‘Dominic?’
Avril nods stupidly.
‘I thought I’d give you a ring,’ says Dominic. ‘Congratulations! I read about your incredible book and everything that’s happening and I wondered if you’d remember me now you’re famous.’
‘I don’t believe this,’ says Bernie, and still, after all that has happened, his voice affects the rhythm of her heart. She is conscious of nothing except his voice. Breathless with hope, ecstatic is the only word for her now.
‘And I wondered if we could meet again.’
She would have said tonight, but remembers the meeting with the editor which could go on until late. She drops a heavy sigh. ‘What’s happened to you and Belinda?’
He doesn’t answer immediately and Bernie stops breathing. After the pause and her gasp he says, ‘Oh, you know me, Bernie, I’ve always been selfish, but I’ve had a long time to think, to look at the way my life is going, and I can’t go through another month searching for something I lost when you and I split up last year.’
This doesn’t sound like the carefree Dominic Bernie once knew. She can’t remember him ever going into himself and his feelings without some stupid punch line at the end.
‘I’ve been very lonely, Dom,’ she says.
‘I don’t expect you’ll ever want to give me another chance?’
‘I never found anyone else.’
‘And I know you won’t have lacked offers.’
Dominic sounds so serious. This change in him is astonishing. It’s as if he has had a religious experience, like Paul on the road to Damascus. This couldn’t be a joke, could it? There couldn’t be people listening in, holding back their hysteria, ready to burst out laughing the moment he gives the signal? No, no, no, even Dom could never be so cruel, although… she doesn’t know what to think any more.
‘We could have dinner tonight,’ he says. ‘I know a place—’
‘I can’t,’ are the most difficult words Bernie has ever spoken.
Dominic pauses, sounds almost relieved. ‘I ought to have known, I’m a fool—’
‘No, no, it’s only because I’m meeting someone. Tomorrow… I could meet you tomorrow?’
‘We’ve got so much to catch up on, you and me.’
This can’t be because of the money, can it? Here she is, suspecting Ed Board of coming on strong because of the dosh, and silly Avril being blind to the truth, but no, Dominic’s family is rolling in it, Dominic doesn’t need money. He is heir to a cardboard-box fortune. Why oh why can’t Bernie stop thinking that nothing deeper than greed drives him back?
‘Tomorrow night then, I’ll come and get you. Is eight o’clock OK?’
‘Fine,’ says Bernie, closing her eyes on a miracle she had begun to despair of, ‘I’ll see you then.’
Oh, Dom, oh, Dom.
Avril has ordered supper in her room and invited Kirsty to join her. This is far more appropriate for Bernie than having Avril tagging along, although, this evening, after that magical phone call, Bernie feels a warm flow of love for everybody around her. But Avril is always so irritating, droning on about her own little problems, she’d bore any dinner guest stiff with talk of her family’s arrival, or her little flirtation with gross old Ed. Especially a dinner guest as influential and sophisticated as this one promises to be. It’s hard to imagine how anyone else could outdo Candice in the role of super-dominant, manipulative human being. Perhaps she herself will be like that one day.
‘Do I look OK?’
And although she asks, she knows the answer, and what is the use of Avril’s opinion?
Bernie sets off downstairs, beautiful and blessed. Some magical light shines off her, and it isn’t because of the tight black taffeta or the sling-back shoes or the diamante earrings Candice lent her. It is the light of love, the power of passion, the trembling turbulence of tumultuous obsession, as blinding and yet every bit as delicate as the thousands of prisms that twinkle in the great chandelier above her head.
It’s an old lady in a scruffy brown wig.
The majestic Candice bears down on Bernie, pulling the crone behind her. ‘This is Clementine, Bernie.’ Candice makes her introductions before leading the way into the bar, the usual cloud of designer perfume lingering in the air behind her.
As Candice orders the drinks, Bernie stares hard at her new editor, who almost disappears in the lumps of the ancient leather chesterfield. Her small, narrow face, almost worn to the bone, is well-shaped, and her eyes are set deep in their sockets, from which they still peer, sharp and bright. She could have been a spy in the French resistance, Odette grown old, or the little sparrow singing sad love songs, there is such a mischievous look about her.
