by Kate Eberlen
When they eventually got back to the cottage, he let Gina have the first shower, and by the time it was his turn the hot water had run out. He had to put his wet jeans back on. The cottage felt cold and damp as a continual stream of traffic sloshed along the road outside.
‘We could light a fire,’ Gina said, looking at the logs in the fireplace.
‘I think they’re ornamental,’ Alf said. He’d never lit a real fire and was quite sure Gina hadn’t either. He didn’t want to take the risk of trying in case the chimney hadn’t been swept, and setting the whole place ablaze.
‘Shall we order in a Chinese?’ Gina asked.
‘I’m not sure they do delivery in the Lake District,’ he said.
‘So I’m going to have to drive us, am I?’ she said.
‘Looks that way,’ he said.
All the preparation and he’d still managed to muck it up.
The sky was clear again on the Sunday morning, the sun coming round the edge of the floral curtains. Alf tiptoed downstairs to make a cup of coffee.
He’d wanted it to be perfect for her and it hadn’t been, but, as she’d said, this way it was like being in a romcom where everything goes wrong. It hadn’t gone that wrong, but he knew what she was getting at.
Gina stretched and yawned when he put the coffee down beside her.
‘Today is my treat,’ she said. ‘Girl can’t have too many treats on her birthday, can she, and Dad sent some money for us to have a good time.’
‘Did you tell your dad about us?’ Alf asked, shocked.
‘He suspected something was going on. He’s cool about it.’
While he was downstairs in the kitchen, Gina had been looking up spa hotels. The place she drove them to was so swanky Alf felt embarrassed about walking into reception given the state his trainers were in, but they were immediately issued with robes and slippers wrapped in plastic. Gina had booked side-by-side massages at two. Alf had never had a massage in his life, but after the initial fear of getting a hard-on, he thought it was something he could get used to. Gina, who’d started out chatting to the masseuse, gradually stopped talking, and the room was incredibly peaceful as they lay face down in a haze of essential oils, surrounded by gentle music that sounded like the sea.
Afterwards, they had tea in a conservatory with palm trees – three tiers of plates with finger sandwiches, scones and cream, and tiny cakes that tasted intensely of chocolate and passionfruit and a pink flavour he couldn’t work out, until Gina told him it was rose.
‘Guess what?’ She leaned across the table. ‘I’ve booked to stay the night.’
‘But my exam is tomorrow afternoon!’ he said.
‘And I have to be at work in the morning. So we can chill, get an early night. We can even do some revision if you want. We’ll leave early tomorrow morning. Traffic will be better when we’re not stuck with everyone who’s returning from their weekend in the Lakes. You’ll have plenty of time to go home and freshen up before the exam.’
‘But . . .’ Alf was sure there was a logical objection flitting around at the back of his brain, but he couldn’t seem to pin it down.
‘Come and see the room at least,’ Gina said.
The bed was enormous, the pillows as soft as a cloud.
‘I’ll make sure you get a good night’s sleep,’ Gina said, loosening the belt of his towelling robe.
28
July
LETTY
One of Frances’s colleagues had given her a piece of paper with a pie chart called the Grief Wheel, which showed the progression of bereavement. It was clearly a comfort to Frances to have a written document demonstrating that Letty’s reactions were not abnormally extreme and that shock, protest and guilt would one day give way to acceptance. For Letty, unable to tell her mother that her feelings of loss and hopelessness were not just because of Marina’s death, the regular appearance of the Grief Wheel was an additional irritant, which she wanted to grab from Frances’s hand and tear into tiny pieces.
Frances advised Letty not to get rid of the dress she had been wearing when Marina died. She was angry now, and that was natural, she said, but she had nothing to be angry about and in time she would see that.
‘I’m not angry,’ Letty shouted, driving Frances from her room, because Letty never usually raised her voice.
She was not angry with the dress, nor with Marina, but she was angry with Ivo, and with Oscar and Raj, who were planning to go ahead with their wedding in Greece. How could they even think of celebrating? But mainly she was angry with Frances, because it was always Frances who made the decisions in the family. And they had decided not to tell her until she got home. They didn’t want to spoil her lovely weekend, they said. But if they had, she would have received the message on the boat on the way back from Burano, and everything would have been different.
‘Were you trying to warn me?’ Letty sometimes asked the empty bed, where she would often kneel and talk to her grandmother as if she was still there.
Then the logical bit of her brain would prevail. There was absolutely no way Marina could have willed the massive stroke that killed her, in order to get Frances to ring Letty in Venice to summon her home, thereby avoiding the horror of that night.
