The Girl in His Eyes

by Jennie Ensor

  The Girl In His Eyes

  Jennie Ensor

  Copyright © 2018 Jennie Ensor

  The right of Jennie Ensor to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2018 by Bloodhound Books

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  In Memory of my Mother

  Contents

  1. Laura

  2. Suzanne

  3. Paul

  4. Laura

  5. Paul

  6. Suzanne

  7. Laura

  8. Suzanne

  9. Laura

  10. Laura

  11. Paul

  12. Laura

  13. Suzanne

  14. Laura

  15. Suzanne

  16. Laura

  17. Laura

  18. Suzanne

  19. Laura

  20. Suzanne

  21. Paul

  22. Laura

  23. Suzanne

  24. Laura

  25. Suzanne

  26. Laura

  27. Paul

  28. Laura

  29. Laura

  30. Suzanne

  31. Laura

  32. Paul

  33. Suzanne

  34. Laura

  35. Laura

  A Note from Bloodhound Books:

  A Note from the Author

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Laura

  29 December 2010

  The face in the window stared back at her. Hers, yet not hers, it blurred into a jelly of reflected faces and the shifting darkness beyond.

  She would be there, soon. With her mother – with him. She would have to say the right things, laugh in the right places. Pretend everything was alright.

  Laura picked up her overnight bag, left the station and began the slog up Wimbledon Hill. Lorries shuddered past, splashing her jeans. She forced her umbrella into the wind. Her body felt flimsy, like one of those skeleton leaves clinging to the trees along the road.

  At the top of the hill she turned into a side road then left into Elgin Drive. Slower now, past the line of stern 1930s houses. Number 31 loomed behind its ten-foot, ruler-flat hedge. The Porsche wasn’t in the driveway.

  She opened the gate, hesitating. She didn’t want to go into this house again – not now, not ever. What if she turned around and went home, said she wasn’t feeling well? It wasn’t far from the truth. The warning signs were back: a thudding heart, a prickling beneath the skin. But she drew in her breath and made herself walk up the path and press the doorbell.

  The hall light came on behind the frosted glass panels. She waited. Then her mother appeared, a little out of breath. Her hair, now highlighted blonde, bore the signs of her favourite Toni & Guy stylist.

  ‘Hello, Mum. I thought you weren’t in.’

  ‘The radio was on, I didn’t hear you.’ She was enveloped by arms, bosom and a cloud of floral perfume. ‘You’re soaked! You should have called, darling, I would have picked you up at the station.’

  ‘It’s only ten minutes. I don’t mind the walk.’

  Laura followed her mother into the kitchen. The cactus on the windowsill had sprouted a third lobe, a spooky shade of orange. On the worktop, plastic containers competed for space with her mother’s collection of herbal and homeopathic remedies for everything from insomnia to swollen ankles.

  ‘Dad isn’t back from work yet?’

  ‘He shouldn’t be long. How was your trip?’

  ‘It was just what I needed, I didn’t want to come back. How was Christmas?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Your father wasn’t in the best of moods.’

  A thick paperback lay beside the toaster – one of those self-help books with instructions for how to transform one’s life. She opened it and read the underlined sentence:

  Picture affirmations as seeds that you are planting in the garden of your mind.

  Laura put down the book. Her mother was a sucker for all that New Age stuff.

  ‘Did Stephen miss you while you were away?’

  ‘I doubt it. We’re not seeing each other anymore.’

  ‘Oh, Laura.’ Her mother’s brightness vanished. ‘What happened?’

  ‘He was seeing other girls,’ she explained. ‘He said he didn’t think our relationship had a future. He said I didn’t trust him. Stuff like that.’

  His words were stuck inside her head. I don’t know who you are, Laura. You never let me see the real you.

  Their parting had been brief, though not painless. Evidence of his betrayal had been left for her to find: an unfamiliar hair slide on his dressing table, a blonde hair on a pillow. She’d yelled, hurled things. He’d told her she was being hysterical.

  ‘I’m so sorry, darling.’ Her mother approached, arms opening. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Laura bit her lip. The tears were banked up behind her lids, ready to flow. But she stiffened and pulled away. She didn’t want to cry here, with her father liable to walk in any moment. In any case, she had cried quite enough lately.

  ‘I just needed time to sort things out in my head.’ It wasn’t only that. She couldn’t talk to her mother about lots of things. Explaining herself to her mother was just too difficult. Keeping things inside was easier, was what she was used to doing.

  ‘How about a cup of tea?’ Her mother was already removing a bottle of milk from the fridge, which was crammed with cling-filmed bowls. A damp ginger cat squeezed with difficulty through the flap and padded towards her. Laura glanced into the hall. She had to be on her own for a few minutes.

