Sofka Zinovieff - Putney

He was using a houseboat on Chelsea Embankment that belonged to a friend who was working abroad for a few years. It provided the perfect space. Removed from the chaos of home life, it was ideal for composing and, with its rugs, cushions and cabin bedrooms, irresistible for trysts. He loved the cradle-like rocking movement and the tides that left the boat stranded in soft mud and then picked it up again, making it creak and judder slightly as it re-floated. That May morning was like the announcement of summer – vivid blue skies, shimmering waters, seagulls playing. Daphne arrived in an outrageous, if fetching get-up of shorts worn over fishnet tights and a shocking-pink mohair sweater.

‘So today we have a circus artiste!’ he remarked and she spun into a cartwheel along the pontoon, then danced up the gangway.

Her easy athleticism always thrilled him. It was delightful to feel enslaved again, at least for a few hours. Slavery with velvet ribbons, not chains. He’d tried to encourage her to take up dance. She had the body for it and the supple elasticity that enabled her to leap high and do the splits as though she barely noticed. And she was musical enough. But she ignored his entreaties to take lessons and her parents never believed in pushing their daughter. ‘Let her find her own way,’ was a useful and much-uttered phrase in the Greenslay household. Ed liked quoting Khalil Gibran about children being living arrows sent forth from the parents’ bow – a poetic excuse for negligence. Ralph had always believed in a bit of parental discipline (how else do you get them to practise their instruments?), but he admitted that with his own offspring, Nina was the one to implement it.

Sunshine warmed the wooden deck and their flesh and he led her down to the cabin.

They were lying on a deep banquette, entangled in blankets, dazzling light streaming through the window, creating patterns on bare skin. It was still morning, maybe midday, and he was smoking. Barges grumbled by, sending pulsations through the water and into their bones. There was something particularly enchanting about embracing decadence in the morning, amplifying the sense of escape from work, obligation, family. The phone rang. ‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘I don’t answer when I’m working. People know that.’ They waited for the ringing to end but it didn’t. He got up, happy in his nakedness, if irritated by the disturbance.

‘Edmundo, amigo,’ he said, all affability, winking at Daphne. Then he heard the news and his legs buckled. He held on to a polished wooden rail like a passenger in a storm. Ellie was dead. A car crash on the Paris Périphérique. Near Clichy. Yes, with Jean-Luc. He was dead too.

His first reaction was to reach for a blanket to cover his body from sudden shame. ‘No, I haven’t seen her.’ The lie was one of the worst he ever told. Edmund said the school couldn’t find Daphne – she was missing. He didn’t know what to do. Theo had been informed and was on his way down from Oxford.

‘I’ll come over.’ So as well as having to give Daphne the news about her mother, he had to invent a plausible plot and ‘find’ her for her father. Christ, it was awful. He managed it all perfectly efficiently, duping the widower, delivering his daughter home as if by magic. Poor little Daff. Struck dumb, initially. Unable to cry or speak. Looking back, he saw it had been the end of their era in one blow. He’d expected it to happen gradually, but this was extremely sudden. She didn’t go back to school. They met a few times before the final break but she was like a wounded animal that lashes out and he felt unable to cope, unable to understand what she wanted from him. And it wasn’t long before she went off and married that Greek shit.

Daphne got up from the table and headed off for the lavatory. She had done that sort of thing as a child – not announcing or explaining what she was doing, leaving others to catch up with her actions. The coffee arrived. He drank his. He turned periodically to peer across the other diners towards the back of the restaurant in the hope of spotting her. She was taking a long time. Finally, he got up, made his way down the narrow steps and called for her outside the Ladies, quietly at first, then louder. Pushing the door open, he found the two cubicles empty. The Gents too. He went back to the table and asked their waiter.

‘I think she go out back door,’ he said, looking with increased interest at Ralph. ‘She gone. While ago.’

Daphne waited inside the ladies’ lavatory, hoping in vain that the choking feeling would pass. The combination of anger and fear was like a physical malady. Heavy head, queasy gut, eyes hot and dry. She ran cold water and splashed her face and neck. She had imagined this conversation with Ralph might bring relief: he would be repentant, she would be magnanimous, he would be grateful. A resolution would be found. Instead, they had stirred up a storm of poisons and she couldn’t face going back for more. The idea of sitting down at the table again and listening to his self-absorbed excuses sickened her.

Emerging into the corridor next to the kitchens, she noticed an emergency fire door, which looked like an opportunity. She pushed it and walked out into the restaurant’s back yard. The relief of fresh air and of getting away was immense. The right decision. I don’t need to explain myself, she thought. I’ll pick up the bike later, so he doesn’t spot me. Sidestepping Don Luigi’s dustbins and the piled-up crates of empty bottles, she opened a gate and found herself in an alleyway. There was birdsong. Small clouds hung high in the sky. It was like escaping from prison.

She strode the warm pavements, allowing herself to be carried along as if her legs were choosing the way. It didn’t matter where. After a few minutes her phone buzzed in her jeans pocket: Ralph. She switched it to silent and only then saw that the voice recorder was still on. One hour forty-one minutes, much of which was Ralph’s confessions. She’d only decided to do that at the last minute, remembering Jane’s recommendation: ‘If you do talk to him about all this, you could record it, you know. If you ever wanted proof or even if you just wanted to go over it yourself, it would be useful.’ The tip of the phone had been sticking out of her back pocket throughout the lunch, picking up Ralph’s secrets and turning them into evidence.

She stopped the voice memo and saved it. Seeing Ralph made her remember herself as a child – how she was swept into things she didn’t understand, how the world appeared out of control. The recording was like taking action for the young Daphne. Stupidly perhaps, she had expected to find some version of mutual understanding or a truce with Ralph. Instead, he presented a vision of her as an object of his fantasies and desires, as though he had created and defined her. There had been no recognition of what it meant for her. She hated that he called her Daff. He was the only person who shortened her name like that and his affectionate soubriquet transported her straight back to those days.

He had infuriated her. Why did she even need to know about the boys? How did they explain what had happened to her? At this stage, a lustful Peter Pan about to hit seventy was ludicrous. It was true that his light-boned physique and wily charm were still there, though the degradations of ageing were clear. The expensive-looking indigo linen and the Japanese-y scarf couldn’t disguise the haggard eyes and the hint of something hurting when he stood up.

She scarcely noticed the hordes of Saturday shoppers as she hurried across the King’s Road. A black-cab driver shouted, ‘Trying to get killed, are we?’ after she ran between him and a bus to get to the other side. She kept going. Only when she got to the river did she realise she had arrived at the houseboats. A return to the scene of the crime. There was an unsettling synchronicity: the place where she’d learned of Ellie’s crash, one of the last times with Ralph; back at the monstrous river again, with its colour of canteen coffee and its dangerous, muddy pull. Hauling herself up on to the wall in the shade of a plane tree, she sat, legs dangling, facing the moored boats.