The Carousel (16 page)

"Mostly," Phoebe told her, "because we want you."

"Mummy's not coming back from Majorca, is she?"

"Why do you say that?"

"She isn't coming, is she?"

"No," said Phoebe.

I selected a bean and began, very neatly, to string and slice it.

"I knew," said Charlotte.

"Would you like to tell us how you knew?"

"Because she had this friend. He was called Desmond. He used to come and see her. He had a riding school quite near our house in Sunningdale. They used to go riding together, and then he'd come back and have a drink or something. He was called Desmond. She went to Majorca with him."

"How do you know that?"

"Because there was one night at the end of the holidays. Before I went back to school and the boiler blew up. Daddy was in Brussels on business. And I had to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and then I was thirsty, and I thought I'd go downstairs and get some Coke out of the fridge. I'm not meant to, but I do sometimes. And then when I was halfway down the stairs I heard voices. I heard a man talking and I thought perhaps it was a burglar. I thought perhaps it was a burglar and he was going to shoot Mummy. But then he said something and I knew it was Desmond. So I sat on the stairs and listened. And they were talking about Majorca. She told Daddy she was going on holiday with an old school friend. I heard her telling him at breakfast one morning, but I knew she was going with Desmond." "Did you say anything?"

"No. Daddy never listens to me anyway, and I was frightened."

"Frightened of your father?"

"No. Just frightened. Frightened of her going and never coming back."

"Did you know that your father rang your grandmother last night?"

"I wasn't asleep. I heard the phone ringing. Granny's drawing room is under my bedroom. You can hear people talking, but you can't hear what they say. But I did hear her say his name. He's called Leslie. And I knew it was him. And I thought perhaps he'd just rung up to see how I was. But this morning everything felt so horrible, I knew it hadn't just been that. And Granny was all funny and cross, and then she sent me and Betty Curnow up to the village to buy Coke. So I knew something was wrong, because I'm always allowed to go to the village by myself."

"I think your grandmother didn't want you to overhear. To be distressed."

"And then when we got back again, Mrs. Curnow and me, Granny said I was coming to stay with you."

"I hope you were pleased."

All the time that she had been speaking, Charlotte had sat with downcast eyes, fiddling with a runner bean that she had slowly and deliberately torn to shreds. Now she looked up at Phoebe, her eyes anxious behind the lenses of her unbecoming spectacles. She was being very brave. "She isn't ever coming back, is she?"

"No. She's going to go and live in South Africa."

"What will happen to us? To Michael and me? Daddy can't look after us. At least, he wouldn't mind looking after Michael. They're always doing things together, like going shooting and watching rugger matches and things like that. But he wouldn't want to look after me."

"Maybe not," said Phoebe. "But I would. That's why I asked your grandmother if I could have you to stay with me."

"But not forever?" 

"Nothing is ever forever."

"Won't I ever see Daddy and Michael again?"

"Yes, of course you will. After all, Michael is your brother."

Charlotte screwed up her nose. "He's not always very kind. I don't like him that much." 

"Even so, he is your brother. Perhaps, next holidays, he'd like to come and stay with me as well. But I expect your grandmother might like to have him."

"She didn't want me," Charlotte pointed out.

"You mustn't think that. She just doesn't find it very easy to have a person of your age around the place. It's called not being good with children. Lots of the nicest people are like that."

"You're good with children," Charlotte told her.

"That's because I like them." Phoebe smiled. "Particularly you. That's why, for the time being at any rate, I want you to stay here."

"What about my school?" Charlotte was still being very wary. "I have to go back to school at the end of the week."

"I had a word with your grandmother about that. Do you like your boarding school?"

"No, I hate it. I hate having to be away all the time. And I'm much the youngest; there's nobody younger than me, not boarding. There are day girls, but they're all friends and they do things together at the weekend, and they don't want me. I wanted to be a day girl, too, but Mummy said it was much better to be a boarder. I don't know why it should be better. I thought it was horribler."

"Then you wouldn't mind too much if you didn't go back?"

Cautiously, Charlotte considered this. For the first time a gleam of something hopeful crossed her face. "Why? Don't I have to?"

