The Outside Child (10 page)

I said, “I didn’t like her much. I suppose I ought to like her because she’s my grandmother, but I didn’t. She was feeble. My father’s not feeble.” I remembered what Plato’s mother had said. “He meant to protect me.”

She looked at me and held out her hand. “Come here, my chuck. Sit beside me.”

I perched on the edge of the sofa and she put her uninjured arm round my shoulders. She said, in a gruff voice as if this was something she found hard to talk about, “You’re a lucky child. You’ve got the best of both parents. You’ve got your Dad’s kindness, and his sweet, easy nature, and you’ve got your mother’s strength. Margaret was a fine, spunky woman. She was pregnant with you when they found she had cancer. The doctor told her there was one way she could live a bit longer. But she was determined to have you. She said, what was a few extra months of life when she could leave behind a beautiful daughter.”

I thought that I ought to feel sad. But it was a long time ago.

I said, “It must have been awful for my father.”

“He loved your mother very much. And went on loving her long after he was married again. You could feel it in him, part of him set aside that no one could touch. Not even Amy. Especially Amy. And that riled her. She got rid of all Margaret’s things, all her clothes, all her photographs. Margaret didn’t have family, she was an only child with both parents dead, so Amy packed most of the stuff off to us to be rid of it.”

I thought of my torn birth certificate. I said, “Is that why she got rid of me?”

Aunt Bill didn’t answer for a minute. I could hear Aunt Sophie open the kitchen door. A lovely rich, soupy smell wafted out. Supper was almost ready.

Aunt Bill said, “Not only that. Annabel was just born, no more than a fortnight old, anyway. Your father brought you back to us and said Amy was afraid you would harm her. Seemed nonsense to us, you were a loving little thing, always peering at babies in prams and asking to hold them. But you were too small to tell us what happened, and we didn’t ask.” Aunt Bill gave me a squeeze and said huskily, “We were too glad to have you back, chicken.”

I knew what had happened. My ears started singing. I said, “I dropped her, Aunt Bill, that’s what happened. I tried to pick Annabel up, and I dropped her.”

Rubbish,
Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie said.
Nonsense.
And,
Even
if
you
did
drop
her,
you
were
such
a
little
thing,
she
wouldn’t
have
fallen
far,
you
couldn’t
have
harmed
her.
If
you
had
we’d
have
heard
all
about
it.

*

I let them think I believed them. But I knew I had hurt her. What I had done was there, plain to see, in her damaged hand. I thought, of course Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie would want to keep such a dreadful thing from me. Perhaps that was the real reason why they had never told me about my brother and sister. They loved me. If someone you loved had done something like that when she was too young to understand—thrown a stone that had killed another child, or set fire to a house—you would hope that she never found out about it, because if she did, she wouldn’t be able to bear it.

I thought—
I
can’t bear it.

I helped Aunt Sophie put Aunt Bill to bed, resting her broken arm and her broken leg up on pillows and making a cage for her by putting chairs on both sides of her bed and stretching the duvet across them. We gave her a bell to ring in the night and a thermos of hot milk, and put the radio where she could reach it so that she could listen to the World Service if she couldn’t sleep. “I’ll be fine,” Aunt Bill said. “I only wish I believed poor Rattlebones had such good nurses. Off to bed now, the pair of you, and sweet dreams until morning.”

I heard the grandmother clock in the hall strike the hours. I heard all the night noises. A police siren, far away to begin with, coming closer, then fading; cats yowling in the back gardens; the tinkle of Aunt Bill’s bell and the soft shush of Aunt Sophie’s slippers as she padded across the landing.

My tooth began hurting again, and until it got really bad, I was almost glad of it. I thought, this is a punishment for what I did to my sister. If I put up with the pain and don’t call Aunt Sophie or go to the bathroom to get an aspirin, then I will have paid back a bit of it. I wasn’t sure what I meant, but it seemed to make sense at the time. I thought of the worst tortures I’d heard of: being buried in sand in a hot country and having ants eat your eyes out, being tied to a stake in the sea with the tide rising, being locked in a pitch dark dungeon and hearing a slimy monster oozing towards you. I thought, I could bear to suffer those things, I could bear anything, if only I hadn’t hurt Annabel.

But I couldn’t even bear a sore tooth. By seven o’clock in the morning my face was swollen and hot and my whole jaw was burning. I cried out when I heard Aunt Sophie’s step on the landing, and she came running. She had a cup of tea for Aunt Bill in her hand. She put it down and bent over me. She said, “Oh, Jane, you poor darling.”

