Eleanor stole a glance at Kat, who was smoking the cigarette at last, screwing up her eyebrows and doing her best to hold it like a man, between her thumb and index finger, the hot tip tucked into her palm. Pity rushed at her.
‘You can come and visit me, you know.’
Kat looked away. ‘Like that’s going to happen.’
‘You’ll be sixteen soon, he’ll let you then.’
‘I wouldn’t want to anyway. All those dull Oxford weirdos.’ She crossed her eyes.
‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’ She flicked the roll-up into a patch of soft mud, where it sat smoking.
‘Dad would be better if you left him alone more. If you didn’t always… get at him.’
‘Don’t fucking tell me how to deal with Dad.’ She dropped to a crouching position and circled the mushroom with her arms. Her bony knees stuck out from under the bunched-up panels of the dress. ‘We simply must eat this,’ she crooned. ‘Fried. On toast. Loads of butter.’
Her lips looked raw round the edges, making Eleanor wonder again about the night, whom Kat had been with, what they had done. Anxiety heaved, but so, dimly, did envy. In her own case, boys seemed to steer a wide berth, apart from Charlie Watson, the son of their farmer neighbour. Charlie had a straggly sun-bleached fringe and a crooked smile that masked a jumble of teeth. Whenever Eleanor saw him bouncing along in a farm vehicle, or striding across a field with his father, he waved and grinned. But whenever they got close he seemed to shrink into himself, stuttering inanities, unless they were actually kissing. She knew her height didn’t help. Standing up, his eyes were level with her collarbone. It made her want to run away sometimes, just to put the poor boy out of his misery.
From somewhere among the voluminous panels of her dress, Kat had whipped out a tiny penknife and was hacking at the stem of the mushroom.
Eleanor released an involuntary gasp. ‘Don’t. I told you, we don’t even know if we can eat it.’
‘And I told you, we can,’ Kat sneered. ‘It’s okay. The same kind are in the shops, just smaller. Christ, you’re such a scaredy-cat.’
‘I just don’t want to die,’ Eleanor muttered, adding to herself, ‘at least not today.’ She looked away, unable to watch.
‘Got ya,’ Kat cried, plucking the mushroom free and holding it over her head like a ghoulish trophy, heedless of the shower of earth raining into her silver bush of hair. ‘Wow, Ellie, look at that. Just huge. We should get a camera. Take a picture.’
‘Mark the day you poisoned me, you mean.’ They caught each other’s eye and laughed properly and joyfully, and suddenly Eleanor was so sad to be leaving, she could have wept.
They walked back in silence across the field, that year an empty square of weeds and compacted earth, Kat carelessly swinging the mushroom by its stalk.
‘Just don’t let Dad get you down, okay?’ she ventured as they neared the garden gate, ‘he can’t help how he is.’
‘Can’t he?’
‘You know he can’t.’
‘He should be taking you today.’
‘What?’
‘Today. He should be driving you. It’s not right.’
‘But Miss Zaphron wants to. It is only because of her that—’
‘Oh shit, I’m going to have to leg it.’ Kat jerked her head in the direction of a light that had flicked on at the largest of the vicarage’s top-floor windows. ‘If he catches me like this…’ She thrust the mushroom at Eleanor and set off at a run, taking the long way round the garden, under the lee of the hedge that fringed the silver birch wood.
Eleanor sighed and walked on, picturing how Kat would race up the drive and down the side of the house where the four stone steps plunged to the unlocked cellar door. From there she would scamper up the back staircase to her bedroom, silent as dear old Titch, the vicarage cat, prowling round their stop-start comings and goings on his neat tiger paws.
Entering the kitchen ten minutes later, Vincent’s eyes widened at the sight of the mushroom, which Eleanor had wiped clean and placed on a chopping board next to the frying pan. ‘What wonders the earth holds in store.’ He bent down to study it more closely, putting on his half-moon spectacles and taking them off again.
‘Kat says it’s okay to eat.’
‘Does she now.’ He tugged at the thinning grey fringe of his beard.
