by Sadie Jones
‘Dad!’
Gilbert had come from talking to Dicky. He had been apologising, and Dicky had made it very difficult for him and, leaving, he had seen Tamsin’s face as she closed the drawing room door. The sight of her, with the vicious bruise around her eye and on her cheek, was still in his mind and when he saw her little sister getting away from his son through the trees, he was very frightened and very angry. They met on the terrace.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing? Get inside!’
‘I have to talk to you.’
‘Inside! You’re not to leave this house.’
The habit of assuming his father’s superiority was very deep in Lewis and he followed Gilbert into the drawing room. Alice wasn’t there. Gilbert went over to the drinks cabinet and started to cram the bottles from the top into the cupboard below, fumbling with them. Lewis watched him and kept thinking, like a child does, that if he could explain, then everything would be all right, and his father would do something and there would be fairness. He could see his father didn’t understand, and he needed to explain to him.
‘You’ve been at the Carmichaels’?’
‘Yes, I’ve been there and I have never been so humiliated. I was humiliated – for you, for what you’ve done! I had to let Dicky Carmichael rub my nose in your filth!’
‘Tamsin? I didn’t hurt her. She—’
He didn’t want to get sidetracked with this. He was thinking of Kit, and he needed to help her, and he didn’t know how to do it. He was frightened he’d lose himself again and he needed to explain, and not lose the hold he had on what was important. He felt the bandage on his cuts, firm and holding, and he shook his head – shut his eyes just quickly – so that he could think. Gilbert was closing the doors of the cabinet and trying to lock them.
‘So bloody lying and deceit are the latest of your sins?’
Gilbert straightened up from the locked drinks cabinet, and Lewis grasped the significance of his trying to hide away the bottles like that; that he was hiding the liquor from him, but Lewis wasn’t thinking about drink, he wasn’t thinking about anything but Kit, and he was trying to be heard and he wasn’t being heard, and Gilbert was facing him and shouting at him and trying to keep him down, like always, trying to keep him down and keep him small and keep him from doing anything.
‘We’ve had violence,’ he was saying, and his voice was shaking with his absurd anger, ‘we’ve had drunkenness, we’ve had a sick form of self-abuse that most people would find hard to imagine, and now you’re—’
‘I didn’t hurt her!’
Lewis tried to keep hold of the thread in his mind and not let his anger break it, but his father was shouting at him.
‘If you think I’m going to let you come back into my home and destroy my life with your—’
Then Lewis went for him – and Alice came into the room as he went for him – and he saw his father’s fear and felt nothing about it. He put his hand on his father. He put his hand on him and grabbed at his neck, his collar and the lapel of his jacket. His father felt weak in his hand, and his hand felt big as he pushed him down. He had enough of himself left not to carry on with him, but he kicked the drinks cabinet, the front of it, and the wood splintered under his foot. His father went down to the floor and the light, decorated doors broke into pieces, and the smell of the liquor, as the bottles smashed, the mixing, sweet, alcohol smell, came up and hit him, and he left, as Alice pressed herself against the wall.
The air seemed to stick to him as he forced his way through it. He ran the path along the edge of the trees and into her garden. He was pouring sweat, and the quiet smell of cut grass and the still beauty of the house were evil to him. He started to shout her name and ran the length of the house looking for her, and it was nothing to him that as he went, and as he shouted for her, he smashed his fist into the glinting mullioned windows. He shouted for her, but she didn’t come. He didn’t feel the sagging lead as he hit the windows, but he shouted Kit’s name and thought she must come to him.
