Nightshade Read online

  ALSO BY ANNALENA MCAFEE

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  FOR YOUNG READERS

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  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2020 by Annalena McAfee

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Vintage, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2020.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McAfee, Annalena, author.

  Title: Nightshade / Annalena McAfee.

  Description: First American Edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. | “This is a Borzoi book”—Title page verso.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019027998 (print) | LCCN 2019027999 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525658290 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525658306 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR6063.C214 N54 2020 (print) | LCC PR6063.C214 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019027998

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019027999

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Ebook ISBN 9780525658306

  Cover image: Deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna).

  Photo © Imagebroker / Bridgeman Images

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Annalena McAfee

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Acknowledgements

  To Jane Maud and Mary Kaye Schilling

  As a man is, so he sees.

  —WILLIAM BLAKE, LETTER TO THE REVEREND DR. J. TRUSLER (1799)

  1

  Night. Winter. A city street. Eve’s footsteps echo as she walks along the broad pavement past sepulchral buildings—Georgian, stuccoed and porticoed—flanking a central garden. Wreaths of greenery on every door brag of good taste and festive fellowship but the houses are mostly in darkness. At number 19, the lights are on in the second floor, the master bedroom, giving the closed red curtains a visceral sheen. Three doors on, the ground-floor windows flicker blue—someone’s watching late-night news, dozing in comfort before grim dispatches from a disintegrating world—while in the basement a night lamp’s sickly amber glow filters through slatted blinds.

  Further on, at number 31, the first-floor drawing room is shamelessly bright—ugly abstracts and clunky sculpture on glaring display. A tall ficus, with viridian leaves so glossy they could be artificial, is hung with strings of coloured lights and mirrored baubles—silver planets spinning in a twinkling solar system. The room is an empty set; the actors have left the stage. This is an industrious street and they keep early hours. But at number 43 they will still be up. Kristof always said, evoking the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, that the world got more interesting round midnight.

  And there he is, framed in the right panel of the ground-floor window’s illuminated triptych. He’s in profile, sitting in the leather armchair by the carved oak bookcase he and Eve bought in Berlin. In one hand is a glass of red wine, in the other a remote, which he’s pointing towards the sound system, summoning Monk, Coltrane or Evans. Lined up on the bookshelves above him are scores of Christmas cards—the usual miscellany of bad art, poor printing and disingenuous greetings penned under pressure, testimony to a rich social life and a mostly functional extended family. Opposite him, in the left panel, also in profile, gripping her own glass of wine, is his new lover: the redhead, coiled and complacent as a marmalade cat in the armchair, entirely at home. Between them, flaring from a large terracotta pot on the bureau, centred in the middle panel, are the massed crimson tongues of poinsettia, the Christmas flower.

  The front-door wreath—holly leaves, red berries, silver-sprayed pine cones—puts her in mind of those East End funeral arrangements: cushions of chrysanthemums spelling out “Dad,” “Mum” or “Nan.” This one could, it occurs to her in a moment of grim fancy, spell out “Eve”—a spiky floral tribute to her, the not-so-dearly, not-quite departed. It’s barely five months since she walked away from this house and the marriage. Kristof has wasted no time.

  In the darkness of the street, she shivers, and her breath is an icy cloudscape on the night air. She tucks her chin into her scarf and gazes through the window at the radiant tableau. It could be a Vermeer: a luminous domestic interior. Her husband, her house, her life. Once. She turns away into the gloom, skirting the locked garden of shadowy evergreen shrubs and skeletal trees ringed by spear-tipped railings. She used to have a key to this private place, like all the residents in this street, and in early spring she would sit on the bench under the fleshy buds of magnolia. Now the garden is barred to her, like the house she lived in for twenty years.

  It took a lifetime to build and a second to wreck. Family life. That was the first to go. Then dignity and, with that, reputation. All the rest followed into the vortex. Only her work remains. The boy caught her glance and held it. Freeze-frame, then rewind. If she could, she would spool all the way back to the beginning, more than three decades ago—before the boy was even born—to her own thirties and the start of the family life she has so resolutely destroyed.

  * * *

  —

  She flexes her gloved hands deep in the warmth of her pockets and walks on, hoping this stocktaking—all she has lost, all she has left—will calm her racing mind.

