Hold My Hand (29 page)

Chapter Forty-seven

She dreams that they are making love. One of those disturbed, disturbing dreams which come to tell us that the past is always with us. She can feel his hard, his warm body against hers, the buttery smoothness of his skin, the rough-soft caress of his hands. She is repulsed and aroused in equal measure: ashamed even in sleep that he should still have such power over her.

“You're mine. You'll always be mine,” whispers Kieran, kisses the tender skin of her neck, and she feels her back arch in response, the wave of pleasure roll through her body.

Oh, God, please stop. Please don't. Don't stop.

He is still there on her skin when the door opens. Repulsing her and arousing her in equal quantity. He always had that power over her, right up until very close to the end, when violence started leaking over into the sex as well. He could make her weak from lust when he saw that the fear was beginning to lose its grip. She is so ashamed. Repelled by her own weakness.

She is still fuddled with sleep, stares wildly into the dark, unsure at first whether she was really woken by the sound of the door. Yasmin hasn't turned the light on in the hall, and she can only feel her, standing in the doorway, waiting.

Oh, thank God. She's forgiven me.

She struggles, finds her voice. “Hello, darling.”

Yasmin doesn't answer.

She waits. Nothing passes between them.

“Can't you sleep?”

No reply.

“Yasmin?”

Bridget shimmies over to the cool left side of the bed. “Do you want to get in?”

She hears her footsteps cross the floor. Yasmin stands beside the bed, over her, unseen, silent.

“I'm sorry,” says Bridget. “If it helps, I couldn't sleep for hours myself. We shouldn't fight, you and me.”

No reply.

She lifts the covers, holds them up. “It's freezing,” she says. “Go on. Get in. Let me warm you up.”

The silent sound of decision. She hears the creak of the bedsprings, feels the mattress drop beside her. Holds out her arms to let her come into them.

Yasmin is cold. Icy cold to the touch; hair, nightdress, feet, skin. As though she's been dipped in frozen water. Stiff against her body, unresponsive. As though the blood in her veins is ice.

“Oh, darling,” whispers Bridget, “you've been out of bed for hours. Here. Let me warm you.”

She wraps herself about her, presses her chin onto the top of her head, rubs with her hands up and down her back. Her hair feels strange: spiky, rough; not the silken strands she's used to. She doesn't speak. Lies stiff in her arms, cold face pressed into her throat. I can't smell her tonight, thinks Bridget. Can't feel her breathe. She's so stiff, it's as though I'd have to crack her joints open to make them bend.

“It's okay,” she whispers. “I'll take care of you, darling. I'll keep you warm. I'll keep you safe.”

Teeth. Teeth sink into her neck just above the collarbone.

Bridget screams. Yasmin digs her fingers into her upper arms. Scratches, clings, feet flailing against her shins.

“Yasmin! Stop it! Ow! What are you doing? Stop it!”

She shoves, hard, breaks her grip, throws herself out of the bed. Red clouds of rage and pain dance before her eyes. She scrabbles for the light switch. What is going on! What is going
on
?

The light dazzles her, makes her throw her hands across her eyes. “What are you
doing
?” she cries. “My God, Yasmin – ”

The bed is empty. Bed, room, empty. No-one here but myself. Door closed. No sound from the corridor.

There is no-one here
.

It wasn't a dream. I didn't dream it. See? My heart is pounding. The hairs are on end on my arms. I can still feel the cold, the deep, black cold where she was pressed against me.

Bridget shakes. Hold her hand out and sees that it is trembling. Puts it against her neck. I can feel it. I can feel where she bit me. It's not a dream. I can feel it.

She takes her fingers away, sees that they are streaked with blood.

Chapter Forty-eight

Something has happened to Mrs Blakemore. It's been happening slowly since the summer, but now she's alone with her in this echoing house, it seems to have speeded up. Her face, so neatly powdered when Lily first arrived, goes without embellishment nowadays, the muscles beneath the skin gone slack, half a dozen thick black hairs sprouting unplucked from chin and upper lip. She rarely bothers with dressing, now; shuffles around the house in a man's woollen dressing-gown and slippers, trailing food stains and the smell of body odour behind her.

No-one comes to the house these days. Not deliveries, not neighbours, not even, with nothing to bring with him, it seems, the postman. It is as though, now the Vaccies have gone and Lily has been expelled from the school, the house and its occupants have been forgotten about, isolated as though they carry disease. It is just the two of them, now: a woman who talks to herself and a child who talks to nobody. Lily has given up running away. Understands now that the is fated to stay, that whatever she does, wherever she runs to, she will end up, as in a recurring nightmare, back where she started.

