Veil of Darkness

by Gillian White

  Thank the Lord Avril has already moved out, because it’s the Stotts who attract these terrible media people. What sort of dysfunctional family could produce the kind of creature who would commit two heinous murders one after the other like that—the first for £1.39 and the second for no obvious reason other than that his sleep must have been disturbed by a probing golf club.

  ‘Let me make you a cucumber sandwich, Mother.’

  Mother has turned furtive. She has started darting her way between cars and caravans and taking sanctuary in Kirsty and Avril’s large mobile home, leaving Richard to face the consequences of his mutant seed and satisfy the cameras.

  The sunbeds and deckchairs have been removed from Mother’s caravan garden. The pot plants are now on the windowsill, their leafy profiles hiding the hunted inmates from the press.

  Still she cannot acknowledge that this tragedy has affected anyone else but herself and her position in society, which matters so much to her. It wouldn’t occur to her that by scuttling over here with the press sniffing at her heels she might be involving two innocent children in the whole ghastly mêlée; it is just a blessing that term has started and Jake and Gemma are at school.

  Kirsty, of course, still works at the Burleston, walks there and back every morning and evening, although Avril has tried to persuade her to give it up: ‘At any moment now that advance will filter through. We’ll be rich! It’s all that’s keeping me going. We’ll be able to buy our own house. Why are you so determined to keep slaving away in that hole?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s because I can’t believe that miracles really happen,’ said Kirsty.

  ‘Maybe I will have that cucumber sandwich,’ says Mother pitifully. ‘I have to eat.’

  ‘I wonder what Graham’s eating now,’ says Avril deliberately.

  ‘I’d rather not discuss him.’

  ‘Or Father. Did you leave him something cold?’

  ‘I can’t be bothered with your father’s fussing while all this mayhem is going on. Let him make his own sandwich. There’s plenty of ham in the fridge.’

  A wave of hatred passes over Avril. It passes over her and drags her out with the undercurrent into a shameless sea of revenge.

  Sometimes it seems as if Father and Graham are figments of Mother’s imagination, the paper people Avril used to cut out of catalogues when she was small, to be animated or screwed up at whim, named, placed, born, married, buried, but with no real presence of their own.

  I wonder what Mother’s reaction would be? thinks Avril, lingering the cucumber and sucking wetly on a watery slice.

  ‘I never told you this before,’ she says, passing over the sandwich with all the crusts cut off, ‘but when I was little Father used to come into my room at night.’

  Mother, still in her place on the step, keeps twisting her head this way and that, on the lookout for long-distance lenses.

  ‘It was mostly when you were downstairs in the lounge watching those two-part dramas. Well, Father was never interested in dramas so he used to come upstairs. I think he used to tell you he was having an early bath.’

  ‘What, Avril? I hope your father will keep his word and speak to the reporters this time. If he would just say a few words some of them might go away. But you know how slow he is.’

  Avril goes on with grim satisfaction. ‘He used to kiss me all over my face and hair and pull my duvet back.’

  ‘Your father used to do that?’

  ‘Yes, and then he would push up my nightie and touch my body with his fingers.’

  Mother’s neck snaps round. One small triangle of sandwich falls from her lap upon the brown, well-weathered grass.

  ‘Avril! Stop it! You don’t know what you are saying! Have you lost your mind?’

  ‘Oh, that didn’t worry me much,’ Avril goes on, swirling a finger in the washing-up water, piling up the liquid froth into weird fantasy shapes. ‘In fact, I quite liked it. It was when he got his penis out that I used to feel frightened. It was so big and stiff. I thought it was horrible. And it used to smell of wet skin.’

  Mother leaps off the caravan step and hurries inside, closing the small door behind her lest some passer-by might hear. She grabs hold of Avril’s arms from behind and pulls her round to face her. When Avril looks into Mother’s eyes she sees not sorrow, not pity, but fear, sheer, unadulterated fear. Mother’s small eyes are piercing, as if there are arrow heads in them.

  ‘You never told me this.’

  ‘I knew there was no point.’

