The Beloved Girls

by Harriet Evans

  ‘Course I do.’

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  There was a silence, as Ros looked up, and around, utterly blank.

  Sylvia said: ‘Charles’s little sister. Pammy, she was called. She was the Outsider one year and it all went wrong. Ros tried to save her, didn’t you?’

  Ros nodded, her eyes bulging. I put my hands in my pockets, looking at them all. I felt scared, for the first time, of them all, of the house, of how . . . wrong I’d got it. I looked at Sylvia, my salvation, but she was looking at her husband, chewing the inside of her mouth, her fingers working at a head of lavender, the buds falling to the ground.

  ‘Charles – Charles, darling? We can go now.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Charles, his voice strained and thin. ‘No, Sylvia. Not now. What the hell is wrong with you?’

  ‘Oh.’ Sylvia shrank back. ‘Of course.’ She muttered something to herself, I saw her staring at the ground. ‘You’re right.’

  Kitty had appeared with Rory’s blanket. She handed it to her mother, who stood clutching it tight, like it was a child.

  ‘Thank you, my darling.’

  I couldn’t stay there, looking at Rory’s heavy, still form whilst Joss and Charles clinically discussed the best way to bury him. I followed Kitty back into the garden, grateful to be away from there. I was shaking.

  She was walking fast; the fluttering of her long red-and-gold skirt sounded like water slapping on rocks. I caught up with her.

  ‘I’m sorry about your dog,’ I said.

  ‘You should have listened to me, Janey,’ she said, quietly, as we reached the terrace steps. ‘Get away now. Just leave. Can’t you see?’

  ‘Oh, go away,’ I said, infuriated, because she was right, but I wanted to be here, a part of me told myself. I had earned it. ‘This isn’t the time, Kitty – I know you’re angry but –’

  ‘Angry!’ She turned and I could see a vein throbbing at her temple, her flushed cheeks, the fury in her eyes. ‘I’m not angry.’

  ‘I didn’t know about Pammy – about your father’s little sister. I didn’t know she died like that.’

  ‘She didn’t want to take part. She told them she wouldn’t be one of the Beloved Girls. Said the whole thing was nonsense. Said she was leaving the first moment she was old enough to go. That she knew Diver was a crook. Did they tell you that? My father did once, when he was drunk, and knocked on my door, at midnight, Janey. Before my mother hauled him away. I kept him talking, Janey, that’s when he told me. They made Pammy be the Outsider instead, and when the bees started attacking they locked themselves in, they left her outside, and they heard her being stung to death. Did you know that? No? That was fifty years ago, and nothing’s changed.’ Her golden hair shook around her face; her nostrils were flared, a vein pulsing in her throat. ‘I think about her all the time. No one remembers her. She’ll just be forgotten. I saw the booklet, in your room. Don’t ever lose it, will you?’ I shook my head, then I nodded, not sure how best to demonstrate I would not let her down. ‘I told you before. They’ve only invited you down here to make you come with me. You know why I hate the bees so much? I’m allergic to them, and they don’t care. They care that we can walk in procession together, because we look similar. Haven’t you noticed?’

  There were identical twins at my school. The first was very beautiful, but something had not blossomed in the same way with the second twin, and she was just – in the cast of her face, the shape of her nose, the look in her eyes – quite plain. Yet they were almost exactly the same. Some curious alchemy. Kitty and I were not twins, and she was beautiful and I was not, but our faces were the same shape, something about our eyes and our noses. I’d noticed it before.

  I didn’t answer. Instead I said: ‘That’s awful, Kitty. What happens if you’re stung?’

  She shrugged. ‘I ended up in hospital the first time.’

  ‘That’s not right –’ I began, and looked up to see her smiling.

  ‘Of course it isn’t. But it doesn’t fit. So it can’t be true. PF needs me to be part of the whole show. He’s hopelessly in debt. He hasn’t sold any antiques for ages and he hates Mummy earning the money. He hates Mummy!’ She was laughing, hysterically. ‘Giles’s father is super nouveau. He wants to buy into what we’ve got. Keeps offering for the house, or bits of furniture PF’s trying to flog but the price is always a joke. He knows PF is desperate. So PF pimped me out to Giles to put them off. They like the idea they can buy a slice of the Hunters, the old traditions. But it’ll only keep them at bay for so long.’

