Scarlet Wakefield 03 - Kiss In The Dark

by Lauren Henderson

  My father’s wearing his regimental uniform; he didn’t resign his commission till after marriage, and he looks ridiculously dashing. My mother, in a white lace dress and a pearl tiara, is reaching one white-gloved hand up to stop her veil from blowing over her face, laughing with happiness. I think they’re the handsomest couple I’ve ever seen. But then, I suppose everyone thinks exactly the same thing when they look at their parents on their wedding day.

  “Scarlett, are you okay?” Taylor says quietly.

  “Can you go to the next issue, please?” I respond, in a voice I don’t even recognize as my own.

  Still holding my hand, Taylor clicks away swiftly with the other, bringing up the following week’s edition of the Wakefield Gazette. It’s no surprise that my parents’ deaths are still front-page news.

  Village Mourns Wakefield Heir and Wife

  the headline reads.

  Joint Funeral on Sunday Saddest Moment for Wakefield Since War, Says Vicar

  Local dignitaries and villagers alike gathered this Sunday for the funeral of Sir Patrick Wakefield and his wife, Sally, struck down in the prime of life by a speeding van in Ditchling Lane as they rode out on Sir Patrick’s Vespa scooter last week to enjoy the summer sunshine. Neither the driver nor the van that caused the hit-and-run has been identified, though a police spokesman insists authorities are still following up leads.

  Sir Patrick, 33, had a distinguished career with the Royal Fusiliers before resigning his commission upon his marriage to devote himself to the running of the Wakefield Hall estate. His wife, Sally, 34, was about to return from full-time motherhood to her job as a translator when their daughter Scarlett, 4, entered kindergarten in the autumn. Both Sir Patrick and Lady Wakefield were well-known and much-loved figures in the Wakefield area, opening up their historic home for summer fetes, sitting on local committees, and in every way amply living up to the excellent tradition that the Wakefields have maintained for centuries as landowners and guardians of their extensive cultural heritage. They will be sorely missed. Honoria, the Dowager Lady Wakefield, has asked that the family be left alone to mourn at this sad time. Sir Patrick is also survived by a sister, Gwendolen, 37 (in main photograph).

  This time, the photo illustrating the front page is of my grandmother and Aunt Gwen flanking me on the steps of the same church, coming out after my parents’ funeral. They’re each bending down to hold one of my hands. I look chubby and bewildered in my black velvet princess coat and patent Mary Janes. My curly hair is rioting everywhere—my grandmother and Aunt Gwen can’t have mustered up the strength it took to wrestle me still while they plaited it into submission that day—and there are tearstains on my cheeks. My grandmother’s expression is hard as a rock; she’s clearly determined to keep a stiff upper lip. My aunt Gwen is looking down at me, her eyes bugging out with disapproval. Story of my life.

  There’s another picture below it, captioned:

  Sir Patrick and Lady Wakefield opening this summer’s fete a fortnight ago, just days after celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary.

  My mother is cutting a ribbon and beaming, wearing what looks like a linen sundress, sunlight glinting at her throat, her hair caught up in a ponytail. Behind her stands my dad, with me in his arms, my smile almost as wide as my face.

  “I’m really sorry, Scarlett,” Taylor murmurs, clicking off the screen.

  I’m grateful that she did. I couldn’t have torn my eyes from the picture of my mother at the fete. There’s something in it that has made my whole body freeze in shock.

  “That’s what happened just after Jase’s birthday party,” I say numbly. “That’s what made Mr. Barnes start drinking….”

  Taylor’s up from her seat and crossing the room, speaking quickly with the librarian. I sit there, still not moving, staring at the blank screen, until she returns with a mug full of hot milky tea.

  “Lots of sugar,” she says, holding the mug out to me. “I wanted something sweet and he made it for you. He said in England it’s the best thing for a shock.”

  She watches me like a hawk, making sure I’m drinking it all down.

  “He says you’ve got the Wakefield face, by the way,” Taylor adds dryly.

  “We should be getting back.” When I stand up, I’m surprised to find that my legs can still hold me.