After the first rushed time, she’d locked herself in the bathroom at the Danieli trying to decide what to do for the best, certain that Spencer would want to do it again, if only to prove that he wasn’t the sort of guy who prematurely ejaculated, like a frustrated teenager. After the way he’d pinned her down, she didn’t think he was going to take no for an answer. She didn’t have her phone in the bathroom to see if there were any flights that evening, and if there were, she probably couldn’t afford them. She certainly didn’t have the money for a water taxi to take her back to the airport, and by the time she’d worked out the public transport options she was pretty sure the last flight would have left. If getting out of Venice wasn’t an option, maybe leaving the hotel was, but again, it would involve getting her stuff together. Would he allow that? When she thought she heard the door to the bedroom close, she wondered if he had gone out, and decided to make a dash for it. But when she opened the bathroom door, he was standing with a champagne flute in his hand and another beside an ice bucket on the table, trails of tiny bubbles rising through pale gold.
‘To us!’ he said, raising the glass.
‘I’ve got a headache,’ Letty said.
‘Champagne’s the best cure I know.’
He didn’t believe her, and why should he? The headache was invented and she wasn’t good at pretending.
‘I’m really sorry, but I think this was a mistake . . .’ she started.
Spencer put his glass down on the table, his expression darker than she had seen it before.
‘You really are the worst kind of cock-tease,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, willing herself to cry – surely he’d take pity on her if she cried? – but fear had somehow switched off her emotions.
He picked up the second glass of champagne and brought it over to her. Taking her right hand from her side, he put the glass into it.
‘Have a drink,’ he ordered.
When room service arrived with a whole dressed lobster and another bottle of champagne, he was on top of her. The fact that he got up, pulled on his robe, and let the waiter into the room, tipping him generously, while she lay right there in the bed, made her feel more degraded than the way he turned her unresponsive body whichever way he wanted it. When she tried to fight him off he held his hand over her neck, thumb and forefinger splayed, not hard enough to bruise, but with just enough pressure to show that he could if he wanted.
‘You know, you’d enjoy it far more if you just relaxed,’ he said.
Letty counted three times, but maybe it was more than that. The champagne dulled the pain, so she drank more, drifting towards oblivion only to wake up with the feeling that she was suffocating because he was inside her again.
In the morning, he sto
od at the window drinking cappuccino, as a cruise liner as big as a block of flats glided surreally past behind him and the room vibrated.
‘They’ll kill the golden goose with those things, if they’re not careful,’ he said.
There was another cappuccino on the table, which he brought over to the bed, presenting it to her, then reaching over to stroke a strand of hair back from her face.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he said, smiling as she instinctively flinched away from him, then leapt out of the way as she suddenly put her hand over her mouth and ran to the bathroom to throw up.
When she finally emerged he said, with a worried look, ‘You are on the pill?’
Surely he didn’t think you got morning sickness just hours after? It was a bit late for him to be concerned now.
She nodded, even though she wasn’t, unable to bear the idea of him thinking for a second that he might have got her pregnant.
Letty’s periods had been erratic since her eating disorder. She bought a pregnancy test, not trusting the result until several more tests had proved negative. She also knew she ought to be checked at the STD clinic. Even though she was symptomless, she must be at risk from a man who didn’t even consider using protection when sleeping with a virtual stranger.
The clinic was in the same hospital that Marina had been admitted to. When Letty was looking for directions, she saw the young doctor who had diagnosed her grandmother’s first stroke approaching with a smile on his face, which faded as she walked straight past him, heading into orthopaedic outpatients, where she waited for several minutes before venturing back into the corridor.
The nurse’s expression did not change when Letty admitted to unprotected sex with someone she didn’t know very well, but looked concerned when she said, ‘I didn’t want it.’
She left the hospital with a leaflet for the rape crisis line.
Had she been raped? Letty asked herself. Could consent be given and withdrawn within ten seconds? The answer was technically yes, of course, but it wasn’t relevant as nobody would believe her.
The leaflet said that it helped to talk to someone. She couldn’t risk telling Frances. She would probably think she should press charges, and then she’d have to tell her that she’d accepted not just one but two lavish weekends abroad from a man she’d met through a website designed to put young women in touch with sugar daddies. What was she thinking? How could she have been so stupid? And wasn’t it the case that the woman’s background was always held against them? Josh’s film was probably still somewhere on the internet. She was stuck in a never-ending loop of shame.
It was a mistake to take the dress to the charity shop, but not for the reasons Frances said. It was so beautiful that they put it on a mannequin in the window. Driving to the funeral parlour to help choose the coffin, or the florist’s to decide on the flowers, or to Rollo’s to discuss the order of service, her father always seemed to select a route that took them past the shop, so it was a more constant reminder than it would have been if Letty had put the dress back in the trunk at the bottom of Marina’s bed.
The third time she passed it, Letty felt a new rush of panic as it occurred to her that there was a risk Spencer might also drive past. It could be on his way to work for all she knew, and he would see it, and then he would know the area where she lived, which she had never told him. Since Venice she had switched off her phone, not daring to look and see if he had tried to contact her. After a sleepless night, she decided to go back to the shop and buy the dress back herself. But when she got there, it was no longer in the window. Letty asked the shop assistant where it was and was told it had just been sold.
‘To a woman?’
The shop assistant gave her a funny look.
‘Someone famous, actually. I can’t tell you who, obviously. Let’s just say model, lives in Primrose Hill.’ She winked as if Letty would know who she was talking about.
