‘Oh,’ I said. I felt a sinking disappointment on her behalf.
‘And I was predicted two As and a B. It’s not that,’ she said. She pressed her lips tightly together and I knew she was trying not to cry; I knew her determined little face so well by now. ‘It’s Daddy. Wondering what he would have said if he was still here. He was so proud of me. He wanted me to have everything he didn’t. He wanted me to go to university. I’m letting him down. And it’s all I wanted. But it’s more than that. I just – a day like today is hard without him.’
‘But you screwed up the exams because you’d just lost your dad,’ I said, squeezing her shoulder.
‘It’s the feeling of having lost something else. Not just him.’ She picked up a syllabub, and went back outside.
I wanted to tell her I had always felt a sense of loss, as a small child. That my Aunt Rosalind told me once I never cried out as a baby, when someone took my toy, or I was hungry. Joss did, all the time. And yet I was frequently to be found in my cot with tears rolling down my cheeks. I don’t remember this. But my earliest memories are about feeling something was missing. I never felt safe at Vanes, or that it was a refuge. I have never liked it here but it’s more than that, as if some past memory from someone else has bled through to me. I can’t help it, but I feel like a stranger here. Since I was old enough to walk I’d stare at the picture of the Reverend Diver downstairs, unable to look away, as my eyes met his curious, flat, hooded gaze that seemed to follow you up and down the hall. I was too young to realise this feeling of separation from your home wasn’t usual. But his face haunted me. I was the outsider, not Janey. She wanted to belong here. I didn’t.
So we went to the pool after supper to celebrate. I climbed up the stone steps out of the water, watching wetness slide off me, feeling the heat instantly on my shoulders, my back. I saw Joss watching me, watched him twitch his groin with one absent-minded gesture as I patted myself. I saw Merry, knees up under her chin, deely bopper headband bopping sadly atop her head, sitting on one of the chairs beside the pool, scanning us all, unable to understand it, the dynamics – poor Merry.
I remember it all so clearly. ‘Running up That Hill’ came on in the background, on the tape machine. I remember pulling the sundress over my head – a faded number Mummy had made with her own material, dusky pink and coral blooms, and the huge pockets she loved, slipping my battered plimsolls on, shaking my hair out, catching sight of myself in the quietening waters of the pool.
‘I’m going for a drive,’ I said, rolling my costume and towel under my arm. ‘D’you fancy coming with me?’
Merry looked up hopefully, but I was staring at Janey.
‘Sure,’ said Joss. I ignored him. Janey’s eyes met mine.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Right.’ She nodded and got up.
‘Where are you going?’ Joss demanded.
‘Giles’s gig at the Good Leper. Some people are meeting to celebrate the results.’
‘Giles?’ Joss’s mouth wobbled, his eyes half closed. ‘I rang him yesterday; he never said anything about it.’
Janey had pulled her T-shirt dress on – also pink and coral, but stripes, and pockets. I remember glancing at her in it, next to me. Behind us. Merry was singing along with Kate Bush.
It’s a small thing, but I sang along with her, looking at my dress, Janey’s dress, and that and the conversation with Mummy, all of it danced together in my mind, and I think the new idea came to me then, fully formed.
I saw then how we could do it. I saw then how it would work.
So I said: ‘Giles isn’t your boyfriend.’
‘Is he yours? Kitty. What is it with you two?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know really.’
Giles likes you, my father had said, around a year ago, when he had brushed against me in the hallway, pushing his flabby frontage against my breasts with a slight grunt. He’s calling you tonight. Be nice to him, won’t you?
‘Well, I have a right to know what’s actually going on. Are you going out with him?’ Joss’s eyes closed again, and his lips fluttered. I thought he was trying not to cry, but then he sneezed, three times, and gave a yelp. ‘Jesus!’ He brushed a bee out of the way, into a puddle of water, where it flailed wildly. I stepped backwards, out of habit.
‘Did it sting you?’ Janey said, leaning over him, with a faint display of concern.
