In a Good Light

by Clare Chambers

  ‘Goodness, you’ve been busy,’ she said, with approval. My general indolence – especially my habit of falling asleep in the afternoons – had lately provided her with regular material for her Little Talks. ‘What’s brought this on? Are you expecting company?’

  ‘When Penny comes to get Christian, we’re all going to sit out here and have lemonade,’ I explained. ‘We’re going to be civilised.’ Civilised was my adjective of the moment: it expressed my deepest yearnings for order, luxury, good taste – all those things which seemed to fall naturally to Penny, but which daily life at home made impossible. Purple suede boots were civilised: Nature Trekkers were not. Having a Portuguese cleaning lady was civilised: dirt was not. En suite bathrooms were civilised: wrapping used sanitary towels in newspaper and putting them in the boiler was not.

  ‘What a good idea,’ said Mum, clearly delighted that my bourgeois aspirations had at least raised me from my usual torpor. ‘I’ll find some decent glasses.’

  By the time Penny arrived, car keys swinging from her middle finger, and Christian had emerged from his room, yawning and stretching and cracking his knuckles, as if from a long hibernation, my preparations were complete. In the course of searching through long-neglected cabinets and dressers, Mum had discovered six undamaged glasses and a large pitcher (civilised), and I had strained the cooled lemonade through a stocking (uncivilised). I had frosted the edges of the glasses and filled them with crushed ice (civilised) and Grandpa Percy had installed himself at the table, in a pair of trousers with a stain down the front (uncivilised).

  There wasn’t much in the larder that could serve as nibbles, but I did find an open packet of walnut pieces. They were soft and rather bitter, but I put them out anyway, along with a bowl of sugar in case the lemonade needed sweetening.

  Everyone was very complimentary about my efforts, though the frosted rims had to be explained to Grandpa, who thought he’d got a dirty glass.

  ‘It’s certainly very refreshing,’ said Dad, surreptitiously wiping his eyes.

  ‘So much better than shop-bought,’ said Mum. As if we’d ever had shop-bought lemonade!

  Christian drained his glass at a gulp, then pretended to flail and claw at his throat. But he helped himself to seconds, which pleased me. There were no takers for the walnuts, I noticed, though the sugar was warmly appreciated.

  ‘How homely,’ said Penny, swilling ice around her glass. ‘My family never does anything like this.’

  But I got the idea from you! I wanted to protest.

  ‘Have you been working hard?’ Mum asked her. ‘Your eyes look a bit bleary.’

  Penny almost bridled at this, but collected herself with a laugh. ‘Yes. All day. My head’s full of Milton.’ She shook it as if to dislodge him.

  ‘How uncomfortable for you both,’ said Dad, gravely.

  ‘You probably deserve an evening off. Christian’s been buried in his room all day, too.’

  ‘Playing darts,’ I said, and Christian gave me a disdainful look.

  ‘Where are you youngsters off to tonight?’ asked Grandpa. He always wanted to know, even though the possible answers: ‘Izzy’s’, ‘The Wire Mill’, ‘The Great American Disaster’, ‘The Old Turtonians’, couldn’t have meant much to him.

  It was weird how we all seemed to live vicariously through Penny and Christian, as though they were our chosen emissaries to the world of fun, which we were too young or too old or too nervous to experience ourselves. There was a sort of wistfulness in Mum and Dad’s directions to ‘have a lovely time’ and ‘take care’, and yet they never showed any inclination to follow suit. There was nothing to stop them going for a drive in the country, or out to a pub, but they never went. In fact, now I came to think about it, they hardly did anything that might be termed fun. All their activities were tied up with service to other people. One evening a week Dad went to play cards with Mrs Tapley, who had no other visitors. Mum made the tea at the mother and toddler group, knitted six inch squares for the Universal Quilt, and read books onto tapes for the blind. Sometimes, with a sort of puzzled detachment, they watched television, but that was just to keep Grandpa company, and not for their own pleasure. No wonder I was always being told what good people my parents were: they were a regular pair of doormats!