  The downstairs toilet was fragrant with air freshener. On the shelf, dried flowers sprayed prettily from a vase. The basin, spotless, boasted a pristine block of Royal Jelly soap. Her reflection startled her: ghost-white face framed by a damp tangle of nearly black hair, eyes smudged with kohl. They stared back at her, as sad and shiny as a spaniel’s.

  She turned the tap on full, wondering if the sound of pouring water would hide the howl that might erupt from her. No, almost certainly not. She neatened her hair and splashed cold water on her face.

  ‘Don’t take this too much to heart, love,’ her mother said as they sat at the kitchen table. ‘You never know who might be round the corner.’

  No one, hopefully. She’d had enough of love, enough of men who wanted too much or too little. Enough of men full stop. Her mother meant well but she just didn’t get it. They were too different, they would never understand each other. They were never going to be the best buddies that she wanted them to be. How could that happen when her mother still loved Dad, thought he was as white as snow? In all this time she’d never guessed the truth.

  ‘Daniel’s bringing Karen with him tomorrow, did he tell you?’

  Laura shook her head. Her brother, two years older than her, was a project manager at a high-tech company in Bristol. She envied his focus, the way his life appeared to go wherever he willed it. Her own life was waiting in vain for some direction. Engrossed by her history course at Durham University, she had graduated with an upper second, better than she’d expected given her erratic performance in exams. But now, eighteen months later, she was starting to wilt. Try as she might to latch on to some sort of career, something vital to success always eluded h
er.

  ‘He said it was about time we met her,’ her mother said with a knowing look.

  It was serious then – Daniel never brought girlfriends to the house. Although she was glad Daniel would be around tomorrow for their father’s birthday, she wished she’d been able to think of a good enough excuse to not be a part of it.

  Her father arrived shortly after 7.30pm. When her mother went to greet him, Laura didn’t get up. His footsteps smacked the wooden floor as he strode along the hall. She saw, as he entered the kitchen, that his face and neck were still tanned from the summer. No sign yet of a beer belly. He was a tall, athletic man, quite decent looking. A man she ought to be proud to have as her father.

  ‘Hey, sweetie, how’re you doing? Good to see you again.’

  He put down his briefcase and momentarily stood before her, arms at his sides as if hoping she might hug him, before leaning over and offering her his cheek. She barely touched the stubble with her lips. Faint, woody notes of his scent, peppermint mouthwash on his breath. He lifted his briefcase onto the worktop, pulled off his tie and took a beer from the fridge, as any other man might do.

  Over dinner, her father’s mood worsened. He grumbled about a scratch he’d discovered on the passenger door of his car, which he suspected wasn’t accidental.

  ‘It’s that kid down the road, I bet. The one who rings on people’s doors for the hell of it – his parents let him roam the streets at all hours. I’ve a good mind to call the police.’

  Her mother nodded, looking worried. ‘How was work today?’

  ‘Not so good.’ He scowled, picking at a patch of candle wax on the dining table. ‘Orders are down, profits are down, and bonuses will be too, most likely. It’s the worst it’s been in nine years. This recession is …’ As he went into detail about the problems the company was facing, Laura drifted away from the conversation. Instead, she found herself contemplating the large bruise-like mark on the wall beside the display cabinet, and the gaudy flowers spreading over the heavy curtains. The smell of geraniums hovered behind everything, and that web of small familiar sounds – the murmur of a radiator, the plaintive mews of the cat, the occasional rhythmic clack-clack of a distant train. The house seemed to be drawing her in, as if she’d never left.

  ‘You’re very quiet, Laura,’ her father remarked suddenly in a loud voice, startling her. ‘How’s the job going?’

  ‘I spent all day typing out captions again,’ she replied. ‘If I stay there any longer, my brain will turn to mush.’

  It had sounded like an interesting, possibly exciting job – trainee production assistant in a TV production company. But they didn’t make documentaries anymore, only film trailers with booming voiceovers, and adverts for DIY stores and dog food. Worse, a large part of every day was taken up with whatever tedious tasks no one else wanted to do, which, by 5.30pm, made her want to scream.

  ‘You’ll keep on with it, won’t you?’ Her father’s tone fell somewhere between sharp and resigned. ‘All you’ve done since leaving college is float from one job to the next. If you don’t get stuck into this one, you’re going to be unemployable.’

  She said nothing. Her father was probably right. Three months into this job, her third since leaving university, she had no idea what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. Her first job, in the V&A museum shop, had gone well until they’d made her redundant after four months. After temping in various offices she’d finally found another ‘permanent’ job, in the customer service section of a telecoms company. But she’d walked out after a month, sick of the constant supply of disgruntled callers.

  The problem was, she didn’t know what she wanted to do. She wasn’t interested in politics, journalism, or the civil service. She couldn’t imagine being a teacher – in any case, there was no need for history teachers at the moment. Research, maybe. But there were no jobs for researchers without experience. It wasn’t the right attitude, she knew, but lately she’d had less and less expectation for her future.

