Chapter 29

29

When Grace reaches the top of the steps, she pauses to catch her breath and then, instead of going into the house, she continues up the hill, past the studio, towards the treeline.

The light is failing, shadows gathering and thickening. Marguerite has a phrase for it: l'heure entre chien et loup , the hour between a dog and a wolf. The time at which one thing might appear to be another, when something benign might appear threatening, when an enemy might come calling in the shape of a friend.

When she was a child, very young, perhaps three or four, Grace got her hand caught in a slamming door (who slammed it? The wind? Her mother?) and the very tip of the third finger on her right hand was severed altogether. She and the severed fingertip were rushed to hospital where a surgeon managed to reattach it.

Grace remembers almost nothing of all this; it was explained to her at some point, presumably when she asked why the third finger on her right hand was slightly misshapen, and fractionally shorter than the third finger on her left.

What she does remember is that she stayed in hospital overnight. Now, as an adult and a doctor, she can't imagine why she was kept in for such a minor thing, but she was. And the thing she remembers is this: when her parents came to get her the following morning, she was seized with an overwhelming terror; she did not want to leave with them, she clung to the ward nurse and howled. She was convinced they were not really her parents, she was sure that her real parents had abandoned her, that they no longer wanted her, and that these impersonators had come in their place. These enemies, in the shape of friends, these wolves in sheep's clothing.

The fear didn't last long, although it recurred from time to time in nightmares; Grace would wake and lie sweating into cold sheets, certain that some cosmic mistake had been made, that she was not where she was supposed to be. Grace couldn't figure out where this sense came from; she remembered her childhood as neither happy nor unhappy, her parents were not demonstrative, but they certainly weren't cruel. She was not neglected. She supposes she was loved. She just didn't seem to come from the same stock, that was all. By the time she was a teenager, she and her parents were strangers to each other.

Though they never mentioned it, Grace felt sure her parents never quite forgave her for that scene in the hospital. Why would a small child think such a thing? they must have wondered. With some justification: why would a small child think such a thing? Why would a child imagine that her parents had abandoned her? What was wrong with her?

As an adult – and a doctor – Grace has returned to this question time and again. She's read the literature, she knows that attachment patterns are laid down in the first few years of life, that infants must have their needs met by some consistent presence that soothes and feeds and pays them the right sort of attention. Did she lack for that? Is that why she doesn't feel things the way other people seem to do? Is that why she sometimes sees affection where only basic kindness was on offer, why she feels touch as caress or assault, nothing in between?

She walks on, into the wood. Here, it's all too easy to imagine figures between the trees, morphing in the gloaming into animals and back again, into men, into monsters. Somewhere in the heart of the wood a barn owl screeches; Grace's skin pimples, her pulse races, she can feel the pounding of blood in her head and in her chest. She walks on, into the dark, through the wood to the place where the trees fell.

The forks in Grace's road have usually been prompted by abandonment – starting, she supposes, with that first one, that imagined childhood desertion. And then there was Nick and Audrey, and after that Vanessa too, in a way. Vanessa changed Grace's life more than anyone else, meeting Vanessa changed her course irrevocably. Vanessa was the answer to a question she'd no idea she'd been asking.

After Vanessa died, Grace was required to hand back the equipment and the medicines she'd been using to care for her in her final weeks, but she was creative with her pharmaceutical accounting and so a single bottle of morphine remained at the back of the drawer in Vanessa's dressing table.

The day they came to take Vanessa's body away, Grace stood at the window in the kitchen, watching the ambulance head towards the mainland. She listened to the roaring silence in the house, dreading the darkness, willing the tide to come in so that she could be sure that she'd be safe and undisturbed.

She went for a walk: she walked through this wood right up to the rock and back; she heard the owl that night, too.

The following day, she went to Vanessa's room but hesitated outside the closed door. She realized that she did not want to die without once more swimming in the sea, she wanted to feel the shock and pain of the cold, and then the relief as her body responded, she wanted to taste salt on her lips, push her toes into the sand, submerge herself, listen to the breakers' roar.

One last time. So she turned back, went into the bathroom and retrieved her swimming costume from the hook on the back of the door and went down to the sea.

The day after that, she stood outside the door again. Again, she did not go in. She walked on the beach that day, and on the next she went to the rock, and on she went, and on, and on, finding things to do, ways to keep herself occupied, every day finding some way to resist the call of the bottle in the drawer.

A few weeks later, she had a call from her old surgery in Carrachan; they were short-staffed, the administrator said, one of their two GPs had quit unexpectedly, they were desperate, was there any way they could persuade her to return, even if just on a part-time basis?

So, a new chapter began. Vanessa might be gone, but people still needed Grace. The vial of morphine remained in the drawer.

It is dark by the time she leaves the wood. She walks slowly and carefully past the studio, keeping to the path, taking care not to lose her footing. The house is dark, but she allows herself to imagine that she is not alone, that someone is inside waiting for her, that all she needs to do is unlock the front door and turn on the light and the place will come to life; she will walk into a kitchen smelling of onions frying in butter, music on the radio, a bottle of wine open on the table.

She opens the front door. Turns on the lights. Silence rings out like a bell. She locks the door behind her and goes into the kitchen, where the shoebox sits, filled with letters. The one sitting topmost catches her eye. She didn't show him this letter, of that she's quite certain. There was something else on top of the pile.

This letter, she knows. This one, she loathes – it is Vanessa at her most pretentious, her most unkind. She doesn't want to look at it and barely needs to: she has read and reread the words on it so many times the most brutal phrases are etched, as if with a scalpel, into the walls of her heart.

Darling Fran,

Thank you so much for sending the Ted Chiang book of stories. I am loving it, its strange melancholy resonates so fiercely with me at the moment.

I am lost, still, unable to work. I move aimlessly, without purpose.

I try to void my mind and let my hands lead me, let the paint lead me, or the clay, but I cannot seem to let go of thought, and soon enough I find myself frozen, at once adrift and trapped.

Grace is ever-present. She is careful, solicitous. I cannot breathe when she is in the room. Her attention is smothering, she cannot know how I suffer. She is incapable of a certain depth of feeling. She does not know what it is to experience the sort of sexual love I had for Julian. I know it is not her fault, I know it is just the way she is made, and yet her lack of understanding infuriates me.

I love her, I pity her, too. And I wish she would not cling to me. I imagine her gone. I imagine the freedom and the fear of life without her.

I know you are upset with me for missing your Bristol show, I know I haven't been the best friend to you this past couple of years, I have been even more self-absorbed than usual.

Please forgive me. I miss you so.

Could I come and see you? If only I could just get away from this place for a while, I think I would start to feel more myself.

Love,

Vanessa

Frances never replied. Vanessa was deeply hurt, and even when – a year or so later – they talked and Frances explained that she'd never received the letter, their friendship did not recover, not fully.

Grace's vision blurs, she blinks away her tears. Even now, all these years later, Vanessa's words cut deep. She is not incapable of a certain depth of feeling ! If anything, she feels too much, she feels disproportionately.

And sometimes, she acts accordingly.

The reason Frances never replied to Vanessa's letter was because Frances never received it. Grace, on one of her periodic checks of Vanessa's state of mind in the weeks and months following Julian's disappearance, opened the letter she had promised to run across to the post box in the village. Wounded by Vanessa's words, she enacted a cruelty of her own: she held the letter back and allowed Vanessa to imagine that her oldest friend had forsaken her.

All is fair in love and war, and friendship is love, too, isn't it? And a kind of war sometimes, as well.