Tarnished (9 page)

Peg closed her eyes. Loz’s constant challenging of her was a good thing, she supposed. It forced her to swim her life, rather than just float it, which is what she had been doing before they met. In fact, how they got together said it all about the two of them.

Halfway between relieved and devastated about Ed – who two weeks earlier had pounced on someone else while they were at a party together – Peg had been at one of her boss Marianne’s library team-building meals. It was being held all the way in town at Seed because Marianne was friendly with Cara the owner, and a generous discount had been promised. As Peg tucked into her quinoa-lime salad, she noticed a beautiful young chef working in the open-plan kitchen. She couldn’t keep her eyes off this tiny, tattooed firework of a woman as she darted from grill to pass to orders board, keeping tabs on what everyone was doing.

Peg told herself she could dream on. This was someone completely out of her league. Yet, to her surprise and delight, the morning after, that very same beautiful young chef approached her at the library desk with a pile of real crime books.

‘What a coincidence,’ Peg had said as they spent her lunch break in Starbucks, her stomach churning with a sort of excitement she had never felt before.

Loz later confessed – when Peg had acted on her suggestion and bunked off sick for the afternoon to take her back to her bed – that it had been no coincidence at all. The night before, she had felt the gentle presence of the striking, tall woman at the table full of nerds so strongly that she could barely concentrate on her work. Thanks to Marianne’s connection with her own boss, tracking her down had been simple.

But even though, a year later, she and Loz now shared a life and a flat, Peg had not managed to broach the subject of their relationship with the other two important women in her life, Doll and Jean. She had DNA in common with them, and had grown up under their care, but she was so different to them that she might as well have come from another planet. It was something her father – because, despite her protestations to Loz, of course she knew it was he who had paid for her school fees – had bought for her. By sending her away to private school, he had made her something very different to the person she might have been. Sometimes she thought that in doing so he had created some kind of Frankenstein’s monster out of her. But mostly she acknowledged that something had been set free in her that otherwise would have remained hidden. Like, for example, the way she was comfortable with the fact that she was drawn to girls. Boys had just never really occurred to her.

Looking at it objectively, she had to be grateful to him for that, at least.

‘Open your eyes, Peg.’ Loz’s hands were again encircling her own. ‘I’m sorry.’

Peg looked at her, then, smiling, she fished in her pocket for her voice recorder. ‘Can I have that for the record?’

Smiling, Loz leaned toward the mouthpiece. ‘I’m sorry, Peg.’

‘Good!’ Peg said. ‘I’m going to keep that forever and listen to it whenever you piss me off.’

‘I
am
sorry, Peg. But sometimes I just feel like you edge me out. You know?’

‘Look. I’m sorry too,’ Peg said. ‘But I’ve got to do this on my own.’

‘But what if you get really upset? What if you need me there?’

‘I’ll phone.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’

Nine

The taxi dropped Peg off by a massive pair of gates set in a tall wall that stretched as far as she could see each side. She watched as the car drove away, bumping over the dirt track and blooming dust clouds in its wake. Its driver had been singularly uncommunicative, only grunting when Peg showed him the address, and holding out his hand at the end for his fare.

Her knees were still a little wobbly from the journey she had just endured, first on a motorway so petrifyingly fast and crammed with traffic that she had found herself gripping the back of the seat in front of her until her knuckles turned white, then on a switchback road climbing up out of the town and into a landscape of sheer drops down to irrigated fields, greenhouses, palm trees and cacti.

At least the fear that she might die any second had taken her mind off what lay at the end of the journey. But now she was standing in front of her father’s house, she had to put up quite a fight to stop herself running away.

She was on her own.

She couldn’t even call Loz for moral support. When her plane landed she had, as promised, composed a sweet little ‘arrived safely, thinking of you’ message for Loz. But she had never taken her basic, no-frills phone abroad before, and it told her it had no reception.

Heart pounding, she tried the gates, but they were locked. There was an entry phone in the gatepost, with a camera on a pole about six feet above her head.

She pushed the call button and waited, holding her face up, trying to draw strength from the sun. Nothing came back at her but the rustle of leaves in the still-warm breeze, broken occasionally by the odd buzz of a late cicada.

