Separation, The

by Jefferies, Dinah

17

  I imagined Mr Oliver lying dead on the bedroom floor, and longed for Billy to come. I had a wee in the corner, then comforted myself by thinking of him. He usually appeared and disappeared quickly, all part of his ambition to be a magician. He was building up the props he needed, bit by bit, and had already got a top hat and a pack of cards. I’d promised to help him make a black cape with silver stars and a purple lining. Mum had taught me how to use a needle and thread and it couldn’t be all that hard.

  Billy’s ambition was something I understood. I practised stories on him and in return, he tried magic tricks on me. I gulped back a sob. It would take more than a magic trick to get me out of the fix I was in.

  It got dark, the damp mouldy smell of the barn filling up the air. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the barn bursting with shiny leaves and ferns, and bright blue birds flying through the air. But all I could think of was Mr Oliver’s furious face and his bloody neck and hands.

  When I woke I didn’t remember where I was, until the memory of what happened punched me in the stomach. I was thirsty but there was nothing to drink, so I curled up in a corner of the barn instead, and buried my head in my hands until I heard the voices of Father and Veronica. Then I made myself tiptoe to the edge and peered over to make certain it was them. Three faces stared up. They must have forced Billy to tell, because he was at the bottom of the ladder too, red faced, the corners of his mouth held down in a scowl.

  I backed down the ladder and stood itching and scratching at the bottom. Billy hung his head, wouldn’t look at me, just sniffed and wiped his nose on his holey jumper. I glanced at Dad. With a stiff look about the face, his hands were bunched in fists. I was so scared I peed myself and felt warmth spread down my inside thigh. My father saw the dark stain appear on my skirt, and his mouth became a hard straight line.

  Veronica knelt down, curls untidy, face as white as ash and her eyes pink. She spoke gently. ‘Emma. Tell us what happened. Why did you do it?’

  If Mum was like fire, she was like water, gentle and sweet, but I couldn’t speak.

  My father took over. ‘For heaven’s sake, child, cat got your tongue? Whatever possessed you to stab Mr Oliver?’

  I hung my head.

  ‘Well, all I can say is, you’re lucky Sidney hasn’t gone to the police.’

  At least he’s not dead, I thought.

  ‘Don’t think you’re getting off scot-free,’ Dad said, and took me by the elbow.

  Back home, he marched me up to my bedroom, then locked the door. It wasn’t fair. Mr Oliver should be the one in trouble, not me. I opened my mouth to say, but the thought of saying the words made me feel sick.

  ‘You’ll stay in your room,’ Dad called out from the landing, and slammed his fist against the door.

  I tensed, afraid of what might happen next. Was it my fault? Had I done something to make it happen?

  After a bit, Veronica brought up a tray of Bournvita and two Cadbury’s orange sandwich biscuits. My eyes filled with tears.

  She leant close and patted my leg. ‘Don’t cry. Sidney isn’t badly hurt. It looks worse than it is. Bit like your dad – bark worse than his bite. It’ll be all right.’

  I noticed her narrow wrist bones and small white hands. She’d changed into a dress with yellow flowers and sort of fixed her hair, but the pins were loose and the lines on her face showed. I felt an ache in my throat. I wanted to ask her how it would be all right, but didn’t dare. I knew she was being kind – more than I deserved – but it could never be all right ever again.

  They moved Fleur’s bed out of the room. I was to sleep alone. Gran crept up while Dad was out, unlocked the door ever so quietly and padded into the room, her finger to her lips. Then she sat on the bed beside me and gave me a cuddle. A beam of sunlight shone on her, and I saw how old and worn she was, her face a mass of wrinkles bunching up. I hung my head. She was so small and it was all my fault.

  ‘Emma, my duck. Tell me what happened?’

  She’d spoken very quietly and I felt tears welling again. I wanted to say, but the words just stuck.

  Gran handed me two bars of Cadbury’s. ‘Make them last, my love. And be sure not to tell your dad.’

  ‘What’s going to happen, Gran?’

  She nodded and tightened the strings of her apron. Somehow the tighter it went the more baggy looking she was.

  ‘They’re looking for a boarding school for you.’

  My face fell. ‘Dad and Granddad?’

