by Sarah Rayne
There had been the tag-end of a single-premium insurance policy to cover the rest of Don’s school fees, and even if Donna had been agreeable to cashing this in for living on, the terms of the policy would not have allowed it. So Don, protesting angrily, had to go back to school.
There was just enough money for the renting and furnishing of a tiny flat for the two of them to live together. Just about enough. The unfairness of it all was a permanent ache in Donna’s throat, but once having found the flat she had taken a job, because it was necessary to have money. She had, in fact, taken several jobs, mostly of the Mayfair receptionist/dinner-parties-in-your-home kind, drifting from one to another, hating almost all of them. But her school French was quite good, and she was fluent in Spanish learnt from her mother, which was occasionally useful.
One or two former friends of her mother helped out with introductions and recommendations. ‘Dear Domina, so brave and really quite clever, she’d be so useful to your little business…Well no, no actual qualifications, but we knew the family–such a tragedy it was, so do employ her if you can.’
It was humiliating to have to depend on people’s charity in this way, but Donna put up with it because of Don and because it was necessary to have money. And if nothing else, the jobs filled in the time until Don left school and they could be together, properly and for always. Then something better would turn up. Donna and Don, golden girl and boy.
The flat felt horridly poky after their lovely house, but Donna made it as attractive as she could for when Don came home for the school holidays. She emulsioned walls and painted skirting boards and searched junk shops for nice old pieces of furniture. She furnished Don’s bedroom lovingly, putting the very best furniture in this room–a beautiful little Victorian bureau for him to store his things, and a cherrywood table to stand by the window.
She placed the bed so its head would catch the early sun, imagining Don lying in it, warm and safe and cherished, his hair on the pillow looking like spilled honey in the morning sunshine…
Exactly as it had looked in the bed at Charity Cottage on that summer’s afternoon…
Renting Charity Cottage for a month each summer had been a quirk of Donna’s mother. Rustic and rural, she had said delightedly when she first discovered the place, somewhere where they could live simply and plainly. She said this every year. ‘And usually,’ observed Don, ‘she says it just before she starts ordering food supplies from Harrods.’
‘And just after buying new outfits from Harvey Nichols,’ added Donna.
But they quite liked going to Charity Cottage, partly because it was so different from the places they normally went, and because they liked exploring the surrounding countryside. Donna had passed her driving test that summer, which meant she and Don might take the car and go off on their own sometimes. Their mother had a different project each year. So far there had been water-colour painting, a study of old churches and horse riding. One disastrous year it had been tracking down local witchcraft customs.
This year’s project was local buildings; she was going to scour the area for really interesting landmarks, and compile a proper, scholarly notebook about their histories. She would illustrate her notebook, of course–she had already asked in Harrods about the right kind of camera, because if you were going to do something you wanted to do it as well as possible.
‘Four hundred pounds for a camera and goodness knows how much else for new clothes,’ said their father, half-exasperated, half-indulgent. ‘Maria, you’ll ruin us.’ But he smiled as he said this, and Donna, looking back at this memory from the other side of that disastrous summer, thought no one could have told from his voice or his expression how very close to the truth his words must have been.
It had not seemed anything like ruin at the time, nor had it felt like the onset of tragedy. Charity Cottage, that last summer, was exactly as it always was: a bit shabby with its slightly battered furniture, and a bit basic with its old-fashioned kitchen and bathroom. Their parents always had the big bedroom at the front, overlooking the park round Quire House, and Donna and Don had a bedroom each at the back. They went for walks and drives, and cooked the evening meal on the old-fashioned cooker, after which their father usually retired to the bedroom to study reports sent by his assistant. So boring, said their mother gaily, they were supposed to be on holiday, for goodness’ sake.
But there was not, actually, a great deal to do at Charity Cottage. Donna and Don played music on the portable CD-player they had brought with them, and their father complained and said music was not what it had been in the sixties. Burt Bacharach and the Beatles and all the great musicals. Fiddler on the Roof and Hair–goodness, do you remember how shocked everyone was by Hair, Maria?