‘Rum and coke for you, Bernie,’ says Candice, not without a sniff, ‘and a double brandy for Clementine.’
The papier-mâché banana earrings worn by the editor look incongruous with the twinset and kilt, the knee-length socks and the ethnic sandals. This is obviously a woman, barely five feet high, who prefers to be comfortable, and not only that. This is obviously a woman, with wisps of grey hair showing under the brown, far more shrewd and knowing than Candice, with all her worldly assurance, and Bernie feels uncertain, as if she’s already been sussed.
‘What an exquisite child,’ says Clementine Davaine, in a voice surprisingly deep and strong. ‘I have been so looking forward to meeting the author of Magdalene, by far the best book I have read in years. Congratulations, my dear.’ And Clementine Davaine holds out a gnarled old hand, the arthritic fingers set firmly in a pen-holding grip.
Sixteen
HAH! GOD LIVES. HE ought to have known the Burleston Hotel would not have bothered with the Yellow Pages. Trev thinks they are possibly ex-directory when he receives the understated brochure, but on such expensive top-notch paper you can’t help but guess at the quality of the place.
Trev was three-quarters of the way through his free Yellow Pages directory, but had certainly not given up hope when he came upon the article in Country Life. He was having his tea break at the time, installing a new central-heating system for a Mrs Strange of Birkenhead. A fine old house surrounded by new development, with a ten-foot fence to keep out the masses.
The article itself was boring: some food and wine convention held by those obnoxious snobs who have time for such crap. There they were in their evening clothes, clashing their long-stemmed glasses together and gazing glazenly into the camera. Now Trev doesn’t have the memory of an elephant, but the name of the hotel bugged him, he didn’t think he’d heard that name, and when he got home he checked up. He rang directory enquiries, fearing the worst, but the computer voice gave him the number slowly and clearly and Trev was quickly into his Inspector Bates persona.
Rhoda, on the other end of the phone, feeling hard done by because, since Avril’s sudden rise in the world, Mr Derek has not yet supplied a replacement, nevertheless responded with interest when she heard it was the police.
‘What d’you want Kirsty for?’ she asked quickly.
‘Oh, nothing important. Just checking up on a few things.’
Typical, the fuzz are so mysterious. Like squeezing water out of a stone. Rhoda wouldn’t have known about Kirsty if she and Avril hadn’t been friends; she would have had to look up the list of Burleston employees, and might well have denied they had such a person to save herself the trouble of searching for it. Well, there’s so much extra work lately, the phones always going and faxes from London for that snooty Candice Love.
‘Kirsty Hoskins is one of our chambermaids.’
‘And could I have Mrs Hoskins’s address?’
‘Oh, she lives in. They mostly do, the seasonal ones.’
‘So presumably her children are not with her?’
‘I’ve never heard of any children.’
‘Right, that’s all I need to know, thank you. Naturally I would be grateful for your discretion on this matter, Miss…’
‘Carp, as in the fish,’ said Rhoda, a habit Mr Derek is trying to train
her out of. ‘Shall I send you our brochure?’
‘Why not?’ said Trevor, taking his final bow as the sleuth Inspector Bates.
No bugger is willing to help him, nobody will believe him, everyone takes the view that Kirsty must have had a reason to run. And, as if life isn’t fraught enough, Trev’s bid for legal aid has failed and he’s been forced to cough up for that useless meeting with that weedy poof Gillespie. But Trevor has two weeks of his holidays left and, although it’s 1 September on Tuesday and a busy month for holidays, he persuades his best mate, Greg, to swap. He was only going to his mother-in-law’s and seemed quite keen to oblige.
If the kids aren’t with Kirsty then where the hell are they? A caring mother, too caring thinks Trev, she would be highly unlikely to dump them just anywhere. Trev’s anger grows. If only he’d acted before, or talked to someone other than his mother. He ought to have guessed she would bolt one day, but Trev is the type of macho man who believes that to discuss private problems is a symptom of weakness, and there is such a thing as disloyalty to the family.
He thinks of himself as the strong, silent type.
