They wrote from time to time, Étienne still addressing him as Fleur du Mal. He’d supposedly put on a lot of weight (‘I am like Oliver Hardy – monstrous!’) and had found work as an interior designer, something he’d fallen into quite accidentally, though it turned out he had an inborn talent (‘You do not have an inborn talent,’ Bart wrote back. ‘I remember that filthy shithole you used to call home.’) Bart could well imagine Étienne designing the homes of Hollywood moguls – they’d hear his French accent and immediately decide that he was a cultured man, an authentic artist. And the scarf around his neck – a bohemian man too! A French bohemian! Here, take all my money and fill my home with bullshit, please!
He was happy for Étienne, he supposed.
Ted was probably home now. He had a wife. Francine. ‘Nice time at the party?’ she’d say. ‘Yes, it was all right, I suppose,’ he’d say, kicking off his shoes. ‘But the fellow hosting the party was quite clearly trying it on with me.’ Here, the wife would pull a face of abject horror. ‘You mean that chap who does those crummy B-movies? Bartholomew Dawes? A faggot?’
‘Yes, Fran, a raving faggot. I can still feel his hands all over my body. I might take a bath actually.’
Bart left the room, holding one arm out to keep his balance – the world was tilting. He passed Tuna and her plus-one in the hall – they were pressed up against the wall by the telephone, kissing. Bart waved a hand in their direction as if trying to ward off nonsense. He drained his glass, turned it upside down and rested it on the top of the whisky bottle. ‘A little hat for you,’ he said, beginning to climb the stairs. All I want, he thought, gripping the banister, is someone to hold me. Someone to lie in bed next to me and hold me until I fall asleep.
Such a simple little thing.
He almost fell into his bedroom, the glass slipping off the bottle and rolling under the bed. He didn’t need a glass. Love and attention and touch – he needed those things. Not a glass. He sat on the bed and drank from the bottle. He heard a sound next door in Bettina’s bedroom.
Oh, God. Oh, Betts.
What was it in him that made his most vicious thoughts shoot out of his mouth like that? There was something very wrong with him. A darkness of the heart.
He opened her door.
She was on the carpet on all fours, her dress hiked up to her waist, and a man – no, he must be hallucinating – what looked like a man, was on his knees behind her, his pelvis slamming into her large pale arse.
No. Ted? No.
They both saw him at the same time. Ted jumped up, his shiny red stiffy bouncing, and yanked his trousers up. Bettina rolled onto her side and slowly, casually, pulled her dress down. She was smiling.
Ted grabbed his hat and ran from the room, scraping his back on the door frame as he dodged past Bart – then, realising that he’d gone out through the wrong door (into the husband’s bedroom!) he ran back through the doorway, again past Bart, who instinctively lifted his foot out to trip him up. Ted went sprawling and landed on his face. He got up, mumbled, ‘I suppose I deserved that,’ and left through the other door.
Bettina was still on her side like a contented house cat, her stomach spilling to the floor with gravity. ‘Here’s your fat whore,’ she said.
Bart gripped the door handle. ‘Pure spite.’
And she nodded.
He threw his whisky bottle at her – it missed, widely, crashing against the mahogany desk which housed her spare typewriter and notebooks. There was her almost-finished manuscript, in a neat, perfect pile. Almost ten years she’d been working on that – ten years of false starts, rewrites, tense changes, ten years of literary anguish and he’d had to witness it all, pretending that he cared. He went and snatched it up, then ran from the room. He heard her cry out and give chase. He bounded down the stairs, missing the sixth from last step and skidding down on his backside, but keeping the manuscript wedged to his ribs like a rugby ball. He looked over his shoulder – she was halfway down, her hem swishing like tidal foam. He got to his feet and ran for the study, almost crashing into a group of people trying to get their coats on.
He dropped the manuscript into the fire and turned around to see Bettina at the doorway. Her mouth dropped open and her eyes grew fantastically huge – just like when Beadie first saw Reanimated Corpse No. 1. The paper was ablaze, thick smoke curling out. She ran to retrieve it but he blocked the hearth, grabbing a poker and wielding it. Bettina looked at him with such bitterness – oh, such bitterness. ‘Two can play at that game,’ she said. And she turned and ran.
He dropped the poker and gave chase – she was running back up the stairs. She was going to do something. What could she possibly do? He went up the steps two at a time – he could almost touch her ankle. He tripped over, thumping his stomach against the stair edge, winding himself. She was already flinging open his bedroom door. He scrambled to his feet, raced along the corridor, sliding on the Persian rug, and burst into his bedroom.
She was clutching a wooden chest and rushing towards the window. His letters from Étienne. ‘Don’t you fucking dare!’ he screamed.
She unlatched the window and pushed it open just before he reached her. She threw the box out and spun around to face him, her back pressed to the ledge, her face wild. He heard the crash as the box exploded its contents all over the drive outside. He pushed her to the side and looked down – papers were skittering around on the gravel drive, some blowing up into the trees – there, pressed by the wind to a thick branch was a life-size sketch of an erect penis. A man and a woman were gaping up at Bart, their scarves twisting in the wind like ribbons. Fifteen years’ worth of letters, drawings, poems. The only written proof that someone had ever loved him.
Bettina stood with her arms straight down by her sides and her hands bunched up. Her face was drained of all colour save for two perfect little circles of red on her cheekbones.
‘I despise you,’ she said, quite simply.
Chapter 26
April 1943, The Boar and Hound, Sussex
It was an especially dark shade of red, the blood, like pickled beetroot. Bettina got out her handkerchief, licked a corner, and wiped it off – her boot was lacquered and it came off clean. She drank her scrumpy. She’d do well to remember that particular shade of red because she was going to write about it.
Ha! She wasn’t going to write about a damn thing.
The scrumpy was lukewarm with a gorgeous tang to it. Even in these days of scarcity she knew exactly where to look for it. This pub was an hour’s bike ride from the farm – absolutely worth it – and it had a scruffy garden with picnic tables. There was a closer pub but it often ran out of stock and was frequented by resentful old farmers. She took her tobacco out of her knapsack and started to roll a cigarette. Writing was for writers and she was no writer. She was something altogether better: she was Brighton’s second-best rat killer.
Good name for a book, actually.
When she’d first come to Hathaway Farm she’d been appallingly unfit. She’d heard stories that some farmers were in the habit of giving all the heavy, horrible work to the wealthy girls, to teach them some kind of lesson (poor people are jealous and bitter – lesson learned!) but that hadn’t happened – possibly because she’d voluntarily enlisted. Or because she was old. All the same, they hadn’t liked her at first, owing to a joke she’d cracked on first being shown around her spartan bedroom – she’d looked around the room snootily and said, ‘What a dump.’ It was, of course, a line from the Bette Davies film Of Human Bondage. The landlady curled her lip in a muddled half-smile – she’d got the reference (they’d chatted about the film ten minutes earlier in the kitchen), but she didn’t find it funny. Too close to the bone. I will shut up from now on, thought Bettina – she worked in silence, only opening her mouth to swap pleasantries or feign enthusiasm: soldiers are dying and I’m picking apples – whoopee.