The Outcast (13 page)

December 1952

After everybody had left and while the servants were clearing up and Dicky and Claire and Tamsin were picking over the party, Kit went from room to room and found little things people had left. She found Alice Aldridge’s red silk evening bag with her lipstick and cigarettes in it. She found a stiletto shoe under the dining table. She found three lighters, two of them gold, but only one engraved. She went quietly around, sorting through the mess for treasures, and thinking about the party.

It had been mid-afternoon when she had got up the courage to speak to Lewis.

‘What are you doing?’ she had said, leaning against the wall in the hall and propping her foot up behind her.

‘Nothing.’

She’d spent the whole party wanting to talk to him, and it wasn’t as if anyone else was.

‘Happy Christmas.’ ‘You too.’

‘How is it?’

‘It’s all right, thank you.’

He didn’t seem to mind being spoken to. ‘Where’s your father?’

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‘In there with Alice and everyone.Where’s yours?’ ‘Shouting at the servants. He’ll come out through there in a

minute.’

They were in the hall, where it turned the corner behind the stairs, and they had a good view of both party rooms, the baize door, the stairs and the front door. It was quite dark, so nobody walking by paid any attention.

‘I’m eleven,’ she said, and felt an absolute fool and wanted to die.

‘Congratulations.’

She decided not to talk any more, it only made her look ridiculous. She would keep quiet.

‘When’s your birthday?’ she said, ‘You’ll be fifteen, won’t you?’

Why couldn’t she shut up? ‘Thursday.’

‘Oh, happy—’

She had run out of words at last, but at the wrong time.

Lewis looked at Kit, standing there on one leg, and took pity.

‘Do you remember that time we went down New Hill on my bike?’ he said, and was rewarded by her smile, which was trans- forming.

‘I was six! I was terrified!’ ‘So was I.’

‘Were you?’

It had never crossed her mind that Lewis would be fright- ened.

To begin with, when she was very little, he had been a hero to her and not distinguishable from the ones in books; she used to muddle him up with them, pointing him out to her nanny,

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‘There’s Lewis!’‘No, dear, that’s the boy in the story . . .’Then, through her childhood, when she’d seen him in the holidays she’d been too small and a girl, and couldn’t be his friend exactly, but he’d always been kind. He either hadn’t noticed her, or he’d been kind. Now she was eleven she knew she was in love with him. He was her secret. He was her imagining. She didn’t long or yearn, or other things she had read about being in love, but she had him in her heart. Sometimes she felt surprised that he didn’t know it.

‘You’re never out with everybody any more,’ she said. ‘No. I’m at home mostly. Reading and things.’

‘I read too!’

He stopped himself from making a crack about successful schooling or medals, she looked so earnest and it was a relief to talk to someone; he was beginning to forget what his voice sounded like.

‘What are you reading?’ he asked her. ‘
Anna Karenina
.’

‘Getting through it all right?’ ‘Yes, thanks.’

‘I liked the bits with Levin. On the farm.’ ‘Me too. I don’t like Anna, she’s a drip.’ ‘What else?’

‘Dickens?’ ‘Soppy.’

‘Yes!’

‘Hardy?’

‘Not yet. I liked Somerset Maugham, but Mummy stopped me.’

Dicky came out through the baize door then, and they watched him march off into the drawing room. Lewis turned

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back to her, seeing her face as she watched her father go, and how it changed.

‘Are you one of those child prodigies?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think so, why?’

‘You seem pretty brainy.’ ‘Well, I’m not thick.’ ‘Glad to hear it.’

He smiled at her, and Kit forgot to speak.

Ed Rawlins crossed the hall and passed them, going into the drawing room, and Kit started to laugh. Ed ignored them and Lewis started to laugh too, and they stood laughing at him until he’d gone.

‘Isn’t he noble-looking?’ said Kit, and they were laughing and leaning against the wall, not looking at each other.

