by Diane Janes
I was already upset about the decision to hold a seance, and the sight of Trudie fawning around Danny when she collected the plates at the end of our meal was another match to the touchpaper. I followed her into the kitchen in silence. We didn’t usually bother with pudding, but earlier that day I’d included a block of ice cream in the shopping and now I went to extract it from the fridge, while Trudie rinsed out the dishes. As I opened the fridge door, I saw that the ice cream had been put on a shelf, rather than in the ice compartment. Globs of vanilla had already escaped from the packet and dripped on to everything underneath.
‘Trudie, you idiot, you were supposed to have put this in the ice box.’
‘It wasn’t me who put it away.’
‘Well, it wasn’t me.’
‘Keep your hair on. It’ll probably be okay.’
‘No it won’t. It’s gone all runny.’
Simon had followed us inside. ‘What’s up?’
‘Trudie put the ice cream on the ordinary shelves in the fridge,’ I said accusingly.
‘It wasn’t me,’ Trudie repeated.
‘And now it’s completely ruined.’
Simon reached for a bottle of beer and opened it with a flourish. ‘Well, it’s not the end of the world.’
‘It’s such a waste of money,’ I protested.
‘It isn’t your money, is it?’ Simon spoke with unaccustomed sharpness. ‘And I don’t suppose it was Trudie who left it to melt, either.’
I was so taken aback that for a moment I didn’t know what to say. Trudie was occupied with the dirty crocks and Simon was opening a second bottle of beer. They both had their backs to me.
‘It was Trudie who put the shopping away.’ I immediately wished I hadn’t spoken. I heard myself with their ears – a petulant child trying to excuse herself, when everyone knows she is the guilty party.
‘That would be par for the course,’ said Simon. ‘Since Trudie does all the rest of the work round here.’
‘That’s not fair,’ I protested. ‘I cooked the dinner tonight.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Simon. ‘I’d forgotten our gourmet feast – burnt fish fingers and baked beans – the exception that proves the rule.’
He walked out of the kitchen and Trudie swept after him without a backward glance, leaving me oddly shaken. I took as long as possible cleaning up the melted ice cream. Eventually Danny came in to see where I’d got to.
‘What have the others been saying about me?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. What do you mean?’
‘The ice cream had melted. I said it was Trudie’s fault and Simon had a go at me.’
Danny’s anxious expression was replaced with a grin. ‘Is that all? Come on, don’t go crying over spilt ice cream. Simon was probably sticking up for Trudie because she’s sweet on him. Take no notice.’
‘But—’
‘No buts. Come on, you’re at least three drinks behind everyone else. Simon and Trudie are fine. You shouldn’t take silly little things to heart.’ He hugged me and we went outside. As we walked hand in hand across the grass, I decided he was right about Trudie. Of course she had been pursuing Simon all along – the feints in Danny’s direction being no more than a ruse to make Simon jealous. As we approached them, Simon made a grab for her and Trudie jumped up and ran towards the house, shrieking with laughter. Simon scrambled to his feet and pursued her. He could take much bigger strides and soon had her cornered at the edge of the rose bed, where Trudie was reluctant to make an incursion in her bare feet.
‘Come on, Danny,’ he called. ‘Let’s throw her into our hole.’
Danny shouted an excuse about being too tired, so Simon pretended to frogmarch her across the lawn, while Trudie continued to struggle and squeal, although she was clearly loving every minute. They flopped on to the grass opposite us and began to trade jibes about gardeners’ boys and kitchen maids. I tried to smile and play along, but inside I experienced a growing sense of uncertainty. I had been one of the original three musketeers, but my perception of our respective positions in the group had just been jolted again.
There was one consolation: if Danny was right then Trudie was going all out after Simon. I watched Simon and Trudie together the following day but, in spite of Danny’s reassuring assessment, I still couldn’t determine exactly how things stood. On the one hand they went off together for a couple of long talks à deux in the garden; but there was no obvious chemistry between them. I noticed Trudie touch his arm a couple of times, but it was no more than a friendly gesture. I reassured myself that since Simon and Trudie were both attractive people, who apparently got on well together, it could only be a matter of time before their relationship progressed to another level. Meantime it was just one more thing for Milady Mystery to keep up her sleeve; because although Trudie had by now discovered a good deal about us, so far as we were concerned she remained an enigma – always responding to our enquiries in the vaguest terms. ‘I’m just travelling around,’ she said once. ‘I’m from everywhere and nowhere. Like the song.’
