I glanced at Helena, and felt for her. Poor Helena. With her indifferent academic achievements and average looks, how could she compete with such a brother? Hitherto I had never given much thought to sibling rivalry. Lucas and I had always been sufficiently fond of each other and sufficiently different in our abilities for comparisons to seem unnecessary, and Mum was not one to show favouritism. But there was no mistaking who was the favourite child in this family.
Later that evening, as I was making my way up to my room, Alex stopped me on the staircase.
‘I meant what I said,’ he told me.
‘What? What did you mean?’ I pressed myself against the wall, hoping he would go past me and let the matter drop.
‘You’re very pretty, Cassandra. Very pretty indeed.’ He turned to face me, placing his hands against the wall on either side of me, effectively preventing me from moving on.
‘Please — please let me pass.’ I made as though to move away, but Alex merely laughed.
‘Oh Cassandra, don’t tell me you’re shy!’
‘No, of course not. I just want — I want to go to bed.’
‘Bed? Did you say bed? What a very forward young lady you are!’
‘I mean I want to go to my room.’ My heart was thumping inside my chest like a trapped bird, and my palms were sweating. I longed for Helena to appear, but she had already gone up for a bath, and was unlikely to come down again. ‘Please. Please let me go.’
‘Why? Why should I let you go?’ Alex seemed to consider for a moment. ‘OK. I’ll let you go. But you’ll have to pay.’
‘Pay?’
‘Yes. A kiss. One little kiss, and then you can go. A small price to pay, wouldn’t you say?’
‘No. I mean, I’d rather not. Please let me go. I just want to go upstairs.’
‘A kiss, Cassandra. I demand it.’ Alex leant forward. I could feel his breath warm on my cheek and smell the wine he had had at dinner. ‘One little kiss.’
I put out my hands to push him away, but he was surprisingly strong. His hands were on my shoulders now, his face close to mine.
‘No! No!’ I managed to get the words out before his mouth closed on mine, and then I screamed. All the terror and revulsion of my encounter with Uncle Rupert came back to me, and I screamed with a strength born of desperation. On some distant level I was aware that I was overreacting; that nothing serious could happen on a staircase in a house full of people, but the screaming wouldn’t stop. It was almost as though it had nothing to do with me; as though some other part of me had taken over.
‘Hey! Hey!’ Alex looked as frightened as I was. He took me by the shoulders and shook me gently. ‘Cassandra! I didn’t mean anything. It was just a joke. Come on. Stop this noise, for goodness’ sake!’
From different parts of the house, I could hear doors opening and hurrying footsteps. I had to get away. Stifling my sobs, I ducked under Alex’s arm and rushed up the stairs, along the corridor and into my room, where I slammed the door shut and then leant against it, my chest heaving, the tears still streaming down my face.
‘Cassandra? Let me in, dear. Whatever’s the matter?’ Helena’s mother was outside the door, trying the door handle. ‘Come on, Cassandra. You must tell me what’s wrong!’
Reluctantly, I moved away from the door. I had no idea what I was going to say. I knew that if I told the truth no one would believe me, for I couldn’t imagine Helena’s parents ever thinking ill of their golden boy. I would be branded a liar, and Helena wouldn’t want me for her friend any more.
Fortunately, Alex had come up with his own version of events.
‘Alex said you thought you saw a mouse. Is that true, Cassandra?’ Helena’s mother came into the room and put her arm round me.
‘No. Yes. Yes — I’m sure I saw a mouse.’ I sat down on the bed. ‘I’m sorry. It — it scared me.’
‘That’s all right, dear, although you did give us all a bit of a fright. After all, if it was a mouse — and I sincerely hope not; we’ve never had mice in this house — it’s nothing to be afraid of, is it?’
I shook my head, unable to speak. I was furious with Alex. Furious with him for subjecting me to his unwanted attentions, furious that he should imply that I was the kind of girl who would be afraid of a mouse, and furious that he should lie to get himself out of his predicament, secure in the knowledge that I would probably back him up. I felt stupid and humiliated and ashamed, and all I wanted now was to be left alone.
But I had to endure all the fussing attention which Helena’s mother seemed to think appropriate for a deranged guest, and it wasn’t until I’d had a hot bath (‘leave the door unlocked, dear — just in case’), a mug of hot milk (which I hated) and a hot water bottle (which I didn’t need) that I was finally left on my own.
Homesick and wretched, wishing myself anywhere but in this awful house, I eventually cried myself to sleep.
Ten
The injection is beginning to work and Mum becomes drowsy, her eyelids drooping, her twitching transparent hands loosening their grip on the sheet. I want her to sleep — of course I do — and yet we have so little time left together and I don’t want to waste a minute of it. Apart from anything else, there’s so much I want to ask her; so much that will die when she dies. How old was I when I took my first steps? Lost my first tooth? Stopped believing in Father Christmas? My whole childhood is sleeping with her on that pillow, and the bits I can’t remember will go when she does. But how can I deny her the little respite she gets from her pain and her anxiety?