  Mother’s fingers squeeze harder on Avril’s arms till they reach bruising capacity. ‘No point?’

  ‘You would tell me I was being filthy, like you did that time you came in the bathroom and caught me having a pee in the bath. You smacked me so hard I went under the water, I thought I was going to drown, I couldn’t stop choking, but you’d gone. You would think there was something twisted about me, like you did when you thought I’d gone into Graham’s room naked.’

  ‘You haven’t said this to anyone else?’

  ‘No, Mother. Why would I?’

  ‘Well, you thought nothing of telling the police that you’d seen Graham on the golf course. You seemed to enjoy incriminating him!’

  ‘The two situations are rather different.’

  ‘No, they’re not. Avril, you are despicable. You are dishonest and wicked. You seem to want to destroy this family. You seem to be going right out of your way to smash us to smithereens. I wouldn’t put it past you to go to the welfare people and tell them these lies about your father.’ Tears of anger spurt into her eyes.

  But Avril braces her shoulders and sets her face to naught.

  ‘Your father was never interested in sex,’ Mother goes on in a high, nervous voice, ‘so why would he bother meddling with you, or anyone else for that matter?’ She thinks in silence for a moment, her arms falling from Avril’s sides. ‘And why are you telling me this now, Avril? What are you trying to do, drive me mad?’

  ‘You would rather I’d kept it to myself?’ Avril asks, moving over to the table and sitting down, drying her hands on a tea towel which she then uses to twist round her fingers.

  ‘Well, of course I would,’ says Mother, joining her, yet carefully making sure no part of her is touching her repellent daughter. ‘I mean, why wait until now? What do you expect me to do?’

  ‘But do you believe me, Mother?’

  Mother shakes herself stiffly. ‘No, Avril. No, I do not. And my conclusions are that you are every bit as wicked as your brother—more sly, underhand, cunning, oh yes, you’ve always been cunning, all those lies.’

  ‘What lies?’

  ‘What’s the point in discussing this now?’

  ‘Tell me, Mother, I need to know, what lies?’

  Her skin, robbed of powder, is red and veined, her eyes are hard and unloving. ‘Little lies, telling me you’d cleaned your teeth when you hadn’t, swearing blind you’d posted my letters and then I’d find them in your duffel-coat pocket, all that bad behaviour at school, and then you’d come home and act as if butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. Well, I knew all the time what you were about.’

  Avril can’t help being fascinated. ‘What was I about?’

  ‘Destruction,’ spits mother wildly, like a priest exorcizing a demon. If she’d had a cross she’d be holding it up, warding Avril off her.

  ‘Is that why you tried to hide me away, made me wear unflattering clothes, forced me to have haircuts that never suited my face, refused to let me wear make-up?’

  Mother’s eyes glare and her voice rises. ‘If I had given you your head, my girl, Lord knows what you would have turned into.’ And her thin lips curl down, as if she is tasting something bitter. ‘Slut. Whore. And now this… this…’ she struggles to find the worst word she can, ‘… this vile accusation, these coarse suggestions against a man who wouldn’t harm a fly.’ Her fury storms up and takes command of her. ‘Your poor father, if he ever found out it would break his heart. I won’t have it, I tell you, I wo
n’t have it.’

  This is the first time Avril has ever heard Mother defending Father.

  But Avril feels enlarged, sanguine and grandiose. All her old timorous caution is gone, she can spar with Mother, tease her like a dog at a bear; she wonders how she has ever been at this sad woman’s mercy. Mother never loved her—a daughter whose natural instincts frightened her so she feared her own child might rise up one day and bring her most shameful thoughts to life. Mother, who is so sexually retentive and prudish she poisons everyone she touches; Mother, to whom the word ‘urges’ brings goose pimples up on her arms. ‘Aren’t you interested to know if Father ever penetrated me? If we had sex together while you were downstairs watching Ruth Rendell? Or how old I was when he started?’

  ‘I’m not staying to listen to any more of this,’ says Mother, standing up stiff as the mop that stands beside the small toilet door. ‘I have no daughter,’ she says to Avril. ‘I have no son. I am childless.’

