The Beloved Girls

by Harriet Evans

  ‘No,’ Catherine had said. ‘None.’

  ‘Right. Well, just make sure you bind it up. Go back to the doctor if it doesn’t get better. And for God’s sake rest it,’ Shelagh said again. ‘I remember what you’re like.’

  ‘I will,’ said Catherine. She smiled. Shelagh’s no-nonsense manner was what she needed. Shelagh, she knew, didn’t see dead people. Catherine had limped to Boots and bought everything Shelagh recommended, then gone back to chambers.

  She stood there for a moment, looking out over the square. The thought crossed her mind: Would it be so bad, if she really was back?

  ‘Anyone call for me?’ she asked Jenny, the cyborg-like receptionist.

  Jenny looked blank for a moment, then her face cleared.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh yes, in fact.’ Her eyes widened slightly. ‘Grant Doyle, from Tarnmoor. He wants to know when you’re coming to pay him a visit. He has something he needs to discuss with you urgently. That was the message.’

  ‘OK. Thanks.’

  ‘Fine.’ There was a pause. ‘He’s a nasty piece of work, if you ask me,’ said Jenny, a spot of pink burning on each cheek.

  Catherine was about to rebuke her, when she saw Jenny’s face. She knew how the conversation would have gone.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Jenny. He shouldn’t talk to you like that. He’s – well, he’s in prison for at least the next decade, if it’s any consolation. Thanks to my best efforts.’

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ said Jenny, with an attempt at a smile.

  ‘Hm,’ said Catherine. Climbing the rickety stairs, clutching her purchases and a replacement soup, she opened the door into her small, thin office with its view of the square, where in the distance a game of erratic tennis had begun, and the last of the daffodils drooped under the plane trees. It had stopped raining. She was alone now, at last, and so she shut the door, trying to breathe, trying not to give in to panic. Breathe in-two-three-four-five. Hold-two-three-four-five. Breathe out-two-three-four-five. Carefully, she drew something out of her bag. The balled-up page from the magazine. She set it down on the desk, smoothing it carefully out from the centre to the corners.

  After a time, she was able to eat her soup, staring at the house.

  She had not seen it for so long. She never looked it up. Never googled herself, though she had, once, heard someone in a pub talking about the Vanes tragedy, and knew then that people must know about it. And she let herself drink in the picture, and the three pictures in tiles below it, of the grounds, the small cosy sitting room and the chapel, looking out to sea. How long she sat there she wasn’t sure. But the door handle shook suddenly, and as she started, violently, a voice said: ‘Sorry, Catherine, wrong room,’ shaking her back into the present.

  I was just looking at a picture of my childhood home, she’d have told whoever it was, if they’d asked what she was doing. The gables are shaped like beehives. No, I don’t know why.

  It’s called Vanes. There’s a weathervane, of a stooped Father Time, and it spins and creaks in the wind. Does it still?

  There’s a pool, where we used to spend all day in the summer, and the water glows a strange green-blue, especially at night.

  That’s the sitting room where Sylvia had her studio. Her own private space, where she worked, away from children, away from her husband.

  That’s the chapel. That’s where the bees lived. I don’t like bees.

  There were three children – Joss Hunter, Kitty Hunter and little Merry Hunter. So Joss is still there.

  It was a beautiful place to grow up. There’s a path down to the sea, a pool, a garden so big you can’t see the edges. The Hunters have been important people in the area for centuries.

  After it happened I became Catherine. Kitty Hunter was a different person. Very different. She was bold, imaginative, fierce, she did what she wanted.

  And for the past twenty-nine years I have tried to do the same. I have tried, and in part it’s worked, but lately it doesn’t work any more. I am timid, frightened, always frightened. I can’t breathe, for a lot of the time. I wake up and can’t breathe. And the more I try the worse it gets. I have these dreams, when I’m back there again, in the middle of it all, and I’m trying to replay it, and it always ends the same way.

