Good Girls

by Amanda Brookfield

  There was an audible intake of breath, warning him that the warmth hadn’t been enough. ‘I know your patients matter more to you than I do, Nick. I know that. But if you could just do a better job of hiding the fact from time to time then I would be most grateful. And don’t call me hon. I have a name, and, funnily enough, I am quite attached to it…’

  ‘I did not mean to upset you,’ Nick interjected hurriedly.

  ‘No, you never do,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘I’m looking forward to dinner,’ Nick tried again, determined not to rise to the bait but marvelling, as always, at his wife’s readiness to be angered. ‘A great idea of yours to go there. Pat said she saw a review saying it’s the new best place for seafood, better even than Riley’s.’

  ‘Yes, well…’

  Detecting a softening, he took heart. ‘It’s lucky one of us has her finger on the pulse.’

  ‘It’s not cheap,’ Donna admitted, ‘but then top-quality things seldom are…’

  Nick noted, with some astonishment, that a reply from Kat had dropped into his inbox. He reached for the mouse and clicked it open:

  By the way, I’m glad you grew to like being a doctor.

  Donna was still talking, appeased in exactly the way he had hoped, moving from the merits of the restaurant to the promise to drop in on her father, which had warranted the last-minute change of her evening schedule. ‘It will mean two cars between us tonight which is crazy, but—’

  ‘Take a taxi. Then you can enjoy a drink.’

  She laughed. ‘Okay. If you’re sure.’

  ‘Of course,’ Nick assured her happily, relief at the truce flooding him as it always did. ‘It’s a weeknight, so I’m only going to have a glass anyway. Give the girls a kiss for me.’

  ‘Okay. See you later.’

  Nick put the phone down and, after thinking for a moment, wrote back to Kat:

  Did I say I like doctoring??!! But yes, I suppose I do. Mostly. Got to go now. Might drop a line another time. Nick.

  When yet another reply popped into his inbox a couple of minutes later, he shook his head in bemusement.

  Write if you want,

  She wrote this time.

  but no raking up of the past, okay? And nothing ‘personal’, thank you very much. At least not if you expect a reply.

  He typed back, chuckling

  I’ll bear that in mind.

  For the next hour Nick continued with the administrative duties he had set himself, while other, broader memories of the Keating sisters drifted into his mind. It was impossible to discount Eleanor, he reflected fondly, if only because she had led to Kat. The two were indivisible. Not that he had known that at the time. But then one knew so little of anything at the time.

  6

  1985 – Sussex

  It had stopped raining at last, though the sky was still a low canopy of metallic grey. Under Eleanor’s knees, the dark, grainy wood of the hall window seat seemed to have hardened to rock. She and Kat had been wedged side by side on it for what felt like hours, passing the time by breathing mist onto the glass and tracing pictures in it with their fingers. Kat had drawn the number eight, because it was her birthday, then the sun, then the cat, Titch, who had come with the vicarage and was curled up asleep behind them in the sagging weave seat of the hall chair. Sensing Kat’s mounting boredom with the game and not wanting her own anxiety to show, Eleanor switched from pictures to letters.

  ‘This is what you drew, Kat. S-U-N. See? Spell it out for me, Kat. Say the letters…’

  But Kat stuck her tongue out and licked the word off the glass instead. It provided a new diversion, Eleanor puffing clouds onto the pane and writing in a race against Kat’s quick, wet tongue, until suddenly, just as they had forgotten to listen out for it, there was the crunch of car wheels in the drive and the old black Vauxhall appeared, exactly as Eleanor had longed for it to, fresh mud from the lane splattered thickly up its sides. They pressed their noses to the smeary windows as their mother, upright behind the wheel, her face rigid with concentration, and pale but for the usual gash of red lipstick, steered between the gateposts. Catching sight of their faces, Connie tooted and waved. Behind them, Titch opened one eye and closed it. Keeping expectations low being a game they were all learning to play.