His is a nonchalant, carefree image. Wife and kiddies at home, central heating, double glazing, everything in his garden is rosy although a quick look at Trev’s garden would soon reveal some hidden truths: discarded clothes-pegs dropped about, cardboard boxes just tossed anywhere, rotting sunbeds not put away, patches of border dug but not finished, now sprouting dandelions amidst pale-green grasses all signs of Kirsty’s malaise in Trev’s sick mind. Trev sincerely believes that Kirsty is to blame; he has convinced himself that black is white in his pursuit of vengeance. ‘Part of her problem was her cleanliness phobia,’ he tells disbelieving friends, turning the truth on its head. ‘The house had to be spotless, even if it meant tipping little messes—old pans of fat and the burned remains of casseroles—out of the kitchen door onto the abandoned beds.’ All lies. ‘And although she dumped bits of broken bike and pram in the garden, indoors the kids’ toys were never in sight—under the beds they had to go, one toy out at a time was the rule. Bloody hell, sometimes I got home and thought I’d arrived in hospital, so strong was the damn disinfectant smell.
‘The cow would shout at me, “Take your shoes off.” Never, ever, “What sort of day have you had?” or ask about the traffic. And the meal was always banged down on the table, mustard, mustard, mustard with everything, and gravy poured all over it. I found her books hidden everywhere, three or four on the go at a time, as if the bitch felt guilty for reading and needed to hide her dirty deeds as though they were some kind of female secret.’
Trev couldn’t care if she read or not so long as he had his Sun for the sport and the Sunday People for the competitions.
Kirsty was obsessive, he told them.
She insisted on ironing and folding his socks.
She hated talking over the telly.
She hid the bills until he had it out with her—when the telephone was cut off, and the electric, he came home once to find them sitting round in the dark, a cold tea, ham with mustard, ready for him on the table. And she’s got such a fetish about her hair, she never allowed him to touch it. She tried to sell his Bisto tin once, knowing it was a favourite of his; she took it to a secondhand shop, along with his mum’s coronation mug. When he finally got the truth out of her, when she admitted what she’d done, he was forced to take his pride in his hands and try to explain at the shop.
The slightest thing would set her off. OK, he admits it, he has hit her in the past; he had to, he had no alternative, it was the only way to bring her to her senses. She thought she was one of her bloody heroines, Amelia or Bethany, Bettina or Wanda—crazy names acted out in even crazier situations. She was lost in a haze of designer gowns or artists’ studios or in the clinics of famous surgeons. Those damn Mills and Boons hypnotized her; chameleonlike, she became the heroine. At times like these she left him; he could wave his hand before her face and she didn’t even flinch, she was gone into another, happier, more glamorous world than Trev could provide.
He told them that he’d tried his best to be patient, that the kiddies didn’t know what was happening; he bathed them and put them to bed but it was their mummy they wanted.
But now, at least, he knows where she’s gone and he’s determined to confront her. This is the last time she will mess them all up—Trev, his mum, the kiddies—Trev’s patience snapped long ago; that nutcase will agree to have treatment if he has to drag her there himself, and he goes off to hire a Vauxhall Cavalier, reliable wheels for his southbound journey.
‘You should teach that cow a lesson,’ says Greg in manly sympathy, as Trev hands over the van and drives off looking lonely.
‘The High Priestess of the Plot’ is how Magdalene’s agents refer to the author, and yes, Kirsty, like the nun, now has the power to make things happen. Look how meekly Dominic Coates is obeying her instructions you see how little it takes to bring these bullies to their knees.
The hippies from the hotel ‘cottage’ come over to bid her goodbye and they hand Kirsty the single key to their derelict home. ‘At least you won’t have rent to pay,’ encourages the one with the woollen hair. ‘Mind the hole in the kitchen floor if there’s kiddies around,’ he says. ‘There might have been a well underneath it, or something deep at any rate from the stench it sometimes gives off.’
Kirsty takes the key he offers without bothering to explain that she’s found a more comfortable home. She wouldn’t dream of living anywhere so unsavoury and dangerous with her kids. She will return the key to Mrs Stokes.
