‘You’ll be all right, won’t you?’ Mrs Hooper checked with Caroline. ‘Take your cardy off, if you like – you must be ever so warm.’
‘No, I’m fine,’ Caroline assured, fretting the hole in its sleeve again.
‘Help yourself to anything you want,’ Mrs Hooper told her brightly, not thinking the child intended to take her at her word – Caroline, remembering something she found in the study on a previous visit, thought she might take it away with her this time. ‘But not upstairs, if you don’t mind.’
Upstairs .
The word sparked feelings that prickled the length of Caroline’s arms. Not that there was anything to fear from the sickroom since it had decanted its patient: the frightening Mr Hooper was deep under the earth in St Oswald’s churchyard and couldn’t hurt her now. It was like a scene from Little Red Riding Hood , not that she hung around to exchange niceties with the patient whose breath smelled worse than the bin lorry that crept around Camden’s streets at dawn. Bad enough to think of the sweetish smell and his eyes ferreting her out from the gloom, but the shock of that hand, attached to its cadaverous blue-skinned arm, still made her judder. Knitted with veins, it shot out to grab her legs as she settled his tea tray among the bottles of pills on his bedside cabinet. ‘My ,’ he’d said, in a voice as rusted over as Dora’s Morris Traveller. ‘What googly eyes you have.’ His remark continued to bother her too, and she made sure to check if she was googly in every reflective surface. Was she googly? Was it another sign she was bad? What a thing to tell someone, she thought unhappily; something like that could scar you for life.
Caroline waited until Mrs Hooper had settled herself alongside Joanna on the piano stool before wandering Pludd Cottage’s compact downstairs. Again, in contrast to Dora’s, this dwelling, with its peacock-patterned carpet, was spotless and shipshape. Without the opulence and dusty-topped antiques that dimmed Pillowell’s crowded rooms, the only thing dominating the front room here was a piano.
Reluctant to head out into the heat again, Caroline stood at the window and looked out on the slope of lawn with its clutch of apple trees singing with birds. Unlike Dora’s garden, Mrs Hooper’s was clearly defined by flowerbeds of sweet Williams and hollyhocks that this part of the country was famous for. She saw the swifts were well ensconced. Noisy and gregarious, drowning out Joanna’s lesson, they swept against a sheet of sky so blue it could have come straight out of her box of watercolours. It made her wish she’d brought them with her, there was so much to draw and paint here. But in the chaos that home became after she and Joanna bounced in after a day at school to find their mother comatose on a sofa pebble-dashed in vomit, Caroline had forgotten to pack them.
Before she returned her attention to the room, she noticed a creature no bigger than a Labrador step daintily into view: fascinating, the glassy-gleam of its huge eye, before it leapt to freedom.
‘I just saw a deer.’ Caroline poked a finger into an ashtray heaped with Gordon’s spent cocktail cigarettes; incongruous amid the neatness, they were the only disorderly things she’d seen.
‘You what, luvvie?’ Mrs Hooper, continuing to direct Joanna to the right keys.
‘A deer. In your garden.’ Caroline cleaned her finger off on her dungarees.
‘Oh, a muntjac ,’ Mrs Hooper furnished her with the foreign-sounding word. ‘Flamin’ nuisance, chew my apple trees … It’s foxes I love. That’s it, one, two, pass your thumb under … ’ She returned to Joanna.
Caroline circled the room, picking up anything that caught her fancy, humming idly along to the background melody.
‘You’ve a pretty voice,’ Lillian told her.
‘What’s the tune called?’ Caroline flushed bright red under the low-key compliment. Unaccustomed to any kind of praise, she leant down to stroke Laika lolling on a cushion with doggy paw prints.
‘“The Little Lark” – there’s words, if you want to sing?’ Mrs Hooper took the tune from Joanna, played it fluidly from beginning to end.
Caroline shook her head, preferring the crop of photographs she’d found. The large prints in silver frames of Mrs Hooper in floor-grazing dresses, holding bouquets of flowers, the points of her shiny shoes poking out like exclamation marks.
‘Why have you got photos of Jo?’ Caroline, avoiding snaps of a small, dark Gordon, fired her arrow of a question into the room. Tinged with envy, believing it to be yet another example of favouritism, the arrow was directed squarely at Mrs Hooper’s head.
