‘Do you feel brave enough to play with Sam and Joe?’ I ask.
She considers the matter seriously. ‘I think so,’ she says.
When we get back to the cottages, I ring at Alice’s door. No one answers for a long time, although I can hear faint sounds of television inside. I ring again and eventually the door is opened not by Alice, but by Simon. He looks terrible – unshaven and red-eyed. He is not welcoming. He regards me not just with annoyance but almost with fear.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he says.
‘Yes. Hello Simon,’ I say brightly. ‘I was hoping to have a word with Alice.’
I can hear that the children are watching some kind of cartoon programme. There is smell of burnt toast in the house.
‘She’s not here,’ he says.
‘Will she be back this afternoon?’
‘She’s gone away.’
‘Away?’
‘For a few days.’
‘How nice for her. Brave of you to hold the fort,’ I say cheerily, but I am puzzled. Alice said nothing to me about plans for going away this week and we had a vague arrangement to go to see The Invisible Woman in Dungate later in the week. ‘Has she gone somewhere nice?’ I ask.
‘London,’ he says, and starts to close the door.
After lunch, I make various suggestions to Freda about what she might do while I’m teaching but she has a plan of her own. She will spring-clean the dolls’ house, she says.
I am impressed by this idea, largely because the concept of spring-cleaning must be something Freda has got from a book. Cleaning of any kind has never really been my bag; just enough to prevent the place from becoming a health hazard has always been my guiding principle and to judge from the state of Ellie’s house, I would say it was hers, too, so Freda has experienced only virtual spring-cleaning. The Wind in the Willows is my guess for her inspiration. I always had a soft spot for the proletarian Mole and I see no reason why Freda shouldn’t feel the same.
Bringing the dolls’ house here was against the William Morris rule that I applied for selecting what to bring with me: Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. I was more stringent than that, actually, interpreting useful as essential, and I was mortified to discover how little of my domestic paraphernalia I believed to be beautiful. Well, the dolls’ house is not beautiful and I could hardly claim that it was useful until today. Now I can claim that I showed remarkable foresight in bringing it with me for just such an occasion as today. Actually, though, sheer sentimentality drove me to bring it. My father made it for me for my sixth birthday. It has not worn well and it was never intended to be beautiful. My father eschewed the romantic fancies of most dolls’ houses; there were never roses round the door. It was, in fact, a faithful copy of our house – a 1960’s box of a house which my mother liked because it was efficient and she didn’t have to think about it very much. The dolls’ house furniture, though, was my choice and I spent my birthday and Christmas money on the romantic and fanciful, from Swedish pastoral flower-painted to French chateau white and gold. And I filled the house with people – not just Mummy, Daddy and children but an elderly retainer in shirt-sleeves, a cook in an apron, a governess with spectacles, a visiting vicar and several grandparents. These provided me with a cast for creating high-voltage domestic dramas that occupied me for hours. It was the perfect toy for an only child.
When I haul it down from the top of a bookcase in Freda’s room, it is covered in dust and its interior is chaotic – furniture scrambled and upended and the dolls lying prone in attitudes of extreme distress. In fact, I am a little disappointed, now, that Freda wants to do anything so mundane as to spring-clean this richly suggestive scene; there is so much potential for drama here in what is obviously the aftermath of some apocalyptic event. She is adamant, however.
‘I’m going to make it all smart,’ she says, ‘and then they can have a party.’
I don’t say that it looks to me as though they’ve had the party already; I fetch her a damp sponge and leave her to it.
Matt arrives for his lesson looking more subdued that I have ever seen him, and without the sweaty glow of recent exercise that usually accompanies him. He flops down in a chair and says he is sorry but he hasn’t written his essay.
‘So much hassle,’ he says. ‘Man, you wouldn’t believe the hassle.’
‘About?’ I ask.
‘About the thing – you know – about Kelly. I was really going to get down to it – the essay – this morning, and then that policewoman turned up. Again. Wanted to know about the Arab guy Kelly had a row with.’ He looks sheepish. ‘I had to tell her about the guy and Dora.’
He closes his eyes and runs a hand over his face. His hands are huge, I notice suddenly.
‘The thing is,’ he says, ‘she’s got it in for me. She thinks I know more than I’m telling. You were in a relationship with her, she keeps saying, and I keep telling her it was like – you know – just f-… just sex.’ He gazes at me like a huge toddler, injured and bewildered. ‘My mum’s completely pissed off with me because they came in and searched the house – everything – the garage, the shed, the loft – the lot.’
‘Do you know what they were looking for?’
‘Kelly’s iPhone. She always had it with her but it wasn’t – you know – on the beach and they haven’t found it in the shop or her flat.’
‘So they think you’ve got it.’
‘I think I was the prime suspect,’ he says, ‘until —’
‘Until Farid came into the picture.’
I consider him. I’ve always thought of him as harmless, like one of those big, bounding dogs which might knock you over accidentally but would never bite you, but now I can’t take my eyes off those enormous hands. Kelly was a strong, fit young woman; someone had to push her pretty hard to send her over the sea wall. And then that someone lifted her head and bashed it repeatedly on the stones. Big hands. And what comes into my mind now is the last time I saw Kelly. She stood in the shop doorway, watching Matt stride away with his big bag hoisted onto his shoulder. ‘Nice lad,’ I said, and she said, ‘That’s all you know.’ At the time, I took it just as Kelly’s usual sourness; I wonder now what she meant.
