‘That was the first time I’ve kissed a girl,’ Bart said. ‘Don’t say anything unkind.’
‘I wasn’t going to.’
‘I thought I should try it, you know?’
‘I thought I should go along with it.’
‘That’s why I got so bonkers drunk. Because I was going to try it.’
She stubbed out her cigarette in the sand. ‘Well. Perhaps it’s a good thing you tried it. Because now we know. Now we don’t have it hanging over us. Did you feel it hanging over us? Because I did.’
He nodded. ‘I meant what I said about missing you and all that.’ He reached out with grasping fingers and she took his hand. He brought his head down and kissed her knuckle. ‘I suppose we’re just not meant for each other, in that way. Perhaps I only long for blondes or brunettes. Or older women.’
‘Or livestock,’ said Bettina.
He laughed with his mouth wide open, all his teeth showing. He really was very handsome, even considering his eyebrows fighting to get to the centre of his face and the cluster of pimples on his forehead. He was probably right; they were too much like siblings. One day she’d be kissed by a man she did not know so intimately, one she hadn’t known all her life, who hadn’t made her eat worms. This strange unattached man from the future would grab her as Bart just had, kiss her as Bart just had, and she’d feel the quickness in her bosom like the women characters from a penny dreadful.
‘One day we shall swoon for others,’ she said, squeezing his hand.
He nodded, squeezing back.
‘I think that would make a good poem,’ she said. ‘“One day we shall swoon for others.” Don’t you think?’
He wrinkled up his face. ‘God no. Do the world a favour and never write a poem as long as you live. Ugh.’
Chapter 3
She damn well hated him. Spread-eagled on the wicker lounger, his belly a hard dome beneath his ugly royal-blue swimsuit, his thick, arrogant fingers – yes, even his fingers were arrogant – tapping cigar ash into the sand. And his face, that look on his face – boredom spreading into something like – no, not disgust, not quite, because disgust was so taxing an emotion and she wasn’t worth the energy required. ‘I am not arguing with you any more,’ said her father. ‘You will do as I say.’
She pictured that cigar in his eye, the red tip sizzling through his retina. ‘Yes, Daddy.’
He squinted up at her, his moustached lip pulled into a sneer. ‘“Daddy?” For heaven’s sake, Bettina, are you five?’
She shrugged, her hands clasped behind her back, toes flexing into the warm sand. Her head itched against the band of her straw hat.
‘I mean, don’t be so transparent, darling. You obviously haven’t been paying close enough attention to your mother.’ He lay his head back down and laughed, shaking his head from side to side. ‘Amateur.’
She stared down at his sun-bright body; his large bald thighs and shiny shins, the narrow pale feet with conjoined toes on the left side, the springy orange hair, the same as hers, spilling over his forehead. Placed next to the lounger was a tumbler of lemonade and a hardback book which, she guessed, was awfully clever. He was a fat old bastard. A fraud. God, she hated him.
She swung her leg back and kicked sand. And she turned and ran, gritting her teeth and wincing as if expecting his arm to somehow reach out to some ludicrous length and his hand to clasp around her ankle, she ran, heels sinking into the sand, knowing that he wouldn’t follow – he had other ways – but all the same waiting, feeling that same ticklish dread that she’d felt, as a small girl, when exiting the small, dark outhouse at the end of her great-auntie’s garden (hands reaching for ankles – she’d always been plagued by hands reaching for ankles); she ran until she reached the scalding boardwalk. Turned back to look. He was dusting the sand off his body and she could see, by the jerking of his head, that he was furious. Good.
Her mother was in the games room playing gin rummy with Bart’s mother, Lucille. They were hunched over the poker table amidst a dense cumulus of smoke, their ankles crossed under their chairs, glasses of sherry at their elbows. Two cigarettes smouldered in the emerald-green ashtray in the centre of the table. Each woman stared at her respective hand with a shark-like focus, neither glancing up when Bettina sloped into the room. Lucille plucked a card from the deck, setting her bracelets to tinkling, and inspected it, her mouth a slick pink line, before scanning the fanned cards in her other hand. She was wearing a purple silk scarf tied around her head and her jewelled ears glinted with every tiny movement.
Bettina could hear the women breathing through their noses. She walked up to the billiards table and ran her palm along the soft felt. She saw her mother bring her sherry to her lips and heard the sound of glass knocking lightly against teeth followed by a dainty glug. She picked up a red ball, felt its weight and then tossed it back on the table where it clattered against another. Both women jerked their heads up.
‘Betsy, darling,’ said her mother, ‘if you carry on like this I’ll have to insist you start wearing a bell around your neck.’
‘Moo,’ said Lucille, laughing into her glass.
Bettina wasn’t sure if she liked or disliked Lucille.
‘Sorry,’ she said to her mother. And then to Lucille: ‘It’s all that ballet she made me take. Turned me into quite the sneak.’ She tiptoed clownishly to the table and peered at her mother’s cards. ‘Who’s winning, then?’
Her mother eyed her with wary bemusement, bringing the cards to her chest. With her free hand she picked up her lipstick-smeared sherry glass and held it out for Bettina to take. ‘Be a sweetie, eh?’
‘Where’s Gerty?’ Gerty was her mother’s maid. She was a mean-looking, roll-necked woman with the face of an exhausted turkey, but was in actual fact a very tender-hearted person deep down. Supposedly. Her mother was always mythologising the serving classes like this.
‘I’ve given her the afternoon off. Her sister is dying, poor thing.’ She shook the empty glass.
Bettina headed over to the bar. Her father had had it installed just before the start of the war and very much enjoyed hinting at its cost. A special kind of mahogany had been imported all the way from Bangor – the American Bangor, not the Welsh one – and he also very much enjoyed bringing this detail to the attention of whichever awful twit he was entertaining, running a lethargic hand along the wood. ‘Not the Welsh one, of course – haha!’ Large front teeth flashing underneath the giant foxbrush over his lip. ‘Not the Welsh one,’ she quietly mimicked, pouring the sherry into a fresh glass.
‘Thanks, dear,’ her mother said, eyes still burning into her card hand. She glanced up at Bettina. ‘Do put some clothes on, won’t you? You look like something the tide rejected. Are all your things packed for school yet?’
‘Uh-huh.’ Bettina curled her foot around the back of her sand-crumbed calf and watched them play. Lucille and Venetia had been best pals since early adulthood. They came from similar social backgrounds (wealthy but not stinking rich, as they saw it) and lived only one mile from each other. Since Lucille’s husband had passed away five years ago, she was over most days. Only once had they properly quarrelled; Lucille had by all accounts been a ‘know-it-all interferer’ when it came to child-rearing, offering unsolicited advice at every turn. Venetia bore this with patience, since Lucille had not only suffered the loss of Tabitha, who had been kicked in the head by a shire horse, but also a stillbirth, and so her incessant commentary was of course motivated by loss. Venetia took her resentment and sat on it, like a letter she never wished to read. But one day, after Lucille had personally taken it upon herself to issue instructions to Bettina’s piano tutor, Venetia snapped: ‘If he wants her to do Chopin, she’ll bloody well do Chopin! It’s none of your business. I don’t tell you how to raise your brat of a son.’