"No, I don't think you do. If you're going to live with me, then it would be much easier for all of us if you went to our local school. Nobody's a boarder there, and I think you'd enjoy it."

"I'm not very good at lessons."

"People can't be good at everything. You're good at drawing and making things. And if you like music, they have a very good music master, and they have a proper orchestra and give concerts. I know one boy, he's only your age, and he plays the clarinet." "Could I go there?"

"If you wanted, I think it could be arranged." "I do want it." "Then you'll stay with me?" "You mean . . . never go back to Daddy?" "Yes," said Phoebe gently. "Perhaps that is what I mean."

"But . . . you just said . . . you said nothing is ever forever." Her eyes were filling with tears, and it was almost too painful to watch. "I can't stay with you . . ."

"Yes you can. For as long as you like. So you see, although the worst has happened, the world hasn't come to an end. You can talk about things, to Prue and to me. You haven't got to keep everything to yourself any longer. Don't go on trying to be brave. It doesn't matter about crying ..."

It was a dam burst of tears, uncontrollable. Charlotte's mouth went square in the manner of all weeping children, but the sobs that racked her small frame sounded more like the suffering grief of an adult.

"Oh, Charlotte . . ."

Phoebe leaned forward in her chair, her arms—the good arm, and the stiff one in its plaster cast—outflung, an open invitation to comfort and love. At any other time the effect of this typically expansive gesture might have been comic, but it wasn't funny now. "... come away, my darling."

And Charlotte scrambled to her feet and flung herself into the lopsided embrace, winding her arms tightly around Phoebe's neck, burying her face in Phoebe's shoulder, knocking Phoebe's hat askew.

I picked up the beans and the saucepan and went indoors. Because it was their own private moment. Because she was Daniel's child. And because I thought I might be going to cry as well.

The kitchen was empty. Through the open back door I could see Lily out on the drying green, pegging out a line of snowy tea towels. Now she was onto another hymn.

Do no sinful action

Speak no angry wer-erd.

I put the beans and the saucepan down on the end of the scrubbed pine table and went upstairs to my bedroom. I had made my bed this morning, but since then Lily had been what she called through the room, which meant a strong smell of floor polish and everything on my dressing table arranged in a straight line. I sat on the edge of the bed and after a little realized that I wasn't going to cry after all. But I felt drained, disoriented, as though I had spent the last three hours in a dark cinema, absorbed in some deeply emotional film, and was now back in the street again, dazzled by the light, blundering my way along an unfamiliar pavement; incapable.

Mummy's not coming back from Majorca, is she? Daddy never listens to me anyway. He wouldn't want to look after me. I wanted to be a day girl, but Mummy said it was much better to be a boarder. My grandmother doesn't want me.

Oh, dear Lord, the things we do to our children.

The window was open, the curtains stirring in the warm breeze. I got off the bed and went to the window and leaned out of it, my elbows on the sill. Below me on the grass, Phoebe and Charlotte still sat. The tears seemed to be over, and now all that could be heard was the companionable murmur of their conversation. Charlotte was back on the rug again, cross-legged, absorbed in making a daisy chain. I looked down at her bowed head, the vulnerable back of her neck. I remembered being her age. My parents were divorced and I lived with my mother, but never was I unloved, unwanted, shunted off to boarding schools. I remembered travelling to Northumberland to stay with my father, willing the train to travel faster and faster as we rocketed north. I remembered being met by him at Newcastle Station and racing up the platform to be swept into his sturdy, tweed-smelling embrace.

I remembered my mother's little house in London, the bedroom she decorated for me exactly the way I wanted it. The clothes she bought me, which were the clothes that I was allowed to choose for myself. The fun of dancing classes in the winter, and Christmas parties; being taken to the pantomime at the Palladium and the Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden. 

I remembered shopping in Harrod's, the tedium of buying school clothes rewarded by the treat of a chocolate milk shake at the soda fountain. And summer outings down the Thames, by boat, with a party of small friends and all the shivery anticipation of a visit to the Tower of London.

And always Cornwall, and Penmarron. And Phoebe.

