The Perfect Girl

TESSA

When I get back downstairs, there’s nobody in the kitchen. On the island, the box of smashed eggs lies untouched, and the mess from it drips silently off the side of the granite down on to the golden stone floor.

I go outside. Lucas and his father are standing at one end of the swimming pool, their faces washed blue and yellow by the lights, and at the other end of it, sitting on the end of the squat diving board, is my sister, the tips of her toes in the water.

Maria’s breakdown after the accident was a slow burn. It began when Zoe was sentenced, and taken to the Unit, which was when Maria stopped having a purpose, and when the adrenalin that had taken her through the trial, and the months leading up to it, crashed. She’d been closely involved in every detail up to then, liaising with Sam, and with the rest of Zoe’s legal team, discussing defence strategies. Adrenalin fuelled her. She lost weight, she more or less lost her husband because they disagreed so strongly, and still she focused only on the case. She continued to be a tiger mother.

But the minute that Zoe was taken down, Maria ceased to cope, because suddenly there was nothing to do. There was just an empty farmhouse, a husband who slept in another room, and a silence that sat with them, twiddling its fingers, looking from one of them to the other, whenever they were in a room together.

‘Philip couldn’t bear it,’ Maria told me. ‘It shamed him. He felt he’d failed her, failed at making a family.’

I think she was right. Philip Guerin had been a doting father, while the going was good, but nothing in his life had prepared him for what Zoe did, and while Maria became a dynamo, he retreated, shut himself down. Perhaps it was because he, like the families whose children died, had been rooted in that community for decades. Perhaps that meant he felt the loss of those three young folk more than Maria did. Perhaps it was because he was weaker than her. Whatever the reason, it was shocking, his inability to cope. He didn’t even protest when Maria moved out, and came to Bristol, to be near me, to make that fresh start with Zoe.

In the dense night air, on the end of the diving board, Maria has pulled her skirt up around her thighs. Her shoes have been discarded and lie poolside, one on its side. Her legs are bare, and thin. Her toenails are painted a deep black-red.

When she sees me, she calls out to me, in a voice that I barely recognise, so strained is it.

‘So,’ she says. ‘I’ve told my husband what happened to Zoe, his stepdaughter. I’ve told him that Zoe has been convicted of a crime, and do you know what, Tess: I think he’s going to dump us.’

Chris turns to me.

‘She’s drunk,’ he says. ‘She’s totally lost her mind. I can’t get any sense out of her.’

I start to walk around the edge of the pool and Maria struggles to her feet. I can’t quite understand how Maria could have got so drunk so quickly, because I reckon I’ve only been out of the house for about forty-five minutes, an hour tops. Though perhaps, as she says, she isn’t.

‘Don’t come near me!’ she shouts. ‘Nobody come near me!’

I almost laugh at that because the diving board is not high and the tone in which she says it makes it sound like a threat, as if she were teetering on the edge of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, hundreds of feet above the Avon Gorge. But I don’t laugh because Maria looks like a broken puppet, and Chris looks desperate, and I don’t want to do anything other than help them to get through this evening, in the hope that once they do, they’ll find that they still have a future together.

‘Maria,’ I say.

She staggers to her feet, skirt tight around her thighs, making her wobble. ‘Don’t come near me!’ she repeats.

So I stop, halfway around the pool. I wonder if in fact Chris is mistaking instability for drunkenness, if the real explanation is that years of ghastliness have just reached their peak, and now threaten to topple her sanity. When she got pregnant with Grace, I did worry about her, that she might not cope with the pressures of starting all over again, but she seemed to sail through that, just as she’d sailed into her new role as Mrs Christopher Kennedy, mother to Zoe, stepmother to Lucas, and now I’m wondering whether that was a plaster, masking wounds that I know run very deep.

Chris says, ‘Maria, come off there, please. Let’s talk; let’s eat. Like you wanted to.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Because the eggs are broken, so I can’t get the breadcrumbs on the meat.’ She sounds pathetic now. She looks at me. ‘I’m sorry, Tessa,’ she says.

‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Of course it is. Don’t be silly.’

Teetering now on the end of the board, Maria has noticed the stain on her shirt and she starts to rub at it, and when that doesn’t work, she begins to unbutton it.

‘For Christ’s sake, Maria!’ Chris’s voice explodes around the pool. ‘What are you doing?’

Lucas turns his head away because before we know it she’s pulled the shirt off and is standing there in just her skirt and bra, a complicated, lacy bit of apparatus which holds her breasts firm and pert. Her body is perfectly taut. I think that her bra probably cost more than my entire outfit.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ she shouts at him. ‘I’m so sorry that I’m not perfect.’

Chris marches around the pool towards her.

‘What are you doing?’ she calls and she’s taunting him. ‘Coming to tell me off? Coming to tell me to behave like a good girl? Coming to tell me I’m useless?’

He pauses at the end of the diving board, unsure what to do.

‘Maria!’ I call. ‘For God’s sake!’

And Maria, in a gesture that’s at once melodramatic and extraordinary, turns around, pinches her nose and lets herself fall back into the pool, and, for a moment or two, we all just watch the splash subside, and see that she’s sunk to the bottom, where she floats for a second or two, eyes shut.

It’s Lucas who gets her out. He jumps in fully clothed and pulls her up to the surface, and they both swim together to the side, where he helps her up the steps, and she’s gasping and coughing, but by the time they’re both out Chris has gone indoors. Turned, and walked away, as if he’s too disgusted to deal with her at all.

I take her sobbing, wet body from Lucas and send him inside to change, partly because he needs dry clothes, but also because I’ve got to strip her out of her sodden skirt and I don’t wish her humiliation to be any worse.

I hold her, just as I held Zoe minutes earlier, and I’m persuading her to try to get out of her wet clothing when Chris reappears. He has a large towel with him, and a change of clothes for her. He holds the towel open and Maria looks at it for a moment before walking slowly towards him and letting him envelop her with it.

He wraps the towel around her and holds her tight in his arms. The water from her soaking skirt still swarms down her legs in rivulets. She’s shivering.

‘Maria,’ he says. ‘My Maria. Come on. Let’s get you in the shower.’

She looks up into his face and nods. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

‘Let’s talk about it,’ he says. She shuts her eyes and leans against him.

‘I think it’s probably best if you go home now,’ he says to me. ‘We’re all right. We’ll be OK.’

‘Are you sure?’ I say. I want to get Maria’s agreement but she’s huddled into him, shaking, seeking the warmth from his body, because the air around us is beginning to lightly shift and buffet.

‘I’ll look after her,’ he says. ‘Are you OK with that, honey? If Tess goes?’

He puts a finger under Maria’s chin and lifts it gently and she looks up at him and nods. Her smile is hopeful but precarious, threatening to break into pieces like the paper napkin that’s fallen into the pool, and floats there, slowly disintegrating into many different pieces in the softly eddying water.