Scar Tissue

by Judith Cutler

  I heard the others gasp; Helen cried out, but covered her mouth. As if she were protecting a kid watching a nasty movie, Meg pulled her face on to her shoulder.

  The silence was awful. Perhaps I shouldn’t have shown them. But how else would they get the message? I made myself say, ‘He said he’d do it to my face next time he saw me. And fill me so full of h – of heroin,’ I added, ‘that I’d die.’

  Chapter Four

  ‘In that case,’ Paula said, trying to sound brisk, ‘you can’t possibly run away. You need us. Doesn’t she, girls?’

  I shook my head. ‘No.’ It came out so husky they might not have heard. So I added, ‘I’m not putting anyone at risk.’

  ‘We’ll be putting ourselves at risk,’ Paula said, naïve for probably the first time ever. ‘Nothing to do with you.’

  Meg pulled a doubtful face. ‘My kids. And Helen’s not much more than a kid.’

  ‘Quite. Now –’ I began.

  Helen, who had been chewing her hair – better than nothing, I tried to tell myself – stamped her foot. ‘I’m old enough to make my own mind up. Caffy never said a word about it being my fault we were in Tenterden in the first place this morning, and it was. If I’d been sensible and packed myself some lunch we wouldn’t have had to go there at all. Would we, Caffy?’ Her eyes looked larger than ever in her thin face.

  Trying to sound firm and calm, I said, ‘No, but we did and it’s nothing to do with being in Tenterden, it’s to do with my past. I can’t wipe it away any more than I can wipe these scars away.’ I touched my stomach. It was horrible, as usual – feeling those tender ridges where there should have been ordinary skin.

  Meg pulled Helen’s face closer. I couldn’t read her own expression.

  Why ever hadn’t I shown them before? Then we wouldn’t have become mates on false pretences.

  Suddenly Helen pulled away. ‘You’ve looked after me: I’ll look after you,’ she said, sidling up to me.

  ‘And the school holidays are starting this weekend: I suppose it wouldn’t hurt my kids to go and spend an extra week with their dad,’ Meg reflected. Hell, she couldn’t let Helen’s sentimentality sway her! ‘Time he pulled his weight. It isn’t as if he wasn’t always moaning about access.’

  ‘No,’ I said, trying not to show how hard I wanted to say ‘yes’. ‘It’s my life and I’m not living it with the knowledge I’ve put anyone at risk.’

  ‘That’s always good to hear,’ said a male voice. We jumped as one, me hitching my dungarees swiftly. ‘I’d rather no one took any risk on my property, thank you very much.’

  As the rest of us swung round to see who was speaking, Paula stepped forward like the bride’s mother ready to greet the vicar. ‘Mr – I mean, er – Todd,’ she said, ‘I don’t think you’ve met all my team.’ She introduced us one by one to Todd, who was about sixty, with a very trim figure but a face that looked as if it had seen more of life than most. Not all of it good, either. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but it would have been rude to stare. ‘Ladies, this is Todd Dawes, who owns the house. Caffy’s been working on the higher-level stuff,’ she added, somehow separating me from the others and walking Dawes and me towards my ladder. She hadn’t had management classes for nothing: she was tactfully leaving the others to discuss the problem of what to do about me. ‘As you can see, she’s had to replace the putty on all those windows there, which is why progress has been slow with the painting.’

  He looked from the window to the ground to me and back again. ‘You’re happy working up there?’

  ‘No reason not to be,’ I said.

  ‘I can think of lots!’ He had a smile that compressed his wrinkles and could have made him look rather like a tortoise. But it didn’t.

  I’d had it with elderly men looking at me appraisingly. But Todd Dawes didn’t appear to be wondering how many perversions I would manage for a minimum fee. So I wouldn’t be rude, even though my question was abrupt. ‘Tell me, a draughty place like this, stuck up high and asking every wind there is inside – why didn’t you whip the windows out and install double glazing? Mind you, it would have cost a week’s pocket money, I suppose.’

  I rather thought he and Paula exchanged looks.

