THE BOOK OF LEAHI drew the curtains and turned off the lights. When I heard the click of the rear gate, I hurried upstairs and hid beneath the blankets.
I can’t see you, I told myself. Or rather, I do see you. I see you so much better than before.
‘Leah! Leah!’
He wouldn’t stop calling; he was going to wake the neighbours. I had to go downstairs and open the door – just a crack, let in a small breath of cold air.
‘You locked it!’ he said, smiling, thinking it a silly mistake.
‘Go away,’ I replied.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Just go away.’
These were the only words I could manage.
‘Is this about … Is this about today, with the girls?’
I said nothing.
‘Because I can explain what that was. It isn’t what you –’
I shut the door, latched it again and stood with my back against it.
‘Leah!’ he called gently. ‘Leah?’
I could hear him sigh and shuffle, lingering, trying to work out the right tenor of comeback. Then the rear gate clicked, marking his retreat.
I stayed behind the door for a long time – the crown of my head against the glass, my palms against the painted wood. How inevitable this had all been. From the moment he mentioned Britta Sayers’ difficult question, my doubt had grown stronger and stronger, until it was bigger than the joy of his presence, more persuasive than any prospect of true love.
I told myself I was lucky. He was Hades and I was Persephone; it was a mercy to be free from the underworld before any real damage was done.
I returned to my Demeter, to the bosom of my family.
All Hallows’ Eve, I walked up through the estate to the gamekeeper’s lodge where my parents lived, past the furthest reaching walls of the Big House, along the winding path there, the bricks beneath my soles slimy with moss. The light hadn’t fallen completely and labouring continued in the fields; a trio of figures moving across the land. The fog had been thin that day; they had to make the most of the conditions. October 31st was supposed to mark the end of harvest, but there was still work to be done. The date didn’t mark the end of summer either. That had vanished long ago.
I carried a bottle of wine, gripped tightly by the neck – an expensive purchase, in payment and in effort. I’d dropped the name of both my father and the Father in the Provisions Store to secure it. Wasn’t I duty-bound to honour them both with a good bottle on this most holy of nights? Wouldn’t it be unchristian to refuse me?
Rhoda Sayers, cow-eyed and heavy-jowled, was unimpressed. The good stuff was to be held over for Christmas rations, she said, no exceptions, no matter who you were. I knew these rules, but winning against the woman suddenly became important.
‘I think you owe me this,’ I said quietly, in all reasonableness.
She folded her arms. ‘How’s that?’
‘Sparing your Britta punishment for those pagan tattoos.’
We locked eyes.
‘That’s not what she said,’ said the woman.
I floundered. ‘Huh?’
I had let the girls’ actions go, not followed them up. I was too engrossed in my own error of judgement, my own heartache. Mr Crane would have seen what they’d done, those scars scabbing at their wrists. Perhaps he meted out a penalty later.
‘So, they were punished?’
It wasn’t enough of a question to prompt Rhoda to respond.
‘What did Britta say?’ I stumbled on.
Rhoda shook her head, disapproving of my fragile grasp of the situation, but she slid the bottle of wine across the counter towards me.
‘Take it,’ she said, claiming victory in this surrender. Then she turned away, sighing as she wrote my purchase in her ledger.
I didn’t want it anymore, the wine, my thirty pieces of silver. I could see what I was doing – challenging the mother in lieu of the daughter, a girl who had been through enough already, manipulated and led astray by our charming newcomer, just as I had.
Sister Agnes’ account of Ben’s graveyard lessons had spread; we all knew where the idea for the tattoos had come from. We all knew that he was the only person on the island with stashes of India ink. I should have been comforting Rhoda in the Provisions Store that evening, assuring her that no one was acting friendly with Mr Hailey in the staff room anymore. I should have apologised for the polite smiles that we hid behind, the way we awkwardly circled questions, not daring to ask. Why was Benjamin Hailey still teaching? Why did Mr Crane still pat him on the back when they passed each other in the corridor?
Instead, I left the store with a muttered thank-you, a gutless one.
I passed the estate’s stone well on the walk uphill to my parents’ place, a familiar structure, but that evening it delivered me a lost memory. Not one I’d forgotten as such, rather a memory I had set aside – an object placed on a high shelf to be brought down when its usefulness was realised.
