‘I know, dear, he’s behaved very badly – a rotten thing to do,’ Kate’s voice was breaking. She was afraid of saying the wrong thing. Freddie was close to her, listening.
‘I’m in London, Mum,’ Tessa said, and her voice brightened. ‘And – I’ve got a job! I thought you’d be proud of me.’
She’s never going to come home, Kate thought. She wanted to shout and scream at her daughter. Instead, she retreated into a simmering silence. Her cheeks flared red. She handed the phone to Freddie, shaking her head.
‘Mum?’
‘Your mum’s not well,’ Freddie said to Tessa.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing a good night’s sleep wouldn’t cure,’ Freddie said. ‘She’s been sitting all night by the phone in case you rang. We’ve been worried sick, Tessa. Are you all right? That’s what I want to know. You’re precious to me – you know that, don’t you?’
He could hear Tessa breathing at the end of the phone, and he visualised himself there with her, his arms around her, his mind still picturing the beautiful, troubled child with chestnut plaits and big eyes that changed as quickly as the skies on an April morning.
‘Shall I come up and fetch you home?’ he offered.
‘Oh Dad – no, thanks. I’ll be all right.’
‘Do you need some money?’
‘I do – but I’m staying with friends, Lou and Clare, and I’ve got a job, Dad, a job I really want to do. I start on Monday.’
Freddie glanced at the newspaper on the table. He figured Tessa had no idea that she was the centre of an unfolding scandal, and he wasn’t going to tell her. Maybe she was better off in London, away from it all. Away from memories of Art, and away from the vitriol of the family grapevine. It would blow over, he was sure. He hoped her employer, whoever it was, didn’t know about it either.
‘I’d like to tell you about my job,’ Tessa said, ‘but I need to start it, find my feet, if you know what I mean. Then I’ll write and tell you all about it – and send you an address.’
‘Ah – all right, love. You keep in touch – always – you promise me that, Tessa.’
‘Okay, yes, Dad, and don’t worry.’
‘And – you look after yourself in London.’
Tessa’s silences were getting longer, and he could hear her sniffing. She’s crying, he thought. He wanted to ask her why she wouldn’t come home – why live in London when she could live in Monterose? Why make it so hard for herself? But then, she’d always chosen hard options, he remembered. The words wouldn’t come, so he said, ‘I wish you lots of luck.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
He put the phone down and went to comfort Kate. She wept and ranted in his arms. ‘I should have said God Bless and told her I loved her.’
‘Ah – she knows that,’ Freddie said. ‘I don’t think she knows about the newspapers, and I’m not gonna tell her. She’s got enough to cope with.’
‘It’s good that she’s coping at all, after what Art did,’ Kate said, drying her eyes on an embroidered hanky. She put her arms round Freddie and gave him a kiss. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Freddie. You’re so wise.’
Freddie smoothed her brow with his gentle-giant hands. ‘I told her you weren’t well – and you aren’t – are you?’
‘No.’
Kate didn’t usually admit to feeling ill, so Freddie’s concern deepened. ‘Why don’t I take you away for a few days?’ he suggested. ‘How about Weymouth?’
Before she could answer there was a shuffle of heavy footsteps outside. The door was pushed open, cautiously, and Freddie’s two sisters, Alice and Betty, came in. They had identical permed hairstyles, gloomy green overcoats steeped in the scent of mothballs, and identical expressions. They both fixed accusing eyes on Kate, and Alice slammed a newspaper on the table. ‘Look what your wicked daughter has done NOW. She’s brought shame on our family. I hope you’re going to punish her.’
Grieving for Art cast pools of darkness over Tessa’s life. Her job with the children shone, isolated and bright as the moon while her sorrow swirled into ever-shifting shadows that moved through her life in London. The landscapes of Somerset blazed in her memory, like stained glass, set into the stories that built walls in her mind: the starry skies, the nightingales, the water meadows of Monterose.