  ‘But . . . Giles is your boyfriend.’

  ‘He’s not. I hate him. He’s –’ And she shivered, and was pale. ‘I hate him. I hate them all. But I can’t do anything about it, unless I escape. I’m in this beautiful home with this beautiful life and I’m trapped. You are too now. I’m so sorry, Janey.’

  ‘I thought you wanted me out.’

  Her voice softened. ‘I wanted you to get out because I love you. I always did, remember? When you came to stay and I thought you were the best thing ever. Did you think of that? I wanted you to be safe, and I thought if I was horrible enough you might go back home, and you’d be safe there.’

  I felt dizzy, as if darkness was clouding in on my peripheral vision. ‘But your mum wouldn’t –’

  ‘Mummy’s lost it. Your dad killing himself, I think something collapsed, some pole in her mind holding everything up.’

  She pulled me to her. Her hair whipped around her face, strands of it wrapping themselves across her features, like spun-gold cobwebs. She kissed me, grabbing my shoulders, the pads of her fingers digging against my bones as her tongue dug into me, and our lips pressed together. She raised her hands to my patchy, itchy scalp, moving over it with tenderness as her tongue moved in my mouth, probing, tasting. She was like salt water. I have never, ever forgotten that kiss, or the way she touched me – wholly with comfort, with love. With Joss, it was like possession.

  ‘She always wanted us to meet. We’ve got the same names, the same secrets. Catherine Lestrange Hunter. Jane Catherine Lestrange. She wanted to bind me to him. So that you and I were connected, even if she wasn’t. Do you remember what she gave you, when you came to stay?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ I hesitated, because I was never sure if the others knew she had given him to me. ‘Her teddy bear. Wellington.’

  ‘Wellington Bear. You still have him, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ He was in my room, my most treasured possession.

  ‘Do you know how she got Wellington Bear? Did your dad ever tell you what happened?’

  I shook my head. ‘He never really talked about her. Apart from once or twice.’

  ‘I know some of it. But there’s more I don’t understand. How she ended up here. And I’ve got to work it out. I’m close.’ She looked away, muttering under her breath, and then reached down to the ground. ‘I gave you a bee the last time you were here, do you remember?’ And delicately, she picked up a dead bee, and put it in my open hand.

  ‘Here. Hold it. She won’t sting. Trust me, I know.’

  Her slim fingers gripped my forearms, her hair flew around her head, the sun cast no shadow at all. I could barely see, it was so bright. I closed my eyes, clutching the dead, soft insect, feeling it scratch my palm. She whispered:

  ‘I’ll tell you all of it, once you say you’re with me, not with Joss. You have to choose. Do you stand with me, or with him? Decide, Janey, open your eyes, then decide.’

  I opened my eyes instantly. I stared at her, and let the bee fall to the ground. We were utterly still. I knew that from then on everything had changed.

  ‘You,’ I said. ‘Of course.’

  Part Three

  1959

  Chapter Nineteen

  One late-spring morning, as snowy-pink petals rained down upon the pavements of Chelsea, a man walked down a quiet side street of red-bricked town houses just off the King’s Road. He was singing, partly to maintain an air of normalcy, but main
ly to buck himself up, to stop himself losing the thread of life, because he did not feel like singing. He did not feel like living. This happened often, and the way he had found to combat it was to do something that required continuation: a tiny action to stop the greater desire – one bullet in the head with his old army revolver – from overwhelming him. He knew how to do it. He was fairly sure that, at some point and one way or another, he would do it.

  He was Captain Simon Lestrange, and he had been dismissed from his job as a glove salesman at Peter Jones in Sloane Square that morning, for being intoxicated whilst at work. It was true that he had partaken of drink the night before with an old army acquaintance and had not shaved as assiduously as he should have, but he was not still drunk – it was bad blood between him and the Gentlemen’s Outfitters, Mr Timms, a pokey, mean-spirited old git, in Simon’s opinion.

