The Beloved Girls

by Harriet Evans

  Chapter Eight

  Catherine had just picked up her wheelie suitcase to leave the office at lunchtime, propping open the door with her foot, when the phone rang. She was halfway out of the door; she debated whether to ignore it or not.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Catherine? It’s Ash. Ashok Sengupta. Grant’s solicitor.’

  Catherine leaned the handle of the case against the bookshelf and slid back into her chair. ‘Hi, Ash. How are you?’

  She gazed out over the square. It was a beautiful day, only 4 May, but there was heat in the air. The building next to their chambers had a wisteria in full bloom; the scent, as she arrived and left, was heady. She always longed to open the window, to let the smell of it in. Scanning the ground, she could see nothing of interest. Nothing at all.

  ‘Catherine. Have you heard?’ Ash had a mildly scolding tone. He’d had it throughout the trial. As if she were at fault, all the time.

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘About Grant.’

  ‘No – I saw him the other day. He was fine.’

  ‘He’s not fine.’ Ash’s voice rose. ‘He’s tried to kill himself. Last night. They found him this morning, unconscious, in his cell. He managed to get hold of the blade from a razor, somehow.’

  A couple stood under the spreading plane tree below; one of them laying out a blanket. ‘Is he alive?’

  ‘He is. He’s been transferred to St Thomas’s. He lost a lot of blood. But he did it the right way – up the vein, you know.’

  ‘Don’t,’ she started to say, and then cleared her throat, turning away from the square. ‘OK. I’m so sorry, Ash. I’ll phone his mother.’

  ‘No,’ said Ash, flatly. ‘His mother called me to tell me. She asked me to let you know. She’s saying it’s your fault. You upset him so much last week, that nonsense about the cease and desist from your family, she’s saying you made threats against him. What the hell happened?’

  ‘I did no such thing, Ash. That’s simply not true.’ Her hand holding the phone was slick with moisture.

  ‘Isn’t it? Well. OK.’

  Catherine spun back towards her desk, the familiar swooping, arcing feeling of freefalling swamping her again, and this time it didn’t, wouldn’t stop, as she raised her eyes to the view in front of her.

  There she was, in the middle of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, waving up at Catherine. Her long hair shone in the hot May sun. Yes, it was spring, but a spring day that is like summer, and summer was her time, it always had been.

  She was in a different outfit, a variation on the same long floral dress and leggings. Catherine knew she could see her. Her eyes – piercing, unblinking, fixed on her office, as though through crosshairs.

  I want it to stop.

  Catherine tried to listen to Ash, who was at his most pompous. She knew she should listen, she should take care, that she should care more about this boy whom she had failed. But she didn’t care. She knew Grant had killed someone else and been glad of it, and he was a bad person, and the jury had understood that and that she’d have never got him off. Sometimes, it was as simple as good and bad, and she saw it now. He was not a good person. But he was a boy. The same age as Tom. He had slit his own wrists, and she didn’t care.

  She sat there and nodded and agreed to be investigated and to hand over files and papers and talk to the police and all the time she watched her, from the window, watched her shadow, moving slightly now and then, watched as she took out a phone and played with it, made gestures up towards Catherine’s window. Waving, smiling, tapping.

  Catherine put the phone down and turned her back on the window, bent over, head between her legs, holding her face, her skull, tightly. She stayed like that for a few seconds, and when she stood up, and looked out again, there was no one there. The small room seemed to be closing in on her.

  The bus wheezed slowly up Kentish Town Road. It was too hot inside already, the air conditioning in the new buses already malfunctioning though it was only May.

  It was two hours until she had to meet her husband at St Pancras – four hours until the Eurostar left, but Davide loved being early for everything. The last thing she wanted to do before the weekend away was visit the home. Even as she got on the Tube that would take her towards North London she’d told herself that she could go another time. She wanted to pull the shades down and sit in her quiet, safe office where she could work for a few hours uninterrupted on the marine insurance fraud case and read through her briefing notes on a new case, an overstretched hospital, a locum’s botched caesarean section. She should have been grateful that, after Doyle, her old work was piling up. The familiar grind, defensive NHS management, distressed families, money in play and she, Catherine, swimming calmly through it all, establishing the facts, building a case, attaining consensus. She could be – she had been – so good at it.

