Good Girls

by Amanda Brookfield

On spotting the old man in a brown felt hat, curled up in the corner of the entrance to her flat, Eleanor’s only thought was how to get past without waking him. But the automatic light flashed on, glaring and buzzing.

  ‘Trevor?’

  The old actor scrambled to his feet, disconcerted, tugging at the rim of his hat, wiping his mouth. ‘I was worried,’ he stuttered. ‘When you left… the way you left… what you had said…’ He looked at her properly. ‘Good God, child. What has happened?’

  Eleanor gripped the keys harder in her pocket. The concrete under her feet was starting to heave and the shout was back inside her head, repeating and repeating. It sounded like Kat. But it couldn’t be, because Kat was dead. ‘Worried? About me?’ Her voice was small and disbelieving.

  ‘Have you been mugged?’

  ‘No, no… but I seem to have lost my bag. Luckily I had these in my pocket.’ She plucked out the keys, holding them high so he could see.

  Trevor rubbed his legs which had stiffened badly and were hurting. He was still foggy-headed, and incredulous that, a resigned insomniac for two years, he should have managed to fall so deeply asleep on an icy concrete floor in a dingy doorway. ‘Oh Lordy,’ he said, bringing Eleanor sufficiently into focus to note the smears of mud on her coat, the bits of twig and leaf in her hair. She had clearly been through something. But she was safe and now all Trevor wanted suddenly, very badly, was to return to the comfort of his own home. His conscience was clear. ‘Here, let me.’

  ‘I can manage, thanks.’ She kept him at bay with her elbow, continuing to work with both hands at twisting the key. There was a streak of mud on one temple, and cuts on the backs of her hands. There were even some scratches on her neck, Trevor noted grimly, his thoughts returning to the possibility of assault.

  When the door opened at last, she jumped round, keeping her back to it, like an animal defending a lair.

  ‘I’d invite you in, but I’m afraid I meant what I said today and so there’s no point. Also I have nothing to offer. Literally, nothing.’ Her big dark eyes glittered. ‘Not even milk. So thanks for coming by but… perhaps now you wouldn’t mind… leaving me alone?’ Her words had started coming out in rushed clusters, as if she was having trouble timing her breathing between sentences.

  Trevor hesitated. She was giving him a way out and he wanted to take it. ‘I’ll see you upstairs first. And I’d like to use the bathroom, if I may.’

  She gave a moan of what sounded like exasperation and led the way inside.

  Trevor took the stairs slowly. There were a lot of them and they were uncarpeted and covered with stains that he tried not to examine too closely. At the top, she opened the door quickly and easily, but then stopped, dropping her forehead against the jamb.

  ‘It’s a tip okay?’

  Trevor nodded, but then could not contain a gasp as the door widened. ‘Oh my word…’

  ‘The bathroom is that door there,’ she said fiercely, pointing across a sea of domestic detritus that made his stomach churn. It was clearly the main living room of the flat. He could make out a couple of armchairs and a table, though, like the floor, they were submerged under clothes, papers, books, notepads, dirty crockery, empty bottles and cans, boxes of takeaway, shoes, coat hangers – there seemed to be a lot of coat hangers. In the middle sat an open suitcase, empty but for a hairdryer and a couple of socks, looking somehow as if it were responsible for spewing out the contents of the room.

  ‘Does it contain a bath?’

  She flinched visibly. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A bath. Does your bathroom have one?’

  She nodded. ‘You want a bath?’

  Trevor smiled, a little sadly. ‘No, my dear. Not for me. For you.’ The desire to be kind was flooding him now. He smiled at her tenderly. ‘I am going to run a bath for you. If there was a drop of bubble bath, I would like to add that too. If there isn’t, I shall purchase some when I go out. Because while you soak yourself – a long soak – I am going to rustle us up something for supper. A curry, I think. Very light – snow peas, coconut milk, chicken, basmati – nothing to startle the stomach.’

  He began picking his way across the room, not looking back in case she detected the fact that he was flying blind.

