He rolls his own fags. His first two fingers are stained yellow. He keeps his tobacco in a genuine old Bisto tin that he reckons is worth some money.
He won’t use tissues. Trevor demands crisp white handkerchiefs, which he insists she boil on top of the stove in the same way his mother does.
He makes her dial if he wants to phone.
The top of his egg must be sliced by a knife so that no bits of shell are broken.
In the meantime the kids will stay with Maddy, a friend and sympathizer from the centre, who sometimes helps out as a stop-gap measure for women with temporary problems. The best thing about Maddy is that she’s unlikely to be traced: she is not a battered wife. Madeleine Kelly is a middle-aged woman of independent means who lives in a cottage in Caldy, the posh side of the river. Kirsty met her just once at the centre, and once was all it had taken for her to feel reassured. If only she’d had a mother like Maddy, a large, round Mrs Apple with a body all soft and folded, who could have come straight from a nursery rhyme. She searched her face most carefully. There was gaiety and relaxation about her, and her laugh was wholesome and catching. She has fostered difficult kids all her life and lives in a homely muddle under thatch, her garden has a stream running through it and she keeps three gentle old dogs. She would be overjoyed to have Jake and Gemma until the end of September and wouldn’t hear of accepting any money. They will not attend school through the summer, but Maddy will teach them herself, give them love, toffee apples, cake mix and cuddles. Kirsty is not to worry. Maddy is merely a phone call away; she will write at least twice a week, and at the first sign of the slightest trouble she will let Kirsty know. Trevor will not pose a problem. No leads will take him to Maddy. But four months is so long.
‘Four months can be a very long time in the life of a child, Lord knows,’ Maddy agreed, nodding so her two chins met. ‘But not in my home,’ she purred. ‘Not with my old dogs, bless ’em. Not with my ducks and my chickens. You go on, my poor Kirsty. I know it’s hard, but you’re doing the right thing. Their four months with me will be one long, happy holiday. Now don’t your kids deserve that much after all they’ve been through?’
And Kirsty, only dimly aware that there was a world like this with such people in it, burst into tears.
He wears the spiky crucifix he was given at his First Holy Communion. Sometimes the silver chain causes a rash on the back of his neck.
Kirsty had expected to feel triumphant by now, so what is this sense of anticlimax? The suitcase rumbles around in the bus. She steadies it with a sweating hand which she wipes on her rain-soaked jacket. Is that his walk? She presses her face against the glass when, with sudden terror, she thinks she sees him hurrying along because of the rain. No, no, it can’t have been him. By now he will be at home in the dry, ringing his mother to ask if she’s there. Hah. Why would she go there? She had gone there once in the early days, hoping for sanctuary, sympathy, advice and understanding. After all, Edna had given birth to eight children; she should have some answers worth hearing. Had she known that her son was an animal? Was his condition genetic? Kirsty would have liked to ask Edna something about her own married life. She didn’t get the chance. She had struggled to Edna’s with a broken arm and a push chair and a child with mumps. Some hope of help from a woman with ‘I beheld Satan like lightning fall from Heaven,’ embroidered on a plaque on the wall. Beside her small coal fire, in a house that smelled of Sundays and sprouts, Edna raised her head and closed her eyes tight. ‘There is nothing more pleasing to God than suffering bravely borne,’ she had said in a voice divinely inspired. Then she rang for the ambulance. The following Christmas she gave Kirsty the text that assured her Jesus would carry her.
Kirsty didn’t want the doctor to know. He must have suspected something, of course, with all those hospital visits—accident prone, she laughed it off. She dreaded the kids being on some register, social workers nosing about and the threat of having them taken away. She was a bad and ineffective mother because she allowed herself to be abused, and Jake and Gemma saw the violence. They felt the violence, they ate, drank and slept the violence, although Trev never touched them—not yet—although there were threats. She kept them out of the house as long as she could at weekends in the park, by the river. On weekdays they went to bed early.