  On the bus she had time to think. As the woman next to her muttered under her breath, fanning herself ostentatiously with a thin, flapping piece of paper, Catherine tried to breathe herself, to calm herself. She had rung Grant’s mother, who had put the phone down on her, then Poppy, his sister, who’d told her that she knew she’d threatened him and he was still a child. ‘I know,’ said Catherine, blankly. ‘I know he is.’ Poppy had put the phone down on her, too.

  What is good and bad. What bad means. For some reason she found herself thinking of Tom. When he was twelve, he’d gone through a phase of being awful – kicking Carys, swearing, being rude to Mr Lebeniah – he’d spat at Catherine, when she told him he had to tidy his room and had gone in herself with a black bin bag. At the same time, money kept disappearing out of her purse and coat – one-pound, two-pound coins she knew she kept hold of for parking and for tea and coffee machines. She’d seen Tom taking coins out of her coat pocket, putting them in his, but she had not said anything, waiting to tackle him about it, knowing if she told Davide, he would have Tom sent off to the Foreign Legion, or marched him to the police station. The next day, when she walked him to the bus stop, Catherine pretended to disappear around the corner again then lingered behind a curved old wall, to watch him for a time. She saw him bend down, give the money to a young man outside the Overground station, who had a decrepit Staffie covered in bald patches, curled peacefully next to him. Tom fondled the dog’s ears whilst he was chatting to the young man. That was what she remembered.

  She talked to him about it that evening.

  ‘It’s wrong to take without asking, darling, you know that, don’t you?’

  He’d nodded. ‘I – I didn’t want to tell you about it.’

  ‘Why?’

  He’d scratched the back of his head, suddenly grown-up.

  ‘Some stuff makes you sad.’

  They were climbing up past the Heath, past her own house. She felt her eyes fill with painful tears which she blinked back. Come on, she told herself. It’s been twenty-nine years, you’ve done it for this long, you can carry on doing it.

  She shook her head, faster and faster. Only a few hours until she’d be on the train with Davide and all would be well . . . She would admit to everything with Grant, she would take whatever punishment was on offer. She had been wrong. If she could just get away, get a reset, just her and Davide . . . it was still in her control to keep this all going. She swallowed down a sour taste in her mouth.

  Driftwood was the name of Eileen Lestrange’s retirement home: it was a tall, Gothic, turreted building that seemed to have been stretched upwards to fit into the tiny plot of land it occupied beside Hampstead Heath. It always reminded her of Jan Pienkowski castles in books she’d read to the children.

  Since January she had come here once a fortnight. She hated it. Hated the distant muffled screams down corridors and the smell of TCP and urine and Katalina, the buxom nurse who wore terrible foundation like stage pancake makeup and pushed the residents in wheelchairs up and down the corridor too fast whilst some of them cried out, obviously terrified.

  Most of all she hated Eileen’s bare, sa
d, dark room. Three pictures on the wall, a cushion in a garish sixties orange and pink paisley print, jarringly out of place in the fawn and beige of the home – Catherine had no idea where it had come from. Every time she left she dared to tell herself perhaps she wouldn’t go again. It was too much. Eileen had no idea who she was. And somehow, every time, ten days would pass and she’d know she had to go and see her. Just in case she said something, told her something more.

  ‘They’re poisoning my tea,’ Eileen said as Catherine walked in.

  Catherine stood her suitcase by the wall and took her jacket off. It was always hot inside. A vase of magenta and orange parrot tulips stood next to the bed, indecently frilly, bent and warped in their last stages. She moved them along the Formica table out of the bright sunshine. Several petals fell onto the carpet.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Hello – Eileen. These are nice flowers. How are you?’

  Eileen’s hair was lank, her cashmere cardigan rather dirty, but otherwise she looked OK. The room was close and smelled sweet, of something rotten. Catherine stooped and kissed her soft cheek. She put the Fortnum’s biscuits down and then went to open the window.

  ‘Who are you? Have you been to see me before?’

  Catherine yanked the window open, drinking in the fresh air, then shut it so it was only open a crack. ‘I’m Janey’s friend. Catherine. Yes, I come every other week or so, to see how you’re settling in.’

