Boys and parents alike lounged around the field, some engrossed in newspapers, some dozing in deckchairs and one or two even watching the match.
She spied a group of kids at the far side of the pitch and determined by their stance and number that her son would be among them. It took a while to navigate the edge of the field. She stepped over open novels, textbooks and crawling babies. She trotted between picnic blankets and folding chairs and stumbled over discarded shoes and cricket pads whilst nodding hello or acknowledgements to several staff and visitors. As she approached the group, she could see that her assumption had been correct.
Dominic lay face down, prostrate on the grass along with several of his peers. Kathryn averted her eyes as an empty bottle of champagne was hastily thrust under a school sweatshirt. The boys and girls alike were in various states of undress, as was fitting for the weather. One of them was Emily Grant, whose shirt was tied up under her bust, revealing the slight paunch of a tanned tummy. Her hair hung down over her face and her eyes were heavily kohled. She lay inches from Dominic, her head propped up on her angled wrist as she raked his back with painted nails.
Kathryn felt an instant ache of regret at having come; she was intruding and wished that she had stayed at home. This was no place for parents or teachers; she was an outsider. Intuition told her she was unwanted before she had uttered a single syllable. If she could have reversed unseen and slunk back into the shadows, she would have.
She looked back to examine the route that she had taken, trying to plot a quick escape. So many obstacles and people littered her view, she couldn’t easily decipher a path. There was a split second when she wondered if she could turn on her heel and slip away unnoticed, back into the crowd.
‘Hey! It’s your mummy, Dom Dom!’
Kathryn wasn’t sure who had spoken, but recognised the tone.
‘Yes it is,’ she offered brightly. ‘Hello, Dom! Hello, everyone!’
Dominic flicked his head around and groaned as he surveyed his mother in her floral cotton apron.
‘Hello, Mrs Brooker!’
It was Luca who had been so very polite.
‘Hello, Mrs Bedmaker!’
Again, she couldn’t determine who had spoken, but presumed it was one of the lower sixth whose face was buried in a white slipover. Kathryn felt her cheeks turn crimson as heads snickered into hands and bodies shook with the exertion of trying not to burst out in guffaws. It was an absolutely hilarious situation. Her breath came in huge gulps and she felt rooted to the spot. Even Dominic laughed, but tried to bury his face into the blanket to conceal his amusement.
‘I just… I… well…’ She pleaded with herself, Don’t cry, Kathryn, not here, not now, not in front of them. Mustering what little dignity she could, she smiled at the group and announced in a loud voice with her head held high, ‘Just came to check on the score. I’ll be off then. Have fun, everyone!’
Clutching her basket, embarrassed by its contents and her earlier intentions, she turned a little too quickly and stumbled on a divot. The bottle of juice rolled onto the floor. She bent to retrieve it before scurrying away. She could hear the ripple of laughter that chased her steps.
Why is it okay to laugh at me? What have I done to deserve this? I am a person, I am not invisible. These thoughts rattled around her head.
A conversation that she had once had with Natasha came to mind. The subject had been sprung on her unawares as they walked in the grounds one autumn day.
‘Do you know that your nickname is Mrs Bedmaker?’
Kathryn had answered carefully. ‘Yes. Yes, I do know. The kids say it to me when they think that they can get away with it. It’s almost like an initiation, a positioning on the bravado scale. They always do get away with it of course, because I let them!’
‘Why is that, Kate?’ Natasha held her arm.
‘Well, because they are only children and most of them are actually very sweet indeed and they are far from home. I have known them all for a long time and I think it would be more harmful or awkward to pick them up on it. I mean, it’s only a bit of harmless fun and I know that they don’t mean anything by it.’
‘No, Kate, you misunderstood me.’ Natasha shook her head. ‘I mean, why is it that they call you Mrs Bedmaker? Why do you wash your bed linen so frequently? I know it’s none of my business, but it is a little… odd.’ She twisted her mouth into a comic grimace, trying to make light of the situation.
