The Drowning Girl

The Drowning Girl
Margaret Leroy

Young single mum Grace is drowning. Her little girl Sylvie is distant, troubled and prone to violent tantrums which the child psychiatrists blame on Grace. But Grace knows there’s something more to what’s happening to Sylvie. There has to be.Travelling from the London suburbs to the west coast of Ireland, Grace and Sylvie embark on a journey of shocking discovery, forcing Grace to question everything she believes in and changing both their lives forever.‘Margaret Leroy writes with candour and intelligence, capturing the menace of suddenly finding that the world may not be at all as you’ve thought it’ Helen Dunmore ‘Margaret Leroy writes like a dream’ Tony Parsons

Acclaim for Margaret Leroy

“Margaret Leroy writes with candour and intelligence,

capturing the menace of suddenly finding that the world

may not be at all as you’ve thought it”

Helen Dunmore

“Leroy handles…domestic life with the same graceful,

precise, rueful style as [Richard Yates], the late novelist did,

though with a warmer, more hopeful intelligence” Washington Post

“Engrossing and affecting”

Eve

“[The Drowning Girl] is a really special book. Sylvie’s vulnerability is so powerfully drawn, so flesh-and-blood real, that you want to reach into the pages and protect her yourself ” Louise Candlish

“Powerful and haunting” Daily Mirror

“What a storyteller Leroy is, and what an eye she

has for contemporary life”

Fay Weldon

“[Leroy’s] quiet, self-assured narrative voice

delivers tremendous psychological depth

and emotional resonance” Kirkus Reviews

“Margaret Leroy writes like a dream”

Tony Parsons

Margaret Leroy studied music at Oxford. She has written four previous novels, one of which was televised by Granada and reached an audience of eight million. Margaret has appeared on numerous radio and TV programmes, and her articles and short stories have been published in the Observer, the Sunday Express and the Mailon Sunday. Her books have been translated into ten languages. Margaret is married, has two daughters and lives in Surrey.

The Drowning Girl

MARGARET LEROY

www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks are due to the following people: Catherine Burke, for her dynamism, warmth and wonderful commitment to the book; the brilliant team at MIRA; my UK agent, Laura Longrigg, who has supported me in so many ways, both intellectual and emotional; and, in the US, Sarah Crichton, my inspirational editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Kathleen Anderson, my marvellous agent, for all her hard work on behalf of my writing. I am deeply grateful to all of you.

Thank you also to Vicki Tippet and Madeleine Fullerton, for sharing stories and book recommendations, and to Lucy Floyd, for her wise comments on an early draft of the book.

Finally, thanks to Mick, Becky and Izzie, for all their love and encouragement, and because they loved Connemara as much as I did.

PROLOGUE

Sometimes I picture it. I know I shouldn’t, but sometimes I can’t stop myself. I find myself imagining what she went through. The astonishing colour that bloomed in the water all around her, the bright, bright red of arterial blood, as she drifted in and out of consciousness, the world still briefly present for her, then slipping and spinning away. How she moved down through the water, feeling its heavy, deadly pull, the drag of it on all her limbs, because nothing had been left to chance, her pockets were weighted with stones. How she held her breath and held her breath, then couldn’t hold it any more. They say it’s pain you’d feel then, don’t they? A searing pain in your lungs, as the water surges into you. That drowning may be the most painful death. I think of that sometimes: to open your mouth and breathe in pain, feel death come rushing in.

CHAPTER 1

It’s pleasant here in Karen’s kitchen, talking about our children, sipping Chardonnay, with before us on the wide oak table the wreck of the children’s tea. I glance around the circle. You can tell that everyone’s dressed up in honour of the party—Fiona has glittery earrings, Michaela is wearing a clingy wrap top that frames her lavish cleavage. But only Karen has a proper costume: she always feels that as hostess she has licence, and today she’s a rather glamorous witch, in a black chiffon frock with a raggedy hem and with lots of Rouge Noir on her nails. Behind her on the windowsill there are lighted pumpkin faces, and the candle flames shiver and falter in the draught that sneaks in round the frame.