  ‘Ah.’ The grey eyes blinked, quite intelligently. ‘You know Janey.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My husband, Martin, he’ll be here soon. He’s in Spain.’

  Catherine always hated this bit. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I had to come back, you see. His children didn’t like me. They were stealing from me. He’s still there. Isn’t he?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Eileen.’

  ‘I’ll wait here, anyway. They’re putting poison in my tea. I told them to stop yesterday.’

  ‘What makes you think they’re doing that, Eileen?’

  ‘Mrs Caraway Seeds to you, thank you very much.’

  ‘I –’

  ‘I can taste it in the tea. It tastes of –’ She stopped and looked at the spongy brown carpet, the small, delicate hands clutched tight in her lap. ‘I don’t remember. Caraway seeds?’

  They chatted for a time in the usual desultory fashion: someone new in the room across the corridor who was very loud. How when she’d lived in Spain she’d had excellent TV reception, all the UK channels. How there was a different presenter on Cash in the Attic and Eileen didn’t care for her, she was rather brash. Whether Kate Middleton was too thin or not. They were poisoning her tea. As always Catherine found herself staring at Eileen’s hands. The nails, beautifully shaped, always kept trimmed. Did she do it? The thin gold band, so slender it might crack, with a tiny cluster of pearls. And what had puzzled her, since Eileen had been brought back from Spain late last year after a combination of factors (the death of Martin, her second husband, Brexit – ‘They hate us, the Spanish. They’re waiting to steal our houses and all our possessions’ – and after her dementia had advanced rapidly): why did she wear her first husband’s ring? She’d left him years ago, when her daughter was twelve, to run off with Martin.

  Catherine’s phone buzzed in her bag. She rubbed her eyes and found the older woman staring at her with an expressionless gaze. She stared down at the ring on her finger, then at Catherine again.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ she said, conversationally.

  Catherine tried to update her once a visit. She didn’t like doing it more than once though. ‘You moved back. From Spain. Martin died. Your husband. Do you remember?’

  ‘Martin, my husband.’ Eileen looked totally blank. ‘Simon was my husband, dear. Catherine, is it?’

  ‘Simon was your husband, then you left him and married Martin. He was a surveyor for Greenford Council? Do you remember?’ Eileen shook her head. ‘His children were Jeanette and Adam?’

  ‘Oh, them,’ said Eileen, bitterly. ‘Promised me I could stay in Murcia. Swore blind. Lied, both of them. They lied! Sold the house from under me! Liars! It was my house!’

  A visitor, walking past the open door, looked in with alarm at this last dramatic declaration. Who are you visiting? Catherine wanted to ask her. Who are they? Do you care? Is it horrible?

  ‘It was their father’s house,’ she said instead, patiently, although she had sympathy with Eileen’s anger, since soon after Martin had died it had been revealed she had no claim whatsoever to the house she’d lived in for thirty years or more. Her second husband’s children had moved brutally fast and the house was sold weeks later – Eileen’s stepchildren perhaps exacting a cold revenge for the removal of their father from their lives as children.

  It had been Catherine whom they contacted, and it was Catherine who found her a home, got her settled and, of course, paid the bills. But she did it. She had to – what choice did she have?

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Davide had said, when she’d told him what she was planning, back in October. ‘She’s a terrible woman. You’ve always said so.’

  ‘Her stepchildren have abandoned her. She’s got no money, no friends in Spain –’

  ‘After years there? Nothing to show for it at all? Catherine, this woman is not your problem.’

  Davide had a way of simplifying things that was sometimes extremely comforting, sometimes not. Catherine sighed.

  ‘I’ll use my money. You won’t notice. Listen. I have to take care of her. She’s my responsibility.’

  For once she saw him look almost angry, and that sliver of phosphorescent tension that sometimes sparked up between them, threatening to grow into something bigger, flickered for a second. But then he shrugged. ‘You must do what you must do, chérie,’ he’d said, paraphrasing Carys, and she’d smiled. ‘I won’t ask.’ But sometimes she wished he would ask.