‘I was looking forward to going home,’ she said, in one of her regular sessions at The Samaritans with Dorothy. ‘I wanted to spend the beautiful autumn there, with Art. I wanted to spend time with Mum and Dad, and see Lexi and Selwyn. I thought we’d be there for the winter, and see the great silver skies, and the floods, and the frosty mornings. Art had a little Queenie stove in the bus, and we were going to be so cosy – our own fire – toast in bed on a frosty morning. We talked of all those things, Dorothy. Our dreams were the same – we loved the same kind of things – we were so happy. Why? Why did it happen? To me!’
Always she would talk herself to that point, like the edge of a cliff where you had to stop. The edge was always the tears that no longer came in sobbing but in a hot bolt of pain from ear to ear. And still Dorothy listened devotedly, patiently riding the wordless chasms. Her responses changed subtly from the blind sympathy of their first talk. Now she often said, ‘You’ll cope. You will.’ And she said it so often and with such kind, motherly conviction that it rang like a comforting mantra in Tessa’s mind.
‘Maybe – I am coping,’ she said.
‘You are, Tessa. You’ve got a job – and a place to live.’
‘I’ve got to stay in London.’ Tessa felt the moment of recognising that she was coping begin to spiral downwards again. ‘I still feel I can’t go home. I can’t LIVE in the places I love – because – because of who I am.’ She looked at Dorothy’s velvet eyes. ‘Who am I anyway?’
‘You’re a lovely girl, a gifted girl too.’
‘So why – why did the man I adored just dump me? For some flinty-eyed slut who was clever enough to have his child! Why couldn’t I do that?’
‘Did you want a child?’ Dorothy asked gently.
‘Well – no – I didn’t. I went to great trouble to get myself on the pill,’ Tessa said. ‘But Art wanted kids. He tried to persuade me a few times, but – this is hard to admit, but I’m terrified, you see. I’m terrified of childbirth.’
‘Why is that, dear? What scares you?’
‘I’m not brave and stoical like other women. I can’t even watch a woman having a baby on television. I have to leave the room. They’re always screaming. It’s always, always horrific – and in the novels I’ve read. I can’t stand hearing about it. My aunties, and my granny used to glory in talking about it in lurid technicolour, and I was so terrified, I used to faint! Or I’d run out of the room and they’d laugh at me, which was awful – and it made me so ANGRY with them. It was like they absolutely relished frightening me like that. I hated them for it. And it made me feel even more oddball.’ She paused to sip the sustaining mug of hot coffee, which somehow tasted like the warmly lit stone arches of St Stephen’s, Walbrook. It was Saturday morning, and she’d just finished her second week at Parkwell School.
‘So how do you feel with the children at work?’ Dorothy asked.
‘I love them,’ Tessa said, and a few sparkles drifted through the sadness in her pale blue eyes. ‘It’s strange because I didn’t expect to feel like that. I thought it would just be a job where I could make a difference. I expected the kids to be difficult – like I was – and they are, but they’re beautiful, and so LOVING – and their horizons are so different. They are so happy with a tiny, tiny bit of success, like tying a shoelace, or catching a ball, or copying their name. They’ve all got huge issues to deal with, and in a way being with them is helping me to cope with my life.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ Dorothy said. ‘So is your life getting any better, Tessa? Better than when you first came in here?’
‘Yes – definitely,’ Tessa said. ‘It’s just the weekends, and evenings. I don’t mind bein
g on my own. But Art haunts me. Everywhere I go I think I see him. Every day I long for a letter from him. I still can’t believe he could cut me off so abruptly, after the love we had. I feel like a soul in exile, banished to a distant island to wait for a ship to bring my love home to me, like Tristan and Isolde. And I feel cheated and rejected. That never changes.’
‘It will, dear. It will change,’ Dorothy said in her comforting voice.
Tessa looked at her. ‘You’ve helped me so much,’ she said, ‘and, one day, when I’m better – if I ever am – I’d like to do what you’re doing.’
‘Then you probably will,’ Dorothy said, and a constructive silence followed, a time when castles of possibility manifested between them, a time when Tessa found archways in the long wall of her grief. The glimpses through those archways were mystical and enticing. Gardens in the sun. Glittering sea shores. Cocoons where kindness was turning itself into butterflies.