He stopped, and yelled her name again to the blank house. There was a man, not Dicky, another man, coming around the side of the house and he heard screaming from inside and Dicky’s voice shouting, and then he saw Kit. She was looking down, from a window above him, and not moving. He was distracted by seeing her, and the man reached him and threw his shoulder against his chest and got him down. He held Lewis down and tried to force his head sideways with his knee on his chest. Lewis twisted his body and kicked the man hard in the face and didn’t think about it, but got up when he could. He saw Dicky come out of the house, but he couldn’t go for him because he had a shotgun in his hands. Lewis saw the man he’d kicked was Preston and that he was bleeding, with his hands up to his face on the ground. There was still screaming. Lewis started to run towards the trees. There was a gunshot, but he was in the trees by then and it was just to scare him, not aimed at him.
The woods were very close and dim, like being underwater, and there was a strong smell of wild garlic and the sap from the trees and nettles. Lewis went away from the path, and through brambles and dead leaves that were years old. When he got to where he couldn’t see a way forward any more he stopped and rested, leaning his hand against a tree and getting his breath.
He shut his eyes and he saw Kit very clearly. His whole body was numb and light and he kept thinking of Kit and that he loved her, and that now he knew that he loved her.
He saw her in his car, in London, smiling at him, and he remembered her dancing with him and the feel of her. He thought of her leaning against the tree in her damp dress that sunny afternoon, and talking to him, but letting him be quiet too. He thought of the sweetness of her. It was stupid to feel happy thinking about her, but when he saw her in his mind he did, or at least could imagine happiness. He thought that the idea of hurting such a girl was too bad to think about, and that letting a girl like that be hurt was just as bad.
He noticed his right hand was stinging and he looked at it and couldn’t understand why it had small pieces of glass stuck into the side of it and the heel of it, where his wrist started, and then he remembered the windows.
He sat down against the tree to pick the pieces of glass out, and the hand started to shake badly and the small cuts burned.
He rested his head on the back of the cut hand for a while and tried to think what to do. It was difficult to concentrate.
Leaving Kit there was intolerable.
Perhaps if he could talk to her, then things would be all right. It was a stupid sort of clarity, but it gave him something to hold on to.
Chapter Ten
Kit had stood in her room as Lewis came for her and shouted for her and she heard the banging on the glass and Tamsin screaming. She was so frightened she shook all over, like she did when her father beat her; she felt the physical horror of those beatings and made a connection to Lewis that she had never made. He had always been gentleness to her. She had thought him gentle and now she wanted to run from him. She would lock her door, she would barricade herself in, she would hide away from him. She was too scared to move from the window as he shouted for her, and when he saw her and shouted her name and she saw Preston trying to hold him and Lewis kick his face, she was sickened by it. The sickness and fear were tied together in her mind with sex – the sex he had with Alice, and the sex she sensed from her father – and thinking of those things was unspeakably dark to her, and unbearable.
To Kit, the idea of sex was a vulnerable and new thing, and when she dreamed of it, or thought of it, it was sweet and thrilling and it had to do with love and promises. The idea of Lewis and Alice, and the fear of him she now felt, belonged to a place that was corrupt. She thought of the woman in the jazz club, stroking his face. She thought of Tamsin running barefoot with her broken-open dress. Lewis wasn’t gentle to her now. She didn’t know what he was.
After he had got away into the woods she went to her bed and sat there for a long time.
There were voi
ces and people downstairs and she could hear her father’s voice and then, after a while, there was the sound of hammering, metal and wood. She went to the window and saw there were men barring the smashed windows with raw timber battens. The hammering went on for a long time, as the sky darkened to invisible outside her window. It was very loud and relentless and after it stopped the silence rang.
Kit switched on the lamp on her bedside table. She looked around her room at the record frieze propped against the skirting and the faces were dumb. There was no Lewis to think of, there was no song to listen to. All of her loves were empty.
She heard footsteps in the corridor, but it wasn’t her father and she didn’t get up.
Tamsin opened the door. Her bruise was ugly against her skin and pale hair and she leaned against the door and looked at Kit very coolly.
‘What’s up, infant?’
Kit felt an infant too, and wanted Tamsin to be kind.
‘Did they finish the windows?’
