Unhallowed Ground (16 page)

So she left the key with Tom Selby and set off on the long journey home, with Lola asleep in the passenger seat.

Selling houses. Sale agreed. Sold. Four years ago, and selling her childhood home had felt like selling her past. All the hiding places went with it, the dens, unseen, unlabelled in the particulars, so many hidden things excluded from the brochure, not just the rising damp.

And she had found herself closing her eyes in certain rooms, as if the smartly dressed couples with the critical eyes could somehow sense an atmosphere, ghostly conversations seeping from the sepia walls, quick footsteps, voices hard with hate, hard smiles. All the furniture was still inside. Well, Georgie herself didn’t want it, and it was all exactly the same; in all the years they’d never changed a thing save for the odd renewal of curtains and covers. Even in this new adult role Georgie was still the child in this house, controlled, hidden, polite, smiling with her hellos and goodbyes and gagging on the mothballs.

And it was while she had waited there to show prospective purchasers round, alone in all that neat brown silence, that she’d felt the worst of the weariness that dragging house always gave her. The smell of pipe smoke still filled the house, not present as an actual cloud, but more like a ghost, a strong, stale smell. Black umbrellas, brown walking sticks and cream, lacy tray cloths—tight, formal things, so innocent in themselves, but they came together in that creaking house to make such a sad song. Even the rattle of the curtains took her back, the full feel of the banister underneath her hand, almost tacky with polish, and the slightly slippery rugs on the floors on long brown landings. All very Fifties.

The dining room was the worst place of all, and she realized that, in spirit, she had always loitered here at the door, unwilling to venture further. She had always seen this place from the threshold.

She could have been a courier on a coach, reciting the past as they drove through it all, waving a casual hand at her childhood. ‘This is where they used to eat,’ she could have told them abstractedly, as if her parents were long extinct, as if she was speaking of some rare and ancient tribe of man. Shining with wax, the dining room table was monarch of the room and everything else subservient to it. ‘At all other times of day they spoke to each other and saw each other no more than necessary. They were polite and passed. But not so in the dining room. This is where we were summoned by a gong, the one you passed in the hall earlier. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Human suffering amid the mahogany. We all emerged from our private dens and here, at the door, we put on our faces, collected our voices before we sat down. See that chair at the side of the table, well, that chair was mine, while Father sat at the top and Mother at the opposite end. I, as you appreciate, sat between them. Sometimes I passed their words, at others I passed the salt.’

The silence was violence.

Conversation was ominous.

‘Food was irrelevant but we had to eat it. I can never remember being hungry. I wanted something but it wasn’t food. Brown gravy in gravy boats and brown slices of meat which Father carved with that same knife there, the one with the brownish, ivory handle.’

Georgina could have gone on and said, ‘Look, there’s my old silver napkin ring with my name inscribed on the side. It was given to me by an aunt at my christening. I wonder if she gave one to Stephen.’

Dear God, those endless meal times. The general comments were safe, and most of it was general comment interspersed with chewing. But when three or four pieces of comment were strung together to make conversation, that is when the going got tough, the jaw began to ache, looks were exchanged, throats were cleared and the sound of silver scraping on crockery grew unbearably loud.

‘My mother would dab at the corner of her mouth with a napkin, she did it so much there were sore places there.’ This was not the room they thought they saw. ‘And her green raffia bag from Madeira was invariably placed beside her feet, that side of the chair. By the end of the meal the handkerchief which she kept up her sleeve would be out, creased, sweaty and tattered.’

This is how it would go:

‘I met Isabel Evans in town today. We had coffee. She asked to be remembered.’

And Harry Southwell would lift his eyes from his plate to murmur, ‘Oh yes.’

‘They’re moving to Bath, apparently.’

‘Well, his family come from there.’

‘They’ve always been a close family.’

This irrelevance would be digested.

‘I have ordered the logs. They are coming tomorrow,’ her father might announce.

‘So someone will have to be in,’ Sylvia would say, brittlely, dabbing at her mouth.

‘I just assumed that somebody would be.’