  While Christian was explaining to Grandpa that he and Penny were going to an eighteenth birthday party in a room over a pub in Chislehurst, Penny picked up Dad’s discarded newspaper and began browsing.

  ‘Oh no, it’s that girl,’ I heard her say, while I was still tuning into Christian’s conversation with Grandpa.

  On the back page was a grainy black and white photograph of a girl’s face at a window, partly obscured by shadow. The caption read: Janine Fellowes, Britain’s most notorious juvenile killer, celebrates her nineteenth birthday at the Young Offender’s institution where she has spent the last eight years. In two years’ time the Home Office must decide whether she will be released or transferred to an adult prison. Below the article, which rehearsed the known details of the crime, was the now-famous picture of her as an eleven-year-old schoolgirl – long, dark hair, Alice band, stern, unsmiling gaze – and the equally famous image of the victim, Baby Claudia – blonde curls, dimples, laughter.

  ‘That awful case,’ Mum murmured, moving in to get a closer look. ‘Why can’t they leave her alone?’

  ‘Surely they’re not allowed to publish a picture of her as she is now,’ said Penny. ‘What happens when she comes out?’

  ‘She’ll never get out,’ said Christian.

  ‘I quite agree, Penny,’ said Dad. ‘These newspaper editors are completely irresponsible. It’s just pandering to the public’s morbid curiosity, with no thought for the future safety of the poor girl – woman, I should say.’

  ‘Well, we’re all gawping at it,’ Christian pointed out. He leaned over Penny’s shoulder. ‘Mind you, she does look pretty evil,’ he added. ‘It’s the eyes.’

  ‘No, it’s the mouth,’ I said. ‘She’s got a cruel mouth.’ Although the photo was fuzzy, I found that looking at it through half-closed eyes brought it into sharper focus.

  ‘I wonder if she’s sorry for what she did,’ said Penny. ‘She doesn’t look very contrite.’

  ‘Well, I can assure you she is,’ said Dad sharply, and we all stared at him.

  ‘How do you know?’ Christian asked. ‘Have you met her?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, already regretting his indiscretion. There was no way we were going to let it go: our family never got caught up with anything interesting.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘When? How come?’

  ‘What was she like?

  Dad sighed, and Mum gave him a look that said, you got yourself into it.

  ‘I shouldn’t really have said anything,’ he said at last, ‘but I was driven to it by your inane remarks about evil eyes and cruel mouths.’ Christian and I looked suitably humbled. ‘I’ve visited her a few times over the years. It started when I wrote a letter to the Times, criticising aspects of the trial. You might remember the brick incident – it was probably related.’

  ‘I remember. It could have killed me,’ said Christian, with a belated attack of indignation. ‘Didn’t we ever follow it up?’

  ‘I seem to recall a policeman came round and had a poke about in the bushes,’ said Mum. ‘We didn’t really expect them to catch anyone.’

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, keen to get back to the main story.

  ‘Janine’s mother saw my letter and seemed to seize on me as a lone sympathetic voice. She asked me to go and visit Janine, and talk to her, so I did.’

  ‘What was she like?’ Penny wanted to know.

  ‘I can’t say she was ordinary, because she’d had such an odd upbringing, but she certainly didn’t strike me as a monster. Her father left home when she was two, then five years later her mother met this Australian in the pub and married him almost immediately. He wanted to go back to Australia, so Janine’s mother gave her and her older sister the c
hoice: come to Australia with them or stay behind. Imagine giving a seven-year-old that choice. The girls decided to stay, so they were packed off to live with their father, who had remarried and had two more children by now. Then the father died horribly at work – I think he was crushed by a digger, or something appalling, anyway – and the stepmother brought them up for a while. But that didn’t work terribly well, not surprisingly, so the mother, who had parted company from the Australian by now, came back home for a belated attempt at bringing up her own daughters. With disastrous results.’

  ‘Did she ever explain why she killed the baby?’ Penny wanted to know.

