Losing Nicola

by Susan Moody

  And indeed, when I cycled down the chalky white road after him, and climbed between elder-trees and overgrown fennel to the top of the hill, I could see that he was right. There were none of the broken branches or trodden grass which signified trespassers into what we had come to look on as our own territories.

  ‘Look . . .’ He carefully hooked aside three or four of the thickest creepers. ‘There’s even a tiny little glade sort of thing in among the bushes.’

  ‘You could hide in there if you wanted to and nobody’d even know you were there. Only problem would be getting in there without tearing yourself to shreds.’

  ‘If you pull this branch here, and duck under that one . . .’ With me cautiously following, he eased himself through the bushes until the two of us were standing on the little patch of grass in the middle.

  He took my arm. ‘Alice . . . don’t tell Nicola about this place, okay?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because.’

  ‘Because what?’

  ‘Because I say so. And I’m older than you.’

  Orlando didn’t often pull rank. ‘What do you think she’s going to do,’ I said. ‘Sneak up here and pick the blackberries before we can?’

  He gave his taut white smile, wrinkled one of his striped eyebrows. ‘Maybe. Who knows? It’s the sort of thing she would do. But promise me, Alice. Promise.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’ I bent down to scratch a mosquito bite on my dusty sun-browned leg.

  We could hear someone coming across the brow of the hill, slashing at the undergrowth with a stick and singing hoarsely. Instinctively we ducked down.

  ‘It’s old Yelland,’ whispered Orlando, peeping through the brambles.

  ‘Hope he doesn’t see us.’

  ‘He must have come over the top, not up from the road. We can always run back down if he tries coming after us.’

  ‘Bit scratchy,’ I objected.

  ‘Better a few scratches than being beaten to death by bloody Yelland.’

  To our horror, Yelland strode about a bit, looking out at the line of the horizon which was a misty blue from the heat, then opened the shooting stick he was carrying and sat down. From the bag slung over his shoulder, he produced a sketch-block and some chalks. He glanced impatiently at his watch, shook his head irritably.

  ‘Creative genius at work,’ Orlando muttered.

  ‘We could be trapped here for hours.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  In other circumstances, I might have enjoyed lying there on the dry grass. Above our heads the sky was cloudless. Larks sprang up, trilling invisibly against the blue. I could smell dusty leaves, the aromatic scent of crushed spearmint and bruised fennel.

  ‘Do you know what a group of larks is called?’ Orlando asked.

  ‘An ecstasy.’

  ‘Nice, isn’t it?’ He leaned on one elbow and peered between the brambles. He went very still.

  ‘What?’ I looked over his shoulder to see Nicola swinging along the cliff path. She was wearing a short denim skirt with brass buttons in a line down the middle and a little pink blouse. We watched as she called out and Yelland swung round.

  ‘Christ!’ he exclaimed. ‘Can’t you ever be on time?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said cheerfully. As she came nearer, she began to undo the buttons of her blouse.

  ‘What’s on earth is she doing?’ I said.

  Orlando shrugged.

  Nicola dropped the blouse at Yelland’s feet; she had nothing underneath it and I could see very clearly the round swelling of her small breasts, the pink nipples. She wriggled out of her skirt to show a pair of white cotton knickers. I distinctly heard Yelland groan as she put her hand inside her underwear and stuck out a provocative hip.

  ‘God . . .’ There was sweat on Orlando’s upper lip. ‘She’s not going to . . .’

  ‘Not going to what?’ He shook his piebald head but didn’t say anything else.

  We watched, appalled and excited, as Nicola pulled off her pants and stood naked in front of Yelland, who was cupping a hand over the front of his trousers. ‘You filthy little trollop,’ he said, his voice sounding thick. ‘Get over here.’

  She shimmied closer. ‘Let’s have the money first,’ she said.

  He reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a note; I couldn’t see how much it was. She bent down and tucked it among her clothes, then climbed astride his knees and wriggled right up close. Slowly, she undid the metal buttons of his corduroy trousers and slipped her hand inside. His big fingers squeezed her buttocks, his mouth sucked at her breasts, while she massaged him, back and forth, in the place between his thighs. I could hear him groaning with each movement of her hand, the sound increasing as her movements grew more frantic until finally, with a great heave which nearly dislodged her, he bucked a few times and then subsided.

