The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  The Hall and its surrounds had always been some sort of vortex for her because it was in this location and farther along the road in Much Wenlock that she’d begun her journey of fucking boys the very moment she could manage it. She’d told herself for a long time that she did it for a lark, that she did it for the story she could tell her mates later, that she did it because she felt the urge. But the truth was she did it for none of those reasons. The larger truth was that she didn’t know why she did it except that it felt like violently spitting into some bloke’s face and that was something she wanted to do all the time. And why she wanted to spit and more—to claw, to bite, to punch—the very moment some bloke took possession of her body . . . ? This was something she had to learn because, if nothing else, the experiment in fucking that she had been engaged in for years needed to reach a conclusion. So when she’d attended her two lectures for the day, keeping her promise to Greta Yates, she took the bus that would eventually deposit her in the vicinity of Cardew Hall.

  She reckoned her mum would be in the vast old kitchen, making batch upon batch of the Cardew Hall jams and chutneys that were offered to tourists to purchase after their visits to the Hall. Her stepfather would be busy as well, checking the public rooms for burnt-out lightbulbs, for slut’s wool missed by the weekly cleaners, and for furniture wanting polishing. If she was careful not to be seen or heard, she could have the place more or less to herself: time alone to investigate, cogitate, and meditate.

  From where the bus stopped, it took her twenty minutes to trudge to the grounds of the Hall. There, she saw, nearly everything was in bloom, so that the gardens and their beds were awash in colour, from the yellow primroses that edged the herbaceous borders to the purple iris that formed a casual backdrop and softened the effect of the stone boundary walls.

  From the drive, she could also see the slate roof of St. James Church, the parish church but also the lord-of-the-manor church. It was where Ding’s ancestors with their piles of money had nodded regally to their retainers—poor sods—as they serenely floated down the aisle to their special pew. That pew still had the family name upon it. Not Donaldson, of course, since the family name in question was her mother’s and not her dad’s.

  That thought stopped her: her dad. Not the surname but the fact of him. Another thought seemed to accompany dad, resting just on the edge of her consciousness. She hesitated, her gaze on the church’s tower, and tried to trick that thought out of her memory. But what came was only a feeling of hollowness and, along with it, a kind of quivering just beneath her skin that suggested . . . fear? Yes, it was fear.

  She needed to get out of the sight of that church, she decided, although when she did so by walking round the ancient building that was her home, she really felt no different. She went to the back, to the cellar door, which was accessed by stone steps so old that they bore the indentations of hundreds of years of other people’s feet upon them.

  Once inside, she was in a stone-floored corridor, dimly lit by weak overhead bulbs that hung from flexes. The prominent features of the place were the damp, cobwebs, and dust so thick that the beams in the walls looked grey rather than what they would be if one ran a finger along them: black from having been fashioned from English oaks and taken from various parts of ancient ships.

  This corridor led to the vast underbelly of Cardew Hall, to its working innards. These consisted of places the public never saw: the kitchen, the larder, the pantry, the scullery, the wine cellar, the root cellar, the laundry where in times past young girls “born into service,” as the expression had it, had worn their hands raw with the washing.

  Ding paused in the semi-darkness and listened. A radio was on, which meant that her mother was in the kitchen, as Ding had suspected would be the case. She could smell the fragrance of cooking fruit as well. That was a very good thing, since such cooking would require her mother’s close attention and thus keep her out of Ding’s way.

  Then she heard her stepfather’s voice. He, too, was in the kitchen, which Ding hadn’t expected, talking either to her mum or into his mobile. The sound of him—and why was this? why?—did what it always did to her. First were the shivers. Then the fury started.

  She didn’t understand why she had this reaction to Stephen, who had always treated her kindly, and she was sick to the bone of not understanding those things that, surely, she was meant to understand if she was ever to put a full stop to how she’d been carrying on her life. And now she wanted an end to it because the fact of Jack Korhonen had brought her up short: she’d never once done it with someone old enough to be her dad.

  It was the thought of her dad that took her to the steps at the far end of the corridor, those that would lead up to the traditional green baize door with its baize so tattered at this point that it might have been nibbled upon by mice and it probably had been, since, really, what could possibly be better than felt to line a mouse’s nest? And God knew there were mice nests aplenty in Cardew Hall, along with birds’ nests in the chimneys, and that’s what she knew of a sudden—just there!—the nest of hair from which the penis emerged, but why was that important and why could she barely cope with seeing it and why did she force herself over and over to see it, to touch it, to take it into her mouth if that’s what he wanted because wasn’t that what he always wanted and didn’t they all always want it and didn’t it come down to that in the end: the penis and what was done with it and because of it and God God God what was wrong with her?

  Before she realised she was doing so, she was up the stairs and into the body of the house and then up a second set of stairs, wide with panelled walls from which dim light from the landing window illuminated dusty paintings of nameless ancestors. Then she was in a shadowy corridor, panelled like the stairway walls, and she was standing in front of a broad door. It was locked, as it always was locked, because no one wanted to go inside because no one, it seemed, wanted to remember, although what it was that no one wanted to remember she could not have said. But what she knew in this moment of shivering torso and quaking hands was that she had to get inside that room.

