Drowning Rose (14 page)

But at LAGs it was all meant to be different. That was the whole point of going. Of my mother not getting the conservatory extension this year either, in spite of having taken on that completely embarrassing part-time job, and of my dad sticking with his ten-year-old Cortina. Of Mum wearing the same dress every time she goes out anywhere and saying it’s because she loves it so much. Of Dad having given up his membership of the club. That’s why they were making sacrifices, so that I could be with girls like me, other bright-feathered girls. Finally I was going to fit in; the round peg in the round hole. Only that’s not how it was, was it?

I got up and walked out through the French windows towards them. When Eliza saw me she startled and her cheeks grew bright pink as if someone had slapped her.

I made my voice all even and said, ‘I thought you weren’t going.’

Rose looked up at me with those huge blue eyes. Then she shrugged.

Portia said, ‘We changed our minds.’

‘I tried to find you,’ Eliza said. She was lying. Again.

Portia and Rose started walking off as if what they had done didn’t matter. I had been quite calm but now I felt the anger build up inside me, choking me, the way it had when I was little and Mum had to give me that cherry-flavoured sedative stuff. I knew I should pause and take deep breaths or count to ten or something, anything rather than what I did. Grab Portia by the shoulder and shriek, ‘Don’t walk away from me, do you hear. Don’t you dare walk away from me. You said you weren’t going in to town today.’ I swung round and pointed at Eliza and her Wimpy carton, ‘You said you had no money.’ I stopped, breathless, as if anger and hurt had driven the very air from my lungs.

Portia assumed an air of theatrical concern. ‘Gosh, you are in a state, aren’t you?’ She followed with Bafflement and finished off with Contrition. ‘We’re sorry. Really we are. Aren’t we, girls?’ She looked at the others and they nodded gravely and said they were indeed sorry.

I wanted to hit them all and I could do it too; if I spun round like a dervish with windmill arms, I could knock them down like skittles. I started counting in my head. One, two, three, four, five, six . . . My arms dropped to my sides, but my free hand, the one not holding the book, was a fist still, clenching and unclenching. ‘Really?’ I had intended that ‘really’ to sound quizzical, somewhat superior, but instead it came out in a squeak as if I were a boy whose voice was breaking.

Eliza looked even more embarrassed. ‘Are you OK? We’re sorry. We didn’t mean to upset you.’ If Miss Doing the Decent Thing Eliza Cummings spent any more time sitting on the bloody fence she would split in two.

Rose put her soft little hand to her mouth to stifle a giggle. My forehead started to itch. I had got better at controlling my temper but I never could control the rash. It started at the hairline and spread down across my forehead; little tiny spots betraying me. I felt the weight of my Penguin edition of
Tristram Shandy
in my hand. I had forgotten I was holding it. My hand rose in the air as if pulled and then I did it. I lobbed the book, as well and as hard as I could, right at Portia’s head.

Portia ducked, but too late. She cried out as the corner of the book hit her right above the left eye, cutting her eyebrow. I took a step back, stumbling on the edge of the lawn. I managed to steady myself but I was breathing as if I had run a race.

‘Are you completely mad?’ Eliza stepped in front of me.

I smirked. I had managed to knock her off that bloody fence at last.

‘Seriously, have you gone completely mad?’

Portia, supported by Rose, had gone to sit down on the bench by the wall.

I looked at them then back to Eliza and I said, all calm now, ‘You lied to me. You all lied to me and then you laughed about it. And I won’t put up with it.’

I spent the rest of the afternoon waiting to be called into Miss Philips’s study. Maybe I would be suspended, expelled even. If I were, at least my parents’ disappointment would be over with quickly, like the blow to the head of a twitching bird.

But nothing happened. There was no summons to the housemistress, no visits from Laura, our up-herself practically-perfect-in-every-way house prefect.

The next day Gillian explained that the princesses would rather swallow their tongues than tell on a friend. I was torn between the rather delicious image of them chewing and swallowing their tongues and the unexpected assessment that I was seen as their friend. Then I remembered that Gillian in her despised position at the bottom of the heap was likely to consider anyone who actually spoke to you a friend, so I concentrated on the tongue swallowing.

The following Wednesday I spent all my money on a huge bottle of ‘Charlie’ for Portia. I wrapped the bottle in red and gold paper – then I tore it off and went back into town and got some floral stuff in case Portia thought I’d been cheap and used Christmas leftovers. I bought a card too, with a punk standing in front of the guards at Buckingham Palace. I wrote saying how sorry I was and that I had never really learnt self-control but now I was learning through example and how amazing I thought it was to be a pupil at LAGs and how much their friendship meant to me. I drew a heart on the card.

The truth was I sort of meant what I wrote. The truth was I made myself sick sometimes by how I behaved. I felt sick now just thinking about it. In my mind my fists pounded the sides of my head until they were crushed bits of bone imploding into bloody mush.

But in the end Portia was actually nice to me about it all. She said she’d already forgotten about the ‘incident’ as she called it and that she just adored ‘Charlie’ and how did I know, seeing that she had never worn it? She even showed me some photos from her skiing holiday, including one of Julian. Portia talked about him all the time to people but only the inner sanctum were shown photos.

Eliza said my apology showed style. I looked at her.

‘I live for your approval,’ I said. Then I smiled, a nice smile as if I were being funny-friendly. She smiled back but I could see from her eyes that she felt uneasy.

Fifteen

Eliza

Up on the hill the air was fresher. Up on the hill the small square opened up like a smile. Up on the hill life was easy. Up on the hill stood a house that looked as if it had been built on the piss. This was the house I wanted. I had wanted it ever since the day I first saw it, an autumn day seven years ago when out walking with Gabriel. He and I had met not long before, as I had staggered into the hospital A&E reception area bleeding all over the lino at the exact same minute as Gabriel was passing that exact same part of the reception area. He had taken my elbow to steady me before passing me over to the triage nurse.