Apparently whoever it was had paid a hundred and fifty pounds for it.
Letty found herself staring at the chart on the wall behind the till, trying to work out what proportion of a goat or a beehive or a school in Africa that would purchase. Then she walked out in a kind of daze.
Marina’s death split the family, even before her failure to leave a new will was discovered. Rollo wanted Marina to be buried with their father. Frances insisted that Marina had told her that she wanted to be cremated, and her ashes scattered in Italy. Letty supported her, but Ivo said he couldn’t remember his mother expressing any strong views to him.
‘I don’t like taking sides,’ he said.
‘But you are taking bloody sides, don’t you see?’ Frances screamed at him. ‘Because unless you agree with me, then your brother will have it his way! What you don’t like taking is responsibility,’ she told him. ‘But for God’s sake, your own mother . . . !’
‘I had no idea you two were so close,’ her father said sarcastically.
‘Well, fuck you!’ Frances shouted. ‘Just trying to do what she wanted, but after all I am only a woman, and so was she, so our views – even on this! – don’t really count . . .’
‘Only you could turn this into an issue of sexual politics!’
‘Please, let’s just make a decision,’ Rollo had said.
Marina was buried, after a Catholic mass – with Frances, ironically, the only one who knew when to kneel and when to stand up, because her upbringing had been Catholic whereas Ivo and Rollo’s father Max had insisted on raising them as atheists.
It was a dismal ceremony, followed by a dismal wake in an Italian restaurant that Marina had never even been to.
For several weeks, Letty couldn’t get out of bed, even though she found it hard to sleep. She couldn’t eat. The thought of food made her sick. Her tears were so near the surface that totally inconsequential things could trigger a convulsion of sobbing. Her books remained untouched on her desk, as she no longer found any consolation in literature.
One night, she dreamed that she was standing at the window in Marina’s bedroom, and her grandmother, lying on the bed behind her, said, ‘Beautiful women are always cast as madonnas or whores. It is the way men try to control them.’
Letty woke up absolutely convinced that she had heard her grandmother speaking to her, and for a blissful moment she wanted to rush into Marina’s room and tell her everything. Then she remembered she wasn’t there.
Perhaps Marina had actually said this, Letty thought, closing her eyes, trying to remember. Perhaps one Sunday lunch during some discussion with Frances? Perhaps explaining the plot of La Traviata, which Marina had taken Letty to see when she was an inquisitive nine-year-old who wanted to know why her namesake Violetta could not be with Alfredo, the man who loved her.
Marina was still with her, she thought. Not as a ghostly presence in the house, but because they had spent so much time together. Letty knew what Marina would say, even if she was no longer there to say it. People lived on – not just through their genes, but in their stories. And that was such a comfort.
29
August
ALF
When Alf went to school to get his A level results, his nerves were worse than they’d ever been before a performance, even though he knew what was going to happen. His fingers shook as he opened the envelope. There was one surprise. He’d got an A for Drama and he hadn’t expected that. There was a different examining board for the English A level. His grade was on the second piece of paper, beneath the Drama result. He knew what it was going to say, but until he looked he could still hang on to the hope that there would be a way out.
Around him, girls were screeching and hugging each other. Nobody approached to ask how he’d done, maybe because of the look on his face, maybe because he’d kept his distance since they formally left school for the revision period. Alf hadn’t gone to the prom. He didn’t want to be in a position where he had to dance with Sadie, or talk to her. If anyone could guess what was going on, it would be her.
Alf left the building
envelope in hand, but stopped himself looking until he was outside the grounds.
Unclassified.
Which meant he had failed.
It felt like he’d been winded.
Now he had to face telling his mum, and her crying and her anger. She’d say the exam result didn’t matter, but lying to her face did.
But if he hadn’t lied, Gina would have lost her job. And losing her job would always be on her record, whereas Alf failing his exam didn’t have to be permanent. Mr Marriot could appeal to the examining board; Mr Marriot adored him. Or he could retake. Or the dance school would make an exception . . .
All the reasons Gina had come up with, standing knee-deep in stinging nettles on the hard shoulder of the M6, had seemed plausible enough at the time.
Now, staring at the stark reality of his result on paper, Alf knew none of that was going to happen. After all the thinking he’d done, he still hadn’t a clue how to justify it without dumping it on Gina, and the whole point was to avoid that, so all he’d done was put off the moment.
They’d had a blow-out on the journey back from the Lakes. They were in the middle lane and Gina had done well not to panic. She’d kept the steering wheel steady and turned on her hazard lights, remembering to look in the mirror to check the traffic behind her before bringing the car safely across to the hard shoulder. It was only once they’d come to a halt that the danger they’d just escaped had hit her. It had taken a while to calm her down enough to call the RAC. The telephone operator had instructed them to get out of the car, climb over the barrier and wait. But it was Monday morning rush hour, and by the time the breakdown service had turned up, there was no way of getting back to Blackpool in time for the exam.