The Girls (5 page)

And now here was Adele, forcing a five-pound note into her eldest daughter’s hand, saying, ‘Go, quickly, you need to get Puppy some milk and some bread. And, oh’ – even though he didn’t need it, did not deserve it – ‘one of those Mr Kipling chocolate-cake things he likes, you know, with all the layers.’ She’d seen him devour a whole one of those in an evening last time he was here. Every ten minutes or so, stretching himself from the sofa, as if about to go somewhere; Adele or Leo saying, ‘Everything OK? Can I get you something?’ And Gordon, crumbs of cake still embedded in the cracks around his mouth, saying, ‘Thought I might just sneak another bit of that delicious cake.’

‘We’re killing him,’ Adele had whispered loudly to Leo in the kitchen as they slid the last slice of cake off its cardboard bottom and on to Gordon’s plate.

‘Yes,’ Leo had whispered back. ‘I know.’

A taxi drew up on the kerb beyond their front door exactly an hour from Gordon’s phone call. They all glanced at each other in panic, all apart from Willow who had no truck with her Puppy and couldn’t understand why everyone else was getting so worked up. The taxi’s engine rattled and banged, matching Adele’s heart rate, then there was the sound of the taxi door being slammed shut, a cheery farewell from the taxi driver (for all his many faults Gordon was an excellent tipper) and the ominous rumble of suitcase wheels up the front path. Nobody moved until the doorbell rang.

‘Hello, Dad.’

‘Hello, hello. Christ. Hello.’

Adele pasted on a smile and popped her head around the kitchen door into the hallway. ‘Hello, Gordon,’ she said, smoothly.

‘Yes,’ said Gordon, ‘hello.’

He looked worse than ever. He was bursting out of a red linen blazer and a mint-green shirt splattered with whatever he’d had to eat on the plane. In one hand was his stick, a gnarled African thing carved from wood with a bird’s head on the top. In the other was the handle of his case, a vast, battered affair, held together in places with parcel tape, and a bulging bag of duty free that clattered together like a milk float. His awful feet were encased in oversized green rubber Crocs. And he was wearing a peaked leather cap on his head of the type favoured by men in 1970s gay bars.

‘Christ,’ he muttered, ‘I need to sit down. Dear Christ, let me sit down.’

Leo snatched his suitcase and his duty free and Adele held open the door to the living room. He lumbered past her and landed on the nearest chair, not noticing the dog asleep on it. ‘What the bloody hell?’ He peered behind his bulky self at the animal he’d almost killed and said, ‘Was this here last time I came?’

The dog leaped from the back of the chair and ran to the kitchen to soothe itself with food.

‘We’ve had him for eight years.’

‘Have you? Good grief.’

He pulled off his odd leather cap and stroked his dyed brown hair back into place. He grimaced and then seemed to remember himself. He smiled from granddaughter to granddaughter and said, ‘Now. Let me see. You all look so similar and you’ve all got those blooming flower fairy names but I’m pretty sure that this is … Fern.’ He pointed at Willow and winked.

Willow shook her head.

‘Then you must be Willow? And you – my goodness, look at the size of you – you must be Fern.’

Fern nodded shyly.

‘Good grief. You were a child last time I saw you and now you’re, well … remarkable. And Catkin. Taller than your mother now. Taller than your father too probably.’ He turned and chuckled over his shoulder at Leo, who at five feet ten had historically been the smallest of the Howes men. Nobody had yet been brave enough to point out to Gordon that he had shrunk substantially and Leo was now a good inch taller than him.

‘Extraordinary.’ He nodded, smiling blandly at the three girls. ‘Like trees. Like bloody trees.’

Adele fetched Gordon a mug of tea and a slice of the chocolate cake.

‘This hasn’t got that godawful fake milk in it, has it?’ he asked in his raspy Big Bad Wolf voice as she passed him the mug.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Proper gold top.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good.’

He put the tea and the cake on a side table and twisted awkwardly to remove his linen blazer. The golden lining was torn in places and stained with old sweat. Adele took the jacket from him gingerly and retreated to the hallway to hang it up.

‘Put it on a hanger will you, Mrs H.?’ he boomed after her.

Mrs H. It was what he’d called Leo’s mother. And what he now called Affie. Adele sucked her breath in deep and hard. She found a hanger and slipped the ancient old jacket on to it. Please, she thought, please let this just be one night.

