Looking For Lucy

by Julie Houston

  ‘I’m actually on my way to the rectory after this,’ Ben said, wolfing down his wholemeal egg mayo wrap. ‘I said I’d pop in and see Sarah, take her some sumac and baharat for her salads, from the wholefood shop on Kirkham Road.’

  ‘Very nice, I’m sure,’ Gloria said, her mouth a pursed dog’s bum. ‘Although I have to say, I prefer a soupcon of salad cream or Branston Pickle, myself.’

  *

  The first time Roger squeezed her arm with enough force to leave vivid fingerprints on the pale skin around her wrist, Sarah assumed he’d done so without realising just how strong his grip could be. They’d been married only three months and were living in Cheltenham, a town Sarah had immediately adored even though it reminded her very much of Harrogate with its associative memories of her parents’ and siblings’ virtual abandonment of her while serving her prison sentence near Manchester.

  It was Christmas, their first Christmas together as a married couple after moving to the south west on Roger’s new appointment to the Gloucester diocese. His promotion, after four years as vicar in the small Manchester parish that had included in its mandate the chaplaincy of the nearby women’s prison, was, Roger felt, long overdue and he accepted with alacrity, feeling that he could now ask Sarah to marry him on her imminent release, taking her to a town where no one would know anything of her shameful past.

  Roger had fallen in love with her the minute her sad, haunted eyes had met his. With her mass of dark, cloudy hair and large, full mouth just waiting to be kissed, Sarah Sykes filled his dreams, his every waking moment and what had, at first, appeared daunting, thrice-weekly visits beyond the huge prison gates, were now looked forward to with eager anticipation. Once he’d come to terms with the gauntlet of shouting, cackling inmates and had even learned to parry their blatantly coarse comments with some ribald backchat of his own, Roger began to thoroughly enjoy his afternoons with the women, and particularly with Sarah.

  In the last year of her sentence, and with a reputation among the prison staff for impeccable behaviour, Sarah had been assigned to help the visiting art teacher in the educational wing. It was here that Roger would find himself heading every week on the pretext of speaking to the women who had, so far, avoided his offer of talk and prayer. Tall, good-looking and with the athletic frame of one who had fully immersed himself in all sports both at his minor public school and university, he was doted upon by inmates and staff alike and many a prison guard made sure her Carmen rollers and Wonderbra were ready for action on the mornings of the Rev. Roger Rabbitt’s visits.

  That first time, it had been Roger’s first Midnight Mass in his new church and, anticipating a huge crowd inspired as much by an over-imbibing of Christmas cheer as a desire to participate in the yearly ritual of welcoming the divine Child, he had been nervously rehearsing his intended message to the good people of Cheltenham for days.

  ‘Sarah, I can’t find my new surplice,’ Roger had shouted up the stairs to the bathroom where Sarah was having a bath in readiness for her Christmas appearance as ‘new young vicar’s new young wife’. ‘The new one I wore last week, but asked you to wash specially for Mass tonight?’

  ‘I bet it’s still in the washing machine,’ Sarah had called back down. ‘If you fish it out and put it to dry on the creel, it should be ready for me to iron later on…’

  Sarah had just been pulling herself out of the bath when Roger calmly walked in with a blue sheet in his hands. She’d stared at it for a second, trying to place which bed it must have come from, and then, realising it was Roger’s new surplice, got a fit of the giggles. ‘Oh, God, Roger, I’m sorry,’ she’d laughed. ‘I must have washed it with those new navy towels Rosemary gave us for a wedding present. I know, perhaps you can wear it with a white tablecloth wrapped round your head and pretend to be the Virgin Mary. It would be very authentic; go down a storm.’ Sarah had laughed again, reaching for a towel to dry herself at the same time as Rev. Roger had reached for her wrist, twisting it as he dug his powerful fingers and nails into her.

  She’d dropped the towel, squealing in pain and shock as he continued to twist her arm. ‘Roger, what the hell are you doing?’

  ‘You stupid girl,’ he’d hissed close up, flecks of spittle landing on her face. ‘Don’t you ever try to make me look stupid again…’

  Her legs had been shaking as he suddenly let go of her arm, and she’d stumbled backwards onto the cold metal of the ancient bath. Roger had thrown the surplice at her and walked out, just as calmly as he had entered only a minute earlier.

