‘My father only got you here to be the other Beloved Girl with me.’
She was a siren, a demon fairy, sent to lure me into something, I was sure of it . . . I stared at her, blankly, my mouth open, wishing I could speak.
‘They’ve planned the whole thing. Just be careful, OK?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Oh – Janey, you’re so innocent, for fuck’s sake. You’ve been brought down here not because they care but because you match me. They’re furious about your hair. We never have anyone to stay. Especially not old friends of Mummy’s. Don’t you see? You’re only here for the Collecting. Don’t start thinking you’re a family friend, or that you’ll ever come back here. They don’t care about you. They’re drawing you in and when it’s over you’ll be out in the cold again. OK?’
I thought of me and Joss, down here by the pool, up in my room, snatching time alone in dark corners. How much I ached for him, and wanted him to do more, but wanted to never see him again at the same time. How washed out I felt, in a louche, exciting way. How I considered all the time doing extraordinary things. Running away. Sending Mummy something awful through the post to Spain. Jumping in front of a train. To shake myself out of the lassitude of this lazy gilded life that felt so attractive, and so dangerous.
‘Your mum wanted me to come.’
‘She doesn’t do anything my father doesn’t want her to. Come on. Just – protect yourself, that’s all. You’re so – alone.’
She pushed herself against me again, one more time, her generous, gorgeous body enveloping mine – A voice behind us, breathless and high, came.
‘Urgh! What’s going on! Oh my God!’
‘Oh shut up, Merry,’ said Kitty, pushing away from me a little, but continuing to dance. I couldn’t speak, I was out of breath, my face red. ‘We’re dancing. And drinking. And no, you’re not having any, so don’t bloody well ask.’
With one backwards glance at me she pushed away, and went back to sit by the pool. The music was still loud now, but too loud, banging at the front of my head. My stomach churned. The heat of the day, the length of the walk; I felt sick, and sat down beside her. She moved away.
‘You’re so weird?’ said Merry.
‘Stop sounding like you’re in Neighbours.’
‘I’m not. Shut up, you are weird?’ I realised she was looking at me, then she said, pettishly:
‘Anyway, a sort of letter just came for you, Janey. It’s registered post. From your mum.’
She handed a thick, small envelope to me. The strange, sudden, dream-like bubble that had been reality for a few minutes burst.
Dear Jane,
Thank you for your letter. I am pleased to hear you are enjoying yourself. Your father was rather under Sylvia’s spell. They are an interesting family that’s for sure.
You asked about the connection. Sylvia met your father as a young girl in London. He was friends with her mother. As for the rest of it, I think it is best you ask Sylvia to tell you more.
You also asked me to think seriously about what you said in your letter. I have done so. Can I ask the same of you now which is that the time has come for you to think carefully about your future. I have spoken to Miss Minas on the telephone, which, as you know, I do not like doing. I have told her to stop filling your head full of these ideas of Oxford Colleges and other nonsense. I wish you could try to understand why I say these things, Jane love.
Even if they wanted you, it seems the height of foolishness to go to university to study ideas, and theories, and not learn how to make a living. In this day and age it is a waste of three years of your time when you could be getting a job. If you can learn to touch type, do shorthand and take dictation, you will be able to work until you are sixty and then get a good pension: people will always need secretaries. Perhaps in the future there’s the chance to do something else but once you’re a secretary you’ve always the means of earning a living.
I’ve been over in London for a couple of nights to sort everything out. Your father died owing a lot of money to various people. The glove importing business, the party shop, the mobile telephone business, all had outstanding debts. The house must be sold to pay people back. Jane I am sorry dear but there is nothing left for you. I have had to arrange to have the locks changed, on Martin’s advice, to be quite sure no creditors who might have keys try to gain access while the place is empty.
As you know Martin worked part-time at the Citizens Advice Bureau. He has been extremely helpful. Thanks to Martin, I am confident I can keep a little money from the house, not much. Martin doesn’t have much either, what with his children to look after back in the UK. I don’t like having to write all this, believe me. But Daddy had no business sense: Martin says anyone setting up a mobile phone business in the age of BT needs their heads examined. Martin has shares in British Airways, Dixons and Woolworths.
