Ninepins (15 page)

Rising to leave, Laura moved to the head of the bed and risked, briefly, the laying of an arm along Willow's narrow shoulders. There was no flinch of recoil, as she'd half expected, which emboldened her to speak.

‘It'll be OK.'

Really, what nonsense, though. What did she know about any of it, to come out with such a glib assurance?

Willow said simply, ‘Thanks.'

It was as she turned towards the door that Laura noticed the matchbox lying on the desk, and next to it the pile of spent matches.

 

Beth had generally been located in the back row, in recent years, at primary school concerts. She hated anyone to see her feet when she was singing, and being one of the taller children in Years 5 and 6 meant that she had her wish and could hide away somewhere at the back and to the side. But now she was a Year 7 and one of the smaller ones, surely? She ought to be near the front. So why couldn't Laura see her?

The concert wasn't due to start for another five minutes. There were still choir members milling about on the stage and blocking Laura's view of the benches; others might be yet to come into the hall. Perhaps Beth had been seized by last minute nerves and nipped off to the loo. It would be typical of her.

Willow, at Laura's side, sat unconcernedly reading the photocopied programme, where Beth's name appeared in bold type among the list of soloists.

Miss Chapman, the music teacher, had appeared at the front of the hall and was persuading her choristers to sit down and stop talking.

‘Where can she have got to?' whispered Laura to Willow, who folded the programme sheet in two and looked up. ‘It's half past. They're going to start in a minute, and she's not here.'

A teacher Laura didn't know had been playing a Bach medley on the piano at the side of the stage as the audience found its seats, but now he stopped and looked over at Miss Chapman, who gave a significant nod. A tall, pale girl of about fifteen stepped forward to the centre of the stage and an expectant hush fell over the room. Her white shirt still held the creases from the packet. She looked, thought Laura, as if she were in the dock and about to be cross-examined.

Then she opened her mouth and a heart-stopping sound emerged, liquid and ethereal, making a cathedral of the stuffy school hall.
Once in Royal David's City
…

But where on earth was Beth?

 

‘Mrs Blackwood, could I have a word?'

It was the end of the carol concert. Most of the audience had been reunited with its musical offspring and had filtered out through the double swing doors to the rear of the hall, comparing notes on the performance and exchanging season's greetings with other departing families. Laura was left sitting on her stacking chair in the middle of a row, with Willow beside her, wondering what to do next.

Miss Chapman stood at the end of the row and coughed. ‘I've got Beth in the practice room. We need to have a quick chat, if you don't mind.'

‘Yes, of course.' Laura rose too quickly, so that the metal chair legs shrieked painfully on the linoleum.

Miss Chapman looked at Willow and opened her mouth to speak, but Willow unfolded the concert programme and began to study it with exaggerated care.

‘See you back here in a minute,' Laura told her.

Following the choir mistress out of the hall and along the emptying corridor, Laura felt her stomach liquefy. She was twelve years old herself, and being taken to the head teacher's study.
Beth, sweetheart, what have you done?
But she knew her daughter; she trusted her. It couldn't be anything so very terrible.

The room set aside for rehearsals was one of the lower school classrooms, just up the corridor from the hall. The desks had been pushed to one side to leave space for the choir to stand; chairs still stood upturned on the desks where the cleaners had left them, their legs like a winter forest. On one of the desks, at the edge of the clearing, sat Beth. Her face was a mask but her dangling feet were desolate.

‘Hello, Beth,' said Miss Chapman, but mother and daughter spoke not a word to each other. Beth was refusing to meet Laura's eye.

‘We need to tell your mother what happened this evening, don't we?'

Why did schoolteachers have to talk that way? That irritating ‘we'. It was obvious Beth wasn't going to be telling anyone anything; she looked as though she would never speak again.

‘We had a warm-up arranged for seven o'clock,' she continued, ‘didn't we, Beth? The choir had eaten their sandwiches here in the rehearsal room, then changed into their concert clothes in the cloakrooms, and I'd said they could go outside to stretch their legs and get a breath of air. But they were due back at seven pm prompt.' She had apparently given up now on a response from Beth and was addressing Laura directly. ‘A proper warm-up is crucial for a vocalist. It's exactly the same as for an athlete. Without warming up, you can cause serious injury to your voice.'

