Tara (28 page)

Inspector Hawkins nodded.

'Is everyone here going to find out about us now?' The girl's amber eyes looked directly into his.

'No. Not even the local police know about it, and that's the way it will stay.'

"That's good.' She stood up and left the room abruptly, not even looking at her mother.

'I'm sorry.' Amy's voice quavered. 'Tara can be very headstrong.'

*

It was later that afternoon when Tara heard her mother crying in the stable.

'What is it, Mum?' she asked softly as she crept in to find her mother with her face nestled against Betsy's neck. She could see perfectly well that Amy had been crying for some time. It was dusk now, and gloomy in the stable, but she could still make out her swollen eyes.

'You're crying for Dad, aren't you?' she said in astonishment. 'What on earth for?'

'Because of what he used to be. Because no-one else cares enough.' Amy patted the white flash down Betsy's nose.

'Well, I'm glad he's dead,' Tara spat out. 'It's the best thing that's happened in my life so far.'

'You can't be, not really?'

'I can. He gave us such a horrible life.'

'Well, today I'm just remembering the man I fell in love with.'

'You're so weak,' Tara exploded. 'You'd find something good in a maggot. I can't stand it.'

She turned and ran back into the house, up the stairs into her bedroom. Only then, in the privacy of her room, could she let go. She didn't want her mother teasing those little memories out of her – of Sundays down Petticoat Lane riding on his shoulders; of riding the Wild Mouse at Southend or walking through the tunnel to Greenwich from the Isle of Dogs when he used to howl like a dog to make her laugh.

She wanted to keep her hate alive, she wanted to remember her mother with a black eye and Paul shaking with fear. Her father had been a bully and a thief, and today she'd discovered he was a murderer too.

'I'm glad he's dead!' she sobbed over and over again.

Tara stayed in her room all evening. Mabel called out that tea was ready, but she didn't go down. She sat at her desk with her reading light on, drawing.

Her room was always warm because it was over the kitchen and pipes from the Aga ran through it. Gran had told her many stories about this room, that had been hers as a girl. How she and her sister Emily used to take the big drawers out of the chest and pretend they were boats. How they would hold on to the footboard of the bed to tie each other's stays. It was here that Gran had got the beating from her father.

The feather mattress was gone now, replaced by a new spring one, but aside from the drawing board Gran bought her last Christmas, and a green carpet, everything else was as it had been then. Her friends had modern bedrooms with Formica-topped dressing tables and sliding doors on their wardrobes, but Tara loved the big pine chest of drawers, the carving on the bedstead, the tile-topped washstand. The pictures on the walls of Adam Faith, Gene Vincent and Elvis Presley were a reminder that she was a modern teenager, but she loved Victoriana.

She and Paul had once dug out a lot of old dresses tucked away in a trunk, and spent a whole day up here trying them on. It made her smile even now to think of Paul in a girl's navy and white striped dress, he had looked so pretty in it once she'd found a sun-bonnet to hide his short hair. Gran had laughed, too, when she saw him, she said it had been her Sunday dress and described the lacy bloomers she used to wear underneath it.

It occurred to Tara that the memories of her brother were becoming less painful. She could think of him without crying, smile at the funny things he had done and said. She wished she could be that way about Harry, too; forget how she'd thrown herself at him out in the cowshed. Now she could never go and stay in London.

The wind got up and was chasing round the house lifting the loose sheets of corrugated iron on the hen house, sending a milk pail rattling across the cobbles and banging the branches of the plum tree against the cowshed.

She was drawing her fantasy shop, its big windows displayed with her designs. First the shop front, dark green paint with Tara Manning' written in gold leaf; then the interior, with ladies posing before long mirrors, their husbands sitting waiting on a couch.

A knock on the door surprised her. She had expected to be ignored.

'I thought you might like a sandwich.' Amy peered round hesitantly. 'Can I come in?'

'Yes, of course.' Tara felt a little awkward now, wondering if she should apologise.

Amy came right in, pushing the door to behind her with one foot. She had milk, too, and a slice of walnut cake. She put the tray down on the bed and came to look over Tara's shoulder.

