Hold My Hand (9 page)

Black. Damp-smelling. You wouldn’t want to store anything that might decay, in here. The sort of cupboard where they lock children in mid-Victorian novels. Bet there are spiders, too.

She closes the door. Now she is looking, she sees that there are bolts on it, top and bottom. She shrugs, shoots them, turns back to survey the devastation.

What do I do here? Nothing I can do, really, except perhaps clear up that vase. I’ll have to show it to Mr Gordhavo before I do anything, or he’ll be blaming me for the damage.

Outside the door, she catches the scutter of running feet. Someone – someone small and light – is running down the corridor, into the depths of the house. Bridget checks her watch, is surprised to find that almost an hour has passed since she got up. Yasmin must have woken and come through the flat door looking for her.

“That you, darling?” she calls.

The footsteps stop. Silence.

“Yas? I’m in here. In the big room.”

Silence. Yasmin is listening. She can feel her listen. It’s unlike her not to speak. Yasmin is a great talker.

“Yasmin?”

She goes toward the door, pauses just before she goes through. Something stop her from going out. She stops, listens. It’s quiet out there. No movement, no rustles. Maybe I’m hearing things. “Yasmin?”

Someone giggles.

Bridget leaps through the doorway, hits the carpet, fingers splayed like a leaping lion.

“Boo!” she shouts.

The corridor is empty.

Chapter Fourteen

I don’t believe it. I don’t
believe
it. I feel –
invaded
. There’s no other word for it.
Invaded
. My house will never feel clean again. It’s as though she’s brought the war with her. I might as well have a house full of Nazis. Worse. At least a Nasty would have the self-respect to be ashamed. This one – my God, I open up my home and not an ounce of gratitude do I receive. Not even the tiniest bit of embarrassment.

God knows what else she’s brought with her. Syphilis, probably, and consumption. It’s quite obvious what the mother does for a living. We’ll all be going down with nameless diseases carted in from the Portsmouth docks. There have
never
been lice at Meneglos school. Never. We’ll be a laughing stock.

“Disgusting,” she says out loud. “You’re disgusting.”

Lily Rickett, hair tangled and sticking out from her head like a bird’s nest, glares at her from the other side of the scullery. Her cheeks are livid with colour, but despite the foregoing ten minutes’ manhandling, there is no sign of tears. Lily doesn't cry. Hasn’t since she was five years old. Crying, she has discovered, gets you nothing, apart from a slap round the ear, most times. “Give it a rest,” she says.

“Come here.”

“No.”

“Come
here
, Lily.”

“No. You’re not coming near me with that thing.”

Felicity Blakemore glances down at the nit comb, a mat of ripped-out follicles wound round the metal teeth. They look like the pelt of some feral animal. They look, in fact, exactly like the sort of thing that would come from the head of this feral child. How do people manage to bring their children up wild like this, in this day and age? She hasn’t noticed that she has been gripping the comb so hard that her palm is indented with two dozen sharp little pinpricks.

“Come on,” she says. “This is all your fault in the first place. If you hadn’t imported nits into this house –”

“Come one step nearer,” says Lily, “and I’ll bite you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I mean it.”

“It has to be done. You can’t walk around like that for the rest of your life. I’ve already had to do it to the others, thanks to you.”

“Yeah, well,” says Lily, “bet you didn’t try and rip their hair out by the roots while you was at it.”

She feels a surge of rage. “Well,
they
didn't give their –
parasites
– to everybody else.”

“How d’you know? Why you blaming me? Coulda been any of ’em. I’m not the only kid in this house, you know. Coulda been one of
your
precious kids.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“What?”

An eyeballing pause. Faced with such naked insolence, Felicity Blakemore struggles to hold on to her training. Has to wait and grit her teeth before she voice is controlled enough to speak again.

“The others may not come from the best walks of life,” she says, “but it is quite evident that there is only one of you who has never been familiar with soap and a flannel. Now, come here. The sooner you do, the sooner it will be over.”

Lily folds her arms, glares out her defiance. “No.”

“If you won’t do it voluntarily, I shall have to make you.”

“Go ahead. Like to see you try.”

“Very well,” she snaps. Shoots the upper bolt on the garden door, out of child’s-arm-reach. Lily makes a lunge for the kitchen door, but too late. Felicity Blakemore has her skinny arm in a grip of steel, swings her round behind her as she calls.

