by Susan Hill
Simon was silent for a minute, looking down. ‘I’ve got no choice. I can’t live with myself like this. I’ve got to stick it out, haven’t I?’
‘How old are you?’
‘Thirty-nine.’
‘Get through this, serve the rest of your time and you’re young enough to start over.’
He stood up. ‘Your kit’s over there. Michael’s outside, he’ll take you up to your room. You’ve got half an hour.’
He had been told only to read a general outline about Stitchford, nothing in detail. That way he would be inquisitive, anxious, alert – like every other prisoner who’d just arrived. He could be surprised, pleasantly or otherwise. He could be whatever he was at a given moment.
He was surprised by the light. Most prisons were dark or in a glare of artificial strip lighting. This one had windows in the roof and high up in the walls, and light-coloured stairwells, walls with bright pictures – presumably done in art therapy. He had been told to make his own decision about art therapy but that to qualify he must show minimum talent and work only in colour. This was not about fine painting, it was about trying to unlock some inner part of himself which had been hidden for a long time. Revelatory, not pretty.
The corridor did not clang, like the metal corridors in other prisons, though footsteps sounded clearly and there was a squeak of rubber soles.
Michael led the way, Serrailler carried his own bag. A man looked out of a doorway, nodded. Someone else came down the corridor wearing a towel and carrying another, trainers in hand, hair wet and flattened onto his head. ‘Y’all right?’
‘Thanks.’
‘Most are helpful, most will be pally. There’s plenty of give and take in here.’
Michael had a shaven head and a small spider tattooed on the back of his neck. The first person Simon had yet seen who looked like a prison officer.
Last few doors, at the window end of the upper corridor.
‘Here you go.’
The small room that would be his home and refuge for however long it took.
‘Looks a bit bare, only you can buy stuff from catalogues – rugs, pot plants, cushions – you earn from whatever work you’re assigned and spend it that way. If you want. If you get invited into anyone else’s room, take a good look round. Sparky in room 11 – his is like Buckingham Palace. OK, four toilets at the end, showers next door to them – you go when you like and if you’re free. No lock-up at night, which might surprise you. Washbasin – you drop down that lid. Light in the ceiling above your bed. You change your bed every week, sheets get left outside your door. Bell goes for your evening meal in about forty-five minutes. Just follow the crowd. Anything you want to know for now?’
‘Can I hang my clothes up anywhere?’
‘Had a nice wardrobe in your other prison, did you? No, you fold them and put them on the shelf. Jacket hangs behind the door. Do your washing in the basement. There’s the bumpf.’
Michael went out, shutting but not locking the door. Someone was shouting loudly on the floor below. Someone else was whistling as they went down the corridor past his room. There was a faint smell of frying fish.
Home.
Simon picked up the duplicated information sheets and lay down on his bed to read them.
Nineteen
Shelley tried to stop shaking. Tim must not see that anything was wrong. She clenched her hands. She felt sick and when she turned her head, she felt dizzy. She felt a boiling up of anger, hurt, confusion and guilt, went over and over in her mind all the way home, what she had said or done, what gesture she might have made to give him the idea. She could think of none. Tim always accused her of flirting, being too friendly, saying too much, asking too many personal questions. Had she?
Tim talked all the way home and she supposed that she answered. He chatted about the food, the drink, the talk, the woman on his right, the woman on his left, the man opposite, and she dreaded him mentioning Richard’s name let alone starting up a conversation about him. He did mention it, and she jumped, but he swerved onto someone else.
As she got out of the car, he said, ‘You ripped the back of your frock. How on earth did you do that? I thought it was a new one?’
‘It is …’ She almost ran up the path.
‘I’m having a nightcap. You?’
‘No. Yes … yes, do we have any brandy?’
‘Brandy? You never drink brandy. Anyway, no, we don’t. Whisky?’
‘Yes. Fine. Yes.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Just need to rush … loo …’
‘Oh God, I hope the chicken wasn’t off. Seemed OK but you never know with mass catering.’
She went into the spare bathroom and locked the door. Still shaking. Still sick. She tore the frock again in her panic to get it off, desperate for it not to be touching her body any longer. Ripped her pants off and threw them into the sink. Got them out again. Dropped them on the floor, shuddering to touch them again and knowing that she couldn’t leave them there. She pushed everything into the laundry bag, shut the bag in the cupboard, locked the cupboard.
‘Shell? Are you all right?’
‘Bit sick, sorry … be out in a minute.’
‘I’ve got your drink here.’
Drink? She didn’t know what he meant. Drink.
She got under the shower and turned it up as hot as she could bear it. Their own shower was better, the pressure on this was weak but she couldn’t go into the bathroom she used every day until she was clean, clean, clean.
She showered for minute after minute, washed every nook and cranny of herself over and over again, washed her hair and rinsed, rinsed, rinsed, hot water, cool water, hot again.
