After forty-five minutes of frantic activity Rachel determines the house will do. Grace offers to start heating the posh nibbles that Rachel has bought from Marks and Spencer, at top speed during her lunch hour, while Rachel puts Jake to bed. When Rachel finally manages to get Jake down, she finds that Grace has been busy in the kitchen. The nibbles are in the oven and she has worked out what has to go in when so that everything is ready at the same time. She has hunted down a couple of large serving platters, some napkins and polished a set of wine glasses that vaguely resemble each other.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t want to move in permanently, Grace?” asks Rachel.
Grace smiles. “If you clear it with my mother, I’d be happy to!”
This reminds Rachel that she really should get in touch with her sister to tell her that Grace seems to be enjoying her time in Wales. But over the telephone, Rachel runs the risk of asking Jocelyn how on earth she has failed to notice that her only child is self-harming so she judges it best to send her a text instead.
Grace is a lovely houseguest, very helpful, and she and Jake are getting on like a house on fire.
Jocelyn’s text in reply says
I do hope you are not using my daughter like an unpaid au pair.
There you go then, thinks Rachel. Very important to ensure that not only your Filipina maid but also your sister toes the line and shows respect.
Grace reads the text over Rachel’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry my mother is such an arse.”
Rachel lifts an eyebrow. “I hope you haven’t picked up that sort of language from Eloise. If you go home using words like arse your mother will kill me.”
Grace laughs. “Don’t worry, I won’t. I’m good at not letting things slip in front of my mother. What book is your Book Club discussing tonight?”
“The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.”
“Oh I loved that!”
“You’ve read it? I’ve only managed a few chapters. It’s not exactly a fun read is it?”
“Not exactly, no. His mum getting blown up in a museum and then him having to leave New York to live with his father miles away in Las Vegas and then all the drugs he takes with Boris and all the trouble Boris causes. There weren’t many jokes no.”
“All that happens? Flip. How depressing. I’m glad I didn’t finish it. Look, do you fancy joining the Book Club tonight?”
“That would be fun, if you think your friends won’t mind.”
“They’ll be glad to have you join us.”
“Does Eloise come along too?”
“Are you kidding? Listen to this.” Rachel calls to Eloise who is watching telly in the living room. “Eloise, honey, do you want to join Grace and me at Book Club tonight?”
“I’d rather stick pins behind my fingernails than watch you and your friends drink too much red wine and talk literary nonsense through your red wine teeth,” Eloise calls back.
*
Jenny is the first to arrive, a hardback version of The Goldfinch clamped under her arm and carrying a large Victoria sponge with cream and strawberries.
“I know, I know,” she says as she puts the cake down carefully on the kitchen table. “I’m an angel.”
“That looks absolutely gorgeous,” Rachel says.
“It will be – so much better than the shop bought rubbish you’d serve left to your own devices.”
“You’re such a hypocrite, Jenny. One minute you’re telling me to stop trying to be superwoman and then the next you’re bustling in here like Mary Berry and dissing me for cutting corners and buying cake.”
“I’m not a hypocrite at all! Baking cake is part of the slow movement. I can bake cake because I have time. And because I like to eat cake. Whereas you have to buy cake because you don’t have time to bake. Are you going to offer me a glass of wine or what?”
“Grace, pass me one of your newly polished glasses will you so I can serve Mrs Berry here a glass of Sauvignon?”
Over the next fifteen minutes or so the other Book Club guests arrive. Eloise reluctantly breaks off from watching telly to open the front door for them and usher them grumpily into the kitchen.
It’s a varied group, all women, and made up of friends, neighbours and mums from school. Jenny was the one who got Rachel involved and even though Rachel often fails to finish the allotted book, she enjoys being part of the club. It’s a chance once a month to have a good chat with women she otherwise only sees to wave at in the street or at school fêtes and concerts. There is always plenty of wine and Rachel knows that without the incentive of Book Club she wouldn’t get round to even starting a book.
