by Clare Boyd
I raised my eyes to him. My vision was blurry. His fingers covered his eyes like a cage, and I felt remorseful and ashamed. I couldn’t stop the next wave of tears. ‘I’m so sorry, Dad. He came on to me. I didn’t have time to … I just didn’t think,’ I sobbed.
His rage surged back. ‘That’s exactly it! You never think! You jump in without looking first. You’ve always been the same, but the stakes are too high now!’
I cowered, pleading, ‘I care so much about you and Mum. I made a mistake. Please forgive me. Please.’
‘I should never have asked you here,’ he muttered.
Then my mother came through. Too late. Always too late. By standing on the outside, she was choosing not to see it.
‘Come on, you two. Stop all this. It’s two in the morning. Come on, Gordon, back to bed.’
She looked down at me and put her hand on top of my head. ‘Off you go, love. Off to bed now.’
I was pitifully grateful for her affection.
‘Let’s get some sleep. It’ll all be forgotten about in the morning,’ she mumbled as they shuffled off to their room.
I let my body fall forward across my thighs. My forehead rested on the floor and I stayed there thinking about what I should do next.
I wanted to leave.
My brain rocked when I stood up. I wove about as I walked to my bedroom, where I stretched to the top of the wardrobe for my suitcase. It was feather-light. I threw it on the bed and stared into its empty cavity.
When I reached into the shelves to scoop my clothes out, the shooting agony in the muscles across my shoulders and down my arms disabled me. I stayed very still for a moment, letting the nausea and hopelessness roll through me. My whole being was sore and tender, too battered to move.
I shoved the suitcase away and crawled under my duvet wearing my clothes.
Tomorrow I would leave.
Twenty
After the party, Elizabeth spent longer than usual in the bathroom, brushing her teeth, tidying her creams, refolding the towels. As she moisturised her face, her reflection in the mirror depressed her. It was as though an unhappy child stared back at her, like Isla after one of her tantrums. The tears had dried up, but she was hollow-eyed and pale. Unlike Isla, she was ugly. The innocence and plumpness of her youth had been sucked away. She was damaged goods, ravaged, empty of love. This was her real face, and she seemed to be seeing it at its true state for the first time in years.
She and Lucas undressed in the semi-darkness of one of their small bedside lights. The guests were gone, as was the pretence between them. Elizabeth had not met his eye since she had seen him in the pool with Heather.
When he spoke, he was sitting on his side of the bed, with his back to the bathroom door, buttoning up his pyjama top.
‘Let’s hope Gordon finds that necklace tomorrow,’ he said.
‘It’s insured, isn’t it?’
‘That’s not really the point. It was Mum’s.’
‘It’s been gathering dust in a safety deposit box for thirty years.’
‘I thought you’d like it, that’s all.’
‘I did.’
Lucas hung his head. ‘I never know how to please you.’
The anger she had been suppressing for weeks rushed up and out of her.
‘You could start by keeping your hands off the help, perhaps,’ she said, climbing into her side of the bed.
He exhaled heavily. ‘You imagine things.’
‘No,’ she said, clear-sighted now. ‘I saw you in the pool together.’
‘Shit.’ He rubbed his face. ‘Shit!’ he said to the ceiling.
Elizabeth shuddered.
‘I don’t want her working here any more.’
‘Please, Elizabeth. Don’t go there.’
‘She’s not like Agata, Lucas.’
‘Agata has nothing to do with this.’
‘Heather sees stuff that Agata doesn’t.’
‘You want Heather to lose her job, her whole livelihood? What about Gordon and Sally? They’d have to go too? What would it achieve?’
‘It would be your doing.’
‘It’s not that simple, and you know it.’
She pleaded with him. ‘Lucas, if nothing else, think of Isla and Hugo.’
He glanced over his shoulder, looking down his own arm rather than at her. His profile was serene and beautiful, like a marble statue. ‘You suddenly care about their feelings?’ he asked.
