Authors: Anne Berry
Mrs Fortinbrass has arrived back with her shopping and condolences. She offers to make Welsh rarebit. Upstairs through and through, the crisis has lured her into nether regions of the house. While she is cooking, Lucilla’s father disappears into the garden shed. Lucilla takes notice of this because it is not the first occasion on which he has done this. This is queer because her mother takes care of the garden, and her father seldom, if ever, goes near the shed. She has also detected subtle changes in his behaviour when he re-emerges from the gloomy interior. On the way in there is a purposeful expression on his frowning face, a determination in his heavy stride. On the way out, some half an hour later, he has adopted an ambling gait, and his face is a trifle flushed and set in a cheery mask. There is, as well, a faint but distinct odour on his breath. It is rather like petrol but different, thicker and sourer.
Tonight he has grown garrulous too, walking in through the back door as though arriving at a party. They eat supper at the dining room table watching the
Black and White Minstrel Show
. Men with black faces, mini-moon eyes and smiling crescent-moon mouths, dressed in sparkling white suits. Beautiful women with complexions dazzling as new-fallen snow, swathed in fur-trimmed gowns. They link arms. They show their blinding pearly-white teeth. They sing ‘Polly Wolly Doodle’, and they wave their hands and dance. Lucilla bites into the savoury creamy cheese sauce, and dwells meditatively on the bowl of her mother’s blood that no one has dealt with yet.
After she has gone to bed, but not to sleep, Lucilla hears the taxi pull up. She slips out from under the blankets, tweaks the curtains and spies Aunt Enid alighting from the black cab. She looks smart in a fitted suit in French navy, the collar trimmed with cream mink, a tiny
scalloped
hat sitting snug on her head like a mauve flower, petals open. The street lights shimmer on her black leather gloves and on her beaded clutch bag. Her high heels click on the pavement. She raps assertively on the front door, and Lucilla, treading softly on the upstairs landing, freezes as it is opened. Her father greets her aunt expansively and welcomes her in. His voice rising up the stairs is pitched much more loudly than usual. Together with the dressmaker’s dummy, Lucilla overhears their dialogue.
Aunt Enid has been to the hospital to visit Mother. She reports that her condition is much improved, that the operation has gone well, but that they will be keeping her in for a few weeks of complete bed rest. Lucilla is somewhat baffled by the mention of surgery. To operate on a nosebleed seems a particularly drastic treatment for a condition that normally dries up of its own accord. Why in the hot weather at school she has had a nosebleed herself. The teacher sat with her in the medical room, while she swabbed it with cotton wool and in minutes it stopped of its own volition. She is pondering if the surgeon put something in her mother’s nose or took something out, as her father ushers Aunt Enid into the front room. He leaves the door ajar. They talk long into the night, mostly about Mother, and the stress she is under. ‘The child’s not without her problems,’ says Aunt Enid. ‘It’s wearing for Harriet at her age.’
‘Oh, things will settle down.’ Her father’s tone is insouciant, reassuring. ‘We must remember she’s only young.’
‘I don’t know about that. At eleven, she’s certainly old enough to know right from wrong,’ Aunt Enid rejoins with conviction. ‘After all, look at my Rachel.’ For a second, Lucilla wonders if Rachel, her cousin, is with her downstairs this second. And then she realises that her aunt is only speaking figuratively.
‘Aye, she’s a grand girl, Rachel is. There’s no denying that,’ her father says wishfully.
‘That day on Beachy Head, by the lighthouse, well, quite honestly, I thought Lucilla was going to throw herself off. She was so het up, I doubted we’d be able to prevent it either. I’m sorry to have to tell you there are times when I think she’s as barmy as a fruit bat. It’s the bad blood. No diluting it.’
‘No, Enid, no! You’re overreacting,’ her father mollifies. ‘She is hypersensitive, highly strung, but no more.’
‘I wish that was the extent of it, Merfyn. You thought you could manage it, but I’m not so sure these days. I told Harriet it’d reveal itself somehow.’
They continue to converse in this wise for several minutes. Lucilla, confused by the oblique references, lets the sentences glide over her head like cartoon speech bubbles. If the headless dummy is unmindful, why, so can she be. Aunt Enid makes tea, and her father tells her he is going to bank up the fire. Lucilla, sitting on the floor, drifts off. Blinking in the gloaming, her hand clasping the dummy’s sole peg leg, she comes to with a start. She wonders if her aunt is still here, or if the taxi has come yet to take her home. Tiptoeing downstairs, skipping the two doddery steps that creak complainingly when you put your weight on them, she strains her ears. She can decipher their voices, though both are quelled now as if they have grown tired, intimate. The hall light is off. The front room standard lamp is on though. This and the glow from the hearth filter through the crack in the door. Holding her breath, she cranes her neck and peers around it.
