The Playroom

by Frances Fyfield

  We sit with her in the study. I shall be sitting here for ever in my mind. I thought my own trembling might communicate some movement, but not yet. Downstairs there is someone hammering on the door, voices raised, but too soon for all the help. I know who you are, my sweet: I knew as soon as I saw your hair and I sit here weeping for all my blindness while those around me organize. There is nothing more important than a little life, my own child or anyone else’s, even if it were a life I ignored; why didn’t I know, why didn’t I see? What wickedness, what terrible stupidity. Bring the doctor, yes, yes. If I hold on to this child, I shall warm her. Don’t do this to me, God, you bastard, can’t you see I was learning already? There was never a more hapless, futile weeping, such harsh initiation into priorities. I must stop crying and hold still: tears fall chilly on this shiny cloth and God she needs the warmth. The face of her is familiar, but very, very old. I think in some weird flash of the futility of face-cream. I must hold her tightly, so that she feels the radiant heat of me. Our silly adult lives do not matter, may she please have the choices we have got. Why didn’t I see? He is shouting at the door, Give her back, she’s mine, she’s mine. I shall never give her back.

  Sebastian will be here soon. They will all be here soon.

  She is very cold.

  CHAPTER 23

  Mary got up from her chair and closed the casement window of her bedroom with noisy efficiency. What had once been a bare boudoir was now cluttered, overfurnished with an armchair, clothes strewn carelessly but with some sense of order. Not a tip, to use Mary’s own phrase, but not tidy either. Katherine was curled in the armchair, wearing a track suit of great antiquity, Mary’s from more energetic days. The shiny magazine she was reading fell to the floor as she raised one hand to tuck hair behind her ear. The smile she gave Mary was dutiful, automatic, not quite reaching the eyes, but an attempt nevertheless. Mary was grateful for anything, felt the rising in her of a protection so fierce she wanted to place barriers on the door. Any expression, any concession to life, was preferable to the catatonic state of her sister when first she had walked upstairs. Katherine squinted towards the sunlight from the window, rattled by a gust of autumn wind outside. Her face became anxious and Mary felt alarm.

  ‘What’s the matter, Kath?’

  ‘Those curtains need mending. The hems have all frayed. Can’t have been very good cotton.’

  ‘Or very good sewing,’ said Mary tartly. ‘You made them, remember?’

  ‘Did I? Oh yes. Liberty cotton. Remnants in the sale. You didn’t like them. You wanted blinds.’

  ‘I love them,’ said Mary, stepping up on to a stool by the window and unhooking the material from the rail overhead, ‘so you’d better mend them, OK?’

  ‘All right.’

  Now there was a triumph: little sister presented with a sewing box, looking into the contents as if they were not entirely unfamiliar. Slowly, with all the deliberate movements of a drunk, finding a needle and the wrong-coloured cotton reel, threading the eye with enormous concentration. Picking up the first curtain, turning up the hem again and making great, clumsy tacking stitches. Really, Mary thought, it does not matter how they look.

  ‘I made a whole bedspread once,’ Katherine said inconsequentially.

  ‘So you did. Do you want something to eat, Kath? We never had any lunch.’ She ignored the shudder which shook her sister from neck to feet, the pale face impossibly paler as her head shook a faint negative. ‘Come on,’ Mary coaxed, ‘I mean, nothing much. Toast or something. Eggs and toast soldiers. You know very well that’s the limit of my culinary skills.’

  ‘Bad for you,’ said Katherine automatically, ‘all that cholesterol. Just toast, if you’re really making some.’

  ‘Milky tea?’

  ‘Please.’ The hands were becoming more certain over their work and the tacking stitches were smaller and more precise. Thank God. Not out of the woods, Mary thought, but perhaps beginning to recognize the trees. She sat on the bed, wanting to fold the pyjamas which were Katherine’s apparel for most of the day. Striped and flannelette, Mary’s again since Mary never threw anything away, resurrected and worn uncomfortably, Katherine’s insistence. Katherine saw her sister looking at the pyjamas and looking away.

  ‘I know they make me look like a convict,’ she said calmly, biting the end of the thread. ‘All they need is little arrows on them. Don’t worry, I’ll soon be what I look like when I’m wearing those. Convict.’

  ‘Oh, Kath, stoppit. The lawyer said, well he said, he doubted if . . .’

  ‘I know what he said. I do have ears, you know.’ There was no shade of reproof in the tone. ‘He said it would depend on the charge, and whatever happens, they don’t always put you away. And on what He says, of course.’ He. There were names they could neither of them mention, not even Mary in her newfound courage, her anxious, uncritical, guilty care. There had been a daughter and a father: now there was neither who could be described by forename, although their faces swam into focus with every passing thought. Confused, swollen, poisoned, hungry faces which made Katherine scream in the middle of the night. Mary, awake in unison, the two of them embracing in a way they had never before embraced, even as frightened children. ‘I love you, Kath, here lean on me, I’ll try to do better,’ brushing away the lack of response, meaning every word. So humbling, to see how you had thought you knew someone, to find you had never known them at all.

  ‘Oh well, I’ll make this toast.’ Mary roused herself.

  ‘If they do put me away,’ Katherine continued, determined to avoid the end of the subject which Mary so wished to block, ‘I shan’t mind, you know, and you mustn’t either. It would feel like paying a debt.’

  ‘That’s no way to pay a debt. And I don’t know how punishment comes into it. And we don’t know yet if Jeanetta . . .’

  ‘They’ll be howling for my blood,’ said Katherine. ‘I know what people think. I read these magazines. I sometimes read your paper. There has to be punishment.’

