The Beloved Girls

by Harriet Evans

  Anyone with any relevant information is urged to contact the Metropolitan Police.

  Part Two

  1989

  Extract from English Folklore, Fortescue, Millard, 1952, etc.

  THE COLLECTING CAROL

  TRADITIONAL, TO THE TUNE OF GREEN GROW THE RUSHES, O!

  I’ll sing you one, O,

  One come for the comb, O!

  What is your one, O?

  One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.

  The origin of this bastardisation of a traditional folk song is unclear, but whilst a great number of versions have been taken down and performed all over the West Country (see Baring-Gould & Sheppard, Songs and Ballads of the West, 1889) this version is sung only in an obscure corner of Somerset on the edge of Exmoor and thus entirely preserved as such is worthy of our attention.

  Every year, in a ritual known as the Collecting dating back to the 18th century, the Hunter family in the parish of Larcombe invites the village to process through the woods (formerly inhabited by lepers) and beyond the boundary of the house to the ruined chapel of St Dunstan where are kept and tended by the family’s many beehives. These bees, cultivated for over two centuries, are thought to inhabit some of the oldest hives in the country, perhaps the world (in Morocco, there is tell of hives extant for four centuries in an ancient monastery at the foot of the Atlas mountains). On St Bartholomew’s Day, the patron saint of bees and beekeepers, 24 August, the ceremony must take place. The hives are opened, and half the comb cut away, to be eaten and enjoyed by the family and assembled throng ‘with some rapture’. Then the honey is collected, to be sampled throughout the year, with the warning: ‘Half for us, half for them, else the Devil take us all’, and the understanding that, if too much is taken from the bees, the inhabitants of Vanes and thus the Hunter family will fall.

  The ceremony was instigated two hundred years ago by the incumbent priest of Vanes rectory, Caradoc Diver, about whom various stories are still told in the village. A short history by a junior member of the Hunter family, purporting to tell the true history of the Reverend Diver and the origins of the ceremony, is said to exist but has never been circulated beyond the family. Village rumour has it he made a pact with the Devil to conjure up a congregation to the church and secure the living. Some say accusations of a most grave nature against Diver are true. Unbelievable and scandalous as such claims may be, they are hard to disprove in a community almost entirely unchanged for centuries.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Lestrange? Hey, are you Janey Lestrange?’

  In my mind’s eye I still see them all perfectly, not as they were that first visit when I was twelve, but as I did the summer of 1989. I was eighteen, and my father had died four months earlier.

  I had taken the train to Taunton, then a bus to Minehead. There had been a rail strike the previous day and virtually no one was aboard the train out of London. Though I’d been to Vanes before I had no idea where I was going, nor where I was when I got to Taunton. I was directed to the bus by a ‘kindly guard’ holding up a sign with my name on it.

  He stared at me when I walked towards him, head down, too shy to make full eye contact. I knew he’d been expecting someone grown-up, glamorous; my surname does that. My mother hated it and gave me a plain name to offset it, which instead highlighted it. I should have been Jacquetta, or Hildegard or something. Mine and Daddy’s favourite obscure fact had been that Ray Stanton Avery, the inventor of the sticky label, married a woman named Ernestine Onderdonk. Now that’s a name. I never cared for my name at all, until it wasn’t mine any more.

  ‘Are you Janey Lestrange?’

  I nodded, only then looking up and glancing at him, defiantly. Come on. Stare at me. I know I’m a freak. I’ve always looked young, but that summer of 1989, for about four months by then, I had had no hair. One might wonder how my mother could have let me go away, but back then horrific things came to seem quite normal.

  My summer job at Boots had come to an end prematurely and I was living alone in the family home, eating Wimpy meals or spaghetti hoops out of cans. Daddy had done all the cooking, and whilst my mother had come back from Spain a couple of weeks before to chivvy me along, and to sort out the house, she had left after ten days, the two of us more distant than ever, every evening spent in resentful, bemused silence. Salvation came in the form of the invitation to Vanes from Sylvia, who telephoned one evening whilst I happened to be out with my best friend, Claire. I got home to find my mother had accepted on my behalf. ‘Go and stay with them. It’ll do you good to get out of the house, Janey. Have a change of scene.’