Aunt Enid is on her feet riddling the fire with the poker. Facing away from Lucilla, she has taken her jacket off and wears an ecru blouse with tiny pearl buttons down the back. Her bottom is squished into her tight skirt and seems to be straining to split the seams. Her hat is off, and firelight is playing on her loose brown hair, singling out golden strands. It all happens so fast. Her father rises and, with a cry, grabs Aunt Enid by the waist from behind. She drops the poker and yelps as
it
skids on the tiled hearth. She struggles manically in his embrace. All the while her father mutters all sorts of soppy things, tightening his hold on her. ‘Oh you glorious … your breasts … brbrbr … breasts are so, so … let me fondle your … your … oh, oh, the softness of … squa– squashy … the scent of your hair … like satin … I want to … to … to … Ooh!’ He is kissing her jerking head, her wavy golden-brown hair, and then her white neck. She manages to corkscrew her body in his arms. He is squeezing her like a tube of toothpaste, and Lucilla is sure she will come all squirting out any moment. Then he kisses her full on the mouth. There are some slobbery, wet, smooching noises. Next, an almighty grunt as Aunt Enid brings her knee up into her father’s groin. ‘Arrgh!’ He stumbles back, his steamed-up glasses slipping down his nose. She advances on him. Her hand with its manicured crimson fingernails flies through the air and strikes his cheek with a whack.
‘How dare you!’ hisses Aunt Enid. Her scarlet lipstick is all smeared over her swollen mouth. And it is smudged across Lucilla’s father’s lips and his huffing cheeks as well, so that he looks a bit like a black and white minstrel – only red. Her aunt seizes up the poker, shaking it at him and backing towards the door, behind which Lucilla is hiding. ‘If my Gethin was alive he’d show you what for. You were never a patch on your brother. He was worth ten of you. He’d teach you a lesson, Gethin would! You filthy sex maniac!’
‘I’m sorry. Oooh, Enid, I’m so sorry,’ moans her father, the breath coming out of him as if he has several punctures. He collapses into an armchair. His mouth and chin are slick with saliva, making the smudged lipstick gleam wetly. He groans, his chest pumping, his face suffused with blood. And his nose, brow and cheekbones are spotted with fat droplets of sweat. When he speaks again, lips quavering, he sounds as if he has a heavy cold, his words furred and blurring into each other. ‘But Enid, Eeenid! Oh, Enid, you must know that I need
to
… want to … your body … I thought it was … mutual. That you wanted … The way I feel about you, how much … much I need …’
‘You stay back you pervert or I’ll … I’ll tell Harriet, so help me I will,’ threatens Aunt Enid, poker held aloft like a magician’s staff. ‘How could you? How could you when your poor wife is recovering from a hysterectomy in hospital. She must have been suffering horribly with her womb riddled with fibroids. The agony of it and blowing up like a balloon. But did she complain? Did she complain? Hardly ever. She is a saint that woman, a veritable saint. And what do you do when she haemorrhages, collapses and nearly bleeds to death and they have to give her an emergency hysterectomy, poor darling, you try to seduce your sister in law. You are despicable.’ She slashes at the air with the poker and Lucilla’s father ducks, then jumps back out of reach. Lucilla does not know what a hysterectomy is, but there isn’t time to dwell on this conundrum. The action in the front room is commanding all her attention.
‘No, no, please don’t. I beseech you. Enid, we could have so … so much … I could bring you to an ec– ec– ecst– ecsta–. Oh, oh, oh, oh!’ Then spontaneously he bursts into noisy, snotty tears. ‘Forgive me. Please forgive me. I thought perhaps you … you – But no, no of course you don’t. How could you? It won’t happen again, Enid. You have to believe me. I don’t know –’
Lucilla does not linger to learn more. In the semi-darkness, she climbs the stairs as she descended them, soft-stepping, avoiding the loose-tongued boards. She scurries back to her bedroom, hesitating only for an instant to sidestep the headless dummy.
Chapter 18
Harriet, 1959
BARBARA IS STAYING
for tea again. She is such a dear, dear girl. Eleven years old. The same age as Lucilla, but the two of them couldn’t be less alike. Barbara is contented, such a nice stay-at-home child, so content, whereas Lucilla is as restless as the wind. Barbara is tall, with the most lustrous wavy hair and comely eyes – both shades of polished walnut. Lucilla’s hair is so fine and straight. You can’t do anything with it. It hangs there looking like a limp shower curtain. She loathes me styling it. I’ve a good mind to perm it one day, get a bit of body into it. And Barbara likes her food, isn’t a picky eater either. As do I. A healthy lass, with a healthy appetite. Lucilla is so fussy, prodding and poking and chewing for ages. I think Barbara looks more my daughter than Lucilla ever will. Merfyn says the resemblance between us is uncanny.