  “Not till I’m sure you’re okay,” Taylor insists.

  “Please. I need to get out of here.”

  The bright fluorescent lights of the library, the concerned stare of the librarian behind his desk, the computer still sitting there on the desk with its blank gray screen, everything’s suddenly pressing in on me. I have to escape into the dark evening, where things aren’t so glaring and I can hide a little. Taylor follows hard on my heels, right beside me as I bend down by my bike stand and start unlocking the chain. Outside it’s a full-on winter’s night, damp and chilly with a black cloudy sky overhead.

  “I can’t talk for a bit, okay?” I manage to say to Taylor.

  Thank God, she understands. She nods and unlocks her own bike. Then she makes sure I’ve switched on my lights and rides beside me in silence all the way back to school, not saying a word. But I can feel her attentiveness, the way she pedals her bike next to mine so that she can stop me from riding into traffic.

  My grandmother would give her a medal if she were there to see. The last thing anyone wants, I imagine, is another Wakefield hit-and-run tragedy.

  I’m amazed I can even pedal. That photo of my mother at the summer fete is dancing before my eyes.

  Because in it, the sunlight is shining off the necklace she’s wearing, the exact same necklace that Jase gave to me. The one that’s around my throat right now, tucked in under my wool sweater. I’ve been hiding it ever since Plum taunted me about its being cheap. I didn’t want to hear any further snarky comments, but I couldn’t bear to take it off.

  I can hardly believe the evidence of my own eyes. Somehow, I’ve ended up wearing my mother’s necklace.

  sixteen

  FEELING LIKE A ZOMBIE

  I can’t face going to dinner at school, sitting at table with the rest of the Lower Sixth, with Plum ready to sink her teeth into me once more. I’m sure she’s told everyone about my finding Mr. Barnes’s body, even though my grandmother warned us not to speak of it.

  I tell Aunt Gwen that I’m not feeling well, make myself a sandwich, and take it up to my room.

  I close my bedroom door, lock it, and cross to the mirror, pulling aside the neck of my sweater to examine the necklace once again. The shape is distinctive and unmistakeable. The setting of the stone inside the circle, the delicate chain it’s hanging on, even the precise place it sits on my collarbone—there’s no question in my mind that the necklace Jase gave me a few days ago, the one with the stone whose color exactly matches my eyes, is the same one my mother was wearing at the village fete eleven years ago.

  How did Jase’s mum end up with my mother’s jewelry? I had no idea they even knew each other! And why would my mother have given Dawn a necklace at all, let alone one she liked enough to wear to a big public event like the summer fete?

  My head’s spinning. I sit down at my desk and try to eat my sandwich, but it’s like trying to chew through chalk. My mouth is dry as a bone and I have no appetite, which is almost unprecedented for greedy me.

  I know about how my parents died, of course. It isn’t a secret. I hadn’t quite realized it was a hit-and-run, though. Since I’d never, ever wanted to hear the details of their deaths, I just filed the story away under “accident” and tried not to think about it too much, because it’s so painful. And scary. Accidents are totally arbitrary; your parents can be wiped out, just like that, with no warning, one summer’s after noon, leaving you alone and bereft. Accidents illustrate that you have no control over your life, because from one moment to the next it could be taken away from you.

  It never occurred to me that my parents’ death might not have been an accident. Why would it?

 
But now the thought’s eating away at me. I can’t get it out of my head.

  Eventually, I stand up. Without formulating any kind of plan, feeling like a zombie, I leave my room again and walk slowly downstairs, to Aunt Gwen’s penguin-filled living room.

  She’s eating dinner off a tray in front of the TV, something microwaved and calorie-counted. Her eyes bulge in surprise as she sees me sit down on an armchair, dislodging some penguins.

  “I want to talk about my mum and dad,” I say over the commercial playing on TV.

  Aunt Gwen spits her mouthful of Lean Cuisine Cod Mornay back into the plastic packaging. The half-masticated bite looks exactly the same as the grayish fish portion still lying beneath it. Coughing, she fumbles forward, grabs her glass of water, and takes a swig of it.