Kathryn had looked into the face of her friend. A little voice in her head had said, Tell her, Kathryn, tell her now, she cares and she can help you! Tell her what he does to you, tell her what he has always done to you, tell her how you are trapped, tell her how you have to stay or you would lose your children and the thought of that is even more unbearable than the life that you are forced to lead.
Instead, she opened her mouth and a sound popped out that would change the parameters of their relationship for a very long time. It was the sound of a very heavy door shutting, the sound of a barrier closing, the sound of a boundary being put in place, a limit, a threshold, a constraint. It was these ten words: ‘You are quite right, it is none of your business.’
She often thought about that conversation and the missed opportunity. What did it matter now? Natasha was teaching at the other end of the country. Kathryn doubted she would see her again, more’s the pity. The two had shared a wonderful friendship.
Kathryn thought about Dominic and Lydia’s behaviour. She had tried their whole lives to make them into decent human beings, showing them the importance of having respect for themselves and other people. This sounded ironic even inside her own head: how could she teach or show them how to have respect for themselves when she had no respect for herself? She was a sham. Her whole life was a horrible pretence.
She knew that at some level her battle to make them into rounded and likeable people was futile. How could they ever grow up with any sense of ‘normal’ when what went on under their roof every night was so very far from normal, no matter how much she tried to convince herself otherwise?
They were embroiled in a battle that they did not even know they were fighting, playing a game in which over half of the rules and players were hidden. It was unfair on all of them.
Kathryn breathed a heavy sigh of relief as she walked up the back path that wound its way between the playing field and their private garden. Here she could hide until the match had finished.
She spied Mark’s head, bent over a garden chore on the other side of the hedge. He was wearing his gardening hat. He insisted it was a panama, but to Kathryn it looked more like a Stetson, which made her chuckle on the inside.
Kathryn paused and looked beyond the gate into the garden. At first she couldn’t identify the strange haze that loitered over the top of the roses, the shimmering distortion of the grass and flowers. The house bricks flickered and the air seemed to flex. Then she realised that she was looking at the house through a wall of heat. Something was burning.
She sniffed the air and recognised the distinctive smell of a bonfire. The bitter, intoxicating smell transported her to her childhood, her dad in his black wellington boots, holding a garden fork as he skewered leaves and wrappings onto the burning pyre. His ‘bonfire’ was a permanent fixture: within a wheelbarrow’s leap of the compost heap, he had constructed a ramshackle box out of chicken wire and an old metal gate. The whole thing was supported by two bricks at each corner. He would always make out that it was an arduous task, but she and Francesca knew it was one of his greatest pleasures. In fact it seemed that most men loved the almost primal task of starting a fire and watching the heat of the flames destroy things.
Kathryn stepped inside the gate. She watched Mark as he bundled up paper and cardboard then threw the pile onto the fire and stood back, hands on hips, to admire his handiwork. Unlike her dad, Mark would be burning things out of necessity, to clear away mess; he would not have secreted a handful of foil-wrapped spuds at its core, for retrieval and eating with butte
r at dusk. She thought back fondly to her and Francesca in their frog-eyed wellies and hand-knitted Aran jerseys, sitting with their father on upturned milk crates, with buttery chins, burning tongues and cold, prune-like toes… Happy, happy days.
She walked down the path towards the house. The black smoke swept across the garden with ferocity and she was thankful that she had taken in the washing earlier.
‘Ah, Kathryn, there you are.’
He smiled at her. He probably required something: a cold drink, sandwich, chair, punch bag, who knew.
She said nothing, but smiled back, nodding her head slightly to indicate that yes, there she was.
Kathryn moved closer to the fire, enjoying the warmth it radiated despite the summery temperature. She quickly became transfixed by the flames. She was fascinated by the colour palette within the blaze: yellow and orange flickered to purple and green with the brightest blue leaping at certain points; it was beautiful and captivating. Kathryn not only loved the sight and scent of a fire, but also the noise. It was distinct and evocative of cosy nights in, romance and snuggling under blankets on a cold winter’s evening; it was a good book and lamplight; it was comfort for aching bones.