Ed went into the party and didn’t acknowledge either of them, but he heard their laughing after he’d passed.They were giggling and bloody babyishly laughing at him. He stood in the door of the long drawing room and looked for Tamsin and his face was red with rage and embarrassment. Laughed at by Lewis Aldridge and Tamsin’s kid sister; it was so uncivilised – first that awful violence in the summer and now this – if he wanted he could knock all Lewis’s teeth out. Ed stepped aside for some people to leave the room and saw Tamsin by the fire with her father. He leaned against the door and waited. He didn’t want to go and talk to her while his face was still red and he was terrified of Mr Carmichael. Tamsin had her hand resting on Dicky’s shoulder while they talked to someone. She looked up at him as he spoke, and Ed imagined her looking up at his face admiringly like that. ‘Look at Ed Rawlins!’ laughed Alice, pointing, ‘he simply

drools over Tamsin Carmichael! He’s not the only one.’

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Gilbert wanted her to keep her voice down. She was drunk. It wasn’t funny drunk, or sweet, it was just dull, coarser-than- usual drunk and he hated to see it.

‘I’m going to talk to Mackereth. Duty chatting. See you later.’

Alice looked around at everyone and smiled. She took another drink from a tray; she wasn’t sure what it was, a champagne cocktail, possibly. She wanted to adjust her roll- on, which was digging into her hips, but she couldn’t do it while people could see. She smoothed it down at the back, hoping it wasn’t spoiling the line of her dress.The dress was new and she’d had it made for the party. It was dark-red shot silk and extremely glamorous. Alice had taken two hours to get ready and they’d been late. She had hated arriving. She looked around the room knowing she looked prettier than most of the women there, and that at thirty she was younger than most of them too, but she felt terribly self-conscious. She smiled at Bridget Cargill and tried to remember when she and Gilbert had last made love. She’d just had her period and it certainly wasn’t since then. She tried to remember when her last period had been . . . before Lewis broke up, when they had the Johnsons to lunch; she didn’t think they’d made love more than once since then, either.

‘Alice, Gilbert run off has he?’

Claire Carmichael was in front of her. ‘Yes, but only with that accounts man.’

Claire made small talk while Alice drank. Across the room, Ed fought bravely through the crowd to Tamsin, who was lovely but on her way somewhere else and he had to endure being interviewed about school by Dicky. Gilbert found Mackereth in the drawing room and they talked numbers for

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an hour, while in the hall – after little Kit Carmichael had reluctantly left him for nursery duty – Lewis was alone. He thought he’d see what he could find to drink. He went into Dicky’s study.

The study was empty, with a fire burning and one lamp lit on Dicky’s desk. The rest of the room was dark. There were drinks laid out on a tray and Lewis took the gin bottle, went over to the window, opened it and stepped out onto the grass. The grass was frozen hard and brittle to walk on and the cold was a relief. He opened his bottle and wandered off towards the garages. He could hear the talking from the party, and the music, and he still felt hot from being inside, and the gin was very good and he drank slowly. He had to hold the bottle down when he passed a couple of drivers, who were looking at Dicky’s cars and talking about them, but they hardly looked up. He walked on down to the tennis court.The night was black, with a small, silver moon high up in a blank empty sky.

Kit held her collection of things in a napkin and cast her eye around the room for more. Her eyes were hot with tiredness and she felt restless. She found a handkerchief, quite clean, with the initials T.M. on it and tried to work out whose it was. The fire was a smouldering heap of ashes and cigarette ends, almost more cigarette ends than logs. She opened the window and the cold air came straight in and moved the hanging smoke around the room.

She went into the hall. Her father was there. ‘Hello, Daddy. Look.’

‘What’s that?’

She tipped her spoils onto the hall table.‘Things people left.’

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‘Why aren’t you in bed? It’s past ten.’ ‘Mummy said I needn’t.’

‘You should have gone to bed when the children were taken home.You weren’t meant to stay up.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Go now.’

She hated the way he spoke. She felt cross and irritated by it all. He was the main one. Of all the people she hated for their smugness and bullying and picking on Lewis and talking like they were better than everybody, of everybody she hated, he was the main one. She bent to pick up the stiletto shoe, which had fallen, and didn’t look at him.

‘All right.’

‘Did you hear me? Go now and don’t speak to me in that tone.’

‘I said all right!’

She straightened up and he smacked her, with a hard open hand across the face.

They both stood there waiting.

He had never smacked her before; he’d never touched her at all that she could remember. Claire came out into the hall; she stood away from them, watching from the door and not saying anything.

Kit’s face burned, but she didn’t touch it and she didn’t look away from Dicky, she kept her eyes on his face. She saw excite- ment.