There were stories attached to the well. My father delighted in telling me that gold lay in its dark, unfathomable depths, along with diamond rings, priceless art and, most hauntingly to the younger me, sacrificial teddy bears. The well would grant you absolute truth on a matter of your asking in return for something you held dear. When my brother, Paul, took over these stories (the gift of the gab bypassing me, the older child, and travelling down the male line), they became more sinister. There were ancient bones down there, he told me, and some not so ancient as you’d expect. There were the remains of prized cattle too, beloved wives and – he knew when to hold a pause – the bodies of favourite children.
I understood his inference, the moral of this parable.
‘I’m not the favourite,’ I snapped back.
‘Yes, you are,’ he replied levelly, no invitation to argue; he was stating a fact. ‘Mum and Dad are making sure everything works out all right for you.’
He was ten then. I’d have been sixteen.
I leaned over the well’s edge and peered down into the dripping dark. With my adult eyes, I still expected to see the flash of gold or a white splinter of bone. I wondered what I could throw into the depths so that I might know the absolute truth about Ben, about his relationship with the Eldest Girls. Had I been right, I would ask, to cut him off, not to let him explain? But that would mean admitting that I still held him dear, despite all efforts not to. Would I have to throw Ben to his death, only to discover his innocence?
The last stretch of the journey to my parents’ house was a steep incline, scented by the zest of pine needles, sycamore keys pirouetting around me. In books, adults returning to a childhood home after many years become overwhelmed by great Proustian rushes of emotion at the things they see and smell and hear, faded memories leaping vividly alive. It occurred to me then, as if I had just thrown something precious into the well to receive this realisation, that I would never really know how that felt. Not the true extent. I would never experience the way a long absence can remould a place, make it warmer, kinder, more palatable.
I passed through the front gate and walked down the side of the lodge to my parents’ back door, bracing myself for my mother’s greeting.
The tone of it came as expected: ‘Oh, here she is, gracing us with her presence! I swear, Leah Cedars, that you are worse than a flea to catch.’
I stepped across the threshold, offering up my excuses – the latest rules from the mainland on testing, along with the implementation of the new GCSE grading system meant my workload was immense, the paperwork never-ending. I kept talking in this way until the perverse urge to confess deserted me. I have been spending almost every evening with the stranger, Mum. I thought that I loved him but it seems he’s not the sort of person I should love, a man who leads young girls to the devil.
Then I might have spoken more truths. Since Paul went, since you made no effort to stop him, this feels like no home at all.
I divulged nothing, having no wish to burden her or compromise her position in Lark’s hierarchy. I perched on one of the stools at the kitchen island – a kitchen that was the envy of all the women for its shiny white cupboards and flecked marble surfaces – and I watched her chop vegetables and baste a chicken too big for the three of us, especially on this evening that was supposed to involve a fast.
In front of me, she placed a bowl of olives, something she had taken to ordering in large jars when the ships were running, and I picked at them as she embarked on an anecdote about the Earl.
‘They thought that he’d died at the weekend,’ she said, eliciting the gasp from me that she so clearly wanted. He may have been an invisible ruler, the Earl, a disenfranchised one, at his own discretion, leaving Lark’s deciding to the Council, but the idea of him dead was terrifying. The island would be a ship without a captain, without a figurehead, without a rudder.
The climax of my mother’s story had Hannah Pass, leader of the Earl’s diminishing housekeeping team and mother of Abigail, one of my Fourth Years, breaking into his locked bedroom to see if he was still breathing. The anti-climax: he was – still breathing, that is. He had merely taken to his bed for a few days, as was his way. The worst of it was that the ‘gazunder’ – the chamber pot – was full to overflowing.
My mother moved on to updates of the latest movements of Elizabeth Bishy and Diana Crane, Martha Signal and Eleanor Springer. Her sweetly worded aspersions on these women, her friends, were not dissimilar to those made about her in return – conversations that I was not supposed to overhear.
‘I wouldn’t trade my kitchen for Susannah Cedars’ “spaceship” for all the riches of Abraham.’
‘And isn’t that exactly what it cost her to have it sent over?’