  ‘You don’t mean you won’t even fight . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Katherine, picking up the curtain again, stitching faster. ‘No, I don’t mean that.’

  ‘Why, Kath, why? How did you let him?’ Mary burst out.

  ‘I wanted to go back,’ Katherine said. ‘Back to being little.’

  Mary left the room. She went into the kitchen to prepare some food. Katherine seemed to refuse eating on principle, but she could be persuaded towards the nibbling consumption of scraps. There were stocks of biscuits, sponge cake, cereal, bland carbohydrate, nothing fancier than eggs and Cheddar cheese, nothing which required the heating of a pan of oil or the scent of frying. The cheese was eaten with biscuits, the eggs were boiled, soup came out of a tin. Sophie’s rations were on display, ready for a visit the same afternoon, acting as both a relief and a trial, bringing the kitten in a special basket, the other arm holding a pint of milk and all conversation consisting of nothing but the rigours of her progress from her own house to this. In her merciful unawareness of all but unimportant detail, Sophie was even funny. Ha, ha, not much to laugh at at all, but then Mary’s sense of humour had always been grim. Forbore even the visit of Mrs Harrison with some of Katherine’s clothes. Oh God, the quality of human kindness, like cruelty, was so strange, so completely unexpected. She had never known.

  Katherine sat sewing, streamlining the pain of her thoughts by furious concentration on the stitches, stopping to look round the room. Spartan white walls, awful furniture, none of it as it had once been, offensive. The sort of semi-institutionalized room which was now synonymous with safety, devoid of character and containing nothing other than standard issue, brought in at a discount without thought of taste. She looked down at the cotton of the flimsy curtains. Some of it had made cushions too, she seemed to recall, pretty. Cushions like the sort you shoved down the front of your smock when you where about six, pretending to have a baby. Those were the days. Something from nothing. Those were the days to follow. The room was
hot, making a tiny trickle of perspiration escape from the line of her hair, forcing her to rise reluctantly and open the window cold-blooded Mary preferred closed. The flat was over a garden, with a road running along the side. Further down the road was a school and in the distance, newly released, childish voices were raised in screams, distant footsteps, distant taunts flying and thundering. Katherine closed the window, moved like an automatic toy back to the armchair, sat with eyes closed and heart pounding.

  Something from nothing: nothing from something.

  Sophie tiptoed in, still dressed in her coat, eyes alight with anticipation of tea and company. Seeing the eyes closed, she carefully placed the cat into Katherine’s lap and stood back with satisfaction. She might know nothing else, but cats did things to people, look how. The thing mewed in protest, then simply accommodated itself to a new source of warmth. With a will all of their own, Katherine’s fingers stroked the tabby fur. The cat began to purr and the sounds of the children began to recede from her mind.

  ‘So you aren’t dead then?’ yelled Sophie. ‘Ah, curtains.’

  ‘No,’ Katherine said, kneading her hands gently in the neck of the animal on her knee. ‘Not dead. Not yet.’

  ‘Any news?’ Sophie yelled again.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh dear, dear me. Still, no news is good news.’

  The long fingers paused, tensed. ‘Why did you never warn me, Granny? About what he was like?’

  Sophie shuffled. ‘He was only doing what was sort of done to us, dear. I didn’t know he would. Don’t let’s talk about it now.’

  Mary came in with a tray of tea, weak to be laced with sugar.

  ‘Where there’s life there’s hope,’ intoned Sophie, repossessing the cat. Katherine moved with a greater briskness, picked up the curtain again. ‘I knew a woman once,’ Sophie went on, ‘made her living out of sewing curtains.’ For the first time in the days of their resumed life, Mary saw on her sister’s white face the ghost of determination.

  ‘Well,’ murmured Katherine, ‘you may have just met another.’

  Then she began to cry, holding the printed cloth up to her eyes, a silent, soaking weeping.

  Sophie turned away, hiding her distress. ‘I say,’ she hissed to Mary in a stage whisper, ‘they can’t make her, you know get rid of . . . it? Can they?’

  ‘No, they can’t.’ Katherine surprised them all by a loud voice, tremulous but almost shouting, petulant but determined. ‘They can’t. I want it.’

  Wisely the women kept silent. Mary smiled. They were safe here. Waiting.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FRANCES FYFIELD has spent much of her professional life practicing as a criminal lawyer, work which has informed her highly acclaimed novels. She has been the recipient of both the Gold and Silver Crime Writers’ Association Daggers. She is also a regular broadcaster on Radio 4, most recently as the presenter of the series ‘Tales from the Stave.’ She lives in London and in Deal, overlooking the sea, which is her passion.

  www.francesfyfield.co.uk

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  ALSO BY FRANCES FYFIELD

  A QUESTION OF GUILT

  SHADOWS ON THE MIRROR

  TRIAL BY FIRE

  SHADOW PLAY

  PERFECTLY PURE AND GOOD

  A CLEAR CONSCIENCE

  WITHOUT CONSENT

  BLIND DATE

  STARING AT THE LIGHT

  UNDERCURRENTS

  THE NATURE OF THE BEAST

  SEEKING SANCTUARY

  LOOKING DOWN

  THE PLAYROOM

  HALF LIGHT

  SAFER THAN HOUSES

  LET’S DANCE

  THE ART OF DROWNING

  BLOOD FROM STONE

  COPYRIGHT

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book was previously published in Great Britain in 1991 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd and by Time Warner Paperbacks in 2003.

  THE PLAYROOM. Copyright © 1991 by Frances Hegarty. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition MAY 2014 ISBN: 9780062304148

  Print Edition ISBN: 9780062304964

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