‘Good-oh,’ said Joss, and he smiled at me.
Chapter Thirteen
Vanes
Larcombe
Somerset
31 July 1989
Dear Mummy,
Thank you for your letter. I am sorry not to have replied sooner. I telephoned but it was call waiting and I had to go to dinner. You could call me. Or, perhaps write me a postcard with a time when I can call you if you don’t mind me reversing the charges.
It is fine here. They are all nice. We have been outside a lot as it has been lovely weather. We’ve been swimming in the pool every day. Joss says the pool is old & made of the same stone as the house. It has been there for two hundred years. Everything is old here.
I hope you are enjoying being back in Spain. You said the apartment was nice and cool. I hope Martin is well.
Sylvia asked me to send you her love if I wrote to you. I like her so much. She has made me a sun dress and some scarves, and a lovely skirt. She said She showed me some of her designs – she works late at night and after lunch when Charles is dozing. She says Charles gets annoyed if she’s lost in the clouds when he wants his tea!
There’s a big thing they do here called the Collecting. They have these bees, in hives, in a chapel just beyond the house wall. I am to play a part in this year’s ceremony when they collect the honey. There will be a big party because the twins turning 18 is a huge deal from a point of view of Joss coming of age. Charles is going to walk me round it all in a few days. There are two girls who accompany the procession, and Kitty and I are to do it together!
The twins’ birthday is 31 August. Imagine that, the last day of summer. They must be the youngest in their year. Kitty doesn’t seem that way, she seems older than everyone. I can’t quite work her out. She has a place at Cambridge to read History, but she doesn’t want to go. There are rows about it, I don’t see how it’s going to end. I don’t think she’s the sort of person to change her mind about something. Joss is nice. He likes Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov and poetry. He is going to agricultural college, which he is looking forward to. They have a sister, called Merry. She is 14 and she is really sweet.
Mummy, will you please reconsider about teacher training, or even university? I know we discussed it. But I have thought a lot about it since arriving at Vanes and I really don’t want to go to secretarial college when I could study more instead. I know I’ve probably ruined my chances for university this autumn but I would try anything, I really would. Miss Minas said retaking exams is still possible. She has written to me here and she will contact you directly about it. I gave her your address, please don’t be cross. Miss Minas says if I want to apply for a place through clearing she will give me references and speak to admissions tutors herself about the circumstances of me taking the exams so soon after Daddy died. She says it is a shame I am not at least trying. Mummy, I know that you want me to have a proper job but if I go to university I’ll be able to get a good job, won’t I? I know what you said about Daddy and money. I promise I’m not like him in all the ways that annoyed you. He was only trying because he so wanted me to go. You know he did. Please Mummy, don’t be cross when you read this letter, and will you think about it?
Love Janey
PPS The water in the pool is perfectly safe and I don’t go in there when it’s dark
PPPS –
I put down my pen, absent-mindedly stroking the lump on my middle finger which was still bulging after months of mock exams and revision, even before I gave up on it. All that training and learning that was, even now, seeping, running out of my brain, never to be used again. I looked down at the tight little lines in my cramped, difficult handwriting which Claire used to say looked like spiders dancing. I wondered whether my mother would realise how much I wasn’t telling her.
I didn’t tell her about Charles and Sylvia: their loud, animal coupling most nights, and how after a week at Vanes it had come to seem normal. About how sweet Sylvia was, but totally vacant most of the time, as if she’d seen a ghost. I didn’t say about Charles, and how she deferred to him about everything, but still didn’t really seem that interested in what he said. I didn’t tell her that Kitty barely appeared all day, except by the pool and at mealtimes, and that Merry and I had started a club where we rolled our eyes at each other, and smiled. I liked Merry, for all that she was a bit childish.
