The Beloved Girls

by Harriet Evans

  ‘That’s OK,’ Janey said, softly. ‘My mum’s sent me some money.’

  ‘There, see? And I’ve got money too. Aunty Ros gave me and Joss a cheque, when we finished our A-levels.’

  ‘Yes . . . That’s great.’ She nodded her head, in time.

  Back to life . . . Back to reality.

  I shook her knee. ‘Janey. Think of the places we can see . . .’

  She nodded, and half raised her soft, prickly head. ‘Can we go to Rome?’

  ‘We can go to Rome. Definitely.’

  ‘I want to see the statue of Marcus Aurelius. Dad was always going on about him. He drank champagne under him after the war. And I want to jump into a fountain. Don’t care where.’

  ‘We’ll do all that,’ I said. I’d never have doubted otherwise, but I knew travelling with Janey would be great. ‘I want to go to Toulouse. Fermat was from Toulouse.’ She gave me a funny look. ‘What? He’s a genius. And Toulouse is pink. The stone. They call it the pink city. La ville rose. In the evenings, the stones glow rose-gold.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, laughing. ‘We’ll go to the pink city.’

  I was laughing now too, lying on my front, hip bones rubbing against the cold stone. ‘I’m so sick of hills, Janey. Toulouse is only a hundred miles from Spain. And then from Spain you can get a boat to Africa.’ My heart was thumping so hard at saying these things out loud.

  ‘Yes, Kitty!’ Janey clapped her hands. ‘Morocco. I want to go to Marrakech, too.’ Her eyes were alight.

  ‘And Fez. The souk. They have bars of sandalwood perfume, the whole city smells of it. And ancient silk hangings laid out on the ground. And spices in wooden bowls, and blue dye –’ She laughed at me. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘It’s not. I can see you wafting around the souk in your long blonde hair, buying up kaftans. Looking like a Getty. Very Kitty Hunter.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, the look –’ She wafted a hand at me, my flowing floral dress, my hair, my Converse. ‘You know what I mean. It’s quite seventies. You look, yeah, you look like one of those rock groupies. You’ve got that sort of vibe going on.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ I stood up. ‘I’m not like that.’

  Janey folded her arms. ‘You’re so funny. You don’t realise, you’re one thing, but you look completely like another thing. When I last saw you, five years ago or whenever, you were just the one thing. A clever funny girl who was loads of fun. But now . . .’ She sketched an outline of a woman, helplessly, with her hands. ‘You’re another thing.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m the same.’

  ‘But you don’t look like that. That’s how people see you. Mostly it’s the hair. You can’t help but look beautiful, Kitty. It’s just a fact. Hey, it’s a good thing!’

  I was silent, then I said: ‘It’s not.’

  ‘Come on.’ Her eyes were kind, but she was still smiling. ‘It is.’

  I reached in and took the scissors out of the basket, and started chopping off my long, thin hair, tugging at each chunk as it fell away glinting, like candy floss spun from a whirling metal barrel. ‘Help me,’ I said, nodding. ‘Help me!’

  She looked horrified. ‘Kitty – what the hell are you doing?’

  ‘Please,’ I said, with a forced smile. ‘Help me.’

  ‘Oh Kitty.’ She came forward, and took the scissors, and then Joss’s battery razor, which he had no cause to use and wouldn’t ever miss. After a few minutes my hair was everywhere around us. A heap on the floor. I picked up a clump, then some more.

  ‘Look,’ I said, leaning over into the water, nudging her to do the same so that we stared at the moonlit water. ‘Don’t you notice anything?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Janey. ‘Oh. I see.’

  Our reflections stared back at us, with golden strands of looped hair scudding the surface: Janey’s face, thinner, the eyes a little darker, but other than that, we were strangely similar.

  ‘It’s . . . It’s odd, isn’t it?’ Janey poked at the water with her finger, so that the surface was disturbed, white-gold blocks of light rippling in between our fingers.

  Baby, can I hold you tonight?

  In the distance over by the low black bulk of the chapel, as ever, the low, constant vibration of the bees, working away, even at night-time.

  Nine days to go.

  I felt, rather than heard, the crunching of feet on the gravel. As I looked up, my hands still clasping Janey’s, I saw the gate to the pool swing open with a bang and Joss limped in towards us.