In the living room she could hear Gordon regaling Leo and the girls with the details of the ‘sub-par’ service he’d experienced at the hands of cabin crew on the way here: ‘Bloody fifteen-year-old poofs and dolly birds. Not a brain cell among them.’

The dog sat by her feet and she patted his head. ‘I know, Scout, I know. Maybe we didn’t feed him enough cake last time, eh? Maybe we should have bought two.’

Dusk was falling on the gardens as Clare came to her back gate and peered across the lawn. She saw the mixed-race boy on his bike, a blur on the path behind her. The girls had told him he was called Dylan. Tall for his age, tawny skin, green eyes and a way about him. Grace was besotted and even Pip was in the throes of some kind of pre-teen crush, even if she didn’t yet know it. Dylan was the same age as Grace, apparently, and went to one of the many private boys’ schools in the area, the ones housed in converted Victorian mansions, which had little liveried buses to take them up the hill to the village and bring them back down again.

Another whizz of rubber against gravel. This time it was the girl called Tyler. She was wearing cut-off dungarees over a cropped T-shirt, her fine blond hair in plaits, windows of pale flesh exposed on her narrow waist with every turn of the wheels. She stood against the pedals, wiry muscled legs pushing hard to catch up with Dylan at the top of the hill. Clare appraised them. They seemed worldly, for children their age. The way they patrolled these gardens for hours on end, often long after dark, never seeming to eat, never seeming to sleep, as if they inhabited a world without grown-ups.

She remembered something her mother had said, when she’d come to see the flat for the first time: ‘You won’t be able to let the girls out here on their own, you know.’ She’d thought it a ridiculous statement of paranoia at the time. But as she wound her way through the so-called Jungle, the Secret Garden, the Rose Garden, the playground, and the network of paths that ran around the demi-lune perimeter of the garden, without any sight of her children, she began to wonder if her mother might have been right.

She glanced at the time on her wristwatch. Six fifty-eight. She took the outer path again, this time peering into the back windows of her neighbours’ houses. She saw people laying tables for dinner, changing babies’ nappies, reading papers, staring into laptops, reaching to put things into tall cupboards. She saw a woman standing in a bath towel, eating a chicken drumstick while staring at the seven o’clock news. She saw a child scoop up a cat and kiss its neck. She saw two men side by side on a sofa with matching beards, eating their dinner off wooden trays.

And then, as she passed one of the big flats in the centre of the crescent, the ones with the twelve-foot windows and big south-facing terraces, she saw a golden dog lying stretched out on its stomach with its legs splayed out around him like a collapsed table. He got to his feet when he noticed Clare looking at him and came to greet her at the garden gate. She crouched to his level and offered him her hand to smell. Through the open French windows, Clare could see into a huge rectangular living room patterned with yellow chinoiserie wallpaper, walls hung with unusual art, a seventies-style glass chandelier, a giant modular sofa upholstered in patchwork fabrics and there, for all the world as if they lived there, she saw her daughters sitting on it.

She rose to her feet and stared incredulously. She felt disarmed. Like unexpectedly encountering her reflection in a shop window. Her children. In a stranger’s house. As she looked she saw more children. It was the other sisters. The wild-looking ones who didn’t ever seem to go to school. The ones whom her own girls had declared ‘weird’. Yet here they were, ensconced in their living room, looking delighted to be there. Pip looked across and caught Clare’s eye. Her face opened up into a smile. She waved and came to the door.

But Grace glanced at her furiously and shook her head. It was code for
keep away
. It meant she was having a good time and did not want it to end.

‘Pip,’ Clare said, ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

As she said this the living-room door opened and the girls’ mother walked into the room. She wore a clingy black T-shirt dress with a scooped neck and lots of ethnic jewellery. She looked cross and anxious. She said something to her daughters and then she noticed Clare and smiled. ‘You must be psychic!’ she sang, coming to the door. ‘I was just coming in to tell them they should probably head home because you’d be getting worried.’ She tossed her head back and laughed. She had those teeth, those big white teeth that looked as though they could withstand anything, and one of those full mouths that was naturally red. She was an attractive woman, sexy and earthy, maybe even a bit dirty. A man walked into the room then and stood behind her. He was attractive in the same way as her: his body was strong and rangy, his face open and honest, his mouth full, his teeth white, his hair thick and tousled. He wore a sludge-green linen shirt with the sleeves pushed up and a pair of stone-coloured shorts. He had a tan and bare feet.