  ‘That had all come out during the trial,’ Dad explained. ‘It was partly rage and frustration at being left alone to look after a baby while everyone else was out enjoying themselves. Claudia’s mother, who lived in the same street, asked Janine’s mother if she’d mind Claudia for the day, while she visited her husband. I think he was inside for something or other. So Janine’s mother agreed, but she went out shopping and left the baby with the girls instead. Janine’s sister, who was fifteen at the time, wasn’t having any of that; she had arranged to meet her boyfriend at the cinema, so she went out as well. Which left poor Janine. The baby wouldn’t stop crying. Janine was only eleven. She couldn’t cope with the noise, and smothering her was the only way to shut her up. She had no normal feelings of love or sympathy for the child, whom she’d never met before, and no thought of the consequences. To Janine Claudia was just a nuisance, another obstacle between herself and her own pleasure.’

  ‘Why did she get such a harsh sentence?’ Christian asked. ‘Plenty of people have got away with less for worse crimes than that.’

  Dad shrugged. ‘Because she was tried in an adult court. Because there’s a mandatory life sentence for murder. Because of the way she behaved after the killing. To satisfy public outrage . . . lots of reasons.’

  ‘What did she do that was so terrible?’

  ‘She didn’t tell anyone what she’d done. She just hid the body in a wardrobe and went to the cinema. That was what really got people: that a young girl could be so heartless.’

  ‘But her mother and sister were as much to blame,’ I said. ‘Didn’t they get into trouble too?’

  ‘They certainly came in for a lot of abuse in the press. The sister came to stay here for a while, after the trial, because it wasn’t safe at home. I don’t suppose you remember her.’

  ‘Cindy,’ I said, trying to resurrect some memory of her that wasn’t related to cosmetics.

  ‘You said she was our au pair,’ Christian protested.

  ‘That’s right. Fancy your remembering,’ said Mum.

  I didn’t say that if I’d known at the time she was the sister of a famous murderess I’d have made a point of remembering more.

  ‘First Cindy, then that vicar-pervert guy, then Aunty Barbara,’ said Christian. ‘What is this – open house for sociopaths?’

  Grandpa Percy, who had been snoozing over his lemonade throughout this discussion, sat up sharply. ‘Is it time for me to go?’ he said.

  23

  ‘YOU SHOULDN’T SPEND so much time hanging around with Christian and Penny,’ Mum admonished me from time to time. ‘It’s not right. You should be mixing with people your own age.’ It was their privacy that concerned her, rather than my exposure to their corrupting influence. To them she said, ‘Don’t feel you have to entertain Esther. She has her own friends.’ (This was an exaggeration: I had Dawn.) ‘You go off and do your own thing.’

  Christian took her very much at her word, as the following day he announced that he and Penny were going away to the Norfolk Broads for a week. There would be three other people in the party: two girls and a boy. The odd number was intended to reassure Mum and Dad that there would be no hanky-panky – a piece of flawed logic, to my mind, but it seemed to allay their suspicions. I knew Christian and Penny must have been having sex for ages, as Penny had confessed to me that she had lost her virginity at the age of fifteen to a friend of her father, a fact I found deeply disturbing. If I was to emulate my mentor in every respect I would have to get a move on: I still hadn’t even been kissed. I think Mum was won over by the fact that the canal boat belonged to the parents of one of the girls and therefore the holiday wouldn’t cost anything. We hadn’t been able to go away ourselves since Aunty Barbara’s estrangement had put the caravan out of bounds.

  The day before they were due to leave, Dad took Christian aside and told him to remember that Penny was somebody’s daughter, and somebody’s sister, and should be treated with respect, and he wasn’t going to say any more, but he hoped Christian knew what he was driving at. Christian, showing unusual self-control, managed to keep a straight face for the duration of the interview, and replied that he had every respect for Penny and all her ancestors, and could he please go and finish packing.

  I caught up with him in his room, where he was still chortling over it hours later. ‘In the unlikely event that you ever get a boyfriend, don’t ever introduce him to Dad,’ he advised. He was folding T-shirts, shorts and trousers and stowing them in a zip-up sports bag. On the bed was a pile of discarded clothes.

  ‘Won’t you be wanting these?’ I asked, picking up his swimming trunks and slinging them across to him.

