The Beloved Girls

by Harriet Evans

  ‘Oh. I – I don’t know anyone there.’

  I concealed a smile. ‘You don’t know Donna Kingsley?’

  ‘N-no – at least, has she been to any Gatecrasher balls?’

  ‘No, she ran over her dad last year. It was on the six o’clock news. And Sarah Johnson – she had a baby in the Sixth Form Block loo. It made all the local papers.’

  ‘That’s rather wild.’ He giggled nervously. ‘They don’t do stuff like that at Kitty’s school. They down a lot of vodka but – no’ – he hunched over the steering wheel, as the car climbed a narrow, steep lane – ‘Letham’s is the girls’ version of my school. Farrars? You know?’

  ‘I remember you talking about it last time. You were about to go there.’

  ‘Right.’ He nodded, modestly. ‘I’ll miss the place. Proud to say I’m a Farrars man, although of course it’s all a load of nonsense, isn’t it?’

  ‘Right,’ I said again. My mother had always had a rather unsavoury obsession with ‘Jennifer’s Diary’ in Harpers & Queen, unsavoury because she knew no one in it and used to pore over the pages, acidly commenting on people. After she moved in with Martin, and before they moved to Spain, I’d go round for tea every week and we’d discuss what was in the society pages. ‘The Duchess of Roxburghe, in that gown, look at her! Dreadful. He’s handsome, that Edward Lamont Du – du-something. I don’t know their names.’ (This was not true – she knew all of them. When Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson my mother recognised most of the congregation in Westminster Abbey.)

  I wonder if she was first drawn to my father because of his name, which did indeed go back to one of the dukes who came over with William the Conqueror. Daddy was proud of this, of this idea of nobility which he endlessly tried to strive towards, before ending up a rather older father in Greenford, with my mother’s aspidistras, matching mint-coloured lounge furniture and a crest of the Lestranges in the downstairs loo, as if humbly drawing attention to it. It made me feel uncomfortable that it mattered to him. I remember even then thinking how silly that was. Ironically my mother’s heritage was much richer, being half Scottish, half Sicilian. Now, I think this is much more interesting, and yet she spent her life trying to pretend she was something she wasn’t.

  ‘Farrars was founded in 1543,’ Joss was saying. ‘The year Henry VIII married Catherine Parr. It’s forty miles away or so from here.’ I shrugged. ‘Four prime ministers went there, and a Prince of Wales. And a Maharajah – that was in Dad’s time – quite a fellow. It’s a very special place.’

  ‘Well, so was St Cecilia’s,’ I said, wondering whether to mention the time the police raided the lockers and found so much glue they declared the area a biohazard risk, or the daughter of an Afghan scientist who had arrived at the school having fled Kabul, and not speaking a word of English, and who had last year won a scholarship to Imperial College London.

  ‘Where are you off to after A-levels? I’m going to agricultural college, if I get in.’

  ‘You’ll enjoy being a secretary,’ my mother had said, when I hadn’t got the offer from Oxford, because I’d screwed up the interview. It was a week after Daddy died. This talk of Oxford, prompted by my headteacher, Miss Minas, who had called Daddy in for a serious meeting about my future a year ago, had mortified my mother. She was, I knew, glad when it came to nothing.

  ‘I’m going to be a secretary,’ I said, winding down the window, to let the sea air in, and breathing in deeply. ‘I’m enrolled on a course in Ealing, this September.’

  ‘Lucky you. Get a flat in London somewhere, find some fun flatmates, sounds bloody amazing. Kitty has to go to Cambridge if she gets the right A-levels, poor sod. She doesn’t want to.’

  I had sat my A-levels, but as with the Oxford interview it was barely two months after Daddy died. I’d stopped working, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t think straight, really. I was so certain I’d failed them I told myself I had very little interest in the process now. For one paper, History, I’d written out the track listing of Like a Prayer, very slowly, to make it look like I was doing something.

  ‘Why not? I remember she was very clever.’

  He shrugged. ‘Kitty? Think she must be. But she says she wants to travel instead, get out of here. I don’t know. I don’t really understand what goes on inside her head these days.’

  ‘Aren’t you twins?’ I said, half joking.

