by Carla McKay
Look at poor Jean – she must have trusted him once. She hadn’t seen Jean since she had come to see her and doubted whether she would get in touch again. It had obviously been an ordeal for her to come and talk to her that day and what she learned must have been mortifying. She would probably be embarrassed to see Judith just now. She wondered what Jean had meant when she had said it mattered because of something that had happened in the past. She supposed she was referring to previous affairs that Lance had had, or perhaps suspected he had.
He was not the sort of man who would ever have been faithful for long; he would always have craved the adulation of new people. Poor Jean, she thought again, but what could she really do to help? She could never go round to see her in case Lance was there but anyway she hardly knew the woman; she just hoped she had somebody else to support her. Sooner or later she was bound to bump into her but naturally she wouldn’t say anything unless Jean brought it up first.
In fact it was a while before she saw Jean again. But by that time she was in reluctant possession of some new explosive information about Lance and everything had changed, were that possible, for the worse.
18
Rose was in Vevey looking for something decent to wear to impress her friend Milly who was due to arrive the next day for a week. It was the summer holidays and her parents once again had her dragged over to their French holiday house for the best part of the summer. This time, however, Rose wasn’t so sulky about it as she had arranged for various friends to come over and stay and she looked forward to showing off her smattering of French and local knowledge. It also meant that she could hang around cafes and even bars in the evening if she was with a friend. This in turn meant meeting other people her age – perhaps some fit French boys, you never knew. In addition she was liberated from the exam pressure which she’d felt in May. She had sat her GCSE exams for better or worse the previous month and they hadn’t been as bad as she feared. In any case there was nothing she could do about them now except await the results in late August.
All in all, the future looked bright – or brighter than usual anyway. Plus, today she felt flush, armed as she was with fifty Euros to spend on anything she liked – birthday money given to her for her sixteenth at the beginning of July. Trouble was, the shops were pretty crap in Vevey. Where was Gap, where was New Look, where was River Island? Rose despaired. How could French teenagers manage? Looking at a crowd of them now laughing and pushing each other off the pavement as they walked along the main street in their lunch break, she could see that they didn’t. They were still wearing things that went out years ago in Britain – well, last year anyhow. Poor them. What was irritating, though, was how thin all the girls were. She supposed it was because they weren’t fed the diet of stodge she got at school. I bet they only eat salad all day she thought furiously. Some of the boys were quite cute though; she wondered whether they could speak English. It might be hard-going in the bars if they couldn’t communicate at all.
As she turned the corner into the historic quarter she spotted Judith sitting having coffee on her own with her nose in a newspaper. She hadn’t given her a thought since the coaching session at half term, but now she realised she was pleased to see her and walked over to say hello.
‘Rose’, exclaimed Judith. ‘Are you back for the summer?’
‘Yes, but I don’t mind so much because I’ve got friends coming out for some parts of it and I’m also going to stay with some people in Provence at the end of this month.’
Judith told her to sit down and ordered her a coffee. ‘Have you seen anything of Sophie?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t seen her around these holidays.’
Rose suddenly remembered the conversation they had had about Lance and Judith telling her to warn Sophie not to go out to dinner with him. She bit her lip, unsure whether to tell Judith what she knew.
After half term when they were both back at school, Rose had been surprised and rather pleased to get a text message from Sophie saying that she had to talk to her and could they meet as soon as the exams were over? She would ask her parents to invite Rose to stay for a couple of days at the first opportunity. Rose was intrigued by the invitation and texted back that she’d love to come before going out to France.
Once she had arrived in Oxfordshire and the girls were safely in Sophie’s part of the house – she didn’t just have a bedroom, but a whole floor to herself now that the boys had left home – Sophie disconcertingly burst in tears and sat on the floor sobbing whilst Rose hunted for tissues, both alarmed for her, and not a little excited at this unexpected development. At last Sophie calmed down enough to blurt out what had happened the night Lance took her out to dinner. Rose had forgotten about the dinner because she had gone back to England with her parents the following day. Now she listened with mounting horror as Sophie told her story between bouts of crying.