  Numbly, Sarah had pulled the plug on the cooling scummy bath water, held her aching, reddening wrist under the cold-water tap for a couple of minutes and then dressed and gone downstairs.

  ‘Roger?’

  ‘Don’t worry, darling.’ Roger had smiled across the kitchen at her. ‘I can wear one of the other surplices. Kettle’s on. Tea?’

  ‘Roger, you really hurt me. Look.’ Sarah had held out her wrist where tiny pinprick blood blisters had appeared.’

  ‘Our first tiff, darling. Let’s make sure we don’t have any more.’ Roger had pulled the sleeve of Sarah’s sweater down over the offending wrist and, placing a hand at the back of her head, pulled her towards him and kissed her so gently she could almost believe the events of the last ten minutes had all been in her imagination.

  Maybe she was overreacting, Sarah had thought to herself later that evening as she sat on the front pew while Roger—in his next-best surplice—wooed a full house with his good looks and humorous narrative. She’d always been too sensitive, she’d told herself. Look how she’d cried those first weeks when, as a terrified gangly eight-year-old, she’d first been sent off to boarding school; how she sobbed every time Bambi fell on the ice; the months and months of protracted weeping for the two little girls she’d given away…

  The second time it happened was over six months later. Heavily pregnant with Jennifer, Sarah had left the preparations for their evening meal and gone into the garden in search of rosemary for the garlicky roast potatoes she was planning on cooking. Breathing in the heady scent of lavender, she’d plucked a couple of the lilac-coloured sprigs and, threading them through the undone buttonhole of her loose cotton frock, had lifted Gandalf, their inherited rectory cat, onto her lap and sat down with him, closing her eyes against the August late-afternoon heat.

  She’d been rudely awakened by a strong grip squeezing her shoulder, shoving her upwards from the deckchair, Gandalf fleeing to the safe haven of the nearby apple tree.

  ‘Get up,’ Roger had hissed in her ear and, dazed, she’d lumbered awkwardly to her feet, pulling the bulk of her pregnant belly up with her. ‘While you’re sunbathing yourself, there’s a pan that’s boiled itself dry on the stove. And the kitchen is a tip.’ Still holding her in a vice-like grip, his fingers sinking into the soft flesh of her upper arm, Roger had dragged her from the balmy warmth of the garden back into the cool depths of the rectory kitchen.

  ‘Is this the thanks I get for taking you on?’ he’d said coldly. ‘For marrying a drug smuggler? A slut who gave birth to her bastard children in prison? Clean the kitchen, Sarah. It’s an absolute disgrace, as are you.’ This time he’d not left her to it but had stood, arms folded over his blue short-sleeved shirt, his white dog collar the only sign of his being a man of God, as she lifted the burned, acrid-smelling contents of the pan from the stove over to the sink.

  She’d thought then about leaving him. Of packing a case and walking out. But where to? Where would she go? Her parents, while not quite believing a lowly C of E vicar to be good enough for the Honourable Sarah Sykes had, nevertheless, been grateful for Roger’s taking on their wayward younger daughter and had given their blessing to the union, relieved that by moving down to Cheltenham with Roger she would be out of their hair, no longer their responsibility.

  Gerald and Anne Sykes, together with Rosemary, and Roger’s mother, Iris, had been in attendance at the very simple ceremony at Roger’s own church in Manchester and had
coughed up for the celebratory meal in an up and coming restaurant on the outskirts of nearby Cheshire afterwards. Immediately the meal was over, Roger had driven his new wife down to Cheltenham, leaving Rosemary to accompany their mother to the station and her train back to Birmingham.

  For Sarah to arrive back on Gerald and Anne’s doorstep, seven months pregnant and with a suitcase but no husband, would not, she knew, be greeted with any modicum of either sympathy or joy. Anyway, her parents, she suddenly remembered, as she stood, dry-eyed, crushing garlic at the kitchen unit, were away in South Africa, enjoying a two months’ stay with the British High Commissioner—a friend of Anne’s from her London days—in Cape Town.

  She was, Sarah reflected dully, as much a prisoner here as she had been in Manchester. Perhaps once her baby was born she would be in more of a position to sort herself out, to put the baby in a nursery, to find a job to keep them both.

  Over the ensuing years, with Jennifer, Jamie and then Poppy to look after, Sarah’s resolve to leave grew weaker. She adored her children, couldn’t countenance abandoning them as she had once abandoned those other two tiny little girls, but with each passing year of being married to Roger something in Sarah died.