I didn’t say that Rosalind Hunter popped up at the most unexpected times, humming that song – ‘Twelve for the twelve new hunters’ – and it unsettled me, how absent her eyes were, like Sylvia’s, only more so. I had started to dread the sound of feet on gravel, though the others barely registered her appearances. There was something about her lumbering tread that could have been amusingly, cartoonishly Frankenstein-like. But it wasn’t amusing. The previous night it had rained so we hadn’t heard her, and all four of us had jumped as the door banged and she walked through the living room, where we were sitting after dinner, listening to some violin concerto of Joss’s: me reading, Merry drawing, Kitty curled up filing her nails, Joss staring at nothing – sometimes at me, but usually at nothing. Upstairs the usual sounds, audible over the rain and the music.
Ros had very solid hair. It never moved. She had pasty-coloured skin across which were hundreds of tiny white bumps, like join the dots. Her eyes rarely fixed on anything, and yet there was purpose to what she did, the way she did it. I knew this. As she burst into the room Merry and I tried to ignore her, but Kitty jumped, and shrank against the wide corner seat.
‘Oh go away, for God’s sake, Aunty Ros. Why can’t you just leave us alone!’ Her voice cracked on alone.
Ros ignored her. She stood there with her hands on her hips, smiling that strangely grotesque smile.
‘Got the Old Girls’ newsletter today, Kits. Merry. Come here. I’ll show it to you. Jacks Benson – top girl, jolly good sort. She’s bloody gone and become an MP! Look! How bloody hilarious. Jackseat Benson, lording it in the House of Commons!’
‘Wow,’ I said, impressed. I didn’t know any MPs. ‘Was she a friend of yours?’
‘No,’ said Ros, shortly. ‘Didn’t play fair. In lacrosse. Wasn’t nice to Daisy.’
Daisy had been Ros’s best friend, who was often mentioned but, according to the others, never seen. She had married a merchant banker and lived in Godalming. ‘And Aunty Ros was her bridesmaid and she keeps a photo of her by her bed but Daisy never even writes to her any more. Her husband said Aunty Ros couldn’t come in the house,’ Merry had informed me with relish, not long after my arrival. ‘He said she was a crackpot.’
‘How do you know?’ I said, and they all looked at me.
‘How do I know what?’
‘Well – where’s the proof? How do you know he said that? Who was there?’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Merry, with a shrug. But the photo of Daisy was on Ros’s bedside table, along with a picture of Unity, Ros’s pet King Charles spaniel she’d had as a girl who’d been squashed by a tractor, almost, it seemed, to Charles’s satisfaction.
‘I told her she was mad to keep a dog like that by the main road. But that’s Ros,’ he’d informed the table, several times now. ‘Adios Unity.’
‘Jackie Benson, MP, what a coup for Letham’s, girls! Our first MP.’
Ros smiled at her nieces, who registered no enthusiasm for this whatsoever. ‘Letham’s prides itself on the quality of the education it gives its girls but also its all-round approach,’ said Aunty Ros to me.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘It should, shouldn’t it?’
‘You can have a look at the book next time you’re up at the gatehouse. From Crumpets to Crenellations: One Hundred Years of Letham’s Ladies’ College. It’s awfully interesting, even if you didn’t go there.’
I nodded politely at her. ‘I’m sure it is,’ I said.
I didn’t tell my mother they laughed at Aunty Ros, when their father wasn’t present. Sylvia too. Rosalind was Charles’s senior by five years. I knew Charles was older than
most fathers, like Daddy had been, but to me Ros seemed to belong to a different generation entirely. I had been, with Merry, to her tiny little cottage, the gatehouse to Vanes, seen the stacked black-and-white photos of her schooldays on the damp walls, labelled in precise calligraphy by an unknown hand: ‘Letham’s Ladies’ College 1935–6’ ‘Drama Group, LLC, 1938’. ‘Kitty will miss the place frantically,’ she told me, munching her lips, her words, her eyes ranging over the photos, never meeting mine. ‘One never really leaves Letham’s though. Kitty knows that too. And you, Merry!’
‘Oh yes!’ said Merry, clasping her hands together.
There was something guileless about her and perhaps I’d have liked Ros more if she ever showed any interest in anything else. She didn’t once ask me about myself, for example, not that I wanted her to. I realised why, and came to dread her appearances. She was like a stuck record, with only two tunes: Letham’s and the Collecting.
