Till We Meet Again (21 page)

But that explanation did nothing to make Beth like him any better.

She put the kettle on, and while it was boiling went to the pantry to get the coffee. The jar was empty.

‘There’s no coffee left,’ she said, immediately feeling tense. ‘I expect Mother’s gone to get some.’

‘No coffee?’ he roared out. ‘She knows I always have it at eleven.’

‘I’ll make you some tea instead,’ Beth said hurriedly.

‘One drinks tea at breakfast. Only labourers drink tea at eleven in the morning,’ Father retorted scathingly.

He was almost as fond of pointing out labourers’ habits as he was of saying he had ‘a position to maintain’. He said labourers kept coal in their baths, wiped their noses on their sleeves and had a great many other disgusting habits. He was one to talk – Beth had seen him piss out of his study window because he was too lazy to walk upstairs, and he rarely even shaved in the winter, let alone had a bath.

Beth tried to appease him by saying her mother wouldn’t be long, and even suggested she rode into the village to get some coffee herself.

‘Do that,’ he snapped at her.

Beth glanced out of the kitchen window at the heavy rain and shuddered. She’d already got wet once that morning on her paper round and her coat and outdoor shoes were still soaked. But she knew that if she complained he would clout her.

‘May I have some money then?’ she asked.

‘Money?’ he roared out. ‘Your mother has the housekeeping money.’

‘But she isn’t here,’ she pointed out.

‘Then use your own,’ he said.

Later, Beth was to wonder whatever possessed her to say she was saving her money for her holiday in Stratford. But it just came out.

‘You won’t be going there again, my girl,’ he said, his eyes narrowing with malice. ‘You’ll work all through the summer. If you think I’m paying for trips for you to see that shrew of an aunt of yours, you are much mistaken.’

‘But Daddy, Suzie has invited me to stay at her house, please let me go,’ she pleaded.

He moved so quickly she didn’t have time to dodge him. He caught hold of her shoulder and punched her so hard in the face that she fell back against the stove, burning her hand.

‘You’ll go nowhere again,’ he yelled. ‘From now on you’ll find a job during every holiday, and you’ll give your mother half of what you earn for your keep. Got that?’

Recalling that ugly scene made tears spring up in Beth’s eyes. She was left with a black eye and a split lip, the same injuries he’d inflicted on her mother so often. She remembered lying there on the cold floor cursing him to hell and back, and swearing to herself she’d make him pay for it.

‘What is it?’ Steven said gently, seeing her tears, and with that Beth found herself blurting out what had happened that day.

‘He sounds like an absolute monster,’ Steven said, slipping his arms round her as he’d done earlier and holding her tight. ‘No wonder you hate him.’

‘I couldn’t bring myself to admit to Suzie why I really couldn’t go,’ she said, drying her eyes, comforted by his arm. ‘I think I made out in the end that I had been offered a good job. But it hardly mattered anyway, because as it happened her mother had the stroke and I don’t suppose she would have been able to spend any time with me, let alone have me to stay with her.’

‘So did you work all the holidays from then on?’ he asked.

Beth nodded. ‘Saturdays too, in a shoe shop in Hastings. Father used to make me bring my pay packet home unopened. He’d pocket half, it never even went to Mother.’

Steven smoothed her hair and sighed. ‘You had to stay, I suppose, if you wanted to go to university?’

‘Yes. But I think I would have left, found a job and a room, if it hadn’t been for Suzie,’ she said. ‘You see, I often told her in my letters that I wanted to leave home, even if I didn’t spell out why. Each time she wrote back she urged me not to do that, she made me believe I was too clever for a dead-end job, and that was all I’d get without qualifications. Her opinion was the only one I really trusted, even Serena and Robert weren’t wholly reliable. I suppose our father made out to them I was dumb, as they didn’t seem to have much faith that I’d make it to university. They often suggested it might be better for me if I got a job as a nanny for a couple of years.’

‘But they presumably knew how it was for you at home? Susan didn’t, did she?’ Steven pointed out.