  ‘I could hear the music halfway down the drive. You’ll wake someone up.’ He was out of breath, as if he’d been running. I could smell the stale beer and cigarettes on him, as he drew closer.

  ‘Who? They’re all sound asleep.’

  I turned, facing him, the scissors in my hand. He froze. ‘Jesus, Kits. What have you done to your hair? Is that my razor?’

  ‘I got back tonight and fancied a change.’

  ‘Oh my God. What will – they all say?’

  ‘I don’t know, Joss. What will they say?’ But I was terrified, now I’d done it. I daren’t look in the mirror. Joss sat down on one of the wooden loungers nearest to us. He ran his hand over his head. ‘Blimey. We look similar again,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Well, a bit similar.’

  Janey and I moved apart. He took Janey’s hand, apparently carelessly, but I knew it wasn’t.

  ‘Anyway, they’re not all asleep. Aunty Ros isn’t. She’s awake. I could hear her singing.’

  I said to Janey: ‘Getting ready for the Collecting. What else does she have to do?’

  ‘I still have no idea what I’m supposed to do.’ She shot me a look.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Joss, airily waving a hand. I closed my eyes, and imagined us. In a square, somewhere in Spain, or France, an utterly foreign place. Together. Warm, spicy smells, cigarette smoke, the clink of glasses. We’d pore over our Lonely Planet guide, or just sit in silence. Free to be who we wanted, to decide where we went next.

  When I opened my eyes Joss was clumsily stroking Janey’s face. She caught his fingers and held them to her skin, smiling at him. I felt a bolt of rage shoot through me, as my brother turned in, towards her.

  ‘I missed you, Janeypoo,’ he said, softly. ‘ ’Twas lonely at the pub wivout you.’

  Janey said: ‘Giles . . . he’s a prat, Joss. I don’t know why you’re friends with him.’

  ‘Giles is a good pal to me. He’s supposed to be your boyfriend, Kitty.’ He looked up at me. ‘You know no one will want to go near you when they see what you’ve done to your hair.’

  ‘How’s my hair different to hers?’ I said, pointing at Janey. I felt furious with her for not saying more after that, just sitting there watching, letting Joss touch her.

  ‘It’s not her fault. She lost it because . . . because of her dad,’ said Joss. He pressed his fingers onto Janey’s breastbone, and kissed the top of her head. I gathered up my clothes and punched off the tape player. All was silent.

  ‘Think about what we said, Janey,’ I said quietly. ‘I’ll leave you two alone now.’

  In the silence without the music from the cassette player the Collecting Carol started circling around in my head, as it did all the time now, whenever there was silence.

  Three, three, the rivals,

  Two, two, the beloved girls,

  Clothed all in green, O,

  One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.

  ‘Thanks, Kits,’ said Joss, so patronisingly. He stroked Janey’s neck, pulling her closer for a kiss. I strode back towards the dark house.

  Janey caught up with me as I reached the terrace, the curling, prickly lichen digging into the soles of my feet.

  ‘Kitty.’

  I turned around.

  ‘I said I was with you before,’ she hissed, and the fury in her voice took me by surprise. ‘I said it, didn’t I? And you doubt me just because I’m fooling around with your brother. Why shouldn’t I? Don’t we need
to keep him onside? Don’t we need to act like everything’s normal?’

  ‘If we’re going to leave it all behind . . . Yes . . .’ I said, slowly, my hand on the door.

  ‘I will risk everything,’ Janey said, her eyes burning. I saw how angry I had made her, and it was thrilling. ‘I’ll do this, I’ll run away so they can never find us. I’ve said I will. Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘I – I do,’ I said. ‘I promise I do.’

  ‘This only works if we’re both in it together.’

  She held out her hand. We shook, and I said:

  ‘I’ll make plans. I’ll book a ferry. Work out what to do with the car. Where we’ll go . . .’

  ‘Good. Good. So . . . don’t doubt me.’ Her fingers pinched my wrist. ‘Don’t ever do it again. We’re leaving. Together. You and me.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. I smiled at her, shaking my hair, before I remembered it wasn’t there. It was in a pile, by the pool, abandoned.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  As Janey said, someone – probably I – had forgotten to explain to her the full tradition of the Collecting, and so it was a surprise to wake up a week later to my Aunt Ros standing at the end of her bed.

