The mushroom was the size of a dinner plate. Behind it, blackening its profile, stretched the steely dawn sky, the sun a brushstroke of pink across its middle. Eleanor blinked in wonderment, her sleepy brain conjuring images of an Alice in Wonderland-style dinner party, attendants seated round the mushroom’s flat, sleek ebony top. Beside her, Kat started humming softly. She was barefoot, up to her ankles in the dew-damp grass, her party dress testifying to another all-nighter. Gold strappy shoes dangled carelessly from the middle finger of her left hand.
‘Still pissed off I got you out of bed?’
‘I was awake anyway.’
‘Yeah, right.’
They both stared at the mushroom. It was Kat’s idea of a gift, Eleanor guessed, an effort to be nice on her last morning at home.
‘It could be breakfast, I thought.’ Kat swung the shoes.
‘Eat it, you mean?’
‘Yes, Dumbo.’ She bulged her tongue into her lower lip. She looked exhausted, wild-eyed, wild-haired, glorious. The dress she was wearing was one of the ones she had lately started running up herself, using their mother’s old sewing box and Singer machine – a tight red bodice sprouting a concoction of silk and lace panels in electric colours. From somewhere in the tangle of hair behind her left ear, she extracted a flattened roll-up, slipping it between her lips but making no move to light it.
‘For all we know it could be poisonous.’
‘It’s not.’
‘And how would you know?’
‘Because I do.’
‘You shouldn’t smoke.’
‘Fuck off.’
Eleanor turned to face her younger sister, arms folded, her gaze steady. The hostility was old hat now, she had got used to it. ‘And where were you last night?’
‘What’s it to you?’ Kat smiled slyly, displaying the small gap between her front teeth that, for some reason Eleanor could never fathom, made her look cute.
‘I hope you are careful?’
Kat rolled her eyes, feigning shock. ‘Oh yes, we must be careful, mustn’t we. Like you would know so much about that, wouldn’t you, Miss Big-Brain? You’re not Mum, so don’t try to be,’ she added nastily. ‘And if you want to tell Dad then go right ahead.’
‘You know I wouldn’t tell Dad,’ Eleanor murmured. In just a few hours, she was going away to start university, starting her life it felt like. Kat could be Kat – wild and bad – without her having to worry about it. The mighty mushroom was auspicious for her, Eleanor decided. Her stomach cramped with sudden joy and terror at the prospect of heaving the old suitcase her father had dug out of the cellar into the trunk of her English teacher’s mini and journeying to the sandy-stoned college that had, miraculously, offered her the chance to spend three years doing nothing but reading and writing about English literature. There would be some Anglo-Saxon to study too, Miss Zaphron had told her – stories about someone called Bear-Wolf and a green knight – a dreamy-eyed look had come into her English teacher’s eyes as she described them.
Eleanor stole a glance at Kat, who was smoking the cigarette at last, screwing up her eyebrows and doing her best to hold it like a man, between her thumb and index finger, the hot tip tucked into her palm. Pity rushed at her.
‘You can come and visit me, you know.’
Kat looked away. ‘Like that’s going to happen.’
‘You’ll be sixteen soon, he’ll let you then.’
‘I wouldn’t want to anyway. All those dull Oxford weirdos.’ She crossed her eyes.
‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’ She flicked the roll-up into a patch of soft mud, where it sat smoking.
‘Dad would be better if you left him alone more. If you didn’t always… get at him.’
‘Don’t fucking tell me how to deal with Dad.’ She dropped to a crouching position and circled the mushroom with her arms. Her bony knees stuck out from under the bunched-up panels of the dress. ‘We simply must eat this,’ she crooned. ‘Fried. On toast. Loads of butter.’
Her lips looked raw round the edges, making Eleanor wonder again about the night, whom Kat had been with, what they had done. Anxiety heaved, but so, dimly, did envy. In her own case, boys seemed to steer a wide berth, apart from Charlie Watson, the son of their farmer neighbour. Charlie had a straggly sun-bleached fringe and a crooked smile that masked a jumble of teeth. Whenever Eleanor saw him bouncing along in a farm vehicle, or striding across a field with his father, he waved and grinned. But whenever they got close he seemed to shrink into himself, stuttering inanities, unless they were actually kissing. She knew her height didn’t help. Standing up, his eyes were level with her collarbone. It made her want to run away sometimes, just to put the poor boy out of his misery.
