by Gwyneth Rees
‘But it’s . . .’ Ben looked uncomfortable. ‘. . . it’s really horrible, taking advantage of her like that . . .’
‘It is pretty mean . . .’ Lou mumbled, sounding less certain. And she looked at me as if she didn’t like the fact that I was listening to this.
‘Miss Johnson’s been really good to us as well,’ Ben added, frowning. He looked down at the job advert again. ‘Our own cottage,’ he said, and swallowed hard.
I could tell how torn Ben was feeling – and even though I wanted to go and live in that cottage too, I also wanted to make things easier for him. ‘It’s OK, Ben,’ I said. ‘We can just stay here, if you like. The school here isn’t that bad.’
Ben just pulled a face like he thought it was. You see, the secondary school I was due to start at after the summer – and the one Louise had switched to after we’d moved here – had a reputation for being pretty rough. I could stand up for myself at school and I had a gang of mates who were going there too, so I wasn’t too worried about getting bullied. But Ben, who had been quite brainy at school and got three A levels, was worried I wouldn’t get any at all, just like Louise, because apparently at that school hardly anybody did.
‘It really is OK,’ I attempted to reassure him. ‘Even if I don’t get any A levels, it doesn’t matter since I don’t want to go to university or anything.’ I’d already told him I wasn’t going to be swotty like him, even if my primary-school teachers were always banging on about how I had a lot of potential if only I’d work harder. It’s being swotty that gets you picked on – at least it would with the mates I hung out with – and I intended to survive school, thanks very much. ‘I mean, you didn’t go to university, did you?’ I added. ‘And neither did Louise.’
That was the wrong thing to say. Ben’s eyes were almost popping out of his head as he answered, ‘I could have gone to university – that’s the point! I got offered a place doing exactly what I wanted to do.’ (The reason Ben hadn’t taken up his place at university was that our mother had died just after he left school, so he’d ended up looking after me instead.) ‘You might want to go to university when you’re older, May,’ he added fiercely, ‘and if you get good enough exam results, you’ll be able to.’
He turned to face Lou now, still looking furious. ‘Did anyone in your year get any A levels, Lou?’ he demanded. ‘Well, did they?’
Lou was looking pretty upset herself. ‘Look, Ben, if you feel so strongly about May’s education, you’ll have to do what I suggested. Otherwise, there’s no point torturing yourself about it, is there, since you can’t change anything?’
Or torturing me, I nearly added, but luckily I thought better of it.
Ben seemed to grit his teeth. ‘OK, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it!’
‘You’re sure?’ Lou looked troubled.
‘I want you to get me that reference.’
‘May, can you leave us a minute, please?’ Lou said firmly, keeping her eyes fixed on Ben.
I slipped away into my bedroom, feeling bad. I liked Miss Johnson and I could sense that, by deceiving her, our family was about to cross some sort of line that we’d all rather not cross. And Ben and Louise were doing this mainly for me, which made me feel like it was my fault, just like it had been my fault that Ben hadn’t got to go to university. (When I’d said that to Ben once, he’d said I’d only been four at the time, so how could anything have been my fault? But sometimes, when he starts ranting on about how much he wants me to go to university one day, I can’t help feeling that he is still angry about it and that he is taking it out on me in a funny sort of way.)
When I got home from school on Wednesday I paused in our hallway as I heard my brother and sister talking in the living room. Lou was telling Ben about the reference that Miss Johnson had dictated to her that afternoon and they didn’t seem to have heard me come in. I had a feeling they might not want me listening in to their conversation, so I stayed in the hall and kept quiet. Lou was telling Ben that she’d only had to tweak the wording on his reference a little bit, as well as substituting the word gardener for painter and decorator, and that she’d made out that Miss Johnson had known Ben for five years instead of just two, because she said that would mean Ben wouldn’t be expected to provide earlier references as well.