They brush up against each other, occasionally, in the halls or the kitchen. Lily occasionally makes forays down into the village with the ration books, or they would be subsisting on a diet of porridge and cabbages from the field behind the house. She has been putting odds and ends on the house's accounts at the shops, but doubts that the credit will last much longer. Mrs Blakemore doesn't seem to notice. Rarely answers the rarely-ringing telephone. Prefers to spend her time drinking her way through the prewar cellars and staring blankly out of the windows across silvered winter farmland. Lily doesn't know what will happen when the shops finally cut off their supplies. When the oats run out, they will probably live on cabbages alone.

Lily doesn't frighten easily, but she is nervous of Mrs B. Knows that she is unwanted, knows that, if the Ministry found her papers, she would be gone in an instant. Wishes, vehemently, that they would. The Barnardo's would be better than this, she thinks. At least in the Barnardo's someone would know I existed.

One way or another, I have to get away from here. The old woman's gone nuts. It's as if someone's come along and taken her soul. If we were in Portsmouth, if we were among the poor people, they would have taken her away by now, cleared out her lodgings and shut her safely away. If we were in Portsmouth, they would have shut
me
safely away after what I did at the school, instead of dumping me and washing their hands, saying it was Blakemore's problem. That was the point. That was the idea. If they weren't going to let me
run
away, I was going to make them
take
me away. And instead, here I am, dodging Blakemore and waiting for Him. For Hugh. They don't want me here, but they won't let me go. It's as if the whole world's been planning it all along.

I'm in solitary confinement, she thinks. I'm a Prisoner of War.

She's crossing the drawing-room on her way to the Big kitchen – where there is, sometimes, a loaf of bread in the breadbox, some marrow jam in the pantry, when the phone starts ringing. Lily jumps at the sound, starts to scamper back the way she has come in case her jailor appears. Realises, as she reaches the door, that she's been mistaken in her assumption of Blakemore's whereabouts: that she is, in fact, emerging from the study. She spends so much time in her bedroom now, alternately sobbing and cursing behind the locked door, that Lily is surprised to find her out of it. Has a split second to decide what to do: be found and risk another burst of random wrath, or hide.

She hides. Dives in behind a floor-length curtain and holds her breath.

The phone rings on. She hears Mrs Blakemore pass her hiding-place, hears her mutter: “all right. All right. Keep your hair on”. The slippers scrape across the floor. They sound oily, sludgy; as though their wearer has trodden in something wet and not bothered to clean it off.

She reaches the hall. Lily hears the tinkle as she lifts receiver from cradle. “Rospetroc House?” she announces, slowly, grandly.

“Tessa!” she cries.

“Mah-vlous, darling!” she cries. “Keeping the old home fires burning! And how is school?”

She listens briefly. Lily watches her finger a greasy lock which trails loose from her bun. Mrs Blakemore has given up the hairbrush. Relies, instead, on an ever-growing army of hairpins, to which she adds each day as she notices an errant strand. So much for my nits, thinks Lily. There must be maggots in there by now. “Good, good,” she says, “now what train are we expecting you on? I can't wait to see you. Hughie's coming on the 17
^th
, and Mr Varco's promised me a goose.”

She hears the scratch of the distant voice, then a gasp. Then Mrs Blakemore is in tears again. “You can't,” she says. “Tessa, you can't.”

Scritch scritch scritch goes the voice.

“But I… Tessa, how can you do this to me? Do you know what he's done? Do you understand? How can you be so…”

“…”

“Disloyal,” she breaks across the stream of explanation. “You are disloyal.”

She plucks at the hairpins. Slumps against the hall wall as though the strength has gone from her legs. “I've done everything,” she wails. “Everything. I've sat here – I've waited for you… I could have… My God. And you betray me. You think he –”

A strange noise escapes her throat: animal, lost. Tessa is silent at the other end, shocked, wordless.

Mrs Blakemore rolls against the wall, dents the plaster with the receiver. “Ay-ay-ay-ay…” she keens. “What will I do? What will I do?”

Lily catches sight of her face. It is waxen, drawn, the eyes wide and staring. She shrinks back behind the curtain, hides herself away.

Scritch scritch scritch.

She hears a whoop of indrawn breath. And when the woman speaks again, her voice is cold. “Well,” she says, “you've made your choice, then. I don't know what I've done to you, but…”

Scritch scritch scritch.

“You always were your daddy's little girl,” she says. “Weren't you? I suppose I should never have put faith in you. Well. I hope you have a lovely time.”

Scritch scritch scritch.

“But it's not just for leave, is it?” says Mrs Blakemore. “That's what you don't understand. That's fine. You can all leave. I don't care. You and your filthy father: go and be with him, then. See if I care. At least I've got a son. At least I still have a son.”

Lily hears the next word. “Mummy!” cries Tessa, all the way from Wantage.

The voice which comes now is cracked and hateful. Lily peeps out to see that Mrs Blakemore is upright again, is pounding the wall with her fist.