His coldness seemed solid, right through him, and her composure fell away. When she spoke, her throat clenched and her voice was hoarse. ‘How can you even question that?’
‘You’re the one who questions it.’
Elizabeth threw off the covers and hurled a pot of handcream from her bedside table at his back. ‘You arsehole! When will you ever forgive me? I was ill! I was ill!’
He picked the cream up from the floor. ‘Your brother’s next door. Do you want him to worry that you’re still ill?’
She lay back in bed. The last person she wanted to worry was Jude.
Rigid on her back, she stared at the cross of oak beams above her pounding head, wishing the rivets that held them together would unscrew, ending this. Pressing her temples, she said, ‘You make me unwell.’ She was telling herself more than telling him.
‘By loving you?’
She sprang up and around the bed to face him, shaking all over. Her finger trembled when she pointed it right into his face. ‘Please spare me your love.’
Her fury rendered her flesh jelly-like. She turned and fled. She would rather die than sleep next to him.
* * *
She stood in the doorway of the spare room in her nightie, hoping Jude was still awake, fearing he had heard their fight.
‘Lucas is snoring and I can’t sleep. Can I join you?’
He was still fully dressed and lying on the top of the duvet.
‘Sure. Jump in,’ he said, putting down his book. ‘Happy?’
‘Yes, happy. You?’ She curled under the covers and listened to how unhappy he was, and to his guilt-ridden monologue about leaving Heather alone by the pool. Apparently Lucas had trapped him in a conversation with Walt Seacart and Benjamin Healing about the value of his triptych. She listened half-heartedly, wishing he would stop talking, desperate to sleep off the rotation of Lucas’s words, the images of him and Heather in the pool together.
‘What do you think?’ he asked her. ‘Do you think I’ve blown my chances?’
‘I expect so,’ she replied drowsily, brooding about Lucas leaving her for Heather.
When Elizabeth and Jude had been teenagers, their mother had explained to them why their father had left them. She told them that Christopher – ‘your father’, she had clarified – had learnt how to clamp his fist around his feelings to survive the challenges thrown at him, and that his parents – ‘your grandparents’ – had been privileged, lazy, bored alcoholics who had left him to fend for himself. According to Virginia, their father hadn’t known how to operate in a family unit. Working too hard and finding love from someone inappropriate had been predictable choices; age-old quick fixes that made it all feel better temporarily.
‘Are you even listening?’ Jude asked.
‘I am.’
But her stream of thoughts continued. Her mother’s theory might explain why Lucas threw himself into his work and made silly mistakes with young women like Heather. And Agata even? The cruelty inflicted on him by his housemaster had inadvertently taught him how to suppress his anger and how to compartmentalise in order to survive.
Jude flopped back. ‘Would you give me Heather’s number?’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘I’ll knock on her door and ask her myself then.’
Elizabeth had to find a way to put Jude off. ‘You can’t possibly do that.’
‘Why not?’
She could never tell her brother the truth. ‘It’s rude.’
‘She wouldn’t think so. She’s not like that.’
‘You can’t date Heather Shaw. No way.’
‘Why not?’
She sat up, tucking the covers under her armpits, and fumbled around in her brain for a plausible reason. She was good at make-believe. When they were little, their mother had written scripts for her and Jude to act out, teaching them to method act, drawing from real-life sadnesses and bringing it into their performances. They would play characters and recreate scenes over and over until they became real in her head, when finally Virginia would clap and hand them pretend Oscars. Sometimes she would ask them to repeat lines she had written to real boyfriends or real bailiffs who had turned up on their doorstep. Often, Elizabeth had been confused about what was real and what was pretend.
‘Because she’s the gardener’s daughter.’
‘It’s not Downton Abbey!’
‘It wouldn’t be right.’
Jude flew to standing. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Lucas is a very traditional man. Just like his dad. He likes things to be done properly. He likes everything to be in order.’
