Tarnished (12 page)

‘And you see,’ he went on, as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘I’ve got this nice little boat now and I don’t want it rocked.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, too aware of the angry tremble in her voice.

‘Now there’s no need to take that tone, Margaret. It’s interesting to see how you’ve turned out. What they’ve done with you.’

‘And?’ she said, holding his look.

He let his eyes drift to the view of the pool again. She was certain she was a disappointment to him. He would have liked her straight in every sense: married, nicely groomed, with a degree and some sort of business acumen. She had failed him on every count.

And part of her was glad.

‘Well then,
Daddy
?’ She stood up and held out her arms. ‘How have I done in your complete and utter absence, then?’ she said, her voice catching on an edge of something gritty.

‘Oh, sit down and keep your hair on, Margaret,’ he said, raising one eyebrow at her but keeping the rest of his body very still.

‘Peg. My name is Peg now.’

He laughed until the tears ran down his face. For a second, she thought he might be having another heart attack. For a second she thought:
good
.

Then he stopped laughing.

‘Peg? What kind of name is that, Margaret? A peg is a
thing
, not a
name
. Anyway, what you don’t know is, ever since you left that bungalow, I’ve been looking out for you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve got these people, just to keep a little check, let me know what you’re up to.’

‘What?’ Peg sat down, her mouth open.

‘I’m worried about you. Now you’re grown-up I want you to get a chance at your own life.’

‘What do you mean?’ Peg could hear that her own voice was now raised.

‘It’s complicated. Look: I had no choice but to leave you with them, and—’

‘What were you in prison for?’

Raymond stopped in his tracks. For the first time – apart from when he had been choking – she thought she could see behind his defences. Then, in a beat, he checked himself, stood up and moved round so that he was next to her, peering down into her face.

‘This is how it is, right?’ he said, quietly. ‘I don’t talk about the past. I don’t even
think
about it. I apply the same rules to your aunt and your grandmother too. And your mother, rest her soul, come to that. And no amount of questions or requests from you are going to get me to change my mind.
And
you are certainly
not
going to get me going back to that place.’

He straightened up and examined his preternaturally neat fingernails, then he looked back at her, his voice level. ‘So you can save your energy by not going on at me. Understood?’ He turned his back on her and returned to his chair, as if that were the end of it.

‘But—’ Peg jumped to her feet again and hit her chair so that it spun like the magazine of a gun. ‘What about
me
? What about how
I
feel?’

He sat entirely still and looked at her, absorbing her outburst so that the energy of it fell to nothing and her hands dropped to her sides. Then he spoke. ‘You don’t know the half of it. And we’re going to keep it that way. All right? And that is how we are going to deal with this issue of “
how you feel
”
.
’ He used his fingers to describe the inverted commas.

‘But—’

‘If you can’t play it by my rules, then you can’t play at all. Understand?’

‘It isn’t a game, Raymond!’

He shot her a warning glance.

‘It’s real life,’ Peg went on. ‘And it’s about your own mother, and your own sister, and your own daughter, and if you can’t take that on, well then, sorry, but that’s that. We have nothing more to say to each other.’

Astounded at herself – no,
pleased
with herself – Peg turned and crossed the room to go.

But there was no door handle, no way of letting herself out. She looked back at him. ‘Open the door, please,’ she said, with as much dignity as she could muster.

‘But I haven’t finished,’ he said from the far side of the room.

‘You’ve said all I need to hear. Now open this door, please.’

‘After you’ve heard this, girly.’ Raymond spread his arms wide, gripping the edges of his desk. ‘And I want you to think seriously about what I’m going to say, because it could do you a lot of good. I want to make you an offer. As you can see, I’ve not done too badly in life. I left when you was what, five?’

‘I was six.’

‘Six, then. Look. I know you’re angry at the moment. I can understand that. I don’t blame you.’

‘That’s very big of you.’ Peg felt her mouth pursing with anger.

He waved his hand, brushing her comment aside. But he chose not to see that in doing so he had only fanned the flame of her fury.

‘I want to make it up to you,’ he went on. ‘If you can leave the past behind, let it lie, then we can move forward. You live in a shitty rented flat above a Paki in the arse end of South London.’