'Your shop?'

She could tell her mother had been stuffing the chicken for Sunday lunch, she smelled of sage and onions. Tara wondered if she was still sad.

'You're lucky you can draw, Tara. I see dresses in my head and I could make them the way I think them, but I couldn't put them on paper.'

Tara felt ashamed. Not for what she'd said, but because she'd hurt her mother. Amy never bore grudges, perhaps that's why she had forgiven Dad so many times?

'Are you still sad about Dad?' she asked in a small voice.

Amy gave a soft sigh and Tara turned in her seat and buried her face in her mother's chest.

'I didn't mean to hurt you,' she whispered. 'It's just that I can't see him the way you can.' She knew without looking up that Amy was crying again and all she could do was hold her mother tightly and hope that it would help.

'No-one in this world is entirely wicked, not even your father,' Amy finally said.

'If I fall in love with a man and he puts one foot wrong, I'll leave him immediately,' Tara said firmly.

Time and again she had tried to work out why women liked men who were cruel to them but, however she looked at it, there was no answer except weakness.

'I think you'll find it's not quite as simple as that.' Amy laughed through her tears. 'I hope the man you fall in love with will be worthy of you. But don't go through life expecting perfection, darling.'

Chapter 13

1963

'I hate school. I want to leave now!'

Tara faced her mother in the kitchen, eyes blazing. She was just sixteen, still in her school uniform, though she had done her best to disguise it by leaving off her tie and wearing a wide belt around her skirt.

'If I have to stay here another year I'll end up as loopy as you and Gran!'

Amy slapped Tara across the face.

'Don't be so cruel,' she shouted. 'I've been trying to explain to you that if you get "A" levels you can go to Goldsmith's College in London. Leave school now and you'll never get in there.'

'Who cares about college? I just want a job.'

Amy turned away, sickened not only by Tara's stubborn and short-sighted view, but also by herself resorting to violence.

'Go and get one, then,' she threw over her shoulder. 'Just don't blame me in a year or two when you regret it.'

Tara ran upstairs. Once in her room she wasn't sure whether to do a gleeful dance, or continue to sulk. She'd worn her mother down and got her own way at last, but somehow the triumph felt a little hollow. But then Mum was good at making her feel like that!

A job wasn't the real issue. What she really wanted was to move to London.

She stood in front of her mirror and looked critically at herself. A ravishing natural beauty, that was how Mr Haig the English teacher described her. He'd raved about her glorious hair and her wide sensual mouth. He had been teaching them how to write a poem, improvising on the spur of the moment, but she knew he felt what he was saying, even if he did laugh about it.

In the two years since Paul's death Tara had become a woman, and now the village didn't have enough to offer her. Aside from the odd dance at the village hall or the Young Farmers' Association, there was absolutely nothing to do – no youth club, no coffee bar. Even if she went into Bristol, the last bus back left soon after ten. She wasn't old enough to go in the pub and, anyway, even if she had been, she wanted a bit more excitement than sitting about with old men who talked about the days before the War and played shove ha'penny. Other girls from school were into riding in a serious way, taking part in gymkhanas, exercising their horses, but Tara wasn't that keen on riding and anyway, most of the girls were terrible snobs. Fashion magazines were her lifeline. She studied each designer's collections, she dreamed of clothes when everyone else mooned over actors and pop stars.

London had preoccupied her mind for over a year now, since she had got over the embarrassment of Harry. Once she had been convinced she could never look him in the face again, but now she merely laughed about it. George and Queenie had been to visit twice during this time, and little snippets of information about Harry disturbed her. He still worked with George, but now he had moved into a flat of his own near the Angel and George was clearly afraid he was getting into bad company. But Harry no longer figured in her scheme of things. All she wanted was to find a job in the fashion industry, and that meant London.

'They were all talking about this actor chap who's staying at Stanton Drew.' Mabel dumped the shopping on the kitchen table and sank down on to a chair as if she'd walked ten miles instead of just nipping up to the Co-op. 'Apparently he's been in a detective series on the television, but I've never heard of him.'

Amy looked up from her ironing. 'What's his name?'