Laura nodded, impatient. She was no longer trying to catch Beth's eye; she gave Miss Chapman her full attention and willed the interview to be over.

‘When Beth wasn't here I sent Alice Seabourn outside to look for her, but she couldn't find her. Of course we had our warm-up without her. At twenty past seven, just when we are thinking of getting ourselves into the hall and on to the stage, Beth turns up, out in the corridor with some other girls, making a frightful racket. Not yet changed, not warmed up. Naturally I had to say she couldn't take part.'

‘Yes.' She glanced at Beth. ‘I'm sorry. I quite understand.'

‘And – ' Miss Chapman fished in her handbag ‘ – she had these.' With a flourish she produced a packet of cigarettes.

Laura felt slightly sick.

‘It's the end of term, and nearly Christmas, so I shan't send her to the head of year for smoking. Just this once – but it must never happen again. Because you know, Mrs Blackwood, the school has a strict zero tolerance policy as far as cigarettes are concerned. It may be a rearguard action – some would say a lost cause – but we're waging it with determination, nonetheless.'

‘Of course. And it really won't happen again. I can't imagine – '

‘There's one thing, though,' said the music teacher, cutting through her attempted propitiation. ‘I'm afraid I can't have Beth in the choir any more after this.'

With neither a word nor a glance to Beth, and with renewed apologies and thanks to Miss Chapman, Laura somehow managed to propel herself and her daughter out of the practice room and back to the hall, where they collected an unspeaking Willow before trooping out to the car. The drive home was conducted in difficult silence, broken only by occasional remarks thrown by Laura to Willow in the passenger seat, brittly cheery, about the carols they had heard. As far as commensurate with safe driving, she avoided looking in her mirror.

Once back at Ninepins, Willow fled like a rabbit for the stairs, leaving the kitchen clear for the showdown. Laura, whose wrath had been building to this moment, watched her departure and, perversely, almost lost heart.
Oh, Beth. Sweetheart
. Instead of flinging the cigarette packet on the table and demanding explanations, she sat down wearily in a chair.

‘Alice had to sing on her own,' she began, her voice flat. ‘The rest of the choir hummed quietly, while she sang your verse by herself.'

Still standing, Beth raised her chin. ‘Bet she was delighted. Everyone looking at her – s'what she loves.'

This provoked a brief renewal of anger. ‘Don't take this out on Alice. This is about you.'

Eyes narrowed, Beth glowered at the wall behind her mother.

‘What have you got to say?'

‘ 'bout what?'

‘About letting Alice down, for a start. About being thrown out of the choir.'

The chin jutted. ‘Stupid choir. Like I care about that. I was going to stop going anyway, after the concert.'

‘But you love singing.'

‘At the primary, that was. Nobody's in the choir at the college.'

Alice is, and Gemma, she wanted to say; but self-evidently the thirty or forty kids on the stage in their clean, white shirts, the boys in ties, were all still ‘nobody'. Rianna and Caitlin were not in the choir.

‘So, who were these other girls you were smoking with?'

Silence. In her coat pocket, Laura's right hand closed round the cardboard packet, still smooth in its cellophane. Half the cigarettes were gone; the packet gave under the pressure of her fingers, buckling out of shape. She squeezed her fist tight.

‘
How could you smoke?
'

There was a short pause, before Beth muttered, ‘I wasn't smoking.'

The reply was not what Laura was expecting and for a moment she said nothing. Her daughter seemed to be mustering herself to speak.

‘I wasn't. Not really. It was the others who were smoking. They're not my cigarettes, I just had them in my pocket, that's all, because Caitlin had taken them from her mum's bag, so she didn't want to be found with them on her or her mum would go mental. I'd hardly had any, not smoked one of my own at all, only had puffs of theirs, just to try. Everyone tries cigarettes. I bet you did, when you were young. Everyone does.'

‘Beth.' Laura said it again, keeping her voice as even as she could, ‘How could you smoke? With your asthma. Even a few puffs. You must know it's the worst possible thing.'