Apparently, everything was fine until Lance had ordered more and more wine at dinner and Sophie thought she was going to faint. The room started spinning and Lance had suggested a walk along the beach to clear her head.
Once on the beach which was completely dark, they walked for about ten minutes before Lance guided her to a sheltered spot in among some sand dunes. ‘Then he completely changed’, sniffed Sophie. ‘Up until then with me he’d been sweet and just nicely flirtatious. Yes, he had tried to kiss me once before in Vevey but it was quite gentle and romantic and I thought that was all he’d try. After all, he’s an old man! I thought he couldn’t think I would want to go any further with him. I know I encouraged him, but I sort of thought it was safe considering he knows my parents and everybody. I thought he just wanted to show off being with a young girl around town and I wanted everyone to think how grown up I was. Oh god, I was so stupid! It was like he suddenly turned into a nasty, snarling animal on that beach. He fell on top of me, literally, and started tearing my clothes off whilst pulling my head back with my hair. I was terrified and trying to tell him to stop but he wouldn’t and my face was all squashed by him so I could hardly breathe let alone scream. My t-shirt was all torn and then he yanked down my jeans whilst still holding me down. You can guess what happened next. In fact I’m not sure it did happen. I was so hysterical and hurting all over that I can’t really tell. And the things he was saying, Rose, the horrible words he said all the time when this was going on’… a fresh bout of sobbing. ‘What words?’ breathed Rose. By now she was holding Sophie, pushing her damp hair out of her eyes and crying a little herself because it was so horrible.
‘Words like ‘whore’ and ‘bitch’ and the c-word all the time, and things like he would kill me if I screamed and how I wanted it and stuff like that. It was like a nightmare. I kept thinking of my parents and what they would say and how it would be when they found me dead. I… I thought he was going to kill me, Rose.’
‘How did it end? How did you stop him?’
‘We heard noises nearby. I think there was a caravan site behind the dunes and there were some people walking nearby. Lance got off me and dragged me up with him. He sort of frogmarched me along the beach telling me to pull myself together and not to make a sound. When we got to his car he pushed me inside and drove off fast. I was past fighting by this time. Everything hurt, especially my head and I kept almost losing consciousness. I couldn’t even cry. It was like being in a bad dream. The next thing we were back at my house which was empty because my parents were away.
Lance pretended to be nice again then and told me he was sorry if he had hurt me, but that I had wanted to make love by moonlight – that’s what he said ‘make love by moonlight’, and that he wanted to make me happy. He said he didn’t mean to be so rough but that some girls liked that. He got me into the shower to clean up and then he put me in bed. He kept telling me that I mustn’t tell anybody what happened because nobody would believe me. He said everyone knew that I was a little fantasist and that everybody had seen me flirting with him.
After that I must have fallen asleep and he must have gone home. Wh
en I woke up it was light and he wasn’t there. I lay there for ages quite still in case he was but I was hurting so much and aching everywhere that I finally got up to find some painkillers. When I looked at my body in the mirror I couldn’t stop crying; there were bruises and cuts everywhere. But then I realised that my parents would be back that day and I already knew that I couldn’t tell them about it, so I just wore baggy clothes and even though my face was all swollen and puffy, they didn’t even really notice. I just said I had a bad headache and felt sick probably because of having a bad mussel or something the night before. Anyway, everyone was in a rush because we had to fly back that night and the next day I went back to school.
‘Oh, Sophie,’ said Rose, ‘How did you cope at school? Did you tell anyone?’