Oh, my darling, how lovely to see you again.

Phoebe. I was suddenly filled with nameless apprehensions for her. What had she taken on, so impulsively, so lovingly? She was sixty-three and had already fallen from a worm-ridden chair and broken her arm. Supposing she had not simply broken her arm, but her hip, or her neck? Supposing she had struck her head and lain there, on the studio floor, concussed, with nobody knowing or coming to look for her? My imagination turned and fled but immediately came up with alternative and even more horrendous fabrications.

I thought of Phoebe driving her old car. She had never done this with much concentration, since she was always being diverted by the goings-on in the roads and streets down which she trundled, quite often on the wrong side of the white line, believing that provided she continued to blow the horn, nothing too dreadful could happen.

Supposing she had a heart attack and died? It happened to other people; why should it not happen to Phoebe? Supposing one summer day she went swimming from the old seawall, as she liked to do. Supposing she dived, wearing her old-fashioned bathing suit and her plastic bath hat, and never came up again? There seemed no end to the possible fatalities, and if anything happened to Phoebe, then who would take care of Charlotte? Once more my mind scurried ahead, searching for a solution to this hypothetical problem.

Who would have her? Myself? In a basement flat in Islington? My mother? Or perhaps my father? He was the sort of man who would take in any lame dog. I tried to picture Charlotte at Windyedge, but somehow nothing quite fit. My young stepmother would welcome any child who would ride her horses, muck out stables, clean tack, and go hunting, but she would have little in common with a small girl who only wanted to play the clarinet and draw.

These gloomy thoughts might have gone on forever, but at that moment I was brought back to reality by the sound of the morning train from Porthkerris, rattling through the cutting behind the house. It appeared busily around the curve of the single line to draw up at the halt, looking like a toy train, the kind that is wound up with a key. For a moment it stood there, and then somebody blew a whistle and waved a green flag, and it moved on, pulling away from the station and leaving behind it on the empty platform a single, lonely figure.

Daniel. Come for the picnic.

As soon as it was clear, he jumped down onto the line, crossed it, climbed a fence, and started down the track, past the small anchorage where the sailing boats bobbed at high tide and so onto the old seawall. He wore blue jeans, a navy blue sweater, a white canvas smock.

I watched his approach, ambling long-legged, his hands in his pockets, and longed for him to be the sort of person to whom I could run with all my problems, just as I used to run into the arms of my father on Newcastle Station. I wanted to be embraced, reassured, loved. I wanted to gabble out to him everything that had occurred on that endless morning, and to be told that nothing mattered, I was never to worry again, he would deal with everything . . .

But Phoebe, who loved Daniel, was wiser than I.

Face him with day-to-day decisions and responsibilities and I could never truly predict how he would react.

I didn't want him to be that sort of person. I wanted him to take charge. To have taken charge. I watched him coming and knew that if what was happening to us all were a story I was making up, then this moment would be the beginning of the end. He would have everything solved, decisions taken and plans formed. I devised a film, slow motion, soft focus: Daniel coming through the gate in the escallonia hedge to run in floating strides up the slope of the lawn. To embrace Phoebe, scoop his child up into his arms, call me down from my open window in order to plan our future together. Violins would soar. "The End" would appear upon the screen. Credits would roll and we would all live happily ever after.

Don't create fantasies about Daniel. They will probably never come true. Instead, reality. Phoebe would take him aside, relate to him bluntly what had happened. No more secrets, Daniel. Annabelle has taken off and nobody else wants Charlotte. Nobody else wants your daughter. 

And he? What would he do? I did not want to think about it. I did not want to know what was going to happen next.

He had moved out of sight, hidden from my view by the slope of the bank and the height of the hedge. I closed my window and turned back to my room. In the mirror over my dressing table I caught sight of my reflection, and my appearance was so appalling that I spent the next five minutes doing things to improve it. Washed my face with a scalding-hot flannel, scrubbed my nails with Phoebe's lavender-scented soap, brushed and combed my hair. I took a fresh cotton shirt from a drawer, changed my shoes, applied mascara, sprayed scent.