‘She might be your
real
daughter,’ he said after she left last week. ‘She’s a bonny lass, Mother. And she loves your homely ways, cooking and sewing. It’s a rare pleasure to see the two of you, industrious as beavers bustling about the house, visions of womanly serenity.’
He left me to make the tea and went back to his columns of figures humming a tuneful hymn, ‘For All the Saints’. Lucilla was sitting hunched on the stairs when I came out with the tray. She was moping as usual. ‘What are you sitting there for, face like the back of a bus?’ I asked.
She shrugged and wrinkled her nose as if smelling something offensive. Then, ‘Where does Barbara live?’ she wanted to know.
‘You didn’t finish your tea,’ I accused, sidetracking.
‘I don’t like macaroni cheese,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s all stodgy.’
‘I’m glad Barbara didn’t hear you say that,’ I told her, now thoroughly out of sorts. ‘She made it herself. I thought it was extremely tasty. And wasn’t the parsley sprinkled on top such a clever idea? She’s going to be a wonderful cook. Why are you still wearing your school uniform?’ In the rush I’d forgotten to send her upstairs to change when she got home from school.
‘Sorry,’ she said routinely.
‘Sorry doesn’t butter parsnips,’ I retorted.
‘I’ll change in a minute. Where does Barbara live? Where’s her mummy and daddy? She doesn’t talk about them.’ She was dogged. She shrugged her arms inside her grey school cardigan and flexed them.
‘Don’t do that. You’ll stretch the sleeves out of shape. Let me give your father his tea and then I’ll tell you.’
When I returned she was still sitting on the stairs in the same place. ‘Barbara doesn’t have a mummy or a daddy. She’s not lucky like you. She lives in a children’s home.’
Her expression lifted immediately and her hands reappeared at the ends of her cardigan sleeves. ‘A home with nothing but children in it?’ she said perkily. ‘No adults? None at all?’
‘Don’t be stupid, Lucilla. Peter Pan and the Lost Boys only happen in those stories you keep filling your head with. Barbara lives at Saint Teresa’s, the children’s home. You know the one. Not more than a half-hour’s walk. They have aunties there, nuns who look after lots of children. It is very difficult because she has to share the aunties. You’re lucky. You have a mother all to yourself.’
‘Oh.’ It peeved me to see Lucilla taking her good fortune for granted like this. Almost as if she’d prefer not to have a mother. Ingratitude!
She
personifies ingratitude some days. She has no concept of how favoured she has been, how
she
could have grown up in a home as well. We’ll have to tell her the truth soon. Merfyn keeps prevaricating. But she ought to know. It seems to become tougher to talk about it as the years go by. And, of course, it will be a dreadful blow. She might take a while to recover from it. She will be distraught learning that I’m not her actual mother, that Merfyn isn’t her actual father. We shan’t tell her about the German. That really would be cruelty. But for the rest, ah yes, the day is coming.
‘Barbara wants you to go and visit her some time. Play. You could take Rachel and Frank. Make an outing of it.’
‘OK,’ she said without much enthusiasm.
We could hear the dog’s bowl sliding on the lino floor in the kitchen as he licked it hopefully. ‘Do you think you could be friends, you and Barbara?’
‘I s’ppose,’ she said, sounding unconvinced.
Barbara will undoubtedly be a positive influence on Lucilla. She may even bring about the transformation that we have failed so blatantly to do thus far. Lead by example. ‘I’d like you to be best friends, you and Barbara. She may come to live with us, you know.’ She yanked on the collar of her grey and white checked shirt, uncertainty writ large on her transparent face. I worked harder to persuade her. ‘She could be your sister.’ She stood up and bit a fingernail uneasily. ‘I’ve told you not to do that. I’ll paint your fingers with that bitter medicine if I see it again!’ She snatched her hand away from her mouth and I saw that it was ink-stained. One fawn knee-length sock was rumpled around her ankle. And the leather of her brown shoes looked scuffed and dull. She was sorry sight. Hands on hips, I sighed my frustration. She had her school beret in her hand and now she pulled it down over her head like a swimming hat. I felt my temper rising. ‘Lucilla,’ I prompted, ‘what do you think of that? Of
Barbara
coming to live here?’ She shrugged indifferently. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, do take that thing off your head.’ She obliged and the static in her hair caused it to rise up and then settle in snarls. Radio music reached us, Joe Loss with Betty Dale and the Blue Notes singing ‘Boo Hoo’. Merfyn called me to pour the tea. ‘You’d have to share a bedroom, mind,’ I cautioned.