The Secrets of Tenley House
Page 4
For all intents, home life was ordered and calm thanks to the smooth running of the house by Betty who took her practical duties as wife and mother seriously, respecting the contribution her husband made to their lives both financially and socially. Her parental role was more of a necessity than an act of love, and she often reminded Ivy of how lucky they were. For this reason and others, Betty strove to keep every aspect of their lives under control, just how she liked it. To her mind, Geoffrey’s benevolence was amply repaid in the deliverance of housewifely comforts, needs of a more personal nature were attended to just once a month. Here, Betty’s show of gratitude lasted no more than a few minutes, barely rumpling the starched bed sheets. During the ordeal, she found that counting rose petals on the wallpaper helped to endure what was happening on top, unless she scrunched her eyes which was sometimes necessary.
It wasn’t that she didn’t love Geoffrey because she did, in a respectful and mutually beneficial way, but the horrors of bloodied sheets covered in the contents of her bowels and bladder continued to haunt her. Betty was therefore avowed to preventing a repeat performance of the sordid event that was a direct result of another. To her, the whole business of reproduction was abhorrent, none of it pleasurable in the slightest, even with Ronald. In her opinion, to endure such a base activity followed nine months later by another round of indignity and pain was sheer foolishness. To then be forced to care for the unwanted culprit of said plight was simply cruel and unfair.
Still, apart from her monthly chore, life was bearable, good even. And Geoffrey had kept his promise although there had been occasions at Sunday service when Betty would glance sideways and observe her husband. His fists would be clenched tightly in prayer, full lips conducting a private conversation with God, causing her to wonder at the content of his communion. And then she would smile, confident that her dear husband was not in battle with lascivious demons but instead congratulating the angels, thanking them and the almighty for his good fortune.
To her left would sit Ivy, also deep in thought and prayer. How ironic it was that on both sides, Betty was deceived and unaware, oblivious to secrets and truths. Little did she know that her auburn-haired daughter, a mere slip of a girl who looked and behaved much younger than her years was in battle with a real-life demon. The one seated next to her mother.
Betty’s more benevolent thoughts were that Ivy was a funny little thing, with her dark button eyes that erred on the side of beady, far too gangly, sharp boned, nervy and always pale. Still, Ivy didn’t cause Betty any bother and was unlikely to, some comfort after all her discomfort.
Obviously, as Ivy waited on a chilly Platform 9 that cold February morning, she was oblivious to the inner workings of her mother’s mind along with the finer details of her marriage, and thankfully unaware of her mother’s disingenuous thoughts. Had she known, Ivy could have dissuaded her mother of many things, starting with the fact that whilst in church she never actually prayed, but she did listen. You see, Ivy didn’t believe in God. In fact she hated church. She had hated school more. There were many reasons for this.
The other girls were wary of being friends or talking to the headmaster’s stepdaughter because she might be a snitch. Nobody wanted to come to tea, not even the other outcasts because Ivy’s mum was a drag and a snob, so naturally her school-hate extended to the dispiriting home in which she lived.
As she grew older, Ivy’s cup of festering resentment and hatred began to overflow especially for him, her stepfather, the raven-haired, clumpy-footed ogre who stalked every waking moment and invaded her dreams as she slept. For this and so much more, Ivy also hated her mother for allowing this predicament as well as being a cold fish, a snobbish prude, the withholder of warmth and caresses, praise or comfort.
It wasn’t her imagination either. Ivy felt him watching her at school, in assembly or the playground, the guise of proud parent and vigilant schoolmaster merely a mask hiding what lay beneath. The stench from his pipe clung to the hairs inside her nostrils, the odour of him crawling upwards to her brain. Even her earliest memories were diseased and poisoned by him, and there were stains on her skin, imprints of his touch that couldn’t be erased.