When everyone has finished making a fuss of Grace and getting a glass of wine they sit down at Rachel’s dining table.
Selecting the books the club reads is done by rota, with the book for the following month’s meeting being announced at the end of that month’s meeting. The person who selects the book also chairs the meeting. The Goldfinch was Jenny’s choice.
“OK,” Jenny says, bossily, “let’s start with a show of hands as to how many of us actually finished the book.”
Only Jenny and Grace stick their hands up. Jenny sighs, theatrically.
“Oh come on, Jenny,” says Michelle, a recently divorced mum of one who is an executive PA and lives across the road from Rachel. “It was far-fetched and tedious and, more to the point, 900 pages long. The hardback version weighed a ton! Who on earth has time to read a book that long in one month? I think you just picked it to show off how fast you can read.”
“I agree that bits of it were turgid,” Jenny replies. “But so much of it was brilliant, it made wading through the bad bits worth it. The bits about the antiques that Hobie makes. And Theo’s loneliness – how absolutely, utterly, alone he is – and his slide into narcotic addiction. What do you think Grace?”
Grace looks a little uncomfortable at being thrust into the limelight of the discussion but clears her throat.
“Um, I loved this book and I read it in a week.” She looks nervously over at Michelle. “I’m not showing off about how fast I can read. It’s just I’ve got time because I’m at school, not working like you. Donna Tartt must have been lonely as a teenager because she knows exactly how it feels.”
Discussion of The Goldfinch carries on for a while longer round the table but, as the wine bottles empty, the conversation starts to fracture off. Jenny and Grace sitting next to each other at one end of the table continue to animatedly discuss the book but the others have moved on to encouraging Michelle to start dating again.
“I truly can’t be bothered,” she says. “Dating would involve sex at some point and to be honest, I’m really not that fussed. The last few years with Andrew I would do anything to avoid it. If he tried so much as to kiss me it made me gag. He thought it was sexy to stick his tongue in and out of my mouth as hard and as fast as he could, like it was a little willy. It was disgusting.”
“I don’t think I’d mind if we never did it again,” says Anita, an old friend of Jenny’s from school. “Matt and I were all over each other for the first few years, but I think we’d both choose a boxed set and a takeaway over sex these days.”
“I think I’d choose crocheting placemats over sex any night,” says Michelle. “All that fuss and mess and…panting. No thank you.”
“You lot should try erotic fiction,” says Liz, one of the mums from school, who is married to Nigel, a lawyer at another firm in Cardiff. Nigel is often on the other side of transactions that Rachel is dealing with. “It worked wonders for me and Nigel. We’d gone a bit off the boil in that department. Erotic fiction has perked us both right up. ”
“You mean that Fifty Shades of Grey rubbish?” asks Anita.
“I don’t actually. Fifty Shades was the first one I bought because everyone was going on about it, but the story is so ridiculous and badly written. There’s a bit on their first date when he kneads her breasts and takes no prisoners or something. It just made me laugh out loud – imagin
ing a jiggly pair of boobs behind bars. Not erotic at all. And the whole sadomasochistic angle didn’t sit right with me. But it did get me going, no smuttiness intended. There’s loads of feminist erotic fiction out there. I read the stories to myself and then I get Nigel to read the dirty passages out loud to me. Makes us both really hot to trot.”
Rachel wonders if she will ever be able to look at Nigel in quite the same way again. Nigel has recently started to wear his hair quite long, very possibly as a result of all this erotic fiction he’s been reading. Rachel pushes from her mind the sudden image of a naked Nigel prancing around in his bedroom, shaking his long locks like a stallion might his mane.
“And what would be the point of me getting all, ‘hot to trot’ as you put it, by myself?” asks Michelle. “What should I do once I am feeling all hot and, er, trotty?”
“Reacquaint yourself with your libido. All by yourself, if you know what I mean.”