‘That was all part of it. You see, everyone, my brother and sister, teachers, neighbours, pitied me. I used to see it in their faces. That saps your ambition, Steven, it weakens your resolve, and it makes you feel worthless. Suzie didn’t pity me, she admired me. I told her at thirteen I wanted to be a lawyer after we’d seen a film together about one. I suppose I presented her with a pretty good case as to why I’d be good at it, and she never let me drift away from it. I always felt indebted to her for that, I can remember thinking of her on the day I graduated, and wishing she was there.’

‘It was a great shame all round you didn’t stay in touch. If you’d still been friends when her parents died, you could have made that swine of a brother of hers share the inheritance.’

‘I know,’ she said dolefully. ‘And maybe if we’d remained friends I could have influenced her to break away from her parents years before and make a life for herself. I’ve thought about that over and over since I met her again.’

‘We’ve all got our own “if onlys”,’ he said with a sigh. ‘But I suppose you got caught up with all the social life at university, made more exciting friends.’

‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I remained a loner. I was never the girl I’d been when I was with Suzie, ever again.’

There was something so plaintive about that statement that Steven turned on the settee to look at her face. Her lower lip was trembling, a deep and terrible sadness in her green eyes. He remembered how Susan had remarked on Beth’s sadness, and clearly it hadn’t been there while they were still friends. He had no doubt that talking about the past had opened up an old wound. That wound must have been inflicted somewhere between her last visit to Stratford and when she went to university, for she’d already stated that she re-invented herself there.

‘What happened to you, Beth?’ he said softly. ‘I know something did. Tell me.’

Her eyes met his, then darted away. A guilty look he’d seen so often in clients’ faces. ‘It’s late,’ she said tersely, her whole body stiffening beside him. ‘It’s time you went home.’

She was right, of course, it was after twelve, but the way she was frantically trying to pull down the shutters was just confirmation he was right too.

‘I told you about Anna because I trust you,’ he said. ‘I think I knew, too, that you would help me to face up to it and deal with it. So please trust me, and let me help you.’

Her wide mouth twisted scornfully. ‘What’s this, some kind of plea bargaining?’

Steven took his courage in both hands. ‘People’s minds and bodies aren’t like your washing machine,’ he said carefully. ‘When something is damaged you can’t just go out and get a new spare part. It has to heal. I think…’ He paused. ‘No. I know,’ he said more forcefully, ‘that you’ve got a wound which hasn’t healed. I won’t claim I can heal it, but at least let me look at it.’

‘What are you, some frustrated shrink?’ Beth said scathingly. ‘I’m a grown woman, I don’t need a man who can’t even press his own suit to suggest I’m troubled.’

Steven blushed. ‘I don’t get enough time to iron the girls’ clothes as well as I’d like to, let alone ponce myself up,’ he said. ‘Don’t try to hurt me to cover up your own pain.’

‘You’ve got a bloody cheek,’ she said, getting up and flouncing across the room. ‘You came here uninvited, I cooked you supper and gave you drinks as a way of showing my appreciation for your dealing with my flood. Okay, maybe because I told you about my childhood, you think you’ve got the right to pry into everything about me. Well, you don’t. Everything I told you tonight was background to Susan, nothing more.’

Steven stood up. He was afraid to persist in case he smashed up the groundwork they’d already laid down this evening. Yet he could sense he was close to getting the truth. She hadn’t actually opened the door to fling him out, and there was a certain note in her voice which suggested that subliminally at least, she wanted to spill it all out.

‘It happened somewhere between sixteen and eighteen,’ he said gently but firmly. ‘Something so shattering you couldn’t even tell your friend. That’s why you dropped her, isn’t it? You could have gone to see her in Stratford once you were at university, but you didn’t dare, in case you let it slip. I’m right, aren’t I?’

Beth just stared at him, eyes wide, face chalky-white, and her wide mouth slack. It was the expression of a child who had been caught doing something wrong. She was terribly afraid. He moved towards her and caught her up in his arms. ‘Don’t be frightened,’ he whispered, holding her tightly. ‘I’ll never use it against you, I only want to make you better.’

She went limp in his arms, and suddenly she was crying, leaning on his shoulder and sobbing like a small child. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, stroking her curly hair with one hand, holding her tight with the other. ‘You are safe with me, Beth. Just tell me.’

‘They raped me,’ she croaked out. ‘Three of them, in an alley, one after the other.’