‘Sorry, luvvie – what was that?’
Caroline indicated to a black and white picture of a pretty little girl. ‘They look a bit old, I know, but they’re Jo, aren’t they?’
The room fell silent.
‘No, luvvie … ’ Mrs Hooper answered. ‘Those are of my daughter … Ursula.’ She swallowed the emotion quivering at the back of her throat. ‘She died long before either of you were born. Although, now you mention it, there are similarities, aren’t there?’ Mrs Hooper tipped sideways to look at Joanna. Memories of Ursula’s funeral rushed at her, and she saw herself raw as a December morning in her mother’s black shawl: no one came near her; it was as if the terrible disease that took her child had infected her too.
‘You must miss her.’ Caroline was concerned she’d said the wrong thing.
‘Ursula was a joy, gifted on the piano too, so –’ a tap of Joanna’s pudgy little knee – ‘that’s why it’s so lovely to have you to teach. You’ve such a talent.’ Mrs Hooper, grateful to steer the conversation into safer waters. ‘Right, how about an F major scale while I give your sister a reading.’
‘I love your garden,’ Caroline said, and sat on a couch the colour of winter clouds.
‘Thank you.’ Mrs Hooper smiled. ‘Have you a garden in London?’
‘No.’ Caroline manipulated the sleeve of her cardigan again. ‘We had one in Primrose Hill – but Mummy had to sell that house after Daddy died.’
Poor little mites, Lillian thought; what sorrow they’ve known in such tiny lives. How was that fair? She flicked her regret from Caroline to Joanna and back again. But with her mind still hovering with her own dead child, she couldn’t express herself further.
‘Dora gets Dean to mow the lawn,’ Caroline told the sadness held in the folds of skin above Mrs Hooper’s eyes.
A snigger from the piano. ‘He don’t do much of a job.’
‘Yes, he does.’ Caroline jumped to Dean’s defence. ‘He does what he can, the place is a tip.’ She pictured the constricting corridor of shrubs, the tree-high hedge … the horses she should have fed the apple cores and carrot tops Dora saved in the colander on her drainer, worrying they’d think she’d forgotten them.
‘It’s not a tip,’ Mrs Hooper said, believing it to be what she should say, rather than feeling it. The juxtaposition between filth and frill in Dora Muller’s holiday home had always bothered her. ‘She does her best – Pillowell’s not the only place she’s got to maintain, she’s got her flat in Bayswater too, remember.’
The girls fell into a contemplative silence and listened to the song of a blackbird close to the window.
‘Anyway.’ Mrs Hooper reached for Caroline’s hands: tenderly, slowly, as if she were ill. ‘You got a boyfriend?’
Joanna, a ripple of giggles. ‘No, she don’t; she loves Dean.’ Bolstered by Mrs Hooper, Joanna was free to tease without fear of reprisals. ‘She wants to marry him.’
‘Dean ?’ Lillian’s turn for incredulity. She looked at Caroline’s hands and winced at the ravaged nails. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said more fiercely than intended. ‘That Dean’s a wrong ’un – you’re to keep away from him.’
‘A wrong ’un ?’ Caroline, finished with scowling at her sister, tested the word. ‘What d’you mean?’
Mrs Hooper frowned as she studied Caroline’s palms. ‘The police are always after him for something.’ Drug dealing, petty theft … she lists to herself, unwilling to share his wrongdoings with the children. ‘He’s a blooming nuisance, revving his motorbike all hou
rs of the day and night, disturbing the village – this was a sleepy little place before he turned up.’
‘It’s still sleepy, though, isn’t it?’ Caroline thought of the continuous noise of London.
‘That’s as may be, but there’s people here who wish he’d go back to where he came from.’ Caroline noted, not for the first time, the striations around Mrs Hooper’s mouth whenever Dean Fry cropped up in conversation.
‘But he’s nice to me, and we’ve loads in common.’ Such was Mrs Hooper’s disapproval, Caroline was afraid to divulge Dean’s intention to ask her out, and prayed Joanna kept her mouth shut. ‘His mummy died when he was little too – like Daddy did. He knows what it feels like.’
‘When did he tell you this?’ Mrs Hooper quizzed.
‘At the pub.’ Caroline stared at the carpet, tried to put the configuration of bright blue peacocks into some kind of order.