  ‘It takes courage to admit one needs help,’ he went on, emerging from the bathroom a couple of minutes later to find her still standing by her open front door, her face slack and frightened, as if she might take off down the stairs at any moment. ‘You’ve clearly been through a lot.’ He surveyed the room, bending down to tug a piece of something sticky off the side of his shoe. ‘It’s in danger of burying you. We are all in danger of getting buried. Sometimes we need other people to dig us out.’

  Eleanor put a hand against the wall. Trevor and the room were spinning. ‘Why should you—’

  ‘Because I want to. Because you have helped me this year more than you know.’ Tears had started spilling silently down her face, but it seemed kindest to ignore them. ‘I am going to the shops now. I won’t be long. I’ll take those keys of yours, if I may.’ Trevor spoke sternly, aware of the importance of appearing in charge. Inside he was still quailing. They may have worked in tandem for ten months, but the meetings had been sporadic and they barely knew each other. ‘Are you sure we have nothing we need to report to the police?’

  She slowly shook her head, looking stunned.

  ‘Except the missing bag, of course,’ he added quickly, ‘but we’ll get to that.’

  He took the keys from her, suppressing a twist of panic at the idea of all her notes, his precious half-formed life story, falling into a stranger’s hands, being scrutinised, mocked. His heart raced. But that would happen anyway, he realised. Readers were an audience like any other. Some would boo and some would cheer.

  ‘I am so stupid,’ Eleanor muttered, not looking at him. ‘I’ve got everything wrong. I don’t matter. I’ve never mattered.’

  In the doorway Trevor paused. He felt a lump swell in his throat, a reflex of sheer, visceral pity. How did a creature of such capabilities, such beauty, get whittled into so pathetic a state? For a moment he was glad he was helping, simply because it might provide some answers.

  ‘Everybody matters,’ he said gruffly, going back to put an arm across her shoulders and steering her towards one of the chairs. She stood, her head hanging like a castigated child, while he removed the various items smothering it, and then pressed her gently into its sagging seat. Trevor picked up a pillow in a greying stained case off the floor and tucked it behind her head. ‘Now, do not move, sweetness. That’s an order. Okay?’

  Eleanor nodded, the fight seeping out of her; a fight that felt as if it had been going on all her life, though quite what it had been about, she couldn’t at that moment have said.

  24

  Christmas 2013

  The puppy staggered to the edge of the box, wagging its little tail so hard that it lost its balance and fell sideways, exposing a smudge of white in the silky jet-black of its underbelly. Its fur was crinkled in places, adding to the impression of a creature zipped into an outfit still several sizes too large. Having got back to the edge of the box, it toppled out face first, righted itself, and then waddled across the sheets of newspaper to the large corner basket that housed its Labrador mother and siblings, already plugged in for an afternoon feed. The litter belonged to a neighbour of Hannah’s family. It was Christmas Eve and the slower puppy had already been picked out as a favourite. Still only three weeks old, it would be early February before it was ready to go its new home.

  A puppy for Christmas. It was sheer genius. Eleanor stole another glance at her sister’s family, in line beside her, rapt and quiet, falling in love, healing. After a week in Trevor’s tender care, she was starting to feel almost healed herself. The kindness of the man, so unexpected, had been like balm. Trevor had arrived at nine on the dot each morning, like Mary Poppins, ready to clean and organise and cook, fixing things as he went. Every inch of her pokey flat now shone, lookin
g, as a result, a lot less pokey. Scores of bin bags had been filled and disposed of. Light poured through the clean windowpanes, falling in bright squares across the polished wood floors. Even her ancient and sorry array of defeated pot-plants, draped and wilting around various windowsills, were sitting up pruned and perky. Laundered linen bulged neatly on the shelves of her bathroom cupboard. Chiselled free of glaciers, her freezer door opened and closed properly for the first time in years. Below it, the racks in the fridge, scrubbed of mildew and stains, housed a dizzying spread of appealing food – fresh pasta, greaseproof paper parcels of deli cheeses and meats, yoghurts, a cooked chicken. The salad drawer contained salad and the egg holder bobbed with eggs. Even more extraordinary, Trevor had managed to track down her lost bag, returning from one of his shopping forages with it strapped across his portly chest like a handbag. Someone had found it hanging on a branch, he explained breezily, and had the good sense to hand it in to a police station.