Miss Minas has been told she must not communicate with you again. Since you don’t have a key any more and the house will be on the market it might be best if you come to Spain for a while. The letter confirming your place has arrived here. If you could telephone to secure it I should be grateful. It is Ealing Secretarial College, 01-992-1638.
If you could send me a postcard letting me know when you will be arriving or telephone if the Hunters don’t mind, I can send you a cheque for the flight. I’ve enclosed your passport, a cheque so you can buy some pesos to pay for the taxi, and your birth certificate in case you need ID to buy pesos and book the flight. Perhaps it is best you have these documents now in any case. I look forward to hearing from you about the above, Jane dear. Take care,
Mum x
Voices were at my back; I looked up, my head now swimming unbearably, shielding my eyes from the setting sun, sliding behind the chapel, a ball of apricot fire. I looked down at the documents that had slid out of the stiff envelope.
JANE CATHERINE LESTRANGE in small typed letters. The birth certificate, the fact of my existence. It was weird, seeing it set out like that.
The voices were closer; I shoved the documents into my pocket. I could feel my fingers crushing the letter, the determined press of the imprint of my mother’s words.
‘I say,’ said Merry. ‘Are you all right? You’re awfully pale.’
‘Just –’ I looked around me. At the cold, dark stone now in shade, at Joss, lounging by the pool, its still waters a dark emerald where only ten minutes ago they had been light turquoise. All at once came the sound of a car, coming up the drive. Kitty was walking away, back towards the house. She was holding two near-empty bottles of wine and, as she did, one slipped, shattering on the flagstones.
She just stood there, looking around at it, not making any effort to clear it up. After a moment, her father appeared from the driveway, her mother in the back door, Rory panting beside her.
‘Clear that up, Catherine,’ her father said, shortly.
‘No,’ Kitty said. ‘It’s broken now.’ She stepped over it, and carried on walking. Her father started shouting, her mother calling after her.
‘Darling – Kitty, your father is very angry when you –’
Rory growled, sadly.
As she walked, I saw there was blood. She pushed past her mother, turning once. I saw her face, as she looked out over the garden. She was so tired. She was eighteen, and so tired, and I understood.
Chapter Eighteen
The incident by the pool, reading both the pamphlet and my mother’s letter, and the broken bottle, changed me. It marked a shift in my time at Vanes. I wanted to be a good girl – I was, after all, my mother’s daughter, as well as my father’s. I wanted to be neat, and polite, and unobtrusive. To take my tray back up to the counter after tea in a café, to return my library books on time, to queue sensibly for the bus.
But I also wasn’t that girl. I knew, when my mother left and our home became a strange limbo land, and then later, when Daddy died, that I wasn’t like everyone else. I didn’t belong anywhere, really, and in t
hat respect too I was my father’s child.
My mother was right: Daddy was terrible with money. He had dreams, but no ability to translate them into results. At least you tried, Janey, he used to tell me, when I couldn’t do my maths homework or found playing the right notes on my school recorder almost impossible. It’s better to have tried. The more you try the easier it gets. And that is why the note he left me was so heartbreaking. He, who believed more than anyone else that all would be well, couldn’t try any more.
Our A-level results were due in a week or so, but after the afternoon by the pool and the subsequent row Kitty and Joss had with their father about the broken bottle, there was a change in atmosphere. As if they had been pretending, and now they weren’t. And that I was now one of them, that I was complicit in what was going on.
Things that now seem so strange – Charles and Sylvia’s nightly, loud, agonised love-making, how public it was, the relationship between Kitty and the rest of her family, Merry’s faux adolescent behaviour – I questioned them less, but, deep down, they disturbed me more. I kept thinking about Diver, striding across the moor towards the chapel. I did not think he was a holy man. I thought he was a cult leader. I knew Pammy had seen through him, too, even though she was the youngest of her siblings. I wondered what Charles and Rosalind thought of what she had written, they who clung to Diver’s ceremonials like the ivy that spread like veins along the back wall of the house. I didn’t say this to anyone though. I still wanted to belong.