  There was no invitation to return to Spain with her. ‘I’d have you over, Janey, but Martin’s children are there at the moment and it’s difficult . . .’

  I think she was afraid of my grief, of the horrendous pain I felt. I have sympathy. I was afraid of it, too. She left, exhorted me to tidy up, or think about sorting the house out so we could put it on the market. I did nothing about it. The night before I was due to leave, alone again, I sat in the house one last time. Impossible to quantify the feelings, the sense of the man still there, of my life drifting utterly away from me. I told myself I didn’t really care. Before falling into bed, I piled a load of clothes into Daddy’s Gladstone bag, any old thing. It’s interesting to consider whether, if I had known I’d never go back, never return to that life again, would I have packed more carefully?

  I wish I had a photograph of him. That’s all.

  The driver was kind, pointing out a seat by the front. ‘It’s better up front, you don’t feel so sick.’

  The ancient bus juddered as though it were a collection of springs held together by string, bouncing through narrow, winding roads towards Minehead, where at the bus station, on a side street, I climbed out along with my fellow passengers, looking around for someone to meet me. At the sight of my patchy head, a child in a buggy dropped her ice-cream cone onto the ground, with a cartoonish splat. As the roars faded into the distance, and I stared around shivering slightly in the lengthening shadows and pulling the precious but unwieldy Gladstone bag closer towards me, a voice said:

  ‘Aha. So you’re the tragic waif and stray then, are you? Jane, isn’t it? Hello again.’

  I looked up, and there was a boy, trapped in a shaft of sunlight, watching me with a quizzical, curious expression. Without doubt he was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen, from the crown of his lustrous head to the pointed dark-plum Chelsea boots on his long, slender feet.

  ‘I’m Janey,’ I said. My dad had always called me Janey. Never Jane.

  He came forward, pushing his hair out of his eyes. ‘It’s lovely to see you again, Janey Lestrange. I’m Joss Hunter.’

  ‘I remember,’ I said, awkwardly. He stared at me, as everyone did, but Joss was too well-mannered to do it for long.

  ‘Mum’s professional name,’ he said, smoothly. ‘Of course.’ I looked blank. ‘Sylvia Lestrange. PF loathes it. I’d forgotten it was your father’s name she took.’

  Your father. He said it almost accusingly and my back stiffened. ‘Right.’ I shrugged, and then said, because I didn’t know what else to say: ‘I don’t know why you’d open with that as a greeting, to be honest.’

  His hair fell in his face again and he flicked it away, smiling with enjoyment. ‘Oh wow. Kitty said you were punchy.’ He held out a hand and I shook it, each of us summing the other up. ‘You’re here now. I’ve come to take you home.’

  Daddy would have moved out of London, but for work, and my mother. His own mother, who died long before I was born, had grown up in one room in a tiny cottage in Dorset, and Daddy loved to tell the story of how as a young girl my grandmother had been given an apple by an ancient Thomas Hardy. He missed the countryside. He talked about it a lot. Curlews, and red campion, and tawny owls. Glow worms, and crickets, and the sound of a breeze in a wheat field just before harvest.

  But apart from our holidays in Worthing every year, where we stayed in a small, prim
hotel called Fairgreen with the same trifle for pudding every evening and the same sickly-sweet-smelling guests, where the sea was four streets away down narrow, chilly lanes, we did not really leave London, save for our snatched day trips here or there. My mother didn’t like to. She was a townie, proudly so, she always said.

  Those day trips were all the more precious, therefore. Every year, just before school started in September, Daddy would wake me early and we’d catch a train somewhere. Out to the Chilterns, to go walking – once we got lost and had to shelter from the rain in a pub near Chequers, and we saw Mrs Thatcher’s car drive past. We went to Bath, and Daddy took a photo of me, reading Emma, in front of the Royal Crescent. We went to Greenwich, by boat, and looked at the giant telescope and saw the spot in Greenwich Park where Flamsteed burned three hundred copies of his own star atlas, because it was full of inaccuracies and he had not wanted it published, but Halley and Newton had gone ahead anyway. (I simmered with the injustice of this for weeks). We went to Cambridge and saw Trinity College, where Newton himself had been a valet to pay his way for his own studies. One year we decided to drive to Alton Towers but the car broke down, and Daddy got anxious, because we had no money for a new car, I think, and we couldn’t go. Mummy had to go to Clerkenwell to collect Gran’s Austin and fetch us from a service station on the M1. She was silently furious the whole way home, Daddy dozing lightly, seat pushed all the way back to accommodate his long legs, arms folded, that gentle, amused smile draped across his face.