  ‘Jesus,’ he gasped. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  She jumped nimbly off his knees. ‘Well, that was fun, wasn’t it?’

  Yelland, breathing hard, didn’t answer.

  Nicola stood naked in front of him with her hands on her hips. ‘By the way, I may have to put up my price,’ she said.

  His face turned an ugly purple colour. ‘You’re bleeding me dry as it is, you greedy little tart.’

  ‘It’s called supply and demand. Or the cost of living. Or something.’ Nicola bent down and neatly inserted herself into her clothes. ‘So, what about next time?’

  ‘If you demand more, I’ll be able to supply less,’ he said. ‘I’m not made of money, you know.’

  ‘I only said I may have to put up the price.’

  And she ran off up the path trodden into the grass, her short skirt flicking from side to side.

  ‘Little bitch,’ Yelland muttered.

  Hot, slightly breathless, I couldn’t have explained the sick fascination of the scene I’d just witnessed, but I knew there was something immeasurably ugly about it. ‘What was . . . what exactly was going on?’ My voice felt estranged from my throat.

  ‘We-ell . . .’ Orlando blew out a breath. On his face was an expression I could not quite fathom. ‘It seems our little Nicola is a fairly nasty bit of work. But then we knew that already.’

  ‘I didn’t. Not that nasty.’ My idol had more than merely feet of clay; she was clay up to her knees. It wasn’t just the transaction between her and Yelland that made me feel nauseous. The loss of something that only a short while ago I had considered beautiful felt like a physical wrench inside my heart. I wanted to go home. I wanted to see Ava and my mother, just breathe in the dependability of their different presences. ‘But anybody could have seen them,’ I said. Indeed, a man was emerging from the hanger of trees which ran up the hillside to the top. He stared curiously down at Yelland, busy fastening his flies, and at Nicola who was skipping away towards the green lane.

  ‘That’s probably part of the fun.’

  ‘Oh, Orlando, let’s go,’ I whispered urgently.

  ‘We can’t. We’re stuck until the old sod leaves,’ murmured Orlando. ‘Can you imagine what he’d do if he knew we’d seen him?’

  ‘Couldn’t we get down the slope below here and out onto the road?’

  ‘Not without him hearing us.’

  I sighed. ‘Good thing it’s not raining.’

  ‘Good thing I brought some light refreshments.’ Orlando took a bar of chocolate from one pocket and a square-shouldered National Health orange-juice bottle full of water from another.

  All around us the blackberry branches drooped, heavy with almost-ripe fruit. Here and there we could see berries which were at their peak of perfection, but we didn’t dare pick them, in case Yelland spotted us.

  ‘Rats in a trap,’ said Orlando, picking up on my own thoughts.

  So we lay there on the scented grass, playing word-games in whispers, neither of us anxious to think about what we had just seen. Nonetheless, it lay there at the back of our minds. My short hair now seemed more like a stigma, glueing me to someone to whom, for all her dash a
nd bravado, I perceived, too late, I had no wish to be connected. Mr Yelland grew increasingly bloated in my imagination, swaying above us like a vast empurpled barrage balloon, swollen with menace and repulsiveness. That furtive opening in his trousers, the fingers tightening on Nicola’s skin, her obvious collusion in whatever nastiness was being enacted in front of our disbelieving eyes. I didn’t want to think about it ever again. Even then I knew it would haunt me until some greater nastiness occurred and took its place.

  We got back to find Glenfield in an uproar. A pink-eyed Ava cowered in the drawing-room, clutching Bella close to her, while my mother stood in the garden, confronting a man who shouted and gesticulated, his accent coarse, his face red and fierce.

  Ava was one of the pillars of my life, stalwart, steady, predictable. To find her weeping and diminished weakened the structures of my own existence in a way that frightened me.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked Callum, home on leave from National Service in the Navy, who was lurking near my mother with a hockey stick in his hand, idly pretending to hit a tennis ball, but in reality there to protect Fiona from any violent outburst the red-faced man might produce.