  ‘Where’s your green dress? Hm? Is it ready?’ is what she’d apparently said.

  Joss had only just gone back to his room. Janey called me in, and I arrived to find Aunty Ros going through the dark and scratched chest of drawers in the corner of the room, removing Janey’s clothes and shaking them out.

  ‘Your mother should have sent you down with something suitable,’ she said, as though Janey were a new housemaid arriving to wait on the Queen. ‘Don’t you understand?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Janey, sitting up in bed. She wrapped the worn quilt more tightly around her – she was naked. I stood in the doorway, watching them.

  ‘The Beloved Girls wear lovely long green dresses. Oof, there you are, Catherine, looking like goodness knows what. Honestly,’ said Aunty Ros, her currant-bun eyes disappearing into her wrinkles as she screwed up her face in reproach. ‘What Miss Lord would say were she to see a Letham’s girl turn out like you –’ She slammed a drawer, furiously. ‘Nothing in here. Nothing at all. Don’t you have anything that’ll do?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Janey. She ruffled her hair, which was, I saw in the morning light, growing back, and fairer than before. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think when I was invited here that I’d be asked to take part in a pagan ritual.’

  ‘Don’t be sarcastic with me, little girl,’ said Aunty Ros, waggling her finger. ‘I know all about you. I know you’ve got your claws into the twins. Both of ’em.’ She shook her head. I realised she was getting herself worked up – she was more and more unpredictable lately. I patted her shoulder.

  ‘Aunty Ros, there’s the Dickins and Jones dress I wore when I was Georgina Lowther’s bridesmaid. That’ll fit Janey. And it’s quite like my dress.’

  ‘You’ll look like boys,’ said Ros, in despair. ‘Both of you. It’s the Beloved Girls. Girls – you should look the part.’

  ‘Princess Di has short hair,’ said Janey.

  ‘Her Royal Highness Diana the Princess of Wales has appropriate hair.’ Aunty Ros clicked her heels together. ‘She doesn’t have hair hacked off with a blunt pair of scissors like a – a – gypsy.’ She shook her finger at Janey again. Her voice rose. ‘St Bartholomew’s Day, or rather this year the twins’ eighteenth birthday, is the most important day of the year here. You can sneer at it all you want. But it means something, to Kitty’s father and me. I always took part in the Collecting – every year after I was eighteen, I was a Beloved Girl. Before that I’d walk with the procession. Daddy carried me if I was too tired. One year, he let me remove the comb myself. Got stung twice, I didn’t cry though!’ She stared out of the window, at the delicate morning sky, pale blue and lemon yellow. I could feel autumn, pressing against the glass, longing to be let in. St Bartholomew’s Day always made me feel like that.

  But we weren’t doing the ceremony on the usual day. Saint Bartholomew’s Day had been and gone, and we were doing the ceremony on our birthday, in two days’ time. And every day we delayed, the bees grew angrier. My father had stopped checking on them, after Rory died. He said it was best to leave them to it, not to open the hives too often, to guard against robber bees and wasps. The previous day after breakfast I had heard Mrs Red ask him if he was going to replace the queen.

  ‘She’s a bad one, Mr Charles.’ She’d rubbed her hands viciously on the tea towel, then leaned back against the sink, arms folded. ‘Get a new one. A new queen will put them in a better mood.’

  But Dad shook his head. ‘She’s fine. They’re all fine.’ He’d been leaning against the kitchen table, an amused look on his face. He’d stepped forward, patting Mrs Red’s arm. ‘Dear Mrs R, have a little faith. I think I know what I’m doing, after all these years, what, what?’

  Mrs Red was old enough to remember Pammy, my father’s sister, dying. I’d asked her about it once. ‘Little thing she was, small for her age, and they made her stay outside when they were in. Terrified she was. Kept saying she didn’t want to stay. Well, they took too much, and disturbed them, and they turned, flew straight out the door, got her. Her poor little heart.’ She’d shaken her head, wiping her eyes. ‘Such a clever girl. Kind. It was dreadful, Kitty, dear. Absolutely dreadful.’

  I had seen the look she gave my father as she moved past him, to put the dishes back on the dresser. Then she glanced up, and caught me peering through the door, and her face twisted from alarm to something different. Jubilation. I didn’t understand it, not then.