And there was nobody else to help her. When Kirsty first craved tea and sympathy she found this fact quite astonishing. How had this happened, her gradual and almost unnoticed alienation from the world? Since her marriage and the children she’d had little time to keep up with friends, and Trev was so disapproving, so rude to the few that were left, that it was easier not to bother. In some appalling and inexplicable way there was a comfortable justification in bowing down and submitting to him. After all, he loved her. He never meant to hurt her, to wrong her. He said he hated his own blind fury. Slowly but surely the Christmas-card list grew shorter and petered out, save for Trev’s scattered relations. Kirsty has no family to speak of—just a brother somewhere in Australia, and he hasn’t written in years, not since he married. She doesn’t even know Ralph’s address any more. They were both brought up by their father, who died the year after her marriage. The girls at the store have their own dramas and Kirsty has never mixed much with them, Trev’s demands being so heavy, his jealousy and distrust so shaming. Because of the loss of her friends, Kirsty realized with a sudden and vast kind of loneliness, she hasn’t laughed properly in years.
And all in the name of love.
‘Nothing’s ever fun with you,’ Trevor said, ‘miserable slut. Forever whining.’
‘Laugh, laugh,’ he would goad her, ‘laugh for God’s sake. Stop your bloody lamenting.’
But sometimes she wondered if he was gay, in spite of his loud masculinity, or whether he hated women, because of the things he did to her, and with such ugly ferocity.
Kirsty sits on the station concourse, nervously sipping an overstewed coffee, her eyes glued to the noticeboard, her ears straining to catch the announcements. She will board her train the minute it’s in. The ticket in her hand is something to treasure, a jewel that took eight years to possess and which is more priceless than a Pharaoh’s gold.
Two
THERE IS STILL A long way to go. Heart pounding, half shambling, Kirsty eventually finds her booked seat and collapses into it, closing her eyes. Then, in panic, she covers her face with her book in case Trev might be raging up and down the platform, peering into the carriages through hooded, angry eyes. There are two spotty guys across the table and a girl with wild black hair sitting next to her; she took this in before she collapsed but not much else about them. Maybe they are going to the Burleston—a block booking, who knows? And that large girl across the aisle; she looks nervous and untravelled. As the train pulls out of Lime Street Station, Kirsty very slowly brings her eyes out of hiding, raises them shyly from her book, over the top of the smell of damp clothes.
She gives such a sigh of relief when the platform slips past without sight or sound of a rampaging Trevor that she fears everyone must have heard, including the girl across the way. Kirsty gives her a sideways glance. Poor thing. Kirsty might be nervous, but if so she’s not alone. The timid-looking girl sitting opposite is far from happy with her surroundings and her distress reaches Kirsty across the airwaves like the tinny sounds of somebody’s Walkman. Kirsty’s focus dwindles uncomfortably to the three tipsy sailors who share the girl’s table.
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
A non-smoking carriage, of course, Kirsty muses, summing up the girl. This girl, identified by the labels on her luggage left in the recess next to the door, would not appreciate smoke attaching itself to that cheap new suit. Is that the first suit she has ever had? The first time she has ever left home? Indeed, the first long journey she has ever made without her family, except with the Guides to the Lake District when she was about twelve years old?
It looks pretty much like it.
There is such a fresh-faced innocence about her.
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Kirsty deals in fantasy, a subject on which she has expertise. And her fantasy was later confirmed when Avril told her she had bought the suit with her mother’s help and encouragement. ‘Of course it’s a business suit,’ said her mother, insisting on going round George Henry Lees instead of Dorothy Perkins, which she suggested, quite correctly, would probably not stock her daughter’s size. ‘All suits are business suits. You wouldn’t wear something as stiff as this for mucking about at home.’
Kirsty’s favourite preoccupation is summing up other people. Pity she didn’t work harder on Trev in the months before she married him.
Avril told Kirsty later how the conversation had gone. ‘But there are other aspects of life, you know, Mother. It’s not just home and work, home and work, with the odd outing to Safeways. Well, not for other people it’s not.’
‘Start,’ said her mother, ‘as you mean to go on. If you look businesslike that’s how they will treat you: with respect, politely. If you look like a ne’er-do-well—long, uncombed hair and mismatched accessories—then you can’t complain if they treat you that way.’
