It was stingingly cold, but she didn’t care. She had been making her way down the hillside through the trees when, just in time, she caught sight of Strafford, stepping out of the caravan and starting up through the trees in her direction.
She moved sideways, away from the path – it was her path, she had been making it for months, no one else walked on it or even knew it was there – and hid herself among a stand of birches. Her duffel coat was the same colour as her surroundings, and she hoped it would camouflage her. But what if he had spied her already? What if he had been specially trained in looking for people in hiding? He seemed to her a hopeless sort of detective, but appearances could be deceptive, as she very well knew.
If he did spot her, though, crouching here among the trees, what would she say, what excuse would she come up with for hiding from him? She could say her father had sent her with a message for Fonsey, something about the horses, and that she had got a fright when she saw a figure in black boots and a slouch hat climbing towards her up the hillside. But he wouldn’t believe it, she knew he wouldn’t.
Yet why was she hiding from him, anyway? Why shouldn’t she be out walking in the woods? She had more right to be there than he did.
All the same, she would have turned and run back up the hill to the road, except that it was too late now, he was already halfway up the slope. He wouldn’t find the path, though, her path, but she could see he was going to pass very close to where she crouched among the pale slim trunks of the birches, hardly daring to breathe.
Was it fright or excitement that was making her heart beat so fast? Both, she supposed. Because she was excited, she was frightened, though in a pleasurable sort of way, thinking how maybe he’d spot her, and come over, and – and what?
Maybe that was it. Maybe she wanted to be caught, maybe she longed to be caught, not just here and now, on this snowy hillside, but always, and everywhere. Sometimes, when she was little, Dominic would let her play hide-and-go-seek with him and his friends, and when the game had started and she had hidden herself inside a wardrobe, behind a rack of her mother’s dresses that smelled of sweat and stale scent, or was lying under the bed in the back bedroom, breathing in dust and trying not to sneeze, she would feel a sort of thick hot surge of something rising inside her – it was a bit like that heaving sensation you have when you’re just about to vomit – and she wouldn’t know whether she was afraid of being discovered in her hiding place, or hoping to be caught and dragged out in shame for everyone to see.
Once, one of the bigger boys, Jimmy Waldron was his name – she could still see him as he was then, with his buck teeth and greasy hair – had pounced on her where she had tucked herself behind the open door of the upstairs lavatory. Instead of shouting out to the others that he had found her, he had pushed her back into the lavatory and locked the door and put his hand up her dress and tried to kiss her, and wouldn’t let her go, until in the end she bit him on the lip and made it bleed.
Strafford was level with her now, and so close, not more than five or six yards away, that she could hear him panting from the effort of scrambling up the steep, slippery slope. What if she were to spring out at him, like an animal, all fangs and claws? That would ruffle his composure, make him take notice of her, oh, yes. But she didn’t move, and held her breath and let him go past.
She watched him until he had reached the crest of the hill and she couldn’t see him any more. She heard a lorry going past, up there. Serve him right if he got knocked down.
He was dreadfully stuck-up, as bad as the chinless wonders at hunt balls who never asked her to dance because they were afraid of her, or her father’s so-called horsey friends, who stood about with sherry glasses in their hands and smiled at her in that stupid, glassy-eyed way that they did. Half of them couldn’t even remember her name. He wasn’t as bad as her stepmother’s family, though, the Harbisons, who thought they were God’s gift to the county, and out of snobbery had let their dotty daughter marry her poor father and make his life a misery.
All the same, the detective was good-looking, in a scrawny sort of way – how could he be so thin? – and he had nice hands, she had noticed them, the nails clean and neatly clipped. She had a phobia about nails, the way they kept growing, like hair, growing and growing, even after you were dead, so someone had once told her. Imagine being stretched out six feet under the ground in the black-dark, your skull swathed in hanks of hair like steel wool, and your skeleton fingers clasped on your skeleton breast with inches of stuff as brittle and shiny as mother-of-pearl sticking out of the tips of them.