  The door of her office was heavy and soundproofed, as were the windows. Catherine sat with these thoughts, hearing the breath that fluttered in her throat. She touched the back of her head, where she’d banged it as she fell. She swallowed the painkillers, taped up her toe firmly, not too firmly, watching a YouTube video that explained how best to do it. She opened the window, just a crack. She could hear traffic, talking, music – London sounds, which soothed her. She paid the bill for Tom’s cello lessons, amended an Ocado order, messaged a mother of a friend in Carys’s class about some party at the weekend. ‘I don’t have a problem with them hanging out on the Heath. They can walk back afterwards,’ she wrote to the woman, who was a self-designated Anxious Mother. ‘If we don’t let them they’ll go anyway,’ she added, disobeying every instinct she had, which was that Carys should stay indoors chained to the kitchen table and never leave the house except for school.

  With every action she felt the painkillers kicking in, her throbbing head easing. She could do it. She screwed the magazine page up and put it in the bin, opened her emails and started to work, sinking into it, into detail and legal minutiae as if into a long, hot bath.

  ‘Here,’ called Davide, when he heard her arrive back that evening. He appeared by the stairs in the hall and tapped at his screen. ‘Look. I will book the Eurostar, for Friday, the fourth of May. OK? Look, I’m pressing “book tickets”, chérie – look – Oh, my goodness. What happened?’

  Tom was helping his mother in. ‘She finally got a crutch for her toe. About time, Mum.’

  ‘I fell over today,’ said Catherine, kissing Tom on the cheek and hobbling to the kitchen island. ‘Hit my head – no, it’s fine, honestly.’

  ‘Mon dieu,’ muttered her husband. He put his iPad down and came towards her. ‘It takes this to make you see a doctor?’

  ‘I didn’t, actually.’ She smiled at him, then started to laugh in horror at his expression. ‘Don’t worry! It’s fine! Jake frogmarched me to the surgery and I waited for a while, but then I got so sick of being in there I left, called Shelagh – you remember the nice physio whose daughter was at school with Tom? She talked me through what I needed to get, so I went to Boots, took some painkillers, taped it up, grabbed a crutch out of Quentin’s office and I’m right as rain. Listen. I’ve been thinking,’ she said, gripping her husband’s hands, as he guided her gently into the sitting room and sat her down on the sofa. ‘I feel so much better. Better than I have in ages. It’s that case, I’m sure.’

  ‘That case,’ he repeated.

  ‘The murder trial. Grant Doyle.’ She still didn’t like saying Grant’s name. He was eighteen, smaller than Tom, but he haunted her.

  ‘Ah,’ said Davide, his face clearing.

  She leaned back against the cushions, her eyes heavy. ‘Shelagh says I should rest. I might not go into the office tomorrow, I’ll work from home.’ She gave him a huge smile.

  Davide grinned back at her. ‘OK. What painkillers are you on?’

  ‘Combined ibuprofen and codeine. It’s good. It feels good.’

  She closed her eyes and waited until Davide, who paused for a moment, looking at her, got up. Catherine opened her eyes, slowly. ‘Davide . . .’

  ‘Yes? Can I get you anything?’

  ‘Book the Eurostar. Book it now.’

  He was looking down at her, the expression in his eyes painful, because she knew how much he loved her. ‘Wonderful.’

  She heard him gently shutting the door and saying to someone outside: ‘She’s just having a rest. The toe.’

  ‘But Mum’s literally never ill,’ came Carys’s voice.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Davide. ‘So let her rest.’

  The first time they’d met, that evening in October,
in a bar on a rose-pink stone square in southern France, she’d told him the truth. ‘I’ve run away from home,’ she’d said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My family,’ she’d told him.

  ‘Again,’ he’d said, signalling for another bière blonde. ‘I must ask you, why?’

  She’d sucked on her cherry-red paper straw, drawing up the last of her cider. Her fringe was growing out and it tickled her eyelashes as she looked up at him.

  She could remember the smell of the Place du Capitole, of cigarettes and grilled meats, of a fresh, autumn wind. The perfume of other diners.

  Catherine was doing what she normally did when she arrived in a new town. Eating a croque-monsieur, which, because she’d been to the Dôme a couple of times, was the only item she knew how to order in French. It was almost two months since she’d run away, leaving them all behind. Her French was getting better every day; she’d immersed herself in it, doing nothing but speaking it whenever she could. (It was a project; she liked a project.) She had picked up bar work here and there, at a club in the suburbs, then at a beach bar on the Dordogne, whilst she waited to hear whether her place at Cambridge had been deferred for a year. She had asked for letters to be forwarded to the post office in Toulouse, poste restante, so she always knew she’d end up there.