He raised his hand again, quickly, and she flinched, and hated herself for flinching, but he didn’t hit her; he smiled at her, and they both knew this was the beginning.

‘Go up to bed,’ he said.

‘Good night, Daddy,’ said Kit,‘good night, Mummy.’

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She went upstairs and Dicky turned to Claire.

‘Why don’t you get on with what you were doing?’ he said.

Kit went up the stairs and along the landing to her room, which was pastTamsin’s and on the other side of the house from Dicky and Claire’s rooms. She sat on her bed.

She felt she was meeting an inevitable fate. Part of her wanted to run away and cry and find somebody to save her, anybody at all, but most of her felt strong, like a soldier. She thought of being brave and coping. She thought, I’ll have to be very strong to manage this, and I won’t let him see how frightened I am. She got up and went down the corridor to the bathroom.

The bathroom was freezing, she could see her breath and there was cold air like a knife coming between the window and the sill. She undressed, shivering, and wishing she had brought her dressing gown. She pulled off her hated party dress and stepped on it for warmth while she took off her underwear. She saw in her knickers that she was bleeding. For a silly moment she thought it was because of her father hitting her and then she realised it was her first period. She thought ofTamsin and Claire and their resigned and conspiratorial conversations about the curse, and she felt tired and at the beginning of something she had no interest in. She held her dress up over herself and ran barefoot down the corridor toTamsin’s room, with the gloomy portraits of other people’s ancestors staring down at her as she ran. She looked in the dressing table and found all the clumsy, quasi-medical equipment she knew you had to use and, holding it, ran back to the bathroom again.

She dealt with it and put on her nightdress and did her teeth. She wrapped the knickers in lavatory paper and hid them at the bottom of the wastepaper basket. She could hear her mother

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and Tamsin talking over one another and laughing as they came up the stairs. Looking into the bathroom mirror she saw that she still had the red mark on her face from Dicky’s hand hitting her. It wasn’t a complete print because his hand was much bigger than her cheek and hadn’t fitted on.

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C
hapter
T
hree
‌

1953

At the beginning of the Easter holidays Alice met Lewis at Waterford station. She stood at the end of the platform wrapped in her coat with her fur hat pulled down. Lewis thought she looked like Anna Karenina and wished she’d jump under the train. Anna Karenina made him remember little Kit Carmichael for a moment; he wondered if she’d ever finished it. Alice didn’t throw herself under the train; she waved in that awful false way she had and started towards him.

‘Hello, Lewis! Jolly cold. I’ve got the car. Come on.’

When Gilbert came home that evening he paid the taxi and stood on the gravel as it drove away. He had to make himself go inside. Alice paused brightly in her drink-making and greeted him. Lewis began to smile. Gilbert looked at his son’s face. He saw Elizabeth and Lewis’s own increasing presence. It was unsettling. He saw Lewis, observed, stop smiling.The three of them stood, forming a triangle – schoolboy, father and wife – speechless, facing three weeks together.

On Saturday, they had breakfast as usual.Alice had all her make- up on except her lipstick, because she knew it was common to wear lipstick at breakfast, but couldn’t have a bare face. Mary

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brought in the tea and toast and a warm dish of sausages and tomatoes because it was the weekend. Gilbert wore his old jacket instead of his suit. Lewis sat with his back to the window where he always sat. Gilbert’s paper was folded on his side plate. He picked it up.

Alice ate with quick looks around the room, a constant performance of finding something interesting to look at that she kept up through all of every meal. Sometimes she remarked on what she saw, ‘We must get the hedge cut’,‘Those flowers need changing’; today she said,‘It’s a shame the weather turned colder for the weekend.’

Lewis ate fast and looked at his plate and tried to ignore the silence and tried not to feel each dead moment touch him.

He was reading
Crime and Punishment
, which he chose because it was long with tiny print and he thought it would be boring enough to pass the time with and not go too crazy, but now he was getting lost in the claustrophobia of it and wished he’d never started it, but couldn’t stop. He couldn’t read at meal- times, and there was nothing to distract from the fact they were all together and how bad that was.Very often Gilbert and Alice were fairly drunk by supper anyway, so it wasn’t as bad as lunch and breakfast, but sometimes the being drunk was worse – you could see what was underneath.