  As Kat scrambled off the window seat, Eleanor hesitated, experiencing the usual jumble of emotions: joy, because her mother had returned at last, with her cloud of hair and her lemon-coloured coat and her slim legs steeply angled into one of the towering, shiny pairs of shoes that Mrs Owens liked to plough at with the hoover, as if they were monsters that needed driving back against the skirting boards; and fearful doubt, just in case it was going to be one of those new strange days when the energetic mood with which her mother left the vicarage was not the same one that accompanied her home. Since the main object of the journey that afternoon had been the secret purchase of a birthday cake for Kat, the doubt was worse than usual. A birthday tea and no cake – Eleanor couldn’t imagine how her little sister would be comforted. They were supposed to have baked one for her – just the two of them, her mother had promised, whispering in her ear as she tucked her up the night before. Kat could watch her beloved cartoons, she said, and they would be girls together, just the two of them, creating heaven in the kitchen.

  Quite how and why this promise hadn’t materialised, Eleanor still wasn’t sure. They had been woken extra early so that Kat could be given her birthday bicycle before their father went off on his Saturday church duties. Shaken out of a deep sleep, chilly in her nightie, Eleanor had sat hugging her knees on the end of her parents’ bed while Kat bounced and squealed at the unveiling of her gift but then refused to sit on it, not even when Eleanor patiently pointed out and explained about the stabilisers. Kat had nestled against the bike instead, stoppering her thumb into her mouth as she stroked the chubby white wheels. Eleanor had retreated to her own bed, only to find Kat crawling in next to her and asking for Jeremy Fisher, but then falling asleep before they got to the exciting bit with the fish.

  The rest of the morning had dragged by, the rain crawling down the windows and Kat forcing her to play baby games. Eleanor, remembering the promise of heaven, had put her head hopefully round the kitchen door on several occasions, only to find her mother with her head in one of her clothes magazines, a tall glass of her special water at her side. ‘Later, Ellie,’ she muttered less volubly each time, barely looking up, ‘you’re so impatient.’

  But later came and went. They ate lunch – cold chicken and bread – and were then allowed to watch television. Kat chose the old Snow White video – her favourite – and made a nest in the sofa cushions. Eleanor slipped out of the room with more high hopes, only to find her mother in her yellow coat by the front door, her hair smooth and full of air, her lipstick sticky-fresh.

  ‘No time for cooking now, Ellie darling. I’m going to whizz out and buy one instead. Not a word to your little sister, okay?’

  Eleanor nodded even though it wasn’t okay. Lots of things weren’t okay that could not be mentioned. She blamed the move from London. Everything had been different in London. Different and better. In London, there had been Maria from next door who sat and played with them all the times her mother was busy. In London, they had been in a street with other houses and shops, near a library and a playground. In London, she had been ten and now she was eleven. Only four months and yet sometimes it felt as if she had left her whole life behind.

  With the weight of these morning disappointments still upon her, Eleanor took the precaution of crossing her fingers as she slid off the window seat to greet her mother, skidding down the hall to catch up with Kat. The finger-crossing was a tactic she reserved for emergencies and which hadn’t often let her down; unlike praying, which, in spite of her father’s regular solemn recommendations, had let her down so badly that she had lately given up on it altogether.

  ‘Oh girls, my good girls,’ Connie cried, as they charged outside.

  ‘But wher
e did you go?’ Kat howled, barrelling into her mother’s thin bare legs.

  Eleanor hung back.

  Connie swayed from the force of Kat’s hurtling embrace, rocking onto the big square heels of her blue shoes and then forward again onto their round tips. Her lipstick had faded to a dry rusty line and she looked wide-eyed, like she was thinking about lots of things beyond birthday teas and Kat’s wretchedness. She patted Kat’s head and then bent down to kiss it. ‘Well, I’m back now, aren’t I, silly lamb? And Ellie looked after you, didn’t you, Ellie?’ Connie straightened and smiled at Eleanor, absently trailing her fingers through Kat’s knotty white frizz as her sister continued her sobbing.

  Eleanor stood a little taller, meeting her mother’s gaze. She had done as she was told and that felt good.

  ‘I missed you,’ Kat croaked, doing fake-crying now, Eleanor could tell, milking the moment because she liked having her head tickled.

  Connie kissed Kat’s hair again and then shifted her to one side so she could reach into her coat pocket for her cigarettes. ‘There now, sweetie. Mummy needs a moment.’