“Hugh! Hughie, come here a moment!”

Lily flails and kicks uselessly at her jailor. “Get off! Get off get off get off!”

The door is pushed open and Hugh appears. “Hullo!” he says. He’s only four years older than Lily, but he’s already almost twice her size. A lifetime of chips and dripping has left Lily small and pale in comparison with her peers.

“Hold this child,” orders his mother.

“With pleasure,” replies the son. He enjoys a bit of rough-and-tumble. Always has. He had already garnered a reputation for toughness at his Prep school which stood him in good stead when he went up to Eton last year. He stands, meaty hands on chunky hips, and cons his houseguest. “Giving you trouble, is she?”

“Apparently she thinks she’s too good for the nit comb.”

“Right,” says Hugh. “We’ll see about that.”

“Please,” says Lily, a little too late, “it hurts.”

“Well perhaps,” says Mrs Blakemore, “you should have thought about that
before
you brought lice into this house.”

Even Hugh can see the faulty reasoning behind this statement. But he’s at an age where the stupidity of adults is more useful than contemptible, and he lets it pass. “If she doesn’t want her hair combed out,” he tells his mother, “there is an alternative.”

It takes a moment for the statement to sink in, then Lily dashes for the outside door. Jumps for the bolt, fails, jumps again, then turns, teeth bared, back pressed to the wall. Like a cornered rat, thinks Mrs Blakemore. In the stables, when we set the terriers on them.

Hugh crosses the flags in two strides, is on the girl like a ferret on a rabbit. Lily plummets sideways against the sink, kicks out with naked feet, screams like an angry ape. The ferocity of her self-defence is enough – almost – to make him lose his grip. But then, blood up, he tightens up again. He’s had plenty of practice – on his sister, on the village boys, on the younger pupils at school – and he enjoys the fight. Enjoys, if he were to admit it, physical confrontation more than anything else in the world. It makes him feel strong, vital,
alive
. And in the last year or so, another element has been creeping in to his enjoyment.

“C’mere,” he says.

She scratches at his face, receives instant punishment with the back of a hand. “Stop it!” he hisses. Gets a wrist in each hand and hauls them backwards into a full nelson. And now she’s panting and wriggling, bent double, and he is looking triumphantly at his mother. Only he and Lily know that the struggle, the animal smell of her, has given him an immediate and urgent adolescent erection.

“Good boy,” says Felicity. “Good. Now, you just hold her there while I fetch the scissors.”

She’s bony in his grip. Her body heaves as she pants, rubs inadvertently against him. “Bastard,” she says. With a mother like hers, she knows all too well what it is that’s pressing into her buttocks. “Dirty bastard.”

Hughie smiles. “You'd know all about dirty
bastards
,” he says, emphasising the final word. “If you’d bothered to have a wash, ever in your life, you wouldn’t be in this position.”

“Oh, but I would,” she says. “You’d make sure of that, wouldn’t you?”

He’s annoyed. Tugs at her arms until she squeals at the pain, then pulls her harder against him to show her who’s boss.

Hughie likes having evacuees. Once you’re at the top of the pecking order, your ambitions have to turn to extending the number of people below you.

His mother comes back, comb in one hand and kitchen scissors, sturdy for cutting up the carcasses of dead birds, in the other. Lily, catching sight of her, bucks hard against her jailor, kicks out in futility.

“Now, don’t struggle,” says Felicity Blakemore. “Struggling will only make it worse.”

Chapter Fifteen

It’s not that they’re unfriendly, exactly. More – silent. If this were Streatham, she knows that the silence would mean that the staff were checking them out as potential shoplifters, but here… Bridget thinks the middle-aged woman behind the till is more interested in whether she’s holiday or home. It’s not worth wasting much breath on someone who will never come back, after all.

She can’t help thinking of
The League of Gentlemen
as she finds herself the subject of such scrutiny.
It’s a local shop, for local people
… the phrase keeps circling her head as she circles the shelves. Meneglos is not a centre of culinary greatness, of that much she is certain. If the village has been invaded by second-homers, they must go up to Padstow or Port Isaac for their polenta and sun-dried tomatoes, because there is nothing here that you wouldn’t find in the average school kitchen. Then again, there’s nothing here that Yasmin would refuse to eat, which is something of a bonus. And nothing with an eat-by date that actually requires attention. Even the fish, five miles from the sea, is tinned: tuna in brine and two types of sardine.

