Her Living Image (15 page)

“And Jacky came to fetch you.”

“Yes. I’m not – he can’t come here, can he? I’m not going back again.”

“It’s all right,” said Clare. “He can’t come here. He can’t find out the address. You can stay as long as you need to.” She hesitated. “Can I
– do you mind, Maria, if I just look at your neck – to see if he’s left bruises? You see, we might need a doctor to testify that you’ve been hurt.”

Maria gave the baby to her daughter. She gathered her straggly hair into a bun at the back of her head, holding it with her left hand while she pulled down the polo neck of her thin jumper. Her
neck was mottled with bruises: several that Carolyn could see were the exact shape and size of thumb prints, yellow, dark purple and red. The woman sat quite still, displaying her neck without
embarrassment. Carolyn felt sick.

“Thank you,” said Clare gently. “I think you ought to be examined by a doctor, Maria. Shall I make an appointment for you?” Maria nodded. She seemed limp now –
exhausted.

“How old is Cathy?” The little girl was still holding the baby, cradling it and smiling into its face.

“Five.”

“Does she go to school?” Maria nodded. “Well we’ll get her into school with the children here, for the time being. We’ll get her started tomorrow. Have you got
enough clothes for them, Maria? What did you bring with you?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. I were afraid of him waking – I didn’t bring anything.”

“Does he work?”

She nodded, yes.

“So he’ll be out today? You could get what you need – pack a case. It’s all right, I’ll come with you –” as Maria started to protest.
“You’ll need some clothes for you and the children, some things of your own. . . .”

As Clare went on arranging things in her calm quiet voice, Carolyn lost concentration. She heard Clare talking about the DHSS, a lawyer, an injunction, all sorts of different things, while Maria
sat silent in front of her, head drooping slightly on her injured neck.

Carolyn found the days at the Refuge terrible. She felt quite inadequate to help anyone there – and almost scared of them, as if the pain and horror of their lives were
contagious. It was so ordinary. They all took it for granted; men hitting their wives and children, men raping their wives and trying to kill them. The women lived with it – some of them came
here for a week and then went back to it. Often when women rang the beds were full and no more could come in. There was nowhere else for them to go.

Although Carolyn told herself she respected Clare, and the others, for the work they were doing, she was repelled by it. She hadn’t known. . . . The women’s stories and miseries
haunted her, filled her dreams; the desperation of their situations made Carolyn herself feel trapped and frantic, so that she dreaded going to the Refuge and was tongue-tied when her help was most
needed. Their injuries seemed to violate her.

She tried to hide her feelings by concentrating, as she had done at the Red House, on the children. The younger ones needed looking after while the mothers were busy, and the distress of the
children, although more naked than that of their mothers, was less terrible. Because they could still be comforted or distracted, by a sweet and a story. She could try, with them.

She hated going to the Refuge and she dreaded letting Clare know that. She felt she could no longer trust her own ideas, the disagreements she had had with Clare, Bryony and
Sue must be due to her own ignorance. How could she presume to argue with them when she knew nothing – nothing – and they lived and worked in situations like this? She was humiliated by
her own ignorance, felt herself losing control completely over the ideas she had begun to hammer out and grasp. Either side of the Refuge, time closed in, with meetings, the children to be looked
after, books to be read, until she felt light-headed with the sense of not coming to grips with anything, of being forced to spin like a top.

In between feeling guilty and inferior to the other women, she felt resentful. Her resentment saved her. She had been forced to go to the Refuge. They expected her to do it. She knew she
didn’t want to. And she
had
made a choice; she had chosen not to go home, she had chosen to live here and cope with sharks between the furniture and Bryony’s contempt, in order
to purchase a freedom . . . to choose what she would do next. At times this was crystal clear. At others, she despised herself for being selfish, even wicked, for not being able to help people who
needed her support so much.

Her discontent came to a head with the beginning of spring. During the winter there had been near-continual snow and rain, then in late March there was a week of mad blustering winds, with
racing cloud and fitful sun.

