Veil of Darkness (3 page)

It looks pretty much like it.

There is such a fresh-faced innocence about her.

Kirsty deals in fantasy, a subject on which she has expertise. And her fantasy was later confirmed when Avril told her she had bought the suit with her mother’s help and encouragement. ‘Of course it’s a business suit,’ said her mother, insisting on going round George Henry Lees instead of Dorothy Perkins, which she suggested, quite correctly, would probably not stock her daughter’s size. ‘All suits are business suits. You wouldn’t wear something as stiff as this for mucking about at home.’

Kirsty’s favourite preoccupation is summing up other people. Pity she didn’t work harder on Trev in the months before she married him.

Avril told Kirsty later how the conversation had gone. ‘But there are other aspects of life, you know, Mother. It’s not just home and work, home and work, with the odd outing to Safeways. Well, not for other people it’s not.’

‘Start,’ said her mother, ‘as you mean to go on. If you look businesslike that’s how they will treat you: with respect, politely. If you look like a ne’er-do-well—long, uncombed hair and mismatched accessories—then you can’t complain if they treat you that way.’

But surely a suit from Dorothy Perkins wouldn’t have ne’er-do-well stamped all over it? And it might be a tad more fashionable than the one they had finally come home with, the one which was itching her then, and constricting her arm and shoulder movements.

‘Trust me, dear,’ said Avril’s mother. ‘I said you would get the job, and you did. Fast and accurate, that’s what you are, and you must remember that.’

The haircut that made Avril ‘businesslike’ is a short, sensible bob which accentuates her wide face with its flat, overlarge features. ‘Strange,’ Avril told Kirsty afterwards, ‘how the word business conjures up bowel movements, or something that is other people’s and makes you seem nosy for asking. The sort of word Mother uses, and just as nasty; words spoken carefully and correctly, like vagina, napkin, testicles, motor car, time of the month and spermatozoa. When some people say them they make them sound shocking.’

There are certainly pluses to be gained from growing up without such a mother. Without any mother at all, thought Kirsty.

The diary, just visible over the top of the plump girl’s bag, is headed Business Studies. ‘My toes curl up when I have to say that’s the subject I did,’ said Avril when Kirsty got to know her. ‘Not psychology or media studies; they were out of the question, courses that sounded like stars in the night, unattainable, there, shining, distant, tempting and beautiful at the far horizons of my world.’

Kirsty would love to have gone to college.

For a flickering moment she envied Avril, she envied her her dominant mother and Avril’s complacent aura of safety.

‘Even the students on our course looked suitably boring compared to the others in the tech art and design departments, drama, music, languages, or science and technology,’ Avril told her wistfully. ‘But Mother was right, as usual. I would stick out like a sore thumb doing any of those exciting subjects. I was too fat. I had no style. It was worse when Dad called me his little beauty.’ But if anyone had bothered to look harder they might have realized that her dad was right: Avril could be improved upon, even though she is fat. Her face has a sweetness about it, her skin is flawless, her wide blue eyes are compelling to look at and ‘merry’ in an old-fashioned way, and if she’d had a decent hairdresser instead of Shirley at Carta’s Parlour, if her hair had been allowed to grow longer so that it curled around her neck and gave her a bit of height on top, she might not have been beautiful in the popularly accepted sense, but she would have looked interesting, striking. Because of the world’s perception of her, poor Avril is shy, boring and ultra-introverted, and she knows it. ‘I mean, when I heard the news that the drama students sitting cross-legged in a circle at the very beginning of term were made to introduce themselves in a ringing, operatic fashion I nearly puked with horror.’

While those, like Avril, doing business studies were given a file and a shared computer and sat in rigid, silent lines. Far more suitable. Far safer. And their tutors, thank God, were all women.

But Kirsty doesn’t know Avril yet. She dreams on in her imagination, her head resting back on the seat, lost in the safety of let’s pretend.

‘Homely’ is the word for the girl who sits opposite. And it’s true, Avril does love her home: the comfortable bedroom at the top of the house with which she is so familiar; the dear old kitchen with its Formica tops which haven’t changed since the house was built; the tiled beige fireplace into which is inserted that most efficient electric false flame with the wooden surrounds and its small brass ornaments. ‘I Remember, I Remember’, was her favourite poem at school. With that much-loved poem she won a certificate in elocution. Her family is tiny and super-nuclear. The word stifling comes to mind, and when Kirsty found out she felt envious again. They do family things like play Trivial Pursuit, go out for a Chinese on a Friday night and visit Granny on Sundays.