She wanders the aisle – there is only one, with a fridge to the right and a display stand of postcards teetering in the middle – and looks at what’s available. Yasmin, her eye caught immediately by a display – well, pile – of clotted cream fudge, stays by the door, huge eyes drinking in the child-snatching prints of puppies and kittens which decorate the boxes. Probably, thinks Bridget, thinks there are actually kittens nestled in among the sugary treats inside.

Things in tins and things in packets. Lots of them. It’s a Seventies convenience retail dream. Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies. Baked beans: plain, curried, BBQ, pork sausage, all-day-breakfast. Green Giant niblets. Soupernoodles. Sandwich Spread. Shipphams paste. Tinned carrots. Marrowfat peas. Angel Delight. She half expects to see a selection of dust-covered sachets of Rise'n'Shine and Vesta just-add-water freeze-dried chicken curry, but instead the chiller cabinet bows to twenty-first-century ill-health with stacks of agent orange Sunny D and cook-chill lasagne. Cottage cheese with pineapple. Ski yoghurt. Mattesons smoked pork sausage. Try saying
that
without saying mmm...

There's a lady sitting on a bar stool behind the toughened glass of the post office counter. It's more there in order to show where the counter is than as an actual security measure. If anyone wanted to rob the place, all they’d have to do would be to step through the open door to her cage. Bridget looks up from the lackadaisical display of lettuces and onions and catches her eye. Smiles.

“If there’s anything you can’t find,” says the lady, “just ask.”

“Thank you,” she says. “I think I’m fine at the moment.”

“Well,” says the lady, “you know we’re here”. Goes back to leafing through her big book of picture stamps.

Bridget lines the bottom of a wire basket with a copy of the
Mirror
, starts loading up. She won’t bother with Wadebridge Tesco until Monday. Figures there won’t be so many crowds. Beans. Bacon. Eggs. Spaghetti. She almost does with spaghetti hoops until she notices that there are three pots of pesto on the top shelf, in among the cook-in-sauces. Pesto: the Marie Rose
sauce of the Nineties. Even Meneglos would have caught up.

She needs to hurry up. Yasmin has moved on to the rack of chocolate at the front of the till. In the chiller, three types of pasty. Gosh, she thinks, I really am in Cornwall: I can’t think of a time when I last saw a pasty that wasn't made by Ginsters. She decides to try each of them for supper tonight, with the beans: drops them into the basket. And then she thinks: sod it. Let’s have some clotted cream. Life can't be all subsistence rations. Scoots back to pick up flour and jam and cream of tartar. This afternoon Yasmin will be introduced to the delights of scones. Now that she doesn’t have to worry that the oven will make the meter run out quicker. Frozen peas. Fish fingers. Oven chips. A big loaf of Hovis. She has more than enough for the weekend, now.

The lady at the till takes her basket and begins, very slowly, to ring the items up and stack them, one by one, in a blue-and-white-striped plastic bag. “Staying locally, are you?”

It’s a local shop, for local people…

“Yes,” says Yasmin.

“Yes – well, no,” says Bridget. Sees her London accent noted, sees the information disappoint. “We’ve just moved in, actually. Up the road.”

The woman perks up. “Really? I hadn’t heard anything had been sold…”

“No, I’m caretaking. Up at Rospetroc. Rospetroc house.”

She shifts on her stool. “Oh,
right
.”

She rings up the bread, the peas. Giving herself some thinking time, observes Bridget.

“And how you settling in, then?”

“Fine,” she answers. “Well – we only got here last night. Didn’t find the boiler ’til this morning, though.”

“Bet you were freezing, big old place like that.”

Bridget laughs.

The woman leans round her. “Ivy! Come out here! We’ve got the new housekeeper at Rospetroc come in!”

Ivy closes her book, comes out to greet her.

“Hello!” she says. It's a quizzical hello, as though Bridget were an old friend who’d suddenly turned up somewhere unexpected. “How you getting on, then? Ivy Walker.”

“Hello.” She shakes her hand, surprised by the friendliness. She used the same corner shop in Streatham for seven years and the owners had only graduated up to a faint nod of recognition by the time she left. “Bridget. Bridget Fl– Sweeny.”

She kicks herself inwardly. I'm going to have to get a lot better at this if it’s going to work.