“Of course I do but I don’t really get it. My sister bought me a Rabbit vibrator when the divorce came through, expressing a similar sentiment. That thing looks like a Magimix. Honestly, I’m sure you’re meant to use it to whip up a batch of scones, not apply to yourself. It’s still in the box.”
“Well get yourself something good to read and get it out of the box!” Liz commands. “Believe me, once you’ve tracked your libido down and restored it to good health, it will drive you frothing at the…well whatever…to Internet dating sites.”
“I think I’d really rather my libido just stayed well and truly lost, thank you very much,” says Michelle crinkling her nose in disgust.
“I might give erotic fiction a try,” says Anita. “I used to enjoy the sex in Jilly Cooper novels at school. Just remembering how I felt back then makes me feel a little friskier.”
Liz claps her hands together. “Excellent, because despite what you may think Anita, your husband would almost certainly prefer hot sex to a takeaway and telly. You’ll have to tell us how it goes!”
Michelle holds her hand up like a policeman directing traffic. “Anita – do us all a favour. Absolutely on no account tell us how it goes,” she says. “But if you’ve got any good crochet patterns feel free to share.”
The women eat and drink and talk and suddenly it is 10.30pm and they are looking for their handbags and collecting up their copies of The Goldfinch and clattering out the door home.
Jenny and Grace have been deep in conversation all night.
“Grace is going to come over to mine later this week, if that’s OK?” Jenny says to Rachel. “We enjoyed our conversation and thought it would be fun to continue it.”
“Of course, if that’s what you would like Grace.”
Grace nods eagerly.
“Excellent. Well I’ve got your mobile number and I’ll be in touch, Grace. Goodnight.”
Grace helps Rachel clear the plates and glasses and stack the dishwasher.
“Thank you for including me tonight, Auntie Rachel.”
“You don’t need to thank me, Grace. It was lovely having you with us. Just as well you were here, or else Jenny would have had no one to discuss the book with. You know, you don’t need to call me Auntie any more. You can just call me Rachel.”
“I like it that you’re my Auntie Rachel.”
“And I like being your Auntie Rachel.” She pulls Grace towards her and hugs her swiftly, kissing her on the forehead.
“Will Uncle Gareth be very late?”
“It’ll be after midnight before he gets home. I’m not going to wait up for him. If I’m still awake when he gets in, he likes to talk his head off about whatever it is he has been working on all day in London and asking what I think. I’ve had far too much wine for that. I’m going to let Oscar out for a wee and then go up to bed.”
“Good night then.”
“Good night, Gracie.”
Before she goes to bed, Rachel stands in front of the bookshelf for a while. Finally, she locates her dog-eared copy of Riders and takes it upstairs with her.
*
Gareth is already stripped to the waist when he comes into the bedroom. He is surprised to find Rachel still awake and reading.
“Well hello, husband. You look rather amazing, I must say.”
She throws back the duvet and kneels up on the bed to greet him with a kiss. She trails her hand across his bare chest.
“Mm, very nice. You haven’t travelled all the way home from London topless have you? What happened to your shirt?”
“Spilled coffee on it on the train on the way home. I’ve put it in to soak.”
“You’ve put it in to soak? What’s come over you? Why not just throw it straight in the washing basket like you usually do? With all the buttons done up so it’s a bugger to iron?”
“Ha ha. How come you’re still up?”
“I’ve been waiting up for you. I’ve been reading the dirty bits from Riders again. Read them so often when I was younger the book falls open at all the right places. I’m feeling very horny now.”
“Good. Because so am I.”
Chapter 13
Jean is waiting for Idris in the Williams’ front parlour. It is too small for the heavy wooden furniture that Mr and Mrs Williams shipped over with them to Canada from Carmarthen and dimly lit, because Mrs Williams keeps the heavy lace curtains closed so that the sunlight doesn’t fade the silver framed photographs of her son that she keeps in there. It smells of furniture polish and sadness.