  ‘Not lately.’ He stubbed out the cigarette, deftly, on the frame of the car, then swerved alarmingly, only just avoiding another car. ‘Here we are.’ We turned into a driveway at the end of which was a tiny one-storey cottage. ‘Aunt Ros, dear old thing,’ said Joss, and he nodded. I saw a curtain move in the front room, and a hand wave methodically, as though it had been waiting by the window for us to arrive.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll see her at some point. Probably later tonight. She’s Daddy’s sister.’

  I didn’t remember there being an aunt in a gatehouse before. But then I couldn’t remember what was real and what wasn’t from my previous trip, mythologised in my mind ever since.

  ‘She’s rather odd but there’s no harm in her. We keep her around to add to the air of general mystery,’ he said carelessly. ‘Here we are. The others will be on the terrace.’

  He got out and quickly raced to the other side of the car to open my door, before I could protest. The idea that a boy that I knew in this day and age did such a thing made me want to laugh. ‘I’ll just get your bag.’

  He picked up my Gladstone bag and gestured past the golden edifice of the old house, with the four curious scalloping, hive-shaped gables atop the two storeys. There was a doorway, cut into a stone wall. I gasped, because it was so familiar, and yet because it was summer, and everything was green, and because light and heat suffused everything, it was utterly different, like seeing it for the first time. Joss put his hand on the heavy wooden door. ‘It’s this way.’

  In the years since that summer sometimes a scent, or a sound, will creep up on me unawares, and the shock of it – how it is hardwired into me, the role it has in my memory – jolts me from the present instantly back as if I’m there again, opening that gate, about to join the Hunters once more.

  I think it is the smell that most of all has the power to transport me there. It was so very different to what I knew, from the acidic, petrol smell of our dusty suburban road and the faint scents of fox and urine on the rusting iron footbridge where, for seven years every morning before school, I waited for Claire so we could walk in together, feet dragging, bag straps dangling, giggling, plotting.

  The smell when I came to Vanes – ah. The smell of the sea and salt that reached out to us across the expanse of turf and meadow, the lightest, slightest wafts of it, always mixed with the heady honey scent of the white dots of alyssum, and the herbs left to sprawl along the slim bed in front of the house so that through the drafty windows the woody, luxuriant scent of thyme, bay and rosemary crept at all times. Otherwise there weren’t many flowers close to the house. They didn’t want to encourage swarming, I was to learn.

  Beyond the terrace were four low wide steps. The stones grew hot in the summer sun. The scent of the herbs and alyssum, the heat rising from the stones, the mildew and wet sea spray against the heat – they all swirled together to form a most specific smell, one I have never encountered again. I remember that Joss slowly opened the heavy wooden door and we were on the other side. To the right, against a wall laced with a delicate, frowsy hydrangea there was a table, around which sat the other Hunters. They were waiting for me, and I was being served up to them, on a plate, with honey.

  Chapter Eleven

  They were all there, with them an ancient, black, soft-eared dog who was shuffling slowly around them, like a guard. I couldn’t remember his name.

  ‘Ah,’ I heard an older, male voice say to the others. ‘She’s here.’ The euphoria I had told myself I felt at my return suddenly vanished, like a trapdoor opening up beneath my feet. They all turned towards me
, as if at some psychic signal.

  The thing you have to understand about the Hunters is that they were all, every one in a different way, very beautiful. People don’t talk about natural beauty, how it twists things. Sylvia had a heart-shaped face, expressive, with apple cheeks and a knot of thick black hair, shot through with silver, at the top of her head. She wore a dress in dusky rose-coloured velvet covered with dark-pink and jade-green flowers, and a navy apron with huge pockets, exactly like the last time. Something about her felt too familiar. It made my skin prickle, my eyes water.

  ‘Sylvia could have been the greatest designer of her generation if she’d wanted,’ Daddy had said on the way back from our visit, when I’d artlessly ventured that I wanted to be her when I grew up. ‘She didn’t take the chance that was given her, Janey. Remember that.’

  Now I smiled at her, nervously. Her slim hands were pressed flat on the table, and she did not seem to see me, but to be staring past me.