‘See what you think,’ she told him, and she began to read it out loud. ‘TO WHOM THIS MAY CONCERN . . . I would highly recommend Benjamin Duthie as a gardener. I have known him for five years and he is extremely conscientious, reliable and courteous, and his work over this time has proved to be of a very high standard. Being blind, I am unable to comment first hand on the appearance of his work, but many trusted friends assure me of its high quality and of his obvious attention to detail. As regards his character, I think it worth adding that Benjamin is an honest, responsible young man who has cared for his younger sister since the death of their mother. I can also vouch for the good character of both his sisters, the older of whom is also in my employ.’ She paused.
‘Miss Johnson must really like you, to say all that, Ben,’ I called out, as I dumped my school bag down noisily to let them know I was back.
‘When did you get home?’ Lou asked as I joined them.
‘Just now. Didn’t you hear me come in? Really, Ben, she must like you a lot,’ I repeated, as I went over to look more closely at the letter Lou was holding.
Although it was written in my sister’s handwriting, Miss Johnson had signed it at the bottom and it was written on her special headed notepaper, which gave her address. Her house had a posh name, which made it sound even grander than it really was, and it was situated in a village a few miles away from where we lived, where all the houses were expensive ones with big gardens.
‘Louise must like me a lot, you mean,’ Ben said drily.
‘No, Ben, I told you, I hardly changed any of it,’ Lou protested. ‘She was the one who said all that stuff about your good character and everything.’
‘I feel really mean, conning her like this.’ Ben was frowning. ‘Especially after she’s gone on about how trustworthy I am.’
‘What would happen to you if anyone found out?’ I asked my brother suddenly. For the first time I was worried that Ben might get into really serious trouble if he got caught faking his reference.
But Louise didn’t give Ben a chance to answer me. ‘Look, Ben, do you want to get May out of this grotty flat and into a better school or not?’
‘You know I do.’
‘Well, you’re doing this for a good reason then, aren’t you? Look, if Miss Johnson knew why you wanted to move, she might even dictate you a false reference herself,’ Lou said, as she slipped the reference into the envelope along with the covering letter Ben had written.
Ben’s letter was typed out – he’d used the computer in our local library to do it – and it was very neat. Ben’s good at writing because English was one of the A-level subjects he did at the grammar school he went to. He did history too, which is the subject he liked best of all and the one he’d been planning to study at university. We’d lived in a better area then, but apparently our mother had had lots of debts, which was why we’d had to move here after she died. Lou says our mother wasn’t very good at managing money, and that that’s the reason Ben is so careful with it himself.
‘Now all you have to do is find out everything you can about gardening,’ Lou added, when our brother remained silent.
‘I suppose I could go next door and speak to Arthur,’ Ben grunted. Arthur was our next-door neighbour and he had an allotment nearby, where he grew vegetables.
‘Good idea! We’ll go and post your letter to Thornton Hall while you’re doing that,’ Lou offered. (Thornton Hall was the name of the house that had advertised for a gardener.) ‘Then we’ll go to the library and get you some gardening books.’
As my sister and I arrived at the postbox outside our flats, ten minutes later, I said, ‘Remember when Ben killed that plant by giving it aspirin?’ Ben had once given one of Lou’s
favourite houseplants a drink of soluble aspirin because he thought he’d read in some newspaper article that aspirin was good for plants, when really it was some kind of cut flowers the article had been talking about. Lou’s plant had died a spectacularly squidgy death and Lou had been really angry and made all sorts of threats about what she’d do to Ben if he ever touched a green living thing that belonged to her ever again.
Louise laughed. (The aspirin incident had become a family joke now.) ‘It’s true that Ben’s never exactly been green-fingered, has he?’ she replied.
‘So do you think it’s safe to let him be a gardener?’ I asked her.
She laughed again. ‘Maybe not right now, but I wouldn’t worry. He’s a real swot when it comes to studying, so I’m sure a few gardening books will turn him into an expert in no time!’
A big pink graffiti heart had been sprayed on to the side of the postbox by one of my friends, and I pointed it out to Lou proudly as we dropped Ben’s letter inside.