  ‘My mother was Italian,’ Eileen said now. She lifted her eyes up, looking out of the window at the blue sky and the Heath beyond. Very, very far away, there was a kite. ‘From Italy, this ring is. Like me.’

  ‘I didn’t know that – that’s lovely,’ Catherine said, as her phone buzzed again. She never wanted to ask questions – she was afraid of the answers, but something made her say: ‘It’s a beautiful ring.’

  ‘Well, Simon gave it to me. Janey’s father. Did you know him?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  Eileen nodded, pleased. ‘He was in love with her, you know, but he married me. I was a dull old thing. I don’t know why he chose me but he did. He came back from his job up North one day, and he just walked back into the shop and put that ring on my finger himself.’

  ‘Did he bring it back . . . from Italy specially for you?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I was thirteen when the war ended. He’d have been arrested for going with me when I was thirteen. He wasn’t like that. He was an old father, my Simon! Yes, he used to joke about it. They both were.’ Her eyes were bright. ‘Do you know, it’s a funny thing. I was so busy wanting him to take me away from my dull old life, Mother, me, bedsit in Clerkenwell, only mixing with other Italian widows, evenings sewing, and he seemed so glamorous. So full of . . .’ She stared out over the Heath, at the glorious new green on the trees. ‘So full of life. And it wasn’t till long afterwards, you see. I realised something.’

  ‘What did you realise?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t love him. I didn’t really like him, actually. All his . . . castle in the sky ways.’

  Catherine nodded – she knew better than to engage any further. She had tried it before and it upset Eileen. And herself.

  ‘My ring,’ said Eileen proudly, to herself, as if the whole conversation had never happened.

  Catherine said, as calmly as she could: ‘So he bought the ring out in Naples during the war, then. He saw it and thought it was the perfect ring.’

  ‘How do you know he was in Naples in the war?’ The voice was suspicious, the mild demeanour suddenly gone.


  ‘You’ve told me before. He was there in the war. Those tulips, Eileen –’

  ‘He was there, yes, he was there. It was dreadful.’

  ‘You said. Who brought you these flowers, Eileen?’

  ‘He went out after it had been destroyed. 1944, Janey. Whole of Naples was rubble. Children starving in the streets. Some already dead. Rows of women waiting in warehouses every afternoon. You could go in and choose which one would sit herself down on you and you’d do it to her –’ The older woman wrinkled her nose, as if it was distasteful for her to have to tell her all this, as if she didn’t want to. ‘Then you’d – ahm – and afterwards, you’d give her your rations – as payment. He told me all this. He couldn’t stop his men going off there. Women tearing hair out of each other for chunks of bread. Selling themselves, their families. A little boy – I won’t tell you what they did to him. Simon found him.’

  Catherine felt an icy trickle of water start at the nape of her neck. ‘Eileen –’

  Eileen’s eyes were alight, her face mobile for once. ‘Well. The Germans had abandoned the place and left them all to die. Simon was trying to help them. The Eye-Ties, they called them. But it broke him, you know. He wasn’t able to get through it, afterwards . . . That’s what Sylvia used to say, anyway.’ She stopped again and stared at her ring once more. The hum of the cooling units on the wall outside filled the empty room. ‘Oh well. Do you remember him? My darling Simon?’

  ‘Yes – yes, of course I do.’

  ‘Very difficult man. But he was. Drove me to distraction. I couldn’t bear it any more. Waking up screaming, sometimes. Saying he’d done wrong. Writing these letters he never sent. He felt such guilt about it all. About abandoning her. And he didn’t love me! And his daughter. I mean she’s my child too, but she never loved me. The two of them, off in everything together, exploring, reading, making things – hah! Leaving me out of it!’ The slight Cockney tinge to her accent increased. ‘That was it, you see. Martin and me, we were very comfortable, and he had a nice place in Malaga. Very nice it was. Simon wasn’t interested in going to Spain, or anywhere like that. He had no ambition for himself. Big dreams, oh yes, but putting it into practice? You must be joking! Martin pointed it out, you know. And your father, he let you do what you liked, Janey! Meeting that black girl every morning on the bridge, even when you was so little. Claire, was it? The mother was totally mad. Hah. She has to learn to stand on her own two feet, Eileen! That’s what he’d say to me. He’d say that.’