“No! Too late! Too late! You've made your bed. I hope you enjoy lying in it! Nasty, ungrateful little girl! He'll leave you! He'll leave you, Tessa! He's done it already and he'll do it again, but don't think you can come back here. Don't think I want you! Don't think that, ever! You will not be –”

She stops. Holds the receiver away from her ear and looks at it, an expression of surprise on her face. Presses it back to her face. “Tessa? Tessa?”

Tessa is gone.

Bawling, Felicity Blakemore crosses the drawing-room and stops in front of the drinks tray. She has nearly emptied the cellar, her father's cellar, with no replenishing stocks coming across the channel, but there is still port, and Armagnac from the last century, loved and turned and conserved for special occasions for over fifty years and now coming in very handy while the rest of the world goes dry. She sobs out loud, lips wet and shapeless as she picks up the bottle. She has become a grotesque, a gargoyle.

With shaking hand, she pours the best part of a quarter-bottle into a cut-glass snifter, raises it to her lips. Drains it. Sways as she swallows, clutching the glass to her chest.

“Nonononono,” she says. Fat tears course down her face, drip from her chin. “Bastard,” she says. Throws the glass into the fireplace.

Lily is frozen behind the curtain. She must not find me, she thinks. If she finds me, sees that I've heard…

“Waaaah,” says Mrs Blakemore. Picks up another glass, fills it again and stumbles over to the sofa. Slumps, feet planted flat on the floor, knees spread as though she were milking a cow. “Betrayed,” she says out loud to walls and silent spectator. “I didn't do anything. What did I do? What did I
do
?”

She doubles over, clutches her stomach. Another sob rings out through the room. “Alone. Alone. Dirty little bitch. Dirty little bitch, I'll kill her. I wish she was dead.”

Lily feels the hairs prickle on the back of her neck. She doesn't know if Mrs Blakemore is talking about Tessa, or herself.

I have to get out of here. I have no choice now.

She waits until Mrs Blakemore has fallen asleep on the sofa, until her snores ring out through the house and drown out the sound of her movements.

I'll get my bag. It's packed anyway. I don't need much.

She tiptoes across the room. Mrs Blakemore is lying on her back, mouth open, one arm tipped over the side of the sofa, knuckles trailing on the rug. Lily can see the tramlines of varicose veins tracing their way up her legs, disappearing beneath her nightdress. One slipper dangles from bent toes. She is dribbling.

What happens? she wonders. How does someone become like this? Her mother used to pass out, sometimes, but never like this. Her mother at least had the decency to be dressed when she drank herself insensible.

This time I'll go across the fields. I'll keep away from the roads, cut across the moor. No-one goes on the moor in the winter. No-one will find me. If I get far enough away before night, I'll be all right. There are sheds on the moor, for sheep and stuff. I can spend the night in one of those. I'll get some bread, and some milk, and I'll run 'til I'm over the brow of the hill. I'll keep going south – I know where south is – 'til I hit the sea, then all I have to do is turn left and keep walking.

She creeps up the stairs to the attic, surveys her suitcase. It's in an even worse state than when she arrived here; it's been thrown several times, dragged and sat on. The left-hand corner of the lid has split altogether. It won't last another journey. It'll be a hindrance, not a help. I'll wear what I need, and carry the rest in a cloth. Like a runaway. Like a proper runaway.

She is filled, suddenly, with optimism. That's what I've been doing wrong. I've been travelling too heavy, attracting attention to myself. Of course they've been noticing a child with a suitcase: anyone would. If I take things in my pockets, and a few bits wrapped up, they won't notice me. It's not like I've got a lot to leave behind. If I'm just a child walking along, they'll not bother to ask questions. There are loads of strangers about in the countryside these days. The only ones they're suspicious of are the ones they think might be Jerry spies.

Lily tips out the case, and strips off her outer layers of clothing. It'll be cold out there. She's not stupid. She's been dressing against the cold all her life. She finds her second vest, her gym pants, the two pairs of stockings the Board issued her with back in May when the sun was shining. Puts them on, puts shorts beneath skirt, jersey over blouse, cardi over jersey, like a queer mismatched twin-set. Perhaps I should lift some pearls to go with it, she thinks. I could sell them when I get to Portsmouth: give us something to live on for a bit. Smiles at the conceit and dismisses it. Pulls socks over stockings and squeezes her feet into her t-bar sandals.

Mum'll be glad to see me, she thinks. That's why she's not been. They've lost my papers and she don't know where I am. She's probably been worrying herself sick, not knowing what has happened to me. I'll go and bang on the door and she'll take a minute to come cause she won't know who it is, and she'll open up and when she sees me her face will go all wobbly and she'll start crying the way she cried when she saw me off at the station. And she'll say how much I've grown and she'll throw her arms out and forget all about the neighbours looking, give me a hug right there in the street for everyone to see.