The woman behind the till reaches out and shakes her hand as well. “Chris Kirkland. Welcome to Meneglos.”

“Thanks.”

Ivy bends at the waist, brings her face down to a level with Yasmin’s. “And who’s this?”

“Yasmin,” says Yasmin, taking a rapid step back. She’s not used to strange adults coming so far into her space. Bridget’s not thought about it before, but people in London are scrupulous about keeping their distance from children for fear of being strung up.

“Hello, Yasmin,” she says. Reaches up to the counter and gets down the giant sweet-jar of lollipops. Unscrews the lid and offers them. “Would you like one of these?”

Yas’s eyes are out on stalks. Then: “no, thank-you,” she says.

Ivy looks taken aback.

“Mum says I’m not to take sweets from strangers,” says Yas.

Chris laughs. “Too right,” she says. “And you've got your manners, too, I see.”

“It’s all right,” Bridget assures her. “They aren’t strangers any more. You can have one.”

The jar is lowered within her reach again. Yasmin takes her time about her choice. Considers each sweet in turn before finally reaching in and plucking out a blue one.

“Thank you,” she says, unprompted.

Oh, bless you, my little darling. You don’t know how grateful I am for this first impression. It’ll be all round the village about us in no time; thank you so much for choosing this moment to not have a screaming tantrum.

“So are you at school, then, my love?” asks Chris. Yasmin, mouth clamped round her lollipop, nods, deep and long.

“She just started in September.”

“Sending her to the village school, are you?”

“Well, I was hoping… what do you think the chances are?”

“Oh, I daresay. It's not exactly Eton. You don’t have to put them down before birth
here
.”

 “Put ’em down,” says Ivy. “I always liked that phrase. Always gives me an image of the upper classes drowning their young in a bucket, like kittens.”

Please don’t let Yasmin have heard that. We’ve quite enough trouble with kittens as it is.

To her relief, Yasmin has found a pile of Barbie magazines, has lost interest in the grownups.

 “Just pop in Monday morning,” says Chris. “They break up Wednesday, so you’re in luck. If there’s no-one in the office, go and knock on the headmistress’s door: it’s the house by the school gates. Blue door. You can’t miss it. Mrs Varco, that’s her name.”

“Will she get in, this late in the year?”

“It’s the law,” says Ivy, simply. “You’re in the catchment area. They’ll just squash another chair round a table and away you go.”

“Thing is, there isn't a choice down here,” says Chris. “Not like in London. No worries about avoiding the sink schools. Here it’s whatever there is or there’s private. Lucky for you, Meneglos is a good one.”

“Well, they don’t come out swearing like pirates, anyway. Not like over at Wadebridge.”

The pair of them fall quiet in contemplation of the urban degeneration of the local market town. Tut and roll their eyes.

“So what sort of state is the old house in, then?” asks Ivy Walker. “I heard Frances Tyler left in something of a hurry.”

The two women exchange a barely perceptible mutual eye-flicker. Bridget only just registers it before it’s gone.

“Not great,” she says. “She obviously left halfway through pretty much everything.”

“That’ll be a lot of work for you, then.”

“Mmm. Well, it's what I'm paid for.”

“True enough,” says Ivy. “He was down here trying to get someone to come up and do it before you arrived. Didn’t have much luck, I expect.”

“I’m surprised,” she fishes, “that no-one round here wanted the job.”

The flicker again.

“Oh, I wouldn’t be, dear,” says Chris, slightly hurriedly. “It’s not much of a salary, if you think about it. It’s okay as a live-in wage, with all your bills covered, but everyone around here’s got somewhere to live anyway, or they wouldn’t be here, would they?”

“Yes,” says Ivy. “And besides, that isolation thing’s more of a city-folk fantasy than it is for people like us. Most country people would rather live in a village. A bit of life. Someone around. You know.”

“You’re very cut off up there,” says Chris. “you need to watch it. You can get cut off if it snows, with that hill to get up. And the power’s not exactly reliable up there. You must make sure you’ve got plenty of candles and stuff because you can lose it altogether for a couple of days, sometimes.”

“Oh, I don't mind,” she says. “After London it feels like a luxury.”

“I daresay it does,” says Ivy. “You couldn’t pay me to live up there, personally.”

Chris laughs. “Well, someone
is
paying her, Ivy. I don’t suppose she’d be there if they wasn’t.”