When I finally did receive an intimation of Trudie’s background, it came completely out of the blue. This startling revelation took place on the pavement outside W. H. Smith in Hereford. We had all four gone into town for the afternoon, ostensibly to obtain a replacement for a broken string on Danny’s guitar. While Danny and Simon were pursuing this errand in the music shop, Trudie had taken the opportunity to pop into Smith’s for a magazine. It was crowded in the shop so I hung around by the door, idly picking up a newspaper from the stand and glancing through it.
The jolt came somewhere about page five. Concern is mounting over the safety of missing schoolgirl Trudie Finch. It was the photograph which had first caught my eye. A standard school head-and-shoulders shot of a girl in a V-neck sweater, school blouse and striped tie. Her long dark hair was tied in two bunches, one above each ear. It was unmistakably Trudie.
She chose that moment to breeze out of the shop. I couldn’t say anything. I just pointed to the picture. Trudie was absolutely calm. She took the paper from me, refolded it and placed it back in the stand. Then she took me gently by the arm and propelled me a few yards down the street.
‘Pretend you haven’t seen it,’ she said.
‘But I have seen it.’
‘Just pretend you haven’t. If you haven’t seen it, then nothing has changed and you don’t need to worry about it, or mention it to the others.’
‘Aren’t you afraid someone is going to recognize you, if you keep coming into town?’
Trudie shrugged. ‘From a school mug shot? Come off it. And you won’t betray me, will you? You’re my friend.’
‘Of course I am,’ I said, ‘but—’
She grabbed my arm and held her finger to her lips. ‘Shh.’ She had spotted the lads emerging from the music store, only a few feet away. There wasn’t time for anything more. Without giving any word or sign of agreement, I had somehow become complicit in her conspiracy.
I suppose there were any number of things I could have said or done at this point – any one of which might have led to the safe return home of missing schoolgirl Trudie Finch. I know I ought to have considered the anguish of her parents but, without knowing any of the facts, my sympathies drifted unerringly in the direction of the runaway. It was not just the usual conspiracy of youth against the older generation: in my case it went deeper than that. Was I not a kind of fugitive myself, enjoying a clandestine respite from the overbearing attentions of my parents? If Trudie’s family was anything like mine, I thought, no wonder she had done a bunk, and good luck to her. She looked at least sixteen, even in the school photograph.
‘Can we go into the cathedral now?’ Trudie was asking. ‘I love it in there.’
Trudie was right. I didn’t need to know about it. I would pretend I had never spent those idle moments looking through the paper. Nothing had changed. And if anyone did chance to discover that Trudie had been staying with us (which was extremely unlikely, as we had so little
contact with the outside world), as Simon had said on the beach that first afternoon, it wasn’t as if we had kidnapped her or anything.
As soon as we got back from Hereford (another day without any work done on the pond) I set about preparing our meal for the second night running – just to show Simon how wrong he was. In the meantime Trudie prowled from room to room, deciding which one had the most promising atmosphere in which to contact the spirit world. I viewed this surveying operation with considerable scepticism, suspecting that Trudie was trying to engender an atmosphere which was as creepy as possible in order to put the wind up us. The room eventually designated most propitious for holding a seance was a large unoccupied bedroom at the front of the house. It not only had a double bed and an old-fashioned suite of wardrobe and dresser, but also boasted a chaise longue, which was positioned on a circular rug between the dressing table and the foot of the bed.