  Once the family moved back north to the village between Harrogate and Leeds, Roger railed daily against the lack of any further promotion while Sarah was reconciled, to some degree, with her parents.

  Sometimes years would pass without incident from Roger and then, out of the blue, when her guard was down, something would provoke his anger and Sarah would find herself gripped and squeezed, her wrists twisted, her arms pulled behind her, her fingers bent back.

  On only one occasion had Sarah ever retaliated. Poppy was just a tiny baby and Roger, unable to concentrate on writing his sermon because of her constant, colicky crying, had burst from his study and, grabbing Sarah’s long hair, had twisted it round and round his hands until she thought she must surely be scalped. Sarah had suddenly lost it: all the unfairness of her imprisonment; the forced giving up of her little girls; the years of fear over Roger’s outbursts suddenly coming to the fore in a red mist that obliterated everything except the uncontrollable rage to hit back. Once he’d let go of her hair she’d stood, trembling with fury and, bringing up her clenched right fist, hit him with such force he’d stumbled back in surprise.

  ‘If you ever, ever touch me again,’ she’d screamed, hitting him once again, this time with a left hook, ‘I will go to the bishop… the News of The World… the… the Archbishop of fucking Canterbury, if necessary, and you, you pathetic bully will be sacked, ex-communicated…’

  Roger, instead of hitting back as she’d expected, had slunk from the house like a whipped dog only to appear, an hour later, bearing flowers. Since then, there had been the occasional arm twisting, the Chinese-burn type attacks on her wrist that left bruises, but she dealt with it, closing her eyes and her inner self until the storm had passed, knowing that her children, her precious babies, had no knowledge whatsoever that their father behaved in such an appalling way. One day, she always promised herself, one day when the children had all finally left home, then she would go; take a boat, a plane to somewhere, anywhere she could live a simple life in a tiny cottage by herself, grow her own food, create new recipes, paint and draw and forget the past, find a new future, find her babies even…

  *

  Ben Carey pushed open the rusting gate that led through to the back garden of the rectory and watched Sarah as she reached a pale, slender arm to the last of the plums from one of the three gnarled fruit trees. She was singing to herself, swearing occasionally as she dropped a flyblown purple fruit, no idea she had an audience. God, she was beautiful, he thought wistfully, one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen and yet she was totally unaware of her own allure.

  ‘Hi, Sarah, I’ve got the stuff from Harrogate you wanted,’ he called and she turned, smiling as she saw him standing there.

  24

  On a dreary Monday morning during the October half-term holiday, Ferguson, Harvey and Williams, the estate agents instructed by Peter’s solicitors to sell the house, descended en masse with tape measures, cameras and clipboards to case the joint. At least that’s how it appeared as I left Max and Allegra watching some dreadful, mind-rotting TV I wouldn’t normally have allowed and went upstairs to try, once more, to prise Sophie from her bed.

  ‘Sophie, darling, you really must get up now. The estate agents are here to measure up; you don’t want them to see you in your pyjamas.’

  Not a sound came from behind Sophie’s closed bedroom door; nothing at all to indicate that a sixteen-year-old girl was in there.

  ‘Sophie?’ I knocked once more and went in, drawing a sharp intake of breath at the disarray, the total and utter dishevelment that met my eyes once they were accustomed to the almost blackout-darkness of the room. ‘Sophie, you have to get up. I’m going to pull the curtains.’

  ‘Sod off. It’s the middle of the sodding night.’ The hump in the middle of the huge king-sized bed turned, pulling the duvet to block out the weak October daylight that filtered through as I pulled up the blind and drew the curtains. A hurricane, a tornado, a tsunami even, must have passed through the room. The utter mess in Sophie’s room could not, surely, have been created by one teenage girl. Half-full cups of coffee and dirty plates littered every surface—I spotted the remains of at least two meals Sophie had sneeringly rejected down in the kitchen—and drawers and cupboards trailing scarves, tops and jeans yawned wide, spewing their contents onto the makeup-smeared cream carpet. Dirty pants, miniscule thongs and the feats of engineering that were Sophie’s bras hung from every available door handle or lay, scattered randomly, on the floor and the bed, while the huge trunk that had accompanied Sophie back from boarding school a week earlier remained unpacked. Bottles of foundation and nail varnish remover had lost their lids, and a dusting of bronzing powder had spread tenaciously over the top of the dressing table like a sprinkling of exotically coloured icing sugar. And over everything hung the cloyingly sweet smell of cheap perfume and stale cigarettes.