  Next to her was Merry, with her pale skin and dark hair and those huge expressive eyes. She was scraping at a stick with a penknife; shavings curled into a soft pile beside her, but as my gaze shifted away from her mother onto her she leaned forward, grinning at me eagerly, then, glancing at her sister, lounged back in her chair again. Much later on when I analysed her welcome, I realised Merry alone had betrayed the others: I was an outsider. They wished I wasn’t there.

  Merry was gorgeous, but she would never have the aristocratic beauty of Joss, standing next to her, with his kind eyes and chiselled cheekbones, nor Charles their father, imperious even when sitting down. Charles was dashing in what I’d thought of as a TV series way; rather like Peter Bowles in my mother’s favourite programme, To the Manor Born. I didn’t know anyone who dressed like him, in tweed and checks. He was handsome, like a statue, with a fine carved profile.

  ‘Hello, Charles,’ I said, because he, at least, met my eyes. ‘Thank you for having me.’

  ‘Well hello –’ he said, then stopped. As if he’d been about to say something else. ‘Terribly sorry about everything, Jane, what? Come and sit down. Oy, you.’ And he nudged the figure next to him. ‘Be polite, you fat oaf. Say hello to our guest.’

  At the end of the table a girl raised her face to look at me, blankly.

  ‘Hi.’ Heavy, corn-coloured shining hair fell about Kitty’s face. She stared at me, then turned away, recrossing her tanned legs, which were resting on the wooden table. The dark green-blue eyes, fringed with heavy black lashes, were the same, but she herself was altered. Gone were the round cheeks; now she had a square, tomboyish jaw that gave her a wild, androgynous look. She wore denim cut-offs and a ruffled coral cotton top.

  I took a deep breath, about to proffer my copy of The Dark is Rising, then patted my pocket and sat down. No. Of course not. In the intervening years, I had grown into an idiosyncratic young woman; Kitty meanwhile had transformed into a goddess, or rather some kind of fallen angel.

  ‘My darling Janey,’ said Sylvia, suddenly coming alive again. She leaped up from the chair and rushed towards me, followed by the ancient spaniel. Rory. That was his name. I groped for actual memories, still feeling as though I’d fallen into another world. ‘It is so lovely to see you. I am – we are so glad your mother allowed you to come to us. So glad, darling.’

  She looked at me properly then and I saw her eyes were full of tears. I glanced down, embarrassed, my gaze falling on the print of her dress and then I remembered: Daddy had had a handkerchief in the same material.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, uncomfortably.

  Rory pushed against me and I staggered back. ‘Ignore Rory. He doesn’t like outsiders, and he’s blind and deaf. Aren’t you, old boy?’ She fondled his silky ears and muttered, quietly: ‘I’m so sorry about your father, my darling. I loved him so much. You know I did.’ One hand rubbed my elbow, the other my cheek. She straightened up and said more loudly: ‘You have wonderful bones, Janey. I must make you a headscarf, Hermès-style. Now, Charles is a stickler for timings – do you want to spend a penny before supper? It’s chicken and ratatouille. I must quickly go and stir it.’

  I nodded, relieved, as very little of the rest of this made sense. I didn’t know what she meant by a headscarf ‘Ermez’ style. I wondered if she was mocking me. And ratatouille, well, I’d absolutely never heard of it, but it sounded awful. Homesickness, for a home I wanted but did not have, swamped me; my stomach contracted with acidic misery. I started as Sylvia reached over and swiftly touched my bare head. ‘When did you lose it?’

  ‘A couple of weeks after.’ I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to say more, trying not to flinch as she stroked my bare skin, her fingers flickering over my skull. She dropped a swift kiss on the scalp and then released me, vanishing into the kitchen.

  ‘Dad,’ said Joss, who’d been silent through this beside me. ‘Shall I put the car away?’

  ‘Well, welcome to Vanes once again, Jane,’ Charles said, as if Joss hadn’t spoken. He gave me a brief smile. ‘It’s a good summer for you to be here.’ There was a short silence in which he clearly expected me to speak. I didn’t know how to reply to this. ‘Of course, you might not want to join in with the whole business, but I think you will. I shall be delighted to talk you through it all, and what we get up to, once you’ve settled in, what what?’

  ‘I’d like that,’ I said, trying to sound polite, though I didn’t really care.