  ‘No, dear. Your father and Veronica. Very concerned for your welfare, she is. Lucky for you she’s not a bit cross about her brother.’

  I frowned. What did that mean? Did she know what her brother was like? If she suspected him, maybe things wouldn’t be so bad for me.

  I sniffed and looked in Gran’s deep blue eyes. ‘Why does he hate me?’

  ‘Who, dear?’

  ‘Dad. Why does he hate me?’

  Gran looked flustered and stood up to smooth out her apron. She sighed and I thought she was going to cry.

  ‘It’s not you, dear, but there are things you don’t understand.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Maybe when you’re older, sweetheart … now, ducks, you must eat humble pie for a bit. Your father has a lot of worries and he’s doing his best. Never forget that. Make sure not to cheek him and everything will turn out all right. I promise. But, Em, dear, you must learn to curb that temper. Do you promise?’

  I hung my head, but her words made me think. Was my father as bad as I made out, or, like a baddy in one of my stories, had I invented a character for him? Was it me who was wrong and not him at all? And how did anyone ever know who was really right? That question bothered me more than I can say.

  ‘Well, the proof of the pudding …’ Gran said, and looked at me with a funny expression, then kissed me on the forehead. ‘Good girl. Now remember, not a word. I’ll put the radio on in the kitchen, so you don’t feel too lonely. It’s Music While You Work now, but maybe Lonnie Donegan will be on Pick of the Pops.’

  I smiled wanly. ‘Or Bill Hayley.’

  ‘That’s the spirit. I’ll turn it up so you can hear. All right, ducks?’

  ‘Can Fleur come up and play snakes and ladders?’

  ‘Oh, Fleur’s going, my dear, for a little while, staying with Veronica while your father sorts things out. She’s taking her to the optician on Tuesday.’

  My heart sank. What about her birthday? Fleur and I weren’t especially close but we were sisters and I supposed I loved her. It had never occurred to me before that Mr Oliver might do to her what he’d done to me. Surely Father would notice if anything was wrong? He hadn’t noticed with me, but Fleur was his favourite and I sometimes even wondered if Fleur missed Mum.

  Before Gran went downstairs I asked her if Mum was ever going to come.

  ‘I don’t know, dear. Only what you know. Just what your dad says.’

  ‘But why would she take so long?’

  Gran shrugged, said she couldn’t remember, and even Dad didn’t know. I groaned and stretched out on my bed.

  Gran called Fleur up.

  ‘I’ll leave you two to say goodbye,’ she said, when Fleur came in, and left the door ajar.

  I looked up at Fleur who stood just inside the door, shuffling her feet. I asked if she missed Mum. She said she had Veronica and Granny, so what was the point. Her answer bothered me.

  ‘Mealy, don’t you love Mummy? Don’t you long for the long grass?’

  Fleur wasn’t speaking. I had to wait. I’d learnt to wait. First, when she was small and couldn’t catch up, then when she was slow to learn to talk. Now I waited because it took her time to say what she meant.

  ‘I do, Em. I do.’

  ‘But you don’t cry.’

  She bit her lip.

  I stood up and stared at her. ‘But don’t you remember the island, Fleur?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘But you must. How can you forget?’ I saw the silvery coastline of
our island holidays. ‘You must remember when jellyfish stung Mummy? And how we had to watch where we put our feet.’

  Fleur hung her head and wouldn’t look up.

  ‘You remember the coconut trees, don’t you? And how you were scared of the breakers.’

  ‘I wasn’t scared,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘So you do remember! I knew you did. When Dad and I ran in and out, you made sandcastles and Mum swam nude.’

  ‘Shut up, Emma. Stop it. Stop going on about Mummy.’ She ran from the room and slammed the door.

  I didn’t go after her, even though I heard her sobbing in the bathroom, and it was me who’d made her cry.

  After a while, I decided I wanted all my favourite things with me, if I was to be sent away. I got out my box of treasures and built a pile. My notebook, for observations, some old black beads of Mum’s, a lovely purple and orange marble and my bristle hair brush. I had to brush my hair a hundred times each day. Most precious was my fountain pen, and bottle of Quink. At school we used a horrid wooden pen. It had a scratchy metal nib with a slit at the end. You had to dip it into a little inkwell in the desk every few words and it dripped, so all my work ended up covered in blots.

