Paradise End

by Elizabeth Laird

  Say yes, Tia, I whispered in my head.

  Tia looked at Dixie with still eyes.

  ‘How was the director? You were going to meet a director, weren’t you?’

  ‘Oh him! You wouldn’t believe it, sweetie. He didn’t turn up. So rude! Luckily Otto had heard about this wonderful new club, or it would all have been too bloody for words.’ She looked at me for the first time, and smiled, and her smile was so charming I could almost believe she meant it. ‘It’s Carly, isn’t it? So thrilled you could come and keep my poor little girl company.’

  She walked over to the sideboard and began to help herself.

  ‘Now listen, all of you,’ she said, turning back to the table. ‘Otto and I have had a simply marvellous idea.’

  Frost didn’t even look up. He was taking a bone from his piece of salmon and laying it carefully on the edge of his plate. Tia was cutting up a bean.

  ‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’ Dixie sat down beside her brother, and I saw that she had taken only two baby potatoes, three or four beans and the tiniest possible piece of salmon.

  ‘You’re all terribly slow today’ Dixie said, ignoring her food and resting her chin on her hands. Although I was wary of her, as if she’d been a bird which would peck me at any moment with its sharp beak, I couldn’t help feeling a little spark of warmth every time her eyes rested on me.

  The others still didn’t say anything.

  ‘Well.’ Dixie gave an exasperated little sigh. ‘Here’s the idea. We’re going to give a party! Now before you groan or say anything horrid, I don’t mean a boring a little drinks party. I mean a party. Marquees on the lawn. A first-class band. Dancing. Lashings of champagne. What do you think, darling?’

  She was looking at Tia, but Tia was looking down at her plate, cutting up a potato into tiny little pieces.

  ‘Who are you planning to invite?’ said Frost, his voice giving nothing away.

  ‘Oh, everyone! Lots of young people, of course. All Tia’s school friends, for example.’

  She was smiling angelically, as if she had no idea that she was being cruel.

  ‘I haven’t got any friends at school, Mimi. You know that.’

  Tia’s pale little voice made Dixie frown sharply.

  She’s going to bully Tia now, I thought, and my fists tightened round my knife and fork.

  ‘Surely,’ Frost said, sounding disbelieving, ‘you’re not planning to give a teenage party.’

  Dixie turned her eyes away from Tia towards him.

  ‘Of course not! We’ll invite all our friends. Lots of theatre people, and the crowd from Chieftain Studios, actors, directors – all the ones Otto and I need to meet. Guest list up to three hundred, I think.’

  She suddenly turned and looked at me.

  ‘We’ll ask the Marchmonts, of course. Your friend Camilla would love to come, I’m sure.’

  My heart lurched. She was playing a game with me. Cat and mouse. But I wasn’t going to let her.

  ‘I don’t know Camilla Marchmont,’ I said, staring back at her. ‘Tia thought I did from something I said, but she got the wrong idea. She made a mistake. Tia and I met by ourselves, when her tennis ball rolled out through the gate and I picked it up and gave it back to her.’

  Frost smiled.

  ‘Well done, Carly,’ he said.

  I felt a shudder go through Tia. She took a deep breath, and her fork clattered nervously against the side of her plate.

  ‘I’m not going to invite anyone from school, Mimi. I’m only going to invite Carly. She’s my best friend. And she didn’t say anything about Camilla. I just made that up.’

  Dixie turned an astonished face towards her. No one would have blinked if I’d spoken out like that at home. They probably wouldn’t even have heard me, but I realized that something amazing had happened. Tia had taken a stand against Dixie. It had taken all her courage, but she’d done it.

  ‘Goodness,’ Dixie said, with an odd little laugh. ‘How very—’ her eyes swept across me, sharp with dislike – ‘extraordinary.’

  Frost was grinning broadly.

  ‘Have a little wine, Carly’ he said, picking up the bottle of wine from the middle of the table and offering it to me.

  I shook my head. I felt as if I was in a jungle, with traps and snares all around me.

  ‘No thanks. My dad doesn’t approve of underage drinking. He’s a policeman.’