That term seemed endless. The weather turned bitingly cold, and we shivered as we scurried between classrooms, rubbing life back into our mottled thighs after games of hockey, where the only pain worse than the blow of a hockey stick against an unsuspecting ankle was a tumble onto the frozen pitch. We were always hungry, and there never seemed to be enough food. Meals were hurried (just twenty minutes for supper, before the start of evening prep), and we went to bed with rumbling stomachs.
Many relied on the contents of tuck boxes to stave off their hunger, and the arrival of food parcels — for that was what they amounted to — was greeted with great joy. Fortunate (and popular) was the girl who received a steady supply of provisions from home, but I was one of the unlucky ones, for in this respect, as in so many others, Mum proved unreliable. When I did receive a package from home it was as likely to contain something knitted by Greta (which I wasn’t allowed to wear) or a book (which I didn’t have the time to read) as the sweets and biscuits I craved. The navy knickers did finally arrive, tucked round two packets of peanuts, but the knickers were too late and the peanuts were musty-tasting. I suspected Mum had found them mouldering away at the back of a cupboard (no sell-by dates in those days).
My friendship with Helena resumed as though half-term had never happened. Perhaps there are some friendships which rely on a particular environment in order to thrive. No reference was made by either of us to what had been a pretty unsuccessful week, and nothing was said of Alex or mice. Had Helena questioned me on the subject of the episode on the stairs, I don’t think I would have been able to dissemble as readily as I had to her mother. I suspect that, like most teenagers, Helena was not overly preoccupied with the ills of others, preferring to concentrate on her own problems (at the time, the likelihood that she would come bottom in the end-of-term exams).
My own school work was proceeding well. St Andrew’s was not an especially academic school, seeming content with its small but respectable annual clutch of university places, and most of the time I hovered comfortably near the top of my class. My chemistry results were consistently abysmal, but that didn’t bother me. An inability to get by in French or an ignorance of English literature might be expected to carry a stigma, but no one was ever condemned for failing to shine at chemistry.
Piano lessons were another matter.
Perhaps to make up for the fact that she had never had piano lessons herself, Mum insisted that I should have them. Not for me the record
player and the ironing board; I was to learn to play a real piano properly.
‘It can’t be that hard,’ she had told me, before I started my new school, her hands moving lovingly up and down the back of one of Call Me Bill’s shirts (she had taken to doing his laundry as well as everyone else’s) to the accompaniment of a Mozart concerto. ‘Lots of people can play the piano.’
What she had evidently failed to notice was that lots of people play the piano very badly, and we were both about to discover that I was one of them.
‘I can’t. I just can’t,’ I sobbed during my fourth piano lesson, when once again I had failed to understand how a scatter of dots and squiggles could be interpreted as musical notes.
‘But you can read, can’t you?’ Mr Presley, a dapper little man who came to the school twice a week to teach piano, looked bewildered. ‘It’s the same principle. You translate letters into words. You do the same with music, only in this case it’s notes. Now dry your eyes, Cassandra, and try again.’
I tried again. And again. But to no avail. How could anyone not only interpret all those lines and dots, but do it with both hands at once? By the end of the term, I had failed to master even the rudiments of ‘The Jolly Farmer’, a horrid bouncy little piece which was the launch pad of the musical career of all Mr Presley’s pupils. And at my last lesson of the term, he gently suggested that I might consider giving it up. I could have kissed him.
I looked forward eagerly to Christmas: to the chaos and bustle of a house full of Mum’s waifs and strays; to the bedraggled football socks which served as Christmas stockings and which Lucas and I hung up on Christmas Eve; and to Christmas carols from an old and very scratched record (we had to help it along in the middle of ‘Silent Night’, where it always got stuck).
I was much exercised as to how I was to travel home, dreading a repeat of Mum and the van, but in the event I was spared, for Call Me Bill took the afternoon off to bring her to collect me in his car.
‘Here we are!’ cried Mum gaily, getting out of the passenger seat and sweeping me into her arms. ‘Oh, Cass! You’ve grown, and you’re so thin!’
I forbore to take this opportunity to remind her that her contributions to my intake of food had been sadly lacking. There would be plenty of time for that later. As I succumbed to her embrace, I was aware of other girls watching us. Next to the Jaguars and the Mercedes, Call Me Bill’s car looked shabby and tired, and Mum, swathed in several layers of faded cardigans and sporting a bright red knitted hat (Greta’s handiwork, I had no doubt), appeared out of place among the tailored and coiffed mothers of my friends, but I didn’t care. I was used to — even proud of — my family’s eccentricities, and after my experience of Helena’s household, I was also grateful.
The Dog, anxious not to be excluded from the reunion, leapt from the open car door and threw himself at me (‘He so wanted to come,’ Mum later explained. ‘He couldn’t wait to see you.’ How on earth could she tell?), and completed our little display by making a neat deposit in the middle of the lawn. It was time to get going.
That Christmas was everything I could have hoped for. Mum, inspired by a posh magazine she’d seen at the dentist’s, had festooned the bannisters and mantelpieces with swags of red ribbon and ivy, and there was a colourful wreath on the front door. All this looked rather incongruous when combined with our faded paper chains and the battered decorations on the Christmas tree, but it gave the house a more than usually festive feel, and in any case, none of us was too much bothered with matters of taste.
