“No, I can’t! I know he wants to take Eddie away from me. I can’t pretend I don’t know, or don’t mind!” she cries.
“I know, I know,” I soothe her. She puts her hands through her messy hair. “Eddie will be back soon,” I add. “You know how much he loves being with you, Beth-he just adores you, and nothing Maxwell ever does will change that.” I grip her shoulders gently, try to coax a smile from her. Beth sighs, folds her arms.
“I know. I just… I’m going for a shower,” she says, and turns away from me.
With Eddie gone, the house is just big and empty again. By silent consensus we have stopped sorting through Meredith’s things for now. The task is just too huge and seems pointless. The contents of this house have been here so long they’ve corroded in place. It would be an impossible task to remove it all now. They will have to use force, maybe bulldozers-I picture that, a metal-toothed bucket scraping through layers of fabric and carpet and paper and wood and dust. Hard work, like trying to scoop balls from an unripe melon. It will be a terrible act of violence. All the little traces of so many lives.
“I never thought, before, about what happens to a person’s things when they die,” I say as we eat supper. The larder was full of Heinz tinned soups when we arrived but we’re getting through them. I’ll have to venture out into the village sometime soon.
“What do you mean?”
“Well… just that, I’ve never known anybody to die before. I’ve never had to deal with the aftermath, to…”
“Deal with the aftermath? You make it sound like a selfish thing to do, dying. Is that what you think?” Beth’s voice is low and intense. Such a change in her, now that Eddie has left.
“No! Of course not. That wasn’t what I was saying at all. I just meant that it’s not something you think about, until it happens… who’ll sort everything out. Where things will go. I mean, what will happen to Meredith’s nighties? Her stockings? The food in the larder?” I am struggling; the conversation was meant to be flippant.
“What does it matter, Erica?” Beth snaps at me. I stop talking, break off a piece of bread, crumble it between my fingers.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. Sometimes I feel very lonely with Beth.
I never used to, not when we were younger, not before. We didn’t antagonize each other much, or argue. Perhaps the age gap between us was big enough. Perhaps it was because we had a common enemy. Not even when we were shut inside for two whole days, two long sunny days, did we turn on each other. That was Henry’s doing, and Meredith’s. Meredith forbade us playing with Dinny from the word go; told us not to talk to any of his family, not to go near them, after we had innocently announced our new friendship to her at teatime.
We met him at the dew pond, where he was swimming. The day was warm but not hot. Early in the summer, I think it was; the landscape still fresh and green. A cool breeze blowing, so that when we first saw him, soaking wet, we shivered. His clothes were in a pile on the bank. All of his clothes. Beth took my hand, but we did not run away. Straight away, we were fascinated. Straight away, we wanted to know him-a thin, dark, naked boy with wet hair clinging to his neck, swimming and diving, all by himself. How old was I? I’m not sure. Four or five, no more than that.
“Who are you?” he asked, treading water. I shuffled closer to Beth, held her hand tighter.
“That’s our grandmother’s house,” Beth explained, pointing back at the manor. Dinny paddled a bit closer.
“But who are you?” he smiled, teeth and eyes gleaming.
“Beth!” I whispered urgently. “He’s got no clothes on!”
“Shh!” Beth hushed me, but it was a funny little sound, made buoyant by a giggle.
“Beth, then. And you?” Dinny looked at me. I lifted my chin a little.
“I’m Erica,” I announced, with all the composure I could muster. Just then a brown and white Jack Russell terrier burst from the woods and bounded over to us, yapping and wagging.
“I’m Nathan Dinsdale and that’s Arthur.” He nodded to the dog. After that, I would have followed him anywhere. I longed for a pet-a proper pet, not the goldfish that was all we had room for at home. I was so busy playing with the dog that I don’t remember how Dinny got out of the pond without Beth seeing him naked. I suspect that he did not.
We kept seeing him, of course, in spite of Meredith’s ban, and we usually managed to keep it secret by giving Henry the slip before going down to the camp where Dinny lived with his family, at the edge of the manor’s grounds. Henry usually steered clear of it anyway. He didn’t want to disobey Meredith, and instead absorbed her contempt for the travellers, nurtured it, let it grow into a hatred of his own. The time she shut us in our parents had gone away for the weekend. We went into the village with Dinny, to buy sweets and Coke at the shop. I turned and saw Henry. He ducked behind the phone box, but not quickly enough, and I had a prickling feeling between my shoulder blades as we walked back to the house. Dinny said goodbye and wandered off through the trees, giving the house a wide berth.
Meredith was waiting for us on the step when we got back; Henry nowhere to be seen. But I knew how she knew. She grabbed our arms, nails cutting in, bent down, put her livid face close to ours. “If you play with dogs, you will catch fleas,” she said, the words clipped and bitten. We were towed upstairs, made to bath in water so hot our skin turned red and angry and I wailed and wailed. Beth was silent, furious.
Afterwards, as I lay in bed and snivelled, Beth coached me in a low voice. “She wants to punish us, by keeping us indoors, so we have to show that we don’t care. That we don’t mind. Do you understand, Erica? Please don’t cry!” she whispered, stroking my hair back with fingers that shook with rage. I nodded, I think, but I was too upset to pay attention to her. It was still broad daylight outside. I could hear Henry playing with one of the dogs on the lawn, hear Clifford’s voice, blurring through the floorboards. A wide August afternoon and we had been put to bed. Confined for the whole weekend.
When our parents got back we told them everything. Dad said, “This is too much, Laura. I mean it this time.” I felt a flare of joy, of love for him.
Mum said, “I’ll talk to her.”
At teatime, I overheard them in the kitchen. Mum and Meredith.
“He seems like a nice enough boy. Quite sensible. I really don’t see the harm in it, Mother,” Mum said.
“Don’t see the harm? Do you want the girls to start using that dreadful Wiltshire slang? Do you want them to learn how to steal, and to swear? Do you want them to come home lousy and degraded? If so, then indeed, there can be no harm,” Meredith replied, coldly.
“My girls would never steal,” Mum told her firmly. “And I think degraded is overdoing it, really.”
“I don’t, Laura. Perhaps you’ve forgotten how much trouble those people have caused us over the years?”
“How could I forget?” Mum sighed.
“Well, they are your children…”
“Yes, they are.”
“But if you want them to live under my roof, and in my care, then they will have to abide by my rules,” Meredith snapped.
Mum took a deep breath. “If I hear that they have been locked up inside again, then they won’t come here at all any more, and neither will David and I,” she said quietly, but I could hear the tension. Nearly a tremor. Meredith did not reply. I heard her footsteps coming toward me and I bolted out of sight. With the coast clear I went in to my mother, found her washing up with a quiet intensity, eyes bright. I put my arms around her legs, squeezed her tight. Meredith was never any less averse to us playing with Dinny, but we were never shut in our room again. Mum won on that point, at least.
Monday morning is leaden and wet. The tips of my fingers and toes were chilled when I woke up, and have stayed that way; and now the end of my nose too. I can’t remember when I was last this cold. In London it just doesn’t happen. There’s the clammy warmth of the underground, the buffeting heat of shops and cafés. A hundred and one places to hide from any dip in the outside temperature. I’m in the orangery, on the south side of the house, overlooking a small lawn ringed with gnarled fruit trees. When we were playing too loudly, when we were trying Meredith’s patience, we would be sent here, to the small lawn, while the grown-ups sat on the west-facing terrace at a white iron table, drinking iced tea and vodka. My companions in here are the skeletal remains of some tomato plants and a toad, sitting plump by the tap that drips verdigris water onto a bright green swathe of duckweed. I had forgotten the quiet of the countryside, and it unnerves me.