The children yell. We turn towards the open door of the living room, watching as the magician pulls some spiders out of his sleeve. Leo, Karen’s husband, who’s in there keeping order, applauds with great enthusiasm. The magician is exceptional, everyone keeps saying so—Karen was brilliant to find him. He looked quite ordinary, arriving in his Transit van, prosaically dressed in jeans and a Coldplay T-shirt. But now, in his cloak of indigo silk with a silver pattern of planets, he has a presence, a mystery.

‘I do like clever hands,’ says Michaela. ‘Can I take him home with me?’

He flings two scarves up into the air, that come down tied together. The children watch wide-eyed. All their own outfits look a little random now—masks hanging off, cloaks slipping from shoulders. Josh, Karen’s son, is at the front, with stick-on scars from Sainsbury’s on his arms, and Lennie, her little girl, is sitting next to Sylvie, dressed as a witch’s black cat. Sylvie has bunched up the skirts of her snowflake dress and is absently sucking the white ribbon hem. She really wanted to be a cat like Lennie, but the black cat costume in Clinton Cards was one of the most expensive, and I took the cheaper snowflake outfit from its peg and held it against her, hoping to persuade her without her getting upset. She looked at herself in the mirror. The dress was white and frothy, of some muslin-like material with trailing ribbons. She has hair like lint, no colour, the slightest smudge of freckles on her nose. Pale things suit her. For myself, I like colour, I’d love to dress her in the rainbow—but too much brightness seems to overwhelm her. She smiled at her reflection, pale and perfect against the whiteness of the dress, and to my relief she was easily persuaded. Though I hate these moments, always, the everyday abrasions, the things I so long to buy for her that I’m sure would make her happy, at least for a little while. None of the other mothers round the table, I suspect, would understand this, nor would they know the panic I feel when Sylvie grows out of her shoes, or at the arrival of a birthday invitation, requiring a present I haven’t budgeted for.

The women are exchanging the numbers of party entertainers. I let their voices float past me. Through the window behind Michaela I can see into Karen’s garden, where the brown light of evening is draining down into the wet, heavy earth. The shape of the tree house where Lennie and Sylvie play in summer is sharp as though cut with a blade against the luminous sky. It’s so still today—not a breath of wind, not a sigh. When we came here, Sylvie and I, when we parked and got out of the car, the stillness fell over us, a stillness like a garment, unbroken and entire. Even the wind chimes hanging from someone’s apple tree were silent, no sound at all in the wide parked-up street but the clear sweet pipe of a bird. There was a rich smell of October, of earth and rot and wet leaves. Sylvie ran on ahead of me. I’d put her in her white summer sandals to match the snowflake outfit, and they have hard soles that made a clear click click in the stillness. I called after her: ‘Be careful, Sylvie, don’t get too far ahead.’ She turned to face me, standing on tiptoe, reaching her arms out to either side, her face intent with concentration, as though she were balancing in a tricky, difficult place. As though she could fall off.

‘I can hear my feet, Grace. I can hear them.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I’ve got noisy noisy feet. I could be a dancer. Listen, Grace. I’m a dancer, aren’t I, Grace?’

‘Yes, you’re a dancer,’ I said.

She did a neat pirouette, pleased, self-aware in her elaborate dress, then ran on again, white as a wisp of smoke or mist against the grey of the pavement, at once so pale and so vivid, as if she were the only living thing in the whole still darkening street.

A few doors up from Karen’s house, someone came out with a pumpkin and put it on their windowsill and lit the candle inside. We stopped to admire the pumpkin. The face was carved with panache: it had a toothy, rakish grin.

‘He’s smiling, Grace, isn’t he? He’s smiling at us.’

‘Yes, he’s smiling,’ I said.

She was happy for a moment, trusting, feeling the world to be benign. I wrapped my hand around hers. Her skin was cold, but she nestled her hand quite firmly into mine. I love it when she’s happy like that.

The magician is building to his grand finale. He wants a volunteer. All the children have raised their hands, urgent and eager, frantic to be chosen. Sylvie too has put up her hand, though not so keenly as the other children. There’s often a little reserve about her, something held back. I will him: Please don’t choose her, please please don’t chooseSylvie. But he does, of course, drawn perhaps by her reticence. He beckons to her, and we watch, all the mothers, as she walks out to the front and he seats her on his chair.

Karen glances towards me, with a quick reassuring smile.

‘She’s doing great,’ she murmurs.