‘The pub ?’ Mrs Hooper was appalled. ‘Dora lets you go there?’
‘I collect glasses and stuff.’ Caroline wiped her nose on her hand, assessed the snail trail it left behind on her skin. ‘I help Liz with the washing up.’
‘Lovely woman, Liz,’ Mrs Hooper said vaguely. ‘That Dean … she can’t control him. He runs her ragged.’
‘He said he liked it better before Liz came along. When it was just him and his dad.’
‘Did he now?’ Mrs Hooper gripped Caroline’s hands: a pair of upturned clams that, closing over, needed to be intermittently prised open. ‘You watch yourself with him, okay? Just because he’s handsome – well, actually, especially because he’s handsome.’
The sisters swapped puzzled looks.
‘Has Gordon got a girlfriend?’ Joanna, stumbling over the notes, wanted to know.
‘Girlfriend ? Gordon ?’ A chuckle. ‘No, no girlfriend. Certainly not one he’s told his mother about, anyway.’
‘Dora wants him to be her boyfriend.’ Caroline dropped the titbit into the tightening awkwardness.
Mrs Hooper ignored the comment, saying instead, ‘Nothing to see, my love.’ And concluding her palmistry session before it properly began, snapped Caroline’s hands shut like book covers. ‘It happens sometimes, I’ll try another day,’ she promised, but clearly disturbed by whatever it was she’d seen, turned away to rearrange her face.
At that moment came the unmistakable crunch of tyres on gravel.
‘Oh.’ Mrs Hooper sprung to her feet. The sisters, identifying the trepidation in her tone, strained their necks to it. ‘Gordon’s home.’
Laika tipped herself out of her bed and raced away. Claws scrabbling the kitchen floor, barking wildly. Caroline didn’t move. A hand curled around the snow globe pinched from Mrs Hooper’s study and buried within the thick folds of her cardigan, she squeezed so hard, she feared it might crack clean in two.
Summer 1990
When Ellie called round the following afternoon carrying her roller skates, it took the sisters a moment to get used to her being a couple of inches shorter.
‘It’s my birthday Saturday,’ she bubbled excitedly on Pillowell’s doorstep. ‘I’m going to be ten years old.’
‘We know.’ Caroline yawned. ‘It’s all you’ve gone on about.’
‘Here,’ Ellie said, ignoring Caroline and beaming at Joanna. ‘These are for you.’ And she handed over her old roller skates.
‘You’re not wearing them now.’ Caroline was fearful of being left out. ‘We agreed, we’re going to the church today to show Ellie the Book of the Dead – even though I still can’t believe no one told you it was there. You still want to see it, don’t you?’
Ellie nodded, but looked unsure.
The girls followed a narrow footpath that eventually widened into a meadow. Wedged between woodland shimmering silver under the bullying heat, the way ahead was littered with dead trees, vast as dinosaurs, stretched out in the tussocky grass. Scattering a cluster of nervous ewes, the cries of lambs almost as big as their mothers, they watched them in the pearly light. They liked the sheep; liked the snags of wool they left behind on the briar and bramble, and equated their muzzles to the downy heads of sow thistle Mrs Hooper identified in the hedgerow.
‘D’you like butter?’ Ellie plucked a sunny buttercup, held it under Joanna’s chin and was in the middle of confirming she did when a rabbit bounded out from a patch of waist-high thistles. Fascinated, they didn’t dare move as it rested on its back legs and surveyed its surroundings. Until one of them sneezed. An involuntary sound that triggered the rabbit’s quick-flash reaction, and it bolted to safety.
‘Oh, look … ’ Skipping along without her wheels, Ellie jabbed the air. ‘A bunch of cows.’
‘Herd of cows,’ Caroline corrected.
‘Course I’ve heard of cows.’ Ellie, suitably insistent. ‘I just said – there’s a bunch of them over there.’
Placid and liquid-eyed, the cows stood guard over their dozing offspring, swishing their rope-like tails. The Jameson sisters were wary, and wrinkled their urban noses at the plate-sized dung pats, admitting that apart from the horses, they’d only seen creatures this huge behind bars at Regent’s Park Zoo. Ellie was familiar with these farm animals and it was good to have the upper hand for a change. Sensitive to Joanna’s wariness towards her sister, she too had a tendency to tiptoe around Caroline, a little afraid of the girl that her mother warned ‘had a mood that could spin on a sixpence’.