She left the shelter of the trees and went down the slope. She took her time, going carefully. She couldn’t afford to slip and land on her backside in the half-frozen muck, for the skirt she was wearing wasn’t her own. When she was sure Doctor Hafner – the Kraut – had left, she had gone into the bedroom where the White Mouse lay passed out on the bed, and had taken one of her tweed skirts and a heavy jumper out of the wardrobe, and brought them to her room and put them on.
She liked to wear her stepmother’s things, she wasn’t sure why, except that it gave her a sort of shivery feeling that she darkly enjoyed.
Now she paused in the trees at the edge of the clearing and took off her knickers – it wasn’t easy, because of her riding boots – and put them in the pocket of her stepmother’s skirt. The air, cool as silk, caressed her thighs. It didn’t make her feel chilled at all – quite the opposite, in fact. She smiled. Oh, she was a bold girl, she knew she was, and gloried in it.
Here was the caravan, with Strafford’s footprints leading away from it, and the big circular bloodstain in the trampled snow.
At the door she hesitated. Even still, after all this time, she hadn’t been able to work out a form of etiquette to deal with these – whatever they were – she couldn’t even think what word to use to describe what she was doing when she came down into the wood like this. Visits? It sounded ridiculously formal, and when she tried it out she heard it in exactly the prissy, strangulated way – ‘vsts’ – that the White Mouse would say it, when she was doing her Queen Lizzie act and putting on that tiny clipped voice that made her sound just like a mouse squeaking. What about ‘trysts’? No, that sounded like ‘vsts’, only stupider.
Anyway, what did it matter? In her own mind, she wasn’t really here. It was strange – how could one be in a place and at the same time not?
She lived in her own mind, that was the fact of the matter. Once, on a bright-green summer morning sparkling with dew – she remembered it so clearly – she had disturbed a spider’s web that was strung between two heads of cabbage in the kitchen garden, and all the baby spiders had suddenly run out along the threads in all directions, there must have been hundreds of them, thousands, even. That was how it was with her, she was the spider sitting at the centre of the web, and all the little black things scurrying away from her were images of herself escaping into the world.
She gave the door a perfunctory knock – he could be up to anything, in there, the dirty brute – and entered through the narrow doorway.
When she was a child and her mother read The Wind in the Willows to her at bedtime, she had always been on the side of the weasels and the stoats.
Fonsey was squatting on his haunches in front of the stove, feeding it with lengths of cut branches.
‘That wood is green,’ Lettie said. ‘How do you expect to get the thing going with green wood? You’re such an ass.’ He didn’t even turn to look at her. The collar of his leather jacket was turned up, and he was wearing tennis shoes without laces – the boots he had just taken off stood beside the stove, agape like giant mouths and with their tongues hanging out. She could smell him from where she stood. ‘And you stink like a polecat.’ He mumbled something. ‘What?’ she said sharply. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said, how do you know what a polecat smells like?’
‘Well, at least I know what a polecat is’ – she didn’t, in fact – ‘which you don’t.’
He stood up. She was always surprised by the size of him. In the impossibly narrow confines of the caravan he looked even bigger than he was. Getting to his feet like that, in his lumbering way, rolling his huge head on its short thick neck, he might have been some huge wild thing surging up out of its hiding place in a hole in the ground.
At these moments, when she came to the heart of the wood and climbed into his smelly lair, she knew she should be afraid of him, but she wasn’t. It was he who was afraid of her, she knew he was. He was twice, three times as strong as she was, he could break her wrist, or her arm – he could break her neck – with one twist of those butcher’s hands of his, yet of the two of them, she was the one in control. How could that be? Men, all men, in her experience of them, went in fear of women, though her experience in this area, as even she had to admit, wasn’t what could be called wide-ranging.
Just then she caught sight of the eviscerated rabbit on the table. ‘What’s that disgusting thing?’