I tear myself away from all this. It’s never constructive to speculate on the homicidal possibilities of one’s pupils, although I have taught several of whom I could have said, That boy will be hanged. We turn to the matter in hand, which is Hamlet. Matt is seriously adrift here. He can’t understand why Hamlet piddles around instead of just getting on with dealing with his wicked uncle, and I suspect he would like the whole thing translated into Key Stage 3 vocabulary. ‘The pretending to be mad stuff,’ he asks, bewildered, ‘what’s that about? How does that help?’
‘Well, that’s an interesting question, Matt,’ I say, encouragingly. ‘You’ve hit on one of the key questions.’
‘But you’re not going to tell me the answer, are you?’ he says. ‘You’re going to ask me what I think.’ He groans and rubs his face again.
‘The time is out of joint. O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right,’ I quote. ‘Hamlet knows what he’s expected to do but he knows he’s not the right person to do it. He finds all kinds of reasons to hesitate, and he’s got no one to confide in: his mother is married to his father’s murderer; his college friends are working for the murderer, too, and his girlfriend conspires in a plot to trap him. It’s enough to send anyone genuinely round the bend.’
‘So he’s not pretending?’
‘It’s a grey area,’ I say.
‘I hate those.’
‘I know,’ I say.
We struggle on. When I think any more complexity will finish him off, I go against all my principles and give him a list of prescribed quotes. Drop these into any essay and you’re bo
und to pick up a few marks.
He brightens up. ‘Magic,’ he says.
When he has gone, I put the kettle on and go upstairs to check on Freda. The miniature scene has shifted now from the aftermath of an orgy or domestic tragedy to the morning after a bombing raid. The dolls’ house is empty, the bodies are laid out in a row and the furniture is spread around, recovering from Freda’s ministrations with the damp sponge. I notice how much of it is broken – missing chair legs, wobbly tables, torn seat covers. Freda has gathered the maimed pieces in one place.
‘I’m only putting the nice things back,’ she says firmly.
Well, she doesn’t get that from me, that sort of ruthlessness. Give me the maimed and damaged – animal, vegetable or mineral – and I will take it under my tattered old wing.
‘We could try and mend the others,’ I say.
Freda scoops up the broken pieces and dumps them into my hands. ‘There you go,’ she says, and turns back to cleaning the little front door with her greying sponge.
I go back downstairs and by the time I have made the tea, I realise that, for the first time, Dora is late for her lesson.
When she does arrive, she is not herself at all. She is not in her school uniform, it being half term, but neither is she carrying her sturdy briefcase. She offers me no plastic-foldered essay and doesn’t really apologise for the absence of the essay or for being late. She seems to be in a daze – so much so, that when I offer her tea, she actually accepts, and drinks it. We have a go at the end of The Tempest. I’m particularly interested in Prospero’s unforgiving forgiveness of his brother, but I can’t say that Dora is. Several times, as I am talking to her, her eyes slide away from mine to look out at the sea, which is rapidly being consumed in the evening murk. She says nothing, really, just answering my questions with a hopeless shake of her head. I manage twenty minutes of this before I say, ‘Look, Dora, I know your father is making things hard for you and Farid, but —’
I get no further. She shakes her head violently and gets to her feet. ‘It’s not…‘ she says. ‘You don’t… I can’t…‘ and she rushes out of the room. I follow her to the front door, where she turns and says, ‘I’m sorry. Sorry.’ Then she runs out into the dark.
I stand and watch her as she passes under the nearest lamppost, then go inside. ‘Bloody hell,’ I mutter, and consider, quite seriously, whether the exam boards would accept special consideration cases for either Matt or Dora. It is a long time since I taught in a school but I doubt that there is much truck with emotional distress under Michael Gove’s malign dispensation. I google, and discover that the death of a close relative can earn you up to an extra 5 per cent. Where does having your girlfriend murdered rank on the scale, I wonder? Especially if you’re not really sure that she was your girlfriend? Are you entitled to anything if it was just sex? As for Dora, an enforced sundering from a boy you’ve known for only a few weeks would hardly count. Adolescent heartbreak lives in its own bleak world; we who are old forget its terrible intensity.
Telling myself, unconvincingly, that youth is intense but resilient, and that it is, after all, still only February, I clear away the tea mugs and go upstairs to Freda.
Here order reigns. Furniture has been allotted rationally to rooms (though the cat in its basket is, oddly, in the bathroom) and the people are sitting at the kitchen table or reclining in the sitting room. I am delighted to see that Freda is blind to class barriers, so the shirt-sleeved retainer sits on a sofa, while the vicar is in the kitchen. There is only one disturbing feature to this tranquil scene. The mother figure is lying in the garden, clearly the victim of a savage sexual assault. Her dress has been ripped from her torso and one of her arms is missing.
‘What happened to her, Freda?’ I ask.