‘You know where I live?’

He smiled and ignored her. ‘Well I’d like to get you a little place closer into town. Something more comfortable, where you don’t have to worry about the bills. Pay for you to go to uni, so you don’t have to do this library job.’ He said the last two words as if they might have been ‘dog turd’. ‘And an allowance so you can, I don’t know, get yourself some nice clothes, a proper haircut. That kind of shit. Keep away from that bungalow.’

‘Why this, so suddenly?’

‘Call it making amends.’

‘You think you can buy me?’ Peg dug her fingers into the flesh of her thighs in an attempt to short-circuit the outrage coursing through her body.

‘Oh Jesus, don’t tell me she’s one of those don’t-care-about-money types,’ Raymond appealed to an imaginary audience. ‘One of those let’s-camp-and-show-the-bankers-what-baddies-we-think-they-are hippies? Jesus Christ. My own flesh and blood.’

‘Keep your money. “Dad”.’

‘Don’t be an idiot, girl. Don’t bite off your nose to spite your face. Tell you what: why don’t you sleep on it, eh?’

‘Please will you open the door?’

‘Take this first.’ He held out a business card and waited until Peg crossed the room to take it from his hand. It was thick, glossy purple card, with his name, phone number and email address reversed out in a slanting, looped font, and his club logo – the word ‘Thatchers’ displayed in letters created from naked female silhouettes.

‘Good girl. Now even if you don’t see sense while you’re here, you can still get in touch with me when you finally come round. OPEN!’ He barked this last word so suddenly that Peg jumped, nearly dropping the card.

The door swung out with barely a whisper. Raymond took his cigar from where it had been resting on the ashtray, put his feet up on his desk and watched as Peg left his office with as much dignity as she could muster.

Once out of his sight, she fled, nearly colliding with Manuela as she crossed the hallway from the living room to the kitchen with brandy, glasses and ashtrays stacked on a tray.

‘
Perdona, Señorita
,’ Manuela said.

Mumbling an apology, Peg went upstairs to her fancy bedroom and threw herself on the king-size bed, where she sobbed until her face felt like a full and soggy sponge.

Much later, unable to sleep, she sat on her balcony staring at the stupidly lit pool. The lights in Raymond’s offices were all out, so he was probably sleeping soundly in some over-draped cushioned bed, happy he had said his piece.

Something was buzzing in her mind and she couldn’t forget about it.

He knew where she lived. He knew where she worked.

He must have been keeping
very
close tabs on her.

She thought about the white vans that had been popping up everywhere she went. She hadn’t been imagining things. She had been followed: trailed like an animal.

That chilling thought alone made her want to run away from the house and away from Raymond.

There was nothing here for her anyway. She had been a fool even to consider that she might get anywhere with him.

Her decision made, she went back into the room, stuffed her few belongings back into her rucksack and hitched it up on to her back. Then, as quietly as she could, she headed down the stairs and slipped out of the front door, hearing it lock shut behind her.

She set out down the porch steps and cut across the lawn. She had half-covered the distance to the first gate, which led to the orchard, when the whole lawn lit up as if it were a stage and she the only actor on it.

Stuck like a rabbit in headlights, unable to move, she looked back to the house in terror as she heard mechanical whirring, barking and clanking coming from the side of the house.

Almost instantly, two Rottweilers, teeth bared, muscles glistening under their glossy, floodlit coats, steamed out from behind the bushes. In an instant, Peg weighed up her chances of outrunning them and realised, panic gripping at her chest, that they were virtually nil.

As the dogs pelted across the lawn towards her, their eyes glowing with red, she cast around wildly for a stick, or a stone, or some sort of weapon. Lights had started to go on in the upstairs rooms of the house.

Then, out of nowhere, the words came to her. The words she had heard shouted in the driveway the day before. She stood her ground and looked firmly at the beasts.

‘
Cállate, Atilla y Bronson! Cállate, Atilla y Bronson!
’

The dogs stopped as if they had run into a wall. Then, obediently, they sat. If Peg hadn’t been in such a state, she might have laughed at their evident confusion. She reached into her bag for the last of Loz’s granola bars and threw them on the ground as far away as possible from where she was standing.

