Silver Bay, Page 26

  And then it was too late. My mum's cancer was shockingly efficient. She had lost weight - a source of pride, then concern when she discovered it was not due solely to her careful monitoring of calories. The latest 'nice man' - a divorce who lived an hour away by train - found excuses not to visit and then, as the treatment became messy and unpleasant, as her emotional demands grew greater - melted away. Perhaps stung by his disappearance, independent to the last, she did not tell Kathleen she was dying. I found out afterwards she had sent a letter that would arrive after her death. In it, she told Kathleen I was not to be pressured to go to Australia but asked her to be there for me wherever I wanted to be. It was the one badly judged decision of her maternal career.

  There is never a good age at which to lose your mother, but my seventeen-year-old self was spectacularly ill prepared to face life alone. I watched my proud, glamorous mother shrink, then diminish. I saw her appetite for life disappear, buried in morphine and confusion. At first I did my best to care for her, and then, as the nurses took over and I understood what she had not been brave enough to tell me, I withdrew. I told myself it was not happening, and as my mother's friends whispered behind their hands at how brave, how capable I was, I sat at home alone, stared at the pitiless bills, and wished I had a life that belonged to anyone but myself.

  My mother died one dark, painful night in November. I was with her, and told her she should stop apologising, that I would be fine, that I knew I was loved. 'There's money in my blue bag,' she told me hoarsely, in one of her last moments of lucidity. 'Use it to go to Kathleen. She'll look after you.' But when I looked, there was less than a hundred pounds - not enough to get me to Scotland, let alone Australia. I suspect pride kept me from telling Kathleen of my plight. Perhaps predictably I went off the rails. I left school and got a job stacking shelves, then discovered that this would not keep me in my mother's house. The rent arrears built up until my mother's friend told me, apologetically, that she could not afford for me to stay. She offered me a position as a live-in nanny, and was relieved when I told her I was going to stay with a friend.

  My life became chaotic. I sold bits of my mother's jewellery, although what little she'd had was worth barely enough to keep me in food. I lived in a squat, discovered nightclubs and worked as a barmaid, trying to ensure that I was drunk enough when I left each night that I didn't have to think about how lonely I was when I got home. For a while I was a Goth, and when I was twenty-one I got pregnant by one of the many men who passed through that squat in Victoria, a giant of a man whose last name I never knew but who made a great lentil stew, stroked my hair and called me 'baby' on one of the nights when I had enough money to get very, very drunk.

  Once I realised I was pregnant, everything changed. I don't know if it was hormones, or just the inheritance of my mother's good sense, but a self-preservation instinct took over. I thought of what I had avoided thinking about for four years, and what my mother would have said if she could see where I was. I never considered getting rid of the baby. I was glad that I would have a family of my own once again, someone who was linked to me by blood.

  So, I stripped my hair of its violent dyes, got a job working as a mother's help, and when Hannah was born, I was employed by friends of that family in a picture-framing shop. They were happy for me to work until half past one when I had to pick up Hannah from nursery. I wrote to Kathleen occasionally, and sent her photographs, and she always wrote back promptly, enclosing a few pounds 'to buy something for the baby', telling me she was proud of me for the life I had created for myself. It was not an easy life, or a financially stable one, but it was fairly happy. I think, as Kathleen used to tell me, my mother would have been pleased to see it. Then one day Steven Villiers came in and asked for a moulded gilt frame with a dark green mount for a print he had bought. And my life, as I had created it, changed for ever.

  I was lonely, you see. I was lucky, I knew, to have a family who were prepared to tolerate me and a baby, but I used to watch them around the kitchen table, joking with each other in front of the television, the children's feet prodding their benign, grubby-jumpered father. I even envied their arguments. I would have loved someone to argue with.

  As I watched Hannah turn from a mewing, downy kitten into a beaming, affectionate toddler, I wanted the same for her. I wanted her to have a father who would love her and swing her round by her hands in a garden, carry her on his shoulders and complain, good-humouredly, about her nappies. I wanted to have someone I could talk to about her, someone who might have an opinion on whether I was feeding her the right things for her age, who might think about schools or shoes.