  Simon’s drinking companion had been known by his fellow soldiers, out in Naples at the end of the war, as the ‘Galloping Major’. He had been so christened by one of the many privates who disliked him and his autocratic air, because of his rather ludicrous ‘what-what’ style, and because he bored on at length about himself. He was young, very thin and reedy, and fancied himself a terrific ladies’ man, famed for chatting up every woman he met out there – old or young, usually young.

  The Galloping Major had not been heard of for some time after the war, and regimental drinks without him had been enjoyable affairs, inasmuch as you could enjoy reminiscing about your time out there. But he had reappeared a few months ago, one of the growing band of antiques dealers who frequented Portobello Market and the King’s Road, haunting the old ladies mummified in their crumbling stucco Belgravia mansions, whisking away their fine Sèvres vases and English Delftware pots. ‘I told her I’d give her a quid for the thing and that was doing her a favour and she believed me, poor dear!’ With the passage of time – fourteen years since the end of the war now – the Galloping Major seemed convinced he and Simon had been friends. He’d get hold of Simon by telephone, and ask if he wanted to ‘meet for a pint’. He rarely paid, but he was someone to drink with, and he’d been in Naples, so theoretically they both understood what the other had seen.

  ‘Old officers must stick together, eh, old boy?’

  He had lost his slender frame but had the same conspicuously outmoded attitude to everything. He claimed to find Chelsea risible. ‘Full of mods and beatniks and ponces, what what?’

  Simon kept hearing that ‘what what?’ today. Their old army comrade Hobbs, the pub landlord, had retreated to the back parlour when they’d appeared. He remembered the Galloping Major of old. ‘Didn’t like the fellow in Italy, don’t like him now,’ he’d told Simon, bluntly. ‘Sorry, Captain Lestrange.’

  He did not know where he was going – he could not go home to his lodgings, because Mrs Weston did not like boarders returning during working hours whilst she was cleaning and – he was certain – entertaining callers in her grubby terraced two-bed in Hornsey. And, anyway, Simon preferred Chelsea.

  Thinking of the Galloping Major again made him recollect there was a nice pub somewhere near here, the Phene Arms, where he and some other old regimental friends had met once or twice. He’d head that way and drown his sorrows with some of the month’s wages he had in his pocket, and then work out what to do. He thought he might actually end it all tonight: he had this morning specifically located his trusty army service revolver, purloined during the chaos of their exit from Naples. But it would leave a mess for Mrs Weston. He couldn’t do that to her. She was a nice woman even if she did steal from him. Somewhere else, then.

  Seeing the Galloping Major had been a mistake. It brought the war back, and the Galloping Major never wanted to talk about those days, preferring instead to sit sideways on at the table, the better to chat up young girls, cadge cigarettes and complain. He was younger than Simon, only twenty-two when he’d been posted to Italy. Simon tried, charitably, to attribute some of his behaviour back then to his youth.

  They had been in Naples at the liberation in 1943 and had stayed for a year, helping to rebuild a flattened city: hundreds of thousands dead or injured, an occupying force driven out, a country having to shift allegiance and reimagine itself in an unrecognisable world. In the midst of all of it, Simon had witnessed the explosion of Vesuvius. That was what people still asked about. They’d heard enough about what had happened in Italy in the war not to want to ask more. ‘You saw Vesuvius go up, didn’t you? What a show that must have been, eh?’

  He had seen people killed by the sliding hot black lava that spread down the hillsides faster than oil, young boys racing each other against the lava, getting trapped, burning to death in front of him. That had been bad enough, but Simon wanted to tell them other things. Things no one ever mentioned, that were never discussed, not by his old comrades, things he couldn’t get over. He’d tried to bring it up with the Galloping Major the night before, with no luck. The lines of women, skirts hoicked aloft, sitting inside the hall beside the bombed-out harbour, their children gathered outside as the women waited for the soldiers, who would come inside them, then hand over their rations. The animals, cats, dogs, dead and dying, everywhere on the streets, people making bonfires to cook them. The mothers, half naked in rubble, breastfeeding squalling children, siblings climbing around in the dirt dressed in tablecloths, curtains, rags torn from anywhere and tied around them. Baroque palaces, torn in two, churches with no steeples, houses smashed to rubble, old people, curled up on the streets, waiting to die. They were ignored – no one had time for the old, not when the young were dying of starvation. The blind, emaciated children holding hands in a row, bursting into the army cafés, crying, screaming, begging for help, hands held out for food.

