Hold My Hand (12 page)

A crash upstairs, followed by the sound of wailing. Too heavy, thinks Bridget. Too large to be mine. “Oh dear,” says Ms Aykroyd. All the other adults have gone on a day trip to Tintagel. “I’d better go and…”

“Yes,” says Bridget. “It sounds like that’d be a good idea.”

CallmeStella shuffles off. Bridget unfurls a duster, leans toward the glass with a cloth-wrapped finger. The lipstick is thick, as though it’s been heated and painted on with a brush. Amazing. If a kid of mine did something like this, I wouldn't just…

Suddenly, from upstairs, the sound of voices. United voices: raised and organised. They are counting, slowly, deliberately.

One… two… three…

She hears a door open, and the sound of running feet. There's a game of some sort afoot.

The footsteps scutter back and forth for a moment, as though their owner is undecided as to which way to go, then make their way up the corridor toward the dining room stairs. As they begin to descend, she stays her polishing and turns to see who’s coming.

It's Yasmin. Looking almost as unkempt as an Aykroyd. Someone has put half a dozen plaits in her long dark hair and tied them off with strips of rag so that she looks like a small and rather giggly Medusa. Barefoot, she seems to be wearing what looks like a party dress: powder-blue satin, gone to holes, several sizes too big and several decades too old for her. She reaches the bottom of the stairs and, in that childish way, only notices her mother’s presence when she gets there. Jumps, laughs at her own foolishness and then grins.

Twelve… thirteen… fourteen…

“What on earth are you wearing?”

“Oh,” she says distantly, looking down and rubbing the cloth between thumb and forefinger, “dressing-up clothes. I found them in the attic. There’s a great big trunk. Lily showed me.”

Bridget doesn't have the faintest idea who Lily is, Doesn’t even know if she’s one of the Aykroyd party, who all seem to rejoice in names like Summer and Moonlight – she wonders if somewhere in an alternative universe there’s a sort of anti-hippie culture which rejoices in filling in tax returns and gives its children all the nature names like Winter and Mudslide that the flower people eschew – or one of the village kids.

“I’m not sure if you ought to be wearing those,” she says. “I’m not sure if Mr Gordhavo –”

“Lily said it was all right,” Yasmin assures her. “She says she wears them all the time.”

Twenty-three… twenty-four…

Yasmin looks wildly over her shoulder. Bridget has forgotten the intensity of feeling that a childhood game can arouse.

“Never mind,” she says. “We can talk about it later. What are you playing? Hide and seek?”

“No,” says Yasmin. “Sardines. I have to hide and everyone has to find me and get in with me.”

“Oh, yes,” says Bridget. “I used to love that one. Where are you going to hide?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, how about under there?” She gestures with her duster toward the huge cloth-covered table.

“Tchuuch!” groans Yasmin. “You’ve only gotta be thick, Mum! That’s the
first
place they’ll look!”

How funny, thinks Bridget, she's already losing her London accent and she’s just been hanging around with these kids for a few days. She’ll sound like a proper Cornish Pisky by the New Year.

“Well, I don’t know.”

Thirty-one… thirty-two…

Yasmin leaps from foot to foot as though she’s suddenly found herself standing on hot coals. “Hurry up! I've only got to fifty!”

Bridget casts about her. Behind the curtains? Behind the sofa in the second salon? Too easy. Not enough room.

She gets it. “Come with me! Quickly!”

She’s noticed that the window seat in the drawing room, which runs the whole length of the south wall, is lidded along its length for storage. Not that there’s anything in there apart from a few Hoover attachments, a few half-burnt church candles, a box of bulk-bought china plates and a lot of dust in there now. It’s these sorts of details that make a house a holiday home. Anything of any real value – sentimental or fiscal – will have been taken away from here years ago.

She holds her hand out to her daughter and they jog quietly into the drawing room. Bridget lifts the lid on the central part of the seat.

“Come on!” she says. “There’s loads of room in here.”

Yasmin looks at her in amazement, as though she’s only just discovered that she has the ability to think independently. “Star!” she says. “How did you know that was there?”

“I know everything, darling,” says Bridget. “You know that. Now hurry up and get in.”

Forty-three… forty-four…

There’s room enough inside to house an entire army. The only thing that will give Yasmin away is her tendency to giggle. She climbs inside, lies down like a princess in a glass coffin and crosses her arms over her chest. “Okay,” she says.