Beth kicked out at a chair leg, viciously, making it judder. ‘Oh yes, it's always my stupid bloody asthma, isn't it? Always the reason I can't do anything, have any fun.'

‘Smoking's ‘‘fun'', then, is it?' But Laura knew this was a mistake: being drawn into argument, into the scoring of inconsequential points. She took a breath. ‘It's not just your asthma. Of course it's not only because of that.'

‘No.' Beth's voice was distorted, thick. ‘It's 'cos you don't like my friends. That's what this is all about, isn't it? You don't want me having any friends.' She was visibly crying now; her eyes bloated with liquid until they released two slow, fat tears. ‘You hate them, don't you? Rianna and Caitlin – you hate them. You always have to spoil everything for me.'

‘I don't hate …'

Her daughter, however, had turned away and was stumbling for the hall and stairs, the sobs beginning only when she was out of the room. Walking over to the bin, Laura was surprised to find her legs quite steady. Nor was her hand shaking as she took out the crushed cigarette packet and dropped it in, letting the metal lid fall with the snap of finality. Beth was completely in the wrong. She'd been late for rehearsal; she'd let down her friend and the rest of the choir; she'd been caught smoking cigarettes. So why should it be Laura who was left with the aftertaste of misery and disgrace?

Surfacing from sleep, Laura half opened her eyes. Then she remembered the date and closed them again. Christmas morning in alternate years still felt the way it should. It felt the way it had done when Beth was a baby, or when Laura was a child herself: the tingle of anticipation upon awakening. But this year, as in every year without Beth, it was just a cold December day with no need to get up for work. She pulled the duvet over her head and tried to recapture sleep.

It was no good. A lifetime of jumping out of bed on this day of all days, to look for surprises left in the night, made lying in impossible. Christmas was still Christmas, even with an empty house. And besides, it wasn't empty, was it, even if Beth's room was.

She pulled on socks, slippers and dressing gown and set off along the landing, past the unstirring spare room and down to the kitchen. It would have been too much, she'd decided, to creep in last night and leave the stocking of goodies at the foot of the spare bed. Willow had been up late, in any case, watching an old film on TV, and Laura had been in bed before her. But this morning was made for indulgences and she had no one else to indulge.

In the cupboard she had a packet of marshmallows: not the usual fat, fluffy pink and white kind but miniature plugs of chocolate and vanilla, sold to top the cappuccino of those with an expensive steamed-milk coffee machine. She'd bought them for Beth, really, for her hot chocolate in bed tomorrow morning. But there was no harm in making the same for Willow today.

Once the milk pan was on the hob to warm, she turned on the radio. The sound of congregational singing lapped into the kitchen, politely modulated and slightly nasal, unmistakably Church of England. …
earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone
. … Frowning, she smothered the thought that Beth's school choir had sung it better. But even the recollection of the carol concert couldn't damp her spirits for long this morning. She whisked up the cocoa powder and sugar in the mug with a light wrist and joined her voice softly as the invisible churchgoers reached the end of Christina Rossetti's deathless poem.
Give my heart
.

She poured in the hot milk and whisked it again before sprinkling on the marshmallows, which bobbed in the froth like tiny corks, then settled and began to blur and melt around the edges. Picking up the mug in one hand and Willow's stocking in the other, she headed back upstairs, still humming to herself.

There was no reply to her knock and Willow appeared to be asleep when she crept in. For a moment she was daunted, feeling foolish, but then Willow stirred and suddenly it was easy.

‘Merry Christmas,' she said, and grinned.

‘What's this?' Willow blinked and half raised herself on an elbow, and soon she was grinning, too. ‘Santa Claus? And, wow – hot chocolate.'

‘I've got nobody else to spoil today.'

The words, intended as apologetic, came out as grudging. But Willow's smile was undented. ‘I'll help you out, then.'

After she had watched Willow unpack the contents of her stocking, and had herself opened the gift-wrapped paperback which Willow slid out from under the bed, she made them both a festive breakfast of porridge with cream and brown sugar, and oranges, and scrambled egg on toast. While Willow washed up, Laura called Simon's house and said her Happy Christmases to Simon and Tessa and Beth.