“Well, you could tell him to bring a friend. Why don’t you? Call him tomorrow-not for the whole of Christmas, of course. But some of the working parents might be glad of a few extra days’ grace before their little homewreckers reappear, don’t you think?”
“Hmm.” Beth rolls her eyes. “I don’t think any of the mothers at that school do anything as common as work for a living.”
“Only riff-raff like you?”
“Only riff-raff like me,” she agrees, deadpan.
“Ironic, really, since you’re the real thing. Blue blood, practically.”
“Hardly. Just as you are.”
“No. I think the nobility skipped a generation in me.” I smile. Meredith told me this once, when I was ten. Your sister has the Calcott mien, Erica. You, I fear, are all your father. I didn’t mind then and I don’t mind now. I wasn’t sure what mien meant, at the time. I thought she meant my hair, which had been chopped off short thanks to an incident with bubblegum. When she turned away I stuck out my tongue, and Mum wagged a finger at me.
Beth rejects it too. She fought with Maxwell-Eddie’s father-to allow their son to attend the village primary school, which was tiny and friendly and had a nature garden in one corner of the yard: frogspawn, the dried-out remains of dragonfly nymphs; primroses in the spring, then pansies. But Maxwell won the toss when it came to secondary education. Perhaps it was for the best. Eddie boards now, all term long. Beth has weeks and weeks to build herself up, shake a sparkle into her smile.
“We’ll fill up the space,” I assure her. “We’ll deck the halls. I’ll dig out a radio. It won’t be like…” but I trail off. I’m not sure what I was about to say. In the corner, the tiny TV gives an angry belch of static that makes us both jump.
Almost midnight, and Beth and I have retired to our rooms. The same rooms we always took, where we found the same bedspreads, smooth and faded. This seemed unreal to me, at first. But then, why would you change the bedspreads in rooms that are never used? I don’t think Beth will be asleep yet either. The quiet in the house rings like a bell. The mattress sinks low where I sit, the springs have lost their spring. The bed has a dark oak headboard and there’s a watercolor on the wall, so faded now. Boats in a harbor, though I never heard of Meredith visiting the coast. I reach behind the headboard, my fingers feeling down the vertical supports until I find it. Brittle now, gritty with dust. The piece of ribbon I tied-red plastic ribbon from a curl on a birthday present. I tied it here when I was eight so that I would know a secret, and only I would know it. I could think about it, after we’d gone back to school. Picture it, out of sight, untouched as the room was cleaned, as people came and went. Here was something that I would know about; a relic of me I could always find.
There’s a tiny knock and Beth’s face appears around the door. Her hair is out of its plait, falling around her face, making her younger. She is so beautiful sometimes that it gives me a pain in my chest, makes my ribs squeeze. Weak light from the bedside lamp puts shadows in her cheekbones, under her eyes; shows up the curve of her top lip.
“Are you OK? I can’t sleep,” she whispers, as if there is somebody else in the house to wake.
“I’m fine, Beth; just not sleepy.”
“Oh.” She lingers in the doorway, hesitates. “It’s so strange to be here.” This is not a question. I wait. “I feel like… I feel a bit like Alice in Through the Looking Glass. Do you know what I mean? It’s all so familiar, and yet wrong too. As if it’s backwards. Why do you think she left us the house?”
“I really don’t know. To get at Mum and Uncle Clifford, I imagine. That’s the kind of thing Meredith would do,” I sigh. Still Beth hovers, so pretty, so girlish. Right now it’s as if no time has passed, as if nothing has changed. She could be twelve again, I could be eight, and she could be leaning in to wake me, to make sure I’m not late for breakfast.
“I think she did it to punish us,” she says softly, and looks stricken.
“No, Beth. We didn’t do anything wrong,” I say firmly.
“Didn’t we? That summer. No. No, I suppose not.” She flicks her eyes over me now, quickly, puzzled; and I get the feeling she is trying to see something, some truth about me. “Good night, Rick,” she whispers, using a familiar tomboy truncation of my name, and vanishes from the doorway.
I remember so many things from that summer. The last summer that everything was right, the summer of 1986. I remember Beth being distraught that Wham! were breaking up. I remember the heat bringing up water blisters across my chest that itched, and burst under my fingernails, making me feel sick. I remember the dead rabbit in the woods that I checked up on almost daily, appalled and riveted by its slow sinking, softening, the way it seemed to breathe, until I poked it with a stick to check it was dead and realized that the movement was the greedy squabble of maggots inside. I remember watching, on Meredith’s tiny television, Sarah Ferguson marry Prince Andrew on the twenty-third of July-that huge dress, making me ache with envy.
I remember making up a dance routine to Diana Ross’s hit “Chain Reaction.” I remember stealing one of Meredith’s boas for my costume, stumbling and stepping on it: a shower of feathers; hiding it in a distant drawer with dread in the pit of my stomach, too scared to own up. I remember reporters and policemen, facing each other either side of Storton Manor’s iron gates. The policemen folded their arms, seemed bored and hot in their uniforms. The reporters milled and fiddled with their equipment, spoke into cameras, into tape recorders, waited and waited for news. I remember Beth’s eyes pinning me as the policeman talked to me about Henry, asked me where we’d been playing, what we’d been doing. His breath smelt of Polo mints, sugar gone sour. I told him, I think, and I felt unwell; and Beth’s eyes on me were ragged and wide.
In spite of these thoughts I sleep easily in the end, once I have got over the cold touch of the sheets, the unfamiliar darkness of the room. And there’s the smell, not unpleasant but all-pervading. The way other people’s houses will smell of their occupants-the combination of their washing soap, their deodorant and their hair when it needs washing; their perfume, skin; the food they cook. Regardless of the winter, this smell lingers in every room, evocative and unsettling. I wake up once; think I hear Beth moving around the house. And then I dream of the dew pond, of swimming in it and trying to dive down, of needing to fetch something from the bottom but being unable to reach. The cold shock of the water, the pressure in my lungs, the awful fear of what my fingers will find at the bottom.
Leaving
1902
I will remain steadfast, Caroline reminded herself firmly, as she watched her aunt Bathilda covertly through lowered eyelashes. The older woman cleared her plate with methodical efficiency before speaking again.
“I fear you are making a grave mistake, my dear.” But there was a glint in her aunt’s eye that did not look fearful at all. More righteous, in fact, more self-satisfied, as if she, in spite of all protestations to the contrary, felt victorious. Caroline studied her own plate, where the fat had risen from the gravy and congealed into an unappetizing crust.
“So you have said before, Aunt Bathilda.” She kept her voice low and respectful, but still her aunt glared at her.
“I repeat myself, child, because you do not appear to hear me,” she snapped.
Heat flared in Caroline’s cheeks. She nudged her cutlery into a neater position, felt the smooth weight of the silver beneath her fingers. She shifted her spine slightly. It was laced into a strict serpentine, and it ached.