‘It is all right, isn’t it?’ Joanna queried. ‘Dora said to watch out if the cows have got babies with them.’
‘It will be if we get a sodding move on.’ Caroline, in control again, whisked them through an excited swarm of midges and onwards to the church, its spire spearing the mantle of trees, skewering it to the heavens.
At the sound of a strimmer from the perimeters of the churchyard, the children rotated their heads in unison to see Frank Petley, with large sweat stains drenching the underarms of his shirt. He was giving the nettles and brambles snaking in from the wild their monthly going over and lifted his goggles to sneak a look in their direction. Not that they acknowledged him, preferring to throw their gazes to the high-sided vicarage, to the top-floor window and Cecilia Mortmain, who was always there. Caroline raised a timid hand to Cecilia, her heart ballooning with joy to have her wave reciprocated. She smiled at the silliness of things, the smallness of things: things that meant the world to a girl who believed herself unlovable. And with a squeeze of pity for the pretty lady who didn’t look well, Caroline thought of her sitting alone, watching the world turn from her upstairs room, and half-wondered if she should call round one day and see her.
Beyond its vast storm doors, the church smelled of damp stone, its breath cold from years of failed prayers and soul-searching. This was where God was hiding, they thought independently, and stepped inside. The book Caroline was keen to share with their summertime companion was as heavy as an infant. And, establishing the coast was clear – the tallest and always in charge – she balanced aboard the rickety stool Tilly Petley sat on to turn Mrs Hooper’s sheet music. In grave danger of overreaching herself, she wobbled from side to side as she stretched to tug the book from its tomb of greasy hymn books and pigeon droppings. Joanna and Ellie waited, hands clamped like limpets to their mouths, trapping the anxiety that always trembled in their throats when they were with Caroline.
Ellie and Joanna tasted the dust and mouldiness as they watched their leader climb the pulpit and lower the book on the lectern. Looking over her shoulder as pages were turned on a gruesome world none of them fully understood, they listened to Caroline embroidering its history the way Dora had done, repeating the remembered words to explain the fetish the Victorians had with photographing their dead.
‘These were the people who died when part of the tunnel collapsed on them,’ she informed Ellie, enjoying the way her voice rang out authoritatively as she identified the frilled collars and caps, the neatly combed hair, the silt-blackened nostrils. How some had their eyelids closed in readiness for the stuttering cam
era lens, while others stared blindly with expressions of wonderment and awe. ‘They were scrubbed clean of the rock and mud that suffocated them, then dressed in borrowed finery and photographed to meet their maker.’
All Joanna could think through her sister’s drone was how utterly dead they were; these mothers and fathers and children and babies. But what were children and babies doing in the tunnel, she had wanted to ask, but there was no one to ask, and she wanted Caroline to shut up. Death was a place, she thought, a far away, shifting place where these people had gone. It was where her father had gone, and she would go there one day and see him again. It was probably what her mother believed too, except she just wanted to get there more quickly, Joanna supposed, and that’s why she took those tablets.
Caroline, in contrast, thought it marvellous that such ordinary people could be transformed into beautiful, sleeping angels after suffering such brutal ends. She hoped someone would dress her up in pretty things when she died, and wondered why no one thought to take pictures of their father after he’d been pulled from the sea.
Equally fascinated, Ellie looked on without a sound. Unflinching and not the least perturbed by the peculiar ensembles of families as dead-eyed as the dolls she played with at home. They were neatly arranged on plush upholstery, leaning into one another on tasselled cushions and throws, the likes of which these poor dead souls would never have known when living. Only when Caroline turned the final plate and Ellie saw what lay buried between the last page and its hardback cover, did her stomach tighten.
A Polaroid of Ellie on her roller skates. Taken only two days ago. Joanna recognised her bubble-gum pink legwarmers and pinpointed it exactly. Startling, unsettling and wrong; the shock made Ellie’s heart beat faster. What did it mean? No one spoke; each seemingly as frightened as the others to touch the incongruous square of plastic as they were to break the spell of unexpected pure, white light pouring in through the large plain windows. A light so bright it bleached out shadow. Caroline whipped the Polaroid out, then shut the book; the creak of its cover reverberated through the hush that closed over them like the lid of a coffin.
A Place to Lie Page 9