  She grew her short, tufted hair into a bob, like Betty Boo, learned to smoke, and listened to Kirsty MacColl, over and over again. She was getting used to being this girl now, the one who knew how to keep moving, how to deal with unfriendly hostel owners and French bureaucracy. It gave her confidence – not the wise-cracking, I-wanna-shout-it-from-the-rooftops kind of confidence, but in her own decisions, her own wisdom. She knew when a guy was dodgy, and that she should feel fine about ignoring him, and when he was lonely and probably OK. She knew that the bar owner in the Dordogne despised her – because she was a girl? She wasn’t sure why, just that he did, and stopped wasting her time trying to get him to like her.

  Summer was coming to an end and she wasn’t worried about winter, exactly, more curious to see how it panned out. Since leaving Vanes, she didn’t care much what happened to her. So when she noticed a dark-haired boy with a quizzical, confident manner watching her, she had smiled at him, briefly, but ignored him and got on with eating. After she’d finished – and this was typical of Davide, something she would remember after she had gone back to England – only after she’d finished, he got up, and sat down in front of her.

  When he started asking about where she’d come from and why she’d left, she’d leaned over and stubbed out her cigarette.

  ‘Look, I don’t want to lie to you, so how about you don’t ask me and I won’t tell you why.’

  ‘Hm. OK.’ He’d shrugged. She could see his eyes, flickering over her, very quickly.

  ‘I just don’t want to talk about it.’ And she’d looked up at him from under her lashes, warily.

  He’d swallowed. ‘What can you tell me?’ he’d said. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you can. Just don’t lie to me, Catrine.’

  So she told him she’d run away from home. That she couldn’t go back.

  ‘Are you wanted by the police?’ he’d said, laughing.

  ‘Probably not,’ she’d said, with a flicker of a smile, and he’d nodded, suddenly seeing she was serious. She handed him a newspaper cutting she’d been keeping folded inside her book. The newspaper had been left on the seat of a touristy restaurant in Albi, folded open at that page. She had looked around, terrified, searching for someone watching her.

  ‘Kitty Hunter,’ he’d said, handing her back the cutting, with a whistle.

  ‘I’m Catherine now,’ she’d said.

  ‘You think that is a disguise that will conceal you from the police?’

  ‘They’ve called off the search,’ she’d said. ‘I read it yesterday in the paper.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My family knows why we left.’

  ‘But . . . are you missing, or aren’t you?’ he’d said, and she liked the lilt in his voice, the rasp at the edge of his tone, his stubble, his smooth skin.

  ‘I’m not,’ she’d said.

  ‘And Janey? Janey Lestrange, your best friend?’

  ‘Oh, she’s dead,’ she told him, and it was true, then. She believed it, for the first time.

  Catherine slept on the sofa in the small, warm sitting room for a couple of hours. When she awoke, it was totally dark, the only light from the golden-yellow of the street lamp outside. The pills had worn off; her head ached, and her toe was throbbing. For a second, she had no idea where, or who, she was. It was terrifying.

  ‘Davide!’ she cried out. ‘Davide? Where are you?’ He was there, of course. He turned on the overhead light and she blinked up at him from the depths of the sofa.

  ‘She is awake. Well, well,’ he said, and he came over and kissed her forehead. ‘I thought you were out for the night. Those painkillers are quite strong.’

  ‘I’ll take some more before bed,’ she said, wiggling her toes, gingerly. ‘If I can just have a good night’s sleep . . . I’m sorry to zonk out.’

  ‘You needed it.’

  ‘Where are the kids?’

  ‘Tom is at Oscar’s, Carys is upstairs. She has watched ten episodes of Friends in a row, she just informed me. She says it’s very historically interesting.’

  ‘That girl makes me feel very old.’ Catherine swung her legs round, onto the floor, and stood up, leaning on her husband. She looked out into the street, thinking she saw someone. But it was only shadows, moving in the wind. She went upstairs. Passing the study with the flapping tarpaulin, she said: ‘Davide, you said your guy was going to fix that today.’