‘Here, boys,
Atilla y Bronson
.’

The dogs loped over towards her and bent their heads to the grass to lap up the granola bars.

‘The dog’s bollocks,’ Peg said, smiling with relief as she slipped into the trees at the far edge of the lawn. ‘Thank you, Loz.’ She reached cover just in time to avoid being seen by Raymond, as he appeared at the front door in his dressing gown, a gun in his hand.

‘Atilla, Bronson, what the fuck you playing at?’ he said. ‘What you got there, you bloody softies?’

His gun still at the ready, he walked over to join the animals. ‘Was it more bloody rabbits setting it all off again, boys? We’ll have to have a word with Kitten to get it sorted.’

With one hand on the biggest dog’s head, he scanned the bushes. Peg stayed completely still until, satisfied there was no intruder, he had taken the dogs back to their quarters to the side of the house. Then she pelted to the first gate – almost jumping right over it – and darted through the orchard towards the big front wall. Twice she fell and twice she picked herself up, scared that Raymond might decide to take a second look for what had disturbed the dogs.

When she reached the wall, panting and shaking, she realised it was far too high to climb. Desperately, she hauled over a nearby wheelie bin, climbed wobblingly up on it and lobbed her rucksack over to the other side. Then she hurriedly picked her way over the barbed wire and broken glass on top of the wall. Her pulse racing, she finally let herself down on to the silent road on the other side.

Pulling her rucksack back onto her shoulders, she set off down the mountain towards the stretch of moonlit sea, in the direction of the orange glow in the sky she hoped was Malaga.

It was nearly dawn when she arrived at the airport. She rather guiltily spun a story at the airline desk about her grandmother being ill, and managed to change to the early-morning flight for just a small administration fee.

It was only when she was visiting the lavatory in the departures lounge that she realised she had a nasty gash in her knee. She sat on the toilet and got out the small first-aid kit she always carried with her and cleaned and plastered the wound. She would have put a couple of stitches in, but she had left her suturing kit at home, because needles weren’t allowed on planes.

Night-worker Loz was still fast asleep when Peg got home, oblivious to everything that had happened since they had said goodbye at the airport. Peg slipped into the sheets beside her, snuggled up to her lovely, welcoming warm back and fell into a deep, obliterating sleep.

Twelve

Peg slept till about midday, when the smell of coffee pulled her from under the duvet. Dragging on the old, rose-patterned dressing gown she had worn as a child and which somehow still fitted her, she stumbled into the living room, where she wrapped her arms round Loz, who was whizzing up pancake batter.

‘What is it?’ Loz said, switching off the food processor and turning to take Peg’s face in her hands. ‘Why are you back so soon?’

She led Peg to the sofa, where she teased out every detail of what had happened the day before, stroking and kissing her tears away. Then she fetched her a cup of coffee and continued making the breakfast feast.

‘What a bastard,’ she said as she slipped a ladleful of pancake batter into the frying pan. ‘And prison. I can’t believe no one told you. What were Doll and Jean thinking?’

‘I don’t know,’ Peg said. She was miserable and hungry, but glad to be back home.

‘We’ll go over there and get it out of him.’ Loz flipped the pancakes over. ‘The whole story. It’s outrageous that he expects you not to want to know what happened. This is about you, not him.’

‘I don’t think he sees it that way. And there’s no way I’m going back there.’ The thought of standing behind Loz as she thumped on Raymond’s colonnaded front door made Peg feel sick. ‘And it’s like he had this portcullis that slammed shut as soon as I started talking about the past or Nan or Aunty Jean . . .’

She frowned and twisted her fingers together. ‘And he’s just full of hate. The way he talked about poor Aunty Jean.’

‘But “poor Aunty Jean” kept you in the dark all these years.’

‘I suppose she thought she was protecting me. And the way I’m feeling now, she probably had a point.’

‘For God’s sake,’ Loz said, retrieving the soda bread from the toaster. Soda bread! Peg had never heard of such a thing before she met Loz. She held on to the thought as a consolation.