  “Coming up on E! True Hollywood Story: Demi Moore,” blares the TV. “How Demi rebounded from a failed marriage and found herself the ultimate boy toy!”

  Glass in one hand, Aunt Gwen frantically reaches for the remote and turns off the TV.

  I’ve never managed to knock Aunt Gwen this much offbalance before. It’s a shame, a small detached voice in the back of my brain observes, that I’m not in any fit state to enjoy it.

  “What’s brought this on?” Aunt Gwen demands, not meeting my eyes.

  “Mr. Barnes’s death, I suppose.”

  I’m not considering my words at all before they issue from my mouth. It’s as if something or someone else is speaking through me.

  “It made me think about my mum and dad,” I continue. “Mr. Barnes died in an accident, and so did they.”

  Aunt Gwen’s mouth is open and flapping like a goldfish’s. I wait to see if she’ll say anything, but she doesn’t, so I go on.

  “No one ever really talked to me about what happened to them,” I say. “I don’t remember that much.”

  “It was a long time ago,” Aunt Gwen says finally. “It was very sad for all of us.”

  “You must really miss my dad,” I press her. “I mean, he was your brother, you grew up together.”

  Her lips purse as if she just tasted something sour.

  “We were close,” she says abruptly. “Before he met your mother. Then he was very much absorbed with her.”

  “And did you like her? My mum?” Keep pushing, the inner voice is saying. Keep pushing till you get somewhere.

  “I really didn’t know her that well,” Aunt Gwen says, staring at the blank TV screen.

  “They lived here for five years,” I say tersely. “Ever since they got married. I was born here. How could you not know her that well?”

  There is a long, long pause. And then Aunt Gwen’s head turns, so she’s looking directly at me for the first time since I sat down in her living room. If I weren’t so insulated by a thick shell of numbness, I’d flinch in fear.

  It’s like that moment in horror films when the demon that has possessed someone’s body finally reveals its presence. The eyeballs flood with black; the head spins round; it speaks in a terrible, grating voice.

  I’ve always known how much my aunt dislikes me. But I’ve never seen her drop her facade so completely and give me the full, chilling, visible evidence that she actually hates my guts.

  “All right, I knew your mother,” she hisses. “And she was no better than she should be. That’s not what you wanted to hear, is it? But it’s the truth. She got hold of your father and grabbed herself a title, and once she’d made sure of him, she started to look around her. It wasn’t enough to have Patrick. She had to make every man around want her. And your father was completely blind. He couldn’t see what was going on right under his nose.”

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Part of me wants to get up and bolt for the door so I don’t have to listen to one single more poisonous word from her. But that clear cold voice inside my head, which has taken me over, is saying:

  She may never let her guard down like this again. Don’t move, and don’t say a word.

  “I felt sorry for him,” she says malevolently. “He’d walk around smiling, without a care in the world. Sir Patrick, lord of all he surveyed, with his grand plans for the farm, and his lovely wife and daughter. It turned my stomach.”

  She pushes her dinner tray farther back on the coffee table.

  “Oh, you’re his, all right,” she adds sarcastically. “You don’t need to worry. You’re the spitting image of them all. She didn’t make that mistake!”

  My eyes widen to the size of saucers. This is so removed from even my wildest speculations about what might have happened in the past that it has the capacity to shock me still further, even on a day so full of horrible revelations.

  But I’m definitely my father’s daughter. Even the librarian said it. I’m a Wakefield, and not even Aunt Gwen can dispute that, much as I’m sure she’d love to.

  “You can’t have been that upset when my mother died, then,” I say coldly. “If she was such a terrible person.”

  I’m expecting her to nod frantically with agreement. What does she have to lose at this stage? But instead she goes very still. I’ve hit a nerve, but I have no idea how or why.

  “I was very surprised,” she says eventually. “It was so unexpected, an accident happening like that. Tragic.”

  “Far too many tragic accidents happen at Wakefield, don’t they?” I hear myself say even more coldly.

  She looks at me now.

  “You mean Mr. Barnes,” she says, her face blank. “That was an accident waiting to happen. He drank like a fish. Poor Kevin.”