Bridget drops the lid down, strolls casually back to return to her cleaning. There’s only the final F of OFF to get rid of now. She picks up the palate knife and scrapes the top layers away, sprays Windolene over the patch.

Coming ready or not…

A herd of water buffalo stampedes from the master bedroom.

Bridget rubs. It must have been very greasy lipstick: theatrical lipstick. the sort of greasepaint you see on movie still from the Thirties and Forties. The smears are taking ages to dissipate.

The sound of feet and voices scatters, dies away. She imagines Yasmin, lying in her wooden coffin, wriggling with the effort of suppressing the urge to leap out and show everyone how clever she has been.

A couple of the Young thunder down the stairs, shriek to a halt when they see her.

“Hello, Leo,” she says. “Hello, Rain.”

She doesn't like Leo much. He's one of those thickset boys who tends to tell people how things are in a stern, unsmiling fashion. She suspects he might be a bit of a bully: certainly, most of the other children seem to obey him at speed when he issues an order.

“Hello,” says the boy. Puts his hands on his hips and looks anywhere other than at her. Some kids are like that. It’s not a social comment. they just don’t think of adults as being worthy of their attention unless they want something from them.

“Are you playing a game of some sort?”

“Yes.”

“Hide and seek?”

His eyes flick over to her.
No
, she sees him think,
she’s a grownup and someone we won’t see again after this week. Not worth the effort of explaining.

“Sort of,” he says. “Have you seen Yasmin?”

Well at least my daughter’s not infra-dig. “I’m not sure if I ought to tell you,” she teases.

He thinks I’m mad. Funny how people with no sense of humour always assume it’s that other people are stupid, even when they’re nine years old.

“It would spoil the game, wouldn’t it?” she finishes.

He gives her a look, ignores what she’s said. “Which way did she go?”

“If I told you that, I’d be a snitch.”

Rain – droopy hair that looks, appropriately enough, permanently damp – sticks her head under the tablecloth. Comes out, combs her bangs back down with greasy fingers. “Not here,” she announces, and trots off to the kitchen.

Leo thinks for a bit. God, I hope Yas doesn't end up shut up alone with
him
for too long. “Right-oh,” he says. Takes off in the opposite direction from the one his sister’s taken.

An eruption of shrieking upstairs. Someone’s obviously found
somebody
. Half a dozen sets of feet rumble off up the corridor toward the far end of the house. They must be well scattered now: this is the perfect house for hide and seek. You could hide anywhere here. All those dark places and hidden doorways. I’m glad we’ve got good locks on the flat door, for the night-time.

She turns back to the mirror, resumes her polishing. Once this is done, she thinks, I’d better go and relay the drawing-room fire. Not so much out of a wish to provide the guests with cosy snugness for tonight, but because I know no-one will sweep the grate out before they rebuild it themselves, and that grate can’t really take more than one fire before it’s full. It’s amazing how much ash you can get on a Persian carpet if you don’t know what to do with a dustpan. Earlier this morning, she saw Humphrey, the one she thinks is probably CallmeStella's partner, and the one she thinks is probably his ex-wife, carrying a log the size of a crocodile across the garden from the woods beyond the pond. If they try and burn that tonight, damp and green as it is, there’ll be bits spitting all over the place. Best not to set things up so any more damage can be done.

Another clutch of children barrel through from the drawing-room, skid across the floor, launch themselves beneath the table and emerge disappointed. They don’t even look at her. Adults, in a child’s world, only really exist when they are providing the entertainment or putting a stop to it. All of them are in some form of fancy dress, she notices, though how much has come from the attic trunk and how much is their normal everyday clothing, she couldn’t say. She’s so used to the sight of seven-years-olds with belly-button rings and platform shoes that nothing much seems odd to her these days. Kieran wanted to get Yasmin’s ears pierced the week they came home from the hospital and she had a bruise on her shoulder for weeks that proved she’d said no. Ear-piercing: the Chav equivalent of circumcision. I always wanted more for her than that.

They throw back the curtains, look behind them and then, with a cursory hello, they trot on to the stairs and disappear. That’s one good hiding place I’ve picked there, she thinks. I hope it’s not
too
good: that they don’t just get bored and wander off and leave Yas lying there all afternoon.

She can’t believe how powerfully this lipstick has adhered. Bridget squirts another dose of window cleaner onto the glass, looks at her misted reflection and sets to polishing.