Like helping her up the stairs as a small child, too close, too near. A cold clammy palm holding hers, the other supposedly guiding, placed upon her bottom, squeezing as they climbed. Swimming in the sea, clumsy touches in private places and while Mother read he would dry Ivy with the towel, stroking, lingering. Later, she felt his eyes as they bore through the layers of her clothes, resting on budding breasts, causing her skin to crawl and prickle. He stood too close when they dried the dishes as Mother put her feet up and listened to the radio, something hard against her hip as he brushed by.
Ivy had always known it was coming, but it was something she had no words for and couldn’t even describe or even picture in her head. Maybe that was a good thing, not to be able to see or understand this thing she was afraid of. Or did that make it worse, the fear of the unknown? That she hated him already was perhaps useful and this single emotion made her braver and provided a shield to hide behind. But there were so many other feelings to accompany hate, like rage.
He’d soiled her childhood memories and replaced them with confusion. Misremembering a blue-sky, sunny day, unsure why amongst the ice-cream cones and sandcastles, donkey rides and chips in newspaper, she could feel the heat of tears, the sea and sand blurring from view. And balled up nice and tight, deep inside a heart full of enmity was a core of bitterness and loathing that gilded the shield and sharpened her sword. Somehow she had known that one day she would need both.
That’s why Ivy didn’t believe. Not anymore. She had asked so many times for God to intervene, to somehow remove her from the situation, anything would do. Had she been given a choice, Ivy would have picked death. Not hers, his.
As soon as she left school, the beast began closing in. Ivy could feel ‘it’. The oppressive force field that radiated from him, even as he chewed his food at dinner, read from behind The Times at breakfast, stopped outside her door after supper where the creaky floorboard betrayed his presence, whatever it was, it was getting stronger. A few days after she’d celebrated her eighteenth birthday, the time finally came for Ivy to meet her fears; one April afternoon just before Easter. While Betty embellished her bonnet at the Women’s Institute, back at home, her daughter’s ordeal turned out to be much less horrific than whatever Ivy hadn’t been able to imagine.
Ivy was due to meet her college friends at the cinema and was so looking forward to watching Cleopatra with young women who didn’t seem to mind that she was slightly introverted, had never had a boyfriend or experienced a first kiss. That afternoon, as habit dictated, Ivy lingered in her bedroom until she thought the house was empty. She preferred the confines of her four walls and often ate meals alone, feigning study or tiredness. Her bedroom was Ivy’s sanctuary until morning came and she could flee her cage.
Whenever Ivy left the house a strange panic would rise in her chest, and such was her eagerness to escape that she had to prevent her legs from sprinting up the path. In the evenings, panic was replaced by a creeping dread and her body became leaden, reluctant to step inside. The stench from his pipe turned her stomach as much as the aroma of the food her mother was about to serve. Looking upon either of them was becoming increasingly hard because she detested him and despised her mother, which was why Ivy had made a secret plan. The moment her teaching certificate was in her hand, she’d be off. The manner in which she would extricate herself was a work in progress but just the idea gave her hope. In the end, poor Ivy wasn’t even allowed the courtesy of arranging or deciding her own fate because as usual it was decided for her.
She would never know or understand why he chose that precise moment or day, as she made her way quickly from bathroom to bedroom in her slip, presuming he was still at the library. Instead he was at the top of the stairs, standing there, for how long she couldn’t tell. But he’d been waiting for years.
Five steps backwards, recoiling from the threat, had taken Ivy into her bedroom, two steps more she felt the edge of her bed ram against her calves and with a final step he was on her. How strange that Ivy felt not fear, perhaps she was resigned to her unknown fate and to resist the great hulk of a lob-sided man would have been futile. Something inside her head advised that it was far simpler to demure because after all, Mother had always reminded her to be grateful, not to make a fuss.
For years afterwards, either in her dreams or unguarded fuzzy moments, Ivy would feel his stubble on her cheek, the curls of his fringe as it flopped onto her forehead as he bobbed up and down. She would hear the church bells chime two, hate forever The Beatles who were singing ‘Please Please Me’ from her transistor radio, still feel pity for the neighbour’s unloved dog who yapped throughout, and smell the odour of stale breath and as she turned her head in disgust, a hint of burnt toast that lingered from breakfast.