(‘Why didn’t you help me yourself?’

‘I’m not an A&E doctor.’

‘So if I’d been lying dying on the road would you have just passed by too?’

‘Of course not. That would be completely different. And I didn’t pass by, I handed you over to the appropriate member of staff. Anyway, if I had treated you I wouldn’t have been able to have a relationship with you. So it was just as well, wasn’t it?’

‘Ah, but you didn’t know that at the time. That you wanted to have a relationship with me.’

‘How do you know I didn’t?’

‘You did?’

‘No. But I do now.’)

Gabriel, with his mind crammed full of matters of life and death was particularly unsuited to that kind of cringe-worthy banter but still he had risen manfully to the challenge, proving, on the way, that love was a true proponent of equality, making fools of us all with no regard to colour, creed, educational attainment or profession.

The second time Gabriel and I met was at the hospital fundraising ball. The tickets had cost a hundred pounds, which was a lot of money for a ceramic restorer to spend on an evening out, but I felt bad for having taken up scarce hospital recourses when my injuries were self-inflicted as near as made no difference. I had also donated a lustreware cup to their raffle. It was not of museum quality but it was pretty and the best piece that I owned and I had thought long and hard before letting it go. In the end I had had to remind myself that the greater the sacrifice the more worthwhile the gift would be. (I’m never sure why it should be so, but it did seem to be the general understanding.) Also I liked thinking how pleased the lucky winner would be with the cup. In the event the man whose raffle ticket won him my cup had turned the gold and pink piece in his hand before passing it, with a laugh and a shake of his head, to his companion.

Then a voice behind me had said, ‘Lucky guy. That’s a beautiful prize.’

That had been Gabriel.

A little later that evening we won the karaoke competition for our rendition of ‘Islands in the Sun’ on account of our having elicited the fewest cat-calls according to the ‘boo-rometer’, and not many days after that, we had come upon the house on the hill.

It had been late October but the sun shone as if it thought it were summer. We had met for breakfast at a café before setting off for a walk on the Heath. As we crossed the road he had taken my hand, more, it has to be said, in the manner of a mother making sure her child didn’t stop to tie her laces in the middle of the traffic than a lover, but either way, his strong warm hand holding mine had sent tingles down my chest to the pit of my stomach.

We had walked to Kenwood House and were returning to his car through the top of the village when I noticed the side street opening up into a small square. ‘Pretty,’ I said, and I pulled him along with me on the detour.

The house was not big, yet it stood back from the square in its own overgrown garden, guarded over by an avuncular mulberry tree. The house itself looked to be Georgian. Judging by its position I thought that it might once have belonged to a larger property that had since been demolished. Perhaps it had been the gardener’s cottage or the coachman’s quarters. Subsidence had given it an apologetic air as it leant towards its larger western neighbour, a tall red-brick, and a ramshackle one-storey brick and glass extension had been added to the eastern wall. The square itself looked like the setting for a television costume drama. Remove the cars, I had thought, and Emma Woodhouse would have felt quite at home wandering across the cobbles on her way to visit an annoying neighbour.

Gabriel put his arm round me. ‘You like it?’

I nodded.

‘Me too.’ He kissed the top of my head. ‘In fact, it reminds me of you.’

I looked up at him. ‘Really?’ I smiled. ‘How?’

He tilted his head as he gazed at the house. ‘It’s got so much unfulfilled potential,’ he said finally. ‘All it needs is some TLC to bring it out.’

I decided that I was far too comfortable standing there in the autumn sunshine with his arm round me to worry about whether or not I had been patronised. I sighed, content, and rested my head against his shoulder. Maybe those shoulders were broad enough even for my baggage.

And now I was standing in that same tiny square gazing at that same house, but this time with Beatrice and an estate agent called Neil, and I thought of the time I had stood pretty much where I was standing now, imagining myself living here with Gabriel. What skill, what determination it had taken to loose such a man as he. I understood some of the reasons for why it had ended but not all. I’d never know, for example, what had made me grumpy when all I wanted was to smile. I winced as I remembered the times he had stepped through the door, his face elongated with exhaustion, yet still managing to put on a cheerful face and greet me like he was happy to be home. And I, who had usually been back for an hour at least, who had looked forward to seeing him, who had tidied up and maybe bought some flowers for the kitchen table, who had brushed my hair and re-applied lipstick and sprayed on scent and was ready to hear about his day and tell him about mine, what did I do? Well, more often than not I would find that the intended smile in return slipped into a pout and that all my stories of the day dried up into a dry little shrug and a sentence about the lousy traffic or uninteresting pot or the headache lurking at the back of my eyes.

Truly, I don’t know how that had all happened, why I had felt this need to come down like a scoop of cold water over his lovely head. But I had. I remember him reaching for the bottle of red wine and, finding it empty (we had started trying to make one bottle last two nights), getting up from the table to open a new one.

‘You shouldn’t,’ I said.

‘Why?’ He had sounded like a rebellious teenager. According to his mother, Gabriel had never been rebellious even when he
was
a teenager so I should have been warned. Instead, a little later, I told him off for dripping water on the floor when washing up – you walk in it and the floor gets all dirty. Then I rewashed the grill pan, sighing loudly as I went.

All in all I had managed to dampen his general enthusiasm nicely, but still he bounced back. We were watching the news and he told me that he had been so encouraged by the reaction to the publication of his paper on the developments of new therapies for Alzheimer’s that although he had had his application for extra funding turned down twice he was going to apply again. ‘They have to agree this time,’ he said, and his eyes shone and he was barely able to sit still as he began listing all the reasons as to why he would be successful.