  I thought for a moment that Frost was going to pretend to be surprised, and play a sort of ‘I know you know I know, but I’m not going to let on’ game, but he just said, ‘Yes, I know that. I’m afraid I asked Hollins to check you out.’

  I was starting to respect Frost. At least he was being straight with me.

  ‘A policeman!’ Dixie opened her eyes wide. ‘How thrilling. I wonder if he knows Sandy Shortford? He’s Lord Lieutenant of the county. He has a lot to do with the police.’

  She was attacking me so cleverly that if I hadn’t overheard her talk to Frost earlier on, I’d probably have started feeling really small and useless. I began to realize what Tia was up against.

  I mustn’t show I’m angry, I thought. If I do, she’ll win.

  ‘My dad doesn’t know people like that,’ I said. ‘He’s a sergeant. He spends his time catching villains and protecting people.’

  Frost burst out laughing.

  ‘Good for you!’ he said.

  Dixie picked up the bottle and poured some wine into her glass. Frost frowned, and when she’d put it down he moved it away out of her reach. Dixie turned to Tia as if neither Frost nor I existed any more.

  ‘Now, darling, we’ll have to think about clothes for the party. You’ll need something really heavenly to wear. Not the blue satin. It’s all right for going out, but that colour simply doesn’t work with the yellow sofas in the drawing room. We’ll get you something new. We could risk black, but quite honestly you do look a tiny bit pale in black sometimes. Ricki will do your hair, of course.’

  She took a long drink from her glass. Tia said nothing. She’d pushed her plate away, and was sitting with her hands on her knees, looking down at the table.

  Dixie drank some more wine and turned to me again.

  ‘And what are you going to wear, Carly?’ she said, her voice thickening a little.

  I stuck my chin up in the air.

  ‘I don’t even know if I’ll be allowed to come. I’ll have to ask Mum. She doesn’t like me being out late when it’s people she doesn’t know.’

  Frost laughed again.

  ‘Very proper,’ he said, nodding at Dixie.

  Dixie shot me a glance spiked with anger and stood up. She hadn’t eaten a single mouthful.

  ‘Do you know, I think you’ll have to excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’ve got the tiniest little headache coming on. Do come and say goodbye to me, Tia, darling, before Hollins takes you back to school.’

  ‘All right, Mimi.’ Tia’s voice was giving nothing away. ‘Lie down. Take one of your little pills.’

  ‘Oh I will, sweetie, I will,’ said Dixie, and she walked carefully out of the dining room.

  ‘I don’t get it, Tia,’ I say. Lunch is over at last, thank goodness, and we’ve gone outside, down to the pool. Tia’s lent me a bathing costume, and we’re sitting on the edge, dangling our legs into the water. ‘Why haven’t you got any friends at school? I mean, you’re a really, really nice person. I’d be your friend, if I went to your school.’

  She shudders.

  ‘You wouldn’t. Not if you’d been there the first day I arrived.’

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘Johnny drove us down. He was Mimi’s boyfriend last year.’

  ‘Last year? You haven’t been there long then?’

  ‘No. Only since September. Mimi keeps changing my school every time we move. We were in Geneva before. I quite liked it there. And before that I was in a really small school in Wales. That was OK. I had friends there. It wasn’t like this place. I hate it so much, you can’t imagine.’


  She stopped.

  ‘Go on. You were going to say what happened on the first day.’

  Her hands are gripping the tiled edge of the pool, and her knuckles are white.

  ‘It wasn’t really Johnny’s fault. He wasn’t too ghastly actually, most of the time. A million miles better than Otto anyway. But Mimi was showing off, you know, about what a good mother she was. She does that sometimes. Anyway, we drove up in Johnny’s car, and got out in front of what looked like the whole school, because everyone else was arriving, and Mrs Farrell, she’s my housemistress, came up to say hello, and Mimi . . .’ She puts her hands over her face. ‘I can’t bear to think about it.’

  ‘It’s OK if you don’t want to tell me,’ I say, moving round a bit because the sunlight’s bouncing off the rippling water, straight into my eyes.