  Mummy left a year or so after that. I used to call her Mummy, but when she left, I stopped really calling her anything. ‘My mother,’ I’d say to people, carelessly. ‘My mother’s gone off with someone else.’

  So it was Daddy who showed me new places, horizons, people. He had always been out in the world. First, in Egypt, where my grandfather had worked his way up from the position of lowly bootboy to still-fairly-lowly colonial servant in Alexandria. This was where my father grew up, eating dates and figs, hearing of an England he’d never visited, building images in his mind. He was sent back to England for school, and then joined the army like his father, culminating in a posting to Naples at the end of the Second World War. That was how, indirectly, he came to meet my mother. And more directly it was how I came to be catching a train to Vanes, one summer morning, off on an adventure just like the ones he and I used to go on, only this time he was dead and I was being packed off to this strange family whom I barely remembered from one trip, over five years ago, and I had to keep getting up from my seat to go and be sick in the tiny, filthy British Rail lavatory.

  Joss’s car was parked almost diagonally on the windy Minehead seafront, a vast curving expanse of beach and promenade, with hills bookmarking each end. Waves crowned with frothy foam danced towards us; here and there people sat in thirties pastel-coloured shelters, looking out to sea.

  ‘Here you go,’ said Joss, throwing open the battered thin blue door of the Mini, covered in scrapes and pockmarks. He reached for my bag – I clung to it, for a second, as if he were trying to snatch it, and then released it. He stared down at it. ‘Unusual.’

  ‘It was D— It was my dad’s,’ I said, and he nodded.

  ‘Oh. Of course. Do get in. Listen, let’s peg it. Don’t want to be late for supper. PF’s funny about that sort of thing.’

  ‘I remember. How’s Kitty? I brought a book of hers back.’

  I’d thought it would be a nice icebreaker, to return a copy of The Dark is Rising to her, five years after taking it. I was looking forward to seeing her again very much; the first time since Daddy died, in fact, that I’d looked forward to something.

  Joss looked rather surprised. ‘Kitty? She’s the same, I suppose.’

  The car smelled of cigarettes, and mints, and the bloom of teenage body odours and aftershave. I shut the door and tugged at the seat belt. ‘Here,’ he said, and leaned over me, hand on my leg, quite casually, yanking it down and into the clip. I stiffened, but he sat back and drove off, quite heedless of the fact that this was the most physical contact I had had with anyone for weeks. My best friend Claire and I had hugged every morning on the bridge before school. But school was over, and Claire had gone to visit her family in Jamaica a couple of weeks ago.

  ‘How long till we get there?’

  ‘About twenty minutes, with a fair wind. Oh, look. Ha! Hey!’ He beeped the horn loudly. ‘Muggers!’ He wound down the window furiously. ‘Muggers! I say!’

  A tall boy our age glanced around, but apparently didn’t register Joss, for he carried on walking.

  ‘Dammit,’ said Joss. ‘Didn’t see me. He’s a mate. Oh well. I can phone him later actually. I’ve got his phone number.’

  ‘Right.’

  He turned on the car radio. The tinny sound of Jason Donovan’s latest hit crackled over the speakers. ‘Muggers lives nearby. Family has a huge place. He’s got two tennis courts.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yep. He’s friends with me, Giles, Nico and so forth. There’s lots of people our age round here, but it’s whether you’ve got a car or not.’

  ‘What about the bus?’ I said, pointing at another bus trundling the other way.

  Joss stared at me. ‘The bus? That’s hilarious. Oh, of course, you got the bus, but that’s OK, it was from the train. You’ll meet the chaps at some point. Everyone’s back now, before we all head off again. It’s going to be a great summer.’