“March showers bring April flowers,” Carolyn recited to herself. Or was it April showers that brought May flowers? She was restless, full of ineffectual undirected anger. After
being at the Refuge on Saturday she woke early on Sunday morning, head crowded with things that needed thinking about and sorting out. Her windows were rattling in the wind, patches of sunlight and
shade sped across the view. Up in the hills it was like a searchlight, like the revolving beam from a lighthouse moving on then reappearing, light, shade, light. The hugeness of the world out there
only served to increase her sense of confinement and frustration.

She went down to make a drink, and as she turned the light on in the dingy kitchen a dark thing shot across the floor to disappear under the dresser. Mice. Carolyn froze. Then she stepped
quickly on to the nearest chair and stood there, listening. Silence. It was waiting for her to go. She jumped down and ran out of the kitchen, shutting the door carefully behind her. Why should
they stay in the kitchen, though? They’re probably in all the rooms. Running over our beds at night. She remembered the mousetrap Clare had given her. She’d thought it was a joke!
Hurriedly she unbolted the french windows and pushed them open. The sun was shining brilliantly, for a moment, and the wind rushed full in her face. She ran to the hall for her coat, then went out,
crossing the poor battered garden. The wind and sun seemed to make everything race, to make her excited about something she didn’t know, like a child.

The winter rain and snow had beaten down the weeds to a mulch of sodden brown stems, through which the bricks and rubbish on the ground protruded. Striding away from the house, Carolyn stubbed
her toe badly on a brick end and had to sit down to nurse it. There was a log beside the blackened site of an old bonfire. As she sat rubbing her foot a sense of the ground around her intruded on
her anger; a sense of the garden as a place, with its own shape and past. How had it got like this? There were bricks and stones everywhere. Something must have been demolished. An old outhouse,
perhaps. Bits of broken glass sparkled in the sunlight. She picked up a piece of pottery and turned it over. It was a long sharp fragment of a willow-pattern saucer, three little blue figures
crossing the hump-backed bridge. Idly she began to stab at the wet ground with it, but it struck something hard straight away. She scraped the earth back and saw something very dark blue –
china or glass, buried there.

The wind in her face was good. As sunlight moved over she closed her eyes and put her head back. What am I going to do? She felt as if she never wanted to go back into the house, as if it had
tied her with a million cobweb fine lines, as the Lilliputians had trapped Gulliver, and that she could not get free. The piece of saucer, scratting and scraping, had cleared a length of blue
glass. It was an unusually deep blue. Abandoning the saucer, she scrabbled at the moist earth with her fingers. The gritty soil filled the cracks behind her fingernails, and the smell of newly
uncovered earth reminded her of her father. It was a bottle, an old-fashioned one. She prised it out of its little grave and wiped it clean. It was very dark blue, quite perfect, about six inches
long. The soil clung to one side, stuck in the roughness of the design. Letters, “
NOT
. . .
TO
. . .
BE
. . .
TAKEN
.” She cradled it between her palms with satisfaction. How nice to discover. How long has it been here? Twenty years? Fifty? It was full of earth. She turned it
upside-down and shook it. But it was packed, “
NOT TO BE TAKEN
.” Like Alice in Wonderland. Why should they sell bottles of “
NOT TO BE
TAKEN
”? It must be for murderers, she thought, and smiled at the house. Three spoonfuls in everybody’s tea. There’s probably more under the soil.

She started to scrape again with the shard of pottery. The feeble sun was almost warm when it came out. I’ll gouge the soil out of it with a knitting needle, when I go in. I don’t
want to go in.

The clear day stretched before her; when she walked back into the house her day would be filled. Stay here, then. Stay here. Stay here and dig the garden. Make a place to plant those seedlings.
It was such a good idea that she couldn’t think anything for a moment – as if someone else had suggested it to her, and she needed to digest it.

I could stay out all day. I’d have an excuse. It’s worth doing – it needs doing. I could grow more things. I could stay here. They’ll laugh at you.

Well let them. She flung the fragment of saucer as far as she could, watching it spinning against the sky. Then she balanced the bottle on the log, and went to the greenhouse.