‘She does,’ Kat announced, appearing in the doorway behind them, miraculously spruce in her school uniform, her hair fastened into a ponytail that corralled the whorls of her hair into an explosion at the nape of her neck. ‘And you trust me, Daddy-oh, don’t you?’
‘Indeed I do,’ Vincent replied mildly, not looking at her. He turned to Eleanor instead, asking her if she was packed and ready. When she said she was, he said he had a gift for her. He disappeared to his study, returning a few minutes later with a small dog-eared dictionary. ‘To help you with all those essays you are going to have to write.’
‘Thanks Dad.’ Eleanor found it hard to speak. He was so rarely attentive, it caught her off guard.
‘Yeah, why use one short word where four long ones will do?’ snorted Kat, pushing between them to take charge of the cooking.
‘Not a morning for silliness, is it,’ said Vincent tightly, pulling out a chair to sit down. Eleanor could see the vein in his left temple twitching.
Kat had tied the frayed stained kitchen apron over her uniform and was slicing the mushroom into chunks, tossing them into a pool of melted butter in the frying pan. She stirred with a wooden spoon till the pieces hissed and shrivelled.
She was so needy and Vincent wouldn’t see it, Eleanor reflected sadly. Kat longed for attention and approval, but he blocked her at every turn. And maybe that wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t once done the opposite. It didn’t matter for her, she was used to being on the outside, negotiating the dark tunnels of her father’s moods. But Kat had never tried to negotiate anything. She just bulldozed on, making trouble. ‘Kat was the one who found the mushroom,’ she gabbled. ‘So clever of her. Inspired.’
‘She must have been up and out early for that.’
‘I was.’ Kat threw him a look from under her long mascara-blackened eyelashes. She lifted the frying pan off the hob, shaking and tossing the mushroom chunks as if they were a pancake. ‘Very early. I couldn’t sleep. I went for a walk.’
‘I’ll do toast,’ Eleanor muttered, rummaging for a knife and sawing with a desperation that went beyond the hardness of the bread. She shook the loose crumbs into the toaster, which hadn’t worked for years, and slid three fat slices of bread under the grill.
Seated in front of their food a few minutes later, the slabs of toast serving as hefty plates for the heaps of fried mushroom, Vincent pressed his palms together and closed his eyes, as he always did. Kat scowled at Eleanor, as she always did. I can’t wait to go, Eleanor thought wildly as her emotions seesawed again. The routines between the three of them were so wearing, an invisible vortex, sucking her down. To be free of it would be like coming up for air.
The mushroom wedges, sodden with butter, were as soft and succulent as steak. Eleanor was too sick with nerves to eat much, but Kat wolfed her portion and Vincent had seconds, wiping the last of the grease off his plate with a ragged crust of toast. Afterwards, he patted his stomach, these days a notable bulk beneath his cassock, and stifled a string of husky burps.
‘The Lord provides bountifully, doesn’t he, Daddy,’ quipped Kat, giving Eleanor a look of disgust, ‘if you know where to seek.’
Vincent swivelled his gloomy eyes to his youngest daughter, the pupils narrowed to pencil dots. Kat merely smiled back at him, one of her big, bold, toothy smiles that dimpled her cheeks and lifted up the corners of her mouth.
And suddenly Vincent was smiling back at her, an ice-berg melting. ‘The Lord certainly does. Exactly.’ He pulled out a grubby handkerchief and dabbed cheerfully at the grease-specks in his beard.
‘You’re missing bits,’ Kat cried, leaping round the t
able to pat his face with a dishcloth, pushing too far as she always did, so that Vincent was soon glowering again, flapping his hands at her to be left alone.
Eleanor took refuge in the washing up, spinning round with an involuntary cry of relief when a car horn sounded in the drive. Kat hugged her from behind, briefly, and then bolted into the hall to watch proceedings from the window seat, belting her arms round her shins and pressing her teeth into her knees.
When Eleanor appeared from upstairs, laden with bags, Vincent trundling ahead of her with the old suitcase, Kat swiftly averted her gaze, keeping it fixed on the window.