  I sat cross-legged on the floor and poked at my stuff, tears prickling the back of my lids. There was a sound in the hall. Dad. I threw everything in, dumped the box in the wardrobe, and noticed a pink rabbit ear sticking out from where it had got lost beneath a tartan blanket. I pulled the rabbit out to give to Fleur to take to Veronica’s, and made an effort to hold my face like a well-behaved little girl.

  18

  Lydia had no recollection of her stay in hospital. No memory of waiting for her smoke burnt lungs to heal, no memory of the journey up to the rest house, nor her wild dart through the embers of the building. When Jack tried to speak about the children, she turned her face to the wall. For a week he fed her, forcing her to swallow, and when she couldn’t sleep, he read to her. She heard the sounds but couldn’t understand the words. Instead she stared into a past where her children lived and breathed, where they smiled and laughed and argued in the way they did.

  Mummy, come and see. Mummy, watch us. We’re dancing.

  In an atmosphere of artificial calm they dressed her cuts and burns, then sedated her. When they opened the shutters for the first time, she lay blinking, blinded by the light. Under the midday sun she dreamt of escape, deep into the trees, where she could fall into one of the dark streams and feel the water close over her head.

  She heard Jack murmuring to a doctor. ‘Clearly an intense heat, signs of flashes, and traces of accelerants placed right round the building, which means multiple points of origin.’ She listened as his words carried on. ‘Fire investigation now complete. Terrorist activity, aided by wind direction. No identifiable bodies.’

  ‘Stop!’ she shouted. ‘Stop!’ She pulled up her knees, covered her ears with her hands and rocked back and forth. Two nurses, one on either side, tried to force her back down. She freed her right arm and lashed out, but a nurse managed to slide a needle into her thigh. On the other side of the room Jack gulped back sobs, tears pouring down his cheeks. One by one the lights went out. What was the matter with Jack, she wondered, as she slipped inside the walls of a cold underwater world, which she shared with silver fish and overgrown terrapins.

  On the morning she woke from dreams of palm trees and white sands, she heard tapping feet in the corridor outside her room, and heavy rain thundering on the roof. She wanted to shut her eyes and for them all to be gone, stretch out on white hospital sheets and for that to be an end to it. When they came in, she shook to discover she’d been wandering and spinning for weeks. Though time had inched past, it appeared to have gone in a flash. She looked up from her hospital pillows and saw a row of yellow flowers on the windowsill. A man with concerned eyes stood beside her bed.

  ‘Can I go home now?’ she asked, and took a sip of lukewarm tea.

  The man nodded. ‘Mr Harding’s here to collect you. The burns are healing and your lungs will be right as rain in a few weeks.’

  She caught her breath. ‘Harding?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘Oh, you mean Jack.’

  As soon as Jack came into the room with a look of worry behind his smile, her tears welled up.

  ‘Tell me it isn’t true,’ she said. ‘Please, Jack.’

  She watched him swallow.

  ‘Lydia –’

  ‘I have to know for certain. Can you go to Ipoh? Or phone George? He’ll know. Ask him. Please, Jack.’

  ‘I’ve already done both. I’m so sorry, but the children were there. George had it firsthand. Alec had not been allocated a house, and there’s been no further record of them anywhere else.’

  ‘Maybe they went to Borneo?’

  ‘Lydia, Alec and the girls were at the rest house. George says there’s no doubt whatsoever. They died in the fire.’

  On their way to the plantation the heavy rain turned into clammy, warm mist, and she was aware of a deep nostalgia for England and steady English rain. Her daughters’ images ran through her mind, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. She had no control of her emotions. Grief clawed at her chest, unrelenting, sent tears dripping down her cheeks, and was followed by hollow wordless fury. She stared straight ahead, not caring to go on living in a world in which it was possible for her children to die. One day you have a family and then you don’t. How could that be? She thought of Em’s stories, and slammed her fists into her eyes.

  Maz slept on his own in the spare room. She chose to sleep with Jack: sleep, nothing more, though she feared them in her sleep, feared them waking from graves they had not lain in and turning accusing eyes on her. Jack held her hot sweating body when she cried out in defence. I didn’t know, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. By day she remained curled up in bed, longing for oblivion, her face buried in the pillow to soak up the tears. How do people survive, she thought, how do they exist?