‘Imagine how it shows up the muck!’
That was how I knew for sure my mother was envied.
‘You’ll be going to the Anchor later for the celebrations, will you?’ Mum asked, lifting the cork out the bottle, not waiting for Dad. There was a directness to her speech that I had not inherited, nor learnt through imitation. We looked alike; I could see my future in the way her lips had thinned and how the skin between her eyes furrowed. I knew my black hair would give way to strands of silver. But I doubted I would ever own that voice.
‘I won’t be, no.’ I pushed another pitted olive into my cheek, enjoying the sensation of its flesh giving way between my teeth.
‘It’s open to women tonight,’ she went on, telling me what I already knew, ‘even though it’s a weeknight.’ She poured two very generous glasses of wine. ‘I think you should go and find out where that handsome teacher is hiding himself.’
I stopped chewing and stared at her.
What handsome teacher? was the reply that rose childishly to my lips. What smashed window? What muddy footprints in the living room?
I took a large mouthful of wine and washed down the olive. I still wasn’t sure if they were truly pleasant things to eat.
‘I see him every day of the week at school,’ I said with a tight smile. ‘I think that’s quite enough, considering the current situation.’
‘Such a shame,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I replied cautiously; her inflection was not that of a woman appalled at a stranger’s behaviour. Quite the opposite.
‘He seemed so perfect,’ she added wistfully, grasping my hand on the cool of the countertop. I flushed hot and gulped more wine. ‘A fella from the mainland,’ she went on, squeezing my hand tighter, beseeching me with shining eyes. ‘He might have broadened your horizons a little.’
I had no idea how to respond.
The island was against Ben, thought him in conversation with the devil – so my mother must think this also. For all her gentle slanders of Diana Crane, she and her husband were important allies of my parents; together they sat on the Council. Or rather, my father and Jacob did; Diana and my mother brewed the tea and made the sandwiches.
The letter Mr Crane had written was aimed at Ben and the girls, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
Yet Ben was still teaching. Mr Crane still patted him on the back when they passed in the corridor. I should have found the courage to ask my mother what was going on, but my father opened the back door at that moment, making her hand fly from mine, sending her back towards the hob. I was startled at the sight of Dad; the whiteness of his beard and his stoop that had become, all of a sudden, more pronounced.
‘Will you come in for some dinner, Luke?’ called my mother to my dad’s young apprentice. Luke Signal loitered outside on the hard-standing, waiting for the formality of an invitation. He nodded at me, sheepish, as he stepped inside. I’d taught Luke for his GCSEs just three years earlier, my first official class when newly qualified, aged twenty-four. I had reprimanded him for the way he tied his tie, the grubbiness of his homework, his difficulty with spelling. His younger brother, Michael, almost sixteen, was in my current class, and always raised his hand, an answer ready. He was a real show-off. It seemed impossible that the two boys were related.
‘You should fill your belly, Luke,’ muttered my father as they wrestled free of their boots and shook off their wax jackets, Luke’s two sizes too large for his wiry frame. ‘You’ll need it for our night ahead on the lamp.’
‘Ah, Peter, no!’ My mother threw down her tea towel and was off. Did my father not remember that he was supposed to be retiring? What on earth was he doing still volunteering for evening work? She would brook no argument about the severity of the fox infestation, because there was Mary, there was Luke now, both trained up to take over the nighttime lamping.
At the end of her speech, my mother’s voice became tender. ‘I just want to spend more time with you, Peter,’ she said.
When only family were present, she would go on to suggest a holiday, a cruise or a visit to Paul on the mainland. When she’d first proposed these things, I’d assumed them a provocation. Look how angry I am, Peter! Listen to what blasphemous things you have me suggesting! But I began to wonder, after the way she’d grasped my hand that evening, if she truly meant to go.
Four places were laid at the table. As was the custom on All Hallows’ Eve, one setting was for the most recently departed family member – in this case, my paternal grandfather, John, whose heart had given up on him four years previously. This was precisely the phrase my mother used – ‘his heart gave up on him’ – and I was beginning to understand the expression viscerally. I couldn’t shake the sensation that our extra setting was not for Grandpa John, but for my brother, Paul, or for a handsome teacher maybe – two people who had not died but, in their different ways, had slipped through my fingers.