  For a moment I debate whether to mention what Dawn told me, about Mr. Barnes’s only starting to drink after my parents’ death. But my attention has been caught and held by her referring to Mr. Barnes by his first name.

  “You and Mr. Barnes were friends.” I’m trying to sound as though I know this already.

  “No!” she retorts at once. “No, we were most definitely not friends!”

  And weirdly, this has the total ring of truth. I believe her completely.

  “We all knew each other growing up,” she continues. “Kevin went to the village school, of course, while your father and I were educated privately. Still, children of the same age, in our holidays … it was impossible to avoid a certain amount of contact. I wouldn’t call it friendship by any means. Your father and he went to the occasional football game together when they were younger. Drinking in the Wakefield Arms. Your father was generally considered to have the common touch.”

  She sniffs dismissively, but I know the common touch is a good thing. It means you can get on with people of all different social classes.

  She looks at me sharply. “That’s why I don’t want you seeing Jase Barnes. It’s all too easy to make friendships in early life that will hold you back as you grow up. Kevin Barnes was overly familiar with your father. It made things difficult.”

  But this doesn’t sound right. If Aunt Gwen was worried about Mr. Barnes’s being too familiar, why did she just call him “poor Kevin”?

  “And what about his wife?” I ask, still keeping my tone flat and even. “Was she too familiar with my father as well?”

  “Her,” Aunt Gwen says between her teeth. “That little mouse, creeping around the grounds, scared of her own shadow. I couldn’t bear the sight of her!” She snorts. “She didn’t last long, did she?”

  She looks at me as if expecting some kind of agreement, almost as if the two of us are friends. This is so bizarre that I can’t help shifting nervously in my seat. I feel the detached interrogator’s expression slip from my face.

  And that’s it. The spell I’ve managed to exert over Aunt Gwen, the one that’s allowing me to ask her all these questions and expect her to give me answers, is broken. Strange, isn’t it? I managed to stay poker-faced through all her insults to my mother and her comments on my parentage. But when she started acting like I was her best mate, that was when I couldn’t keep it together any longer.

  Aggression from Aunt Gwen was manageable. Intimacy was defin
itely not.

  Well, the intimacy didn’t last long. As I recoil, the aggression snaps right back into place, cutting me off before I can show her the necklace as I’d planned.

  “Get out of my living room,” she barks at me, shoving back the tray, standing up and flapping her hands at me as if she were shooing out a stray animal. “You interrupt my dinner, ask me personal questions … I don’t know why I even talked to you about Kevin and Dawn. You’re a thorn in my side, just like your bloody mother. Get out!”

  I stalk out of there halfway through this tirade, but I can hear her voice, high and hateful, following me upstairs, until I slam my bedroom door shut so hard it rocks on its hinges.

  And then I sit on my bed in the dark, shaking from the release of tension, trying to calm my breathing, rocking back and forth like a crazy person in an insane asylum, quivering from head to toe, until finally I kick off my shoes and crawl under the covers, still shaking, and I fall asleep like that, fully dressed.

  seventeen

  SIDEKICKS OR RIVALS

  “Hop!” Miss Carter screeches. “Left leg! Left, Lizzie! Your other left! God give me patience!”

  Sharon Persaud and the hockey girls snicker in unison as Lizzie switches legs in panic and nearly falls over in the process.

  “And … change!” Miss Carter blows her whistle. “Right leg now! All the way across the hockey pitch, come on! Build those quads!”

  Plum, wobbling along at the end of the line like an awkward flamingo, wails, appalled at the thought of making her legs any bigger. Even I crack a smile at this.

  “I’m sure I’m getting my period, Miss Carter,” she pleads for the third time this PE session.

  But Miss Carter, though young, blond, and comparatively pretty, is as tough as old boots and totally unembarrassed about discussions of bodily functions.

  “Nonsense,” she bellows cheerfully. “You said that last week!”

  “I’m very irregular,” Plum says quickly.

  “Best thing for irregular periods—regular exercise!” Miss Carter retorts. “You run your body, it doesn’t run you.”