Her enlightenment, the bestowing of carnal knowledge for which she had no desire, whilst uncomfortable, due to an explosion of pent-up perversion, was mercifully swift. After the fact, Ivy was more nauseated by the mess he left behind, the residue of his greed that stuck to her leg.
Later as she bathed and sobbed, Ivy winced as soap studs inflamed those invaded regions of her body, yet still she scrubbed. How lonely she had felt that day, waiting for her mother to come home, then realising that she would be of no use because how could she say it, describe or admit to what he had done? Crying into her pillow, Ivy tried to erase it all but each time she closed her eyes, was even more repulsed by a flaccid image, quickly tucked away before its owner hobbled silently from the room.
By the early hours, after refusing supper and listening to every creak and miniscule sound, something else invaded Ivy’s body – shock, which summarily banished fear, coating Ivy in an ironic silver lining. She now realised why Betty slept in a separate bed to her husband, dressed in a manner as not to attract attention or desire and kept shows of affection to the minimum. To encourage intimacy, especially with that cumbersome monster was simply foolish. Perhaps Betty felt repulsion at being subjected to acts of this kind, maybe even with her first husband whose body part had entered, leaving behind his fluid, causing a seed to grow and a baby to be born. This was the cause of Betty’s thinly veiled resentment of her only child, the reason she withheld love. Yes, Ivy understood it all.
As she lay beneath the sheets, her hands rested gently on a ribcage still bruised from the weight of an invader, tears pricking her eyes. Amongst the confusion of her own brain, she felt a hint of humility towards the cold unloving fish that was her mother. It lasted only seconds before Ivy was overcome by a wave of rage, washing away any trace of compassion.
If her mother knew all this, then why had she not protected her or taken Ivy to one side and explained, warned of the dangers of men, apologised for her own failings and tried harder to show her child affection? During the coming together of man and woman, an act that preceded her birth and then after, Ivy was innocent. While a monster grunted and dribbled as he pinned her daughter to the bed, Betty was only minutes away sticking paper flowers onto an Easter bonnet. For this and so much more, Ivy decided, she would not forgive her mother and denounced humility as a worthless virtue. Both she and her stepfather were iniquitous in their treatment of her, guilty as charged and no reprieve would be given.
In the days that followed, Ivy noticed something else – the absence of that unknown quantity. It didn’t stalk her every move and not only that, since the incident, he had changed. Whatever urges had consumed him appeared to have departed. Geoffrey became a shadow whose lustful eyes were now averted, and the footsteps outside the door ceased. Ivy hoped that shame was ravaging his soul, just like it was poisoning hers.
Had they not listened in church? So many sermons, thousands of hours of prayers and yet still they disobeyed, still they went unpunished. Ivy was confused about many things, apart from one. God had forsaken her, and in return she would forsake him and take matters into her own hands. Ivy vowed to escape and not only that, if the monster dared come near her again, she would rather die before he laid one sweaty, stubby finger on her, or she would kill him instead. In Ivy’s mind it was all quite simple. Sadly it wasn’t.
Five months later, a stern-faced woman drove purposefully down the M1. Betty was going a little too fast, urging the car onwards and away from a nursing home in Yorkshire, a cold and uninviting place in which she had deposited her only child like an unwanted sack in the charity shop door. Betty’s thoughts were not of being stopped by a policeman or the fate of Ivy and certainly not of her unborn grandchild. Instead, she focused solely on the avoidance of shame, the true purpose of the trip. Her secondary concern was the appeasement of Geoffrey who had been so rocked and clearly disgusted at the discovery of Ivy’s pregnancy that she worried for his mental and physical health.
There had been such a terrible scene and once the words were spoken, it was as though a huge mushroom cloud of panic and anger swelled inside the house, like the images of Hiroshima Betty had seen on television. That day, when Ivy announced she was pregnant, an atom bomb went off and decimated all their lives.
