Veil of Darkness (30 page)

Avril notices how the policemen glance at each other now and again, as if they’ve picked up something significant, like the way dentists’ eyes, enlarged by the mirror, move around inside your mouth and stop when they find a filling or some vulnerable, soft, pink place.

‘Why did you go and visit Graham yesterday?’

‘Because I felt guilty, I felt sorry for Graham, I thought I should give him some support.’

‘Rather a sudden change of heart?’

‘Not really. He had never been charged with murder before.’

‘Some people might think that fact would harden you against him.’

‘From all I’ve heard, it sounds as if he didn’t mean it.’

‘But you think he meant to kill Ed Board?’

‘I don’t know, how could I know? I can’t see into Graham’s head. All I know is that he was there and I recognized him.’

‘But you didn’t call out or acknowledge him. The brother you hadn’t seen in years? Don’t you think that’s rather odd?’

‘I was very confused. Graham, here in Cornwall? I thought I must have been mistaken.’

‘Ah. But now? With hindsight?’

‘Now that I know my brother was in the area, seeing him that morning makes perfect sense.’

‘I believe you and Ed Board had something going between you?’

‘We were friends.’

‘No more than friends?’

‘We were close friends.’

‘Did you ever have sexual intercourse with Edward Board?’

‘No. I am a virgin.’

And the men’s sharp eyes swivel and snap with significance once again.

‘How could you do this to me, Avril?’ sobs Mother, sitting, defeated, on the caravan steps. ‘Oh, how could you?’

There is elation to be had in this, too. Avril feels no remorse, no sympathy for her grieving mother, no wish to turn back the clock, no shame at the enormity of her lies or the awesome consequences of them. Quite the contrary in fact. She is revelling in her new persona and wonders why it has taken so long for her to discover the thrill of being evil and the acceptance of it as a Godlike state.

And as for her poor father, well, if he’d stood up for himself and not been walked all over by Mother, Graham, his mean employers, the foreman at the garage, the dustbinmen, his next-door neighbour and any Tom, Dick or Harry who happened to
bump into him in the street, Avril might have felt a pang of pity at the sight of his anguished face. But there comes a time in everyone’s life when one ought to put up a fight—Kirsty’s managed it, Avril’s done it—and maybe this terrible catastrophe might be a watershed for him.

Magdalene has a theory that the devil and God are one and the same. God invented the eternity of hell and only a demon could think up that.

Magdalene took the veil to hide from the abominations of men.

Magdalene chose a closed and silent order so she could concentrate on her purity of thought.

Magdalene slipped out at night through the vast convent kitchens and changed into the casual clothes she hid in a metal box by the gate.

The understandable media frenzy brings the rat packs of London down to this peaceful Cornish Cove in their droves, to the mortification of Mr Derek, who finds some of them posing as guests, having booked into the Burleston under false pretences.

Thank the Lord Avril has already moved out, because it’s the Stotts who attract these terrible media people. What sort of dysfunctional family could produce the kind of creature who would commit two heinous murders one after the other like that—the first for £1.39 and the second for no obvious reason other than that his sleep must have been disturbed by a probing golf club.

‘Let me make you a cucumber sandwich, Mother.’

Mother has turned furtive. She has started darting her way between cars and caravans and taking sanctuary in Kirsty and Avril’s large mobile home, leaving Richard to face the consequences of his mutant seed and satisfy the cameras.

The sunbeds and deckchairs have been removed from Mother’s caravan garden. The pot plants are now on the windowsill, their leafy profiles hiding the hunted inmates from the press.

Still she cannot acknowledge that this tragedy has affected anyone else but herself and her position in society, which matters so much to her. It wouldn’t occur to her that by scuttling over here with the press sniffing at her heels she might be involving two innocent children in the whole ghastly mêlée; it is just a blessing that term has started and Jake and Gemma are at school.

Kirsty, of course, still works at the Burleston, walks there and back every morning and evening, although Avril has tried to persuade her to give it up: ‘At any moment now that advance will filter through. We’ll be rich! It’s all that’s keeping me going. We’ll be able to buy our own house. Why are you so determined to keep slaving away in that hole?’

‘Perhaps it’s because I can’t believe that miracles really happen,’ said Kirsty.