  ‘Good question,’ he said. It was as if someone were raking through ashes – his voice was both gravelly and pleasantly warm. ‘The thing is, this is a conservation area, which is pretty restricting.’

  ‘True. You can’t blow your nose unless you’ve got the right colour hanky,’ I nodded.

  ‘So,’ he grinned, ‘I’m forking out a month’s pocket money to have the sort of secondary glazing everyone approves.’ He looked up at the house with an expression of love – the sort most men reserve for their cars or their children. I recognised the feeling immediately: it was one of the things that had brought me into this line of trade.

  ‘It deserves it,’ I said, whether in response to my thought or to his comment I wasn’t sure.

  ‘Yes, it does. A couple of other people thought so, but I managed to outbid them. Have you seen inside yet?’ God, the man even had dimples. If only I’d had a dad like that.

  Swallowing, I shook my head.

  ‘Would you like to?’

  It was clear he wanted to show it off, and who was I to spoil a man’s innocent fun? ‘Do witches charm warts?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?’

  Paula coughed. ‘We need to get Meg back to her children, and if you ask me Helen’s got a date. You won’t want to be driving Trev – that’s our van, Todd – on your own, will you?’ she added meaningfully.

  Dawes looked at me almost sternly. ‘I wouldn’t have put you down as the sort of woman who couldn’t drive a van.’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I said. ‘But Paula’s right – I ought to go with the others. No one else understands the van’s starter motor like I do.’ Mistake.

  And he picked it up immediately. ‘So it’s the “on your own” bit, not the van driving bit.’

  I scuffed my trainers in his overlong grass.

  ‘Look, Caffy, where do you live?’

  ‘The other side of Ashford.’ There, that’d fix him. No one in his right mind would offer to run me home.

  ‘Well, I’m meeting my wife at the International Station at seven-fifteen. It looks as if you have a lift – provided you want one.’

  Try as I might, I couldn’t see him having any predatory designs on me. My hair was wind-dried and wind-blown, not in a sexy Brigitte Bardot way (sister, did she do tousled well!) but in the before half of a conditioner advertisement sort of way. My dungarees stank of white spirit and paint. My feet were in those ancient trainers. No high heels, no basque, just a working-class girl with mates who knew where she was.

  And I didn’t get the bad vibes. That was what clinched it.

  ‘If you’re sure you don’t mind… And provided we can persuade the van to start with Meg at the wheel.’

  Entering the house was like stepping into Sleeping Beauty’s palace – if she had one, that is. I was never very hot on fairy-tales. There was no furniture, no carpets or curtains – just these wonderful rooms waiting for us to breathe new life into them with our paint and wallpaper.

  ‘You should have seen it at its worst: damp, rising and from blocked gutters. Broken windows. Wisteria thrusting blind growth between the sash windows and their frames and crawling over bedroom walls. You know, it was actually quite frightening.’

  I nodded. Blind will in any form is scary.

  ‘But we still fell in love with it.’ That loving smile again.

  Fell in love with it. Well, that made three of us. I’d have to be terribly careful I didn’t fall in love with him too. Perhaps if I just treated him in the off-hand way I’d seen girls treat their deeply-loved parents… But despite my urgent check on my emotions, I couldn’t help gasping, ‘You will let us do it, won’t you?’

  ‘I’d thought some specialised firm –’ he began, awkwardly. ‘After all
– you see, Caffy, it’s only ours in trust. Don’t shout it from the rooftops but we’ve left it to English Heritage in our will.’

  Which meant they’d have to leave a lot of money to maintain it. But he didn’t seem to be boasting about his money, so much as apologising for wanting everything right. I liked him more and more each moment.

  ‘Paula’s fully-trained in restoration work.’ I said. ‘And I’m booked in for a residential course at the end of August.’ I wasn’t just taking a week of my annual leave, I’d scraped together enough savings to pay for it too. I wanted to reach out and hug the place. ‘Todd, it’s all so wonderful. Look at that fanlight,’ I said. Without any encouragement from me, my hands spread and clasped, as if I were some camp art expert. ‘And that stair-rail.’ It had been rubbed smooth by countless generations of hands.

