Dick was straddling the chair, his flies undone, holding his penis in his hand, thrusting it against her mouth. Flaccid, purple, grimy, nuzzling her cheek as she twisted her head away. He pinched her jaw in one huge, gloved hand, forcing her lips apart, stuck his penis in, his belly ballooning round her face. Vomit rose in her throat. He thrust, lazily, almost absent-mindedly. Then he looked at his member in dim surprise at its lack of compliance, did not persist. The smell of him was overpowering. He grunted, zipped up his trousers furtively, looked over his shoulder as the engine revved outside. As one final action to appease his disappointment he caught hold of her cotton nightdress, ripped it to the waist, pinched one nipple between thumb and forefinger, painfully hard. She screamed.
In the background, throughout it all, there were shouted instructions, and, over the sound of the music, the noise of her mother, clapping her hands, like a child at a pantomime, her voice rising into a high shriek of utter hilarity. Saliva dribbled down Isabel’s chin. The laughter continued.
A different smell now, cleaner. Bob, leaning over the chair designed for the nursing of children, fumbling with the bonds. Speaking. ‘Sorry about that,’ he was muttering.
Perhaps she fainted for a minute, perhaps oblivion mercifully arrived on demand, but it seemed to her later that she had remained where she was for a long time. Enough for the first shock to recede, the spittle to dribble on to her chest and a self-protective anger to follow in a great white-hot surge which had her screaming over that bloody music, wrenching her hands free. The kitchen swam into focus, candles still burning. Someone had trodden on her bare toes. The pain brought life. Her eyes sought out her mother.
There she was, standing by the door, one arm across her chest, the other waving goodbye into the darkness like a wistful child. As she waved, her body swayed in tune with some long-remembered dance.
Isabel’s fingers and toes were as cold as snow, her head wet with perspiration. She could not coordinate her movements; nothing worked to order. Yet she limped over to where the ancient one stood, grabbed hold of the neck of her coat and slapped her face. Once, twice, four times before she lost count. The knuckle of her right index finger caught the outcrop of eyebrow: she could feel that, sensed damage being done, skin torn, and then she stopped. It was impossible to imagine that her hands had done that. Serena’s face swam before hers as something hideous, requiring destruction. Isabel was not horrified for the moment, merely temporarily satisfied.
Serena staggered, fell against the door frame, then righted herself. Her hands came up to embrace her purpled face: she closed her eyes as she felt the left one, gingerly. Tears formed. Her head wobbled dangerously on her neck.
‘What did I do?’ she asked, clearly bewildered. ‘What did I do?’
The room was still blurred. Serena’s ability to speak worked on Isabel’s mind like one more insult, enraging her. Her own tongue felt like an obstruction inside her mouth, preventing words.
‘It’s what you – didn’t do – you filthy-minded old cow!’ Isabel yelled and then found herself shaking so hard she could not speak at all. She leaned on the table to keep her balance, looked around, shaking her head unsteadily, trying to suppress the panic and find some clue as to what to do next. Something, before she shook to pieces. She wanted to lie down on the floor, but the floor, she noticed, was filthy. Someone had to tell her what to do. She could not think of it herself.
Serena turned on the light, moved uncertainly towards the candles on the table, blew them out, one by one. With enormous difficulty and greater reluctance. Three, four puffs each. Smoke idled in the air. The tape came to an end.
‘They forgot these,’ she said sadly, gesturing to the silver candlesticks.
Isabel burst into uncontrollable laughter. Spasms of it shook her naked breasts. Loud, hysterical giggles rising to screams, descending into barks and yelps, on and on, choking her. She staggered against the stove, recoiled from the warmth, collided with the chair on which she had sat, leaped out of it and cracked her knee against the table.
‘Take a deep breath, I would.’ Serena’s disinterested instruction had an effect.
The room settled into its familiar contours, reminding Isabel of duties, obligations and the panacea of little, familiar tasks. It was imperative not to stay still. Without any conscious thought she knew that in movement she would find sanity of a kind. If she did not move, she would freeze in this attitude. She would simply freeze.