‘My dinner.’ He took down a blackened frying pan from its hook above the sink and set it atop the stove. ‘Want some?’
‘You won’t get that thing hot enough with that—’
‘So what will you do, eat it raw? I can just see you, munching on a slab of it with blood dribbling down your chin. You’re half animal yourself.’
He looked at her. She met his look with one of her own. Those awful pimples, she said to herself – how could she bear to come close to him, with those things all over his forehead?
‘Did you bring any fags?’ he asked.
From the pocket of her duffel coat she took a flat silver cigarette case and clicked it open. The case was one of numerous items she had borrowed from her stepmother, without asking, and had kept it. The cigarettes were Churchman’s. She usually brought Senior Service, a fistful of which she would scoop out of one of the boxes of two hundred that her father ordered fortnightly from Fox’s of College Green. The Churchman’s she had pinched from Father Lawless. He wouldn’t miss them. ‘I got this, too,’ she said, bringing out from an inside pocket a naggin bottle of Cork Dry Gin. She laughed. ‘We can have a cocktail party.’
Fonsey did his crooked smile, showing the gap in his front teeth. ‘Are you going to take off your coat?’ he asked softly. When they were together like this, in the wood, he could make even the simplest question sound suggestive.
‘Do you know how cold it is in here?’ she demanded indignantly. ‘Why don’t you take off your coat, or whatever that thing is called that you’re wearing?’ He had told her his jacket was made from horse-hide, and that it had been worn by a Spitfire pilot in the war, who was killed. She didn’t believe it, of course, except the bit about the horse-hide, for the thing reeked of the knacker’s yard. Was it true, she wondered, what Dominic had once told her, that dog dirt was used in the process of tanning leather? The world was horrible in so many ways.
She was tearing the seal from the gin bottle with her fingernails. He watched her happily, picking absent-mindedly at the sore on his lip.
‘That detective was here,’ he said. ‘Stafford, or whatever his name is.’
‘I know. I saw him going up the hill. That rabbit really stinks, by the way. I can smell it from here.’
‘Smells like you,’ Fonsey said with a sly grin, pressing the tip of his tongue through the gap in his front teeth.
‘You’re disgusting.’
They sat down on the bunks, facing each other, leaning their backs against the walls of the caravan. They had lit their cigarettes, and now Lettie uncorked the gin. She held up the little bottle before her, frowning. ‘How are we going to drink this?’
‘Share and share alike.’
‘You mean, the two of us drink from the same bottle? Not on your life – and certainly not with that revolting sore on your mouth. Find me a glass.’
He went and opened the cupboard and came back with a grimy tumbler. ‘It’s filthy!’ she cried. ‘Don’t you ever clean anything?’
She took hold of a length of the hem of her skirt and ran it vigorously around the inside of the glass. Fonsey threw himself down on the bunk again, supporting himself on an elbow. Lettie’s right leg was raised, and he could see all the way to the top of her stocking and the suspender button holding it taut.
‘You have nice legs,’ he said.
‘Yes, nice and bandy, thanks to dear Papa.’
‘I like them.’
‘You’d like anything.’
She poured half the gin into the glass and handed him the bottle. ‘Chin-chin.’ She took a sip and grimaced. ‘I hate the taste of this stuff, I don’t know why I drink it.’
‘Because it makes you feel better.’
‘Maybe it makes you feel better. It makes me feel as if I’ve swallowed a dose of paraquat.’
‘Then don’t drink it. Give it to me.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ she said, feeling listless suddenly, and turned her face away from him. She took another drink, and another puff from her cigarette. She hadn’t learned to inhale yet. A good smoke was wasted on her, Fonsey always said. She was studying the latening light in the dirty back window. ‘What did you say to Sherlock Holmes?’ she asked.
‘Who?’
‘The detective, remember? He was here? Or has he slipped out of your mighty brain already?’
‘Did he see you?’
‘Of course he didn’t! I hid.’ She paused. ‘What did he ask you?’
‘Nothing. He wanted to know where I was last night.’