“You’re what?”
A whispered response was all that Ivy could manage, even fainter than her original confession. “Pregnant.”
“But you can’t be. You haven’t even got a boyfriend. Are you sure? No, this isn’t happening, not to us, to me.” Betty was horrified, transfixed, staring at her daughter’s bent head and just the sight of her auburn locks, the fiery red of movie stars, seemed to fuel her anger. “Ivy! Look at me right now. I am going to phone the doctor immediately and we can sort out all this nonsense. It will be a mistake, just a silly mistake.”
“Mum, please, listen. I’ve already seen the doctor and he confirmed it. I’m pregnant.” No matter how many times Ivy had said the words either to her mother or to herself as she lay in bed, panic stricken and terrified, they still didn’t seem real.
“Oh dear God… what have you done, Ivy, who did this to you? Give me the young man’s name, tell me who it is and I shall speak with his parents and let them sort this mess out. Is it a boy from college or from here in the village?” For some reason the faces of every single male who had stood at the counter and bought a stamp, flashed before Betty’s eyes and none of them were good enough for her daughter who was now soiled, dirty and shamed. They all were, or would be when the news got out. It was at that precise moment that Betty thought of Geoffrey, his job and standing within the community and how he had taken them both in, that caused the mushroom cloud to billow and the flames at its centre glowed angry red.
“I will give you one more chance to tell me who it is… Ivy! Stop snivelling. Right now. I demand you tell me his name.” Betty was trembling and had balled her fists in temper, fighting the urge to pummel the bent head of her disgusting daughter who sobbed and hiccupped before her.
“Do you realise what you have done, you dirty little whore? You have thrown away your life for some scabby youth who you allowed to paw and defile your body. You will bring shame on Geoffrey and I, and for what? Your own selfish desires, your depraved wants and needs that came before your family, before me and worse, before God. You have let us all down and I have never been so ashamed in my life.” Betty spat the words at her child and as she did so, caught a glimpse of herself in the oval mirror that hung above the fireplace. Instead of seeing a face twisted with rage and eyes that were cold hard balls of rage, Betty saw only a God-fearing woman wearing a pinny covered in flour, an upstanding member of the community who deserved so much better than this, than that which sat before her.
“Get out of my sight, do you hear me, Ivy, get out
of my sight. I cannot bear to look at you for a moment longer.” Betty tried hard to calm the inferno within, paying heed to the voice in her head that told her not to pick up the poker from the grate and use it to beat her daughter.
When Ivy stood, her slight body visibly shaking, for the first time finding the courage to look her mother in the eye, she reached out her hands in the hope that maybe, now Betty had vented her hurt, she would find it within her to soothe her child’s pain.
“Please, Mum, please listen. I’m so sorry, I truly am, but it wasn’t my fault, I swear. I wish I could make it go away, I wish it hadn’t happened, but I need you to help me. Please help me, Mum. I’m scared.”
Betty took a step backwards, recoiling from Ivy’s attempt at contact. “Scared. Sorry. Oh you will be, believe me. And when I find out who did this to you, he will rue the day he laid a finger on you. You won’t be able to keep it a secret, I will find out who he is and he’d better do the decent thing because I won’t keep you or a bastard child, not under this roof. Have you even thought how this will affect your stepfather… what it could do to his career and my marriage? Dear God, Ivy, what will Geoffrey say when he finds out?”
Ivy listened in silence as her mother spoke the name of a rapist. The gap between them had been just a few inches, yet in that instant it became a hundred miles, or a deep river flowing with simmering hate. It occurred to Ivy, as she looked into the eyes of the cold frightened woman who stood on the other bank, that there was no way across. Even if Ivy did reach the other side, the comfort she sought, in a simple hug or a gentle word of reassurance would be denied. In fact her mother was incapable, she had been for a long time and as Ivy realised this, the river froze over and so did her heart.