‘Very nice,’ she said, not sounding as if she thought it was nice at all. ‘God, I can’t wait to get out of this dump.’
‘I’m sure if Ben does get this job, there’ll be room for you to come and live with us in the cottage too,’ I said hopefully. ‘If you change your mind about going travelling, I mean.’
‘I’m not changing my mind, May,’ Lou replied, frowning.
We didn’t talk much on the bus, and when we got to the library we headed straight for the gardening section and chose three books we thought might help Ben.
‘Let’s get a film out as well, shall we?’ Lou suggested then. ‘We can watch it tonight.’ She knew how much I loved it when she stayed in to watch TV with me instead of going out with Greg on her nights off, so I guessed she was making a special effort to cheer me up.
We went across to look at the DVDs and Lou immediately chose an old black-and-white film called Rebecca, which she said I was really going to like because it was all about a girl who went to live in a massive old house where there were lots of secrets. Apparently it was based on a book that Lou had read and thought was brilliant.
‘It sounds a bit like The Secret Garden,’ I said, and she nodded. But then I saw from the picture on the box that the main character wasn’t a girl my age at all, but a young woman, Lou’s age, and I knew Lou was just trying to get me to agree to watch what she wanted as usual. I tried to put it back and take out Bride of Dracula instead, but she wouldn’t let me.
‘You’re too young for that. It’ll give you nightmares,’ she said firmly. She was looking across at the computer section. Since we didn’t have a computer at home, we tended to use the ones in the library quite a lot. ‘I know . . . let’s set you up with your own email address while we’re here. Then we can email each other while I’m away. You can tell me all about what you’re doing and we can have proper girly chats, no matter what country I’m in! It’ll be fun!’
‘Not as much fun as if you stayed here with us,’ I nearly replied. But I stopped myself. She’d explained to me why she had to go and I knew she really wanted me to understand that. So I felt like I had no choice but to try.
After we’d cleared away the dishes that evening, Lou persuaded Ben to stop studying his gardening books so that we could all watch Rebecca together. I thought it would be boring, and I’d made up my mind only to watch it for as long as it took to eat the chocolate Lou had bought for the film. But in the end, I sort of got into it. It’s all about this young woman who marries a rich older man and goes to live with him in this huge old house by the sea where he used to live with his first wife – Rebecca – who died tragically, only to start with you don’t know exactly how. And there’s this really sinister housekeeper, all dressed in black, called Mrs Danvers, who never smiles and who taunts the girl by telling her how perfect and beautiful Rebecca was.
‘I hope the housekeeper at Thornton Hall isn’t like her,’ Ben joked when we got to the part in the film where the girl is really upset and Mrs Danvers tells her she’d be better off dead and tries to persuade her to jump out of an upstairs window. ‘She sounded pretty scary on the phone.’
‘What’s her name?’ I asked.
‘Mrs Daniels,’ he replied.
Lou and I both looked up.
‘You’re kidding,’ Lou said.
He shook his head.
‘Daniels, not Danvers,’ I pointed out.
‘Still . . .’ Lou grinned. Then she started to giggle. Lou’s giggles are infectious and soon Ben and I were joining in.
‘I won’t be able to keep a straight face if I have to meet this Danvers woman now,’ Ben gasped, when he finally stopped laughing.
‘You mean, Daniels woman,’ I corrected him.
Lou let out a snort, and then we were laughing again, so loudly that you’d never think we were about to set off into the unknown, where things would never be the same old, just-the-three-of-us way they were now, ever again.
On the morning Lou was due to leave, I switched on my videotape of The Secret Garden and listened to the bit with the oboe music while Lou was putting the last few things into her backpack. At the start of The Secret Garden, Mary’s mother and father have just died, but she doesn’t feel bad about it because she hardly knew them. And I might as well mention now that that’s how I feel about my parents too.