  I had soon found that men were not interested in women with babies - the men I knew, anyway. They were not interested in why you couldn't meet them at the pub in the evening, why you suggested the park at Sunday lunchtime. They didn't see the charms of my beautiful, fair-haired girl, just the restrictions she imposed on me. So when Steven Villiers bumped into me outside the supermarket and not only did not eye Hannah like she was something infectious, but offered to push the buggy for me, so that I could manage my shopping more easily on the short walk home, was it really any surprise that I was lost?

  He reminded me at first of the father of the family I lived with. He had the same shabby-expensive way of dressing. But that was the only similarity. Steven was compact, but gave the impression of height. He had a kind of inbuilt authority, one of those people who make you stand back slightly without quite understanding why. He was surprisingly old never to have married - a fact he put down, while looking me straight in the eye, to never having met the right person. He lived with his mother in a beautiful house at Virginia Water, the sort you see in expensive property magazines, with huge, neatly clipped hedges and a bathroom for every bedroom. He was surprised when I expressed awe at what he possessed - he was the kind of man who assumed his life was the norm, and never bothered to enquire further.

  Given his background, his assets, I was unsure for a long time what he saw in me. I wore clothes from charity shops. I was no longer wild-looking, but there was no way I could have been confused with the kind of sleek, moneyed girls he had grown up with. I had nothing to offer. When I look at photographs from that period, I now know a little better. I was beautiful. I had a kind of unworldliness, despite my situation, that men found appealing. I was without friends or support and therefore malleable. I was still emotionally giddy from my daughter's birth, anxious to see love everywhere, to bestow what I felt for her on everyone around me. I thought he was a saviour, and everything I said and did would have convinced him of that. It was probably how he saw himself then.

  The first time I went to bed with him I lay in his arms afterwards and I told him of my life, of the mistakes I had made, while he held me close, kissed the top of my head and told me I was safe. There is something remarkably seductive, if you have been alone and vulnerable, in hearing you are safe. He said he was meant to be with me, that he thought I was his mission. I was so grateful, so besotted, that I saw nothing worrying in that statement.

  Six weeks after we met he asked me to marry him. I moved in with him and his mother. My clothes became more conventional - he took me shopping - and my hair was tidier, which was more fitting in the fiancee of that kind of man. I took a new pride in my housekeeping skills, slowly adapting under the terse tutelage of my prospective mother-in-law. There were hiccups, but Hannah and I learnt together how to live under that roof. I had grown up, I told myself. I enjoyed the challenge of fitting in.

  Then, some four months later, I discovered I was pregnant. Initially Steven was shocked, but quite quickly delighted. Letty was born as it grew light on the morning of 16 April, and I thanked God, as Hannah and Steven cooed over her, that I finally had a family of my own. A proper family.

  Letty was not the most beautiful of babies - in fact, she resembled a shar pei for several months longer than she should have - but she was the most adored. I used to watch Steven's uncomplicated love for her, her gran
dmother's affectionate fussing, and wish it had been the same for Hannah. As a baby, Letty was as sweet-natured and sunny as they come.

  Perhaps it was sleep deprivation, or just the moment-to-moment nature of life with a new baby, but it wasn't until several months after Letty's birth that I realised Steven hardly noticed Hannah. Until then I had told myself he loved her, that his occasional thoughtlessness towards her was a male thing, rather than deliberate omission. I had little to go on, you see. Having been brought up by my mother, and seen so little of my grandfather, I wasn't familiar with the ways of men. Steven was a good provider - as his mother was always telling me - he knew about discipline and routines, and if Hannah frustrated him with her two-year-old tantrums and her faddiness about food, was it any surprise that he sent her to bed? Letty was so adorable - was it any surprise that fairly often, Hannah's own behaviour was seen as wanting?