The other thing that happened was Joss and me. Who knows how long it would have taken, had I been the old me, back in Greenford. But moving into the second half of August, in the humid, stifling atmosphere of Vanes, it was easy.
Joss knocked on my door one night a few days after the broken bottle – I was starting to lose track of time. It felt like I’d been living there for years, sleeping in that tiny room on the edge of the woods overlooking the sea. When I opened it, he was twirling the wheels of a cassette between his bony fingers. ‘Oh, h-hi, Janey. Can I come in?’
His eyes were wide, but his voice was gentle. I knew he was nervous. Joss was many things, many bad things, but he was not a player. ‘Sure,’ I said. I ignored the fact I was in my nightie. Or, at least, I didn’t ignore this fact, I just didn’t care. I think that characterises my feelings at that particular point in the holiday. I didn’t care about much then. I just wanted to see what was going to happen.
The window was open, and an owl called from the woods below. There was no wind. I thought of the bees, teeming in their millions, in the darkness of the combs in the chapel.
I thought to myself: there’s a boy in my room, I’ve let him in, and then the thought came again. Who cares? Just see what happens, for once.
Joss came in and sat on the slim bed.
‘Sorry about this evening,’ he said. ‘Mummy said I had to apologise about dinner.’
There had been another row, about Cambridge, or rather, a non-row, because the Hunters never really put it all out on the table. It was all coded. But Charles had been horrible to Kitty. He really seemed to enjoy it, to want to bait her. And she had been horrible to Merry, and doors had been slammed, and Sylvia had for once shouted, clamping her hands over her ears. ‘I can’t stand this. I can’t stand it.’
‘That’s fine. We’re all a bit nervous, results and everything.’
‘I know. But Kitty can be such a bitch sometimes.’ He bit his lip. ‘And my father – he gets really angry with her. He notices everything she does. Not me. It’s never me.’
I didn’t think this was true. I thought his father was spectacularly uninterested in all his children, or rather interested only in catching them out, in exposing them as if they were conmen, coming to his table every night expecting to be fed and unaware they were about to be unmasked. I thought of Daddy, the attention he gave to everything I did or told him, and I felt sorry for them. Perhaps it was the first time I saw I had something they did not. I took a short, deep breath and blinked. ‘Parents. Yours aren’t too bad. Not compared to mine, anyway.’ I meant it lightly, but it wasn’t funny and, I realised, wasn’t true. I felt shabby.
‘They are. You don’t know,’ he said, moodily. ‘You’ve been here a few weeks and you think you know everything.’
‘Hey,’ I said, mildly. ‘No I don’t.’ I thought of the pamphlet by Pammy Hunter. It was still in my bedside table. I hadn’t given it back to Merry. I’d reread it several times. I don’t know why. ‘I’m just trying to be interested, that’s all.’
‘Sorry.’ He turned to look at me. ‘You’ve – your hair’s grown.’
‘I shaved it again, and that seems to have helped.’
He ran his fingers over it, just as Kitty had done. I felt a shiver run over my scalp, as if wind was lapping it. I paused, processing the feeling, and realised something was wrong. Joss kept stroking my head. Eventually, I said: ‘Please don’t.’
I felt almost sick – at the knowledge that I liked the way he made me feel, but that was because it felt nice and not because I liked him. I suddenly and inexplicably found him curiously repellent, and now the thought was there it would not go away. He was a fake, a phony, insubstantial, like clouds. He was not Kitty, vital and alluring and real, poor Joss. He just was not what I had built him up to be.
There was a short, potent silence, and I could have asked him to leave. But I didn’t.
Instead I took the tape, and plugged it into my own Walkman. We listened, one earbud each. Bob Marley, the Undertones, Dire Straits, some snatches of Wagner – he took pride in being eclectic. This, all in silence, as he stroked me, his hands rubbing my back, over my thighs, my breasts. Eventually my neck grew stiff from leaning towards his, and I moved away. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I really like it.’