With slow steps, she went to the sink and doused her face with water. Put on the kettle, found her dressing-gown and buttoned it, making her fingers work. While the kettle made reassuring noises she found a hot-water bottle with a fleecy cover, gave it to her mother to hold while she herself made tea. The water splashed everywhere; the finding of milk and sugar was an almost insurmountable task. There was a sense of triumph in achieving it. The cup made a loud noise against her teeth. Somewhere in the course of all this, with the deliberate steps of a puppet, she looked for the telephone: it must have gone with the van. She made Serena sip the tea and escorted her to bed with another hot-water bottle. She found witch hazel in the bathroom, soaked a pad of cotton wool and applied it to the injured face where one eye was puffed like a purple balloon. Her touch was trembling, full of revulsion. She marvelled at herself, encouraged herself, muttered under her breath; good girl, good girl.
Serena took all remarks as being addressed to herself. She was utterly cooperative, consented to the wearing of bedsocks and snuggled down sweetly.
‘They danced with me,’ she said, over and over again. ‘They danced with me.’
Her eyes closed.
Isabel’s could not. She dressed in the dark, piling on three layers of sweaters with the same studied efficiency that had governed all her movements for the last hour. She went downstairs and lit the drawing-room fire. Her movements were steady now: they had become faster and faster. Her mind was slow; it functioned painfully. The blur of shock was preferable.
Such a lovely room, but the firelight was less kind than the moonlight. Empty, save for a single chair with a damaged seat. They had not bothered with that and the omission, the judgement on it, was oddly offensive. Items removed from drawers and bookcases were littered against the walls to facilitate removal of the carpet. Paper from Mother’s desk drifted round her feet. In desultory fashion, like a person hypnotized, Isabel began to tidy them up. She was her mother’s housekeeper; housekeepers tidy up. Words hit her eyes. Letters to strangers. Fuck, cunt, damn. Mother’s form of communication.
Isabel began to cry. Every ounce of her hurt, as if she had been pummelled. The words were appropriate expletives for the sense of filth and failure that paralysed all but automatic action, and the automatic movements did not quite keep realization at bay. Here was a writer of indecent missives. Here was her daughter. What had the silly daughter done?
Nothing of any merit, ever. Excelled herself. Allowed her mother’s property to be removed from under her nose. Gone to sleep drunk, woken too late. Failed to stop them even then. Let herself be violated. Hit an old lady who knew no better. Had she done that too? Of course she had and of course Serena, who did know better, would remember her daughter leaving a mark which she would never want anyone else to see. Serena would remember who had done that, wouldn’t she ever? She would shout it from the rooftops. Burglars are nice men in comparison to my daughter: they didn’t hit me, they danced. My daughter was already filth before they started.
Isabel stopped sobbing. All the hysteria had fled, leaving a terrible and deceptive clarity.
The neighbourhood thinks you’re a kind of whore, anyway. They’re not going to believe in you as victim, oh no. What’s the difference between a tart and someone who hits her mother? Not much. One kind of poisoned butterfly or another. She’d have to tell the police, of course, but not all of it, only some of it. Perhaps that should come first. Maybe it could wait.
She wouldn’t be telling them or anyone else about the vital discovery, of how much her m
other hated her. And how she would have to go on with the pair of them rattling round this great house, waiting for the men to come back and dance. Go on into the blue yonder, a happy couple who hated one another and no choice about it, because there was nothing much left in life to do right, nothing to hold dear and absolutely nowhere else to go. And it was all her fault.
She sat, dry-eyed in the emptiness of the room, willing herself to weep again. Mother had unlocked the door. Invited them in. Would have cheered them on if they had raped her daughter, one by one. Laughed herself sick.
So that now there were the two of them: one mad, one defiled.