‘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.’
I didn’t tell my mother the rest of the business about the bees. It hadn’t come up last time. It had been almost winter and they were inside keeping warm, or maybe I simply hadn’t noticed, caught up in playing stupid games with Kitty, dancing, lying on her bed, chatting.
But I understood now that everything was about the bees. You were always aware of them, no matter where you were. Sometimes it was so faint you wondered if it was the sea. Out on the terrace, you could hear them everywhere, especially towards the chapel. Out in the long drive lined with flowerbeds that turned into hedgerow towards Rosalind’s cottage, and on the other side into woodland, you could hear them constantly collecting, collecting as they darted from flower to flower. The strength of their wings when you got too close to them shocked me: the whirring, cold air. I never really got used to it, though I stopped jumping when one landed near me.
Thankfully the bees never appeared in a great number as they had done that first evening. ‘They’re angry bees, this lot. Hungry. They give no end of trouble,’ Mrs Red, the daily who came up from the village, liked to say.
Most of all I didn’t tell my mother about Joss. How his arm would, at supper, be next to mine: fine hairs and the faintest touch of skin were all that connected us, but it was like being stroked, repeatedly, kissed with fire, with a fluttering feeling in my heart and stomach. How we stayed close to each other anywhere we went, sometimes accidentally on purpose walking so our arms pressed together. How he touched my hand to ask me if I wanted more honey on my muesli at breakfast, or wine at dinner. How I never said no to him, but never looked at him. It is still hard for me to recall how ugly I believed myself to be, yet another difference between me and Kitty. Most days I wore a headscarf Sylvia had run up for me, in a pastel mint and apricot pattern, or Daddy’s panama.
Once Joss passed me on the stairs and I brushed in front of him, my chest touching his. I felt my nipples, sharp as points, tingling to be touched, touched by him. I wanted him, and I was horrified by it, which is sad. I was eighteen, and full of life, and I should have been proud of my body, should have wanted to share it with someone else, to explore their body, too.
I didn’t tell my mother about the house – the chaos of it, the broken china, the faint waft of manure that drifted over when the wind changed, and then the sea again, asserting its primacy. Mrs Red, whose family had lived here for generations, liked to tell us bloodcurdling stories of yesteryear. ‘There were wolves in the woods, long ago, they’d eat the lepers, and the bones would be found, flush with flies, they’d have to burn them.’ (I sometimes tried to imagine hearing a sentence like that back in Greenford.) The bickering: when my mother was still there my home was icily still, confrontation never dreamed of, usually the only sound me and Daddy, chatting about something, or him, in the garage, whistling over his inventions, or some new plans. Afterwards it was just the two of us, latterly quieter than ever as Daddy sat slumped at his desk, scribbling out plans, ideas, late into the night. And then it was just me.
Here, someone was always snarling at someone else, Merry at Joss when he teased her about Top of the Pops, Charles at his eldest two children, Kitty at everyone. And the past: everything was about the past, nothing was new, apart from Merry’s pop magazines and Kitty’s Walkman. There was no computer, only two radios, one with a tape machine shared by Joss and Kitty, one in the kitchen. The TV had no remote control. It was colour at least, a fact they all kept telling me as if it was something of which to be slightly ashamed. ‘I thought of getting a fax machine once, when I was really getting a lot of interest in my work,’ Sylvia had told me. ‘But Charles didn’t think it was worth the money.’ The china had been here longer than any of the occupants, and the lichen on the stones, and the ancient spring flowing down from Exmoor behind us that fed the pool, winding its way past the chapel and down the cliffs to the sea.
There was plenty else I didn’t tell my mother. I could not risk upsetting her any more. I understood the reason she couldn’t countenance letting me be anything else but a secretary. She wanted to make sure I didn’t get ideas above my station. She was terrified I would turn out like my father, who had too many ideas, and lived entirely above his station.