  ‘We’ll practise this evening, so we’re all clear,’ said Aunty Ros now. ‘It’s the biggest one yet, it’s important to get it right. Everyone needs to know their part.’

  ‘Do we have twelve hunters?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. She opened the window, letting in morning air. ‘The Red family, the Culneys, Pete Crawter from the Good Leper, and so on. They’re honoured to do it.’

  Janey gave a repressed chuckle, and Ros looked at her suspiciously. ‘Is it funny?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Janey reached out for her nightie, then pulled it over her head, stretching out her arms and yawning. ‘It’s – you’re all so obsessed with it. I find it a bit funny, that’s all. All to celebrate Joss’s birthday. Not even Kitty’s birthday.’

  Ros took her time folding up a jumper and placing it carefully back on the chest of drawers. ‘It’s tradition, Jane.’

  ‘I know it’s tradition, but –’ Janey hopped out of bed and stretched again. ‘I don’t mean to sound rude. But the world is changing. You know, a thousand people had a rave not far from here the other week. All those men and women who drowned on the Marchioness last week. They were young, they had their whole lives to live. Some of them would have changed things. For the better. It just seems so – I don’t know, strange, to be obsessed with this ceremony, when it – it’s got nothing to do with real life.’

  ‘Have you lived in the countryside before?’ Jane shrugged a no. ‘Of course not. Listen.’ Ros hitched up her skirt, rolling her head round her neck in an alarming fashion. ‘What’s your favourite clothes shop? And what’s your favourite thing to eat? Quickly. Tell me.’

  ‘Um . . .’ Janey held one arm, the other dangling, head on one side. ‘Dash? Topshop? And my favourite thing is . . . well, it’s toast, actually. With lots of butter. And apples.’

  ‘There. So not far from here, there’s the Lowthers’ fields of wheat, hundreds of acres of the stuff, they sell it to Sainsbury’s mainly, that makes flour for the bread you eat. And the sheep who make the wool for that jumper, they’re grazed all over these parts. And we make the honey. Hugo’s family, they make vegetable oil. You drive half an hour east and all of Somerset is one big apple orchard. My family used to own coal mines not far from here, so your family could keep warm. You don’t think about where it comes from. You see it and think how strange we are. But there’s a connection,
a connection to the seasons, to the land.’ She opened the drawer, hypnotically slowly, and slid the clothes back in. We watched her. ‘Listen, Janey Lestrange. I don’t listen to the news. I don’t need to know what’s going on today. I know what matters.’ She jabbed the top of the chest of drawers with one stumpy finger. ‘We lose that connection and we are in trouble. If bees don’t fly around collecting pollen on their legs and brushing it off onto other plants, the plants don’t get pollinated. If they don’t get pollinated, we don’t have apples for you to eat. We don’t have most fruit and vegetables, we’re dead in twenty years.’

  Janey looked at her, obviously not believing a word of this. ‘OK.’

  Aunty Ros said, grinding her jaw: ‘I ask you simply to understand that this is a little corner of the world that follows the rhythm of the year, that respects it, and the ceremony with the bees is one way of acknowledging that. And that’s why it means so much to people.’

  ‘Yes, Ros,’ said Janey. She nodded. ‘Sorry if I sounded rude.’

  ‘Fine. Why don’t you come down with me and we’ll find that dress of Kitty’s. It’s hanging in Sylvia’s wardrobe. You can see if it fits.’ She handed Janey some knickers. ‘Leave your nightie on, you’ll change afterwards.’ Janey nodded meekly. ‘The hunters, the honey makers and the three rivals will be here at six.’

  ‘Who are the rivals?’ I asked.

  ‘Some friends of Joss.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Giles?’

  ‘Yes. Joss asked for him specially. Your father’s pleased. I imagine you are, too!’ Ros smiled, her face creasing into unfamiliar lines. ‘Kitty, dear, that reminds me. I’ve found a nice hairband you might want to wear, to cover up the haircut.’ Ros gave a chuckle, determined now to indulge us, as if it were all a big game. ‘I don’t ask for you to be in crinolines, but it’s nice to be young ladies now and again, Kitty, and the ceremony is so special –’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  She bent down and patted the bear on Janey’s bed. ‘Come on, Janey, dear. This is a pretty little room. It was mine when I was a girl.’