*

The dentist’s surgery opened at nine, and we were there ten minutes early. Our dentist is terrifying, a nine-foot-tall sadist who grins in a devilish way as he fills your mouth with his hideous instruments. But today I was quite glad to enter the torture chamber. And in spite of his evil grin, he was quite sympathetic. He apologised when his probe sent red hot needles shooting through my skull. He said he wished he could do something immediately but that he would rather not touch the tooth until the antibiotics he was going to give me had dispersed the abcess. He patted my shoulder and called me a ‘brave little lady’.

*

I was sick into the rhododendron bush outside the surgery door. Aunt Sophie pushed some earth over it and cleaned me up with her handkerchief. She said, “This isn’t our week, is it?” in a grumbly voice that had a laugh running through it.

Although I felt ghastly, I couldn’t help smiling. Then I remembered the Edinburgh Festival. I said, “I hope my tooth is better by Saturday.”

“Forget about that,” Aunt Sophie said. “I can’t leave you with Bill, not with her in that state.”

“I can manage,” I said. “Honestly.”

Aunt Sophie set her mouth in a pinched, obstinate line. “I wouldn’t think of it. Bill can’t get around without help. And she’s a big, heavy woman.”

“Please,” I said.
“Please.
It may have escaped your notice, Aunt Sophie, but I’m bigger and stronger than you.”

It wasn’t just that I knew how important the Festival was to her. I wanted to do something for somebody as a sort of penance. To make
me
feel better.

She frowned. But I could see she was weakening and that once she had thought it over she would give in altogether. She looked at me approvingly. “You’re a good girl,” she said.

Good girl! Brave little lady! I had my father’s ‘sweet, easy nature’, and my mother’s ‘strength’. I knew that I didn’t deserve all this praise. All the same, it ought to have cheered me a little, or at least made me feel less dark about myself than I had done in the night. Instead, the next two weeks were the most miserable of my whole life.

My tooth helped to begin with. I didn’t have to pretend to be happy. If I looked miserable the Aunts assumed that I was in pain and didn’t ask questions. Besides, Aunt Bill was in pain herself with her arm and her leg, and Aunt Sophie was busy hiring a van to take her drums and percussion instruments to Edinburgh and going to London to buy a new Vibraslap and Cabassa. And I was either going to the dentist or coming back from the dentist or sitting in his
chair having the sort of things done to my jaw that I prefer not to mention. But as my tooth got better, when I was no longer writhing in torment, other things got much worse.

*

Plato went to America. He went without saying goodbye to me. His mother said it had all been arranged in twenty-four hours and that he had tried to ring several times. But I knew she was just being kind, and this was a clear sign that he hadn’t forgiven me.

Plato not writing wasn’t as bad as Annabel’s hand, but it made the load of sadness I seemed to be lugging about with me a lot heavier.

I thought, if only I could remember. I must have done something dreadful to make Amy hate me so much. But all I could remember was my musical box and the monster in the corner cupboard and HER angry voice. I thought of Hugo’s tiny fingers trapped in the holes of his shawl. They were so frail you could snap them like a dry twig. But if I had broken Annabel’s thumb and forefinger, the doctor would have put them in splints and they would have mended.

The day before Aunt Sophie came back from Edinburgh, I thought of a terrible answer.

Plato’s mother came to cook our lunches while Aunt Sophie was at the Festival. “Plato didn’t want to leave me alone,” she said. “And your Aunt Sophie doesn’t want you to look after Aunt Bill by yourself. So it suits all round, Jane, and you’d better show me where everything is in the kitchen.”

Fat lot of good that will do us, I thought, thinking of Aunt Bill’s likely expression if she was faced with fish fingers and frozen peas every day. But to my astonishment (though not of course to Aunt Bill’s, because she had never experienced Plato’s mother’s cuisine before) the meals were delicious.

Plato’s mother seemed to have changed in other ways, too. She was still smoking, though not as much as she did in her own home, and she opened the windows and emptied the ash trays. She was fatter, and her skin looked less muddy. And she hardly wailed at all. She wailed when she dropped a carton of eggs on the stone kitchen floor, and slipped in the mess, and knocked a pan of stewed bilberries off the stove. “Oh, I’m so clumsy,” she mourned. “It’s one of the things that used to upset Plato’s father.”

I didn’t answer this, just set about clearing up, hoping that this wasn’t the beginning of a long bout of wailing. But there was only one other occasion.

She was making minestrone soup for our last lunch, chopping carrots and turnips and onions and parsnips into tiny squares. I had picked parsley and young green peas in the garden and was sitting at the table shelling the peas. A stock of chicken bones and herbs was simmering on the stove.

I asked her if she had heard from Plato and she shook her head. I said, “I thought he might have telephoned. Or sent you a postcard.”