Taking up the big garden fork in the corner, she went straight out again. Where to begin? Instinctively she headed for the fence at the far end, wanting to be as far away from the house as
possible. Selecting a clear-looking spot she jabbed the fork into the earth and stood on the crossbar. It stuck, shivering in the ground, the prongs buried to a depth of about three inches. Then it
wobbled under her weight and tilted forwards. She jumped off and tried again – same effect. It felt as if the prongs were meeting solid stone. Using the fork like a pick she chipped away at
the soil. Brick. She scraped away trails of earth to reveal the dark orange rectangle of a whole brick. She knelt and prised it from its bed. In the damp earth its indentation was like a casting
mould, clear and sharp-cornered, composed of earth and living things, tiny translucent snails and a pale slug. She threw the brick over to the bonfire site and attacked with the fork again. Again,
it struck something solid.

After unearthing four bricks, a milk bottle, and an unidentifiable piece of metal, it was possible to turn over a forkful of earth on that spot. If the whole garden was covered in such a layer
of rubbish, she would be mad to dig it. She walked a few feet and stabbed at the earth with the fork. It hit something hard. A few yards further – again. Each random spot she tried was the
same. The ground was solid with rubble.

Bitterly disappointed, she sat on the log. It would take weeks of back-breaking work. Crawling round on your hands and knees, prising up brick ends. Mad. There are enough bricks to build a
house. And the soil’s probably useless anyway. The french windows banged and Clare came out into the garden, holding a piece of toast. She walked quickly over the uneven ground.

“Hello. Nice day. Have you taken leave of your senses?”

Carolyn nodded.

“How long’ve you been up?”

“Don’t know. Since eight.”

“Two hours. Well, at that rate –” she indicated the square foot of dug earth, and the fork abandoned beside it, “I guess it’ll take you – ooh – three
years?”

“Ha ha,” said Carolyn sourly. “Look, I found this.” She passed the bottle to Clare.

“That’s nice. Victorian blue. Lovely. Want some toast?” She handed it to Carolyn, who ate in silence.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know.” Carolyn chewed a mouthful of toast, then said, “There’s mice in the kitchen.”

“I like mice,” said Clare.

“They’re dirty. They carry diseases.”

“No more than a dog or cat.” Clare watched her eating for a moment. “I’m going to clean up this morning. I’ve been busy.”

“I know.” Carolyn was consumed with guilt.

Silence. “What’s the matter?”

Carolyn gouged some earth out from under her nails. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I can suggest lots of things.”

Suddenly, unaccountably, Clare reminded her of her mother.

“But I don’t want to do what you suggest.”

Clare blew a raspberry and stood up. “Dig the garden then.” She went back into the house.

Carolyn worked in the garden all that day. It was slow, back-breaking work, but it gave her great satisfaction. She enjoyed uncovering a corner of brick enough to insert the trowel blade beneath
it and twist, and prise it slowly out of its bed. She enjoyed picking the loosened brick up and weighing it in her right hand before swinging her arm to sling it on to the rubble pile. She liked
scraping the dirt away from unknown objects, trying to guess what they would be. She worked like an automaton, and her mind was as drowned out by it as her speech would have been in a noisy
factory. Scratch, clear, scrape; stick, twist, heave; lift, weigh, sling. A large blister came on the heel of her right palm, from forcing the trowel handle down to prise bricks up. Her spine, neck
and shoulders ached dully, but after a while she could almost relish the aches, as if each physical pain was another blotter for the press of ideas in her head. She worked crouching down, and the
infinitesimal pace of her labours made her feel like an ant, toiling away earnestly at a microscopic task. It was satisfying to be an ant. She wasn’t thinking at all; hands preoccupied with
textures, grainy soil and rough brick, smooth stone, slimy wetness of the odd slug or worm.

By the evening there were two damp heaps of rubble and a cleared row of just over five yards. A sharp cold wind had sprung up with the fading light, removing the sweaty warmth of her exertions
and letting her know that she was cold and exhausted. Her back ached, her hand was blistered. She was starving. She felt light-headedly happy. She had escaped – for a whole day she had
escaped even the thought of the Refuge.