  ‘It’s Ava’s husband, come back to claim his bride.’ My eldest brother was big, with the broad shoulders and thick neck of a rugby-player. Already in his second year of medical school in Edinburgh, he was a distant figure to me, yet one who exuded the same kind of security as Ava. ‘And she doesn’t want to go with him.’

  ‘I don’t blame her.’

  ‘Nor me.’

  ‘I wonder how he tracked her down.’ We knew Ava had absconded while her violent soldier-boy was overseas, had snatched up her child and her fancy clothes, her Soir de Paris by Bourjois, her peep-toe shoes and flimsy undergarments and fled. Like her, we had assumed that her husband would never find her.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll just have to accept the situation, Mr Edwardes,’ Fiona was saying.

  ‘You fuckin’ old cow,’ Edwardes lunged in my mother’s direction but stopped when Callum casually flourished the hockey stick.

  ‘She’s had quite enough of your unacceptable behaviour.’ My mother had adopted what Orlando called her Empire-building voice, ideally adapted to calling recalcitrant natives to order, and warding off man-eating tigers.

  ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’

  ‘In this instance, I believe I can. Your wife and child live beneath my roof and have placed themselves under my protection.’ Fiona was magnificent.

  ‘I’ve got my rights.’

  ‘So has she.’

  ‘The girl is my daughter too, you know.’

  ‘Are you referring to Arabella?’ said my mother, at her iciest.

  ‘She’s no more an Arabella than I’m a . . . a ballet dancer.’ Edwardes rose unsteadily on to his toes and lifted his arms above his head. ‘Took her down the registry office myself, registered her as Enid after my mum.’

  ‘That probably counts as a crime against a minor,’ said Orlando in my ear.

  ‘Enid Gladys,’ said Edwardes. ‘That’s her name. And as for that bitch indoors, Ava’s not her name neither.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that. Mrs Edwardes explained in graphic detail the reasons for her choosing to change her name. I think you can probably remember some of them.’

  ‘Don’t give me that bollocks,’ snarled the man, bunching his fists. ‘I fought for King and Country, and I got a right to my family around me now.’

  ‘And they have a right to stay here. This isn’t the Victorian era, when a wife was her husband’s chattel, you know.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘And if you haven’t removed yourself from my property within the next three minutes, I shall call the police and have you arrested for trespass.’

  I loved my mother deeply though I did not always esteem her. But at that moment, I admired her more than I could have imagined. Brave, indomitable, generous of heart and spirit; even if she had once tried to give me away to some Swedes, I knew then that she would fight for us wherever and whenever necessary, that she would always do what was right.

  ‘Keep your hair on,’ slurred Mr Edwardes. ‘I’ll go. But don’t think you’ve heard the last of this.’ He looked at the French windows and raised his voice so that Ava could hear. ‘You too, you bloody slag! I’ll be back, don’t you worry.’

  We stood in a protective half-circle, shielding the hidden Ava from anything further, and after a hesitant moment, he turned and stumbled off down the short gravel drive to the gate.

  ‘Phew . . .’ Callum let out his breath in a windy sigh. ‘Now what do we do? He’s bound to hang about here, frightening poor Ava into fits.’

  ‘He might even try to kidnap Bella,’ Orlando said.

  ‘Unfortunately, you may well be right,’ said Fiona. ‘How on earth did he find her, I wonder?’

  ‘It’s that Nicola,’ Ava said. ‘I know it is.’ The tip of her nose was red, her eyes were watery. She sniffed into a lace-edged handkerchief. ‘She was asking me all sort of questions a couple of weeks ago, and like a fool, I told her.’

  ‘And somehow she tracked down your husband?’ said Fiona. ‘Surely not.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be difficult,’ said Orlando. ‘Not if you were determined. There’s all sorts of information down at the library, if you know what to look for.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Well, I’m flabbergasted. That anyone would do such a thing in the first place, and secondly that someone so young could be so . . . so malicious.’ She surveyed her own brood, and shook her head. ‘I simply can’t imagine any of you doing such a thing.’