CHAPTER TEN
It was so cold, so very cold, that her blood formed itself into crystals. The movement of a kneecap or an elbow seemed to grate. The fire in the hearth had gone out, also her own: she moved with the precision of the waking dead, tidying as she went. Picking things up, putting them down. Then the dog, that stupid, redundant old brute, came wagging towards her, paws clipping the bare wooden floor, a waddling unit of warmth wanting to be let out. She gazed into brown eyes, docile with stupidity, and at that point Isabel realized she was, still, inescapably alive.
She paused in front of a modern mirror the burglars had also left, breathed over the glass and watched the mist form. Not dead yet. Not beautiful, either. Scrubbing herself in the bathroom did not improve anything.
She could not find the car keys and would not look, walked down the road to the church, limping slightly. Imagining herself running away, slowing down to resist the impulse. When in doubt, turn tail. But then, running away was a practice she had adopted too often and it always involved coming back. Isabel made herself think, rooted her thoughts in memories.
What was it Mab had said so sadly? You only know your own strength when you learn to keep on loving someone who does not love you. There was a frost, dampening slowly in the face of the winter sun which swelled behind cloud, more a presence than a reality. Her mouth felt dry and, at the back of her throat, a lingering taste of wine. One step proceeded in front of another, towards a telephone.
She could not remember the neighbours’ names; she could scarcely recall her own. It was a miracle that Andrew’s card was in her purse. Isabel steeled herself to tell lies.
In the town-centre branch of Dixon’s, as soon as it opened its doors, George carefully avoided the sales assistant who had been so dismissive of him last time, although there would have been a certain sense of triumph had he encountered her and proved he could pay for the dictaphone. It was a matter of pride for him to have brought with him in a separate paper bag exactly the right sum, down to the last 99p. The woman behind the counter took the cash without any sign of being impressed by the nonchalant ease with which he presented it. She must have mistaken him for some executive. He was shaken by sudden irritation that she did not want to engage him in conversation: why did he want to buy it, who it was for, how thrilled the recipient would be and how amazing it was for anyone to spend all this money at once. Then he looked around at cameras, computers and ritzy telephones coloured pink and green, and felt himself shrink. He was glad there was no one else in the shop to negate the effect of his own purchase by buying something far larger, and, in the end, was so anxious to leave he almost forgot his parcel.
Where to put this possession, to save it from prying eyes? A problem, that. He walked around town, aware of carrying the equivalent of contraband, wondering about it. The exercise of spending money made him curious and confident. He stepped boldy in and out of the shops, no longer intimidated, looking at sweaters, socks, radios, shoes, items he would only ever consider buying in the charity shops where he was more at home. He felt, in a strange way, content, superior, relieved to be free of the kind of indecision which must surely accompany the buying of goods at such prices. There was a moment of unhappiness when he paused outside a jeweller’s and wished against every other wish he could have bought her something pretty, but then he felt the shape of the recorder against his chest, solid and safe, felt, yes, he had done the right thing after all.
Strange, when he was enjoying himself the presence of people receded into the background: even the noise was forgiven.
He felt rich. A big spender. A fully paid-up member of the human race.
By the time George had finished dreaming and failed to discover anything better to do with Serena’s gift than carry it round with him, probably until Christmas when he would present her with it, he was late, way outside the normal routine of arrival, and he even felt satisfaction in that. He sat inside the car, making sure he could work it. He said hallo to it twice, then said goodbye and erased it, delighted.
Perhaps by Christmas Isabel would have gone. Gone and long forgotten. Fed up and out of the way. He had an enormous capacity for self-deception: it came from being a dreamer. He could put things out of his mind and on to a different planet by a sheer effort of will, had made himself suspend belief about Derek’s plans, just by blotting them out. The refusal to think could be made to last for days: it was a cue to survival, but when he got to the house, he knew. He could almost hear the sensation of his dreams exploding around him like the sound of tinkling glass.
George saw from the gates the signs of the posse of the sheriff’s men. One police car, Doc Reilly’s Volvo, Robert Burley’s Ford still hot from two hours’ drive, Andrew Cornell’s car which he recognized from his own careful habit of noting vehicles, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. Not a posse, a jury, waiting to find him guilty. Instead of going into the house, which he knew he would have to do sometime, but not just yet, he reversed the car down the road, left it and walked away across the fields.