‘Bye Kat,’ Eleanor called softly.
‘Bye.’ She snapped the word like a whip.
Out in the drive, Vincent had stowed her case in the boot and was engaging the English teacher in the usual animated exchanges he managed for outsiders. Eleanor pawed at the gravel with the toe of her shoe. The lump in her throat ebbed and swelled; maddening, given how keen she was to be gone.
‘Well, goodbye, child,’ Vincent growled, turning to her at last and placing his heavy spade-hands on her shoulders. ‘You are all clear on money, aren’t you?’ He looked at her – for the first time in years it felt like – with the big dark eyes that were such a mirror of her own.
Eleanor nodded. The money was a princely eighty-pound monthly allowance, on top of a full government grant. It was another thing that made her feel guilty, but also thrilled.
‘Study hard.’
She nodded again, aware of her English teacher on the far side of the car tactfully staring in the opposite direction, towards the sloping tail-end ribs of the Downs.
‘And remember,’ Vincent went on mournfully, still pressing her shoulders, ‘the Lord gives each of us talents, just as he gives each of us burdens. We must accept both with good grace.’ He released his hands at last, such a heaviness lifting that Eleanor had a strong sensation of floating rather than walking the couple of feet to the car. The feeling stayed with her for several minutes after she had settled into her seat, contributing to the sense of flying as she and Miss Zaphron took off down the lane, the wheels of the little car rocking and thwacking between the potholes and ridges.
Eleanor waited until the bend to look back. The drive was empty, but Kat was still there, her face a white smudge behind the hall window.
4
‘So, are you coming?’
‘In a minute… I just need to…’ Eleanor gestured helplessly at the books piled around her corner of the library table, an ill-constructed semicircular wall, sprouting pencils and torn scraps of paper, where she was trying to keep track of relevant paragraphs. The books weren’t the ones she had been recommended; those had already been whipped out of the library by the smarter, faster members of her year group. Instead she was trawling through turgid tomes that were in no demand whatsoever, desperate to unearth any snippet of information that might assist in the otherwise impossible task of tackling an essay entitled ‘Beowulf: Poet or Warrior?’
It was on being presented with these four words the previous Wednesday, her third week of term, that Eleanor had started facing up to the realisation that she was stupid. Worse still, she was a fraud. Since arriving, she had so far cobbled together just one composition, on whether Thomas Hardy was more of a social reformer than a novelist, managing an answer of sorts by drawing heavily on Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which she had been fortunate enough to study in the sixth form with Miss Zaphron. It had garnered a few dry words of encouragement from her college tutor, a softly-spoken Irishman with kind grey eyes, who had then offered a respite of sorts in the form of a two-week spell looking at Dickens, with whom she was also lucky enough to have had some previous acquaintance.
But Anglo-Saxon was another matter. For that, she and her peers had been directed to attend the overheated, chaotic rooms of a man called Dr Pugh, who resided in another college and who preferred to rain down his words of wisdom, and much spittle, from the top of a set of library steps parked against one of his many book-stacks. With his domed hairless head, beady black eyes, glittering behind thick lens spectacles, Eleanor found herself unable to look at him without thinking of a bald-headed eagle, about to swoop onto his prey. When he announced the Beowulf essay, flinging down each word from his favoured perch, along with fluttering copies of a recommended reading list, the rest of her group had jumped to catch the pieces of paper like gleeful children chasing leaves, but Eleanor had stayed in her chair, frozen by the certainty that there was no way she would be able to answer such a question satisfactorily in seven years, let alone seven days.
‘So, are you coming or not?’
Eleanor could hear the mounting impatience in her companion’s voice. She was a girl called Camilla, also a Fresher, but studying History not English. Her own few books had been cleared away and buckled into the smart leather bag she wore across her chest. She occupied the room next to Eleanor’s in the modern honeycomb of a block where the college housed most of its first-year students. Bumping into each other within hours of their arrival, they had braved the first meal in hall together and stuck to each other’s sides ever since.