‘No – no, it’s fine.’ Joss flicked the bee into the pool, morosely, as if accepting defeat. ‘It’s Kitty we have to be careful about around bees. It’s dead, Kits, don’t worry.’ He flicked it back at me, and it landed at my feet. ‘Look – do you have to go?’
‘Tell Mummy I’m showing Janey the sights. I don’t know when we’ll be back.’
‘But Kitty!’ Merry stood up. ‘Dad wanted to run over the Collecting stuff.’
‘I know what happens by now, for Christ’s sake.’ I tugged Janey’s arm, impatiently. ‘Sorry, darling. Come on. Let’s go.’
I had worked out early on why Janey had really been invited to stay – they needed another eighteen-year-old girl, to stand with me, one of the Beloved Girls. In normal years, it wouldn’t have mattered, but somehow, something to do with Joss reaching his maturity, this was the Ceremony that mattered. My father’s obsession was absolute: this year would be the high point of his life, being able to display to the Leigh-Smiths and the grand families of the county, and also the locals, the Reds and the Culneys, who remembered the old stories, that he, Charles Hunter, still held sway here. That he mattered.
Mired in my own teenage myopia, I didn’t realise until after Rory was killed quite how desperate Janey was. She had night terrors, and bit her nails and skin until they were raw, with spongy, pink or yellowing patches around the cuticle. She had lost her father, who was her world. So raw with grief for him was she, and deadened with misery, that she was willing to consider anything. Janey had suffered so much, and I think the trauma meant she had lost the ability to consider, to solve, to adapt. She blundered around, those first few weeks whilst I was watching her, wondering when she’d come to me. She chatted up my mother. She listened obediently to my father, she palled up with Merry – she even fucked Joss – how obvious. As though with each member of the family she was trying something different. She went through all of them, and I was just there, waiting.
‘Are we really going to the pub?’ she said, as we went across the lawn, water still dripping down our bodies, between our legs, onto the grass. I looked up to see my father watching us from the terrace, a half-smoked Café Crème hanging from his bottom lip. He was diminished since Rory’s death, suddenly older, this long, lingering summer sucking him dry. I knew that too.
‘Of course we are,’ I told her.
I reversed carefully down the drive. As ever, Joss had backed the car into a tight wedge by the oak tree and never bothered to turn it around.
‘You didn’t do that, did you?’ She pointed to the mangled wing mirror.
‘Do you mind? Joss caught it on a gate on the way back from the pub.’
I could see she knew what night I was talking about. She’d been here only a week and Joss and I had gone to the Good Leper because the band was playing. He’d drunk too much and insisted on driving home; the boys had told him he had to be careful, with me in the back. It was out of the question I’d drive, of course. It was one of many nights at the Good Leper where I’d wished to be somewhere else.
You’ll ask, well, why did you go? It’s hard to say. I knew I was treated badly. But I knew I had to go otherwise it would cause more trouble. The trouble with being a victim is you often don’t realise you are one. Part of me still told myself I was lucky. That my life without them was so bad it was worth it. That I didn’t care.
That evening, the last time I’d sung with the band, seemed a long time ago. ‘It’s like you’ve only been here a couple of days, but actually that evening was another lifetime.’
She nodded, simply. ‘The days are long but the years are short, that’s wha
t Daddy used to say.’ Her hands were patiently folded in her lap. She was very restful, I’d noticed. Her movements were gentle. She never raised her voice. ‘I just want to be straight about this, properly clear. Why have you decided to like me, now? Is it because of Joss?’
I turned onto the main road from the drive, and as I did caught a flash of a face, peeping around a curtain in Ros’s gatehouse sitting room. ‘What about Joss?’
‘Well, me and him.’
‘Ha. No.’
‘What is it then?’
I didn’t like the line of questioning. ‘Sit tight, will you? I always liked you. Don’t you remember? I had to wait till you worked some stuff out. Till you started to see through it. Forget about stupid A-levels. Let’s celebrate that instead.’