  I tell myself now that I was blinded by the demands of new motherhood. That one sees what one wants to see. But in my heart I should have known. I should have grasped earlier that my daughter's increasing silence was not solely the result of adapting to a new sibling. I should have seen that my mother-in-law and Steven had become harsher with her, their criticisms more openly expressed. Mostly I should have guessed it from that woman's attitude.

  She never forgave me for saddling her son - her senior manager with prospects - with a child who wasn't his. She didn't like the fact that I had no history, as she called it. Oh, she was polite enough to start with, but she was one of those bridge-playing women, the ones with blue helmet hair and Jaeger cardigans, and everything I was screamed irresponsibility and fecklessness at her, whether I was making a lentil stew (hippie food) or letting Hannah sleep with me when she was two.

  She dared not say anything at first, when Steven and I were locked in our bubble of new love. She had led him to believe that he was the head of the family since his own father had died, and now found that she had painted herself into a corner because he would not discuss my supposed faults. Until Letty was born, when I could not meet their standards. Then my inability to cope with two small children in the manner Steven and she expected was gradually revealed. As the toys spread across the floors, and our beds remained unmade until the afternoon, my clothes wore epaulettes of baby milk and Hannah screamed in a corner over some supposed misdemeanour, my mother-in-law discovered she could say and do whatever she liked.

  Once, before it got too bad, I dared to ask Steven whether we might find somewhere of our own, whether we might be happier by ourselves, but the look he gave me was withering. 'You can barely get those girls dressed by yourself,' he said, 'let alone run a house. Do you think you'd last five minutes without my mother?'

  Looking back now, I find it hard to identify myself as that creature. In Kathleen's pictures, from which Steven was long removed, I see a strange, lost girl with hair that wasn't like hers and weird, docile clothes. Her eyes display a fearful determination not to recognise what she had got herself into. What was the alternative, after all? I had nothing - no home, no money, no support. I had two infant daughters and a man who was a father to them, prepared to forgive me for the mess I had made of my life. I had a mother-in-law who was prepared to tolerate me in her beautiful house, even though it was far beyond anything I had known. My domestic skills weren't up to much and, frankly, my manners often let them down, especially since Steven had been elected to the local council and his career at the bank was taking off.

  You don't understand how easy it is to be ground down, if you haven't been there. With his mother's help, over the years, Steven gradually grew to acknowledge my faults. Our wedding was spoken of rarely, then never. Hannah learnt to close her mouth while she ate, and that the better she behaved the less likely she was to be scolded. I learnt that if you wore long sleeves the mothers at playgroup would stop remarking on your bruises.

  I had grown up believing that that kind of thing only happened in the most desperate houses. I thought it was about poverty, and lack of education. With Steven, I learnt that it was about my own inadequacy, my failure to repay the trust he had placed in me, my inability to make myself look half-way decent and, when it was really bad, my uselessness in bed.

  The first time he hurt me I was so shocked I assumed it had been an accident. We were upstairs and the girls were crying, fighting over some cheap plastic toy. I had been so distracted by them that I had forgotten the iron, which was burning through his shirt. He had come into the room, furious at the noise, yelled at the girls, and then, when he saw the shirt, he cuffed me, as if I were a dog.

  'Ow!' I exclaimed. 'That hurt!' He turned to me with an expression of disbelief on his face, as if I hadn't understood it was meant to. And as I stood, holding my throbbing ear, he walked briskly downstairs, as if nothing had happened.

  He apologised later, blamed work stress or something like it, but sometimes I think that that first time was a tipping point for him. That once he had crossed the line, it was easier to cross it again. Sometimes we went months with nothing happening, but there were times when almost anything I did - peeling potatoes wastefully, not polishing shoes - prompted a fist or a hard hand. Never a fight - he was too clever for that - just enough to tell me who was boss.