‘You blooming well keep that key, maid,’ says Flagherty the gardener, closing one papery lid over a watering eye. ‘That might stop the blighters being tempted to let it out again and I’m sick and tired of the riffraff that’s taken to coming down here. Seems I’m the only responsible one in this place any more.’ He kicks a soily boot against his stationary spade. ‘You could allus store things in him.’
She gets a curious pleasure from watching her literary tableau unfold from the wings, from handing over the power to Bernie and seeing Avril take her rightful place in the limelight. Trev once called her a masochist—hah! She laughed at him, where did he get that long word from? But Kirsty was forced to look it up and it sounded as if he might have been right. Depriving herself, hurting herself, lowering herself—all this is part of a need she has to find real contentment.
Kirsty likes to suffer. That’s how the vicious circle turns.
The permanent penitent.
The scourging of the guilty soul.
Sometimes, with a splintering thrill that verges on the erotic, she imagines herself as a servant in the little attic room where she now sleeps alone, a servant back in the bad old days when they were forced to get up at five and not return to bed until late. She pretends she has no bed covers and lies in bed shivering, imagining the dinners and balls going on downstairs. She will skip a meal and purposefully go to bed hungry. Sometimes she scrubs her hands with a nailbrush till the fingernails bleed, as the skivvies’ hands must have bled in the big houses of yesteryear. She sees Mrs Stokes as the wicked housekeeper who throws erring maids onto the street, where they have to sell their bodies to survive, or watch their illegitimate babies starve. Mrs Stokes is an easy target: unknowingly, yet expertly, she fulfils this role every day.
And all this dark, debasing stuff Kirsty shares with her heroine, Magdalene.
Magdalene is a masochist, too. That’s why she became a nun. But Magdalene has risen above it.
The sensitive Avril is sympathetic to Kirsty’s hurt expressions and sorrowful body language. Avril can’t do enough to help, but Bernie is not so driven. So pleased with herself is Bernie that she doesn’t give a thought to anyone else and now Dominic is back on the scene her selfish attitude is escalating.
Oh dear, dear.
And poor Kirsty has done so much for Bernie.
All her hard work is for Bernie’s good. When she cleans another lavatory Ki
rsty dwells on ungrateful Bernie and all the miseries heaped upon her. When Bernie makes it to the top, she will probably turn on Kirsty as Trevor turned on her before.
Bernie will probably try to cheat her out of the money completely, just as Trev used to watch her with money, and take it away when he found it.
This is the luggage Kirsty carts with her. But Magdalene says it must stop.
Kirsty visits the Happy Stay to pay Mrs Gilcrest a month in advance. At last she has managed to save it up. She once asked Bernie if Candice Love would give her a small advance, but Bernie said no as if she was talking to a stranger. ‘She doesn’t give me money. She says the advance on the book won’t be long. Sometimes Candice pays for the odd expenses, but it’s Mr Derek who’s footing this bill because he thinks I might be famous and he still wants to get his leg over.’
Avril and Ed give Kirsty a lift to the Happy Stay in Ed’s old VW.
‘I don’t want to go,’ moans Avril, over and over again. ‘I really don’t want to see them just now and I know Mother will be nasty to Ed.’
‘Avril,’ says Ed with admirable patience, and his red eyebrows flatten out across a broadly accepting forehead, ‘I’ve already told you, it’s no skin off my nose, whatever your Mother’s attitude is it will make no difference to us.’
‘She’ll even be rude to you, Kirsty,’ warns Avril, back to her old slouching ways, biting her nails, defeat in her eyes. ‘Mother has never approved of my friends. She’ll find something to criticize, and when she meets Bernie, God knows what she’ll say.’
Is Ed after Avril’s money as Bernie seems to think?
And does this matter if he makes Avril happy?
Her parents can’t be as bad as she says. Avril has some chip on her shoulder, probably dating back to her childhood. Now that she is independent and so much more self-confident with Ed at her side, how can her mother possibly affect her?
‘Oh,’ says Avril’s mother, emerging from the caravan with a pinny tied round her waist and a dishcloth in her hand. ‘Oh, Avril, we thought you would be alone, didn’t we, Richard?’
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