‘And what did you say?’ She watched him over the rim of the glass.
‘What do you think I said?’
She nodded, thinking. ‘He’s not as much of a duffer as he looks.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just do.’ She had drawn up both knees, and Fonsey’s gaze was fixed on the pale undersides of her legs, which now she parted a little, pretending not to notice she was doing it. He stared, and she laughed. ‘Have a good look, why don’t you?’ she said, and took another, longer drink from the grimy glass.
He glanced up at her face, then fixed his humid gaze again on what she was revealing to him. She held out the last of her cigarette. ‘Get rid of this, will you?’
He crushed the butt into a saucer on the draining board, beside the smouldering remains of his own cigarette.
‘That pan is burning,’ she said. ‘There’s smoke coming off it, look.’
He reached over and lifted the pan from the heat and dropped it on the floor with a clang.
‘And the stove is smoking too. We’ll be suffocated.’
‘I got it going, anyway,’ he said, ‘even if the wood was green.’
‘Oh, yes, you’re a genius.’
She had relaxed her thighs completely now, allowing them to fall slackly apart. The wings of her duffel coat were pushed back, and her skirt had ridden up to her hips. Fonsey’s brow was flushed, the pimples on it fairly glowing, and she could hear him breathing, not fast, but deeply, slowly. It seemed a kind of soft moaning. She thought of Strafford passing by her on the hillside, and of the sound of him panting, quick and hoarse.
Fonsey had taken on a strained look, almost as if he were in pain.
‘Kneel down,’ she commanded in a low voice, a little hoarse herself now. ‘Come on, down on your knees, oaf.’
Oaf. It was a word she had come across recently, in some book or other. She had known it already, it was a common word, but this time she had taken special note of it, and remembered it. She liked it. Oaf.
Fonsey heaved himself from the bunk and sank on to his knees in front of her. It wasn’t easy, there was hardly room for him, so narrow was the space between the bunks. She looked down at him as he thrashed about. She put one hand on top of his head, and dipped three fingers of the other into her glass and smeared the gin between her thighs. The alcohol stung her, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care about the sore on his lip, either. She didn’t care about anything. ‘Drink it,’ she commanded, her voice thickening. ‘Go on, lap – lap it up.’
He lowered his face past her knees and burrowed deep down between her thighs, like a terrier, she thought, digging in a foxhole. His hair was hot and ticklish against her skin. It was like being licked by an animal. She lifted languid eyes again to the twilight in the window. Oaf, she thought. Lap. Lap my lap. Lap my lap! She would have laughed, if she hadn’t been so close to coming. Star-like lights popped and fizzled in front of her eyes, and she thought of those cartoon creatures, Tom the Cat, was it, and that rabbit, what was he called? When they got hit on the head, stars whirled above them in circles, like Catherine wheels. Bugs Bunny, that was it! She could smell the rabbit on the table. He had said it smelled like her. Maybe it did? Lap, oaf, lap. Stars. His tongue was rough, a cat’s tongue. Tom the Cat, Tom cat, tomcat. Fizzles, fizzles. Fizzle.
Now Fonsey withdrew his head from between her thighs, and she leaned back, sighing, and drank the last few drops of gin in her glass. She often thought this was the best part of it all, these few lazy moments after it was over and her mind went fuzzy in that lovely way and she didn’t have to think about anything at all. Fonsey, her poor oaf, her poor wild man of the woods, knelt with his shoulders slumped against her knees, his great shaggy head resting on her thigh. They never kissed, she wouldn’t allow it, she wouldn’t ever allow it, even if he hadn’t got a sore on his mouth and pimples on his forehead and the taste of her on his lips. She just didn’t want to kiss him. She didn’t want to kiss anyone.
She put a hand against his shoulder and pushed him away.
‘Now you,’ she said.