  ‘Jesus,’ I breathed, taking in every aspect of the room. ‘Jesus Christ…’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ the disembodied voice rebuked from the depths of the bed, ‘but it would appear the events of the last few weeks have proved beyond doubt that, like Santa, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, the great man is yet another figment of adult imagination.’

  While Sophie, I mused, might run true to teenage form with regards to her disgusting bedroom and appalling behaviour, her way with words could be amusingly adult. Maybe that’s where I was going wrong in my handling of my stepdaughter; maybe I should try harder to treat her as an emerging adult rather than the recalcitrant child she so often appeared. With this in mind, I walked over to the spacious en-suite bathroom that was a feature of all the bedrooms in this fabulous house that very soon we would all have to leave.

  ‘Jesus wept.’ I jumped back in horror at the prevalence of dead insects conglomerating in the white basin at the far side of the bathroom.

  ‘If he doesn’t exist he can’t weep.’

  Tentatively, I walked over to get a better look.

  Over the past week I—and Izzy when she was round—had watched in wonder as Sophie had, daily, added several more layers of mascara to her already sooty eyelashes until, by the end of the week, she was beginning to resemble a pantomime dame. Izzy and I had even taken bets as to how on earth she was going to remove it all without the eye-makeup remover I’d offered but which had been witheringly turned down. I now realised just how she’d removed a week’s build-up of gunk: in and around Sophie’s bathroom sink and mirror were myriad spiders’ legs of mascara, painstakingly and patiently pulled off and abandoned without a care.

  ‘Right. Enough, Sophie,’ I snapped, pulling back the duvet. ‘Up. Now. There are men coming up to the bedrooms very soon.’

  ‘Oh, just up your street, Clem. You’ll know what to do with them up here,
won’t you?’

  My hands itched to crack her legs, and I found myself about to rise to the bait when Allegra appeared round the door.

  ‘Mummy…’

  ‘Oh, is that the little car? Hello, little Audi—oops sorry, wrong car name.’

  ‘Cut it out, Sophie,’ I snapped again, but this time seizing the duvet and, with one swift move, dragging it off the bed and behind me. ‘What is it, Allegra? What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s Max, Mummy. He’s crying.’

  I ran down the steps with Allegra on my heels and found Max on the sitting-room floor, curled like a foetus around a large framed photograph of Vanessa, while two estate agents looked on, embarrassed.

  ‘Darling, come on, up you get.’ I had to get down on my knees and gently prise the frame from Max’s hands before pulling him onto my knee. ‘Shh, now, shh. I know, I know,’ I crooned as Max continued to sob, great fat tears that splashed onto my jeans turning the light blue denim dark.

  ‘Would you mind measuring up somewhere else for just a few minutes?’ I asked the men. ‘I’ll take the children out for a walk with the dog.’ I stroked Max’s hair and kissed his cheek. ‘Shall we do that, you two? Come on, let’s grab our willies and jellies… oops.’ I giggled ‘Silly me… wellies and gilets, and walk down to the village and get a hot chocolate.’

  If only, I thought, as the three of us, plus George, ran through the long wet grass of David Henderson’s fields and down to the village café, if only I could distract Sophie with the promise of hot chocolate as easily.

  *

  ‘Well, if you think I’m going to live in a house like this, you are much mistaken,’ Sophie snapped, gazing around the second double bedroom with raised eyebrows. ‘Where’s the en-suite?’

  I’d brought the children—insisting that Sophie should come along as well—to look round a house that had come up for sale near Izzy, and which Izzy had rung to tell me about the day before. It was the last day of the half-term holiday and I still had to drive over to the nearby sixth-form college to show Sophie where she would be starting the following Monday morning, as well as buy her some bits and pieces that she’d need for her new school. I’d ended up having a couple of heated arguments with the headteachers and office staff of the two most highly rated—and nearest—high schools who had assured me, in no uncertain terms, that, as oversubscribed schools, they were full to capacity and their doors were closed to any new pupils regardless of the fact that their address might be within a stone’s throw of the actual campus.