Working to Trudie’s instructions, Simon and Danny moved the chaise longue to one side and rolled up the rug. This left a large empty space on the green and grey lino, in the centre of which Trudie placed an empty jam jar with a couple of joss sticks in it. These she lit – to purify the room, she said, although I was certain it was merely to help contrive a sense of weirdness. She had also acquired some candles from the pantry – the stumpy white ones which every well-regulated household kept to hand in case of power cuts – and these she stood on saucers: first dribbling a puddle of wax to cement each one in place. When each of the lighted candles had been carefully positioned and the one used for dribbling extinguished, Trudie declared the preparations complete but for one last thing – a crucifix.
We all looked at Danny. He habitually wore a small gold crucifix on a chain round his neck. The chain was fine enough to be unobtrusive, and long enough that the crucifix itself was out of sight unless he removed his shirt, when it could be seen nestling among his chest hair: but of course we had all seen him in this degree of undress on an almost daily basis and therefore knew of its existence.
‘There might be something else in the house we could use,’ ventured Simon, clearly sensing Danny’s reluctance.
Trudie fell in with this willingly enough, but although we wandered from room to room, scrutinizing the objects which cluttered every surface, peering into cupboards and checking high shelves, no suitable religious artefact could be found.
We ended up back in the seance room. ‘It’ll have to be Danny’s crucifix,’ said Trudie.
No one said anything for a moment, then Danny himself broke the silence. ‘Will you unfasten it, Katy? I hardly ever take it off.’
He turned his back to facilitate the operation. I had to move his hair aside to reach the catch. He had recently complained that the catch was faulty and occasionally came undone by itself, but tonight it seemed to take forever to disengage, as if reluctant to leave its owner’s neck.
Trudie took it from me and placed it almost reverently on the lino, beside the jam jar containing the joss sticks, which were smoking steadily.
‘Now what?’ asked Simon.
‘Now we have to leave everything like this until it gets dark,’ said Trudie. ‘Long after dark,’ she corrected herself. ‘Midnight would probably be the best time, so I suggest we come back here at quarter to twelve, ready to begin.’
She ushered us out, closing the door behind us. No one spoke: indeed we all but tiptoed away. I had to try very hard to stop myself imagining that there was already something else in that room – something which had arrived the moment the latch clicked shut.
TEN
I don’t do anniversaries as a rule. I don’t take flowers to the cemetery or put an ad in the newspaper. One day is the same as another: we remember what we want to remember – and sometimes what we want to forget.
I make an exception for Hilly. I know it is the third anniversary of Trevor’s death on the 24th and I make a point of spending it with her, because I know she’ll find it hard to cope alone. Her daughters live too far away to be of assistance – Bethany is in Edinburgh, Sophie not even in the same time zone. So Hilly and I go out to dinner. This is much better than staying in the house, which still speaks loudly of Trevor – although he has been gone from it a thousand days and more.
Hilly is grateful. ‘You don’t want to hear me going on about Trev,’ she says: to which I say I don’t mind and she does go on a bit, saying what a good husband he was and how much they loved each other -never quite realizing just how painful this line of conversation is for me – dear Hilly – never knowing how much this still touches me on the raw.
Hilly was never what you would have called pretty. She’s always been a rather square, solid person, to tell the truth, but she has worn well and maturity suits her. She doesn’t succumb to my petty vanities, the Keep Fit and the dyed hair. Hers is grey, cropped short in a slightly masculine style, which helps tone down her bohemian taste in clothes – the big earrings and drapey scarves, embroidered tops and baggy trousers. Hilly has always been what Marjorie would call ‘a bit arty’. She likes the theatre and plays the piano, and recently she’s taken up painting, which she has turned out to be rather good at – although way too modest to admit it.
I know she misses Trevor terribly – thinks they were soulmates. He was too good to be true, really. The sort of guy no one ever had a bad word for. I met him on a course – it was about maths teaching, as far as I can remember. We hit it off straight away and, somehow or other, I ended up introducing him to my flatmate – Hilly. My mistake.
Hilly was still very quiet at that stage. She’d begun to regain her confidence, but she hadn’t had a boyfriend in all the time I’d known her, so the speed of the Trevor thing took me by surprise. I went away for one weekend to attend my grandparents’ Golden Wedding and I came back to find Trevor had spent the night. Next thing anyone knew, the church was booked and Hilly was sporting an engagement ring. Apart from the two of them, I was the only one who knew for sure that Hilly was pregnant. We were so close then, Hilly and I. We depended on each other.