  She knew where the key was. It came to her that she’d always known, because in her mind’s eye she was crouched in a corner in the shadows and once the police had come and gone she had seen her mother lock that door and put the key at the very top of a tridarn so tall that she could barely reach it and so, of course, Ding would never find it only she’d seen she’d seen she’d seen from the shadows that that was where the key had gone to and all along her mum had not shed a tear not a single tear and what was wrong with her?

  The tridarn was still there. Nothing was ever moved in Cardew Hall and nothing this large ever would be. But petite as she was, Ding could not reach the top of it. She needed something to stand on, so she went to her mum and stepdad’s room and there she fetched one of those ancient stools: the kind with carvings and banged-up stretchers that people breathlessly took to the Antiques Roadshow only to learn it was worth twenty-five quid.

  She dragged it from the bedroom to the corridor and over to the tridarn. There, she mounted it and hoisted herself high. She felt round the top of the tridarn in the dust and the grime, along the edges and into the centre till she found the key.

  Her bowels were loosening as she got down from the stool and approached the door with the key in her hand. She had to do it. For she understood now that whatever was behind the door was something terrible and she had to know exactly what it was because it seemed to her that it was the only thing left that was capable of explaining to her why she was the way she was and why she would continue to be that way if she didn’t open that door and step into the room behind it.

  The key was a burning brand in her palm. Hastily, then, she stuck it into the keyhole and turned it to release the lock. Her heart was thudding, so she took a moment, and she shut her eyes tight, not to blind her vision but to force the tears to go somewhere besides down her cheeks. This was stupid, she told
herself. It was just a room. What was she expecting to find inside? Dancing skeletons? Jack the Ripper? Poltergeists tossing the furniture round?

  She made herself do it. She swung the door open, and although her limbs were shaking so badly she wasn’t sure she could even move forward, she managed it. Eyes open, arms at her side, feet rising and falling on a scarred wooden floor and then upon an old Persian carpet . . .

  Ding saw it was a bedroom like any other, save for the fact that it was musty with lack of use, with lack of fresh air, with lack of dusting and hoovering. It was dark inside because the heavy curtains were closed, but still she could see the shapes of furniture. Her breath began to come faster, though, as she took it all in: a chest of drawers a heavy chair an armoire a bed with four posters a dressing table and suddenly she knew she hadn’t been meant to go inside this room then either but she did go inside and why was it why except now yes she remembered it was the dog but had there ever been a dog? yes there had been and was he inside the room? no he hadn’t been had he but he was upstairs where he wasn’t allowed and he was in the dropdown position her dad had taught him and when she went to him and tried to take him away because no one was supposed to bother her father when he was in that room the dog bared his teeth which he never ever did because he knew he wasn’t supposed to show his teeth then he whined some more and that was why she opened the door because she knew the dog wanted no he needed to go inside that room just the way she had done but what was it what was it about this room?

  “Ding! My God! I thought I heard something.”

  Ding swung round. There stood her mother in the doorway with fingers on her lips and an expression on her face that told Ding something was there, there just at the edge of her own consciousness.

  Her mother extended her hand and said, “You gave me such a fright. What’re you doing here? Come out of there.”

  Yes! It was the gesture. It was the words combined with the gesture. What are you doing here come out of there and Ding remembered. All of it. She said, “It wasn’t an accident. You told me it was. You said he was working in the house and there was something he was doing with electricity because of the flex. It was a flex and you thought I would believe—” It suddenly felt as if something deadly was flowing from her along with her words, a foul effluent that would drown them both. “You lied to me,” she cried. “You lied to me you lied to me and you kept lying.”

  “Ding, come out of there. Now. Please.”

  And then behind her mother in the doorway Ding saw her stepfather and in a flash it was so much worse because she remembered him her father’s old school friend her father’s best friend and he was there as well just after it happened no he was there when it happened and why was he there? What was he doing there? Why had he come?

  “You killed him!” she cried. “I remember! He was . . .” She looked round the room and found it she found it she pointed to one of the two posters at the end of the bed. It was thick and carved and constructed of that same heavy and unbreakable oak that so much of the house had been made from and that was where he had hanged himself. “The flex . . . that flex . . . it was round his neck and he was . . . Mum, he was naked and he was dead.”

  Her mother entered the room, then. She said over her shoulder to her husband, “Stephen, let me handle this. Let me—”

  “Lie.” Ding wept. “Stephen let me lie is what you mean. Stephen let me lie let me tell her something so she won’t ever know what I did what we did because both of you did it both of you planned it you wanted to be together didn’t you so—”

  “Stop it! Stephen, for God’s sake, leave us.”

  “She needs to know what happened,” Ding’s stepfather said.

  “Yes, all right, I realise that. Now go! Ding, come out of this room.”