‘Maybe I will have that cucumber sandwich,’ says Mother pitifully. ‘I have to eat.’

‘I wonder what Graham’s eating now,’ says Avril deliberately.

‘I’d rather not discuss him.’

‘Or Father. Did you leave him something cold?’

‘I can’t be bothered with your father’s fussing while all this mayhem is going on. Let him make his own sandwich. There’s plenty of ham in the fridge.’

A wave of hatred passes over Avril. It passes over her and drags her out with the undercurrent into a shameless sea of revenge.

Sometimes it seems as if Father and Graham are figments of Mother’s imagination, the paper people Avril used to cut out of catalogues when she was small, to be animated or screwed up at whim, named, placed, born, married, buried, but with no real presence of their own.

I wonder what Mother’s reaction would be? thinks Avril, lingering the cucumber and sucking wetly on a watery slice.

‘I never told you this before,’ she says, passing over the sandwich with all the crusts cut off, ‘but when I was little Father used to come into my room at night.’

Mother, still in her place on the step, keeps twisting her head this way and that, on the lookout for long-distance lenses.

‘It was mostly when you were downstairs in the lounge watching those two-part dramas. Well, Father was never interested in dramas so he used to come upstairs. I think he used to tell you he was having an early bath.’

‘What, Avril? I hope your father will keep his word and speak to the reporters this time. If he would just say a few words some of them might go away. But you know how slow he is.’

Avril goes on with grim satisfaction. ‘He used to kiss me all over my face and hair and pull my duvet back.’

‘Your father used to do that?’

‘Yes, and then he would push up my nightie and touch my body with his fingers.’

Mother’s neck snaps round. One small triangle of sandwich falls from her lap upon the brown, well-weathered grass.

‘Avril!
Stop it
! You don’t know what you are saying! Have you lost your mind?’

‘Oh, that didn’t worry me much,’ Avril goes on, swirling a finger in the washing-up water, piling up the liquid froth into weird fantasy shapes. ‘In fact, I quite liked it. It was when he got his penis out that I used to feel frightened. It was so big and stiff. I thought it was horrible. And it used to smell of wet skin.’

Mother leaps off the caravan step and hurries inside, closing the small door behind her lest some passer-by might hear. She grabs hold of Avril’s arms from behind and pulls her round to face her. When Avril looks into Mother’s eyes she sees not sorrow, not pity, but fear, sheer, unadulterated fear. Mother’s small eyes are piercing, as if there are arrow heads in them.

‘You never told me this.’

‘I knew there was no point.’

Mother’s fingers squeeze harder on Avril’s arms till they reach bruising capacity. ‘
No point
?’

‘You would tell me I was being filthy, like you did that time you came in the bathroom and caught me having a pee in the bath. You smacked me so hard I went under the water, I thought I was going to drown, I couldn’t stop choking, but you’d gone. You would think there was something twisted about me, like you did when you thought I’d gone into Graham’s room naked.’

‘You haven’t said this to anyone else?’

‘No, Mother. Why would I?’

‘Well, you thought nothing of telling the police that you’d seen Graham on the golf course. You seemed to enjoy incriminating him!’

‘The two situations are rather different.’

‘No, they’re not. Avril, you are despicable. You are dishonest and wicked. You seem to want to destroy this family. You seem to be going right out of your way to smash us to smithereens. I wouldn’t put it past you to go to the welfare people and tell them these lies about your father.’ Tears of anger spurt into her eyes.

But Avril braces her shoulders and sets her face to naught.

‘Your father was never interested in sex,’ Mother goes on in a high, nervous voice, ‘so why would he bother meddling with you, or anyone else for that matter?’ She thinks in silence for a moment, her arms falling from Avril’s sides. ‘And why are you telling me this now, Avril? What are you trying to do, drive me mad?’

‘You would rather I’d kept it to myself?’ Avril asks, moving over to the table and sitting down, drying her hands on a tea towel which she then uses to twist round her fingers.

‘Well, of course I would,’ says Mother, joining her, yet carefully making sure no part of her is touching her repellent daughter. ‘I mean, why wait until now? What do you expect me to do?’

‘But do you believe me, Mother?’

