standing by the window, scrolling down the screen of his phone.

  Only the ice pack hints at an accident. Only the way my heart is racing, emergency.

  Chloe is standing outside the double doors of A and E, and Nadia too, an incongruous-looking mother and daughter: Nadia, a teacher, in a slim skirt and navy shirt, Chloe beach fresh in T-shirt dress and plimsolls but pale and shivering.

  ‘Cate.’ Nadia comes towards me, her arms open and I allow myself the awkwardness of the embrace, which feels more like an obstacle to seeing my daughter.

  ‘Where is she?’ I look at Chloe, salty and sun-kissed, the straps of her swimming costume visible above the line of her dress: a reminder of the day that has been but no longer is.

  ‘She’s in there.’ Nadia nods towards the double doors and I brush past her towards them.

  But Nadia is at my side, her hand on my arm. ‘They told us to wait here. They said someone would come out in a minute.’

  ‘But I’m her mother.’ I shrug off Nadia’s hand and the sympathy it conveys.

  I grab one of the door handles, expecting it to yield, but it only rattles, locked above the keypad for which I have no code.

  ‘They said they’d be out as soon as …’

  I stand on tiptoe and peer through the frosted glass. There is movement inside. I knock on it. But it’s tough, hardly makes a sound. I try the door again.

  ‘Cate?’ Nadia is pleading. ‘It won’t be long.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Martin had told me a version as he drove me to the hospital but I need to hear it from Chloe. She was there. She witnessed everything.

  Chloe’s expression is one of shock. ‘She went for another swim. She wanted to swim to the sandbar.’

  When the tide is out the sandbar appears, like an island rising in the midst of the sea. At low water, you can sometimes walk to it. When it’s a little higher, people swim there. All the time.

  Chloe is giving me facts. I want an explanation. ‘There were these boys playing cricket there.’ Chloe tugs at the strap of her swimming costume. ‘She was standing up and talking to them.’ She lets go of the strap and it pings against her chest but she grabs it again as she resumes. ‘I wasn’t watching. I saw her there, and then I went back to reading my book. It was only when the boys started waving and shouting that I realized something was wrong. I couldn’t see Beth anywhere ‒ and then the lifeboat was racing out …’

  She pauses, swallows. ‘I knew it was for Beth.’

  There must be some mistake, I tell myself. She must have got it wrong. Beth will walk in at any moment and explain, surely. She’s a strong swimmer. She practically grew up at the beach.

  ‘But the lifeboat crew got to her quickly?’ I’m retelling the story, before I’ve even heard it. Beth gets swept away but the lifeboat gets there in time. They pick her up. They bring her in. It’s all going to be okay. Someone will walk out through the locked double doors at any minute and tell me they’ve given Beth the once-over and she’s fine.

  ‘Well, it was out there for a while, looking.’ Chloe blinks and swallows hard again, then looks at her father.

  She opens her mouth to speak. She pulls the strap of her swimsuit, half choking herself with the action.

  ‘She wasn’t breathing when they brought her out of the water,’ Martin says quietly, helping her, repeating some of what he’s already said in the car.

  ‘They did CPR on the beach,’ Chloe says, looking away to the double doors, which remain resolutely locked, trying to hide her tears from me.

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ I say. Any of it. ‘She swims there all the time.’ None of this makes sense.

  Martin is saying something about a rip tide. About it pulling her out to sea. I can hear the words and see his mouth moving but it seems all wrong, like watching a TV recording that is slightly out of sync.

  CPR. Resuscitation. What do these words have to do with two teenage girls spending an afternoon at the beach?

  The double doors open. Finally. A woman in uniform comes out.

  ‘Can I see her?’ I’m desperate to see her.

  ‘Mrs Challoner?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, although my name is Tierney. Beth has Patrick’s name but I will be Mrs Challoner if it gets me to Beth faster.

  I follow her through the double doors.

  All those television programmes you see, Doctors, Casualty, ER, Green Wing, they do nothing to prepare you for the reality of seeing your child lying lifeless but alive. No amount of make-up can create the drained pallor of someone in this position. No amount of rehearsing can perfect the absent look.

  Beth is dwarfed by a maze of tubes and monitors, her hair pulled back from her grey and sunken face.

  ‘Beth, sweetheart.’ I put out my hand to touch her cheek, which feels dry and rough, where usually it’s so smooth.

  Nothing. No sign of response.

  I stroke her hair, which is salt-encrusted and lacking its normal lustre.

  I bend down and kiss her forehead, like I used to when she was little. ‘Darling. It’s Mum … Beth!’ My voice becomes louder. It’s almost an admonishment, born of desperation. ‘Can you hear me?’

  I increase the pressure of my hand on her head. I’m not being gentle enough but I must get some response from her.

  ‘Beth. Please. Come on now.’

  Nothing.

  I look at her. The beauty spot on her cheek, the sprinkle of freckles that have darkened and spread over the summer, the wispy down around her hairline, all the familiar details of my daughter are still there.

  But her eyes are unfamiliar. Beth’s eyes are a peculiarly unique shade of bluey-green. There’s warmth to them, inquisitiveness and knowingness, as if the world they see is at once pleasing, enticing and familiar. Beautiful eyes. But now, although they are open, they are not registering – not the ceiling, not the doctors, not me. ‘Beth?’ What am I asking?

  I need to hold her, to lift her torso and clasp it close to mine, to feel her warmth, to make her better. I have to do something. But there are so many wires and tubes.

  ‘Sweetheart.’ I take her hand and find it cool and clammy.

  The outline of her legs, unmoving, is visible beneath the sheet and I put my hand on her knee, the way I used to when she was little. She’d pretend it wasn’t her leg at all and try not to react but could never stop herself squirming and laughing.

  She doesn’t do that now.

  ‘It’s okay, lovely girl.’ It is my job to reassure her. ‘You’re going to be okay.’

  The medics by her bedside have moved away a little. They are conferring quietly a few feet from her bed.

  ‘The doctor will be with you in a minute,’ says the woman who ushered me in, kindly but without the reassurance I crave. ‘I’ll bring you a chair to wait.’ She produces an orange plastic one, which she places next to the bed, the ubiquitous Robin Day stackable classic that is the only familiar thing in the ward. Even though Beth is there, on the bed beside me, I feel utterly alone. Scared and alone.