“There’s still time,” she said. “But it’s very wild where they are, on this lake. You have to row across to the store to get to a telephone, and he and Aliki will be busy boating and swimming and talking. They have a lot to catch up on. But I’m sure he’ll send you a card if he can find one.”

I thought, why should he bother? I was foul to him. And anyway, I am only second best to his sister.

I said, very casually, “Did a letter come from me by any chance? For Plato I mean, before he went to America? It isn’t important, just part of a game we were playing. I only
wondered.
It was his turn to answer.”

She had finished chopping the vegetables. She took the stock off the stove and strained it into another saucepan. She said, screwing up her eyes against the steam, “I think so.
Would it have URGENT on it? I thought that it might be from you.”

“It probably was,” I said. “I can’t be sure, but it sounds like part of our code. It’s a silly game, really. I expect we’re both growing out of it.”

I laughed to show her how little I cared about letters from Plato. I had shelled all the peas. I stood up, bunched the washed parsley, and reached across the table for the chopping knife she had been using.

“No,” she said. “
No
.”

I was so startled, I dropped the knife. She had gone a funny grey colour.

I said, “I was going to chop the parsley.”

She wailed then. “Oh, I’m so sorry, how silly. But the knife is so sharp. I thought you were going to pick it up by the blade.”

“Of course I wasn’t,” I said.

She smiled in a shamed, trembly way. “I’m so stupid about children and knives. Plato will tell you. Though of course you’re both old enough—that’s what makes me so silly. I’m so sorry, Jane.”

“That’s all right,” I said cheerfully, and began cutting the parsley with the kitchen scissors to save further trouble.

After lunch we played Scrabble. I could only think of words that had one thing in common. Tin. Cut. Glass. Razor. Stab. Sword. Slice. Slash. Gash. Chop. Wound. Knife. All words with nasty, sharp edges.

Plato’s mother said to Aunt Bill, “I think Jane looks peaky. I suppose that trouble with her tooth has taken it out of her. I hope her Aunt Sophie won’t think I’ve been starving her when she comes home tomorrow.”

I shook my head and smiled merrily.

“I’m leaving your supper on the table, ready to pop in the oven,” Plato’s mother said. “And there’s a moussaka for the three of you tomorrow. But if you need me again, you only have to give me a ring. And of course, Jane, I’ll let you
know the minute I hear from Plato. If you get a letter, perhaps you’ll ring me.”

She said this without any hint of a sly grin or arch look. I hadn’t realised before that she was really quite pretty.

*

In bed that night I told myself that Plato had not been able to crack the code in my letter. But I didn’t believe it. Plato could crack any code I could think of. And that code was easy.

I went to bed and dreamed of knives and blood.

*

Aunt Sophie drove overnight and was at home when I woke in the morning. She had had a wonderful time; they had played to packed houses and there had been several good reviews in the papers. She said that Aunt Bill looked better but that I looked pale and mopey. “You need to get out and about, Jane,” she said. “Plato isn’t the only friend you’ve got, is he?”

I played tennis with Maureen. Once was enough. I rang several girls I was quite friendly with, but one had glandular fever and the others all seemed to be in remote places in Tuscany.

I said, “Everyone is having a proper holiday except me. Other girls go and lie in the sun and their mothers don’t worry that they’ll get skin cancer. Or that they’ll have an accident if they ride a bike. Or that their teeth will drop out if they drink Coke. Why do I have to be different?”

Aunt Bill said, “Tuscany must be getting quite crowded, with half your school going there. Dorset would be emptier and rather more peaceful. I’m sorry about my old leg. Would you like to go on your own?”

“I can’t leave Aunt Sophie to take care of you by herself. And there’s nowhere I want to go at the moment.”

I thought that I sounded noble and sad. But Aunt Bill said, sternly for her, “If you can’t be happy, you might as well try to be useful.”

*

I helped Aunt Bill learn to walk on her crutches. I cut the grass and tidied the flower beds while she watched to see that I didn’t pull up her best weeds. I picked blackcurrants and helped Aunt Sophie pack them for the freezer. I went to the garage to visit Rattlebones and see how close she was to recovery, and was able to come back and tell Aunt Bill that her car was convalescent and would be out of hospital by the end of the week.

*

I had a letter from Plato. It had taken ten days to come and was creased up and muddy and torn in one corner, as if it had been caught up in a machine, or left in a sack, or dropped in a ditch. But the letter inside was undamaged.

It was the same sort of code as the one I’d sent him, but a little bit harder.

*

Aunt Bill said, “You look cheerful all of a sudden! I knew it would take you out of yourself to try and think a bit more about other people.”