‘Mm,’ he said, and this time he slid his hand between my thighs, pushing them slightly apart.
The thing that characterises this whole operation is my indifference to it. I suppose in a way it made it bearable. I don’t think he took advantage of me, or I him. What stands out is how impersonal it was.
Unexpectedly, and to his credit, he gave me an orgasm. A short, rather surprising one, but nonetheless I came. We were on the bed, his fingers frantically rubbing me, like a magician, or a bunny, his eyes alight, and I parted my legs a little, my head rolling back. I closed my eyes, and thought of his sister, and their parents, and Paul, and I felt it happen.
‘Can I?’ said Joss, eagerly, and I nodded.
‘Oh. Course,’ I said, and we moved towards the pillows, and I lay back. He produced a condom, and I watched his penis, bobbing in front of me.
I’d read Forever, and every other week Claire and I pored over ‘Body & Soul’, the advice page in Mizz magazine where Tricia Kreitman briskly told hapless teenage girls their periods were perfectly normal, that they hadn’t had sex if they’d only done that, that they probably were pregnant, and that a cousin shouldn’t do that to you at Christmas. Besides, my girls’ school was instructive on this subject both in lessons and out of them, and once again I was grateful to Miss Minas. So I helped him put the condom on. I squeezed him when it was all on, and his eyes bulged, and he swallowed.
‘Careful. Sorry. God. I’m sorry.’
His erection wilted a little. I realised then that whilst I was an informed teenager, more aware of my rights and the fact that sex, the first time, was bound to be a disappointment than I was about many other things, Joss seemed mortified. He tucked his hair behind his ears, as if determining himself to do it, and leaned down towards me, kissing me hard and hitting my nose. The leather thong he wore round his neck swung into my eye.
‘Ow,’ I said.
‘Oh God,’ he said, and he bit his lip. ‘That’s my shark’s tooth.’ He fumbled to untie the thong from around his neck. ‘I – I got it off a guy in Camden Market. Brings me luck. It’s like, a hundred years old. Sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry,’ I said, in a breathy voice, like I found being hit in the face with an ol
d tooth, and him, irresistible. He was attractive, I still thought so, even if I saw too that I didn’t like him much any more. After all, he was a boy, with a nice body, and I liked the feeling of him kissing me, of our skin together, the newness, the secrecy, the excitement of it. I found that I liked it all – if I forgot it was Joss. Poor Joss.
‘I like it,’ I whispered. ‘It’s OK.’
I pulled his head down towards my breasts, and felt his rubber-covered organ edge up my thigh, jabbing me. I pointed it in the right direction, and gradually, after a while, we got there. I loved this new, insouciant me, who layered new experiences on top of old, unbearable ones. And I knew what to do – besides Mizz, and the more advanced More, there was a terrifying book about sexual technique Claire’s mother had under her bed, which Claire and I had once or twice managed to sneak out and stare at in horror.
And I enjoyed it, actually. I enjoyed the sensation of him pushing into me, and of being in control of it all. And I liked feeling grown-up. That I was on the edge of new discovery. And he enjoyed it. I thought of Paul again – his soft brown hair, shiny, his big tortoiseshell glasses, his kind smile.
When Joss came, he gave a low, shuddering roar. It was almost like an impression of an army major assembling his troops. It was so sudden, I heard myself give a little shout of laughter, which I quickly turned into a moan of approval. And then it was over.
‘Hey,’ he said, stroking my head with one clammy hand. I wanted him to go. It was too hot, in that stifling, airless room under the old eaves. ‘You’re pretty, you know that, don’t you? Even without hair.’
‘Th-thank you.’
‘And all that’s good in dark and light, meet in her attic, and her eyes.’
‘Th-thanks.’
‘It’s Byron,’ he explained. ‘He wrote it. “To His Coy Mistress”.’
I didn’t point out his mistake. What was the point? There was some movement from outside and I felt the slight suggestion of a cooler breeze waft in through the window, and the stirring of the sea. I sat up. ‘You don’t have to stay,’ I said.
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