Bettina’s room had a view of the countryside. She used to loathe the countryside, the scraggly, parochial quaintness of it. The unsexiness of it. She took her clothes bag out of the basket and put each item – trousers, blouse, cardigan, dress, underwear – in the correct drawers. Her toothbrush she left on the dressing table. She brought out the wrapped-up pistol and put it on top of the wardrobe, standing on tiptoes and nudging it with her fingers until it was out of sight. She returned to the window. A few cows, a gypsy caravan glinting far off in the distance. Clear skies save for the odd sneeze of cloud. She started crying – a sudden storm, the kind that has you bent, that aches through the middle.
They spent the days at the beach mostly, lying side by side on a picnic blanket and reading their respective books. Monty’s old pavilion had been taken down fifteen years earlier, but not before one of its great white gull-shitted tarps had been snatched away by a gale-force wind and blown up into the cliffs, where it had snagged itself on a rock. It was there still – a crumpled white mess, high up, reflecting the light on sunny days so that the eye was always drawn to it.
The beach was a long stretch of pale sand and grey pebbles curving off into the far distance and usually empty of people – twenty miles along it joined Brighton Beach, and this was where you went if you wanted people. Bart was most likely up near the cove-end, partly enclosed by an arm of jagged rocks – he’d always liked dabbling his feet in the rock pools there. When they came down for breakfast in the mornings he’d already be gone, his empty porridge bowl left on the table next to an ashtray with three butts. He took his evening meal at a nearby pub which served fresh fish.
On the second night, while Ivy was playing solitaire in her bedroom, Bettina went downstairs to find her mother – also playing solitaire, funnily enough – in the sitting room. There was a glass of some sort of spirit at her right-hand side.
‘Where’s Lucille?’
‘She’s gone to the cinema with Bart. They’re running an old Clark Gable.’ She sipped her drink, eyes on the cards laid out. ‘I’d have liked to have seen it myself, but that would mean I was picking sides.’ She placed a four of clubs on a five of diamonds. Made the row neat with a little push of her fingernail.
‘Don’t be silly. You should have gone.’ Bettina sat opposite her mother. ‘I’m sorry you’re stuck in the middle like this.’
‘Not as sorry as I am.’
‘What am I supposed to do?’
‘Fix your marriage.’
‘What marriage? I don’t have a marriage to fix.’
Venetia put her cards down. She took her cigarette out of the ashtray and inhaled, her mouth wrinkles deep and long, like seismic ruptures. ‘Anything that is broken can be fixed,’ she said.
‘So wise.’
‘Don’t belittle me. What I’m saying is true.’
‘Really? Tell that to someone with a shattered spine.’
‘Shut up, you silly child, and listen for once in your life.’
Sighing, Bettina propped her elbows on the table and dropped her chin into her palms. She was going to start on about how marriage was hard work and compromises must be made.
‘You and Bart are both dominant characters. You’re defensive and full of yourselves and neither of you knows how to submit to another’s will. With your father and I, he was the more dominant. He had the edge. And so I would submit to him. Don’t make that face – it wasn’t because he was a man, it was because I’m pragmatic. My own father taught me much about power and so I came into my marriage well equipped. I want you to listen to what I’m about to say next, and if you absorb at least one thing, let it be this: everything is about power.’ She nodded to herself and drank from her glass. ‘Everything is about power.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Bettina.
Venetia slammed her glass down on the table. ‘Everything! Every relationship, every interaction, small or large. From buying a set of curtains from the haberdashery to marriage and child-rearing. Parents, employers, friends, children. Everyone, everything.’ She lit a cigarette from the embers of her dying one, maintaining eye contact. ‘People who think they’ve won all the power don’t necessarily have all the power. And those who exert dominance are often weak little children underneath it all. Your father was weak. I submitted to him because I was truly strong. His shows of strength were just that – a show. And so, every time – are you listening? And so, every time he got his own way, I pictured him as a small brat at a fair who pouts and rages until he finally gets that ice cream. Enjoy that ice cream, I’d think. It tastes good, but it’s going to rot your teeth and make you fat, and oops – look, you just dropped it all over yourself! And look at me. No ice cream on me. I didn’t want the ice cream, I didn’t need the ice cream, I was already full from dinner – nourishing beef and cabbage stew. Now go and clean yourself up, little boy.’