  * * *

  —

  To her younger self in the distant, urgent days post–art school, slumming it in New York’s febrile Lower East Side, intent on making it in the arts scene, her relationship with Kristof, ten years older and already a rising architectural star, seemed a kind of ending too—a happy ending: to confusion, to insecurity and loneliness, and to the hectic distractions that had almost derailed her teens and early twenties. That she was also saying goodbye to freedom and spontaneity didn’t trouble
her. She’d had enough of that. Choice was another tyranny. Wasn’t there liberty in confinement? Fewer options meant greater clarity. Time to give contentment and partnership a go.

  * * *

  —

  It’s starting to rain. She rummages in her bag for her umbrella—an object she would never be seen with as a young woman. Too uncool. Let the hard rain fall. But at this risk-averse end of life, in a hostile landscape, you take shelter where you find it.

  * * *

  —

  Better to think of the past, where the few snares encountered inflicted only flesh wounds. As an art student, her sole commitments were to pleasure and work. Creative, busy chaos was her medium. With the move to New York—three feral post-punks from hard-pressed seventies London let loose in a city where it was still possible to survive on ideas and a certain pugnacious style—she embraced pandemonium. Then, finally, after she moved back to Europe with Kristof, busy order became the rule. She was lucky with pregnancy—a few months’ discomfort and inconvenience, followed by a Caesarean, barely impinged on her work.

  One critic, a Marxist feminist, later wrote that “motherhood” launched Eve, guiding her from a formal retread of still life on canvas—“an obsessive mimesis that holds a mirror up to nature and shows rather than tells”—through “an oblique dialogue with botanical illustration” and “skilful flirtations with genre” to a dynamic, “multi-media exploration of life, freezing time and privileging perception over analysis, being over doing.” Eve bridled when she read the review—did they ever mention “fatherhood” when discussing the work of male artists? But at least the critic seemed to be on her side. The review hadn’t harmed her reputation, either.

  The baby, though, did her best to disrupt it all. Nancy was an avid, picky consumer from the moment she first opened one baleful eye and wailed at the waiting world. In her early years, she was a night-time despot too, and Eve, hollow-eyed and guilty, despaired as she watched her contemporaries transformed from scratchy, work-fixated feminists into bovine Madonnas, dreamy and doting. Even Mara, crop-haired firebrand of the art school triumvirate, succumbed. Once she was back in London and had little Esme at her breast, conceived with the aid of an obliging gay male friend, Mara Novak turned into a placid nurturer as depicted by Raphael. She’d spent years making banners, Reclaiming the Night and marching to protest the patriarchy—for this? But then her Esme was a sleeper—“straight through till 7 a.m.,” the newly ruminant Mara would boast, as if her daughter’s capacity for slumber somehow conferred moral superiority on her.

  What did that say about Eve, up at least six times a night with her own howling infant? Not for nothing was sleep deprivation used as torture by repressive regimes. For a time, she even envied the execrable Wanda: the plain, neurotic room-mate, devoid of talent, who stayed on in New York to pursue her questionable career, declaring that her artworks and performances—a baffling series of self-obsessed happenings, “aktions” and installations—were her progeny. She was grappling, she said, “with woman’s place in the universe.” An actual child would be a distraction, she said. She got something right, perhaps. She was the only one of the three who didn’t have children. She was also the least talented. Look at her career, then look at theirs.

  * * *

  —

  A car approaches, its headlights smouldering in the heavy rain, and sweeps past in a blur of brightness and pounding noise. Drum and bass? Grunge? Where’s the pleasure in sealing yourself from the world in a metal box and subjecting your ears to bone-jarring decibels? The driver would be stone deaf within a decade. Eve catches her irritability—she sounds like an apoplectic matron from the Home Counties—and relents. Perhaps, for the driver, it’s a means of reclaiming power. Taking back control, as that delusional political phrase has it. As for the compulsion to seal yourself from the world, Eve knows more about that than most.

  * * *

  —

  In the early years of their relationship, Kristof paid lip service to her needs and did his best to ensure that there was always a studio available for her. Once the baby came along, though, Eve didn’t have the mental space, let alone the time and energy, for creative work.