When Sophie and Bethany got older, they did the maths and actually used to tease their parents about this ‘shotgun wedding’ – they knew they were on safe ground, because everyone could see what a devoted couple their parents were. Hilly always said the baby made no difference –they would have ended up together eventually – it was meant to be. I never begged to differ. What was the point? I didn’twant to lose my best friend.
We are well down our bottle of wine before Hilly says: ‘Tell me about this thing with Danny’s mother. Did you manage to find out why she wants to see you so badly?’
I have already mentioned receiving a letter from Mrs Ivanisovic, so I am prepared for this. ‘Poor old thing hasn’t got long to go, I suppose. She probably just wants someone to reminisce with – someone who knew Danny. I think most of her close family are dead now. The ones that are left probably don’t remember him.’
‘It must be awful to outlive your children,’ Hilly says.
‘It would be fairer if we all died in age order,’ I say, half laughing.
Hilly nods. ‘Look at my mother. It’s a terrible thing to say, I know, but I have sometimes thought she would be better off dead – and yet she looks set to go on for ever.’
‘Anyway, I got this second letter asking me to go and see her, so I’ve promised to drive up there tomorrow.’
Hilly looks surprised and concerned. ‘That’s very good of you, Kate. Does she realize how far it is for you?’
‘I suppose she must do. I couldn’t refuse her really, poor old thing.’
‘You’re so good,’ says Hilly. She means it too. Hilly is always convinced of my goodness and will have nothing said to the contrary. In fact, Hilly is invariably prepared to think well of everyone. She’s such a gentle soul herself that she finds it difficult to encompass any notion of evil in others. Deliberate misdeeds occasion her not only pain, but genuine bewilderment. She cannot conceive of how anyone could set out to deliberately harm another. Half a cent
ury of life experience has done nothing to dent this innocent faith in human nature – it is part of her charm.
No wonder it was dangerous to introduce her to Trevor. They were two of a kind in many ways. He became one of those rare, saintly headmasters, beloved even of the bad kids. Thirty years’ worth of pupils turned out for his funeral. They had to relay the service outside on loudspeakers. You couldn’t see the coffin for flowers.
Hilly has brought some brochures for us to look through while we drink our coffee. We’re planning a holiday to the Greek islands – sunshine and archaeology – with Shirley Valentine type romance entirely off the agenda. The brochures have been conveyed to the restaurant in Hilly’s bag, the latest in a long succession of massive handbags with which she is always equipped. It’s another family joke, Hilly’s bags. Whenever anyone expresses a need for any item, however large or obscure, the girls always announce that ‘Mum has probably got one in her bag.’
I know all the family jokes, you see – the ones about the shotgun wedding and the giant handbags – because I am almost one of the family, like a sort of honorary relation, or old family retainer. Hilly and Trevor’s girls never guessing how I once hoped to be so much more.
After I drop Hilly off, I don’t go straight home. Instead I drive in the opposite direction. The route is so familiar that I could do it blindfold. I slow down to make the turn into Menlove Avenue, then let the car creep the last hundred yards or so down the wide tree-lined road, before I finally park, halfway between two street lamps. I switch off the lights, kill the engine, and sit in the quiet darkness, staring at the lighted windows of a house a few doors away. A lot of the houses are dark already, but the occupants of this one seldom retire much before eleven-thirty.
With the engine stilled I can hear the thin breeze working the tree branches overheard. When another car turns into the road I sit very still, my fingers poised ready to fire the ignition, but the other vehicle passes by without noticing me and goes out of sight round the bend. I keep glancing around, more alive than ever to the risks I run in coming here since the conversation with Marjorie a couple of days ago. I just can’t understand why I didn’t see her. She must have parked a lot further down the road and gone into one of the houses behind me; from which I deduce that her friend must live at the Harding Lane end of the road. As a precaution I’ve got the car facing in the opposite direction tonight – to make sure that she can’t sneak up on me. I really ought not to have come at all. I can’t afford to let her catch me a second time.