If there had been an ambulance he would have faced up right away. As it was he wanted to preserve the residue of hope for an hour, paced into the valley, counting his steps, breathing with deliberate regularity. He stopped beneath a tree and tried the recorder again. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he repeated, his teeth chattering. ‘I didn’t do it.’
John Cornell looked at the auction room and wished his son could love him with half the intensity with which he loved his son. No method of loving could be identical: any way would do, as long as it carried acceptance and fair judgement. Such as son recognizing that father was not entirely without heart. Or seeing at some point that he admired a boy with such high and naïve principles of honour, even if it meant a dearth of bloody common sense sometimes. It was just as well that one of them had been a cynical opportunist for most of his life: but hardly the same thing as the crudity of theft that Andrew suspected. Andrew had far too much fine taste for his own good. Antique furniture was not worthy of veneration: it existed to be acquired and no commodity was worth that much respect. Business was business: buy cheap and sell dear. Looking after a dog was more important.
The telephone he held in his hand was cold to the touch. He supposed it was efficient of the police to phone anyone in the business as soon as ever to tell them to look out for anyone flogging large items the day after they were nicked. Routine procedure, but it was this assumption that all thieves were congenital idiots which led to so many of them getting away with it. For Christ’s sake, that stuff was long gone. No one would deposit it on their own doorstep. What troubled him most was the idea that his son might suspect he had something to do with it. Perfidious he might be. Pragmatic to the point of brutality. But dishonesty on such a scale was self-defeating.
‘Tell them,’ he said to the disembodied voice at the other end, ‘that if they want to borrow stuff, I got plenty in store they can have. Really.’
Borrow it, keep it, what was the difference? It was only money.
He wanted a word with that son of his. About the young woman; about her mother and her aunt.
‘How is she?’
‘She keeps asking about the cat…’
Serena sat on the single chair, close to the fire, with her handbag over her arm, smiling politely. She reminded him of the queen, posing for a photograph to put on a stamp. Privately, and with difficulty i
n keeping his estimation from becoming obvious, Andrew Cornell found Robert Burley quite ridiculous. There had been a conspiracy of efficiency and quiet voices before he arrived, a decent aura of shock and respect between the time when the faint voice of Isabel had caught him unawares and he had told her to wait where she was and he would come and collect her, bringing a phone. Then he arranged the arrival of Doc Reilly, whom Andrew considered she needed, along with that of the police, all huddling together, pooling God alone knows what theories and information, murmuring names and instructions while someone else arrived to add to the mess with fingerprint powder. And yet R. Burley acted like a conductor. The sort, Andrew thought, who would reduce an orchestra to anarchy before the end of Act One.
‘I don’t understand how this could have happened,’ he was saying for the tenth time, looking at his sister with an expression supposed to be sorrowful, but, in reality, merely full of sorrowful recrimination. The look given to a destructive idiot one is bound to forgive. Andrew wondered how many people in the world considered Isabel to be a fool. He did not; Doc Reilly did not; only her brother knew better. I must ask him, Andrew thought, if his father was also a bully.
‘It must have been someone who knows the house,’ Robert stated with all the authority of an expert. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t hear a thing.’
‘Not at first, no.’ Isabel was mild. ‘But I did, finally.’
Robert did not appear to register that her passivity was brittle and artificial, too calm to be genuine. ‘And you saw them but you can’t even remember what they looked like? Amazing. Even the one who tied you up?’
She winced. ‘Not very well. Faces get distorted in candlelight…’
‘Colours, too,’ Andrew added.
‘One with a big nose,’ Isabel said, deliberately vague. ‘One with a big beard. One with … Oh, never mind.’ She stopped and stared at her feet. Slipper socks; most unbecoming. Whatever else had been seen in the kitchen was not going to be mentioned. She was confused, speaking like a person with retarded intelligence, but some things she could force herself to forget.
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