  It was the physical pain that forced her to move. She showered with slow deliberate movements, her body stiff, doubled up like an old lady. She rubbed the steam from Jack’s shaving mirror, examined the fragile woman who looked back at her, poked the waxy skin, stared at the eyes sunk back in their sockets. Where had she gone? Nothing about her looked the same, but for the one eyebrow higher than the other. She raised and lowered it, then spun round hearing their voices, did not imagine it, heard them clearly inside of her. It’s all right, darlings, Mummy’s here. But it wasn’t all right, and Mummy had not been there.

  She shaved her legs with Jack’s razor, selected a cool linen skirt and emerald blouse and went outside to wait for breakfast. The sun was blazing in a bright blue sky. She breathed in and out slowly, aware for the first time that she was hungry.

  An Indian woman in a bright sari came out, carrying a tray.

  ‘Where’s Lili?’ Lydia asked.

  The woman shrugged. ‘My name is Channa.’

  Lydia slowly chewed dry rice biscuits and oversweetened mango jam, felt she couldn’t drink, but then held up her cup for more coffee. Maz sat opposite, watching silently.

  She looked at him, noticed he’d grown taller and his hair was wild. He was so alive. How was it possible for Emma and Fleur to be dead? How could they be when he was still alive? When she was still alive. She could not stop the memories. The morning she’d left to go to Suzanne replayed in her mind. If there’d just been a sign. If she hadn’t taken Suzanne’s call. If she’d got to Ipoh in time. If she had only said something more than just goodbye.

  Heat flooded her veins. None of it made sense. Somebody had to pay, somebody more than the faceless Chinese insurgents who had set fire to the rest house, somebody she could look in the eyes and scream at.

  The burst of rage took her by surprise. Her fingers resting at the edge of the breakfast table suddenly stiffened, she closed her eyes, and with a shout she pushed the entire table over. As it tipped, coffee cup, plate, jam and biscuits slid off. She heard the crash and spl
atter on the veranda floor, heard Maz yelp and leap out of the way. She hung her head, kept her eyes closed, longed for her girls with the kind of longing that led nowhere, that could only bounce back at her and drive her crazy. When she opened her eyes, there was nothing. Just the day, the dust, the damp smell of the trees, and jam.

  Channa came out with a broom and dustpan.

  ‘Sorry,’ Lydia said, and the woman looked at her with wide-set slanting eyes, but did not speak.

  She listened to the creaks of the rubber trees and creatures stirring in the nearby branches. Tales the gardener used to tell the girls slipped in and out of her mind, and the way the children shrieked with delight when he did. Mummy. Mummy.

  Maz looked at her with enormous sad eyes. She held out a hand to him and he let her squeeze his hand. They smiled at each other, and briefly, it was how it had been before. She knew it wasn’t fair on Maz, and worried that he must have run wild while she was in hospital. He went back to the kitchen and she heard him chattering with Channa’s son, Burhan. Hopefully he’d be happy counting stones or searching for butterflies with his friend.

  The days stretched ahead. An image of a smart European woman she knew in Malacca came to mind. What was her name? Ah yes, Cicely. She’d sent a card. So sorry not to come, she’d said, but I’m just off travelling in Australia. Lydia didn’t want her anyway. Didn’t want anyone. It had been Cicely who warned her off Jack right at the start. An image of Jack naked flashed in her mind. Probably jealous. Gin and tonic, tinkle of ice, slice of lemon; a discreet before lunch drinker. It gave her an idea. A way for memories to be erased.

  The drinks cabinet revealed an unopened bottle but no tonic. She hurried to the sombre kitchen.

  ‘Tonic?’ She held up the bottle and shook it. ‘For the gin?’

  No reply. The woman shrugged. Lydia pulled open the door of the fridge. A tall American refrigerator run on kerosene. Plenty of beer. She tried the small larder off the sooty kitchen, wrinkled her nose at the odour of overripe pineapple, but spied boxes piled in the corner. Careless of potentially deadly spiders carried in the spiralling dust, she pulled out two cases of beer and one containing soft drinks, then dragged it to the lounge.