  ‘No. I’ll tell you. Anyway, Mimi was just – I mean, just so awful, you can’t imagine. Terribly sweet, but deadly too. I wanted to sink down right into the ground. She insisted on being shown round the whole school. This girl, Lucia, took us, and all the others were watching, and we went to the dorm, and Mimi said, “Tia can’t possibly sleep in a room without a good outlook. She simply must have a view. She’s so visually sensitive. I absolutely insist that she has a room on the other side of the house.” I wanted to die. Just die, you know? I could hear them all giggling behind me. And it got worse and worse. She kept saying things like, “This is ridiculous. Of course Tia must have extra French lessons. Languages are the only thing she’s any good at. You’re a bit of a duffer at everything else, aren’t you, sweetie?” She didn’t know how awful it would be for me after that. She was only trying to impress Johnny.’

  Of course she knew. She must have done, I want to say.

  I long to jump up and rush straight back into the house, find Dixie and strangle her with my bare hands. But Tia’s sitting there too, right beside me, and she’s trying not to cry, gulping in a quiet sort of way, and I know I’ve got to stay there and comfort her. The trouble is, I don’t know what to say.

  ‘That’s so horrible,’ is all I can think of. ‘I’d have just – I don’t know what I’d have done. Run away or punched someone or something.’

  ‘It started the minute she’d gone,’ Tia says. ‘The teasing. They do it all the time. Putting stuff in my bed, pouring salt into my tea, hiding my things, calling me Dufferina. Lucia gets them all going. Everyone’s scared of her. There are one or two who’d be nice, I think, but Lucia’s decided to hate me and everyone else just has to go along with it.’ She was twisting her hands together and the knuckles were going white. ‘I just go quiet. I pretend I’m not there. I keep thinking that if I try hard enough, and go somewhere else in my head all the time, and be nothing, and nobody, I really will go away. I’ll become totally invisible, and they won’t be able to get at me any more.’

  ‘I’d fight them!’ I burst out. ‘I’d shout and scream and beat them up! I’d put arsenic in their cornflakes and poisonous spiders in their knickers!’

  She gives one last gigantic sniff and manages to smile at me.

  ‘I know you would, Carly. That’s why you’re so brilliant. I wish I was like you.’

  The red haze in front of my eyes is dissolving. I’m starting to think clearly again.

  ‘You know what you ought to do? Try to make a joke of it. You know, say things like, “Hey, you guys, better be nice to me because I’m so sensitive, ha ha.” Do stuff like that.’

  It sounds feeble, even to me, and I can tell that it’s hopeless. Tia’s lost it at school. She can’t win now. Dixie’s messed it up for her totally and forever, and there’s nothing Tia can do to put things right.

  ‘It’s Sunday!’ Tia suddenly says. ‘I don’t want to think about school any more and ruin the rest of the day. Come on, Carly. I’ll race you to the end of the pool.’

  She’ll win, I know she will. I’m useless at swimming. All I can do is thrash about and keep my head above water. But I jump in after her and do my best, and by the time I’ve got to the other end, I’m gasping for breath, and she’s laughing at me. And we’ve forgotten about her horrible school, and we crawl out of the pool and lie down on two of the long chairs beside it to do a bit of sunbathing, and the unbelievable luxury of Paradise End closes round me again, and in spite of all the awful things in Tia’s life I can feel envy sprouting up in my heart again, and I have to stamp on it hard to keep it down.

  13

  I can’t remember all that much about the next few weeks. School was the same as usual, sometimes dead boring, sometimes quite fun. Nothing much happened at home either, except that Lauren drove me even madder than usual, pestering me all the time to remind Tia about her Barbie clothes, and Dad and Mum kept rowing with Sam, who’d started his job with Jepson’s, and kept missing the last bus home to Canningtree.

  The weekends had a pattern now. I’d race through my homework after school on Friday, and Tia would ring at around eight, as soon as Mr Hollins had brought her home, and we’d make our plans. I’d do tap on Saturday mornings, of course, then I’d go up to Paradise End in the afternoon, and Tia and I would mess around by the pool or bash a few tennis balls over the net on the court. Mostly, though, we’d lie around in Tia’s room and talk.

  Frost was hardly ever there, and Dixie was almost always out with Otto. If she was around, I’d try to keep out of her way. She was really weird with me. Sometimes she looked vague and dreamy and hardly seemed to notice I was there, and sometimes she was cruel. Once or twice she was so kind and charming that I couldn’t help liking her, and wondered if I’d imagined all the horrible things.