From somewhere among the voluminous panels of her dress, Kat had whipped out a tiny penknife and was hacking at the stem of the mushroom.
Eleanor released an involuntary gasp. ‘Don’t. I told you, we don’t even know if we can eat it.’
‘And I told you, we can,’ Kat sneered. ‘It’s okay. The same kind are in the shops, just smaller. Christ, you’re such a scaredy-cat.’
‘I just don’t want to die,’ Eleanor muttered, adding to herself, ‘at least not today.’ She looked away, unable to watch.
‘Got ya,’ Kat cried, plucking the mushroom free and holding it over her head like a ghoulish trophy, heedless of the shower of earth raining into her silver bush of hair. ‘Wow, Ellie, look at that. Just huge. We should get a camera. Take a picture.’
‘Mark the day you poisoned me, you mean.’ They caught each other’s eye and laughed properly and joyfully, and suddenly Eleanor was so sad to be leaving, she could have wept.
They walked back in silence across the field, that year an empty square of weeds and compacted earth, Kat carelessly swinging the mushroom by its stalk.
‘Just don’t let Dad get you down, okay?’ she ventured as they neared the garden gate, ‘he can’t help how he is.’
‘Can’t he?’
‘You know he can’t.’
‘He should be taking you today.’
‘What?’
‘Today. He should be driving you. It’s not right.’
‘But Miss Zaphron wants to. It is only because of her that—’
‘Oh shit, I’m going to have to leg it.’ Kat jerked her head in the direction of a light that had flicked on at the largest of the vicarage’s top-floor windows. ‘If he catches me like this…’ She thrust the mushroom at Eleanor and set off at a run, taking the long way round the garden, under the lee of the hedge that fringed the silver birch wood.
Eleanor sighed and walked on, picturing how Kat would race up the drive and down the side of the house where the four stone steps plunged to the unlocked cellar door. From there she would scamper up the back staircase to her bedroom, silent as dear old Titch, the vicarage cat, prowling round their stop-start comings and goings on his neat tiger paws.
Entering the kitchen ten minutes later, Vincent’s eyes widened at the sight of the mushroom, which Eleanor had wiped clean and placed on a chopping board next to the frying pan. ‘What wonders the earth holds in store.’ He bent down to study it more closely, putting on his half-moon spectacles and taking them off again.
‘Kat says it’s okay to eat.’
‘Does she now.’ He tugged at the thinning grey fringe of his beard.
‘She does,’ Kat announced, appearing in the doorway behind them, miraculously spruce in her school uniform, her hair fastened into a ponytail that corralled the whorls of her hair into an explosion at the nape of her neck. ‘And you trust me, Daddy-oh, don’t you?’
‘Indeed I do,’ Vincent replied mildly, not looking at her. He turned to Eleanor instead, asking her if she was packed and ready. When she said she was, he said he had a gift for her. He disappeared to his study, returning a few minutes later with a small dog-eared dictionary. ‘To help you with all those essays you are going to have to write.’
‘Thanks Dad.’ Eleanor found it hard to speak. He was so rarely attentive, it caught her off guard.
‘Yeah, why use one short word where four long ones will do?’ snorted Kat, pushing between them to take charge of the cooking.
‘Not a morning for silliness, is it,’ said Vincent tightly, pulling out a chair to sit down. Eleanor could see the vein in his left temple twitching.
Kat had tied the frayed stained kitchen apron over her uniform and was slicing the mushroom into chunks, tossing them into a pool of melted butter in the frying pan. She stirred with a wooden spoon till the pieces hissed and shrivelled.
She was so needy and Vincent wouldn’t see it, Eleanor reflected sadly. Kat longed for attention and approval, but he blocked her at every turn. And maybe that wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t once done the opposite. It didn’t matter for her, she was used to being on the outside, negotiating the dark tunnels of her father’s moods. But Kat had never tried to negotiate anything. She just bulldozed on, making trouble. ‘Kat was the one who found the mushroom,’ she gabbled. ‘So clever of her. Inspired.’