  ‘It’s only two nights. You’ll be fine,’ he had told her in his kind, commanding way that morning, posting her into a taxi to catch her Christmas Eve train to Fairfield and sliding a twenty-pound note into her hand before he slammed the door. He was setting off himself later in the day to spend the entire Christmas and New Year break with a couple he referred to as his ‘Dorset cousins’, an elderly pair of women about whom he was amusingly disparaging but of whom he was clearly very fond. ‘Just be gentle with yourself. Don’t try too hard. And if you are not up to visiting that father of yours, then don’t do that either.’

  Eleanor had spent the train journey in a state of gathering nervous tension nonetheless, worried about her hastily cobbled gifts, tucked among a few spare clothes in her holdall, and dreading a three-day charade of festivities in a house still trembling with loss. Hovering on the edge of such worries, like a patch of thin ice where she still feared to tread, was her recent meltdown on the common. Near-madness in retrospect. Yet Trevor had helped immeasurably with that too, probing for details as to what had happened and why, but always as he scrubbed or cooked, so that Eleanor was faced with the easier task of directing her answers to the back of his head.

  It was almost as if their roles had been reversed, Eleanor had mused wryly: she pouring out every sorry twist of her life story, while Trevor listened. Except that, unlike her, her new friend never seemed burdened by the need to make things add up, contenting himself instead with flinging out occasional and refreshingly pithy comments along the lines that life was a bugger and families a mess-up and unless Eleanor dropped the habit of blaming herself for every bad thing that had happened, she might as well leg it back to her railway line. Not even the Nick business fazed him. Love and grief were both forms of madness, he assured her, and could produce all sorts of strange behaviours. The only thing she mentioned that produced a vehement response was the voice that had brought her to her senses. That was her inner self, Trevor had pronounced solemnly, pausing in his labours to give Eleanor his full attention; it was the core of her, yelling its desire to survive, and she should bloody well listen to it.

  The moment Eleanor had seen Howard, striding towards her along the small country station platform, grinning warmly, his arms outstretched to relieve her of her bag, all the apprehension had dissolved.

  ‘Thank God you came.’ He had hugged her hard, keeping hold of her for several seconds. ‘I so wanted you to. I’ve made the children wait in the car. I needed to say sorry to you first. I was too hung-over to manage it last time.’ He stepped back, keeping a grip on her elbows, compelling her to look him squarely in the face. ‘How I behaved at Kat’s funeral was terrible. Getting so drunk afterwards, telling you what I did. Can we put it behind us? As Kat herself would have wanted?’

  Eleanor had tried to speak, but he ploughed on, drowning her out. The platform had emptied round them.

  ‘Every word I said was true,’ he went on urgently. ‘Kat did always care, deeply, about how you might judge her, but I also know – what I was in too much of a state to articulate properly – is that part of her motive in not telling you was to protect you.’

  ‘Protect me?’ Eleanor had let out a laugh of disbelief.

  ‘Yes.’ Howard had eyed her gravely. ‘What your father did was so… ugly.’ He paused, his thin face trembling. ‘She wanted to protect you from the burden of knowing about it, not let it cast a shadow over your life as it had hers. The trouble was,’ he added quietly, ‘that seeing you always reminded her of it, and she found that hard. At least, that’s my theory.’

  Eleanor had taken a deep breath before answering, still processing what he had said, wanting so badly to believe it that she didn’t quite trust herself. ‘Thank you,’ she said finally. ‘It’s a good theory.’

  Along the platform behind him, Evie had edged into view by the exit, wearing what looked like a brand new pink anorak and matching wellington boots.

  ‘I think someone is losing patience,’ Eleanor had murmured, waving at her niece over his shoulder.

  ‘Hey, bad girl,’ Howard called, scooping up Eleanor’s bag and setting off at once to retrieve his daughter, any suggestion of real anger belied by the grin splitting his face. ‘I thought I told you to stay in the car. Didn’t we agree that getting a puppy for Christmas would only happen if you were good… I know it’s mad,’ he added, glancing back and laughing at the expression on Eleanor’s face, ‘but a near neighbour of Hannah’s has a litter of black labs to find homes for and it felt like it was one of those things that was meant to be. We are going straight there now, there having being a general consensus round the breakfast table that it would be nice to have you to help us choose.’