Don thought it was gross to even mention things like that, and Donna thought it embarrassing to have your parents singing ‘All You Need is Love’ all round the cottage, and trying to remember the sequence of the verses in ‘American Pie’.
But after the first week their father discovered all over again how much his children’s constant presence interrupted his study of the quarterly business review, and their mother discovered afresh how tedious it was to have to cook every night, and demanded to be taken out to dinner at the local pub, or at the very least into the nearest big town to buy good-quality prepared food. One forgot how extremely tiresome it was to peel potatoes and cut up meat, she said, while as for washing-up after every meal…
The only thing that had really been different at that stage of the holiday, had been Maria’s project about historic landmarks, and a sudden out-of-the-blue question from her as to whether it might be possible to buy Quire House. It was a bit dilapidated, but it would scrub up very nicely and it would be splendid for summer entertaining and weekend parties, what did anyone think?
What Donna thought–what she later said to Don–was that their mother had spotted a new toy, and was visualizing herself playing lady of the manor. Donna did not much like Quire House which seemed to her a rather sad place, and which Don, who was going through a slightly effete stage, said was an ugly specimen of an ugly architectural period. But they walked dutifully round the house one afternoon, peering in through windows and disturbing jackdaws’ nests. Their father was forced into agreeing to try to track down the owner, although the owner would probably be some inaccessible property company and there would be preservation orders and listed-building prohibitions on every square inch of brick so you could not even change a light bulb without permission. That being so, he said, Maria was not to build up any hopes.
Maria Robards promised not to do so, and switched temporarily back to her scavenging expeditions for historic buildings. She went off most afternoons armed with camera and loose-leaved notebook, dressed in co-ordinating trousers and tweed jackets because she refused to be seen in public, or even in private, wearing denim (shudder) or trainers (God forbid).
These well-dressed expeditions, inevitably, took her to Twygrist.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Twygrist. Even years afterwards, the name conjured up a smothering darkness for Donna.
Twygrist was the old watermill just outside Amberwood’s little market town. It was no longer working, but it was a bit of a landmark; local people said, ‘Turn left just past Twygrist,’ or, ‘He lives about a mile along from Twygrist.’
Twygrist might have been any age at all, but it had an air of extreme antiquity as if it had crouched there malevolently all through the Dark Ages. Even the clock set into one wall in memory of somebody or other, looked a bit like a face, so that from some angles you could imagine it was watching you as you went along the road.
Donna’s mother was fascinated by Twygrist. She scoured the local library and the offices of the local newspaper to find out about its history, which she related to her family. (‘Ad nauseam,’ said Don, who thought watermills nearly as gross as spending summer holidays with parents.)
Twygrist, said Maria undaunted by Don, had once stood on the edge of a vast estate owned by the local baronial
lords, but a fire had destroyed almost the entire estate in the middle 1800s. After this, somewhere around 1860, the mill had been bought and put into working order by a certain Josiah Forrester, who had clearly been one of those canny Victorian gentlemen with an eye to a profit. ‘Your father would have had a lot in common with him, dears.’
Maria was trying to find a photograph of Josiah, although that was proving difficult, with photography having been in its infancy at the time. Still, there might be a painting somewhere–one of those municipal portraits in a library or something. Dundreary whiskers and a large stomach, like Edward VII, most likely.
She was also on the track of a man called George Lincoln, whom Josiah had employed as his miller towards the end of the nineteenth century. George, it seemed, had been a man of some substance. One had not known that millers were so highly regarded, but there were records of him having owned quite a big house with servants, so there you were, you could never tell who might be prosperous from one century to the next. She was going to spend the day at the nearby archive office, to see what she could find out about George and his family.
‘Your father’s going to drive me straight there after breakfast, aren’t you, Jim? It’ll be quite a long day, so we’ll have lunch out somewhere and get home around mid-afternoon. Are you two sure you won’t come with us?’