I have sympathy for her. Daddy had loved my mother in his way, I know that. He’d loved how she sometimes smiled at him, her frowning grey eyes lighting up as he said something to strike the flint within her. He loved her calmness – she was always calm, though at what cost I don’t know. She was never late to pick me up, and she listened to my concerns, if I had been unfairly treated or was concerned about something. I inherited my desire for justice from her, not him. I am grateful to her for that. But perhaps too many years working at the labyrinthine town hall in the Planning Department, months spent defusing neighbourly tensions, mopping up tears, deciphering handwriting and soothing ruffled feathers, combined with being married to my father, had done something to her. She had started out as a shop girl selling gloves, and retrained to work for the council when I was old enough to go to nursery. I think of her now with more affection than when she was my mother. I see how hard it must have been for her, and that she was admirable, in many ways, not wanting to tie herself to the stove, to live the life prescribed for her. But I didn’t really love her. I don’t know if she loved my father. And I am certain she didn’t love me. I’m not sure when I realised this – before she left, I think.
I pictured her now, sitting at the little white table of Martin’s tiny apartment in Spain that looked out over the ziggurat-shaped apartment block opposite. There was acid-purple bougainvillea on a wall, but otherwise no view. You walked to a bar, filled with English people, and a supermarket, where they said Hole-lar and Grassy-arse to the cashier. There were things I liked about being there: the baby fried squid and the patatas bravas, and the smell of warmth, of cigarettes, of cooking, but I never really felt like I was abroad, let alone somewhere new, exciting.
I took a deep breath and wrote the final line.
PPS Please think again about university, Mum. Thank you so much. Hope you are having a wonderful summer and are glad to be back. Say hi to Martin. I miss you. Don’t worry about me. I’ve settled in well and am really starting to feel at home with them all xxx
As with so much else in the letter, this wasn’t true. The more I got to know the Hunters, the fuzzier they seemed to become, quite the reverse of normal people.
Chapter Fourteen
It was lovely to wake up in the little bedroom at the top of the house, cocooned inside a skep-shaped gable. The sun flooded into the warm, quiet room and I’d lie in bed smelling that salted, herb-scented air, feeling almost content. It was very different from the grief that swamped me at night, when I woke unable to breathe, my heart aching with longing for Daddy, for his crooked smile, his eyes brimful of laughter, the pain he must have been in . . . At night when I couldn’t sleep, owls and nightjars
called out loudly in the woods behind the house.
Ten days into my stay, it was Charles’s birthday, and the day Sylvia came up with a new idea for her work, what would become the famous ‘Summer Rain’ print.
There was a tiny harbour at Larcombe, where you could fish, or go crabbing, a pub – the Good Leper – a café, and a shop and post office. People kept boats in the harbour. Once, it had been an important port along the wild coast. Mostly it was a ridged channel of pebbles, a natural barricade against the sea salt marshes, stretching flat along from the harbour up to the hills, but there was a tiny stretch of shingle beach.
We walked down to Larcombe along the narrow track through the ancient oak woodland that curled gracefully against the curve of the land: dry leaves crackled underfoot. On the way down, we met several walkers: I hadn’t seen anyone else other than Mrs Red since I’d arrived. They stared at me, mouths open, aghast, taking no trouble to hide it. As if I wouldn’t notice their expressions, as if my baldness rendered me blind, too, and as if, by being different, I deserved to be stared at. It stayed with me, that idea I’d first noticed after Daddy died, that if you are most in need you are often met not with compassion and help but hostility from others, as if your situation threatens their stability, their happiness. It’s easier for white people to think I’m a bad or dangerous person than engage with how racist the world around them is, Claire’s dad had said to me once, and I hadn’t understood him. I’d been offended, even. I had no idea why he’d want to say that. She’s a nutty Women’s Libber, I’d heard Ems’s dad say of my beady-eyed headmistress, Miss Minas, who had written a letter home about encouraging girls to try for a university education. The year after I left school Miss Minas left too, drummed out by the local Tory MP, who said she was indoctrinating girls. Indoctrinating them into what? Happier lives? The governors fired her. It was easier to make her the problem.
The Beloved Girls Page 16