  It was a small thing perhaps, in the grand scheme of all that had happened, but sitting on a kitchen floor with puppies clambering across her knees, and afterwards back in the hubbub of the car, Howard chairing a fierce back-seat debate about names, the smell of the pups still on her skin, Eleanor was aware of a warmth inside her that went beyond the efficient heating of Howard’s Range Rover. The children chattered and shouted and didn’t listen to each other. Howard laughed and told them off with idle jokey threats. It was Kat’s family, and she was part of it.

  Shooting over the Roman Bridge, long since mended from the flooding at the start of the year, Eleanor found her mind travelling back to her arrival at Fairfield station almost twelve months before, the taxi driver so irritated by the queue for the bridge repairs, Kat still frail from her operation, awaiting her with that prickly cheerfulness for which Eleanor had learnt to brace herself. It was like looking back to different lives, different people, and yet all that had altered was her understanding. And Kat was gone.

  Eleanor stared out at the tight white wintry sky, an awning over the flat brown fields, all of it blurring as Howard cruised along the country lanes. At least I am staring life in the face again, she consoled herself, at least I am not looking the other way.

  As soon as they got to the house and Luke had made a touchingly adult to-do of carrying her bag upstairs for her, Eleanor pulled on a purple beanie of Kat’s from off a coat peg and slipped out into the back garden. The swing hung forlornly from the tree branch. Under it the grass was much thinner than the rest of the lawn and pitted with patches of hardened mud. Eleanor watched her feet as she approached, reminding herself she was treading on bits of Kat. Howard had asked if she wanted to be with them for the ash scattering and she had said no. ‘Sorry, darling,’ she said to the air now. ‘I was too sad. Too afraid. I let you down. Again.’

  A gust of wind blew through the garden, stirring the swing. Eleanor took hold of it and sat down, pulling the beanie lower over her ears and dropping her head to lean on one of the ropey arms. She wanted to think of Kat, but it was a memory of Connie that surfaced; of their mother’s fast lithe fingers folding squares of coloured paper into animals, flowers, boats. Around them, the floor was a sea of shapes and coloured papers. Kat, fluffy-headed and dimple-kneed, toddled through it, kicking and whooping. Connie had scooped her up and
grabbed Eleanor’s hand. ‘Now to the sea, my chickadees,’ she cried, dancing them to the bathroom, where she put Kat on a stool and filled the basin, setting three little paper boats on the water, one pink, one blue, one yellow. ‘Go, little boats. Run for your lives. Escape while you can.’ She blew gently, making the little flotilla bob between the taps, while Kat and Eleanor huffed and puffed, giggling at their new-found power.

  Eleanor looked up and saw Evie watching through the kitchen window, palms and nose pressed flat against the glass. She smiled and waved, aware of the origami afternoon still floating inside her, a bubble of comfort, one of several that had been emerging since her recent meltdown.

  Evie disappeared from the window and appeared skipping across the lawn a few minutes later, her new pink wellies flapping audibly against her shins.

  ‘Can I push you?’

  Eleanor laughed. ‘I was going to push you.’ But Evie already had two hands on her back, and was groaning dramatically at the physical effort of the task. Eleanor gave a gentle push-off to help and was soon swinging so freely her only worry was knocking her niece off her feet.

  Howard’s Christmas gift to her was a lilac pashmina, weightless and soft as gossamer, immaculately wrapped in layers of crisp white tissue and gold festive paper, tied with matching ribbon and a gold tag. There was a new bond of candour between them, and in spite of the indomitable Hannah’s extensive culinary preparations on their behalf, Eleanor and Howard muddled through the Christmas meal together. They forgot several of the trimmings and poured so much brandy onto the pudding to get it lit that, had the children not opted instead for Hannah’s mince pies, they might well have passed out. If ever Eleanor fell silent for too long, she would look up to find Howard throwing her a questioning glance of sympathy and she did her best to offer the same in return; although, happily, Howard, in demand on all sides, seemed little in need of it. Rather to her surprise, Hannah joined them soon after the Christmas lunch had been cleared away. There were difficulties at home, Howard explained quietly, sensing Eleanor’s reaction.