‘I couldn’t tell anyone. I was so ashamed of myself and anyway I believed Lance when he said that no-one would believe me. He was right. I’ve often boasted about things that didn’t really happen at school so it would be like crying wolf or whatever. And if they had believed me, they would have called me a dirty slag and I would have got a terrible reputation. I couldn’t win either way. I just tried to blank it out and concentrate on work which I did. Only I kept having these crying jags when I didn’t expect it – like my body was still unhappy even if I wasn’t if you know what I mean. You were the only person I wanted to tell, Rose. Partly because you know Lance, and partly because I thought you would understand. You’re a kind person I can tell. I don’t know anyone else like you at my school and I had to talk to someone.’
Rose hugged her tightly. ‘Of course you did,’ she said. ‘And I do understand and I’m so, so sorry for you. But shouldn’t you tell someone, your parents or the police? Because you’ve been raped, Sophie, and you can’t keep this to yourself.’
But, Rose thought now, as she sat with Judith two weeks later in the sun, Sophie was absolutely clear that she didn’t want anyone else to know. In fact after that terrible outburst, Sophie had seemed OK for the rest of her stay. Clearly, she was not the same Sophie Stanhope as the one of two months previously who had lorded it over Rose and acted like she was twenty-five; but she was a lot nicer. Some of the stuffing had been knocked out of her and if she had lost confidence and had a nasty shock then she had also lost her conceit and precocity. Rose liked the new Sophie a lot, and felt nothing but pity for her. All that showing off before had just been an act. When, as Rose was leaving, Sophie thanked her for being such a good friend to her, Rose got the impression that all Sophie had ever wanted for someone to pay her a little attention. It made her sad.
Now, with Judith, she was very torn. She had kept Sophie’s secret but she was still very concerned for her and outraged by Lance’s behaviour. The man should be arrested. Judith, she felt, was possibly the one sensible adult she could trust with the secret. She knew everybody involved but was distanced from them; she was also understanding and Rose felt she would be sympathetic without becoming hysterical. Rose realised that for the past couple of weeks she had been carrying a dreadful burden on Sophie’s behalf and now that the opportunity presented itself, she very much wanted to offload it. Judith, she sensed, would know what to do. She began to tell her the story.
19
Just across the street from where Rose and Judith were having coffee, Fern was dusting the dangling coloured glass lanterns in the shop where she had found work in Vevey. It was kind of shop Fern adored, full of what her mother would have called knick-knacks. In other words, the kind of things one had no need for whatsoever but appealed to tourists who felt the urge to spend money. Although the shop had a French name, L’Étoile Clair, it had a definite Eastern hippy feel to it. The sweet cloying scent of incense was always in the air and there was a brisk trade in associated artefacts such as candles, joss sticks, hookah pipes and herbal soaps. The clothes they had were floaty cheesecloth numbers, some of them with elaborate beading which came direct from India where they were no doubt run up in sweat shops by children. Fern didn’t like to think about this, but otherwise she approved of the merchandise. It had exactly the kind of things she herself liked to linger over like essential oils, silver earrings and small, carved cedar-wood boxes. She knew that back in England these kind of shops were completely outdated and had been replaced by more sophisticated chains like Monsoon, but she was perfectly happy floating around in this sixties time-warp shop in her own black cheesecloth shift caught up at the waist in a butterfly belt.
With her blonde bob and face burnished by the sun, she looked well and pretty and a million times better than she had back in Bicester, her white face pinched by cold and unhappiness. Sure, she had been lonely at first, but now she had a rented flat she could afford, a comfortable job and was beginning to make friends. Miriam, the French girl who owned the shop was a bit younger than her but she spoke good English and had been very kind to her, introducing her to regular customers and other shop owners nearby so that Fern now knew a number of both French and English people with whom she could have a drink or pass the time of day. Her only worry – and it was a big one – was Ben.
He had been so amenable about coming to France and leaving behind his beloved football and close circle of friends. Like her, he had thought it a bit of an adventure and was prepared to give it his best. He hadn’t even made a fuss about going to the local school half way through a term and being plunged into an entirely foreign system with little grasp of the language. She had been so proud of him, especially since at first he was evidently a kind of star attraction and he had boasted to her about all the new slang he was picking up and the friends he was beginning to make.