She stood silently for some minutes as Mark jabbed at the flames with a long branch. As she focussed, she could make out an empty tissue box, the front cover of an old cardboard file and some peanut shells. As she continued to stare, her eye was drawn to some lettering that jumped out at her from the burning matter and punctured her vision. It was just a few letters that weren’t immediately decipherable: g… u… d… i… gudi.
Kathryn knew at once to what those four letters referred: Tales from Malgudi! Oh no! Oh no! Her breath quickened as her heart thudded inside her rib cage. She began to shake. She screwed her eyes into slits to better withstand the acrid smoke, and, taking one step closer, she looked deep inside the flames.
They were all there: Tom Jones, Portrait in Sepia, The God of Small Things. All of them. She pictured her husband tearing through the house, a whirling dervish in search of all her concealed treasures, saw him gathering them into his crooked arms and tearing down the stairs in his haste to throw them onto the flames. Would it have brought him joy to know that he was destroying her secrets? Yes, yes, she knew that it would.
Her mouth hung open. Putting her hand to her forehead, she looked at Mark, who returned her gaze with an unwavering, expressionless stare.
All of her books that she had hidden about the house – her friends, her distractions, her joy. He had found them and he was burning them. The discovery may not have been made today; he may have known about them for some time and had simply been biding his time, waiting for the right moment to execute his plan.
That moment was clearly now and her books were nearly gone; seconds of life remained in one or two untouched words. He was burning her novels. Burning her books… Burning her books… It didn’t matter how many times she repeated the horror inside her head, it didn’t make it any less distressing.
Kathryn dropped her basket, indifferent to the lemon drizzle cake that spilled onto the grass and the bottle of juice that skittered off the path, coming to rest under a shrub. She sank to her knees, unaware that dirt and soil were seeping through her skirt and discolouring her knees. She looked again at her husband, but no words came. There were no words, nothing to adequately convey what she was feeling or that would make him understand. She wanted to use words like bereft, anguish, sorrow and heartache. She knew, however, that to him they would feel like an exaggeration, a taunt, and so she could not speak them, not with it being only a couple of hours until bedtime.
It was while she sat mourning the loss of her books and her only means of escape that something else caught her eye. Sticking out from the corner of the fire was a rounded wooden knob. It was about a centimetre in diameter. Once her eyes had identified it, she quickly spotted the split legs of another and the head of another and another…
Kathryn slumped forward until her head was on the soil. She beat the ground with clenched fists, then ripped at the grass with her fingers. The sound she emitted was part cat mewl and part wail, animalistic and desperate.
‘No! No! No! Please, no!’
He had burnt her grandmother’s pegs, severing the last tangible link she had with her mother and grandmother. He had destroyed part of her history and part of Lydia’s future, removing the only things that made her whole pitiful laundry routine bearable. These little dolly shapes were her one diversion from the abuse she suffered. Whilst pegging out her bed linen, these little wooden objects enabled her to think of her grandma and of summer days in childhood, of homemade cakes and garden picnics and not the fact that she had once again been forced to remove the evidence of her husband’s torture.
Tears slid from her eyes and down into her open mouth. She sobbed without restraint. Kathryn had mastered the art of crying silently and discreetly and could even cry on the inside, allowing tears to slip down the back of her nose and throat without breaking her smile. Today this was not possible; her distress was overwhelming and all consuming.
She cried loudly as she fought for breath. Burying her dirt-covered face in her hands, she sobbed and sobbed. Every time she peeked between her fingers and glimpsed the glowing, charred remains of the little wooden splints, her tears would flow again. He had burnt her grandmother’s pegs…
She continued to sit statue-like on the dewy grass long after the flames had disappeared. In their place was a pile of smoking charcoal. Occasionally a small defiant flame would fizz and flare, but this display was always short-lived and feeble.