  Oh, he had seen such terrible things. And there was the smell – of rotten, dead and dying humans and animals. There were days when the horror of it draped itself over him, and there was no one to tell him that, yes, it was wrong, that he had been brave, that he had tried his best, that this was the worst of the world and now it was over, that this was very rare, that he had been very unlucky to witness it.

  The more you pushed it away, the more it came back when you did not want. He knew men who’d been there and who, afterwards, had killed themselves but he and the others never mentioned them. It wasn’t done. And then there were some chaps like the Galloping Major, for whom the horror barely seemed to register, for whom it was abroad, could come back to England, return to the old family home in the country and simply file it away.

  There was a little boy, who he couldn’t stop thinking about today, who had cried, clinging to his leg, begging him for food. His body was covered in lice bites, his feet wrapped in rags. He wore a dress, someone’s dress, as a tunic, torn at the knees.

  ‘It’s the Eyeties,’ his commanding officer, Brigadier Jupes, had said. ‘Hysterical. On the make. He’s got a mama somewhere pushing him out onto you. Forget about it.’

  But he couldn’t forget, how could he? When it was particularly bad he felt he couldn’t breathe deeply enough. It would make him dizzy, give him a swooping feeling in his stomach, which was usually empty anyway.

  Simon suddenly had to stop, leaning against a railing, looking up at the sky, flecked as it was by the branches of a cherry blossom tree.

  London was beautiful, now, more beautiful than he had known it for years, and spring showed it at its best. The air was sweeter, too, away from the traffic, the coal smoke and smog of the river. Come on now, he told himself. Come on and pick yourself up. One foot, keep on walking, then another foot, and all shall be well, and all shall be well.

  It was particularly bad today. Simon told himself firmly that he mustn’t meet up with the Galloping Major again. He breathed in, closing his eyes. Three, three, the rivals . . . That song. Why did he keep singing that dratted song? The damned man, he whistled it all the time.

  It was a miracle, actually, how it happened, but it did. He heard a voice, nearby – he really did, he knew it r
ight away, it wasn’t like other voices he heard. Someone was singing, another song, a lullaby, and it was sweeter, clearer than the other voice. He carried on walking, one foot in front of the other, towards the noise.

  At the end of the road was the Royal Hospital, flanked by two mansion blocks, and just before them, on his left, was a little cottage, a building transplanted from an English country village into the heart of town. It was creamy white, with small leaded windows. There was a delightful garden in front, strewn with late daffodils, bright purple and blue anemones, budding jasmine clambering up a wall, and in this little garden, quite incongruous, sat a girl, on the lawn, raking her thin fingers over the stomach of an enormous marmalade-and-gold cat. She was singing as she stroked him – ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ – then she looked up at him and smiled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Was I singing very loudly?’

  For the rest of his life Simon would remember this moment of discovery – the oasis of it, the cottage, set back from the road, and this girl – not quite a young woman, he saw that now – with her laughing face, her dark eyes, slim hands, the way she caressed the cat, who was like a small tiger really, clambering all over her, making noises for her attention. She was fixed in his mind now, and whenever he was unable to concentrate on anything else, sometimes it helped to call her to mind. Sometimes she could banish the thoughts.

  She was dressed simply, in an embroidered coral flared skirt, a cream peasant blouse. A blue and turquoise patterned scarf was tied round her hair. She looked up at him, and gave him a big, generous smile, and held out her hand.

  ‘My mother used to sing it to me,’ she said. ‘And I was trying to remember it again. How do you do? I’m Sylvia Raverat.’

  Simon Lestrange was not in the habit of sitting on the wall of strange front gardens chatting to young girls, but he found himself doing just that, as the cat – whose name was Morris – crawled over her lap and on the grass. At one point he reached up one casual elongated paw and leisurely scratched Sylvia’s face, but Sylvia only said: ‘No, darling. Not nice,’ and carried on talking, as a red welt appeared on her cheek.