But surely a suit from Dorothy Perkins wouldn’t have ne’er-do-well stamped all over it? And it might be a tad more fashionable than the one they had finally come home with, the one which was itching her then, and constricting her arm and shoulder movements.
‘Trust me, dear,’ said Avril’s mother. ‘I said you would get the job, and you did. Fast and accurate, that’s what you are, and you must remember that.’
The haircut that made Avril ‘businesslike’ is a short, sensible bob which accentuates her wide face with its flat, overlarge features. ‘Strange,’ Avril told Kirsty afterwards, ‘how the word business conjures up bowel movements, or something that is other people’s and makes you seem nosy for asking. The sort of word Mother uses, and just as nasty; words spoken carefully and correctly, like vagina, napkin, testicles, motor car, time of the month and spermatozoa. When some people say them they make them sound shocking.’
There are certainly pluses to be gained from growing up without such a mother. Without any mother at all, thought Kirsty.
The diary, just visible over the top of the plump girl’s bag, is headed Business Studies. ‘My toes curl up when I have to say that’s the subject I did,’ said Avril when Kirsty got to know her. ‘Not psychology or media studies; they were out of the question, courses that sounded like stars in the night, unattainable, there, shining, distant, tempting and beautiful at the far horizons of my world.’
Kirsty would love to have gone to college.
For a flickering moment she envied Avril, she envied her her dominant mother and Avril’s complacent aura of safety.
‘Even the students on our course looked suitably boring compared to the others in the tech art and design departments, drama, music, languages, or science and technology,’ Avril told her wistfully. ‘But Mother was right, as usual. I would stick out like a sore thumb doing any of those exciting subjects. I was too fat. I had no style. It was worse when Dad called me his little beauty.’ But if anyone had bothered to look harder they might have realized that her dad was right: Avril could be improved upon, even though she is fat. Her face has a sweetness about it, her skin is flawless, her wide blue eyes are compelling to look at and ‘merry’ in an old-fashioned way, and if she’d had a decent hairdresser instead of Shirley at Carta’s Parlour, if her hair had been allowed to grow longer so that it curled around her neck and gave her a bit of height on top, she might not have been beautiful in the popularly accepted sense, but she would have looked interesting, striking. Because of the world’s perception of her, poor Avril is shy, boring and ultra-introverted, and she knows it. ‘I mean, when I heard the news that the drama students sitting cross-legged in a circle at the very beginning of term were made to introduce themselves in a ringing, operatic fashion I nearly puked with horror.’
While those, like Avril, doing business studies were given a file and a shared computer and sat in rigid, silent lines. Far more suitable. Far safer. And their tutors, thank God, were all women.
But Kirsty doesn’t know Avril yet. She dreams on in her imagination, her head resting back on the seat, lost in the safety of let’s pretend.
‘Homely’ is the word for the girl who sits opposite. And it’s true, Avril does love her home: the comfortable bedroom at the top of the house with which she is so familiar; the dear old kitchen with its Formica tops which haven’t changed since the house was built; the tiled beige fireplace into which is inserted that most efficient electric false flame with the wooden surrounds and its small brass ornaments. ‘I Remember, I Remember’, was her favourite poem at school. With that much-loved poem she won a certificate in elocution. Her family is tiny and super-nuclear. The word stifling comes to mind, and when Kirsty found out she felt envious again. They do family things like play Trivial Pursuit, go out for a Chinese on a Friday night and visit Granny on Sundays.
And now the poor child is leaving all this behind and taking off on her first great adventure. Kirsty tries hard not to stare as the girl tries to blink away tears, wiping them with a handkerchief corner as if there’s something stuck there that she is trying, discreetly, to remove.
Avril’s mother would despise her companions.
Her seat was booked by the Burleston beforehand; if not, Avril, increasingly uncomfortable, would have moved elsewhere by now. Although there are spaces and she would prefer a smaller, two-seater arrangement where she could park her bag on the neighbouring seat and thus discourage insensitive passengers, she lacks the courage to do so, and Kirsty sympathized with that when she told her. ‘I felt nervous enough, worried enough, at leaving my luggage beside the door. What if someone made off with it? All my worldly goods in two Marks & Spencer tartan cases.’