‘Quite sure,’ said Don, who had bought several new CDs in Chester the previous day, and was planning to lie on his bed and listen to them.
Maria thought this very antisocial of him, and would have started an argument, but their father interrupted, saying, ‘Oh leave the boy alone, my dear, he’s probably got girl problems, I know I had them at his age.’ Maria retorted that she did not see how having girl problems gave Don an excuse for sulks and moods. This, as Donna could have told them, had the effect of sending Don flouncing from the breakfast table, stumping crossly up the stairs to his bedroom and slamming the door so hard that the crockery on the dresser jiggled.
‘Typical teenager,’ said Donna’s father resignedly, and her mother suggested they leave Don to his romantic sulks, and that Donna came with them.
But Donna did not feel like chasing millers across half of Cheshire, and her mother would expect her to act as assistant and make masses of tedious notes. So she said she would stay at the cottage, and perhaps walk down to Amberwood later. She could look round the little art gallery–they’d some quite good jewellery last summer. She was into chunky modern jewellery at the moment, said Donna. Don might come with her if he could be torn away from his CDs, but she did not care if he did not. Whatever they did they would be perfectly all right. Yes, they would prepare a meal for tonight.
After her parents left, Donna wandered around the cottage, trying to summon up the energy to walk down to Amberwood. Girl problems, their father had said. Girl problems…Donna had not known about any girl in Don’s life. Who was she, this unknown girl, who might be the cause of his flouncing tantrums? Probably she did not exist. But if she did, how old was she? Don’s age? Younger–fourteen or so? That was not too young for sexual adventures these days–Donna knew that perfectly well. Had Don been to bed with this girl?
The thumping of a CD was filling the little house, and it seemed to insinuate itself inside Donna’s head. It was a hard, rhythmic pounding, and the longer it went on, the more it drummed up all kinds of images…
One of those images was of Don lying on his bed upstairs, his hair tousled against the pillows so that it looked like polished tow…He wore his hair a bit longer than was currently fashionable, but Donna rather liked that. It gave him a romantic soulful look. Like a poet. You could not imagine Byron or Keats having a convict-type haircut.
Had he stripped off his shirt to listen to his music? It was high summer and it got quite hot under the roof. Was he lying on the bed wearing only cotton jeans or shorts? His hair and his skin glowed from the sun, and his body was lean and supple from playing games at school. He was good at games, although at the moment he was pretending to find them too exhausting for words.
Girl problems. It was inevitable there would be girls in Don’s life: he was so charming, so good-looking. There would be the sisters of schoolfriends, and girls he would meet in the holidays…
The pounding music was no longer inside Donna’s mind, it was scudding and throbbing through her whole body. Like the scudding and throbbing you felt with a boy when you were in bed with him. There had not been many boys with whom Donna had been to bed but there had been a couple; you could not reach eighteen these days without having explored your sexual prowess. It was necessary to conform, to go with the crowd, to take part in slightly hysterical giggling sessions with girlfriends, relating how far you had gone and whether it had been any good, and whether he had been any good. Sometimes shrieking and saying things like, ‘Oh God, you didn’t do it with him, did you, how utterly gross…’
The trouble was that none of the boys Donna had met matched up to Don. She had sometimes thought she might be a bit cold. But this was not something that could be admitted so she had dutifully yielded her virginity, since not to do so meant being regarded by your contemporaries as a freak, a sad old vestal. Imagine being eighteen and still a virgin, said Donna’s friends pityingly, and Donna had agreed and laughed at the very idea.
But imagine being eighteen, and standing in the kitchen of a battered old cottage, trying to beat down a pulsating lust for your own brother.
Of course Donna was not going to do anything–well–anything wrong with Don. This was the last quarter of the twentieth century, and they were living in a civilized society. It was only in the Dark Ages, in tiny rural backwaters with no means of travelling anywhere or seeing people beyond your own family, that brothers and sisters ended up in bed together. There was a sick old joke, wasn’t there, that incest almost died out when the railways came?