An extra place was found for Luke, so the untouched knife and fork could remain, and my father asked him to say grace. I watched Luke’s Adam’s apple ride his throat at the prospect. He was neither a master of words nor memory in my classroom, though I’d heard he’d developed a particular swagger lately, holding court at the Anchor if he had a story to tell. His name was used as a reliable witness in gossip about the Eldest Girls and I imagined that he had an eye on one of them. His classmates Bernadette Dean and Tom Ainsley had left the island as soon as their exams were done and married on the mainland. Luke would need to look to the younger girls, to Britta, Anna or Jade-Marie. Perhaps they thought him appealing in return. He was nineteen, aspirational, had the same black hair as his fifteen-year-old brother. Both brothers were tall, the height difference barely noticeable, despite their age gap, though Michael carried more meat on his bones. Luke was the one with the sculpted cheekbones and jaw. There was a not-unattractive dirtiness to his skin that I imagined would remain no matter how hot the bath.
Luke launched into a stuttering, ‘Be present at our table, Lord …’ and we all closed our eyes and clasped our hands. Amens done, enquiries were made as to the health of Luke’s mother and father. Dad carved the chicken and Mum piled Luke’s plate too high with vegetables. This would be discussed in the Provisions Store the following day: how Susannah Cedars served up food like it was going out of fashion, as if rationing didn’t apply to her; how my father probably pinched what he fancied straight from the allotments.
‘Hold the wine for me and the boy,’ said Dad, putting a hand over Luke’s glass as my mother wielded the bottle. ‘We need a steady hand for the rifle.’
In defiance, she filled my glass to the rim, hers too. I watched Luke take this in, saw its onward prattling journey. The Cedars women are true sots. You wouldn’t think it, but they are.
‘And what’s new with you, Master Luke?’ asked my mother, spreading a napkin over her lap. ‘Is the boarding house still suiting you? Not missing your mother’s cooking? I bet she’s disappointed you’re not with her tonight.’
My mother was seeking ammunition of her own – Martha Signal’s dinners are so bad, even her own son left home to escape them! – but the boy came back with: ‘That stranger’s moved in.’
There was the shortest, loudest silence. Luke continued to fork food into his mouth. My mother’s eyes flitted to me, then quickly away again.
I told him not to, I might have said to her if the circumstances had been different. I told him to stick with his lodgings with the widow, wait it out, see what else might come up.
‘Oh, that’s no good.’ My mother’s voice was too unctuous to be sincere, and my father could hear it. He looked to his wife, then to me.
I took a large gulp of wine.
‘Esther Deezer threw him out,’ Luke went on, oblivious to the tension, his focus on the heaping of his next forkful. ‘Abe Powell said someone ought take him in.’
‘Well, you boys are bound to set him on the right track, aren’t you?’ said my mother gaily.
My father grunted and turned to me. ‘You’re to steer clear of him, Leah, you hear me? He’s worked his way into Jacob Crane’s pocket and…’ He took a mouthful of food as if plugging the barrel of a gun.
Luke stopped shovelling, understanding well the pattern of Peter Cedars’ moods – how to recognise the signs of a coming storm.
My father swallowed. ‘He’s just not to be trusted, all right?’
We ate without talking, my mother and I taking great slugs of wine, until, fortified by alcohol, my mother decided to return to the subject.
‘The man made a momentary stumble,’ she said. ‘That’s all it’ll be, I’m sure.’
‘“Momentary stumble”?’ My father threw down his cutlery. Luke visibly jumped.
‘Well, we must have hope in him changing his ways, mustn’t we, Peter?’ my mother persisted. ‘Because… Because…’ Her eyes went upwards in search of scripture.
My mind worked faster.
‘If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’
My father was silenced by the quotation, but not satisfied.
‘Aren’t you hungry, Leah?’ he said.
I had pulled apart a potato and eaten just a small morsel of chicken.
‘I had too many olives,’ I said. ‘Before. And –’ The words left my mouth before I knew what I was doing ‘– now I have to go.’ I drained my glass and stood.
‘Where?’ demanded my father.