‘Don’t fraternise with the staff? Is that actually what you’re saying?’
His disgust with her made her eyes sting, but she had good reason not to back down. ‘That’s a crass way of putting it …’
‘When did you turn into such a snob?’
‘It’s not about snobbery; it’s about setting down ground rules for our employees.’
‘She’s not my employee. She’s yours.’
‘Think of Heather,’ she urged him. ‘It’ll put her in a terribly awkward situation.’
He began changing out of his jeans. ‘No it won’t. You’re the one being awkward. It’s the twenty-first century, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Some of the old values still mean something round here. I like it that way.’
Standing in his boxer shorts, he turned and stared at her open-mouthed, then he climbed into bed and turned the side light off. Into the dark he said, ‘Wow, sis, you really have changed.’
She slid down next to him, remembering how they had shared beds on holidays when they had been little, and how close they had been back then. Turning on her side, away from him, she longed for those simple days back.
She no longer knew what was right, what normal people did or thought. To survive life at Copper Lodge, her mind had adapted; its pathways had been mapped in a particular direction, programmed to think differently. She had been corrupted, while Jude was still pure; an innocent, like Hugo. If Jude had seen Lucas and Heather together, knowing what she knew about their past, what would he have done? Would he have psychoanalysed Lucas and forgiven him? Would he have insisted she divorce him? She wanted to see the situation through his eyes. Jude would have clear ideas of right and wrong.
Night night, little brother, she thought, tears sliding down her cheeks into the pillow. I’ll prove to you that I’m still the same big sister you grew up with, that I’m still the girl who trapped Olly Welsh’s tie in the wheelie bin. I can find that strength again, I’ll prove it to you.
Instead of sleeping, she wrestled with her conscience and her fears, battling between them to find a way to prove to Jude that she wasn’t lost. She ripped at the skin round her thumbnail with her teeth until it bled. It tasted metallic and chlorinated when she sucked on it. As the night wore on, spiky pieces of rag-tagged skin feathered around her nail, and she searched her soul to find the good, brave part of herself that could acknowledge the life she really led, rather than the face she showed to the public.
* * *
As dawn broke, she tiptoed outside into the garden in bare feet, checking behind her to make sure that the blinds were closed at the master bedroom window.
Discarded napkins and plates, fallen champagne flutes and half-eaten canapés littered the grass. The sun crept up behind the marquee in the meadow. It looked floppier and sadder in the daylight; used and thrown away.
As she approached the guest house, she could see that the curtains were pulled, all except one. Through the slit, she could make out a colourful shape moving inside. It was Bo, in her orange and pink yoga outfit, bent into a Downward Dog. Elizabeth ran past the window as fast as she could and crouched down by the flower bed. She shoved her hand into the ‘Silver Queen’ plants, underneath which she hoped the necklace would be. She needed to find it before Gordon and Heather arrived later. They were being paid double time to work on Sunday to clear up after the party.
The soil was soft and damp under her fingers.
Nothing.
She stepped into the bed, in between the plants, to take a proper look. Her feet sank, the earth pressing through her toes. Her heart rate increased. She feared the necklace had been found by someone in the early hours, stolen by them. But the chances of a guest sneaking around and finding it was slim.
She widened her search, creeping through the foliage, remembering the shock of last night and how she had tossed the necklace with abandon. It could be anywhere around here.
One more step forward – too close to the back window, through which Bo could look any minute – and Elizabeth’s foot landed on cold metal. She dropped to her haunches to retrieve it. Its diamond chain was crumpled and coiled in her palm, both delicate and weighty. She brushed the dirt from the bright blue stone, shaking it off, holding onto it tightly as she walked back to the house.
Twenty-One
First thing, before my parents woke up, I packed my bags and loaded the car. If my father was spying on me out of his bedroom window now, as he had been last night, he wasn’t stopping me. He would know why I was leaving.