The house guests consisted of Call Me Bill, who didn’t appear to have any family, the Lodger, who had fallen out with his parents, and a friend of Greta’s who was over from Switzerland. Fortunately, Greta’s friend was small and shy and fitted perfectly onto the sitting-room sofa (I refused to give up my bed, reasoning that I had been without it for quite long enough, and for once Mum understood).
If I had grown, so had Lucas, who seemed to have reached overnight that spotty gangly stage so common in adolescent boys; all bony wrists and Adam’s apple and wispy suggestions of facial hair, which seemed designed to put off the opposite sex rather than the reverse (which I imagined to be what adolescence was all about). Certainly, the girlfriend had apparently ditched him in favour of an older model, but Lucas appeared unfazed. There were, he told me confidently, plenty more fish in the sea. I just hoped for his sake that the fish didn’t go too much on appearances.
Otherwise, Lucas seemed much the same, and we quickly settled back into our easy bantering relationship punctuated with the odd comfortably familiar squabble. His school report was as bad as mine was good, but Mum seemed entertained rather than annoyed.
‘Look, Cass,’ she said, holding up a report in either hand. ‘They’re almost mirror images of each other. If I could add all your good points together, I’d have a perfect child!’
And there was something in what she said. For while I had contrived to come either top or second in almost every subject except chemistry, chemistry appeared to be the one subject in which Lucas had if not excelled, then at least passed unnoticed. Add to this the fact that he was good at sport and passable on the violin — while my sporting record had been as bad as my piano playing — and it would appear that between us Mum had indeed produced the ingredients for one perfectly rounded child (and presumably one dismal failure as well, but she obviously preferred not to look at it that way).
But throughout Christmas and the new year — through all the feasting and drinking, the partying and singing — there was something about Mum which wasn’t quite right. She seemed to be throwing herself into the festivities with a kind of desperation, almost as though she were using Christmas as a diversion from some other far more serious matter. And as the three weeks of my holiday drew to a close, I became increasingly worried. Was Mum heading for one of her famous depressions? She hadn’t had one for some time, and they didn’t usually last long, but I dreaded a return of those black moods; of the overwhelming sadness and the weeping and the catalogue of regrets which haunted her on these occasions. As far as I knew, nothing had happened to precipitate such a decline; she had seemed happy, Lucas and I were reasonably settled, the house was as full as even Mum could have wished. And yet I knew that something was wrong.
‘Is Mum OK?’ I asked Lucas one day, while we were out walking The Dog. ‘She doesn’t seem — right.’
‘I don’t know.’ Lucas picked up a stick and threw it for The Dog. ‘I’ve asked her, and she says she’s fine, but she’s not herself.’
‘It’s not man trouble, is it?’ Man trouble featured regularly in our mother’s life, and although she tended to keep it to herself, and Lucas and I rarely even knew the identity of the man in question, the fallout of man trouble affected us all.
‘I don’t think so. I don’t even think there’s been a man recently, though you never can tell with Mum.’ Lucas paused. ‘She might tell you, Cass. After all, you’re a woman.’
I wanted to say that no, I wasn’t a woman, I was not yet fifteen, and still anxious to hang on to what little childhood I had left, but there was no point in trying to explain this to Lucas. Lucas, with his fake ID for getting into pubs and his eager anticipation of his provisional driving licence (one year to go) wouldn’t understand at all.
I tackled Mum while she was drying her hair up in her bedroom.
‘What’s up, Mum?’
‘Up? What do you mean, what’s up?’ Mum lifted and shook out a thick handful of hair. She had beautiful hair, a deep rich auburn; a colour she hadn’t managed to hand on to either of her offspring.
‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’ I sat down on the bed beside her. ‘Please tell me, Mum. I need to know. I can’t go back to school, leaving you like this. I’ll only worry.’
She turned to me, letting her hair fall back onto her shoulders, and placed the hairdryer on the bedside table.
‘Oh, Cass. I’m in a bit of a mess. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Mess
? What sort of mess? Is it money?’
‘No. Not money.’
‘What, then? You’ve got to tell me.’
‘Something — something’s happened, Cass. It — it’s difficult.’
‘So I see. But you’ll have to tell me sooner or later, so you may as well get it over now.’
‘You’re too young. You shouldn’t have to be bothered with this sort of thing yet.’
What sort of thing? What on earth could have happened to Mum which required me to be older in order to cope with it?
‘Are you ill? Is that it?’ I was becoming frightened. Perhaps Mum had some incurable illness. How would I manage? How would any of us manage without her?
‘No. Not ill. Oh, Cass. Promise you won’t say anything to anyone else if I tell you?’
‘Promise.’
‘And you’ll forgive me?’
‘Of course.’ Why shouldn’t I forgive her? What on earth had Mum been up to? I took her hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘Tell me, Mum.’
‘Well then.’ She took a deep breath. ‘There’s no easy way of saying this, but — oh, Cass! — I’m pregnant. I’m going to have a baby.’
Eleven
January 1962
I eased myself off the bed and walked unsteadily over to the open window to get some air.
The Frances Garrood Collection Page 7