‘The Anchor. I promised Ruth and Cat I would see them there.’
My mother twitched at the lie but tamped down her impulse to call it out.
‘Sit down,’ said my father.
‘I can’t, Dad. Sorry.’
‘Your mother has cooked. You will stay and eat,’
Luke’s eyes went wide at this spectacle, his former teacher being scolded like a child.
‘Let her go, Peter,’ said my mum, forcing a laugh for Luke’s sake. ‘She’s a grown woman; she can do what she likes.’
My father looked up at me, as if what my mother had said was news to him, as if the last twelve years had passed him by and he still expected to see a fifteen-year-old girl standing there. I couldn’t bear it, that feeling of being small under his gaze, so vulnerable. I left the table and put on my coat.
‘You have a lovely time!’ my mother called after me, a cue for those who remained to be cheerful now. ‘You young ones,’ I heard her say to Luke, as I opened the door, ‘you have so much energy, you make me green for it!’
I stumbled back down through the estate, past the sycamore and the pine, sliding on catkins, tripping on the brick path. The Cedars women are not sots at all. They practise too little with the stuff; it knocks them unsteady.
I went to the Anchor because I’d told my parents that was where I was going, because it’s wrong to tell a lie. I met Ruth and Cat; I was true to my word. They expressed surprise to see me there. Was I really up for such silliness when we all had to be bright-eyed for school the next day? I shrugged away their assumptions, feigned offence at the idea that I would not be in the market for fun.
I was wary though, of being in that bar room. If Ben showed up, I would be forced to have the conversation that I had closed my kitchen door upon – explain why I believed, without question, he was doing something terrible with those girls. He wasn’t there, of course. He was supposed to be doing penance and drinking in public would never do.
I felt no such restrictions on my own behaviour. The wine had relaxed me. Standing up to my father had filled me with a strange sense of rebellion. I tipped back every glass of rum that was brought to the table, and time slipped. I found myself joining in with the dooking for apples hanging from the beams. Ruth laughed uproariously as I stumbled towards her, a mangled fruit gripped in my teeth.
‘You look like a suckling pig,’ someone was saying, and I looked down to see that apple juice stained the front of my blouse, turning it transparent.
Then, Saul Cooper’s whiskery face was close to mine, yet there was none of the revulsion I usually felt when in proximity to the man. I was mesmerised by the way the hair on his head had prematurely greyed, the centre of his beard too, but not his eyebrows, nor the remainder of his facial hair; that was all still darkest Larkian black. I think I might have licked a thumb and stroked one of his eyebrows into place, then joked about how his appearance seemed different while I was under the influence of rum.
‘Hallelujah, it’s a miracle on earth!’ I cried at this discovery and Saul was not offended, nor rude in return. He laughed and pulled me close in a friendly way, urging me to shush so I didn’t get into trouble for using the Lord’s words in vain. The rest of our exchange is hazy, but I was definitely the one who suggested we go outside because the bar was too full, too hot. Then, when the cold wind hit the dampness of my blouse, I suggested we go inside the Customs House for blankets.
The record skips again, and the next thing I know we are on the floor of the front office of the Customs House. I am naked, on top of Saul; he is hard inside of me. I am reaching down and fingering myself, bucking towards a shuddering climax, and he looks afraid, says, ‘What are you doing?’
Another skip. He is reaching up for me, sucking on one of my breasts. The blankets we’ve laid on the floor are bunched together, not enough to stop our backs and knees from skinning as we grind against one another. I kiss him as violently as I’d seized that apple, biting at his lip and drawing blood. He pushes me over, flips himself on top of me, finishes what we’ve started, pulling free with a groan and spilling himself across the wooden floorboards.
‘That will leave a stain,’ I have the wherewithal to say.
Then, I am on my sofa, dressed, and I have woken breathlessly, my head hammering. I was dreaming of dragonflies, iridescent and beautiful, but trapped, banging themselves hopelessly against the glass of my kitchen window. A hopeful thought arrives: all that went before was just part of this same nightmare. Then I feel the stickiness between my thighs, the pain pulsing from the raw skin on my knees.
I did all that I did.
I realise I could have left this out, not mentioned what happened that night. But if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.