Tessa unlocked the heavy front door of the house in Nottingham Place. The thick cold air of London seemed to follow her inside, chilling the walls, adding mildew to the damp, dark red carpets. On the third step of the stairs was a dead mouse. She stood looking at its cute, pink, shell-like ears, its pale, sleek belly, its exquisite little paws, and remembered how tenderly she and Lucy would have buried such a creature under the lilacs at home. She picked it up in her gloved hands. It weighed nothing. I’ve got nowhere to bury it, she thought, and mice don’t matter in London. She took it outside, and placed it tenderly under the leaves of a dandelion plant that had fought its way out of the bricks.
She trudged up the stairs, past the first landing where plastic bags of rubbish were stashed outside closed doors, and on up to the second floor to her bedsit. At least it was hers. It was home. A narrow, high-ceilinged slot of a room, with the bed against the wall, a cream enamel sink unit along the opposite wall, next to a square of Fablon-covered worktop with a single gas ring under a slot meter that ate shillings. There was just room to walk between the sink and the bed. The saving grace was the tall sash window, facing south, where the sun streamed in on good days, lighting the dust motes. Tessa had replaced the heavy, brown damask curtains with a brightly coloured pair she’d found at a jumble sale. Lou’s ethnic blanket covered her bed, and two orange and white Habitat cushions Lucy had given her for Christmas were propped against the wall.
In her bag was a slim bundle of green daffodil buds which she took out and arranged in a glass milk bottle on the window sill. London in December was depressing, and she’d found that spending a shilling on a bunch of buds from a street barrow was worth it, for the contemplative joy of watching them slowly come open into optimistic golden blooms. It helped her stay alive.
Under the window sill were three wooden orange boxes which she’d painted in psychedelic colours. They held her books, a Roberts radio, her jar of sand from Porthmeor Beach, her black elvan pebble, and photos of Jonti and Selwyn, and of her parents outside the front door of The Pines. The photos were monochrome and tiny, with white borders and curling edges, done with her Brownie Box camera. Tessa had glued them into a wooden frame she’d bought for sixpence in a junk shop. She’d painted it apple green, filling the woodworm holes with thick paint.
Her photo of Art was in her diary, inside a cream envelope which she’d decorated with hearts. She couldn’t bear to look at the photo, but kept it hidden. She’d drawn the hearts as symbols of eternal romance, a thin trail of hope that he would come back to her. She’d wanted to add a broken heart, jagged and tragic, and coloured black, but her pencil had stopped in the air. Don’t spoil it, she’d thought, even if he never comes back, the memory is still a love story. Sometimes she couldn’t even open the diary in case she saw that cream envelope covered in hearts.
Saturday mornings had settled into a predictable routine. She paid her rent, two pounds and ten shillings, to the greasy-haired landlord who lived in the basement. It was done by remote control. She handed it to him through a hatch, and he took it, grunted, signed the rent book and handed it back through a haze of nicotine, his eyebrows fiercely shielding a pair of cloudy, expressionless eyes. He never looked at Tessa, and she wondered if anyone was actually in there, a soul, a spirit, even a person dwelling within the tweed-jacketed lump.
Today she returned home after seeing Dorothy, and found her mum’s little blue letter stuck in the post rack in the hall. Nothing from Art. The usual jolt of pain. There had been times when Tessa had sat in the window, perched on the end of her bed and craning her neck to watch the postman going from door to door along Nottingham Place, waiting for him to arrive at the front door. Hope and dread were woven together in her mind, and when he did arrive she tore down the two flights of stairs to find – nothing. On weekdays after work she emerged from Baker Street tube station and ran down the wide pavements of Marylebone Road, past the dome of the Planetarium, and into Nottingham Place with every beat of her heart yearning for a letter from Art, only to find – nothing. Each day of nothing took her further and further into a desert of sorrow where the crystal sands scorched her feet, blew dust through her hair and into her eyes, a nothing place where no trees grew, a place where the only option was to lie, exhausted, on the fiery sand and pray for rain.
Today she was pleased to find the predictable letter from her mum, full of homely news, threaded with subtle euphemisms and always a cry at the end. A ‘when are you coming home?’ cry, and still the silent, unspeakable answer loitered in Tessa’s mind. NEVER.