'Wainwright.' Mabel took sugar and flour out of the bag and looked suspiciously at a bunch of bananas. 'Look at these, half of them are black. I should've been watching what Muriel was doing instead of listening to tittle-tattle.'

Amy smiled weakly. She was still brooding about Tara and wishing she hadn't smacked her face, but her mother could be very funny sometimes. She pretended to have no interest in gossip, yet she always knew everything.

Mabel looked round at her daughter.

'You've been crying!'

Amy shrugged her shoulders. 'Tara upset me. I told her she could get a job if that's what she wants.'

'She wants to leave home,' Mabel said brusquely. 'And you can't stop her, Amy.'

Amy was surprised by her mother's attitude; she had expected opposition.

'I can't bear it,' she said. 'Why has she turned against me, Mother? She can hardly be bothered to speak to me these days.'

'She hasn't turned against you. You didn't want to be with me, either, when you were her age,' Mabel said in a surprisingly gentle manner. 'I know I gave you good reason to want to be away from me, but I think you'll find that, even in the closest families, girls of her age want to get out.'

'I wouldn't mind her leaving home to go to college,' Amy said. 'But she's being so foolhardy, refusing to take her "A" levels. At college they'll channel her into a proper career, but left to her own devices she'll just drift.'

Mabel got up and slid the kettle on to the Aga. Tara was the best in school at art and her needlework had improved vastly in the last two years, but she was as impatient and obstinate as herself. In just the way Mabel had imagined herself sweeping into a studio and becoming a successful illustrator overnight, Tara believed she had enough talent to take the fashion industry by storm.

'She doesn't understand that if she wants to become a dress designer she'll have to work up through the ranks,' Amy continued. 'She wouldn't last five minutes in a workshop. And don't tell me things have changed since I was a seamstress, Mother, because they haven't.'

Mabel smiled. Amy was right. Tara would be put to work picking up pins, machining seams and pressing. Even Amy, whose needlework was exquisite, had never got a chance to put forward her own ideas.

'The trouble with us,' Mabel said thoughtfully as she warmed the teapot, 'is we both want everything for Tara we never had. Perhaps we want her to achieve the things we never did.'

Amy's fame as a dressmaker had spread since she made a wedding dress for the local headmaster's daughter. With a sixteen-feet train, every inch of it embroidered with tiny seed pearls, it had been the talk of the village for months afterwards. Now she mainly made evening dresses and bridal gowns, all rich with embroidery or beading, but even so she knew she couldn't expect to walk into one of the leading fashion houses and call herself a designer.

'So what should we do?' Amy asked, knowing in her heart Mabel was right.

'Don't argue with her.' Mabel shrugged her shoulders. 'If she has set her eyes on London, I suppose we'll just have to accept it. Suppose we said she could take a summer job in London and asked George and Queenie to put her up?'

Amy's face brightened. A few weeks of having to kowtow to other women would probably bring Tara back to heel!

'That's a brilliant idea,' she agreed. 'I bet Queenie could find her a place with one of the dress manufacturers. If we said she could go after doing her "O" levels, that might appease her enough to swot for the exams!'

She put the ironing board away, piling the clothes on a chair ready to take upstairs, then sat down with her mother for a cup of tea. From upstairs the sound of Cilia Black's 'Anyone who had a heart' was booming out of Tara's record player – clearly she was wallowing in self-pity.

'It's the dance on Saturday.' Amy smiled. 'If only she'd meet some local boy and fall for him.'

'Pigs might fly,' Mabel said dourly. 'I never saw one lad around here when I was a girl that made my heart race. And look at you! A beautiful woman in your prime and your only admirer is a tubby doctor!'

'He's a kind, generous man,' Amy said indignantly. Greg had become far more than just Amy's doctor in the past two years. It was his friendship and interest that sustained her when her mother's stubborn and crusty nature irritated her. Sometimes she went for walks with him and his dog Winston, and he often called in at the farm for tea. 'I don't know why you go on laughing about him, anyway. You're quick enough to pick his brains when you need some advice!'

'He just hasn't got much...' Mabel broke off, unable to think of the right word.