She was just about to press the button again when there was a crackle and a woman’s voice issued from the speaker grille underneath.

‘Hello? Can I help you?’ An exaggeration around the ‘o’s showed up a failed attempt to mask the Estuarine mud of her accent. Jean used the same voice when she was on the telephone.

Peg leaned in so that her mouth was right against the mesh. ‘Is this where Raymond Thwaites lives?’

‘Who is it wants to know?’

Peg took a deep breath and plunged in.

‘It’s Peg. Margaret. Raymond Thwaites’s daughter.’

‘Oh,’ the woman said, drawing it out into several syllables. Then she fell silent.

‘Hello?’ Peg said.

There was no response.

‘Hello?’

Eventually, just as Peg had started to scan the wall for climbing possibilities, the entryphone croaked back into action.

‘Look up so’s I can see you,’ a new, male voice said.

Unsmilingly, Peg looked up at the camera.

‘Jesus Christ,’ the man said. ‘It
is
you.’ There was a rustle and crackle at his end, as if he were putting his hand over the microphone. ‘It’s her all right.’ Then he sighed. ‘Well, you’d better come in then, Margaret.’

A buzzer sounded and the gate swung open. Peg picked up her rucksack and walked through, along a smooth driveway leading through some sort of orchard. On the other side of the trees, a vast, emerald lawn gave way to an enormous, spanking-new villa, sparkling white and pink in the afternoon sunshine, soaring columns surrounding a double-width front door. The scale and brightness dazzled her and made her feel as if, with every step she took, she was walking on a tightrope that was bending further and further towards the ground.

As she got closer to the house, the air filled with the sound of dogs barking, chains rattling and clanging metal.

Peg froze.

‘
Cállate, Atilla y Bronson!
’ a gruff voice shouted from somewhere behind the house and instantly the noise faded into a couple of whimpers.

Composing herself once more, Peg crossed a terrace of salmon-coloured crazy paving that looked like a melted strawberry milkshake. From somewhere over the back of the house, she could faintly hear the sort of music you might get in a hotel lobby. The driveway was surrounded by huge shrubs bearing highly scented, waxy pink flowers. Their sweet smell, which reminded Peg of candyfloss, didn’t quite mask the sour aroma of sewage which percolated thickly through the air.

The front door swung open to reveal a lot of gold worn by an overweight grey-haired man in a pink-and-white striped shirt and straining white chinos. A cigar protruded from the corner of his mouth.

If this was Raymond, he didn’t look a bit as she had imagined – not the faintly glamorous picture built from Doll’s glowing account, nor the fine catch poor Carleen lost to her mother.

He was fatter, older, smaller and on an altogether more human scale.

He was, in short, a disappointment.

Although she still had to fight the urge to flee, with him standing so unimpressively in front of her, her task looked a little bit more doable: she thought she could see the type of man he was.

‘So. Margaret. Well then,’ he said looking her up and down – but not, she noticed, in the eye. ‘My, haven’t you grown, gel.’ His voice – at once highly pitched and gruff, in accent every bit as South London as his mother and sister – gave nothing away. But the weakish lines of his face couldn’t disguise the shock he was clearly feeling.

‘Hello, Dad,’ Peg said, surprising herself. She had decided she was going to call him Raymond, but the other word just slipped out. She put down her rucksack, stepped forward and held out her hand, but he took the cigar out of his mouth, opened his arms wide, then enfolded her in a tight but awkward hug. As he held his face against her chest – he was shorter than her by about four or five inches – she thought she heard him sigh.

He smelled of coal-tar soap, tobacco and alcohol.

After a thankfully short while, where she had to work hard not to stiffen under his embrace, he stood back and looked at her.

‘You’re tall,’ he said.

‘Yep.’

‘Six foot?’

‘Six one.’

‘Fuck me. Mind you,’ he waved his cigar in the air, ‘your mother was tall, too. But not that tall. Leave your bag. I’ll get the girl to take it in for you. Well then. You’ve caught us on the hop a bit. Come on through and meet Caroline and Paulie.’

Caroline and Paulie. Must be the new wife and son. Her stepmother and half-brother, Peg supposed. Her head was bursting with all the new information she was having to process. She wondered again if she couldn’t just go home and forget all about this.