The Good Leper sat at the heart of Larcombe, at the mouth of the stream that flowed down from the woods. There was a little iron bridge from the harbour leading to an artificial island from which jutted a small pier. As a child, I longed to live in one of the sweet cottages on the island, blue, red, green front doors each and gardens filled with listing hollyhocks. It was eight o’clock, and the remaining day trippers on the rocky beach were packing up for the day.
It was less than two weeks since my father’s birthday, when we had sat out here on a fresh summer’s day eating fish and chips, when there had at least been a smattering of rain. That summer, the heat was constant, and it seemed bound up with something else in the air. It had been the hottest May for almost three hundred years. And as the heat grew an atmosphere seemed to creep into everything, too. Isolated though we were, I was part of this generation of young people who’d grown up with Thatcher. She was my formative political memory; she was in total control. When I’d slip out to meet Sam Red in Larcombe or Minehead he’d talk about YTS schemes, how there was no work for any young people, how there was no money in the countryside, only in the city, especially London. Something was changing that summer. I knew it, I felt it. Young people were going to mass raves, getting high, taking E and acid: they just wanted to dance, not worry about anything else. I’d been to a rave near the school, and not been caught, and it was amazing. I’d danced for three hours without stopping, in a field in the middle of nowhere. Everyone around me loved everyone else. There were no barriers, no impediments to change. And change was happening, it was in my father’s copy of The Times every day. It was happening in Europe, people swimming across rivers to leave East Germany, people protesting in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. I’d read about it, in the newspaper, heard it on the radio in the kitchen whilst Mummy cooked. No one else at home was interested. But I noticed. I noticed how stuck we were, and how different it was to the rest of the world. There was change in the air, and even here you could sense it.
‘I hate August.’ I leaned down to lock the Mini. ‘That feeling of summer coming to an end.’
‘It’s your birthday in a week, isn’t it? Aren’t you looking forward to it?’
‘That’s partly why I hate it. We haven’t got long, have we?’ Then I stopped, and caught her arm: I felt very protective of her, suddenly. ‘Before we go in, just listen, OK? Don’t let any of them get to you. They say stuff, but it’s just banter. To wind people up.’
‘OK,’ said Janey.
I had my Converse on, and my hair was almost dried, so I ruffled it, making it as big as possible. Wendy James would have approved.
Janey looked at me. ‘I’d love to be you,’ she said, unexpectedly, and I saw her look down at her T-shirt dress, her loafers.
‘You really wouldn’t. At least –’ And I stopped. ‘Never mind, let’s go.’
Arm in arm, we went into the pub together.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I’d known Giles Leigh-Smith since we were children. His father was County Sheriff and they lived up towards Bossington in a huge, ugly, Edwardian mansion, dirty yellow, and extremely draughty. They were always having parties with a marquee and hired waiters and lots of rented champagne flutes – they were that kind of people.
Initially we’d rather ignored them; we were ‘old’ county, and they were a bit nouveau. Mrs Red called them ‘jumped-up’. But this changed as the eighties progressed and money was the thing rather than class; my father cultivated Mr Leigh-Smith, who had money to burn if it meant social acceptance. Mr Leigh-Smith wanted a house to match the gold-tooled books he’d paid a bookshop in Mayfair to supply; so he bought enough antiques off my father to keep the Hunter family afloat far longer than he realised.
The final piece of the puzzle was that Giles went to Farrars with Joss and was a big success: it was the kind of school that rewarded brutish, muscular young men. I’d asked him once if he enjoyed watching cricket, and he looked totally blank.
‘Not unless I’m playing. Waste of time.’
He was taken on a yacht two summers ago with Nico, whose father was a Greek shipping magnate, and it was a great surprise to everyone when Giles returned from the Med completely transformed. Gone was the upturned collar of the rugby shirt which had seemed once to form a layer of his skin. In its place paisley shirts from Hyper Hyper and Sols in Kensington Market. Gone the bottles of Stoly and Bolly he filched from his parents’ booze cupboard which he used to help him date-rape girls – I’d been one of them, losing my virginity to him on a pile of coats at a house party, in a haze of champagne and pain. Now he drank gin and tonics, White Russians – anything sophisticated, eccentric, unusual.