  Those were the days of rage. As Kristof’s public profile grew, she felt herself shrinking. So diminished was she by the incessant demands of domesticity that she felt she might as well take up residence in Nancy’s doll’s house. Would Kristof even notice? Finally, he intervened, sending a succession of dim and pretty au pairs to the rescue—a scented cavalry charge, with stuffed saddlebags scattering mascara wands, lipsticks, used tissues and foolish magazines in its wake. The girls kept Nancy under control, or at least out of earshot, so successfully that sometimes it seemed it wasn’t the child but the staff—all those tempestuous phone calls and tearful retreats to the bedroom—who were the real impediment to household peace and progress.

  There are so many ways of measuring a life. Most people, imagining their deathbed inventories, are said to think in terms of relationships—love won or lost. For Eve, in these harrowing days, that’s a reckoning too far. “What will survive of us is love” was an unpersuasive line from a poet who, more convincingly, wrote “Man hands on misery to man.” Velocity was another calculation—from the languorous slo-mo of childhood, cranking up to the adolescent’s brisk, bright Super-8 narrative, accelerating on to the breathless blur of old age, swift as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it credit sequence. That’s all folks!

  There was altitude, too; heights ascended and depths plumbed, in terms of career, or emotions, or those relationships she didn’t at this moment have the stomach to consider.

  For Kristof, who spent his working life meticulously drawing to scale, she guessed this would be the chosen measure—the arc ascending, from post-hippy firm designing low-cost housing and community projects, to global practice with clients in high-rise property development, finance and government. The salary rise was vertical, too.

  Real estate was another gauge—for her, the trajectory from childhood home, a mock-Tudor hutch incubating boredom and mediocrity in London’s outer suburbs, to dingy student rooms in the inner city, then a turbulent shared house in the old Huguenot quarter, before the move to New York and a squalid sublet with Mara and Wanda above a funeral parlour in Alphabet City. From there, it was a few blocks south-west to her first home with Kristof, a sparsely furnished loft shared with nine others—musicians and artists—in a former Bowery “dime museum.” By this measure, Delaunay Gardens, and all its entailed comforts, was her summit. It’s downhill all the way—a headlong rush—from here.

  * * *

  —

  A buzzing vibration startles her out of her thoughts. Her phone. She stops to retrieve it. A missed call from Ines Alvaro in New York. Eve shuts off the phone and drops it back in her bag. Too late, Ines.

  * * *

  —

  Though her own New York years had been fraught—creative drive and ambition butting against an indifferent world; the distracting Rubik’s cube of relationships—Eve fought the return to London. Fought and lost. So they left bohemian New York for the bright aquarium of a serviced London duplex in one of Kristof’s first “cookie cutter” Thameside blocks, and from there it was a short hop—or a long Tube journey—to that Georgian villa glowering proprietorially over its shared central garden.

  * * *

  —

  She walks on through the empty streets, black and glassy with rain, away from the stifling security of her past, towards an unfathomable future. Too late to turn back.

  * * *

  —

  There were, over the years, ancillary acquisitions: the Devon cottage, their weekend bolt-hole, sold long ago; the unlamented chalet in Chamonix (she never mastered skiing and found the cold unbearable); the Tribeca penthouse, on the top floor of the building used by Kristof as his firm’s U.S. headquarters; and—she winces to think of it—the convert
ed barn in Wales, her own secluded Eden. That was the hardest to let go.

  At the barn, hidden in oak woods under the Black Mountains, she first attempted a more intimate engagement with her subject, growing annuals from seed in an Edwardian glasshouse, planting them out on the five-acre smallholding, picking them—revelling in the godlike pleasures of scrutiny and selection—discarding inferior specimens and conveying the best of them to a Victorian draughtsman’s table under the big north-facing window. Here she would draw and paint them, fixing their evanescent beauty in time, before their frail, broken forms were swept away to join their substandard compatriots on the compost heap, their immortality assured in her meticulous, radiant likenesses.

  She wasn’t, in fact, very good at the growing. The attrition rate, seed to seedling, was high. She lacked the patience and the commitment—her mothering style should have been an early warning—and it proved as difficult to find someone dependable to attend to the seedlings in her absence as it was to find reliable childcare. Still, there were some successes. Sweet peas, cosmos, larkspur, campion. Those paintings, translucent watercolour on vellum, were all now in private collections in Japan. But these days, someone else is tending, or supervising, Eve’s patch in Wales. She wonders if that smug redhead in the window ever gets compost under her fingernails.