Incest. It was an ugly, sly word. Donna thrust it away, and went to the foot of the stairs to shout up to Don that she would walk down to the village to pick up some food for tonight. She pulled on her trainers, slammed the cottage door, and went out into the warm sunshine before anything could make her change her mind.
But as she walked into Amberwood, and as she looked at the hand-crafted jewellery in the gallery, her mind was full of images of Don. She bought a pair of jade earrings, and picked up some cooked ham and chicken from the nearby delicatessen, together with ingredients for a salad. By midday she was walking back to the cottage. The sun was high overhead; if you looked straight at it, you got sunspots in front of your eyes.
When she reached the cottage she put the food in the fridge, and unlaced her trainers. The sunspots were still dancing across her vision, but the cottage was cool and dim, and the old oak floors were smooth and friendly under her bare feet. She went up the narrow creaking stairs, intending to go into her bedroom to put the earrings away.
Don’s bedroom was on the half-landing, where the stairs turned sharply to the right. Donna hesitated, and put out a hand to touch the door. Was he in there now? Had he heard her come in? She tapped, and called out his name, and heard a movement from within. The sunspots whirled across her eyes again, like showers of gold flecks. She was aware of the scent of the deodorant she had put on that morning diluting the sweat forming under her arms.
After a moment, she pushed open the door and went in.
It was like stepping into the image she had had earlier. Don had stripped off his shirt, and was lying on his back on the bed staring up at the ceiling. The CDs had apparently come to an end or he had not bothered to replay them, and the room was very quiet. What had he been thinking?
There was a scent of old timbers, as there was in most of the rooms of Charity Cottage, but there was the faint scent of masculine sweat as well, which was exciting, because it was Don’s sweat. Donna found the silence exciting as well. The feeling that she was entering her own fantasy deepened. If either of them spoke, or if any sound at all disturbed the utter quiet, the fantasy would shatter, and she would
simply go back downstairs and wash the lettuce and radishes for tonight’s supper, and the moment would pass into ordinariness.
But Don did not speak, there were no sounds from outside and the moment did not pass into ordinariness. The silence went on and on, and the sunspots, the heat of the day and the room’s scents began to blur in Donna’s mind. Don had not moved; he was watching her from the bed, and his eyes had a slanting, beckoning look. Was this how he looked at those girls–those unknown, possibly nonexistent girls? Donna suddenly hated all the girls Don might know or who he would come to know in the future. She could not bear the thought of those girls eyeing him with giggling teenage lust, wanting to touch him, perhaps being touched by him…Telling one another about it afterwards–‘I did it with Don Robards last night, and he was terrific…’
She was not aware of having crossed the room, or of having sat down on the edge of the bed, but she discovered she had done so. She was close enough to see the faint sheen of perspiration on his skin, and the slight flush across his cheekbones. Beautiful. Oh God, he’s so beautiful. And just as she had not meant to walk across to the bed, nor had she meant to actually touch him. But they were inside the fantasy together, of course, so it was all right. Her hands reached out to him, tracing the line of his chest, feeling the warm firmness of his skin against her palms. Like a cushion of satin.
His reaction to her touch was instant; it sizzled between them, Donna could feel it–it was like an arcing light, like watching fireworks ignite on a dark river. Donna and Don, moving together towards the deepest, most intense intimacy there could ever be…
He was nervous–Donna could sense that, but she could also sense that he was trembling with fear and passion. When she pulled off her shirt he seemed to flinch. Donna laughed, understanding that he was fearful of what they were about to do, pulling him against her for a moment to reassure him, and then reaching down to unfasten his jeans, pulling them open and sliding her hand inside. There was no mistaking his response now. As her fingers closed around him, he hardened instantly, and made an involuntary thrusting movement. Donna unfastened her own jeans with her other hand and kicked them off.