Jean is sitting very upright in a tall wooden chair but her eyes are closed and in the dimness Idris thinks at first she must be asleep. Then he sees that her eyes are closed because she has been badly beaten – both her eyes are blackened and swollen and her lip is split.
“What happened to you, Jean?” he kneels down in front of her.
Jean smiles and holds her hands out to him. He takes them and clasps them tight. She has lost so much weight that her collarbone looks like a coat hanger, her skin stretched so tightly it looks like it might poke right through. She is sunburned from outdoor work and her hands when he takes them in his are rough and calloused.
“Did someone do this to you?” he asks, more insistently.
She nods. “It was Mrs Barraclough.”
“The lady you’ve been working for? Why?”
“Because of something I said. Something I told her.”
“What? What can you have said to her that would make her beat you like this?”
“I don’t like to say.”
“Jean, I need you to tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“Please, Jean.”
“I told her that Mr Barraclough had been touching me every chance he got and that I’d tried to ignore him, had pushed him off. But that the more I refused the harder he tried. And that finally he had not taken no for an answer and had come into my room in the middle of the night and put his hands around my throat and squeezed so hard I fainted and then forced himself on me. While she lay sleeping down the hall.”
Jean does not cry as she tells Idris this. She keeps her eyes down, fixed on her lap.
Idris is silent for a while. He breathes deeply, trying to keep calm. His first reaction is to punch Mrs Williams’ oak sideboard until it splinters.
“Do you mean…?”
She nods. “I believe so. When I came to he was gone but there was blood and…other…” She trails off, unable to finish her sentence.
“When did this happen, Jean?”
“Yesterday. I walked straight out, leaving everything I own behind, the trunk the Quarriers gave me, letters from you and Janet, everything. They never paid me any wages the whole time I was there so I begged at the train station for money to buy a ticket to Toronto.”
“We should go to the police. Tell them you have been the victim of a terrible crime.”
Jean shakes her head, wearily. “No Idris, I am not going to go to the police. ‘Little slave child,’ Mrs Barraclough used to call me, and tell me that little slaves didn’t get to go to sch
ool. She said that if I went to the police she would say that I’d been trying to get Mr Barraclough’s attention since I arrived, had been throwing myself at him with the intention of blackmailing him, extorting money from him. She said she’d get the farmworkers to say the same thing and that no one would believe a slave. She said I was not the first to make these accusations and I would fare no better than the last girl.”
“This is outrageous Jean. These people took you in. They were meant to be responsible for you. They are liars. You can’t stand by and not do anything.”
“I can and I will Idris. If I go to the police it will be me that is on trial, not them. And I don’t ever want to see them again. Not in a courtroom. Not ever. I just want to forget it ever happened.”
“We need to get word to Janet. You need to be with her now. You two need to find that big house you talked about, one that will give you both positions as domestic servants, so you can live in the same place.”
“Janet has fallen on her feet. The family have taken her in almost as one of their own and she doesn’t even have to work anymore, goes to school every day. The children’s mother brushes her hair every morning, like she does her own daughters.” Jean smiles, sadly.
“But you’ve been assaulted. If Janet knew that, she would leave so as to be by your side.”
“Yes she would, in a heartbeat. And she would also ask her family to take me in and in the process cause them to think less of her. I am not going to ruin Janet’s happiness just because mine is ruined.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Will you ask Mrs Williams if I can stay here for a few days? Once the black in my eyes has gone and I have rested a little, I will be able to look for a position. I’m going to be 16 very soon.”
Idris tells Mrs Williams a very watered down version of the story. That Mrs Barraclough slapped Jean so hard for burning a hole in a damask sheet she was ironing that Jean fell against the hearth.
“I don’t know Idris. We only have two bedrooms. I would have to make up a bed for her in my sewing room. It won’t be very comfortable. Also, I am not running a boarding house here you know. You are the first lodger Mr Williams and I have taken and I don’t imagine there will be another once you go.”
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