He fumbled with the front of his dungarees, undoing the clasps and pulling it down, and she twined her legs around his neck, crossing her ankles at the back. She didn’t watch him, hunched over himself there, trembling and grunting. She never wanted to watch, it was too ugly, that big purplish thing sticking up, the top of it like a helmet, and his fist pumping in that awful spasmodic way – he might as well be milking a cow. At the end he made a surprisingly soft little mewling sound, like the sound a child would make in its sleep. Her legs were still around his neck, and he let his head slump sideways and forward and glued his mouth to the soft cool pearl-grey flesh behind her knee. It looked so strange, that big head with its mass of greasy red curls, propped there between her knees, like a severed head on a platter.
He began to say something but she stopped him. ‘Don’t!’ she said in a fierce whisper, grabbing him by one ear and twisting it hard. ‘Don’t start with the love business. You don’t love me and I don’t love you. Nobody loves anybody. Right? Got that?’ He mumbled something, trying to nod, and she let go of his ear, which glowed bright red.
She wasn’t sure where the stuff he had pumped out of himself had gone to – it had spilled on the floor, she supposed, or splattered against the side of the bunk. On one of their afternoons together she had taken up a drop of it on her finger and tasted it, just the tiniest taste, with the very tip of her tongue, out of curiosity. It had a strange flavour, like salt and sawdust soaked in milk.
Imagine having globs of that goo inside you, sticky and hot, and those tiny little tadpoles squirming out of it and racing each other up along your tubes.
She had never let anyone do it to her, though more than a few had tried, including Jimmy Waldron, at a party at the Athertons’ the previous Christmas. He was grown up now and studying to be a teacher or something, and played rugby. He seemed to have forgotten having trapped her in the lavatory, that day long ago when they were children. But she had remembered. Oh, yes, she had remembered. He had to be taken home from the Athertons’, after being sick on the floor in the conservatory when she drove her knee with all her strength into his crotch. Maybe that would teach him to keep his hands out of places where they weren’t wanted.
Fonsey had done up his dungarees and hauled himself back to the other bunk, and he leaned there now on his elbow again, looking at her with a half-witted grin. She pushed the heavy stuff of the skirt down over her knees. A pity she couldn’t let the White Rabbit know what her stepdaughter had got up to in it just a minute ago. Next time maybe she’d make Fonsey shoot his stuff all over the front of it, then she could hang it back in the wardrobe and give the bitch something to wonder about.
‘When are you going back to school?’ Fonsey asked, lighting up another cigarette.
‘I’m not,’ she answered.
‘Oh? Why not?’
‘I’m just not, that’s all.’
‘Your Da will have something to say about that.’
‘Yes, well, my “Da” can say what he likes.’
She had been a boarder for four years at a school in South Wales, a ghastly dump outside a town with a name she had never learned to pronounce properly, since it had about twelve consonants in it and hardly any vowels. She had told no one except Dominic that she wouldn’t be going back after the Christmas holidays, and she hadn’t told him why. The fact was, she had been expelled – Matron had caught her with a fellow, a townie, at the back gate one night, she with his thing in her hand – it reminded her of the rubber grip on the handlebar of a bike – and he with a hot paw halfway up her gymslip.
She might have got away with it, except that it was one more, and the most serious, in the long list of her depravities, so-called. She hadn’t enjoyed the interview with Miss Twyford-Healy, the headmistress, but that was a small price to pay for the gift of freedom that had so suddenly been bestowed on her. Tee-Hee, which was what everyone called Miss Twyford-Healy, had written to her father, saying his daughter wouldn’t be allowed to return after the Christmas break. She had managed to intercept the letter, though – so many mornings she had spent crouched on the landing, chilled to the bone in her nightdress, while she watched through the banisters for the post to come – and now she lay for what seemed hours in bed, sleepless, every night, wondering what exactly to say to her father, when the time came for her to go back to school and she had to tell him she’d been given the boot.
Funny, with so much on her mind, how something as trivial as being kicked out of school weighed so heavily on her thoughts. There was no accounting for herself, that was a fact.