She sat on her bed with her back against the wall, and opened the envelope. Her mother’s letter was brief this time. She wasn’t well. Lucy had been to visit, and Tim refused to come into the house, and Freddie had stubbornly stayed in his workshop. Kate felt she was the only one still flying the flag of unconditional love. Inside Kate’s letter was a bit of treasure – a letter from her dad in his copperplate script. It was folded neatly into four, and when Tessa opened it, a pound note fell out.
Freddie wanted her to think about the field, and what to do with it. He’d been up there with Herbie and fenced off a strip of it close to the woods, and planted the lime trees he’d grown from seed. He’d gathered acorns, walnuts and beechnuts and planted them in pots. He hoped she’d come home one day and help him in his lone mission to plant trees for the future.
Tessa closed her eyes, holding his letter between her hands. She could feel his energy in the paper. The noon-time sun streamed through the tall window, warming her hands and face. A memory hummed in her mind. A glaze of light over an oasis in the desert of grief. Gaia. The Rainbow Warriors. The hippie dream of saving the earth from destructive chemicals and pollution. Saving the wild creatures. What am I doing here? she thought. How far away have I come from my true self?
At the same moment she heard footsteps on the stairs, heavy male footsteps. In soft shoes. She tensed, listening, expecting it to be one of the other tenants on his way home. She listened for the sound of a key turning in a lock, a rustle of shopping bags being carried in. Instead, the man stopped outside her door. She could hear him breathing.
Tessa got to her feet, her eyes big with fear, watching the door like a startled animal. She felt cornered.
There was a minute crackling sound, like cellophane. Then a polite tap on the door.
The warrior surfaced, and she opened the door wide and positive, ready for battle, a shoe in one hand.
A pair of hazel eyes confronted her. A tall young man, clean-shaven and rangy, his jeans too clean, his cheeks too eager, a bunch of carnations in his hand.
‘Hi, Tessa!’
‘Paul!’
He looked suddenly bashful. ‘I got you some flowers. Are you angry?’
‘Well – thanks, they’re lovely,’ Tessa said, sniffing the heavy clove-like scent of the carnations. ‘And, no, I’m just surprised. You look so different.’
‘Yeah.’ Paul ran his fingers through his new boyish crew cut. ‘The sun-bleached locks had to go. Didn’t fit my old man’s image of a son.’
&nb
sp; ‘I know what you mean,’ Tessa said. ‘My beads had to go.’
‘Are you going to ask me in?’
She studied his hazel eyes, remembering how they had looked when he was rescuing her from the sea. Steady. Boring. But safe. Well – safe-ISH, she thought, remembering the wounded-wolf look he’d given her one day when she’d rejected his attempt to kiss her.
‘You can come in for a quick coffee,’ she said. ‘Then I’m going out.’
‘Right.’ He followed her inside and shut the door. Immediately Tessa felt uneasy. Trapped. His fidgety shadow between her and the door. His needy soul already drawing energy from her light, or what was left of it. She’d never lost the habit of using her ability to see the human aura, and Paul’s was an acid yellow with chinks of flinty darkness. He had the aura of a loner, a misfit who had survived by swinging wildly between being a bully and being a fairy-tale prince.
She didn’t trust him.
‘How did you know my address?’ she asked.
‘Your mum gave it to me.’
Tessa’s eyes rounded. ‘She did?’
‘I saw you in the paper, in the fountain. It blew my mind! I thought, yeah, that’s Tessa. And Barcussy isn’t a common name. I asked directory enquiries for it, in Monterose, and they gave it to me. Your mum answered, and I put on my best upper class accent and told her I was an old friend, that I’d rescued you from the sea. I told her I lived in London, and that Dad was a lawyer, said I was concerned about you being alone in the big smoke, and she gave in like a little lamb and told me your address.’
Tessa nodded. Kate had sent her the cutting from the Gazette and Tessa had screwed it into a ball and binned it.
Obviously Kate had fallen for Paul’s charm, and his accent, and his credibility. Damn, she thought, Mum has got to learn not to do this to me.
‘Your mum sounded nice.’
‘She is.’
‘She kind of – chatted to me in a confidential sort of way. She told me about Art and what he’d done to you. That dreadful hippie, she called him. I mean – are you all right, Tessa? After what that bastard did?’
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