  I wished he’d stop talking. I wanted to sink down into the seat, not to look out of the window, because the landscape, vaguely familiar yet utterly alien, made me realise just how far away I was.

  We were driving away from the sea through town, along the high street decked with begonias in hanging baskets and candy-striped plastic windbreakers rolled up outside shops. Children and adults shuffled along in jelly shoes, shoulders slumped. Away from the seafront it was hot – too hot, as it had been for weeks in London too, a cloudless heat seemingly draped over everything. We stopped at the lights. A child, being dragged along by its father, caught sight of me and started yelling. ‘Look at her! Dad Dad Dad! Look at her hair!!’ I shut my eyes – I thought I might be sick in the car, and that would be unimaginable.

  Joss glanced over at me and turned the radio off. ‘Here,’ he said, fumbling in the glove compartment and shoving a tape into the tape deck. ‘More restful.’

  It was classical music, I didn’t know what, but it was rather nice. Joss lit a cigarette and offered me one. I shook my head.

  ‘This is Bruch,’ he said. ‘I mean it’s maybe the greatest piece of work for a violin ever written. It’s really emotional. I just listen to it in my room and think.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Do you like classical music?’

  ‘My dad loved it. He’d go to the Proms sometimes. He used to take me . . .’ I trailed off, unable to speak.

  ‘OK. I love classical. It’s just very poetic. I love house, too. House music? Acid. S’Express. Danny Rampling. Lil Louis. Do you like acid house?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What music do you like then?’

  ‘Um – all sorts. Transvision Vamp. Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, Kate Bush. And of course . . .’ I put my hands together in prayer. ‘. . . of course, Madonna. I record the charts off the radio.’

  ‘Oh.’ He snorted. ‘Chart stuff. Bloody Jason Donovan, he’s everywhere. Kylie. And Big Fun. Melissa loves them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My little sister. You remember Merry. She’s trying to get us to call her Melissa, but it doesn’t work.’

  ‘I do remember her. Of course,’ I said, defensively. I wanted to make out I was entirely at home at their place, that this was all normal. ‘Does she like Madonna? Like a Prayer is my favourite album of hers. Have you got it?’

  ‘Me?’ Joss sounded horrified. ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’ I shrugged. ‘That’s OK. You can borrow my cassette if you want. And Soul II Soul. That album is amazing . . . My best friend Claire an
d I listen to it all the time.’ Claire had been given the Soul II Soul album by her dad. We almost wore it out on the record player in her cramped, cluttered bedroom, sitting on the bed with her pastel blue and peach duvet cover. I swallowed. ‘And Flanders and Swann. Tom Lehrer. Also, I really adore Liza Minnelli singing “Losing My Mind”. My dad loves musicals.’ I corrected myself, briskly. ‘He loved musicals.’

  I could sense Joss struggling to put a label on this. Joss, for all his wild declarations of individuality, in his paisley shirt and black 501s and leather waistcoat and pendant silver crescent hanging from the leather thong and love of classical music was as conformist as any number of public school boys. To be truly radical that summer for a boy like him would be to love Jason Donovan. ‘That’s – sure.’

  ‘It’s what I like,’ I said, shrugging.

  He glanced at me. ‘Yeah, right, of course. Cool.’

  We were out of town now. Dense woods hugged the hills, a ribbon of slim otherland, somewhere caught between the moors and the sea. Memory came back to me. The winding roads. The wet, dripping orange and green. Kitty’s friendly, kind face, in a sea of gloom. Dancing to Wham! Hiding from Merry and Joss. Laughing till we were sick.

  ‘The Collecting is at the end of August,’ Joss said. ‘Will you be here then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You didn’t bring much for six weeks, if that’s the case.’

  ‘I’m not sure how long I’m staying,’ I said, wishing he’d shut up. I gazed out of the window.

  ‘I am very sorry about your father,’ he said after a short silence, very formally, which was excruciating.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘I – you’re not at school with Kitty, are you?’

  ‘I live in London.’

  ‘But it’s a boarding school, Letham’s.’

  ‘Still no,’ I said, nonplussed. ‘I went to St Cecilia’s School for Girls. In Greenford.’