‘She had an accident,’ she says, unconcerned, occupied with the tiny cups and saucers on the kitchen table.
‘What sort of accident?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know, Granny,’ she says. Then she turns to look at me. ‘I didn’t do the accident,’ she explains patiently. ‘It was a long-ago accident.’
‘So that’s how you found her?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ She adopts a suitably mournful expression. ‘It’s quite sad, isn’t it?’
‘It is.’ I pick the little figure up. It is oddly disturbing. The Salem witch trials come to mind – the evidence of mutilated ‘poppets’ got several people hanged, I think. But there is no witchcraft here, of course, just clumsy fingers. I saved the dolls’ house for Ellie and didn’t give it to her until she was old enough to enjoy it properly, but Annie got at it, of course, at an age when destruction is more fun than construction. She was probably trying to undress the little woman, I assume, and the arm was collateral damage. The fact that it was the mother figure that she maimed was surely incidental. There was no malice intended, was there?
Later, when I am cooking supper, the doorbell rings and I find Dora on the doorstep once again. She is white and ghostly in the lamplight.
‘They’ve taken him,’ she says. ‘They’ve taken him, and I don’t know what to do.’
Chapter Ten
DISGRACE
Tuesday 18th February 2014
Dora
There was nothing wrong with the revision schedule, as such, Dora Karalis thought, as she looked at it lying on her desk under her bedroom window. A lot of care and thought had gone into that schedule, and it looked great with its different colours for different subjects – blue for Greek, red for French, green for English. The mock exams would start as soon as they went back after half term and she had calculated nine hours work a day for six days – three hours per subject per day, eighteen hours per subject in total. She had been on several websites which gave advice about avoiding exam stress and she had followed their advice scrupulously: none of her work sessions was more than two hours long, she had sensible breaks scheduled for taking some exercise, eating and rewarding herself with treats. Those were important, all the websites agreed. Only the treats she had imagined were not the chocolate bars and exotic smoothies that she knew some of the other girls had planned. Her treats were to be calls to Farid, and now, without those, she couldn’t even get started. She looked at her watch. It was ten-fifteen on the morning of the second day of her schedule and she was already nine and a half hours behind. She had managed three quarters of an hour the previous day, but she couldn’t remember anything she had read and after her father had gone off to London for a church meeting she had crawled into bed and spent most of the day there. She looked again at her schedule. She could rewrite it, reallocating the sessions she had missed yesterday. The websites told you not to do that; a distraction tactic they called that, along with tidying your room, reorganising your books, taking the dog for a walk and making cups of coffee other than at the allocated times. Well, her schedule didn’t include Sunday. She had given herself the day off on Sunday, as the websites advised, but she would work then, if she felt like it.
If she felt like it. She folded her arms over the mocking schedule with its neat boxes and bright colours, and laid her head on them. It was over a week now since her father had broken her heart. She knew that sounded melodramatic but it was the only way she could describe it – as though the heart had literally gone out of her, as if her body and mind were going on working mechanically but there was no blood pumping through her. She couldn’t believe that her father – who did love her, she knew – could have done this to her. She kept thinking about how she had defended Prospero to Gina – the only time she had ever argued with Gina, she thought. She had said that Prospero put difficulties between Miranda and Ferdinand out of love, to make sure that Ferdinand didn’t win her too easily. A bit of her still hoped that her father might be doing the same, that if she and Farid could keep loving each other even though they were kept apart, then he might, eventually, change his mind. But she couldn’t get him to talk about it. Let us
just put it aside, Dora, is all he would say when she tried to talk. It was a mistake of youth. Now we forget it. And he had been kind and gentle to her, as though she was convalescing from a serious illness. She couldn’t hate him.
She sat up. She could hate Kelly Field, though, who had told him about Farid before she had a chance to introduce them and make her father see what a good person Farid was. She could hate Kelly and she could be glad that she was dead – glad, actually, that someone else hated her enough to kill her.
She picked up her schedule. She would do this: it was her test, like Ferdinand being made to carry logs. If she worked hard and did well in her exams and made her father proud, then it could still be all right. If only she could just speak once to Farid, just to tell him that she had walked away with her father because she had to, because it would have disgraced all three of them if she had struggled and made a fuss in the street, that she loved him and would always love him, that she needed him to say that he loved her. Her father had taken her phone. He had asked her to promise not to see Farid and she had promised because she knew she couldn’t see him without being spotted by someone, but when he asked her if she would promise not to ring Farid, she knew it was a promise she couldn’t keep, so she had let him take the phone. She was almost sure she knew where it was, though. It would be on top of the wardrobe in her father’s room, in the place where he kept birthday and Christmas presents. From when she was very small, presents had been kept up there, because she couldn’t reach them. It never seemed to have occurred to him that it wasn’t inaccessible to her any more. The day after he took the phone, she heard it ringing from somewhere in his room; since then it hadn’t rung again. He had turned it off, she assumed, or it had run out of charge. Or Farid had stopped ringing. It would be so easy to go in and find it and just give Farid one call, but it would be the end of her and the person she was. It would be ignoble, she thought, and she wouldn’t deserve Farid.
Drown My Books Page 9