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’
She came quickly out and into the bedroom. ‘Think so. Sorry.’
‘Funny – I’m all right and I ate the chicken. I wonder if anyone else is ill – I’ll ring round in the morning. Sure you’re not just pissed?’
She was shivering again.
‘Look, you get into bed, I’ll bring you a hot-water bottle. Maybe whisky isn’t the best idea.’
Tim folded the duvet back and helped her in. Kind Tim. Thoughtful Tim. Good, loving husband Tim.
Tim can’t know. I could never …
‘Someone raped me,’ she heard herself say.
Tim was on his way out of the room. Stopped dead.
‘It – I wasn’t sick. It’s nothing I ate.’
He turned slowly. ‘You can’t have been raped. You haven’t been anywhere to –’
‘When I went down to the cloakroom.’
She was shivering so much now that her teeth were chattering. Why had she said it? She wasn’t going to tell Tim. Tim mustn’t know.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and put his hand over hers. ‘Shelley, do you think you’ve got a temperature?’
She stared at him.
‘Just that – listen, you could be really ill – high temperatures can make people hallucinate.’
‘I’m not hallucinating.’
‘You’d better tell me what you think happened.’
‘No. What happened. It happened.’ She turned on her side rather than look at him. ‘It doesn’t matter. Forget it. I just want to go to sleep. It’s over with.’
‘Of course it isn’t. Shelley? Please tell me what happened – now you’ve started you have to tell me everything.’
‘I went to the cloakroom … it’s got a – you know that place, everything’s huge, all the rooms – it’s got a sort of outer powder room … sofas and mirrors … I don’t suppose you know what I mean. Never mind.’
‘Go on.’
‘Please, no. I wish I hadn’t told you.’
‘Go on.’
‘Just … there was no one in there at all but I suppose he – he must have followed me. Down the stairs. I was in this outer room and … he came in.’
‘Who came in?’
She hesitated for a split second only. ‘Richard,’ she sa
id.
‘Richard Serrailler? You have to be joking, Shelley. Of course it can’t have been Richard.’
‘It was Richard. Do you think I don’t know? Do you think I was so blind drunk I couldn’t identify him? Of course I could.’
‘For God’s sake … if this is true … I’ll have him strung up. What exactly happened? You must go over it, Shelley. You can’t make a mistake about this.’
‘No, I can’t and I’m not. He just … pushed me down … there was this chaise longue – sofa thing.’
‘He must have been extremely drunk.’
Why, she thought, but did not say, why must he have been drunk? To want to rape me? To bother with me?’
‘Not drunk.’
‘What else? What happened then?’
‘There’s nothing else to tell you, is there? You know what rape means.’ She pulled the bedclothes up higher, wanting to bury herself away.
‘Why didn’t you say anything until just now, Shelley?’
Why? A thousand reasons and none. She had been too shocked to say anything, too afraid of seeing him again, too disgusted with herself. With him. With it.
‘I couldn’t. I didn’t want to tell you and I don’t want to think about it.’
‘All right. I’ll bring you some tea – be better for you than anything else. I’ll think about what you ought to do.’
‘There isn’t anything to do. It happened. It’s over.’
She was half asleep and in the shadows of a dream when Tim came back. She kept her eyes closed, her back turned from him. When she woke it would be morning – no, later morning, it was past two now – and it would be even more over than it had been over immediately after Richard Serrailler had walked out of the cloakroom. It happened. Get over it.
‘One thing,’ Tim said when he returned, and as if there had been no pause in their conversation, ‘I don’t know if it has crossed your mind to go to the police, but if it has, forget it. No way.’
Police. It had not, in fact, crossed her mind, but now Tim had said it, she clutched at the word, because it was the right one. Police. What Richard had done was wrong and a crime and of course she had to go to the police.
‘Even if you could prove it, which of course you can’t …’
No.
‘… They wouldn’t do anything and they can be quite nasty to women over this sort of thing.’
Was there any ‘sort of thing’? She was raped, that was all. All.
‘They would take into account the fact that you’d been drinking –’
‘I had not “been drinking” – I had a drink at dinner.’
‘Well, more than one, and before … and besides, you know him.’
‘What difference does that make?’
‘It means they’d assume you’d, you know …’
‘No, I don’t – that I’d what?’
‘Led him on. It’s different with real rape … if you’d been attacked in a dark place by someone … some man who was a complete stranger.’
‘This was “real rape” – whatever you mean by that.’
‘Listen, sweetheart, I don’t mean to upset you but I did say this – not to have too much drink because when you do, well, you flirt. Don’t you?’
Shelley sat up, her shivering over, body quite still, head clear.
‘You mean I led him on? You mean I was asking for it? Is that what you’re saying, Tim?’
‘No, no, of course not … but you do and you always flirt with Richard – you’ve always said he was attractive.’