  After dinner, Laura sat with her parents in the living room. When the BBC Ten O’Clock News was over she told them she was tired and she’d see them in the morning.

  Across the landing from her parents’ room, her old bedroom waited, its door ajar. These days she hardly ever slept in it, apart from a night or so over Christmas. The room smelled of the lavender pouches her mother used to ward off moths. Its walls were still covered in the lilac shade of paint she’d chosen, aged eleven. On the shelf, her battered straw hat lay atop a row of the hunky volumes on archaeology and ancient history collected over her teenage years. Her overnight bag had been placed on the single bed and her battered childhood slippers lay side by side beneath the dressing table, which had been carefully arranged with her left-behind jewellery and hair accessories.

  Everything looked homely and welcoming. She pushed away a sudden sense of confinement and loneliness, of boundaries slipping, of time slipping. She was her twelve-year-old self again, waiting for something awful to happen.

  Laura undressed, pulled on a long, stretchy top, and lay in bed with the bedside lamp on. A hundred sounds percolated into her brain, each demanding attention. The drone of a plane heading towards Heathrow. A soft scraping from downstairs that she couldn’t identify, followed by a hollow clatter – her mother cleaning the cat’s bowl, maybe. Footsteps on the stairs. A series of creaks from the landing. Subdued voices from her parents’ bedroom then the click of their door closing. Finally, she switched off the lamp.

  There’s nothing to be afraid of, she told herself.

  The garden seemed smaller and neater than she remembered. Its grass verges were trimmed, the rose bushes pruned. The earwig-infested tree stumps had been taken away. No fallen leaves cluttered the lawn. It was hard to recognise the sprawling garden she’d known as a child, with its endless places to play and hide.

  Laura looked up at the featureless layer of thick cloud obscuring the sky. It was nearly midday. She had woken late after another bad night’s sleep and taken a cup of tea up to her room before getting up. Then she’d done her best to help her mother, who’d been trying to peel carrots, look for fluted glasses, and season the guinea fowl. Her father was in good spirits, popping in and out of the kitchen to make sauces and help himself to nuts and wine when he wasn’t occupied with his latest stereo, a birthday present to himself. She was thinking she ought to go back inside and offer to lay the table when her mother appeared in the doorway of the conservatory.

  ‘Laura! Daniel and Karen are here!’

  After the greetings were over they were corralled into the living room, where her father opened his presents. Flurries of conversation were helped along by a bottle of Prosecco and her father’s well-honed charm. Despite this, the occasion felt awkward. Her mother kept rushing out to tend to something in the kitchen, and said little. Her brother seemed less relaxed than usual, and Karen smiled nervously, from time to time glancing at Daniel for reassurance. He had no doubt warned Karen about Dad’s uncertain moods. And maybe she sensed something else besides a bad temper lurking beneath his jovial surface.

  They all sat around the dining table eyeing the pot of stew her mother was ladling onto plates. Pintard something or other.

  Daniel raised his glass. ‘Happy birthday, Dad. Roll on sixty!’

  Laura wished her father a happy birthday with the others.

  ‘Start, everyone,’ her mother urged, before turning to Karen with a smile of encouragement. ‘So, what made you want to be a vet?’

  Laura shifted in her chair. She was uneasy again. She watched her father as he discussed the latest Test match with her brother. As usual he was nicely turned out, in a dark-green silk shirt, open at the neck, black trousers and polished leather shoes. He sounded more than ever like an Englishman, only occasional traces of his Canadian accent coming through. He was on his best behaviour, she could tell. Her brother, with his shirt pressed and hair combed, looked oddly well-groomed for a weekend. Karen had made an effort too, with a smart velve
t dress and carefully applied make-up. Her own make-up was minimal and her outfit simple – a blouse and short cardigan over narrow black jeans.

  Karen and her mother were on to facials and their favoured remedies for open pores. Her mother laughed suddenly, and reached across to touch Karen’s arm. Already there was a warmth and ease between the two women. Laura looked away. She felt the echo of some long-ago emotion, one she’d almost forgotten. That ache of being left out, of wanting to join in but not knowing how.

  Daniel caught her eye and winked at her. ‘Alright, sis?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ She turned her attention back to her plate, her serving mostly uneaten.

  As their plates emptied, there was a hiatus in the conversation.

  ‘Does anyone want to hear a joke?’ Daniel looked around expectantly.

  ‘Go on then,’ said her mother.

  Daniel waited until he had everyone’s attention. ‘What do you say to a black man in a suit?’

  ‘Who’s your tailor?’ offered her father.

  ‘Will the defendant please rise.’

  ‘That’s really bad,’ her father said.

  ‘Daniel,’ her mother began in a weary tone. ‘Don’t you know any jokes that aren’t racist?’

  Her brother scratched his head, mischief on his face. ‘Okay, how about this one. What are Belgium’s most famous inventions?’

  Around the table, vacant looks.