  ‘No,’ he said, chucking them back on the heap.

  ‘Aren’t you allowed to swim in the Norfolk Broads?’ I asked. To me, that would have made for a very frustrating boat trip.

  ‘Oh,’ said Christian, nonplussed. ‘I don’t know. Probably. Oh, give them here, then.’ He didn’t seem the least bit grateful for my intervention, but carried on packing with his back to me.

  While he and Penny were away I took the opportunity to ingratiate myself with Dawn again. Since Penny’s arrival on the scene I had tended to neglect her, especially at weekends, when I had been in the habit of making myself available at home in case Christian and Penny decided to include me in any of their jaunts. I had deliberately engineered it so that although Penny and Dawn knew plenty about each other, they had never actually met. For reasons that I hadn’t troubled to examine, I preferred not to let my friends cross-pollinate. Perhaps I sensed that I presented a different face to each of them, and to bring them together would involve me in a tricky collision of roles. Although I was not prepared to abandon my quest for all things civilised, in truth I did still enjoy many aspects of my pre-civilised life: prancing around to the Top Forty, Mrs Clubb’s batter, True Confessions!, and hanging around the garages on the estate with Dawn, watching the gangs of boys squaring up.

  This particular free weekend I arranged to meet Dawn in town. The plan was to spend the day according to our usual fashion: loitering in the precinct; trying out the make-up testers in Boots until the assistants shooed us away; checking out the ethnic jewellery in the indoor market and stalking any good-looking boys. The last of these schemes got no further than our imaginations: good-looking boys were a scarcity and those few who met our exacting criteria were invariably attached to good-looking girls.

  By lunchtime Dawn and I had run through our usual repertoire and spent nearly all our limited funds in the pound store and the discount stalls in the indoor market. Now we were sitting in Luigi’s grill – the cheapest and least civilised café in the precinct – picking over our bargains and making two Cokes last an hour.

  ‘Do you think these are real gold?’ Dawn asked, fingering her ten-pence bangles. As if in reply a tiny piece flaked off against her nail. ‘Bloody typical,’ she grumbled. ‘I’ve a good mind to take it back.’ Amongst her other lucky finds were a make-up compact containing pressed rectangles of eyeshadow and lipstick in various shades of bruise, and a travel toothbrush, which made me laugh because, like me, the furthest Dawn ever travelled was to school and back.

  I had chosen vanilla joss-sticks, a floating candle, and a set of ‘Six Wives of Henry VIII’ guest soaps. I thought it might be civilised to put one of these in the bathroom to replace the hairy slab of Camay nex
t time visitors were expected.

  The waitress at Luigi’s was the most miserable woman alive, and her glowering presence in the doorway was a deterrent to all but the most determined customers. She had been over a couple of times to check the levels in our glasses, and give the table a wipe with her greasy cloth to encourage us to be on our way, not realising that in matters of thrift I was my mother’s child, and unembarrassable.

  Now she was back on sentry duty by the door, and Dawn was busy tearing one corner off all the sugar sachets in the dish, just to be petty, when the strangest thing happened. Dawn dug me in the ribs and said, ‘Hey, isn’t that your brother?’

  I looked up and simultaneously saw and did not see Christian, outside the window, peering in at the display of cheesecakes and pastries, before moving off, out of sight. I saw him, because he was there, but at the same time I didn’t see him, because he was far away in Norfolk.

  ‘Isn’t he meant to be in Norfolk?’ said Dawn, echoing my own thoughts.

  ‘It wasn’t him,’ I said. ‘It just looked like him.’

  ‘It was him, I tell you,’ Dawn insisted.

  ‘I think I’d know my own brother,’ I replied indignantly.

  ‘Well, if it wasn’t him it must have been his twin,’ she retorted and, nettled by my intransigence, she raced to the doorway to call after him and prove me wrong. Old Cerberus must have thought she was doing a runner, because she stuck out her arm to bar the exit, and there followed a frank exchange of views between Dawn and the waitress, which was only halted by the intervention of Luigi himself, who told us to pay up and scram.