  By the time I realised what I had to do I was a shadowy creature, a woman who had learnt it was best not to offer an opinion, answer back or draw attention to myself, that scars fade quickly, even if their memory lingers. But then I looked at my daughter's face on the day he hit her, hard, for failing to take her shoes off before she reached the pale green hall carpet, and my resolve began to return.

  I began to stash money. I would ask for an amount to buy a coat for Letty - knowing he could refuse his daughter nothing - then would show off something immaculate I had bought from the charity shop, pocketing the difference. I squirrelled away money from the supermarket shopping. I was good at living on little, having done it for years. And they suspected nothing, because I had become such a downtrodden thing.

  By then I hated him. The fog of my depression lifted, and I saw clearly what had happened to me. I saw his coldness, his arrogance, his blind ambition. I saw his determination to ensure my elder daughter knew she was a second-class citizen in his house, even at the tender age of six. I saw that other families did not live like we did and, finally, that his class, his background and financial position did not prevent what he was doing from being abuse. I saw, with relief, that my daughters loved each other regardless, that their tenderness, games and bickering were those of every other set of siblings. I saw Letty's plump brown arms linked casually round her sister's neck, heard her high, lisping voice telling Hannah stories about what she had done at playschool, begging her to 'pretty up' her hair; I saw Hannah, at night, snuggled in with Letty as she read her a story, their blonde hair entwined, their nighties a pastel tangle. He had not poisoned them yet.

  But seeing the truth of my situation did not help me - I could leave with Hannah, I thought, and they would barely care. (Half the time he told me I was a waste of space anyway.) But they would never hand over Letty. In one argument, when I had threatened to leave with them both, he had laughed at me. 'What kind of judge is going to let you look after my daughter?' he said. 'Look at what you have to offer, Elizabeth. Look at your history - squats and goodness knows what - your lack of education or prospects, and then look at what she'll get with me. You wouldn't have a bloody hope.'

  I suspect he was sleeping with someone else by then. His physical demands on me were far fewer - a source of relief. He had a schizophrenic attitude towards me. If I dressed nicely he told me I was ugly, if I approached him with affection, that I was a turn-off. If another man looked at me, even if I was dressed simply in jeans and a loose shirt, he held my face tightly between his hands and told me that no other man would ever lay a hand on me. On the night when his work colleague made an admiring comment about my legs he forced himself on me so that I could barely walk the next day.

  What kept me going was t
he money mounting up in the lining of my green coat. The hours in which they thought I spent mindlessly ironing or washing up or sitting with the girls in the park, but in which I sat, the peaceful expression on my face belying my burning intent, plotting escape.

  They were creatures of habit. Every Tuesday and Thursday she would play bridge. For years, on Thursday and Friday evenings he 'went to his club' - a euphemism for the other woman - and on Saturdays he played golf. I cherished those Thursday evenings, when I knew I had a few precious hours alone with the girls to laugh, run around, be silly and remember who I was before the sound of a key in the door could leave me silent and cowed.

  Then, one Thursday, Steven came back early and found the letter I was writing to Kathleen, telling her the truth about what he had done to me. After his initial rage was spent, I suspect he told his mother I was not to be left alone: after that, whenever I was in the house, so was one of them. And whenever I went out, they would find a reason to take Letty to the park, or keep her at home. From that point I was never alone with my two girls. I think he knew by then he was losing control; that letter to Kathleen (thank goodness I hadn't addressed it) had shocked him, not only because it showed I might have the courage to tell someone what he had done, but because it laid his actions bare, in print, and they were not pretty. Until then I think he had convinced himself that his behaviour was reasonable, that his beatings were an inevitable consequence of my failures. To see the cruel words, the split lips and broken fingers in print, to see his actions for what they were - the behaviour of a bully - must have been unconscionable for him.

  I bided my time. I had become patient. I just needed to get to Kathleen. I could work out everything else from there. Her home was a mirage I hugged to myself on the nights when the darkness of my life was overwhelming. He knew only that I had a distant aunt. He had no idea where she lived.