  Kat, who could never be interested in anything for long, not even being miserable, skipped off, sniffing, her candy-floss head bobbing, and was soon lost to an inspection of the large patch of green slime that had been growing for weeks under the broken drainpipe by the kitchen door.

  Eleanor shuffled nearer the back of the car, unhooking her crossed fingers at the sight of two shopping bags, one of which had spilled its contents sufficiently to reveal the corner of a promising-looking bright pink square box.

  Catching her mother’s eye, she pointed at the cake box, licking her lips and rubbing her stomach. Connie offered a half-smile back through the grey frills of her cigarette smoke, pressing a finger to her mouth to indicate the need for secrecy. She meant about the cake, Eleanor knew, though it made her think of other things too, like the cigarette, which she wasn’t supposed to have, and leaving them alone, which she wasn’t supposed to do. When it got to tea, she would ask to light the cake candles, Eleanor decided suddenly, in a blaze of happy certainty at how the day might yet work out.

  ‘And did you two stay inside like you know I need you to?’ Connie asked sternly. ‘No wandering off into these woods or down by that railway line?’ She threw a backward glance at the silver birch wood skirting the vicarage drive, and then the other way, towards the green sea of fields and hedges that lapped round the islands of the distant hill-tips everyone called the Downs. ‘You remember how Daddy had to tell you off last time?’

  Eleanor nodded earnestly. She remembered the telling-off only too well; the biting whack of the hairbrush on her bare backside, Kat whimpering as she waited her turn. ‘I tried to make Kat ride her bike,’ she confessed, ‘but only in the hall. She still wouldn’t. Then we drew pictures.’

  Connie dropped her cigarette, twisting it into the broken gravel under the ball of her foot. ‘And no answering the phone?’

  Eleanor squirmed, shaking her head. There had been a phone call that afternoon, but it was only Mrs Owens, whom her mother didn’t like, asking if she had left her gloves from Friday.

  ‘And no one at the door for Daddy?’

  ‘No one,’ Eleanor assured her eagerly. In London, there had often been visitors for her father, but it didn’t happen in Broughton.

  ‘Darling girl. You are such a good girl. Come here.’

  Connie crouched down opening both arms. Eleanor ran into them, happy that Kat was too busy with the green patch to do her usual thing of trying to join in. She buried her face in her mother’s shoulder, smelling her flowery smoky smell, remembering dimly the time when it had just been the two of them, before Kat and going to school and all the other emerging horribleness of growing up. Through the tangle of Connie’s hair, she blinked at the silver birches. In the late afternoon light, they had become tall, floating ghosts. Eleanor squeezed her eye-lids shut. The realisation of how things could change if you stared at them hard enough was new. It made her afraid to look properly sometimes.

  ‘Swimming,’ Connie cried, standing up so suddenly that she knocked Eleanor off balance. ‘Kat, you’d like that wouldn’t you?’ she called. ‘Swimming? A birthday treat? For my big grown-up eight-year-old girl.’ Connie laughed at Kat, already stomping through the island of slime in celebration, squawking and flapping her elbows like a chicken.

  Eleanor did her best to summon some excitement about the swimming. ‘You mean go swimming now, Mummy?’ she ventured.

  ‘Of course now, you doodlebug,’ her mother retorted, the edge in her voice as good as a smack. ‘Daddy’s always saying we should get to know the area. Well, when I was out I saw a sign to a leisure centre.’ She carved a large loopy square in the air to demonstrate. ‘And Kat wants to and it’s Kat’s special day, isn’t it my chickadee?’ she called, waving at Kat, who waved back. ‘Fetch the swimmies for us, Ellie, there’s a love.’

  ‘I don’t know where they are.’ Eleanor spoke in her smallest voice. One of the panicky surges was coming at her, a longing to be back in their old house in a normal street, where everything, not just swimming things, had been in its right place.

  ‘Oh, never mind,’ Connie muttered, managing to suggest that Eleanor should mind quite a lot. ‘You watch your sister.’

  She strode towards the house, wavering a little on her tall blue shoes, and then reappearing what felt like an age later with three towels rolled into fat sausages poking out of a thin plastic bag that was splitting down the sides.