They introduced themselves. She was Adele. He was Leo. They’d love to invite her in for wine but they’d just found out they had an unexpected house guest on the way and it was such a shame because they’d been about to suggest the girls could stay for dinner and they could all watch a movie together. But never mind, maybe next time, they’ve all been having such a nice time together, and where is it you live? On the terrace, lovely.

They were distracted but friendly and a minute later Adele and the girls were heading back to the flat.

‘Seriously, you two, you can’t do that. You can’t just disappear. Or if you do, at least take your phones with you.’

‘But we weren’t expecting it,’ said Pip. ‘We didn’t know they were going to ask us to come inside. We didn’t know we were going to stay for so long.’

‘Oh God, their flat is so cool,’ said Grace. ‘It’s, like, massive and they’ve all got huge bedrooms and, get this, they’re home-schooled.’

‘Yeah, their mum teaches them. And the younger two have never been to school in their lives!’

‘Yeah, and they go on spontaneous trips to museums or, say, if they’re learning about World War Two, their mum takes them to, like, Normandy for the night to look at the soldiers’ graves …’

‘Yeah, or once she took them to Berlin to look at where the wall was, for a project they were doing.’

‘And they can go on holiday whenever they want. Like, literally. You know, like they can wake up in the morning and go: Oh, it’s a nice day, why don’t we drive down to the seaside.’

‘Or go to Thorpe Park.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So, they’re not so weird after all?’

‘Yeah, well, they are
quite
weird,’ said Pip.

‘Yes,’ agreed Grace. ‘They are a bit.’

‘In what way?’ Clare opened the back gate and let the girls go ahead of her.

‘I don’t know,’ said Grace. ‘They just are.’

‘But nice?’

‘Yes.’ Grace shrugged. ‘They’re nice.’

‘Friends?’

Pip nodded and Grace shrugged again.

‘Maybe,’ said Pip.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Grace.

‘And what about their mum and dad? What did you think of them?’

‘Nice,’ said Pip.

‘Yes,’ Grace agreed. ‘I really like them. They’re really good with kids.’

‘Good with kids.’ Clare laughed drily. She’d never been
good with kids
. Not in that playing-at-their-level way. She was good at looking after kids. And good at talking to kids. And good at loving kids. And good at putting her kids’ needs before hers. But she’d never been good at playing or mucking about, chucking about, running about, role play, imaginative play. That was why she’d had her babies so close together. Company for each other.

‘Yeah,’ said Grace. ‘It’s like they’re both really in touch with their inner child.’

She thought of Chris, when they’d first met. She’d had children with him young because he’d had that air about him: that air of innocence and naïvety. She’d pictured him in her mind’s eye leaving her to sleep on Saturday mornings, disappearing for hours with their brood of grubby, wild-haired children to have unplanned adventures, returning home later than intended, muddy, pink-cheeked and full of secrets. She’d thought he’d be their playmate.

How wrong she’d been.

‘What’s the dad like?’ she asked, thinking of the smooth-skinned man with the dazzling smile.

‘He’s really, really, really nice,’ said Grace, with surprising enthusiasm.

Clare arched an eyebrow. ‘Really, really,
really
nice?’

She saw her daughter’s face flush pink. But Grace didn’t say a word.

Five

It was a sunny afternoon, almost warm. Pip had put on a dress, a short one from New Look with a skater skirt. Grace was wearing a loose T-shirt and high-waisted leggings. They both had ponytails. And Grace, Pip had not been able to help but notice, was wearing mascara. There was an unspoken but concentrated effort from both of them to look nonchalant as they headed across the lawn towards the group of children sitting on the benches at the top of the hill. This was all still new. Although they’d hung out at the sisters’ flat on Friday night that didn’t mean they were automatically accepted into the gang. There was still a long way to go.

Tyler noticed them first. Pip went to put her hand up in greeting but Grace held it firmly down by her side.

Nobody said hello as they approached the group, but Willow inched across the bench she was sitting on so that Pip could sit down, and Catkin turned and smiled. Pip glanced curiously at the other person. He was standing next to Dylan, wearing earphones attached to an iPod. He was very tall, at least six foot, if not more, and he was sort of funny-looking. He seemed too old to be one of the gang, probably about twenty-five, but also too young to be an adult. No one introduced him or explained him and he didn’t seem to be at all interested in either of them.