  Oh she would, she would. She would come out, and then she did so, brushing past her mother and her stepfather, hurtling down the corridor in the direction of the wide stairway that would take her to the main entrance hall below and then to the door and finally she was out in the air because she had to get away only she could hear her mother calling for her to stop just stop but she would not listen she would not and there was the church and its graveyard but the road the road was in the opposite direction and she had to get to the road at once because there she could find the bus that would take her to—

  “He killed himself, Dena! He didn’t mean to. It was an accident. But he killed himself.”

  She spun round. “You’re lying because that’s what you do you always lie you lie and lie and you always have and I hate you!”

  But she was finished running, and she knew it. She sank onto the uncut grass next to a grave marker so old and worn that nothing remained upon it save the indication by its presence that someone long forgotten lay buried beneath it. When her mother reached her, she did not protest. When her mother dropped onto the grass next to her, she did not try to get away.

  Her mother did not speak at first. She seemed to be waiting. Ding reckoned she was waiting for courage. Or perhaps she was waiting only for calm.

  After a bit she said, “Ding, you were four years old and just barely that. I couldn’t tell you because there was no way to explain to a four-year-old what her father had been doing in that room and that what he’d been doing had caused his death. How could you ever have understood that he used that room for . . . that when he wanted . . . It was auto-eroticism. That’s how he died. Do you know what that is? Well, you must because children know things these days that they never would have known before this bloody age of information. I didn’t know what he was doing in there. All I knew was that we weren’t meant to go into that room when the door was closed because, he said, he’d be reading and he wanted to be able to read in peace for an hour or so, that was all he said. Just a bit of time to relax. Earlier, this was before you were even born, I’d caught him at it but not there in that room because it was before I inherited the house. He told me he’d read about it in one of his novels and he’d been curious and it was only that one time and he could see how dangerous it was. He swore he would never do it again. He was lying, of course, because that’s what people do. You were right in that, Dena, people lie. And I lied to you because I didn’t know how to explain to a four-year-old girl who’d just come upon her dead, naked, strung-up father that he’d done this to himself because he wanted . . . he just had to have . . . it was all about him and his pleasure and he didn’t think about us. So there he was in the middle of a Saturday afternoon naked with a flex round his neck, hanging from a bedpost, with his face contorted and his eyes his eyes and yes you are absolutely right I did not tell you because the last thing I ever wanted was that you would remember how he died much less why he died like that.”

  Ding’s hand had risen to cover her mouth. Her mother had long since begun to weep. She herself saw the past in a series of images, pushed so far back into her memory that she wondered if they were real at all: the uniforms of the police; someone carrying . . . what? a medical bag? figures passing along the corridor; the black garb of a priest; an ambulance trolley rolling along the corridor; the long, dark, zippered bag; the dog barking at all the intruders and all the confusion; her mother weeping; questions being asked and answers being given; and a woman coming into her room and sitting on the edge of the bed and she had been the paediatrician hadn’t she and she was saying over her shoulder Children this young and to Ding herself Let’s see if we can help you sleep a little, sweetheart because it had been a nightmare, hadn’t it, that she’d awakened from terrified and if she went to sleep when she next awoke it would all be as if it had never happened.

  She understood. Not why her father had done that to himself, not why her mother had lied to her for years upon years, but why she herself had taken the route she’d taken, the one that was gaining her nothing and would continue to do so should she remain upon it.

  COALBROOKDALE

  SHROPSHIRE

>   Timothy was still at work in the pharmacy when Yasmina returned to the clinic late that afternoon. She found him counting out a prescription for antibiotics for an elderly gentleman sent from Broseley’s chemist, who’d apparently run out of the drug. Once the pills were ready, Timothy did what he’d always done: carefully explain how they were meant to be taken. When he’d made certain the old gent understood, he clasped the man’s shoulder and said, “You’re going to mind me, aren’t you?” to which the reply was a gruff, “Got a feeling you’ll chase me down ’f I don’t.”

  Timothy promised that he would do just that, squeezed the man’s shoulder, and sent him on his way, which was out to a minivan where someone who looked like his daughter was waiting. Then Timothy turned to Yasmina.

  “Did you play the truant today?” His tone was friendly, and he was smiling the same smile that had at first beguiled her all those years ago. “Where’d you get off to? The cinema? A shopping trip?”

  “I went to Ludlow.”

  The smile disappeared. Caution came onto his features. “Everything fine with Mum?”

  “I went to the college,” she told him.

  It took a moment before he said, “Yasmina . . . ,” in a tone that established its position on the border between warning and resignation. He went to lock the front doors to the pharmacy. He returned and began to deal with the till, opening its drawer and removing from it the tray that contained notes and coins. He set this to one side and looked at her. “You must know that approach isn’t going to work.”

  “How can you say that when you have no idea why I went there?”

  He removed the notes from the tray, and from beneath the counter he brought out the leather zip pouch in which he deposited the money at night. He put the notes inside it and then added the coins, saying, “I’m not a fool. If you went to the college, it has to do with Missa.”