‘She must have been up and out early for that.’
‘I was.’ Kat threw him a look from under her long mascara-blackened eyelashes. She lifted the frying pan off the hob, shaking and tossing the mushroom chunks as if they were a pancake. ‘Very early. I couldn’t sleep. I went for a walk.’
‘I’ll do toast,’ Eleanor muttered, rummaging for a knife and sawing with a desperation that went beyond the hardness of the bread. She shook the loose crumbs into the toaster, which hadn’t worked for years, and slid three fat slices of bread under the grill.
Seated in front of their food a few minutes later, the slabs of toast serving as hefty plates for the heaps of fried mushroom, Vincent pressed his palms together and closed his eyes, as he always did. Kat scowled at Eleanor, as she always did. I can’t wait to go, Eleanor thought wildly as her emotions seesawed again. The routines between the three of them were so wearing, an invisible vortex, sucking her down. To be free of it would be like coming up for air.
The mushroom wedges, sodden with butter, were as soft and succulent as steak. Eleanor was too sick with nerves to eat much, but Kat wolfed her portion and Vincent had seconds, wiping the last of the grease off his plate with a ragged crust of toast. Afterwards, he patted his stomach, these days a notable bulk beneath his cassock, and stifled a string of husky burps.
‘The Lord provides bountifully, doesn’t he, Daddy,’ quipped Kat, giving Eleanor a look of disgust, ‘if you know where to seek.’
Vincent swivelled his gloomy eyes to his youngest daughter, the pupils narrowed to pencil dots. Kat merely smiled back at him, one of her big, bold, toothy smiles that dimpled her cheeks and lifted up the corners of her mouth.
And suddenly Vincent was smiling back at her, an ice-berg melting. ‘The Lord certainly does. Exactly.’ He pulled out a grubby handkerchief and dabbed cheerfully at the grease-specks in his beard.
‘You’re missing bits,’ Kat cried, leaping round the table to pat his face with a dishcloth, pushing too far as she always did, so that Vincent was soon glowering again, flapping his hands at her to be left alone.
Eleanor took refuge in the washing up, spinning round with an involuntary cry of relief when a car horn sounded in the drive. Kat hugged her from behind, briefly, and then bolted into the hall to watch proceedings from the window seat, belting her arms round her shins and pressing her teeth into her knees.
When Eleanor appeared from upstairs, laden with bags, Vincent trundling ahead of her with the old suitcase, Kat swiftly averted her gaze, keeping it fixed on the window.
‘Bye Kat,’ Eleanor called softly.
‘Bye.’ She snapped the word like a whip.
Out in the drive, Vincent had stowed her case in the boot and was engaging the English teacher in the usual animated exchanges he managed for outsiders. Eleanor pawed at the gravel with the toe of her shoe. The lump in her throat ebbed and swelled; maddening, given how keen she was to be gone.
‘Well, goodbye, child,’ Vincent growled, turning to her at last and placing his heavy spade-hands on her shoulders. ‘You are all clear on money, aren’t you?’ He looked at her – for the first time in years it felt like – with the big dark eyes that were such a mirror of her own.
Eleanor nodded. The money was a princely eighty-pound monthly allowance, on top of a full government grant. It was another thing that made her feel guilty, but also thrilled.
‘Study hard.’
She nodded again, aware of her English teacher on the far side of the car tactfully staring in the opposite direction, towards the sloping tail-end ribs of the Downs.
‘And remember,’ Vincent went on mournfully, still pressing her shoulders, ‘the Lord gives each of us talents, just as he gives each of us burdens. We must accept both with good grace.’ He released his hands at last, such a heaviness lifting that Eleanor had a strong sensation of floating rather than walking the couple of feet to the car. The feeling stayed with her for several minutes after she had settled into her seat, contributing to the sense of flying as she and Miss Zaphron took off down the lane, the wheels of the little car rocking and thwacking between the potholes and ridges.
Eleanor waited until the bend to look back. The drive was empty, but Kat was still there, her face a white smudge behind the hall window.