Kathryn became aware that it was growing dark and that she was dreadfully uncomfortable, damp, aching and covered in dirt. It hadn’t occurred to her to finish off supper or attend to her chores; she could only focus on her distress. Standing slowly, she looked into the kitchen window and into the face of her husband, who stood on the other side of the pane with a glass of wine in his hand.
Her soot-smeared face was streaked with the paths of tears that had long since dried, leaving only tracks of salty residue. Slowly Mark’s mouth twisted into a smile and his eyes creased accordingly. He was smiling at her, but she couldn’t even pretend. She couldn’t find her happy face or her happy voice. She felt broken, broken and beyond repair.
Hey, little girl,
Comb your hair, fix your make-up.
Soon he will open the door.
Don’t think because
There’s a ring on your finger,
You needn’t try any more
* * *
Next morning, Kathryn felt surprisingly numb. Each time she closed her eyes, the nightmare of her burnt pegs leapt into focus. She could picture nothing else; the images consumed her every thought. She felt strangely disconnected from her surroundings and stacked the breakfast things into the dishwasher slowly.
‘You okay, Mum?’ Her son’s tone was one of concern.
Kathryn couldn’t find any words of response or her happy smile, so she simply nodded.
The chapel was busy; each boarding house occupied its usual pew. Invited parents in their finery crammed into the narrow seats, each mummy trying to out-yummy the next. Pinstriped dads shook hands and slapped each other’s backs in congratulations at all that they had achieved: a smart suit, flash car, expensive watch and gorgeous wife. Game, set and match.
Governors and staff were dotted among the congregation, wearing their dusty graduation gowns and university colours with pride. The organ music boomed and invigorated, giving everyone who sat staring at the ornate domed ceiling a feeling of self-importance and belonging: our history, our tradition, our money well spent.
Kathryn felt all eyes scan the headmaster and his wife as they settled into their seats. She had to resist the temptation to stand and shout at the appraising eyes, ‘Yes, I know I am wearing the blue jersey and pleated skirt again, but truth be known it’s my “chapel outfit” and you will all be seeing it for at least this year and probably the greater p
art of next.’ She was wrong; no one at chapel that day would see this outfit again.
Kathryn glanced over at the masters sitting with jutting chins and narrowed eyes in their allocated seats. She knew that at least three of them would be dozing within minutes, using the ruse of deep prayer and concentration with eyes closed to catch up on sleep. They fooled no one, least of all the children, who would point and nudge at the lolling heads.
Kathryn had almost given up on the God to whom they all paid homage, but it was important that she attended nonetheless. Not to do so would be bad manners and she did enjoy the beautiful surroundings, the singing and the sight of her children, whom she watched surreptitiously from across the aisle. She wondered if every mother felt the same swell of love and pride when they studied the perfect faces of the humans they had created.
Unaware that they were being scrutinised, Lydia and Dominic looked relaxed and natural. Dominic twitched his nose involuntarily; a tiny act that transported Kathryn back to when he was a baby. It amazed her that this boy-man was only ever a minor flinch away from the baby she had held in her arms. If she closed her eyes and breathed deeply, she could still invoke his newborn scent, a unique and intoxicating combination of baked bread and new human. Lydia had smelt quite different: fresher, with an almost citrusy tang, like a warm lemon muffin.
Kathryn watched Lydia put the nail of her index finger into her mouth and start nibbling. It made her wince. Lydia had the beautiful hands of an artist: long, tapering fingers and almond-shaped nails. It was a long-standing family joke that if she sat on her hands she would be unable to communicate; she was so expressive with them, using her palms and fingers to illustrate and emphasise every point.
Dominic sat with his fingers interlaced in his lap. His gaze was steady in the direction of the chaplain. A casual observer might think that he was transfixed by the words being dispensed from the lectern, but Kathryn knew different. From her privileged vantage point she could see that Emily Grant was sitting slightly to the right of the chaplain and was busy returning her boyfriend’s gaze with not so subtle nods, gestures and raised eyebrows. Kathryn smiled to herself, feeling like a secret had inadvertently been shared with her.
What Have I Done? Page 23