  ‘Perhaps Ava needs bodyguards,’ Orlando suggested. ‘You could use Julian and the others?’

  ‘It sounds a little melodramatic.’

  ‘Obviously they wouldn’t be carrying weapons or anything –’ I said.

  ‘I should think not!’

  ‘– they’d just be sort of there, to let him know he’s being watched.’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ Fiona’s forehead creased. ‘I suppose for a few days, something along those lines can’t do any harm.’ She gave me one of her cool grey stares. ‘I’ll have a word or two with their mothers.’

  It wasn’t until I was in bed that night that I had time to consider the scene played out between Nicola and Mr Yelland. Despite my brothers, I was still largely ignorant of the realities of physical sex, but because Fiona encouraged us to read everything we could, I knew a lot about it in theory. Especially the seamier side. Furtive transactions, red lights, men in dirty raincoats, brothels, tightly corseted Madames, prostitutes with hearts of gold. And try as I might to rationalize it, there was no escaping the fact that whatever Nicola was doing, it could only be described as seamy. What I found particularly difficult to encompass was the matter-of-fact way in which she had handled the incident, as though she had done it many times before, and with other men. I passionately wished I had not witnessed the scene.

  A flash of Orlando’s face came back to me. In the darkness of my bedroom, I was able to examine it more carefully, and come to the conclusion that while its predominant emotion had been one of shock, there’d been a certain amount of satisfaction there too. But what could he have been satisfied about? I wondered if he’d seen Nicola and Yelland up there before. Whether he had persuaded me up to the Secret Glade in order to demonstrate just what kind of a girl she was. To shatter whatever illusions about her I still held intact.

  My mother obviously spoke to the mothers of David, Jeremy, Julian and Charles. The boys found themselves more comfortable with a tangible enemy like Edwardes than they’d been with the possibility of a spy lurking on Mrs Sheffield’s first floor. For a few days, Bella and Ava were escorted wherever they went, which proved useful for carrying the shopping. The red-faced husband could be seen from time to time, lurching along the front, or balefully eyeing the house, or, if it was after dark, shouting obscenities at us.

  I did
n’t tell anyone, not even Orlando, but I was sure Ava was right. I’d seen Nicola once, from Sasha’s window, sitting on a bench, talking to a man I now recognized as Edwardes. She had been pointing at our windows, and it hadn’t looked as though she was using some of her own ripe language to tell him to leave us alone. Quite the opposite.

  SIX

  Fiona smiled at us across the breakfast table. ‘Good news, darlings. Or bad, depending on your outlook.’

  Most of us looked apprehensive. ‘What?’

  ‘You’re sending us all to an orphanage and taking the veil,’ hazarded Orlando.

  ‘I said good news, Orlando.’

  ‘Maybe the little blighter considers an orphanage good news,’ muttered Bertram Yelland. He surveyed his porridge. ‘Can’t say I blame him.’

  ‘Is this likely to affect us all, Mrs Beecham, or just the immediate family?’ asked Gordon.

  Miss Vane sipped her tea, one finger neatly raised, and said nothing. I saw her reach one plump hand out for a fourth piece of toast and then, flushing, glancing sideways at me, pull it back, while I carefully pretended not to have noticed.

  ‘Well, obviously it will have repercussions for all of us.’ Fiona beamed at us. ‘My husband and I have finally found a suitable house for us. It’s an old mill house, with the original mill-wheel still there, and a millpond and about an acre of ground.’

  ‘It sounds awfully grand,’ said Orlando. ‘How can we afford it?’

  ‘It’s all down to Aunt.’ Instinctively we raised our eyes to the ceiling, where the old lady could be heard shuffling about in her room, burning toast, spilling tea, dropping cutlery, enjoying her independence. Looking back, I can see that Fiona’s brand of inattention was in fact the kindest sort of care. The fact that Aunt’s teacups still needed washing after she’d washed them, that she occasionally left little patches of damp on her armchair cushions, that food sometimes spilled onto her jumpers, was immaterial. She still had an illusion of independence, she made her own meals, she lived autonomously.