  ‘You would have been happier childless,’ says Avril to the empty space: sweet, timid Avril; chubby, childlike Avril; with skin like a peach and the poem, ‘I Remember, I Remember’, stuck in the back of her five-year diary.

  How could she be so callous?

  How could anyone tell such malicious lies?

  Especially when you know that ‘If’ was another of her favourite poems, but she realized early in life that in order to be a man you had to be a boy-child first.

  Twenty-Four

  ‘YOU DON’T HAVE ANYTHING on me,’ the sulking Dominic tells Kirsty when she phones him the next day. ‘You can’t use me any more, I’m out of it now, last week’s news. So stuff your threats, I’ll be gone from here tomorrow.’

  This is worrying news for Kirsty. How will Bernie, that floundering vessel, survive in London on her own? And, without Dominic’s nose to the ground, how will Kirsty know what’s happening?

  But Kirsty isn’t the only one thrown into turmoil today. Dominic is going through a painful identity crisis. This young Eros has suffered a fall, he has been chucked for another, a more affluent, cultivated, experienced and debonair fellow than he, Rory Coburn, with the lean and muscled body of one who visits the gym to get fit, and an exclusive gym at that.

  ‘And how the hell do I know what has happened to the money?’ Why should he act as informant to Kirsty, the woman who got him into this mess in the first place with her nasty threats of exposure? In fact, the money in question will soon be on its way because the lovely, literary Rory with the silver streaks and the black smoking jacket has taken it upon himself to hassle the publishers over the water and push for an early signing.

  ‘How the hell d’you think I feel?’ he answers Kirsty’s question petulantly. ‘I feel as if I’ve been used, and not just by you.’

  Bernie, too, has used him cruelly. Just when he was about to break into the closed world of publishing she takes up with one of the biggest fish and he, Dominic, who has worked so hard on her behalf, is forced, like a prince turned toad, right out of the pond.

  Dammit.

  His future now lies in cardboard boxes.

  But this is only half of his grievance.

  Whilst once Bernie meant nothing to him, just one of the many apertures into which he could dip his wick, since their reunion his emotions have led him into far deeper waters. He soon had reason to thank Kirsty for forcing him to retract; his admiration for Bernie’s talents moved some part of him, spiritually and sexually, which had lain dormant before. He enjoyed making love to a prodigy. He adored her status as superstar. He relished the life of comfort and the company of admiring intellectual people, the chattering classes with whom he had previously had no entrée, his father’s family having rather more of an industrial bent.

  Dominic also loved his status as partner and escort of a cause célèbre.

  Bernie’s added fascination is that she shows no signs of being a phenomenon. Far from it.

  Take the TV show last Friday.

  Rory accompanied Bernie who was nervous. Dominic stayed home alone, drank far too much brandy and watched.

  It was more than ghastly.

  It was diabolical.

  ‘The little lady from Ireland who has stunned the snooty literary world. At the age of nineteen, ladies and gentlemen, no scholarly bluestocking, no stuttering oddball, but our very own Scouse, BERNADETTE KAVANAGH.’

  And if this wasn’t excruciating enough, coming from the poof with the saccharine smile and the hair striped like a badger’s, the audience looked like a coachload released from some rest home for the occasion. Why oh why had Bernie insisted? She was beginning to believe her own hype. She thought she was invincible. She even believed the suave Rory Coburn was enamoured by her charms.

  But she ought to be able to do better than this.

  Quite out of character, Bernie performed with a goggle-eyed stupefaction, which was painful for all to see. Bearing in mind the loud and lack-lustre performances of her three fellow contestants, if she’d been herself she could have survived, shone even. When the host started on the questions Dominic closed his eyes and let his head fall into his hands. The questions were full of smutty innuendo—something that Bernie had never mastered; she never understood the simplest of jokes and detested slapstick. So she took all the jokes at face value and tried to answer the questions seriously, which added to the audience hysteria and made her the jibe of the host’s worst taunts.