Avril has her own sandwiches and a large flask of sweet tea. ‘You don’t want to pay those wicked buffet prices,’ her mother had said, arranging the tuna. But her three companions care nothing for prices. Their whole journey so far has consisted of visits to the loo and the buffet, only to return with even more cans of extra-strong lager. ‘I was dead scared of unwrapping those sandwiches, even though my tummy was rumbling. I knew what they’d make of that fierce smell of fish. What if those sailors thought it was me? What if they thought the smell came from my knickers?’
Kirsty knows what she means. The sailors are taking the piss. You can tell this by the rolling of an eye, the dig of an elbow, the wink of a lid, and Avril knows what is happening. She is used to looking for clues like this from way back in her early playground days. They have a particular way of speaking, defiantly vulgar, as if to include her. ‘I kept my eyes fixed hard on my book but I couldn’t take in one word,’ she told Kirsty. ‘I just hoped they would get out at Plymouth before they got too pissed and started behaving embarrassingly, showing me up, mocking me openly.’
Kirsty, who makes up people as a hobby, guesses this girl has never had a boyfriend.
It’s possible that she believes nobody else goes through life as wistful and utterly solitary as she. How wrong she is. How wrong.
‘Yep, I was beginning to think that no man would ever want me or undress me or feel me or bring me flowers. I knew I would never get married. At times I thought I might be gay just because that would be easier.’ She described the homely girls like her doing business studies, who went round in black tights, pleated skirts and anoraks. ‘And I’ve read every book about nuns there is. I mean, what a happy release that would be.’ Given time and faith she would worship God in the same sort of exquisite, tingling, distant way she had worshipped some boy in the fourth year. A habit might slim her down. She had fantasized, under covers of course, of throwing herself down on a cold, slate floor in the shape of a crucifix and confessing her sins to a cruel, black-clad inquisitor. Only in these shameful dreams she was naked, and afterwards everyone ‘had her’ as she lay back spread over the altar. Oh dear, oh dear, more satanic than Christian. And what would Mother say?
&nbs
p; Avril plucks up courage and glances around. There would probably be other ‘girls’ like her on the train, Mother had said, all going to the Burleston Hotel to begin the new season. Mother especially approved of the idea of Avril ‘living in’. A good way to ‘grow into independence’, and Mother has the housekeeper’s assurance that she will keep an eye on young Avril. At the interviews for the various posts, Avril was surprised by the scope. There were chambermaid jobs, vacancies for waitresses, porters and office staff, like herself, one children’s nanny, two lifeguards, porters, chefs, washers up and cleaners. Why did they need to look in Liverpool? Weren’t the locals more handy?
‘There’s probably no local population to speak of,’ said Mother. ‘The place is in the middle of nowhere, and the Cornish are notoriously lazy. It’s the pace of life. It’s a different world.’
But the Burleston was open all year round. Couldn’t they keep their staff?
She had asked this at the interview—well, obviously not in those words. Mother rehearsed her, ‘Will there be any possibility of a full-time job with you if you find my work satisfactory?’
The answer, given by a tarty recruitment-agency official with one-inch-long red fingernails, was simple. Raised expectations. ‘In this day and age not many people, I’m afraid, Miss Stott, are willing to shut themselves away from the world for longer than one season.’ The blond-headed woman with the blotchy lashes gave Avril a small, tight smile and tapped one nail on the folder before her. ‘I must emphasize again, Miss Stott, that the Burleston caters for a certain, select class of guest. Those who are looking for peace and quiet, right away from the hurly-burly. Thus Colonel Parker’s policy is not to offer any kind of glamorous nightlife, or organize events or outings, or encourage guests who are young or unmarried or groups of the same sex. Families are the hotel’s bread and butter, young families during the summer and older clientele in the winter, you understand. Many go to the Burleston to use the exclusive nine-hole golf course and they sometimes arrange small competitions, I believe, if the guests so desire.’
Veil of Darkness Page 2