Laura’s flowers were in a vase beside Horace. He drifted in his water, mouth opening and shutting, gawping at the endless movie he watched through the curved glass. Charley wondered if he realised that he saw everything distorted, as if he were watching life through a hall of mirrors reflection. She wondered if she saw it distorted too.
There was a faint smell of laundry in the kitchen, from the dishcloths and socks and underwear and Tom’s striped shirts hanging on the drying rack above her. ‘How was Laura? OK, was she? I mean she was fine when I saw her, just fine. But that was five o’clock and she couldn’t come for a drink because she was hurrying home to organise a dinner party.’
Ben’s tail wagged. He dropped the bone he had been chomping on and padded over expectantly. ‘Not for you, boy,’ she said, staring at the lumps of steak on the chopping board. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing to worry about.
It was really sweet of Tom to pop over. I got home and found this absolutely stinking letter from Bob.
Why the hell shouldn’t Laura have had a letter from Bob? Bob was always causing Laura trouble. Perfectly reasonable. Yes-yes-yes. Tom had gone round because …
Is she a good screw, the bitch?
Charley stood still for a moment. The thought slammed through her; the words; as if someone else were speaking them, whispering them into her ear. They repeated louder, more insistent. She shook her head, trying to clear it. Not Laura. No. Maybe others, but not Laura. Definitely not.
Never.
Friends didn’t do that. Not friends who went back twenty years.
The kettle boiled and she poured some water into her mug. She stirred the coffee. Tom’s steak was thick, red, huge; she had asked the woman to cut it thick and she had, a massive T-bone. She prodded it and felt squeamish suddenly at the soft slimy texture.
A navy blue sock fell silently on to it.
She looked up at the drying rack. It was motionless. The other sock still hung from one of the wooden rails. Ben let out a low rumbling growl. Her eyes narrowed, her heart was beating a little faster than it should. She picked the sock off the steak and saw that some of the cotton fibres had stuck to the meat.
She didn’t feel squeamish any more. It looked good as it was, raw. Flesh. Red meat. Bloody. She wanted to eat it, to cram it into her mouth and chew it raw, like an animal. She remembered, vaguely, a book she had read where a woman had a craving for raw meat.
She picked up her piece of steak, cut thinner than Tom’s, and bit a mouthful off it. Her eyes screwed up and bile heaved in her stomach. She leaned forward, spat the chewed meat out into the sink, ran the tap, held her mouth under it, swilled the water around and spat it out.
Ye gods.
Why on earth had she done that? The taste lingered, of blood, flesh, something rancid, something — She gulped at the coffee and spat that out too, then, feeling sick she ran upstairs into the bedroom, through to the bathroom and brushed her teeth.
She leaned against the basin. In the mirror her eyes were red and puffy from crying. Crying because she knew … knew that he had not gone there to look at a letter from Bob.
Her mouth tasted better, minty. She went into the bedroom, sat down at her dressing table and dabbed some powder on her face, then tidied up her smudged mascara. Anger welled inside her again.
The front door opened and closed and she was surprised not to hear Ben barking. Still absorbed with his bone, she assumed, and tried to prod some life into her hair.
The stairs creaked; Tom’s footsteps up it, slow, as if he was tired, or nervous of a confrontation.
Stay calm. Cool. She tossed her head and tried to concentrate on her hair, tried to ignore him as she heard him come in the door, heard him walk across the slanting floor and felt him standing behind her.
Cold air had come in with him. Bitter cold air. The room felt like a freezer. She stared in the mirror.
But could not see him.
She felt the icy breath down her neck and smelled a musky perfume. She spun round.
There was no one. The room was empty.
But a smell of perfume hung in the air. Strong. Shivers ran down the small of her back. It was perfume she had smelled before, knew from somewhere. The room reeked of it, as if someone wearing it was there. Her eyes darted around.
‘Tom?’ she called out. ‘Tom?’ She walked across the floor, peered into the bathroom, stared at the bath, at the shower curtain, walked back into the bedroom, stood and listened.