And now the poor child is leaving all this behind and taking off on her first great adventure. Kirsty tries hard not to stare as the girl tries to blink away tears, wiping them with a handkerchief corner as if there’s something stuck there that she is trying, discreetly, to remove.

Avril’s mother would despise her companions.

Her seat was booked by the Burleston beforehand; if not, Avril, increasingly uncomfortable, would have moved elsewhere by now. Although there are spaces and she would prefer a smaller, two-seater arrangement where she could park her bag on the neighbouring seat and thus discourage insensitive passengers, she lacks the courage to do so, and Kirsty sympathized with that when she told her. ‘I felt nervous enough, worried enough, at leaving my luggage beside the door. What if someone made off with it? All my worldly goods in two Marks & Spencer tartan cases.’

Avril has her own sandwiches and a large flask of sweet tea. ‘You don’t want to pay those wicked buffet prices,’ her mother had said, arranging the tuna. But her three companions care nothing for prices. Their whole journey so far has consisted of visits to the loo and the buffet, only to return with even more cans of extra-strong lager. ‘I was dead scared of unwrapping those sandwiches, even though my tummy was rumbling. I knew what they’d make of that fierce smell of fish. What if those sailors thought it was me? What if they thought the smell came from my knickers?’

Kirsty knows what she means. The sailors are taking the piss. You can tell this by the rolling of an eye, the dig of an elbow, the wink of a lid, and Avril knows what is happening. She is used to looking for clues like this from way back in her early playground days. They have a particular way of speaking, defiantly vulgar, as if to include her. ‘I kept my eyes fixed hard on my book but I couldn’t take in one word,’ she told Kirsty. ‘I just hoped they would get out at Plymouth before they got too pissed and started behaving embarrassingly, showing me up, mocking me openly.’

Kirsty, who makes up people as a hobby, guesses this girl has never had a boyfriend.

It’s possible that she believes nobody else goes through life as wistful and utterly solitary as she. How wrong she is. How wrong.

‘Yep, I was beginning to think that no man would ever want me or undress me or feel me or bring me flowers. I knew I would never get married. At times I thought I might be gay just because that would be easier.’ She described the homely girls like her doing business studies, who went round in black tights, pleated skirts and anoraks. ‘And I’ve read every book about nuns there is. I mean, what a happy release that would be.’ Given time and faith she would worship God in the same sort of exquisite, tingling, distant way she had worshipped some boy in the fourth year. A habit might slim her down. She had fantasized, under covers of course, of throwing herself down on a cold, slate floor in the shape of a crucifix and confessing her sins to a cruel, black-clad inquisitor. Only in these shameful dreams she was naked, and afterwards everyone ‘had her’ as she lay back spread over the altar. Oh dear, oh dear, more satanic than Christian. And what would Mother say?

Avril plucks up courage and glances around. There would probably be other ‘girls’ like her on the train, Mother had said, all going to the Burleston Hotel to begin the new season. Mother especially approved of the idea of Avril ‘living in’. A good way to ‘grow into independence’, and Mother has the housekeeper’s assurance that she will keep an eye on young Avril. At the interviews for the various posts, Avril was surprised by the scope. There were chambermaid jobs, vacancies for waitresses, porters and office staff, like herself, one children’s nanny, two lifeguards, porters, chefs, washers up and cleaners. Why did they need to look in Liverpool? Weren’t the locals more handy?

‘There’s probably no local population to speak of,’ said Mother. ‘The place is in the middle of nowhere, and the Cornish are notoriously lazy. It’s the pace of life. It’s a different world.’

But the Burleston was open all year round. Couldn’t they keep their staff?

She had asked this at the interview—well, obviously not in those words. Mother rehearsed her, ‘Will there be any possibility of a full-time job with you if you find my work satisfactory?’