An angry flush flew over her cheekbones. ‘It might have been nice to have been consulted.’

A heavy sigh from Harry’s end. ‘I cannot consult you on every damn issue…’

‘It just would have been…’

‘For Christ’s sake, Sylvia…’

‘And why are we still ordering logs from the Turnbills when there’s that new man…?’

‘If you would like to order the logs, dear, then you must say so. I would quite happily delegate that responsibility any time

‘Oh, do stop being so absurd…’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I ought to have realized…’

‘But you don’t realize, do you, Harry, that’s the trouble, you never have realized…’

Silence. The sounds of heavy digestion, and Georgie felt she was interfering, annoying them by just sitting there, as a morsel of gristle might annoy.

And then, ‘When did you order the
Radio Times
? I told them at Buntings it wasn’t ours. I told them we don’t take the
Radio Times
, never have, and Mrs Betts said you’d been in and ordered it last week.’

Sylvia, plying her knife and fork with the utmost delicacy, said mildly, ‘It’s easier having the
Radio Times
.’

‘And what is wrong with looking in the paper?’

The clock on the mantelpiece rang half-past one, its tinklings unnoticed by either opponent. From the lime trees outside came the chatter of sparrows and from behind the shrubbery the burble of pigeons. There was such a thin slither between the world of normality out there and this vicious ritual. If only the walls were of cardboard, Georgie could put out one finger and knock them down for ever. Some other part of her mind could see the radiance outside and faraway like a golden cloud. But these walls were solid and square, shutting the three of them off from every other soul in the world. ‘I can never find the bally paper, Harry, that’s the whole point. You always take the paper and disappear off with it, and then I find it somewhere obscure like the greenhouse.’

The light in Harry’s eye was now as angry as his wife’s. He worked his fork rapidly and vigorously. ‘I take the paper because I know damn well you never bother to read it.’

‘Well, I need to see what’s on TV. That’s why I ordered the
Radio Times
. So you don’t have to worry about taking the paper away now, do you? If we didn’t have such a dry, boring paper maybe I would read it.’

‘It would have been more sensible, Sylvia, if you had ordered a paper like the
Sketch
, instead of the
Radio Times
. The sort of paper you might enjoy.’

‘There is nothing wrong with the
Sketch
.’ Sylvia’s lower lip was thrust forward obstinately.

‘Not if you enjoy scandal and overt pornography, no.’

A cold, silvery laugh. Sylvia had sharpened her stilettos and was determined to use them. ‘Pornography! My God, Harry, you wouldn’t know what pornography looked like if it slapped you in the face.’

‘
For God’s sake.
’ His eyes lit up angrily. He slammed his knife and fork on the table.

Silence sat between them for a while and mingled with the smell of mint sauce.

‘I don’t know how much more of this I can take.’ There’d be much scrabbling at the handkerchief. ‘I’ve had it up to here and I really don’t think I can carry on with all this…’

‘You don’t have to take it, Sylvia.’ Although Harry spoke quietly his fists were clenched, starched as the cloth, and his mouth, under his fierce moustache, was a grim, thin-lipped straight line.

‘Oh?
Oh?
And what is my alternative? This house is mortgaged up to the hilt, I have no means of earning a living, I have given my life to you and Georgina,’—there was never any mention of Stephen—‘and what do I get in return? No gratitude. No respect. Just a miserable existence cutting corners, having to manage this blasted mausoleum with only one maid in the house…’ etc… etc. And when she had finished, she sat there panting while Harry chewed on the stem of his pipe, puffing its contents into furious life.

The voices were always controlled, never raised.

Silence. A much longer one this time. And Georgie might dare to chip in with, ‘I might be going riding tomorrow. Sarah said if I helped her clean the stables this morning I could have a free ride tomorrow afternoon.’ Her mind wandered and babbled.

But her words would be swallowed by quick sips of water as the battle subsided, as the contestants refreshed themselves ready for round two.

And then there were those tough little puddings: syrup tart, burned jam sponge, hard pieces of pineapple with bits in, blancmanges with leathery skins. And every time Gwyneth or Megan put her head through the hatch there was a stony silence, and every time that hatch was closed they’d be off again with some harmless comment that piled and flowed into conversation, thick and enveloping as the custard.