  ‘He is!’

  Catherine frowned. ‘What, at ten thirty in the evening?’

  ‘He is coming tomorrow. He is very apologetic.’ Davide was competitive with Catherine about tradespeople. If she found a good plumber, he always wanted to trump her with a plumber who was cheaper and superior in all ways. If they were French, so much the better. ‘He is a busy man.’

  ‘It’s been a week.’ Catherine turned her head away from the open door. She didn’t want to be reminded of the study. Of the papers in there she hadn’t sorted through, the years of work. Of the moment the window was smashed, crumpling in on itself, the hatred required to do it.

  ‘It will be fixed, Catrine. Go to sleep.’

  Catherine acquiesced. She fell into bed with relief, without even washing her face and brushing her hair, almost a first for her.

  At 3 a.m. she woke up and knew something was wrong. Padding gingerly downstairs, Catherine saw, in the yellowing light from the street lamp, a letter on the floor, past the doormat, on the tiles themselves. Her name, written in outsized letters: ‘CATHERINE’.

  I have to pick it up now and read it, she told herself. That’s the game. Crouched down in the hallway, cold and alone, she opened the folded piece of paper.

  It was nice, seeing you today. But you didn’t seem very pleased to see me. It takes a lot for me to come to your work and stand there waiting for you. And you ignored me, you swept past me up the stairs like you thought you were better than me.

  Old Kitty was like that, but I hoped Catherine wouldn’t be.

  I’ve been thinking back, lately. Have you?

  I want to go and see the house again, don’t you? One more time? Are you angry they don’t know where you are? Kitty was born before Joss, she should inherit, shouldn’t she? And what about your best friend, the one you made all your promises to, what about Janey? I miss her. I wonder if you do. I wonder if you’re glad she’s gone.

  Let’s go back. Let’s go and see Joss. Tell him you deserve a share of the house, even if you don’t need it. Let’s smash it wide open and tell everyone the truth. What they did, what really happened to us.

  I’ll come to you and explain how, and when. Just be ready. Be ready to steal away. Because your husband doesn’t know, does he? Your children don’t know. Your colleagues, your neighbour
s – that nice old man Mr Lebeniah who’s lived next door to you for twenty years, that nosy Judith across the road, they don’t know, do they, that we planned it all, that we left them for dead.

  I know you’ll make excuses. But I think you should see if you remember the words to the song. It’s time the Beloved Girls went collecting again.

  Chapter Five

  The late April morning sun shot through the house at this time of year, sliding through the heavy bedroom curtains, hitting her in the eyes. Coming downstairs into the cool of the teal-blue iron and glass kitchen, Catherine found Davide, already sitting at the breakfast bar, flicking through the newspaper.

  He didn’t hear her and she had the luxury of watching him for a moment. His tousled dark hair, shot through with lead grey, his small tortoiseshell glasses, the stubble on his chiselled chin, still tanned after his two weeks in February, skiing in the Pyrenees. The same two weeks, every year, the same group of friends.

  He shook out the paper and took another sip of coffee from the green porcelain cup she had given him twelve years ago which he had deemed ‘extremely acceptable, Catrine.’ Davide was a creature of habit. He had always read The Times, because he was an Arsenal fan and he liked their football coverage. He drank only coffee made with his Jura S8 and was horrified when people offered him a Nespresso or, God forbid, as a parent at a kid’s birthday party had said to him a couple of years ago: ‘I’m just popping to Starbucks for a Pumpkin latte, Dave. Do you want anything?’

  He did all their cooking, and clearing away, and he liked folding laundry. He ironed his own shirts. Not hers. ‘I am not your servant, woman.’ He was tirelessly tidy – Catherine was tidy, but he took it to new levels. He loathed Sarkozy with a passion that surprised Catherine – really, how could one person be that bad? He had that Gallic contradictory combination she had never found with her own people, a formality and appreciation of the good things mixed with an almost frightening anarchism. ‘Yes, yes, they should riot, and some will die, but they will have stood up to the erosion of liberty!’ he’d said once of the rail workers who were striking over proposed changes to their already – in Catherine’s opinion extremely cushy – pension. He was so easy to live with. He said what he meant. He never, ever played games.