Case Histories

Chapter 26. Amelia

No more slaters, no more Garys and Craigs and Darryls. No more Philip and his yapping Pekingese. No more Oxford. No more old Amelia. A fresh start, a new person.

She had thought it might be an orgy, but it really was just the barbecue they had promised ("Oh, do come.") and the conversation was about the difficulty of finding a good plumber and how to keep snails off delphiniums ("Copper tape," Amelia offered and they all said, "Really? How fascinating!"). The only difference was that they were all naked.

When she arrived on the riverbank (feeling overdressed and terrified), Cooper ("Cooper Lock, erstwhile history professor at St. Cat's, now a ne'er-do-well,") strode toward her, his balls swinging, and said, "Amelia, you came, how wonderful," and Jean ("Jean Stanton, lawyer, amateur rock climber, local Conservative Party secretary") rushed up, all smiles and small bouncing breasts and said, "Good show. Everyone, this is Amelia Land. She's so interesting."

And then she had swum naked in the river with them and it had been just as she remembered it except that there was no swimming costume between her body and the water and she could feel the plants and weeds streaming over her body like thick wet ribbons.

And then they ate grilled sausages and steaks and drank South African Chardonnay as the twilight deepened and then later she had lain next to Jean, in Jean's pine sleigh bed in an attic room painted white and scented by Diptyque candles, the cost of one of which would probably have kept a family in Bangladesh for a year. But Amelia managed to ignore this fact, as she managed to ignore the fact that Jean was the secretary of the local Conservative Party (although obviously Jean's politics couldn't remain off the conversational agenda forever), and Amelia could ignore these things and many other things because even though Jean was in her fifties she had a hard, lithe, brown body that she slid along Amelia's own pale, soft body (she felt like a sea creature that had been shelled), and Jean said, "You're luscious, Amelia, like a big ripe melon," and the old Amelia would have snorted with derision at this point but the new Amelia cried out like a startled bird because Jean was lapping at her labia like a cat ("Oh, call it a cunt, Amelia, don't be shy,") and giving her her first-ever orgasm.

And it was funny because she really had wanted to die, and now she really wanted to live. Just like that. Really and truly there wasn't much more she could ask for. She had a huge garden to look after, as many cats as she could handle, and she had experienced an orgasm. Was she really a lesbian? She still wanted Jackson. "Everyone's bi these days," Jean said nonchalantly. Amelia thought she might introduce Jean to Julia. She would have liked just once to see Julia look shocked ("Jean, this is Julia, my sister. Julia, this is Jean, my lover. Henry? Oh, everyone's bi, Julia, these days, didn't you know that?" Ha!) She must try to be nicer to Julia – she was her sister, after all.

They had been unsure what to do with Olivia. Neither of them wanted to cremate her, to lose what little they had, so hard-won after all this time. On the other hand, she had been buried in the dark alone for so long that it seemed wrong to put her back in the ground. If it hadn't been against all social practice (and probably illegal) Amelia would have kept her bones on display, made a kind of reliquary, a shrine. In the end they buried her, in a tiny white coffin, that was laid alongside Annabelle, the afterthought baby, on top of Rosemary's coffin in the family plot. Amelia and Julia both sobbed throughout the funeral. The local press had tried to take photographs ("Lost local tot finally laid to rest") and Jackson's big black friend had got very demonstrative with them. Amelia found Howell both terrifying and ravishing at the same time (thereby testifying to her bisexual nature, she supposed) and much more politically correct than Jean, of course. Jackson – utterly bizarre – was accompanied by the yellow-haired homeless girl, who was now pink haired and no longer homeless. "Why?" Amelia said to Jackson and Jackson said, "Why not?" and Amelia said, "Because –" but Julia came along and dragged her away.

Did it feel better to have found Olivia? To know that she had wandered off, wandered off while she was in her care? Amelia had been fast asleep and her sister had wandered off and died. Didn't that make it her fault? Then Jackson had taken her aside at the funeral and said, "I'm going to break the sanctity of the confessional," as if he were a priest. He would have made a very good priest. The thought of Jackson as a priest was very alluring, in a perverted kind of way. "I'm going to tell you what happened," he said, "and then you have to decide what you want to do about it." He didn't tell Julia, he told her. She finally became the keeper of a secret.

So Olivia would have a shrine, she would have a garden. And Amelia would fill Binky Rain's garden with roses, with Duchesse d'Angouleme and Felicite Parmentier, Eglantines and Gertrude Jekylls, the pale rosettes of the Boule de Neige and the fragrant peachy Perdita, for their own lost girl.