Bettina started laughing – she couldn’t help it. ‘So what you’re essentially saying is that you dealt with your debasement by enjoying a gloating sense of superiority.’
‘No! The point is, I didn’t need the ice cream because I was already full. The ice cream is power. Or rather, illusory power.’
Bettina dropped her face into her hands and snorted out air. Ice cream! Preposterous. ‘I’m not capable. I’m just not. I’d rather walk across hot coals than go grovelling to Bart.’
‘What about the children?’
‘Don’t bring them into it,’ she said, wearily.
Venetia lowered her head and said, in a quiet voice, ‘And must you flaunt that girl in his face? I wasn’t born yesterday. I have eyes. Those little looks you give each other.’ She shook her head. ‘Lucille sees it too, and then she sees her son alone, at the beach, and I’m sorry, Bettina, but if I were in her place, I’d think you were the devil. It makes it very hard for me to stay on your side.’
‘Oh, I can make it easier for you.’ Bettina laughed, shaking her head, and stabbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. ‘I’ll make it very easy for you. Remember that French chap who was staying with us for a while? The one you thought was a footman? Tell me, Mother – why do you think he was staying with us?’
‘I can’t remember.’
Bettina smiled – she was enjoying this. ‘He was a friend of Bart’s.’ She spoke the next bit very slowly, savouring each word. ‘He was more than a friend of Bart’s.’ She sank back in her chair and lit a fresh cigarette.
‘Are you saying … is he a—’
‘Yep.’
‘No.’
‘Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes.’
‘Are you honestly saying—’
‘Mother. This should not come as some great revelation. Father knew. He might not have voiced it, but he knew.’
Venetia swatted the air. ‘Monty thought everyone was hiding some deep, dark secret.’
‘Well, most of us are.’
Venetia was frowning, one ruby-ringed hand clasping her cheek. ‘God’s honest truth?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you knew this when you married him?’
‘Naturally.’
Venetia stared at her daughter – it was comic, it was lampoonish, the way she was staring at her – like she was rehearsing for a play and the director had just told her to perform shock-horror. ‘What the hell is this world coming to?’
Bettina shrugged. ‘Hitler’s going to destroy it all soon, so might as well let the perverts have their fun, eh?’
*
On the third night, Ivy and Bettina had an argument – one that appeared trivial on the surface but underneath was crawling with … well, with … it was like picking up a large flat pebble on a beach and turning it over to look at its murky, sea-darkened belly to find a fossil, its curlicue gaps crawling with sea scabs and the crushed bones of baby crabs – this dark history, this ever-pervasive—
Bettina was drunk. She’d been walking on the beach for three hours. The argument had been about Bart. Ivy, like Étienne, was adept at playing devil’s advocate, and was constantly forcing Bettina to consider the feelings of others, which was noble, she supposed, but also exasperating. ‘It sounds to me like you’ve both been equally horrid to each other.’ That’s what she’d said. ‘It sounds to me,’ replied Bettina, ‘that though Dilys was indeed exploitative and manipulative, you were clingy and overbearing.’ Dilys was Ivy’s old best friend, the one she’d fallen in love with. ‘Therefore, you were perhaps as horrid as each other.’ There. See how she liked it.
She returned from the beach and went straight to Ivy’s room, and they both apologised at the same time. They kissed and were soon naked, and they went at each other savagely, deliriously, all niceties gone. Neither would ever forget it – and neither would forget what came after. Because as they were lying together, slick with sweat and lined with scratch-marks and slap-prints, the door was flung open and there stood Henry, holding a bundle of clean bedding.