  Everybody but Bernie could see that the out-of-focus picture was an elephant’s bum. Yes, this was the level of the quiz: guess the subject of a distorted picture. It became so obvious it was embarrassing. And even when the full picture emerged Bernie couldn’t identify it. All she kept saying was two ships’ funnels and the audience fell about in their chairs.

  Dominic flinched as he watched her performance, as she fiddled with her hair, bit her nails, laughed in the wrong places and failed to get the host’s name right.

  And as for poor Bernie, she was aware she was doing, not just badly, but catastrophically. How come she handled all that press stuff with such aplomb, it was a cinch, a piece of cake, demanding not much more than smiling and agreeing with everything anyone said. But now…

  Hell.

  Rory would be waiting for her in the hospitality suite, and oh, he would be so disappointed. How was she going to explain this pitiful performance? And just when she reckoned she had snared him. He has already organized a small advance payment into her account, and she and he are off to have dinner after this fiasco is over, at a floating restaurant on the river.

  Why should she have to put up with this public mortification while Kirsty and Avril sit back and wait for their fair shares? Her financial advisers might well be right. Why should she share the advance three ways when she was being made a spectacle of, in public, in front of millions?

  And here comes the only serious question, one for each of the guests, involving their individual careers.

  ‘What authors have made the greatest impression on me in my life?’ Bernie was reduced to repeating this unanswerable question. She couldn’t think of one author apart from Shakespeare and that would sound naff. Everyone’s eyes were telling her this was a kindergarten question, and yet she sat there silently with her mouth half open, willing a sensible name to come out.

  ‘I’m not a great reader,’ she said lamely.

  And everyone looked at her askance.

  ‘Well, I haven’t had time,’ said Bernie. ‘I’ve had to work. You know?’

  Where was the power and the presence that she sensed had been guiding her earlier? And she hoped the cameras were being kind and not following her hand as it inched downwards towards her knee to give it a hopeless scratch.

  ‘You were quite dreadful,’ Rory tells her unhelpfully as she falls back into the hospitality suite gasping with shame and relief. ‘What happened to you in there? Are you feeling unwell?’

  ‘Nerves. I was frightened,’ she says childishly, hoping that her vulnerability might redeem her in her agent�
��s eyes.

  But it doesn’t.

  ‘Any more like that and we’re going to have to make out you’re a recluse,’ says Rory, not laughing. ‘And Clementine rang again this evening to ask if you’ve done any work yet.’

  ‘I can’t stand much more of this pressure.’ Bernie wipes her brow in a feeble gesture of womanly weakness.

  ‘Perhaps I should take you back to the flat,’ says Rory unkindly, ‘and let you get on. All these diversions don’t seem to be helping.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to take me out! It was your idea,’ says Bernie, wondering where the admiration has gone from his hardening eyes. Manipulating Rory is not so straightforward as dealing with Dominic, who has packed his bag and plans to move out of the flat in the morning. He hoped Bernie would beg for forgiveness and plead with him to change his mind, but she has lost interest in her former lover, a young, unworldly student, a drop-out too easily impressed, stale and vastly inferior to someone with the power and charisma of Rory. But perhaps she has read Rory all wrong. Just because he flatters her vanity and uses that publishers’ hyperbole, just because he adores Magdalene, just because he sees her as the bestselling author he’s ever had, does not necessarily mean that he confuses the book with the woman.

  Perhaps it’s the book he loves, not her.

  She remembers the warnings of Candice Love. ‘He flirts with all his authors.’ And, ‘I think he might be gay.’

  The rest of the evening does nothing for her battered self-esteem. When they arrive at the restaurant, a haunt for various celebrities, Bernie is chastened to see that his treatment of women is invariably conducted with his own style of effusive elegance. ‘Darling, how gorgeous to see you.’ So artificial and strained. Will Bernie ever be able to understand all this freakish behaviour? She, who comes from Liverpool, where a spade is called a spade and if you look into anyone’s eyes the way Rory looks into hers it’s an invitation to jump straight into bed.