  ‘What about the cake?’ Eleanor tried to speak quietly.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The cake…’ She glanced at Kat, who had taken off one of her wellies and was using it to scoop water out of the puddle. ‘Should we put—’

  ‘We’ll have it with Daddy, later, little Miss Fusspot. Okay? Now, help me persuade madam here to get in the car and not kick up a stink about being strapped in. I can’t have her clambering around the car today, I just can’t.’

  They were halfway down the drive, within sight of the main road, when the Vauxhall performed a lurch and sank sideways into a soft bank of mud, its wheels spinning. Connie, who had just started her warbling version of Snow White’s ‘Whistle While You Work’ to entertain Kat, clamped her mouth shut and pumped at the car pedals with her right foot. The engine roared and raced, a rocket trying to take off.

  ‘Bloody car. Bloody place.’ She tugged at the steering wheel as if it was a plant she was trying to pull out by the roots. ‘Bloody hell.’ She dropped her forehead onto its top edge with a thump that made Eleanor need to look away. Behind them, Kat started to cry.

  ‘Should we get out?’ Eleanor stole a glance at her mother, to whom this obvious possibility did not seem to have occurred. Instead, she had wound down her window and was staring into the army of silver trees that surrounded them, as if they alone contained the answer to their predicament. Which sort of turned out to be true, since an instant later the towering figure of their father appeared through the ghostly mesh, the panels of his long black cloak flapping round the skirts of his cassock, the ridges of his thick-soled walking boots swinging up into view with every stride.

  Eleanor waved madly, too strangled with relief even to speak. Beside her, Connie put her hands to her face with a soft groan.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’ Kat shrieked, kicking her feet madly into the back of Eleanor’s seat and yanking at the belt across her belly.

  ‘Trouble, ladies?’ Vincent bellowed with a grin that split his dark, grizzled beard. ‘Stay where you are.’

  They watched in silence as he waded towards them through the sludgy mud, swinging his arms from side to side like a speed-skater.

  ‘Oh, Vince.’ Connie extended a hand through the open window, fluttering her fingers as if they were the only part of her still able to move.

  He seized her hand, shooting her a glittering look as he pressed it to his lips.

  ‘Daddy.’ Kat was in torment on the back seat.

  �
��Okay, Kitty-Kat, you first.’ Vincent opened the door and swung her out onto his hip, jigging her like she was still a baby until she fell silent. ‘Where were you going, my love?’ he murmured, throwing Connie another look.

  ‘Swimming,’ Kat answered for her, trumpeting the word into his ear and then inspecting the wooden crucifix that hung round his neck as if she had never seen it before. ‘For my birthday.’ She gave the cross an elaborate kiss, holding it to her mouth with both hands.

  ‘Yes, swimming,’ Connie echoed. She looked very tired suddenly. Even her hair looked tired, all falling round her face.

  ‘Okay.’ Vincent shifted Kat higher onto his waist and tweaked her nose. ‘Well, I’d say it looks like we need a change of plan, doesn’t it?’ He seemed the opposite of tired, Eleanor noticed, as if there was nothing that could have made him happier than finding his family submerged in a mud bank as the sun dropped behind the trees on a dank Saturday evening. ‘I’ll ask Mr Watson to come by with his tractor and pull the old girl free—’

  ‘It’s not a girl, Daddy,’ Kat interjected crossly, ‘it’s a car.’

  ‘Quite right,’ he laughed. ‘But you are a girl, aren’t you? A big good girl, who is now eight years old.’ He set her down carefully in the middle of the lane and then came round to Eleanor’s side, just as she had been hoping he would, if she waited long enough and didn’t fuss. ‘I’m going to put you on dry land too and then look after Mum. All right?’

  ‘There’s cake, Dad,’ Eleanor whispered, locking her sturdy legs round his broad waist as he swung her out of the seat, ‘for Kat’s birthday.’ She pointed towards the boot. ‘Mummy bought it, but I think she might have forgot.’

  ‘Cake. Brilliant. Well done, Mum.’ Vincent set her down next to her sister and squelched back through the mud to retrieve first the shopping, slinging both bags over one arm, and then Connie, squatting down in the open car door so that she could climb onto his back.