This initial buoyancy hadn’t lasted very long however and now Ben would hardly talk about school, beyond saying that the work was very hard. When Fern tried to ask him about his friends there and whether he would like to bring any of them home, he clammed up. French kids, according to him, didn’t go to each others’ houses; they all had to be home for the family meal at 6pm and then they had to do homework. None of them seemed to do any sport after school, or if they did, they were driven to private clubs which Ben didn’t know about. He became quiet and withdrawn and went up to his room as soon as he returned from school, refusing to discuss his day with her.
Becoming increasingly anxious about him, Fern finally plucked up courage to go to speak to the Directrice of his school. It was a difficult interview. Madame Jospert was a formidable middle-aged lady with scarlet finger nails and a bun, the kind of tough efficient French woman to be found in all corners of the great lumbering bureaucracy which penetrated every area of French life, dedicated to doing things by the book. School was evidently just an adjunct to her of the civil service and she clearly had little patience with Fern’s stammered anxieties about her son’s welfare.
‘C’est normal’, was her considered shrugged response to Fern’s worries about Ben’s lack of friends, difficulties with the work and the language and apparent unhappiness. The subtext, Fern thought grimly, was what did she expect – an incompetent Englishwoman turning up in the middle of the school year with a teenage son who had no chance of passing the baccalaureate and little hope of fitting in. She had cried afterwards and determined to take Ben away and if necessary find him another school or scrape up enough money for private coaching. Her heart quailed at the thought of having to return home, but she knew she would do it if it was what Ben needed to do.
But Ben had been adamant that this was not what he wanted. ‘Don’t worry, mum, it’ll be OK,’ he told her that night. ‘I can hack it. And in any case, I couldn’t go back to Bicester now. All my friends have done their exams there now and some of them have even left school. I wouldn’t fit in there now either.’
Things seemed to get a little better after Fern met Judith in the shop and got talking to her about Ben. Judith had suggested that if Ben’s French improved, then it might be easier for him to integrate and had offered to coach him once or twice a week. Fern accepted gladly and was grateful that Judith (sensing Fern’s desperation an
d lack of money) had offered to do it for next to nothing. ‘It’ll be good for me to keep my hand in at teaching’, she said after she’d met Ben, whom she liked and felt sorry for. He was clearly lonely but trying hard to cope. After that, Ben seemed to cheer up a bit and his French had certainly improved.
Now Fern was more relaxed about Ben. All of a sudden he seemed almost like his old self again, almost light-hearted. He was a funny boy though. Just lately, he had become fanatical about sorting out his room which had formerly been reassuringly squalid. He had got several black bin liners and had thrown out a huge amount of junk. Also, she knew for a fact that he was planning to give away several of his favourite things such as books and CDs. He had asked Fern for some wrapping paper and said he was going to give them to all his friends back home as Christmas presents even though it was only July. When she mentioned this to Judith, she had looked thoughtful. ‘That’s odd’, she said, ‘I meant to mention to you that Ben gave me something too recently – a rather beautiful statue of a tiger carved from soapstone. Of course I said I couldn’t accept it, but he insisted.’
‘But he loves that statue,’ cried Fern. ‘It was one of the few things his father gave him… I can’t believe he gave you that. I’m glad he gave you a present of course – you’ve been such a help to him, but I’m very surprised it was that.’ Fern determined to speak to Ben that evening. What on earth was he doing giving all these things away. And she was a bit unnerved about his room now. She’d been pleased at first because it had been such a mess but his behaviour was a bit strange – she wondered with a sudden pang of anxiety whether he was planning to run away or something. That evening at home she poured herself a drink and waited anxiously for Ben to come back. She must talk to him. But when he did return, he was evasive as usual.