‘I’ve said no such thing. Or if I have …’
‘There you are –’
‘If I ever have it was only a general remark – you might say someone’s wife was attractive, mightn’t you? Mightn’t you?’
‘Well, yes …’
‘Yes. And does that mean you want to rape her and might even try it? Even do it? And would that be a good reason?’
‘Shelley, calm down. Lie down and take a deep breath. I think you’re getting this whole thing out of proportion.’
How was it possible to get being raped out of proportion?
But he came to bed, lay beside her, put his arms round her and held her to him.
‘Poor darling. Whatever actually happened, it should not have done and I’ll sort it. He won’t bother you ever again.’
He doesn’t get it. He just has no idea. It felt wrong to be close to him, even though she had had a shower. Wrong. But she couldn’t push him away.
She stayed in bed until after he had gone to work. He got carefully out of bed, out of the room, out of the house, considerate, thoughtful and without any idea of how she felt. She could not even be sure that he did believe her.
She waited for ten minutes after the car had gone before getting up and having a shower in their own bathroom this time, the power turned on full and almost unbearably hot. She tried to think of nothing but the water sluicing over her, but in fact she thought of Richard Serrailler, going over and over not so much what he had done as how it had ever happened, whether she had ‘led him on’, even inadvertently, whether a certain amount of harmless flirting ever could be ‘harmless’. She had flirted, yes. She had held his eye, smiled, responded to the subtext of his remarks. As she went over it, she understood that. But she had behaved like it before, as Tim had said, often enough – she liked to flirt, though only in what she had always thought of as a safe context. She and Tim had had a rock-solid marriage for seventeen years. Without children, which neither of them had wanted, they had been everything to one another and yet gathered plenty of friends round them. Neither had ever had an affair. It wouldn’t have interested them. Yes, Shelley thought now, yes, she had sometimes flirted, because – she stopped soaping herself for a moment – because it was fun. Nothing more. Tim had been known to flirt too. It meant nothing.
She turned the water off and stood there, shuddered, put on her towelling robe, and went back to the bedroom. It was a bright, clear-skied morning, warm, inviting. But her stomach lurched at the thought of going out, of people looking at her, at walking among them, in the streets, for surely they would guess. She looked at herself in the mirror, and looked away, and dressed without looking again. Did her hair and her face and barely looked at either.
But through her head like a regular beat was the insistent thought that she had to do something and no matter what Tim had said, that something was report it to the police. Even if they did nothing, disbelieved her, made her feel a slut, as she had read that the police could – even then, she had to go because unless she did the anger inside her would destroy her. It was corrosive, bitter and hateful. She could not forget the look on his face – gloating, sneering, amused. Whatever they said to her, whatever they did or did not do, even if it led nowhere, to get rid of the turmoil of feelings of anger and shame and hatred inside her, she had no choice but to go to the police.
She started the car. Stalled it. Started it again. Switched off the engine. The clothes were still in the bathroom cupboard and she wanted rid of them, wanted them burned or torn to shreds. She went back into the house, but when she opened the cupboard door and saw the laundry bag she was sick without warning and without the chance to reach the basin. When she had cleaned up, and before she could throw up again, she picked up the bag on the end of a coat hanger, and stuffed it into a black binbag and then into the car boot. Everything felt contaminated. She threw the hanger in the bin.
She drove aimlessly around the streets, into a one-way system, almost colliding with a delivery van, out onto the bypass and back into town, not thinking, not knowing where she would end up, still nauseous. In the end, the thought of the bag was so sickening that she turned back, hit the bypass again, then a road that led towards Starly. She stopped by a gate. A field. No animals. Nothing. No other car came by and she forced herself to drag the bag out of the boot and throw it sideways over the gate into a ditch on the far side.
She was shaking again, and had to sit, head between her knees, to s
top herself fainting. But gradually, taking deep breaths and remembering what she had just done, she calmed. When she got back into the car she felt better. It had gone and somehow, a line was drawn. It had happened but whereas an hour before it had somehow gone on happening, over and over again, now it was done and in the past. Over.
She drove back towards Lafferton and home and work, conscious that she had not even opened up the computer to check the morning’s emails.
She was shocked when she found herself pulling up in the police station forecourt fifteen minutes later.
Twenty
Judith, looking better, with colour in her face and her appetite back, sat in the old wicker garden chair podding broad beans. The late-afternoon sun always caught this corner, and as Cat watched her expertly sliding a row of beans from their fleecy bed into the bowl, she thought that two days here at the farmhouse, recuperating, had made a difference to more than just her physical health. She seemed relaxed, less anxious, less touchy. She had spent an hour helping Sam sort out the muddle that was his history homework, read to Felix, who was perfectly able to read himself but still enjoyed the attention, taken Wookie for walks and combed the knots out of Mephisto’s undercoat, to his silent fury.
‘All done. Shall I bring them in?’