Georgie would have to explain to the viewers that they’d always had live-in staff. ‘This was their room, this mean little bedsit next to the kitchen, filled with ill-matching odds and sods: the old-fashioned telly, the glued ornaments, the Lloyd loom chair.’ The staff never stayed long. Most of them came from Wales, and Georgie used to wonder why so many rosy-cheeked girls left their homeland and came to live and work here. Why would anyone choose to live here? The idea was incredible. No wonder they cried so frequently. She would come upon them all over the place, dusters in their hands and hopeless tears running down their faces. It was only when she got older she learned why they got fatter and fatter. They had their babies in the nearby mother and baby home, gave them up for adoption and went.

The girls got their keep, nothing more. This was just somewhere to hide their shame from the sad little valleys they came from. A charitable venture most convenient for embarrassed gentlefolk with large houses.

She might stop and explain in the hall. ‘My parents loathed each other, you see, that’s the musty feeling you can taste on your tongue. Their hatred. And I can’t understand why they stayed together, but then people tended to do that in those days. Not like now.’

And then she might show them the drinks cupboard, sticky still, with the sort of stain you can’t scrub off. No household cleaner is strong enough to take away that kind of stain. And her teeth might clench as the shudder passed through her and she saw the drunken eyes, smelled the sweet stench coming towards her, between the teeth in the dark… no wonder… poor Stephen. They say it is genetic. How come it affected Stephen, not her? A nasty little bequest. She demanded a key to her room in the end and spent her holidays at Daisy’s.

How could she ever invite her friends there? Her mother was wicked to suggest that she could.

But in spite of all this, Georgie managed to sell the house to a nice respectable couple with children, who were not put off by the terrible brownness or the clinging of pain.

Perhaps they didn’t even notice.

She thought about this as she drove back to London, dreading what lay in store for her there, the internal inquiry was starting tomorrow, but with the worry of selling the cottage off her mind, and with Stephen’s paintings stacked in the boot.

She was looking forward to choosing her favourites and hanging them up round her flat. She would enjoy showing friends, especially the self-portrait. Discussing them. Exploring them. A family she could talk about at last, a brother she could display with pride.

And Wooton-Coney seemed far away, as unreachable as any fantasy world.

H
ER HEAD FELT AS
though it had burst right open—at eleven thirty that night a brick came smashing through Georgie’s window.

After so many disturbed nights she was exhausted anyway, relieved to be back in her own bed, just dropping off, reaching that dreamy unreal stage when she heard the explosion and leaped up, heart bursting, dry eyes pulsing.

The first terror was that some madman had broken into the flat. The screaming quiet after the crash buzzed in her ears as she tried to listen. Cautiously she got out of bed, slipping into her dressing gown as she crossed the hall and entered the kitchen. The draught drew her gaze to the window. Jagged shards of glass strew the carpet and a little drizzle dampened the place where she stood. Timidly Georgie stepped forward to draw the curtains before attempting the light. She trod on the brick on her way to the switch. ‘Jesus Christ!’ she shivered in terror, standing still while she stared down helplessly at the crude, broken weapon, clutching her dressing gown more firmly round her for whatever protection that might afford.

If she had been slightly less tired she might have been able to summon some anger, because it was there all right, a knot in her chest, bulging furiously, screaming to be unravelled and pulled to pieces. But she couldn’t reach it and was left instead with the dry-mouthed, panicky cold of fear. Was the invisible enemy still out there watching, waiting to throw something else? Was their intention to frighten her stiff? Or were they after more than that, actual bodily harm? She thought about Gail Hopkins; these same attacks were happening to her, poor Gail had even had shit shoved through her letter box, impossible here because the flat was on the first floor and the front door was automatically controlled by the residents only.

Oh God, she prayed that one of the residents had not been careless tonight—it had been known to happen, somebody came in late, worse for wear, and forgot to click the door after them. Of course, she had never done that herself. Georgie has more self-control.