  ‘It makes you feel as if you’ve come home, doesn’t it?’ he asked, laughing as if he were embarrassed by his flight of fancy. ‘Mind you, I daresay when it was at its grandest I wouldn’t have made it to be under-butler.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have minded being a chambermaid. Provided they didn’t have droit de seigneur,’ I added. I knew a lot about droit de seigneur, after all. As Clive Granville could have told you.

  I must have sounded more bitter than I’d meant. He gave me another one of his glances, and led me in silence through the other rooms, stopping from time to time to show me original shutters or an example of particularly lovely plasterwork filled up by generations of the wrong sort of paint. I’d have to use dental burrs to sort it out.

  We were in the servants’ dormitory when he looked at his watch. ‘My God, we shall have to scarper,’ he said. ‘Mustn’t keep my wife waiting.’

  He drove an ordinary middle-aged Range Rover complete with tow bar, not the flash job I’d rather have expected. But then, if he’d sunk as much as I imagined into this new place, and was prepared to restore and presumably furnish it in an appropriate style, he might have had to make economies somewhere. He also drove more slowly than I’d have done, despite his haste to reach Ashford. Come to think of it, it was odd for a woman owning half a house like that to be reduced to travelling by Connex South-East, with its old-fashioned slam-door carriages.

  But she’d come in on Eurostar, hadn’t she, as I found out when she got into the Range Rover. We’d been too late for him to drop me off and then come back, so the poor woman found this scruff-bag sitting in her place.

  If she was surprised, so was I. Lots of men his age turn in the old wife for a younger model – the old my wife doesn’t understand me line. But Mrs Dawes, though rather better preserved than he, was no spring chicken.

  I leapt out and helped load her case in the back. ‘Paris. I’ve been shopping,’ she said, as if she needed to. ‘Not clothes. Lots of samples of fabric for the house.’

  ‘You’ll have to check that Caffy here approves,’ Todd said. ‘She’s one of the restoration team.’

  ‘You’ve settled on someone already!’ Her voice was pretty chilly: it was clear that he should have discussed it with her first.

  ‘You could say they’ve already settled on us,’ he said dryly.

  From my new place on a back seat I caught the glance between the two. My instincts had been right. If ever a couple looked together the Daweses did. His explanation – half-mocking, half-exasperated with not just me but also himself – brought a reluctant smile to her face. He clinched the deal with a comment I didn’t understand. ‘No pink bedroom for this one either.’

  She bit her lip, but was smiling by the time she looked back over her shoulder at me, nodding in agreement with something that hadn’t been said. Not aloud, anyway.

  I directed him to my flat, out in Kennington, quite a mixed suburb of Ashford. My bit was especially mixed, but in a town where cheap accommodation was at a premium, everyone apparently wanting an executive four-bedroom residence with en suite and downstairs cloaks, I wasn’t going to argue.

  I hopped out, swinging my bag after me.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ she said, smiling and waving. Yes, she and I were old friends now, just like me and Todd.

  That was what clinched it. As the bag brushed my stomach, I said, ‘No. I can’t work for you any more.’

  Fine exit line. Pity I spoiled it by bursting into tears.

  I was so angry with myself. Tears weren’t something I did. I did tough and funky and baseball caps and dungarees, not great sobs that wracked my chest. The Daweses insisted on coming in with me, she sending him into my kitchen while she tried to calm me down. My tears weren’t having any, though. The nicer she was, the harder they came. It was as if I were sitting outside myself, watching it happen. I’d no more control over the situation than over a tragic news shot on TV.

  At last the tea someone had made – it must have been him – started to work, though by that time I’d run out of tissues and was reduced to sniffing into toilet roll. And yes, the kitchen and bathroom were up to visitors: it was something I’d learned that gave me pride in myself during rehab: the importance of clean private places.

  While she sat beside me, holding my hand, he stationed himself on the chair opposite.

  ‘Tell me, Caffy’ he began. And then he stopped. ‘When I drove up, you’d pulled down your dungarees and were showing your mates your tum. I heard them cry out. They sounded really shocked, Jan,’ he told his wife. ‘Then you tucked yourself in and had some sort of argument with them – about putting them at risk. Which is where I came in, Jan. I said I didn’t want anyone risking their neck on my property.’