‘Yes, isn’t it ghastly? All barred in till tomorrow when they’ll get somebody in to see about them properly. Why was he shouting for you?’
‘What?’
‘Lewis. Why was he shouting for you?’
‘Instead of you, you mean?’
‘Idiot. No, I mean what on earth was all that about?’
‘Does Daddy want to know?’
‘Have you been out? Did you see Lewis after they let him go?’
‘No.’
‘What happened when he took the car?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well, why was he after you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you tell him?’
‘Tell him what?’
There was silence.
‘Does he know? You know, about you being – did you tell him about Daddy?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Nobody would believe a person like him anyway.’
‘I know.’
‘Well, good then.’
Tamsin went to the window and looked out, but it was dark now and the woods were hidden. She turned from the window and sat on the edge of Kit’s bed and she looked uncomfortable doing it.
‘Horrid, wasn’t it?’ she said.
Kit nodded.
‘You know they’ve sent a policeman to watch the house?’ said Tamsin. ‘We’re safe inside, all of us.’ And she smiled at her and was warm and like a proper big sister.
‘Why don’t you come down and be with us all?’ she said. ‘We’re in the drawing room. It’s not supper yet because everything’s late. Come on. Mummy will probably let you have a sherry, it’s that sort of day, and you’re practically sixteen.’
She held out her hand and Kit took it and they went together, along the corridor, down the stairs and into the drawing room. Dicky and Claire were on the sofa and they looked up at the girls as they came in.
‘There you are,’ said Dicky, smiling.
‘Look,’ said Tamsin, ‘there’s your kitten. I don’t know how she got in again. I’ve been playing with her. Look, try her with this, she loves it.’
She let go of Kit’s hand and picked up a skein of Claire’s tapestry wool from the floor and handed it to her. Kit took it and went to the floor by the kitten, near her mother. Tamsin and Dicky looked at each other, and Tamsin smiled a little and Dicky nodded and went back to his paper. The family sat in the drawing room and waited for dinner to be ready.
Wilson came to speak to Gilbert. Alice went to her room and stayed there. If she heard the things they said about Lewis she would cry with fear, and show her guilt. She lay in bed, like a little girl pretending to have a temperature, and listened to the men’s voices coming up from the drawing room, and it didn’t make any difference that she couldn’t hear the words. They were talking about how to find Lewis, and what he’d done and that he was beyond being accommodated and forgiven now – by his father, and by everybody.
Lewis was hidden in the woods watching Dicky Carmichael’s house. There was a man walking past the windows. Bars of light came through the wood and fell on him as he walked.
If Lewis could get to the house and get Kit’s attention, she might come out to him. He knew there was no explaining what had happened between him and Alice, especially to her little-girl heart. He had to try.
He waited for the man to go away from him around the house and then he ran across the dark grass to the drawing room.
He could see her now. She was on the hearth rug with a kitten and absorbed in playing with it. She had her legs tucked under her and he wanted to pick her up in his arms, curled up like that, and hold her. He stared at her and willed her to look up.
Tamsin said something to Kit, but Lewis didn’t hear it, and Kit got up and walked away from the family. Lewis kept pace with her in the darkness and at the end of the room she stopped by the radio. She bent over it and started searching for a programme. She was about four feet away from him through the damaged window. Lewis glanced to his right, to where the man would reappear in a moment. Kit was frowning at the radio as she tuned it. She found the Third Programme and twiddled the knob some more, and then Tamsin’s voice came down the room again and she looked up – and saw Lewis.
She fixed her eyes on him. She had changed. Lewis knew the man would come around the corner, but he couldn’t move; he just stood looking at how different she was and thinking that he had made her different.
Then Kit opened her mouth, slowly. She took a breath, ‘There!’
Lewis didn’t wait; he ran – before the policeman got around the house, before Dicky got down the drawing room to Kit, and put his arm around her, and asked her what she had seen, and held her, as they both looked out into the garden.