Others – notably my brother – followed suit, and within a term at Farrars half the year were sporting black leather necklaces and skull rings, swapping Cure and Smiths and Bowie albums. The remaining boys, the truly committed rugby props and the hopeless geeky swots, the fringes, looked on with momentary bemusement, and then looked away again.
Farrars was our life, you see. There were just as many girls in the neighbourhood (of our kind of people, naturally), but it was what the boys were doing that mattered. The school had stood for five hundred years, and never mind if two masters were in prison for what they’d done to several prep school boys, and never mind if my father still had nightmares not from his time in the war, but from his years at Farrars, where the headmaster selected a boy every week to cane for no reason. There was a grand arch at the entrance, in Portland stone, so once you’d passed through it you knew you were on Farrars land.
Joss never really talked about school, though the Christmas of his first year he barricaded himself in the bedroom and refused to come out. My father had to break the door down. He beat him for that. Joss and I had been close, playing together in the grounds of Vanes, looking after the bees together, building dens, swimming races day after day, but after he went to school we never really were, and to my eternal shame I never asked Joss if he was happy. Really we had nothing binding us together any more until Giles came back from this boat trip and became Mr Camden Market, and showed Joss the way to be. Joss loved classical music, and colour, and noise. He hated team sports, and the company of other men. I think probably he was very miserable until, on the whim of another boy, he was allowed to change his entire personality.
As children, we hunted in the woods, and I loved the bees and making up stories to myself in the garden. I got on with Merry well enough. I adored my father, until I was about twelve, and started to see through him, to find his gaze on me unsettling; around this time he started to criticise me. The two were linked, but separate: at first I didn’t understand why he’d be so cruel, telling me I was stupid, or fat, or lazy, or a slut.
‘She’s turning into a beautiful young woman,’ the Reverend Piper had said one Christmas at our drinks party. I was thirteen. I suppose he thought that was an OK thing to say.
‘Don’t flirt with the vicar, you little slut,’ my father hissed later that evening, and he’d actually slapped my face, then pushed me into my bedroom, shutting the door. It was the summer I started wearing a bra, and also the summer Mummy started taking our father upstairs immediately after supper, leaving him virtually comatose afterward
s.
Then I was stung and had to go to hospital, to have an adrenaline shot. No one seemed to know what to do with me, but the doctor who treated me airily said if they’d stung me once, it was less likely I’d have the same reaction again. We came home and no one mentioned it again, though I was terrified now, of what was at the end of the garden, of how they didn’t take it seriously, of how not one of us seemed to like the life we were living in the house.
Perhaps this would have gone on indefinitely, perhaps I’d have got away. But the truth is it wasn’t until Janey came for the second time that I saw how very odd we were, and by the time I’d noticed it the box was open, and couldn’t be shut again. Though I’m not sure I’d have shut it even if I could.
We weaved our way through the crowded tables to the group next to the end of the bar, beside the sticky-looking jukebox, a lifeboat collection tin and an assortment of ancient-looking packets of pork scratchings. Ranged against the bar was a collection of young people and I saw them through Janey’s eyes, though I knew them well. Polly Baring – BJ Baring as she was known, at both Letham’s and Farrars – pursed her famous lips into a pouting smile. Nico, just out of hospital for downing a bottle of Smirnoff on his eighteenth birthday at the start of the holidays, was next to her, sitting weakly in a chair, black velvet frock coat, roll-up cigarette dangling from fingers, twist of curled forelock hanging over his eyes. I had been ‘given’ to him by Giles as a birthday present. I didn’t meet his eye.
Polly, my nominal best friend, turned back to Guy, her tiny frame eclipsed by him. The rest watched me approach: Lucy, Hugo, Freddy, Bonar – these were the people with whom I spent my childhood, my schooldays and now my holidays.
‘Well, here we are,’ I told Janey. She said nothing. I saw her rake her bitten fingernails over her balding head.
‘Giles?’ someone called, as I walked through the bar. ‘She’s here, mate.’
The Beloved Girls Page 30