‘You go on,’ Eleanor urged. ‘I’ll catch you up.’
‘But we might not eat lunch there. Billy said there was a chance of hooking up with some others—’
‘That’s fine.’
Camilla fiddled with the strap on her shoulder bag. ‘The point being, that if you don’t come now you might not find us.’ She spoke in a whisper, even though it was past one o’clock and they were the only two people left in the library.
‘I know. That’s okay, honestly.’
Still, Camilla hesitated at the corner of the library table. She was well brought up. She had heavy straight blonde hair, cut in ramrod lines, so that her face looked as if it was perpetually staring out of a small window. She had come from an established girls’ boarding school and acted with all the confidence Eleanor both feared and expected to find in the produce of such places: a strong voice, strong opinions, coupled with a brusque self-confidence. She played hockey and tennis and had signed up for college rowing. She had big green eyes, set at a feline slant, and wide nostrils that flared when she was amused, which was quite often.
‘Are you spoken for?’ she had asked Eleanor, having invited her in for a coffee just minutes after they met. Her own identical box of a room had already been transformed into a homely, softly lit collage of lamps, beads, spreads, posters and knick-knacks, causing Eleanor to reflect with shame on the lacklustre efforts of her own unpacking: a few books on the desk, her toothbrush and paste on the edge of the basin, the big old suitcase still spilling with the heavy winter clothes that had proved too bulky to cram into the room’s meagre wardrobe.
‘No,’ Eleanor had admitted shyly, thinking of and dismissing the unsatisfactory and intermittent fumblings with poor Charlie Watson.
‘Clever you. Good. I dumped mine before coming up. We might have some fun then, might we not?’
Eleanor had nodded, grateful – and faintly alarmed – to have found such an amicable and adventurous friend so early on. But three and a half weeks into term and Camilla was tiring of her, she could tell. With the proximity of their rooms, she suspected she had merely provided a convenient starting point for Camilla’s social ambitions; the first rung on what would be a tall ladder. She had not yet stopped Eleanor from sharing her company, but an air of endurance had crept into the arrangement. Several other people were now being made much more obviously welcome; people like the charismatic Billy Stokes who was behind that day’s nebulous lunch plan.
A fellow historian with a cherubic smile and the big square body of a seasoned rugby player, Billy was one of those who seemed to know everyone he passed in the street, sharing not only Camilla’s armadillo confidence but also her apparent determination to put having fun above the priorities of academic work. Eleanor marvelled at and envied their insouciance. She did not dare to slack off her own studies for a moment. Stupid people had to work ha
rder, she knew that. More to the point, she literally could not afford to enjoy herself in the cavalier manner that they did. Lunch with Billy and his friends would mean drinks, food, then more drinks, necessitating the recurring shame of having to remind them all that she was on a tight budget.
It had taken Eleanor a couple of weeks to realise this herself. What had once felt like riches was evaporating at terrifying speed: books, stationery, tea, coffee, milk, bread, sugar, the couple of subs for societies to which she had boldly and misguidedly committed herself during the course of Freshers’ Fair had already proved such a drain on her finances that she was starting to wonder how she would last the term, let alone the year. Her new friends claimed to share such anxieties, but then joked easily about increasing overdraft limits and wheedling more money out of their parents. Eleanor laughed with them, inwardly picturing Vincent’s granite face, knowing there was nothing more to come out of him, financial or otherwise.
Camilla at last conceded defeat and took off. Eleanor twirled her pencil in a show of careless farewell, but the moment the library door swung shut, she stabbed the pencil’s lead point into her palm, repeating the attack until she had created a circle of deep pink indentations in her skin.
The silence of the old room was suffocating. No one else needed to work through their lunch hour, she reflected bitterly. No one else was so stupid. ‘The Pride of Broughton’ the Head, Mrs Mayfield, had called her in Leavers’ Assembly. Looking back on it now, recalling the self-conscious prickle of pleasure on her scalp as all heads in the small school hall had turned to stare, Eleanor could have laughed out loud.
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