This time they did come after him. He hadn’t been in the woods very long before he heard movement behind him, and voices. He looked over his shoulder and there were lights, flicking as they crossed through the trees.
He left the path and tried to go quicker, but it was too dark. He couldn’t see his arms in front of him or the trees around. It was like being blind, except that when he turned he could see the lights behind him. They could move fast because they could see, and he was like something blinded and couldn’t get away as quickly as they could follow him. They hadn’t seen him yet, but they were closer. He began to panic. He was running and falling and, when he fell, trying to get along the ground because it didn’t seem to make any difference if he was on his feet or not.
There were brambles and tree trunks and ferns and ditches and he didn’t know what he was putting his hands on. The people chasing him were closer still and he fell again, against a fallen tree, and forced himself lower to the ground and down further, as flat as he could to the ground, trying to keep still and quiet.
He could hear them coming.
He was frightened of them, but what was worse was that they were human, and comforting because of that. They knew where they were at least – they were part of something and sure.
They were getting closer.
He wished they’d find him, but that meant being held down again, it meant being hit again. He thought of being dragged out and he thought of being locked up, and he covered his mouth to stop from crying and to stop himself shouting out to them and he pushed himself lower into the ground.
A beam of light flashed past him. He could see a fallen tree, weirdly lit undergrowth, and then darkness again, more complete than before. He shut his eyes so he’d be in his own darkness.
They were talking to each other, quite relaxed and determined, and not sure which way to go. They went silent for a moment and Lewis opened his eyes again and there were lights flashing around, but not near him. One of them said, ‘Here!’
It wasn’t the man just near Lewis, but another, and the man near Lewis carried on walking, and walked past him and his footfalls were heavy and close.
They moved off. They were talking, not always about him, sometimes about other things, normal things, and he envied them again and,
when they had gone on, he was quiet and lay where he was.
He wiped his face, and found he’d been crying. To lie with your face in dirt and cry with fear and not even feel it because you were terrified – it didn’t seem like there was anything worse than that. And Kit looking at him the way she had. She had been hurt all of this time and he hadn’t known, and he hadn’t seen her and he was ashamed. He would be locked up and he couldn’t help her.
He got up.
He had been losing his balance in total darkness, but now he could see that ahead of him there was a difference between the ground and the trees and the sky. He went towards where the darkness wasn’t so complete. He didn’t know if it was the end of the woods or a gap in them – until he saw the river.
The air moved over his skin. The river was shining. It was shining because the sky was full of stars. He looked up at the stars. They gave a light that dimly washed over everything and wasn’t white like moonlight, and he could see the woods all around the clearing, and the water ahead.
The ten-year-old in him recognised it first; it’s the part of the river with the wreck in it, he thought. He walked over to the edge of the water, where he had stood and watched his mother swimming.
‘Right then! … This dashed rudder. I’m going to get it.’
* * *
The river was still, but he could hear water splashing. He felt water around him mixing with the hot air, and then less air and just water, and he put his hand out, but his hand was on the ground because he was down on his knees; he kept his eyes open and stinging sweat went into them and he felt the sand and the stones against his face. He could hear his own breathing.
He slept and he dreamed, but he didn’t know that he was sleeping, and when he remembered it later it never felt like a dream, but like something that happened to him, with all the clarity and beauty of truth, perhaps more clarity and beauty than that.
Lewis hadn’t seen his mother for nine years. He had put the part of himself that missed her away in his mind, and he had put away the part that remembered too, so that when she came out of the trees towards him it was a jolt of remembering her, more than surprise. It had been so very, very long since he had seen her and she walked towards him in her normal way. She was wearing a short-sleeved dress with a green background and pink. He must have been lying down because when she reached him she knelt. He saw her cheek and brown hair, clipped back. He looked into her face. He realised they both had the same coloured eyes. He hadn’t noticed before. There was enough light to see her by and he wasn’t sure why that was, because it was still night. It must have been all the stars, he thought. The sky was full of them.