As she followed him through the marble hallway, Peg caught her reflection in one of the many immaculately polished mirrors lining the walls. She felt like a Greggs bun in Harrods food hall, a Primark T-shirt on a Versace catwalk, a mis-shelved library book.

Raymond opened a pair of double doors and led Peg into a vast living room. Two squashy white leather sofas the size of lorries sat in front of a monolithic stone fireplace and the whole of the back wall was glass, looking out onto a terraced swimming pool as big as the old baths Peg tried to visit three times a week back at home.

She thought of the grim little bungalow in Tankerton and the injustice of it all made her nostrils flare. It was obscene how this man had deserted his own mother and sister.

The pool steamed in the November air. In its middle, frolicking on a Li-Lo, was a small blond boy with an alarmingly deep suntan. On a brown wicker seating unit curving round a matching circular glass-topped table, an equally mahogany-coloured woman sat underneath a glowing patio heater. She was smoking a cigarette and looked a little on edge.

Raymond slid open the glass window and the woman and boy looked round. The low-level music Peg had heard from the driveway was in fact Rod Stewart, crooning through speakers on the terrace.

The woman stood quickly, stubbed out her cigarette, took off her vast tortoiseshell-and-gold sunglasses and extended her hand. ‘You must be Margaret. I’m Caroline. Hello, my darling.’ It was the same voice Peg had heard at the gate: the type of girlish tone that sits uneasily on a middle-aged woman.

‘Hi,’ Peg said, noticing the rock of diamond on the third finger of the left hand wielding the sunglasses.

‘And this is Paulie,’ Raymond said, lifting a towelling robe from the back of the seating unit and taking it to the pool where he held it out for the boy, who swung himself up and onto the side. ‘Come and meet Margaret, Paulie.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ the boy said, nodding his head rather formally, but keeping his distance.

‘He’s a special fella,’ Raymond said, his eyes shining, his voice catching slightly. ‘One in a million.’

There was a brief silence while Raymond rubbed the towel over the little boy. Peg shifted from foot to foot, fighting hard to stop her first-ever sibling emotion from being jealousy.

‘How was your journey?’ Caroline said, making small talk as if she had been expecting Peg, as if all this had been planned. She rang a little hand bell on the table in front of her. Almost instantly, a short, dark woman appeared, apparently from underneath the terrace.

‘Manuela. Can you bring us up some Cava, please?’ Caroline said, slowly and clearly.

‘And a beer for me, Manuela, cheers,’ Raymond said.

‘And some olives and crisps,’ Caroline added.

‘And a Coke for me,’ Paulie said.

Manuela nodded silently and disappeared back under the terrace.

‘You run in and get some proper clothes on, Paulie,’ Raymond said.

‘But—’

‘No buts. You’ll catch your death in those wet trunks.’

Reluctantly, Paulie ran inside the house. Raymond turned to Peg.

‘I don’t want him to know who you are just yet. He needs a bit of preparation. You OK with that?’

Peg nodded. It wasn’t Paulie’s fault, she supposed, that her father had so completely failed her. Although, however much generosity she was trying to feel towards the little boy, she couldn’t help a small part of her wanting him to suffer just a little bit. Just as a learning process.

‘We haven’t told him about you, you see,’ Caroline said. ‘Or anything about the past.’

Raymond shot her a sharp look.

‘Well we haven’t. But I’m so glad to meet you at last, Margaret,’ she went on. ‘Raymond’s told me so much about you.’

Peg wondered what on earth he had to say about her, not having made contact for sixteen years. She was having to bite her tongue so much she was afraid of chewing it right off. She was really glad Loz hadn’t come. It would have been impossible for her to keep her lip buttoned, and that would have completely sabotaged the mission.

No, she had to keep quiet and choose her moment.

‘Why don’t you sit down, dear?’ Caroline patted the seat next to her. Raymond sat opposite them. He still hadn’t looked Peg in the eye. She supposed that this was down to a deserved sense of shame at confronting the daughter he had abandoned, so she took heart from this.

‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ Caroline said, to break the awkward silence between them all.