A movement behind her makes her jump. A small figure, emerging silently from the anteroom. She hasn’t heard anyone go in there. She turns, looks.

A small girl. Not one she recognises. Must be one of the village kids: probably one they picked up in the playground because she certainly doesn’t have the pink-cheeked, vitamin-fed, nightly-bathed look of the Aykroyd friends’ spawn. This one is sort of greyish-yellow, if she’s anything: hollow cheeks and big dark patches round the eyes, and arms bleached like flotsam. Someone’s given her a bad home haircut with the kitchen scissors, by the look of it. And dressed her from Oxfam.

“Where on earth did you come from?” she asks.

The girl stops dead in the doorway and stares at Bridget as though – a small shiver of shock runs through her – she hates her.

She's got a nasty little mouth. Ill-tempered, judgemental.

“Are you looking for Yasmin?”

The child folds her arms and narrows her eyes. Juts her jaw and gives Bridget a look of pure poison.

“It wasn’t me,” she says. “I didn’t bloody do it.”

Chapter Nineteen

She doesn’t wait for the others. They wouldn’t wait for her – and anyway, she is too happy. She doesn't want them bursting her bubble.
This is my day, she thinks. My day. Today, I won a prize, and nobody’s ever given me a prize before.

Fighting her way through the front door, jostled by end-of-term schoolmates eager to start the long summer holiday, she is momentarily dazzled by the brightness of the light. The sun, as they sat cross-legged while the hour-after-hour of assembly – even a sixty-pupil school can drag prizegiving out 'til lunchtime – crawled past, has burst through the clouds and bathes the fields around Meneglos in gold.

I won, she thinks. I won a prize. Clutches her handwritten certificate against her chest as she wanders away from the group. No-one notices her go. No-one wants her to stay. There's a game of rounders starting up on the common and no-one will want her on their team. She knows without having to put herself through the humiliation of the selection process. But Lily doesn't care. She doesn't care. She’s been the outsider all her life; she barely notices any more.

They can’t take it away from me. That’s one thing they can’t take away. I’m the best drawer in the whole school and no-one can take that away.

Suddenly she sees a world of possibility. I can be an artist. When I grow up. People pay money for that. Good money. Biddy Blakemore’s always going on about how much her precious paintings are worth, and mine are much better. At least my children look like children. Hers look like tiny little grownups with great big pumpkin heads stuck on top. Like dwarves. Mine look like they can move. Mrs Carlyon said so. In front of the whole school. She said I was the best painter she’d ever taught and they can never take that away from me.

Her cheek muscles, unused to smiling, ache slightly as she walks up the lane. There are flowers on the hedges – Lily never saw a hedge in Portsmouth, never even made it to the clipped-and-tonsured suburbs, so she doesn’t know that the Cornish hedge, with its banks and moss-covered stone walls, is not a hedge as the rest of the country knows it – and she suddenly notices their beauty for the first time in her life.

I’ll practice all summer, she thinks. Someone will let me do a job for them, earn enough to buy some pencils and some paper, and then I’ll spend the whole summer… maybe Tessa will let me use hers, if I ask her. If I’m nice. She’s got more than she needs. She can’t want all those: she never uses them. I’ll go everywhere. The lanes and the hedges and the moor and down by the stream, and I’ll draw it all. All these colours. That big tree in the garden, the one with the swing hanging off it. It looks black when you first look at it, but when you look some more, it’s full of colours: black and blue and green, and the trunk’s not brown, like little kids draw it: it’s grey and silver, and there’s yellow as well: great stripes of it, all down one side. And other people don’t notice these things, but I do, and that’s why I’m better than them.

She pauses at the junction where the Menglos road crosses the St Mabyn road, turns, on the far side, into the unmetalled track that runs down through arable fields to Rospetroc. The wheat is knee-high. It ripples in the breeze as she looks down at her destination. Lily takes a moment to untie the ribbon that binds her certificate, to unfurl it and look once again at the proof of her triumph. She can barely read it – Mrs Carlyon says her reading’s a disgrace – but she can make out the words “First Prize” copper-plated across the top, inside the scrolled margin which runs all the way round, and her own name, written carefully in India ink. Lily Rickett. That’s me. Prizewinner Lily Rickett.