Mother shakes herself stiffly. ‘No, Avril. No, I do not. And my conclusions are that you are every bit as wicked as your brother—more sly, underhand, cunning, oh yes, you’ve always been cunning, all those lies.’

‘What lies?’

‘What’s the point in discussing this now?’

‘Tell me, Mother, I need to know, what lies?’

Her skin, robbed of powder, is red and veined, her eyes are hard and unloving. ‘Little lies, telling me you’d cleaned your teeth when you hadn’t, swearing blind you’d posted my letters and then I’d find them in your duffel-coat pocket, all that bad behaviour at school, and then you’d come home and act as if butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. Well, I knew all the time what you were about.’

Avril can’t help being fascinated. ‘What was I about?’

‘Destruction,’ spits mother wildly, like a priest exorcizing a demon. If she’d had a cross she’d be holding it up, warding Avril off her.

‘Is that why you tried to hide me away, made me wear unflattering clothes, forced me to have haircuts that never suited my face, refused to let me wear make-up?’

Mother’s eyes glare and her voice rises. ‘If I had given you your head, my girl, Lord knows what you would have turned into.’ And her thin lips curl down, as if she is tasting something bitter. ‘Slut.
Whore. And now this… this…’ she struggles to find the worst word she can, ‘… this vile accusation, these coarse suggestions against a man who wouldn’t harm a fly.’ Her fury storms up and takes command of her. ‘Your poor father, if he ever found out it would break his heart. I won’t have it, I tell you, I won’t have it.’

This is the first time Avril has ever heard Mother defending Father.

But Avril feels enlarged, sanguine and grandiose. All her old timorous caution is gone, she can spar with Mother, tease her like a dog at a bear; she wonders how she has ever been at this sad woman’s mercy. Mother never loved her—a daughter whose natural instincts frightened her so she feared her own child might rise up one day and bring her most shameful thoughts to life. Mother, who is so sexually retentive and prudish she poisons everyone she touches; Mother, to whom the word ‘urges’ brings goose pimples up on her arms. ‘Aren’t you interested to know if Father ever penetrated me? If we had sex together while you were downstairs watching Ruth Rendell? Or how old I was when he started?’

‘I’m not staying to listen to any more of this,’ says Mother, standing up stiff as the mop that stands beside the small toilet door. ‘I have no daughter,’ she says to Avril. ‘I have no son. I am childless.’

‘You would have been happier childless,’ says Avril to the empty space: sweet, timid Avril; chubby, childlike Avril; with skin like a peach and the poem, ‘I Remember, I Remember’, stuck in the back of her five-year diary.

How could she be so callous?

How could anyone tell such malicious lies?

Especially when you know that ‘If’ was another of her favourite poems, but she realized early in life that in order to be a man you had to be a boy-child first.

‘Y
OU DON’T HAVE ANYTHING
on me,’ the sulking Dominic tells Kirsty when she phones him the next day. ‘You can’t use me any more, I’m out of it now, last week’s news. So stuff your threats, I’ll be gone from here tomorrow.’

This is worrying news for Kirsty. How will Bernie, that floundering vessel, survive in London on her own? And, without Dominic’s nose to the ground, how will Kirsty know what’s happening?

But Kirsty isn’t the only one thrown into turmoil today. Dominic is going through a painful identity crisis. This young Eros has suffered a fall, he has been chucked for another, a more affluent, cultivated, experienced and debonair fellow than he, Rory Coburn, with the lean and muscled body of one who visits the gym to get fit, and an exclusive gym at that.

‘And how the hell do I know what has happened to the money?’ Why should he act as informant to Kirsty, the woman who got him into this mess in the first place with her nasty threats of exposure? In fact, the money in question will soon be on its way because the lovely, literary Rory with the silver streaks and the black smoking jacket has taken it upon himself to hassle the publishers over the water and push for an early signing.

‘How the hell d’you think I feel?’ he answers Kirsty’s question petulantly. ‘I feel as if I’ve been used, and not just by you.’

Bernie, too, has used him cruelly. Just when he was about to break into the closed world of publishing she takes up with one of the biggest fish and he, Dominic, who has worked so hard on her behalf, is forced, like a prince turned toad, right out of the pond.

Dammit.