Philippa

Abstract

Philippa Allen Bratton (bio) Philippa, on the chaise longue, draws her knees up toward her shoulders. The clouds have come in, and her stomach hurts. The Mediterranean is dark, the coastal forests are dark. She is glad to put on a robe; she’s bloated, her nipples show through her swimsuit, her inner thighs are red with razor burn. The robe doesn’t hide her bruised knees or the scrapes on her toe knuckles from the bottom of the swimming pool, whose surface fuzzes with the light beginning of rain. Her sister Blanche says, “Oh no, it’s actually raining.” Their stepmother Jeanne is putting on her wide-brimmed hat, stepping back into her sandals. She says, “We’ll stay in for dinner, then.” On the safer side of the glass doors, Jeanne runs her fingers through her long dark hair, combing out the superficial damp. She watches the sea like the wife of a sailor. But she is the wife of the Duke of Lancaster, and the housekeeper is running out onto the terrace, rescuing the cloth cushions and umbrellas. [End Page 106] _______ When Philippa wipes after peeing, the tissue comes away with a slick dark stripe down its center. She looks between her legs just in time to see a heavy teardrop of—what is it, placenta? no, uterine lining? was that the same thing?—splash into the water. This is such a fucking joke, she thinks. As of three hours ago she was five ten and eight-and-a-half stone, 16.5 BMI, data she tracks even though she knows it means nothing. She gets dizzy when she stands, her stomach aches, she’s perpetually constipated. Still her body punishes her for having failed to let a man come inside her. Philippa is eighteen. Her mother had been twenty-one when she had her first child. Then she had five others, of which Philippa was the last. She had died aged twenty-nine; if she had started at eighteen, she might not have even lived to twenty-six. What right did Jeanne have, marrying Philippa’s father at the age of forty-five and never giving birth to a single one of his children? The villa is nice, though. The shower in her suite is so big Philippa feels wrong being naked in it, kicking blobs of uterus down the drain. _______ Philippa’s brother Tom is an associate at a boutique investment firm. Her brother John is an associate at a private equity firm. Her brother Humphrey teaches tennis to the children of oligarchs. Her brother Hal is their father’s heir, and that is what he is. But even the son and heir has got to “do” things. At school he did tennis, at uni it was drugs; then an internship at a Tory think tank, then something unimpressive at their uncle’s energy company. Now he manages the estate: he meets the needs of the tenant farmers out of spite for his boyfriend, who thinks the thousand acres should be rewilded. Tonight Tom and John are at work, and Humphrey is on a [End Page 107] superyacht near Corfu, flirting with the hot governess. God knows where Hal is; Philippa says a prayer for him. She stands on the balcony of the bedroom Jeanne has assigned her and smokes her French Marlboros with the label that says fumer tue. The rain is clearing, but the sun has just set. The sea breaks on the rocks. Philippa scrolls through her Instagram, comparing her thighs to those of the girls she’d gone to school with and not really liked. She is still on the balcony when the darkness is full and the air is dry and a person appears on the terrace below. The pool is lit, glowing turquoise, throbbing with subaqueous shadow. The person walks down the steps into the water. It’s Jeanne, of course, or else a trespasser: the hair is black, Philippa and Blanche are blonds. She walks till the water is too deep to stand in, then pulls her legs up and floats. _______ Cramps wake Philippa at four in the morning. The painkillers she’d taken...