‘Oh, I thought you’d left this afternoon,’ he said, unperturbed, as if he’d walked in on them brushing each other’s hair. ‘Sorry, my mistake.’ And he gently closed the door.
*
The clouds were two-tiered, with bright silvery ones on the bottom and dark ones the shade of dry coal at the top. The air had that static feel to it that went right up the nose and always reminded Bettina – for some reason – of woollen cardigan sleeves. She and Ivy tiptoed through the morning, neither speaking. At eleven o’clock, the rain came – torrential and absolute.
Henry busied himself in his usual languid way, polishing silverware at the kitchen table while humming ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’. Giving out nothing. Lucille came in soaking wet (she had been caught in the downpour while bringing in the tea towels from the line), daring Venetia to just try laughing, just bloody try it, a gritty black droplet of mascara hanging off the end of her chin, and then Bart came in, also wet, with a sodden newspaper over his head. Bettina and Ivy went back upstairs.
‘What’s the worst he could do?’ asked Ivy, up in her room. ‘Everyone already knows.’
‘Yes, but it’ll be unpleasant all the same if he chooses to talk. Messy.’
Ivy closed her window and the rain became a dull roar.
‘How would he profit from spilling?’
‘He doesn’t like me. He’s never liked me.’
But Henry did nothing and said nothing that day.
Ivy had started her monthlies in the night and wanted to stay in bed – she was prey to cramps, often paired with a migraine, and sometimes it got so bad that she found it impossible to do anything but lie down with the curtains drawn. Bettina decided to go for a walk in the woods and perhaps take a look at Wadley House. She put on her boots in the kitchen. Her mother was leaning against the counter, smoking a cigarette, the sleeves of her housedress rolled up to the elbows.
‘Careful where you head off to,’ she said. ‘There’s been lots of doomy whispering in the village. They think we’re due a bit of trouble.’ She shrugged. ‘Probably nothing.’
‘I’m always careful,’ said Bettina.
The sun was out, the grass, still sodden, full of bright-white glitter. The songbirds twittered and chirped hesitantly, as if distrustful of the sudden lull in the weather.
The woods covered a dozen or so acres and ran parallel to the beach. The path from Longworth House was wild and rarely used. Somewhere along it there was another path, branching right, which led to Wadley House. The family who’d taken it over all those years ago were supposedly a ghastly lot who squabbled pettily with the surrounding households and had once shot the McCarthys’ family dog because it had encroached their boundaries by a mere ten feet.
Bettina hopped over the small rubble wall, crossed the lane (there were indeed lots of lipstick-stained cigarette butts) and entered the wood through a gap in the trees. Her father had loved the woods, taking her and Jonathan for long strolls on dry Sundays. He’d crouch down to show them patches of mushrooms, saying which were safe to eat and which weren’t. He’d grown up poor, he reminded her, and used to pick mushrooms and wild garlic for his mother, who’d then bake them into delicious pies, sometimes with meat, usually without.
The path was boggy and slippery but clear of obstruction. How marvellous it was that she could hop this way and that, her feet sure and light, without falling into a gasping fat sweat. And how much easier to do it in trousers. She came to a large silvery birch – the marker. Just after it was the right turn which led to the other path. The way the tree branched, it’d always reminded her of an upside-down naked woman – there was the little pouch of her belly and the meeting place between the thighs, overgrown with moss. She and Bart had had plenty to say about that. She turned onto the side path, lighting a cigarette. Hadn’t they had a name for that tree, she and Bart? Lady … something.
A crunch close by – a branch being stepped on. She looked behind her, cigarette gripped between her lips, its smoke curling into her eye. She went to take it out but the paper had glued itself to her bottom lip and her fingers slid along its length all the way to the glowing tip, and she gasped, taking in an unsolicited throatful of smoke. Coughing, she snatched the cigarette from her lip and clutched her burned finger.
‘Only fools smoke,’ came a voice.