I was four when my mother died and I can hardly remember her at all. Ben and Louise have told me things about her, of course. Apparently she used to stay in bed a lot after Ben and Louise’s dad left her, and when she eventually started going out again she dated a few different men – one of whom must have been my father. I came along after a while, as a ‘lovely, unexpected surprise’, according to Louise. My mother never told Lou and Ben who my father was so, like I said before, I’ve always counted him as sort of non-existent.
After my mother got ill with cancer when I was still a baby, I went to live with foster carers on and off. I can’t remember any of that. As soon as he was old enough, Ben took care of me instead, and when our mother died he was allowed to keep me. He says that’s because the people who decide these things realized he was the person I was most attached to. Of course, I was also attached to Louise, who was fifteen by then. She stayed with us too, because she didn’t want to go and live with her dad and his girlfriend who she didn’t like very much. We had a social worker for a while – I remember her coming to visit us sometimes – but then, as we all got older, social services left us alone.
So you see, even though I didn’t have any parents, I’d always had my brother and sister and I’d always felt loved and looked after and wanted. Until now . . .
Of course, I knew why Lou was leaving. She’d explained it to me as best she could. I knew it wasn’t because she didn’t love me, and I also knew that it wasn’t as if she was going away for good, because she’d be back by this time next year. But somehow it still felt as if she was going away forever, because when she came back she wouldn’t be living with me and Ben any more. She had already told me that too.
Ben and I went to the train station to see her and Greg off. First they had to catch the train to London, then they were flying to India from Heathrow. They both had enormous backpacks and Lou was complaining about how heavy hers was. Greg, who had been backpacking before, felt the weight of it himself and said, ‘My God, what have you got in here?’ which made Lou burst into tears.
She wasn’t crying because of her backpack though. She was crying because she was saying goodbye.
‘You don’t need to stay away for a whole year if you don’t like it when you get there,’ I told her, as I tried to stop blubbing myself.
She smiled at me through her tears, but she didn’t say anything back.
Ben looked upset too, but he didn’t cry – he never does.
Greg looked embarrassed as he busied himself with loading their backpacks on to the train while we finished our farewells. His parents lived in London so they were going to meet him at the airport to say goodbye.
Wh
en the London train had disappeared from view and I had nothing to wave at any more Ben put his arm round me. ‘A year isn’t that long, you know,’ he mumbled, sounding like he was trying to convince himself as much as me. ‘Think how quickly this year’s passed.’
But I didn’t think the past year had gone by that quickly at all.
As we were leaving the station Ben’s mobile phone started ringing. I immediately thought it was Lou, calling us from the train to say goodbye again, but it wasn’t. It was the housekeeper from Thornton Hall. Ben had given both his numbers when he’d sent in his job application.
‘Hello . . . Yes . . . Mrs Daniels . . . ? No, it’s OK . . . What . . . ? OK . . . Thank you . . . Sure . . . We’ll be there!’
He came off the phone, looking like he didn’t know whether to smile or freak out. ‘They want me to go for an interview at Thornton Hall the day after tomorrow,’ he said. ‘And since you’ll be living in the cottage as well if I get the job, they want to meet you too.’
It turned out that Thornton Hall was situated in a village called Lower Thornton, which was very near the seaside town we’d visited two weeks earlier. In fact, it was only one stop before it on the train, so we ended up doing almost the same journey to get there. Thankfully, when we had our tickets checked this time it was by a different inspector. Ben said he didn’t care if we met the same one again – but I could tell he would have been embarrassed really.
‘Ben, what happened when you got caught fare-dodging that time when you were fourteen?’ I suddenly wanted to know.
Ben pulled a face as if he didn’t like remembering that time very much. ‘I had to pay a fine, and Mum and Dad got told, of course. Mum wasn’t too bothered, but Dad went ballistic. He whacked me pretty hard and said if I did it again he’d force me to live with him instead of with Mum, so he could make sure I got the discipline I needed. That was in the days when we actually saw him once a week, before he moved up north with his new girlfriend.’ He grimaced. ‘Funny thing is, even though he’d just laid into me, I missed him back then, so that actually felt like quite a tempting offer.’