  She nodded. ‘Quite right.’

  ‘We talk about the house, which you’ve obviously fallen in love with just as we have, and then you say you can’t work for us any more. What’s going on? I’d really like to know.’

  Well, maybe I could tell them about Granville and the drugs. Nothing else, though. Not nice people like this. Not friends I’d technically known a couple of hours but who already seemed closer than people I’d known all my life. Very weird, this love business, when you weren’t used to it, and particularly when they offered it just as freely as I did, and with just as few strings. If I’d been a romantic, I’d have said I was like the Prodigal Son, simply walking back into their lives and being welcomed without recrimination for my years away.

  ‘You had a take-away with Todd Dawes!’ Meg squeaked. ‘Todd Dawes, the delectable, sexy, Todd Dawes.’

  The generation gap was yawning to the width of the Channel. I just managed to stop myself saying that former pop star though he might be, he still was old enough to be my grandfather. We were friends and colleagues, after all, and I didn’t wish to insult her. But it was true, and though she may have creamed her knickers over him when she was my age, he was almost certainly Train Pass Man now. And not Dirty Old Train Pass Man either.

  Helen said, ‘You always told me to watch older men. Only want one thing, you said.’

  I shook my head emphatically. ‘He’s never once, for so much as an instant, made me feel like a single woman in the company of a single man.’

  ‘Which is all the more to his credit,’ Meg conceded, ‘since he must have had countless women thrusting themselves at him.’ She looked at me shrewdly. ‘You’re sure he’s not just being nice when he’s with his wife?’

  ‘Todd and his wife are both very nice to me,’ I insisted, rather primly. ‘He really wasn’t on the pull.’ Time to divert her. ‘You didn’t really fancy him, did you?’

  ‘Did? Still do! It’s the first thing on my Christmas list every year, his new album. Mind you, his voice is cracking a bit these days.’

  ‘I thought that was only boys,’ Helen said. ‘You know, like Aled Jones.’

  ‘More, wearing out,’ I explained, not altogether kindly come to think of it.

  ‘So what did you talk about?’ Meg demanded. ‘You and him?’

  ‘And his wife. About the house. Their plans for it: they’re thinking of having different rooms done in different styles – you know, refl
ecting the different periods of the house’s growth.’ Push me how she would, I wouldn’t split. Well, keeping schtum about what people said had been part of my job, hadn’t it? Client confidentiality, Paula might have called it.

  Helen talked a bit about the spot she was growing on her chin: it certainly sounded like pre-date anxiety to me, so last night must have gone all right. I drove, following country lanes all the way this time and keeping an eye on the mirror all the time. Meg hummed what she claimed were his greatest hits.

  Paula was waiting when we arrived. ‘A word,’ she mouthed at me, half-lifting a wallet of photos from her rucksack. Out loud she said brightly, ‘You’ve decided to stay, then. Isn’t that great, girls! Caffy?’

  I nodded, silently. Sure I wanted to stay. But what I feared more than anything was that by succumbing to temptation I’d exposed to danger even more people that I cared for.

  As if discussing my day’s tasks with me, Paula took me on one side. ‘I’ve sent copies of these to my bank,’ she said, tapping the photos. ‘Just in case. Do you want to keep a set too?’

  I wrinkled my nose, ‘Nowhere to hide them in my place. And my bank doesn’t have vaults and things – it’s a phone account.’

  ‘OK. What shall we do with them then? Send them to a different police station and try again?’

  ‘You keep them. You don’t think the old jungle drums have been beating nineteen to the dozen about my inconvenient find? Oh, and my convenient past.’

  ‘But the police – you know –’

  ‘I can tell you’ve always been a law-abiding woman, Paula. The police are a corrupt load of bastards. OK, some police are a corrupt load of bastards. And if ever one stank of corruption it was my friend DS Marsh. The only thing that surprises me is that he hasn’t tried to pin the murder on me.’

  We laughed heartily, though I hadn’t been joking. Not one scrap.