She went out on to the landing. The cold air seemed to follow her. ‘Tom?’ She sniffed, but there was nothing now, no smell. Goosepimples prickled her. ‘Tom? Is that you?’
Slowly, nervously, she went downstairs. ‘Tom?’
She walked along the dim passageway, past the cellar door and into the kitchen. Ben was gnawing busily. She stopped, listened again. The door; she was certain she had heard the front door, footsteps up the stairs. Smelled the perfume. She stared at the drying rack, nervous of it for some reason, stared at the single blue sock, then lowered the rack slowly, creakily, paying out the cord and hung back the second sock.
Bright lights flashed against the window. A car scrunched down the gravel outside. Tom’s car.
Instead of anger, as she walked down the passageway to greet him, she felt only relief.
Charley gazed through the curtainless window at the black starless night. Tom slept beside her, breathing heavily, smelling clean, squeaky clean, exuding a faint odour of pine shampoo.
She’d cooked him his steak, exactly as he liked it and he’d sat at the kitchen table opposite her and eaten his way through it silently, mechanically, not dining, merely refuelling.
Throughout their marriage there had been many times before when they had eaten in silence, when Tom had been in one of his moods, moods that had often lasted for days. But tonight it wasn’t one of his moods, and Charley wished it was because she understood those, knew that with a mood it was a matter of waiting and everything would be OK again.
Tonight something had changed, in both of them.
She wished they were back in London, in their small house with the streetlights and cars outside and neighbours around, the house where they had begun their married life, where they had made their home. Where they had been happy.
Ben padded around the room, his name-tag jingling from his collar, restless.
There was a cry outside, like a woman in distress. Ben barked and Tom stirred slightly.
Ben whined and pawed at the door.
‘Foxes,’ Tom grunted. ‘Vixens.’
She dozed. Images flashed in her mind, and she could not sleep. She listened to the roar of water, heard the hissing of the urn, the howls of Viola Letters’s dog. Howls. Shrieks. Screams.
‘Jesus Christ!’
The bed moved, creaked. She opened her eyes. Tom stood silhouetted at the window. Her clock radio said 4.35. Then she realised.
The sound was real.
It was coming from outside. Dreadful panicky squawking, screeching. Ben was barking frantically. Tom pulled on his dressing gown. She ran downstairs after him, into the kitchen and jammed her bare feet into her wellington boots.
They ran across the wet grass, under the streaky back-lit sky, the noise getting worse the closer to the hen run they got, a hideous cacophony of clucking and beating wings and croaking and clattering wire, and a lump swelled up inside her throat. Ben stopped, unable to comprehend what was going on.
At first she was unable to comprehend also. She thought they were panicked, that was all. They were flapping wildly, Boadicea and Daisy and Clementine and Molly, rolling around as if they were drunk, crashing into each other, into the wire, falling over, pulling themselves along the floor of the run by their wings like old people on crutches. It was as if someone was shaking the run like a box. Boadicea rose up in the air, crashed into the netting, fell upside down, her neck twisting, her beak opening and shutting, her legs kicking, two bloody feetless stumps.
Charley clutched Tom’s arm. Molly cartw
heeled over and over, blood smeared across the white feathers of her stomach. She crashed into the mesh in front of Charley, trying to push her head through as if she was screaming for help.
‘Jesus,’ Tom said. ‘Bastard. Bastard.’
Charley stared in horror at a twig on the ground, a thin grey gnarled twig, except it wasn’t a twig, it was the foot of one of the hens. Then she saw another.
All the hens’ feet had been severed.
Boadicea tried to stand on her bloody stumps, Boadicea who had been so proud now fell over sideways, chewing at the ground with her beak.
The bile slid up and she turned away and was sick on the ground behind her, her ears filled with the pitiful agony of the clucking and flapping. Tom marched into the run. He knelt and grabbed Boadicea firmly, gave a sudden sharp twist of his hand, there was a crunch and the hen went limp. Blood dripped down.
