Yvonne interrupted. ‘All this is making me poorly.’
Eva said, ‘It explains everything.’
Stanley insisted, ‘But none of that excuses her current behaviour.’
Alexander nodded. ‘My mum used to leave me locked in my room in the dark. I don’t know where she went. She ordered me to keep clear of the window and told me that if I cried she would send me away, so I did as I was told. But The done OK.’
He looked up to find Eva gazing back at him with a fierce look in her eyes, as if she were seeing him for the first time.
Yvonne said, miserably, ‘If I’d known there was a deranged person staying here – well, another deranged person – I would never have come.’
Eva countered, ‘I’m not deranged, Yvonne. Can I remind you that your son, my husband, is downstairs arguing with his mistress?’
Yvonne looked down and straightened the rings on her arthritic fingers.
Brian Junior said, ‘I’ve got her GCSE and A level certificates here. She got twelve GCSEs, nothing below a C grade, but only two A levels – an A in English, and an A* in Religious Studies.’
‘So, she’s not just a psychopath,’ Alexander said, ‘she’s quite a clever psychopath. Now that is frightening.’
They all jumped and stared at the bedroom door as they heard the front door slam, followed by the familiar clump of Poppy’s boots in the hall.
Eva said, ‘I want to talk to her. Brian Junior, will you ask her to come up here, please?’
‘Why me, why do I have to go? I don’t want to speak to her. I don’t want to look at her. I don’t want to breathe the same air as her.’
Everybody looked at everybody else, but nobody moved.
Alexander said, ‘I’ll go.’
He went downstairs and eventually found her pretending to be asleep on the sofa in the sitting room, covered in a red blanket. She didn’t open her eyes, but Alexander could see by the flickering of her eyelids that she wasn’t really asleep.
He said, loudly, ‘Eva wants to see you,’ then watched her impersonating someone waking up. He felt a mixture of pity and contempt for her.
Poppy/Paula exclaimed, ‘I must have fallen asleep! It was an exhausting morning. Everybody at the shelter wanted a little bit of Poppy time.’
Alexander said, ‘Well, now Eva wants a little bit of Poppy time.’
When they walked into Eva’s bedroom, Poppy was met by a room full of accusatory faces. But she’d been in similar situations many times before. ‘Style it out, girl,’ she said to herself.
Eva patted the side of the bed and said, ‘Sit here, Paula. You don’t have to lie any more. We know who you are. We know your parents are alive.’ She held up a piece of paper. ‘It says here that your mother went to the Department of Work and Pensions on the 22nd of December, and asked for a crisis loan, claiming that she had no money for Christmas. Your mother is Claire Theresa Maria Gibb, isn’t she? Incidentally, are you Poppy or Paula?’
‘Poppy,’ the girl said, with a crooked nervous smile. ‘Please, don’t call me Paula. Please. Don’t call me Paula. I gave myself a new name. Don’t call me Paula.’
Eva took her hand and said, ‘OK. You’re Poppy. Why don’t you try to be yourself?’
Poppy’s first instinct was to pretend to cry, and sob, ‘But I don’t know who I am!’ Then she became curious: who was she? She would try to drop the little-girl voice, she thought. When she looked at the fraying 1950s evening dress she was wearing, it suddenly didn’t seem as charmingly eccentric as vintage clothes did on Helena Bonham Carter. And her big boots, with the carefully loosened laces, no longer gave her ‘character’. She shifted the gears in her brain into neutral and waited a few seconds to see where this would take her. She said, testing her new voice, ‘Can I stay until uni starts, please?’
Brianne and Brian Junior said, in unison, ‘No!’
Eva said, ‘Yes, you can stay until term starts. But these are the house rules. One, no more lies.’
Poppy repeated, ‘No more lies.’
‘Two, no more lounging on the sofa in your underwear. And three, no more stealing.’
Brianne said, ‘I found our egg timer in her bag last night.’
Poppy sat down next to Alexander, who said, ‘You’ve been given a great chance. Don’t fuck it up.’
Brianne said, ‘So, that’s it, is it? She’s forgiven, is she?’
‘Yes,’ said Eva. ‘Just like I’ve forgiven Dad.’
Stanley raised his hand and asked, ‘May I say something?’ He looked at Poppy. ‘I’m not a very forgiving person, and I cannot tell you how angry and distressed I am about your swastika tattoo. It has been preying on my mind. I know you are young, but you must have studied modern history and be fully aware that the swastika symbolises a great evil. And please don’t tell me that your fascist tattoo represents a Hindu god, or some such nonsense. You and I know that you chose a swastika either because you’re a Nazi, or because you wanted to boast about your alienation from our mostly decent society in order to shock. You could have chosen a snake, a flower, a bluebird, but you chose the swastika. I have in my house a collection of videos which chart the progress of the Second World War. One of those videos shows the liberation of Belsen, the concentration camp. Have you heard of Belsen?’
‘It’s where Anne Frank died. I did her for GCSE.’
Stanley continued, ‘When the Allied troops arrived to free the prisoners, they found skeletal creatures barely alive, pleading for food and water. A large pit was discovered, full of dead bodies. Horrifically, some poor wretches were still alive. A bulldozer -’
Ruby shouted, ‘No more, Stanley!’
‘I apologise, I didn’t want to upset…’ He turned back to Poppy. ‘If you would like to see the video, you are welcome to come and sit with me, and we will watch it together.’
Poppy shook her head.
There was silence.
Eventually, Poppy said, ‘I’ll have it removed, lasered off. I adore Anne Frank. I forgot she was a Jew I cried when the Nazis found her in the attic. I only had a swastika tattoo when I was fourteen because I was infatuated with a boy who loved Hitler. He had a suitcase under his bed, full of daggers and medals and stuff. He told me that Hitler was an animal lover and a vegetarian, and he only wanted to bring peace to the world. When we were in his bedroom, his rule was that we called each other Adolf and Eva.’
Everybody looked at Eva, who said, ‘Blame my mother.’
Ruby said indignantly, ‘You’re named after the film star. Eva Marie Saint.’
‘He went off me after two months,’ said Poppy, ‘but the tattoo stayed.’
Stanley nodded. ‘I shan’t speak of it again.’ He gave a little cough, which acted as a punctuation mark, then turned to Ruby and said, ‘Ah, Eva Marie Saint. The scene with Marlon Brando. The swing, the glove, her lovely face.’
The conversation had turned.
Alexander was the last to leave Eva’s room.
‘If you need me, ring,’ he said, ‘and I’ll come running.’ When he had gone, Eva could not get the words of the song out of her head. She started to sing it quietly, to herself. Winter, spring, summer or fall…’
In the middle of the night, when the rest of the household were asleep, Poppy crept into Eva’s room. The walls were illuminated by the full moon, and it was by this light that Poppy climbed into the bed.
Eva stirred but did not wake.
Poppy laid her face against Eva’s shoulder, and put her arm around Eva’s waist.
In the morning, Eva felt the presence of another person. But when she turned to look, she saw only a depression in the pillow.
36
Mr Lin was excited when he saw Ho’s handwriting on a letter he had picked up from his district post office in the Beijing suburbs. Perhaps Ho was writing to express holiday greetings. Mr Lin knew that in England people celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ – who, he had been told, was not only the son of their God, but had also been a revolutionary communist who was tortured and executed by the authorities.