And I’ll get good enough, and the war will finish next year, and I can slip away while no-one’s looking. I’ll go a long, long way away, where no-one knows me, and I’ll find a little cottage somewhere, in the middle of the country where no-one wants to live, and I’ll draw and draw and paint and paint and paint, and people will come. They’ll come. They’ll hear about me and they’ll come and they’ll see my pictures and they’ll give me money and it won’t be like the old days. And I’ll be famous, and then they’ll all want to know me. And when I’m rich, I’ll go back. I’ll go back to Portsmouth and I’ll find my mum, and I’ll show her. I’ll show her my good clothes and my car and my shoes, and she probably won’t even know who I am till I tell her. And she’ll be sitting there in the pub, and I’ll just walk in and…

She rolls it back up with greater care than she has ever treated any other possession, reties the ribbon, walks on. A few feet onto the track, she kicks off her shoes – the holes in the soles make them more uncomfortable, strangely, than walking barefoot – and steps onto the verge.

Just think. They’ll all be sorry they didn't make friends with me then. They’ll say: I lived with her once. With Lily Rickett, the famous artist. We were evacuated together during the bombing. I wish I’d been nicer to her. I saw her in the street the other day, and she didn’t even know who I was. Ted and Pearl and Vera and Geoffrey: think they’re a cut above, won’t talk to me, Pearl crying all the time and Geoffrey telling everyone they’ll catch things off me. And I’ll see him in the street one day, and he’ll want to know me then. And I’ll just look at him, and I’ll toss my head, and I’ll say: no. I don’t remember you. Who did you say you was, again?

The grass is soft, prickly, the earth beneath damp from last night's rain.
I like the smell here
, she thinks.
Not like Portsmouth. No coal-fires or glue works or spilled fuel. No smell of mushrooms in the bedroom or shit in the yard. No fags or port-and-lemon as she comes in with whoever, turfs me out of my nice warm bed so she can make noises like an animal, and that smell when she lets me back in: salt and old milk and sweat…

Lily stops and sups the air. Smells are colours to her: the ones on this hillside green and brown and gold, with something soft and purple drifting on the breeze from the moor. She digs a toe into the soft broken surface of a molehill, feels a tiny shiver of pleasure at the cool, slimy, crumbled texture. And suddenly she has a thought she doesn't remember having had before. It catches her by surprise, shocks her.

I could be happy.

The thought disturbs her, thrills her at the same time, the way early moments of sexual attraction take the young. She is rooted to the spot, frozen with fear and exhilaration. She looks wildly around her, as though she is afraid that someone might have overheard the thought.

My God, I could be happy
.

It's too much. Too much for her untrained mind.

Lily takes to her heels, bolts down the hill. But as she runs, she feels the breeze, feels the earth beneath her feet, feels the world reel on its axis, and the surge returns.

I could be happy. It could all be all right. I could be…

Hugh is home. She's caught unawares, hasn't expected him. Of course he's home. Eton breaks up just like other schools, and the long summer holidays would justify the search for the space on a train.

He is standing in the dining room, by the dresser, with a cricket bat in his hand. He has his back to her, but by the time, running in from the sunlight, she realises he is there, shrieks to a halt and tries to back out, it is too late. He has heard her. Starts, whips round with a look on his face made up of fear, guilt and defiance. And when he sees who has caught him, his expression changes.

Oh God,
she thinks.
He's just the same.

She backs away, tries to make her way toward the door and the possibility of escape.

“Oh,” he says. “You're still here, then.”

Lily doesn't answer. Just looks at his face, at the gloat that has started to play across it.

“If you tell,” he says, “you'll regret it.”

“I won't tell,” she says reflexively. And then she sees what she's not supposed to tell about. On the floor by his feet lies a cricket ball – hard, scuffed oxblood leather, a fray in the string which binds it – and the shards of half a dozen figurines. The stern features of the Duke of Wellington stare up at her, the baleful half-face of Queen Victoria, the tragic simper of Nell Gwynn, orange still gripped in her graceful hand, basket lying three feet away.

And then she sees something else pass across his face. A new thought. And then a gleeful decision.

Oh, God. I'm in for it now.

“Mummy's going to be very, very angry,” he says.

Again, she doesn't say anything.

He steps toward her. “It would be better for you,” he says, “if you just owned up straight away. I know how her mind works. She'll be furious, of course, but what she really can't stand is a liar.”

He steps toward her, and she closes her eyes.