The answer, given by a tarty recruitment-agency official with one-inch-long red fingernails, was simple. Raised expectations. ‘In this day and age not many people, I’m afraid, Miss Stott, are willing to shut themselves away from the world for longer than one season.’ The blond-headed woman with the blotchy lashes gave Avril a small, tight smile and tapped one nail on the folder before her. ‘I must emphasize again, Miss Stott, that the Burleston caters for a certain, select class of guest. Those who are looking for peace and quiet, right away from the hurly-burly. Thus Colonel Parker’s policy is not to offer any kind of glamorous nightlife, or organize events or outings, or encourage guests who are young or unmarried or groups of the same sex. Families are the hotel’s bread and butter, young families during the summer and older clientele in the winter, you understand. Many go to the Burleston to use the exclusive nine-hole golf course and they sometimes arrange small competitions, I believe, if the guests so desire.’

So there she had it. It was just too boring. Mother’s careful research had paid off.

A sigh runs down the length of her spine, all the way from Avril’s shoulders. Well, at least she won’t feel left out if there’s nowhere to be invited. The nearest village is three miles away. The nearest pub is eight. And there’s no bus service.

Who are Avril’s fellow workers likely to be? The group of four across the aisle? Who else, like her, would be willing to forgo all social and sexual contact for the five long months of summer? Students? Avril peers across. That little group isn’t speaking, but why is that woman staring? Avril catches Kirsty’s eyes and she looks down guiltily. Irish or Italian migrant workers? How can she possibly tell? There can’t be many young girls like herself—nineteen years old in the first flush of youth, with all their juices flowing.

Ugh! That’s another of Mother’s expressions that makes poor Avril want to vomit.

It has always been Mother’s greatest wish that Avril should partake in ‘the leaving of Liverpool’. Mother, because of the books she reads, has a romanticized and clichéd rags-to-riches view of the city that has kept her husband in his humble place since he first went to work twenty-three years ago at Burt and Sturgess, the gentleman’s outfitters in the city centre. Straining after gentility, Mother has spent her married life longing to ‘cross the Mersey’ to the land of milk and honey, the Wirral, that exclusive, glorious mecca that lies on the other side. And if Graham, her wilful son, had had the wit to do as he’d been told—procured a few certificates and trained to be somebody—he wouldn’t have got in with the wrong crowd, fallen foul of the law and ended up doing a stretch at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

His name is not spoken in Mother’s house.

And it is only because of Mother’s dire view of life in the north of England in general that she has released her only daughter, albeit in a strictured way, to go off and make her fortune with a brand-new wardrobe in two Marks & Spencer suitcases instead of a red-and-white spotted handkerchief on a stick.

Outside the window now all is meadow and hedgerow and wood. The telegraph wires switchback from pole to pole. Avril thinks she can smell the sea.

All the nice girls love a sailor…

In a minute they will offer her a drink. With a dread premonition she knows it, she is touched with a foretaste of well-known pain, and they will offer it so expansively that the whole carriage will hear. There is no way she can emphasize her modesty by crossing her legs and looking stiff because of the short and fashionable suit skirt that she had foolishly insisted upon. She had practised bending over in the full-length mirror at home and discovered that the slightest angle could well give a glimpse of her underwear. Too late, too late to take the wretched suit back and change it for the version with the boot-length skirt. Avril should have known better. The young and nubile can get away with skirts that hardly cover their crotches, they can leap onto motorbikes, slide into cars, mount steps and dance leaning backwards without appearing obscene. Not so poor Avril with her plump and generous thighs.

‘Come on, sexy, chill out.’ The can is handed across with a belch.

Avril reddens. ‘I don’t drink actually.’

‘Ha. Get that. I don’t drink actually.’ He mimics her bleating voice to perfection and leers, encouraging the others to join in. See, his look says, see, it’s easy. She’s a cinch. Come on, for a laugh.

She wants to beg them to leave her alone, them and their depravity. She wants to explain how they’re hurting her. But, of course, you can’t do that, so Avril smiles, trying to bring them on to her side in the only way she knows how. This friendly method had occasionally worked when used against bullies at school.

She can feel his knee touching her knee, her naked knee because of her skirt. She knows that her large breasts are overly defined in that tight brown body she insisted on wearing in spite of Mother’s advice. If only she could do up her suit jacket.