Henry came out to her to offer his condolences. He stood over her and gave his little speech, his shoe touching her ankle, only just. He’d always done that – stood too close to her, a part of him touching a part of her, just. So that if the indiscretion was ever pointed out, he could very easily claim innocence. Oh, I’m so very sorry! How clumsy of me. More than once he’d swiped her breast with his finger in the act of handing her something.
She thanked him for his ‘kind words’ in as stilted and daggered a way as humanly possible. Odious cunt. She abhorred the word, but it fitted him like a tailored suit. One good thing to come out of this sorry business: Henry would hopefully lose his job, her mother having no way of paying his wages. He dipped his head, turned smartly on his heel and returned to the house, the sun spilling out onto his balding head like a cracked egg yolk. See, that was good. Egg yolk. So why couldn’t she write poetry?
She supposed the question should be: Why must she try? And, well – it was obvious. So obvious it was boring. If she wrote a marvellous, perfect poem now it would be one over on her dead father. You were wrong, it would say. You were wrong.
‘Dear Father,’ she wrote, ‘you were wrong.’ And she continued to write, in prose form, until she’d filled twelve pages and her hand and wrist were aching nearly as much as the bones of her dead father’s house, and the one remaining solicitor’s car had driven away, carrying away its grey-faced cargo, and every light inside the house had been switched on, the windows glowing with warm defiant light, defiant because the electricity powering this light could no longer be afforded.
‘So you weren’t entirely wrong, Father,’ she wrote. ‘I can’t write poetry. But I can do many other things, and in any case, your opinions are no longer valid because you are dead. I am alive and you, Father, are dead. And anything I write will surely enjoy a healthier legacy than yours, you squandering whoremaster, you abysmal punchline to a dubious joke, you posthumous failure. It could be discovered after my death that I liked to fuck women (which I do, Father – I just adore fucking women) and even this sordid disclosure would not make me as hated as you. You are sorely hated, Father. I hate you, Father.’
She crossed out the last line, frowning through a sheen of tears. Only silly little girls hated their fathers.
Chapter 20
April 1928, Davenport House, London
During her early days in London, Jean had frequented The Little Boat, a working-class pub known for its mainly female clientele – ‘Dykes, in other words,’ she told Bettina, who was both shocked that such a place existed and annoyed that no one had told her about it. Jean made friends there – most of whom she slept with, naturally. Some of these were women of her ilk – suffragettes, academics, artists – but the majority were prostitutes or ex-service staff. There was a smug sort of pride in Jean’s bearing as she disclosed this – what a darling she was, befriending tramps and drudges.
One such woman, Megan, had once worked as a nanny for a wealthy family. ‘According to her,’ Jean told Bettina, ‘the husband pushed her into the coal house and flopped out his weenie. And when she rejected his advances, he ran to his wife and said he’d caught her stealing.’
Megan arrived at the Dawes’ house for an interview one cloudy morning. Bettina had never been so sleep-deprived – flashing purple stars appeared at the corner of her vision like fireworks set off behind her head, and every time she closed her eyes, she heard snatches of disjointed conversation, as if her skull contained a miniature market square. ‘Babies are awful,’ said Bart in a weary monotone, Tabby lying on his lap, her tiny fists clenching and unclenching. ‘I daresay, even a little evil.’ Bettina burst into dizzy giggles, spilling strong coffee onto her knees. It was at this point that a quick rat-a-tat announced Megan’s arrival.
Bettina jumped up from her chair and started dabbing her knees with one of the baby’s muslin cloths, succeeding only in transferring milky sick to her stockings. ‘Oh for God’s sake.’ She threw the cloth on the table. ‘I don’t care if this woman has a satanic pentagram tattooed on her head, we’re hiring her.’
Her eyes – that was the first thing and the best thing; they were set far apart and slanted up at the corners slightly, and the green irises were flecked with gold – not brown, but actual gold. And her cheekbones… she’d had a maths teacher with cheekbones like that – Miss Moody – and Margo had once said that a small family could pitch up a tent and camp under those cheekbones, and if it were to rain, they’d stay perfectly dry. Her hair, underneath her hat, was bobbed and black.
Étienne glanced at Bettina knowingly. With a panic-eyed grin, she breathed in deep through her nose and ushered the woman through to the drawing room. ‘You are in trouble,’ Étienne whispered to her.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she whispered back, her eyes on Megan’s large behind.
She’d been wrong about the eyes – they weren’t her best feature.
Megan had been raised in an orphanage in Cornwall. Her father was a loveless drunk who’d died in an alleyway somewhere, his head kicked in, his pockets emptied and his one gold tooth plucked out, and her mother – also a drunk – passed away shortly after giving birth to her, of a haemorrhage. The orphanage was predictably terrible and Megan still had the scars along her right arm from all the lashings, which she eagerly showed Bettina, rolling up her sleeve and pointing them out one by one with an accompanying back-story – ‘This is from when they caught me trying to read under the covers at lights out’, ‘This is for backchat’, etc. A lot of them were for backchat.
Bart called her ‘Meg the Mouth’ behind her back.
‘Don’t be mean, Meow,’ Bettina admonished, the first time he said it.
They were smoking on the bench at the end of the garden.
‘You want to fuck her.’
‘Shh! Keep your voice down. I don’t want to do anything of the sort.’
‘Why not? She’s a sexpot.’
‘She’s Tabby’s nanny.’
‘She’s a lowly commoner – at least be honest, Betts.’
‘That’s not true.’ Bettina flicked her cigarette butt away and immediately lit another. ‘Well, maybe it’s true.’ She side-glanced at Bart, coolly, and they both laughed.
‘So if Étienne was a cleaner of lavatories or something like that, would you have fallen for him?’
‘Étienne is dirt-poor. His mother ran a brothel.’
‘Yes, but he’s an artist,’ she said. ‘And it was a French brothel.’
‘You’re diverting the conversation away from yourself.’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t want to sleep with the nanny. I already have a lover. Stop talking about it. Oh, look out – she’s coming over.’
Megan was carrying the baby with one crooked arm and shielding her face from the sun with the other. How lovely she’d look painted, just like that.
‘You want to lick her nipples,’ whispered Bart.
Bettina abruptly rose to greet Megan. ‘Hello there.’
‘Beautiful day, isn’t it?’ said Megan, looking up at the sky. ‘Thought I’d give the little madam some fresh air and sunlight. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Of course not,’ said Bettina. ‘Please, join us.’
‘Oh no, I wouldn’t want to impose.’ She spoke with a clear voice – the vocal equivalent, Bettina thought, of a splash of cool mountain water in one’s face on a clammy day.
Bart held his arms out, gesturing for Megan to hand the baby over.