On the way along the high street, my headache became vicious. I felt faint and rolled down the window. I didn’t think I could go much further. My concentration was impaired by the pain. It could have been concussion, or perhaps anxiety symptoms about leaving Connolly Close. Or it could have been the memory of last night that was searing through my brain’s pathways like electrical currents, triggering one before it from years ago.
* * *
‘Stop that!’ Dad shouted.
His voice had come out of nowhere. I dropped the door knocker and held my breath high up in my chest. If I’d known I was being naughty, I would have stopped before he was cross. I didn’t like it when he was cross.
‘Stop that!’ he repeated.
I had stopped. But I looked down at my hands. Sometimes they would do stuff that I didn’t know about. They were not on the knocker. They were slid safely into the front pockets of my dungarees.
‘STOP THAT!’ His whole head had gone red. He brought it down to my level, close to me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to stop, so I stopped breathing. I turned hot and fizzy.
‘What do you say?’
‘Sorry,’ I said. The word came out wrong.
‘What was that?’
Louder, I said, ‘Sorry.’
‘Now say it like you mean it.’
I would try really hard.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘SORRY!’ It was a shout and I had wanted it to be.
He yanked me by the arm, inside the house, along the corridor, where his belt and his slipper lived in the bedroom.
He didn’t go in there; he pushed me into the bathroom instead.
My boots left mud on the tiles. Mum would be cross. Everyone was going to be cross. I wanted to cry and I hated that pathetic feeling. I tried so hard to be happy and strong.
He held the back of my head and grabbed the bar of pink soap, which looked grey and cracked and disgusting. He shoved it into my mouth. It was too big and it tasted like vomit. It scraped along my teeth to the back of my throat. One molar was wobbly and I was terrified it would come out and fall down my throat, making me die. If I died, Dad would be sorry. Sorry! Sorry! SORRY! Stop, Dad! But he wouldn’t stop. The bar hit my throat again and again, forcing me to gag, turning my tummy inside out. He shouted at me to stay still, but I couldn’t help it. The jabbing went on and on, back and forth, cleaning my di
rty mouth out, making me sore and tired.
When he left me, coughing at the sink, blood swirled into the water.
Later, at the kitchen table, he sat with his head in his hands. The end of the day hadn’t left enough light to see him with. He was a big, sad shadow in the space. I felt ashamed.
I went to him and put my arms around his neck and I said sorry, and this time I really did mean it.
* * *
The taste of dirty soap came up from my gullet again. I made a detour to the leisure centre. I would swim. The rhythm of my body would be meditative and the thoughts of Lucas and Dad would stop. A swim would tell me whether my headache was concussion or a deeper malaise. Swimming was what I reached for when my feelings took over, when I wanted to give up on everyone and everything, when my aloneness swamped me. It had been Lucas who had given me that gift. When my father’s temper had threatened to pull me under, Lucas had taught me to float. More than float; to fly. Fly through the water and cut through the chill and gulp in the evening air when I needed it, rhythmically, deep into my lungs, breathing life into them once again, strengthening my resolve to survive my father’s outbursts.
The echoing sounds of the leisure centre pool lifted my mood. My towel was rolled under my arm, stuffed with my goggles and swimsuit. The lock on the changing room door was stiff and I worried I would get stuck in there. My hands started to sweat. The vision of my father closing in on me came looming into the small space. The sound of my heart began to pound in my head. I had to sit on the bench and hang my head between my knees so that I didn’t pass out. The sound of the hairdryers became as loud as planes taking off. The kids’ screams in the pool were deafening. The heat of the cubicle was one hundred degrees, but I couldn’t take my clothes off. I couldn’t breathe. I had to get out of there. The door unlocked after three frantic attempts.
I wove through the staring, dripping swimmers and out of the changing rooms. In the car park, I called my mother’s mobile, trying to sound less desperate than I felt.