  Often, if she saw me with Tia, she’d look at me as if she’d never seen me before and say, ‘Oh, it’s you, Carly. You’ve taken my little girl away from me again. I really must be allowed a little bit of her precious weekend. Run along home, will you?’

  Then, as likely as not, the phone would ring half an hour later.

  ‘Mimi got bored and went out,’ Tia would say. ‘Can you come over again?’

  The only thing that ever seemed to interest Dixie about Tia was her clothes. Tia might have a giant bruise on her arm from when someone at her school had tripped her up, but Dixie’s eyes would slide over it, and all she’d say would be, ‘Not that yellow top with those trousers, sweetie. Do you know, I’m not sure that yellow’s quite your thing after all.’

  It was funny because, although Tia had enough fabulous clothes to start a boutique, she didn’t care about any of them. She couldn’t help looking fantastic, because everything she pulled out of the cupboards in her dressing room was super-fashionable and expensive (and perfectly ironed by Graziella, but she didn’t seem to notice what she wore. The only clothes she cared about were the ones she made for her soft toys and dolls, and the dress she’d designed for me.

  It was coming along brilliantly. Graziella had made a pattern for it and cut it out. Every evening, Mum said, ‘I’ll get sewing tonight, love, promise, after I’ve put my feet up for five minutes,’ but every night she dozed off in front of the telly and never got round to it. In the end, Graziella said she’d rather finish the job off on her own and be done with it (I think she was afraid that Mum would mess up her work).

  After that, every now and then, Graziella would come up to Tia’s room when I was there, and they’d do a fitting, making me try the dress on, and taking bits in and letting bits out. I was nervous at first that it wasn’t going to work. It looked awful to begin with, just bits of shiny black material hanging round me without any shape at all, but slowly I began to see what Tia and Graziella could see – the finished thing – and I knew it would be OK. It was going to be brilliant, in fact.

  I’d almost forgotten about Dixie’s party idea. Tia hadn’t said anything about it, and I suppose I’d thought Dixie hadn’t really been serious. But one Saturday morning a white envelope addressed to me appeared. Everyone (except Sam, of course) was having breakfast, and they were sitting staring at it, propped up against the cerea
l packet, when I came into the kitchen. I was in a rush, like I always am on a Saturday before tap.

  ‘There’s a letter for you,’ said Lauren, and her little eyes were jealous and sharp and curious.

  I opened the envelope and pulled out a stiff, white card. It was printed to look like old-fashioned handwriting and it said,

  Lauren would have snatched it out of my hand if I hadn’t held it up out of her reach.

  ‘Is it from the Wellesley?’ Mum said. ‘About the display?’

  ‘No. It’s a party. Tia’s mum said she was going to have one,’ I said, and I passed the card over to her. I wasn’t sure whether I was pleased and excited or just terrified.

  She read it and handed it to Dad. They looked at each other and didn’t say anything.

  ‘What does it mean, black tie?’ Lauren said, peering at it over Dad’s shoulder.

  ‘Evening dress,’ Mum said. ‘Sounds like a posh do. Satin and diamonds. Not exactly what we’re used to around here.’ She curled her fingers round her coffee mug.

  I suppose if I’d been listening properly I’d have realized that she wasn’t exactly thrilled, but I was too stunned by the card. I took it back from Dad and stared at it again.

  ‘I haven’t got an evening dress.’

  ‘No,’ said Mum. ‘You haven’t. Not that it matters. I’m afraid you can’t go love anyway.’

  My head came up with a jerk. I thought I hadn’t heard her properly. I suddenly realized that I wanted to go to the party at Paradise End more than anything I’d ever wanted to do in my whole life, except dance at the display.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I could feel panic in my chest.

  ‘Three reasons.’ Mum held up her fingers and began to tick them off in a horribly maddening way. ‘One. I’ve been asking around at school. Carole reads all the gossip columns in the papers. She told me that Dixie Braithwaite had a terrible reputation a few years ago, going round with the wildest people. Was it booze or drugs? I can’t remember. Anyway, she was in and out of rehab. It really isn’t likely to be a suitable party for children. Two—’