The cacophony of sound seemed to be getting louder. The wings of a hen thrashed against Charley’s face, blood sprayed over her. It was Clementine. Charley picked her up, but she wriggled free and fell to the ground showering blood and feathers. She tried again, holding on harder, and put her hand on the hen’s neck. For a moment Clementine was motionless, staring her straight in the eye, her beak opening and shutting as if she were trying to speak. Charley put her down and turned away.
She stumbled out of the run and sat down on the wet grass of the bank, listening to Ben barking and the cries of the hens quieting as Tom worked through them, the same pattern, a flurry of squawking, a crunch, a brief silence. Then a final silence, complete silence, even from Ben, even from the dawn chorus of birds, even, it seemed, from the weir.
Tom sat beside her, his face and dressing gown spattered in blood and excrement and feathers, and wiped his hands on the grass. ‘I thought humans were the only creatures that killed for sport,’ he said.
The air was full of the coppery smell of blood and the stench of damp feathers and the sweet morning dew. The sky above the lake was streaked with brushstrokes of pink and yellow and grey. She stared at it dully through her haze of tears. It was going to be a beautiful day.
Chapter Nineteen
Charley sat in the morning sun holding her mother’s hand as she always did, staring at the flowers in the crystal vase and the oak chest of drawers on which they stood that contained most of her mother’s possessions.
A few clothes, some photographs, trinkets, a passport with its one single purple stamp on its blank pages, ‘10 Jul. 1978, Entrada A Barcelona’, the only time her mother had ever been abroad. Charley and Tom had taken her with them on holiday to a villa they had rented in Spain. Her mother hadn’t liked it much — too hot, she had said apologetically, and the toilet had a peculiar smell.
‘We lost our hens on Monday night. It was horrible. The fox didn’t kill them, he just bit off their legs. I wanted to bury them and Tom said that was ridiculous and got angry. He said we’d have eaten them anyway.
‘I couldn’t do that. I buried them up in the woods, then I bought four chickens from Safeways and put them in the freezer, so he won’t know.’
Her mother’s nails were getting long, would need cutting soon. ‘I think Tom’s having an affair. But I can’t say anything in case I’m wrong. I’d look a bloody fool.’ She hesitated. ‘You know who I think he’s having it with? Laura.’
Laura. The name stuck in her gullet.
‘Did daddy ever do anything like that?’
There was no reaction; they sat in silence for a while.
‘What did you mean, mum, on Monday when I was here? You said “lies death”. At least, that’s what it sounded like. Lies death. What did you mean?’
There was a rasp of breath, different to the normal pattern. Her mother was trembling and perspiration was trickling down her face. ‘What is it, mum? Are you OK?’ A child shouted outside and there was a burst of music from a car radio that was too loud. Her cream gabardine dress was feeling too tight and stuck to her skin. It was always like a hothouse in here, summer and winter.
‘I wish we could talk, mum, like we used to. There’s so much I need to know from you. So much advice I’d like. I don’t have anyone else to ask.’
There was another silence. After a while Charley said, ‘Horace is still going strong. My goldfish. Remember him? He’s eleven now. Tom won him at a funfair by shooting at ping-pong balls. He was in a tiny plastic bag and we never thought he’d make it home, let alone live for eleven years.’ She scanned her mother’s face, seeking a glimmer, but saw nothing. She stroked her hand gently. ‘Funny how you get attached to things. Even a dumb fish in a bowl can be your friend.’
‘Truth,’ her mother said suddenly. ‘Go back.’
Charley looked at her, startled, but she was staring blankly ahead again. ‘“Truth”, mum? “Go back”?’
There was no reaction.
‘What do you mean truth?’ She leaned closer. ‘What truth? Go back where?’
Nothing. Charley listened to the traffic outside. A telephone rang in another room. Her mother still trembled.
‘I helped out at a jumble sale yesterday in the church hall in Elmwood. There’s an old lady down the lane — Viola Letters — that’s an old-fashioned name, Viola, isn’t it? She’s getting me involved in the local community. A nice old stick. She doesn’t have any children either. Been a widow for years. You’ve been a widow for years too, haven’t you? Would you have liked to have remarried? Did I stop you, make it harder for you?’