  ‘I never liked him,’ my mother had said when we’d spoken last. ‘Never understood why your father used to go around with him. But you won’t have to bother with him much.’

  As I stood there wondering what my mother was up to now, whether she and Martin were enjoying a vodka and Coke on the grey concrete terrace of their flat, whether she ever, ever thought about me, a voice broke into my thoughts. ‘Why is your hair all patchy?’ Merry asked.

  I looked around, but Sylvia hadn’t returned. Joss was talking to his father, in a low voice. Kitty had picked up a worn, fat paperback, face down on the table, and was reading, apparently absorbed.

  ‘I – it fell out.’

  Merry advanced towards me in a quick darting motion, like her mother, then stopped. ‘Did you have cancer?’

  ‘No. I – I just wasn’t very well. They say it’ll grow back.’

  Her eyes grew huge. ‘Oh. Is it catching?’

  She waited for me to say more and then, when I said nothing, she sat down again, turning back to her penknife and the stick she was holding, brushing her hair away from her face. A long, paper-thin shaving curled away from the wood and drifted like a feather to the floor.

  My eyes ached. I wanted to be alone. I knew she wanted to touch it – the waxy smoothness of the bald patches, the gritty, bristly stubble of the new growth. It had got so patchy that Claire had shaved off what remained a couple of weeks ago. That’ll teach the hair that’s fallen out to grow back evenly again, she’d said, as if the absent hair, the hair that had fallen out in great clumps, lifting away from my scalp at night by the handful in the weeks after Daddy had died, merely needed to understand it was being silly and just needed to jump back onto my head again. I’d nodded.

  The long day and the sleepless night before it were catching up with me now. Behind us, the horizon shimmered in the evening sun. Oh Claire. I missed her.

  Charles looked up then. ‘Kitty, take Jo up and show her to her room. See she’s settled in.’

  Kitty heaved herself up from the table, immediately, leaving the book open downwards on the table. ‘Janey?’

  ‘Yes, of course Janey. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes. But you called her Jo.’

  ‘I did no such thing.’

  Kitty raised her eyebrows. ‘Err . . . Well, you did, but it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that, you. Have some damned manners,’ said her father, sharply. He glanced around at the others, raising his eyebrows. Can you believe this girl. ‘Stand up, stop flashing your legs around. We don’t want to see all that. Show our guest
to her room, now. You understand me? I’m starving. You must be too, Jane. Kitty, tell your mother we’ll want to eat a little earlier, about seven thirty.’

  Slowly, Kitty nodded. ‘Yes, PF.’

  Charles nudged Joss. ‘The bag.’

  ‘What, sir?’

  Charles’s thin, handsome face twitched. ‘The bag, you ass. Fetch your guest’s bag, hand it to your sister.’

  ‘Of course.’ Joss handed Kitty the bag. They didn’t look at each other. But she glanced down at the bag, and an unreadable expression flitted across her face. I followed her across the terrace, enviously drinking in her curved, willowy silhouette, the way the coral ruffles on her top filtered the evening sun, and the cut-offs that were just the right length – Claire and Ems, another girl from school, and I had cut ours off the previous summer and they’d been uneven, a disaster. Ems’s mum had made her throw hers away, she said they were shorter than her knickers, which we found hilarious. Ems had stowed them in the back of her cupboard, like contraband vodka. She vowed she’d take them to university, wear them there.

  Kitty’s shorts were so short you could see the white fabric of the pockets on her bum, but somehow it worked. On her slender feet were electric-blue flat slip-ons with thin straps. I wanted them. I wanted everything she had.

  I looked down. I was dressed in a velvet jacket and badly fitting Laura Ashley skirt I had bought at a jumble sale, and a shapeless T-shirt, much worn, once emblazoned with the legend ‘DIALTHETICS’ – one of Daddy’s many schemes that had promised untold wealth but had ended with him losing money and selling his car to pay his debts. The white symbol, with the slogan underneath (‘Dial 01 993 5684 for FITNESS NOW’) had almost faded to nothing. I liked wearing it, because though it didn’t smell of him, it had been his. Before he died I wouldn’t have been seen dead in it, as it were. The velvet jacket had been Daddy’s too. ‘Must you wear that?’ my mother had asked, on her last visit when we went out shopping. As if I was dressed in only a thong.