Steven was struck dumb with horror. He certainly hadn’t expected anything like this, he’d been thinking more along the lines of her getting pregnant, or being jilted by a boyfriend. In his profession he’d met many women who were rape victims, and he knew how it blighted their lives.

His instinct was purely paternal. He picked her up bodily, carried her to the couch, then cradled her as he would have done his own girls if they were hurt.

‘You’ve said the worst bit now,’ he said soothingly, stroking her hair back from her face. ‘Now tell me exactly how it happened.’

‘It was in the Christmas holidays, early January 1968, in Hastings. We had the January sale on at the shoe shop and instead of going straight home I went to the Rococo coffee bar,’ she blurted out, as if wanting to get it over with as quickly as possible. ‘Everyone at school went there all the time, it was “the” place to hang out. But I’d only ever been there during the day, because I wasn’t allowed out in the evenings. It was about six when I got there, and I thought I’d hang about and catch the half past seven bus home. If Father said anything about being late, I’d make out I’d been stocktaking.’

Beth’s face was taut with tension and she gripped Steven’s arm tightly as she told him exactly what happened that night.

The reason she wanted to stay in Hastings, despite it being bitterly cold, was because she’d met a boy called Mike on the bus whom she really liked, and she knew he went to the Rococo. She didn’t think she looked too bad in her work clothes, black mini-skirt and skinny-rib sweater, and she could take off her school coat as soon as she got in there.

The Rococo was above a shop, two rooms fitted out with lots of low seating and dim lights, a steamy place with loud music from the juke-box. To her disappointment Mike wasn’t there. She drank several cups of espresso, chatted to a couple of girls she knew from the shop, put a few records on the juke-box, and finally at around twenty past seven she left a little disconsolately to catch the bus home to Battle.

Frost was glistening on the pavements, and the wind coming in straight off the sea was so cold it seemed to cut right through her. The streets were completely deserted now, and it seemed strange to see all the lighted shop windows without anyone looking in them.

She heard someone whistle at her, and looking over the street towards the clock tower, she saw two boys waving to her. It was too dark to see clearly but she thought one of them was Mike and ran over to him.

It wasn’t until she was just a few yards away, that she realized it wasn’t Mike. She didn’t know either boy. The one she’d thought was Mike, was several inches shorter, and older by at least three years. Close up, he looked rough and dirty, the only similarity was that he had blond hair cut in a Beatle style like Mike’s.

‘I thought you were someone else,’ Beth said, stopping short, terribly embarrassed by her mistake.

The boy she had thought was Mike said something about what did it matter if she didn’t know him and made some crack about her being so tall.

She was well used to jokes about her height, but they always stung her, and she always retaliated with an insult. ‘Maybe you think that because you are rather stunted,’ she said in her best snooty voice and turned to walk away.

‘Wha’cha mean?’ he called out, then came after her, looking up at her scornfully. She was scared then, wishing she hadn’t made the remark – she could smell drink on his breath and his leather jacket and grubby jeans suggested he was one of the town’s hard cases.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just that it’s not very nice having people making jokes about how tall I am,’ she said, moving away from him.

‘They should put a lamp on yer ‘ead and turn you into a lamp-post,’ his friend chimed in, and roared with laughter at his own joke. ‘’Ere, Bob, look ‘ow skinny ‘er legs are an ‘all,’ he added gleefully.

‘The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat,’ Bob with the blond hair laughed sneeringly.

Beth began walking away from them fast. But they followed her, making remarks about her hair, her school coat, and the fact that her feet were big. She was frightened even then. The streets were deserted, and she was scared they might follow her on to the bus.

‘Please leave me alone,’ she said, stopping and turning towards them.

‘Please leave me alone,’ Bob repeated in a parody of her voice. ‘You ain’t ‘alf posh. I always wanted to shag a posh bird.’

Beth ignored that and walked on, and when she saw a man come out of a side turning and call out to them, she thought they’d be distracted enough to leave her.

A quick glance was enough to see he was much older than the other two. He was tall and well built, wearing a black Crombie overcoat, and he had a droopy moustache and an almost shaved head. As the two younger ones stopped to speak to him, she hurried on, but their voices carried on the wind and she could hear they were talking about her.