Charley chatted on, trying to sound jolly through her heavy heart, about the party they were going to on Saturday, colours they had chosen for some of their rooms and the carpets they were going to look at. They thought a rug for the bedroom floor, keeping the bare wooden floorboards either side, would be more in character than wall-to-wall carpeting.
Her mother made no further sounds and gradually the trembling subsided during the next two hours. She was still staring vacantly ahead as Charley left, blowing her one final hopeful kiss from the door.
‘Tom, if I wanted to trace my real parents what would the procedure be?’
He dug around disinterestedly in his salad bowl, elbows on the kitchen table, his striped office shirt opened at the collar and the cuffs rolled up. He lifted a forkful of mung beans and alfalfa sprouts and gazed dubiously at it. ‘I thought you weren’t interested in tracing your parents.’
A light breeze came through the open windows and a late bird twittered. She speared a couple of pasta shells. ‘I used not to be. I suppose I am a bit now. I thought if we ever did have children it might be nice for them to know their ancestry.’
‘Your parents are dead.’
She ate a mouthful. ‘There might be aunts and uncles.’
He chewed his sprouts and screwed up his face. ‘Christ, these taste like an old sack.’ He had a pallor of grease on his skin from London that a quick dab from the cold tap had not cleaned away. He looked tired, strained. The way she felt. ‘Charley, when people are adopted it’s usually because there aren’t any relatives who can — or want to — care for the baby.’
‘I’m not saying I’m going to contact anyone. I think I’d like to know. I mean it’s not as if I was the result of a one-night stand or anything like that. My parents were married.’
‘Your mother died giving birth to you and your father died of a broken heart. Right?’
‘That’s what mum always told me.’
‘He probably died of something else.’ He frowned. ‘How would your mum have known that, anyway?’
‘That he died of a broken heart?’ She shrugged. ‘No idea. I’ve never thought about it.’
‘You were adopted within a few days of being born, weren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘People who die of broken hearts don’t die immediately. And adoptive parents never usually maintain contact with the real parents.’
‘Maybe he had a heart attack or something,’ Charley said.
‘Has your mum ever told you anything about them??
??
‘Not really. They were young, hadn’t been married very long — about a year.’ She drank some wine but it made her feel queasy.
‘Do you know their name?’
‘No.’
‘The hospital where you were born?’
‘No.’ She saw her adoptive mother trembling in her bed.
‘If they had a common name, it can be very difficult. I’ve known it take years — and cost a fortune.’
‘What’s the procedure?’ she said. Her voice was barely more than a whisper.
‘You have to apply for your original birth certificate at St Catherine’s House in London.’
‘Is that a long process?’ It seemed as if it were someone else speaking.
Lies death.
Lies.
Lies about her parents’ death? Was that what her mother had been trying to say? That she had told lies about their death?
Truth. Go back.
She remembered her mother trembling when she first told her they were moving. Had she started trembling because they were moving?
Or because of where they were moving to?
Go back.
Where?
A fat hamburger slid past, leaking gherkins and ketchup from its midriff like an open wound. It was followed by a plate of bacon and eggs, then a girl tossing her long brown hair in the wind.
‘Alpha Temps. Join the smart set!’
Charley stood wedged in the crowd as the escalators carried her upwards like flotsam on a wave.
The rush hour. A few weeks of country living and she was feeling increasingly an alien in London. She stepped out into the daylight, found her bearings and turned right down the Strand.
She had not been back to the boutique, had not spoken to Laura since that Monday night. The thought of Laura at the moment made her uneasy. She was certain last night, when Tom had arrived back late again, that she had smelled Laura’s perfume on him.
The words ‘ST CATHERINE’S HOUSE’ were clearly visible on the other side of the Aldwych. The building had large glass doors and a sign ‘Wet Paint — Use Other Entrance’.