Veil of Darkness (5 page)

The lanes are growing alarmingly narrow and so twisty Kirsty feels sick. There is nothing to see because it is dark, almost eleven o’clock, and the hotel has promised a cold snack will be served on arrival.

How do the others see her? A character from a tragedy, or a farce? Or probably just a dull-looking woman who looks as if she could do with a snack or something to revive her. She catches herself in the driving mirror. Her eyes are like two smouldering wounds, she has clearly been wet and dried off again, she has such a huddled, high-shouldered look and she badly needs her bed, poor thing. That is what they must be thinking.

But Bernadette is too tired to think. Bed, as usual, is intensely inviting. Bed is the only place she can throw off all sham and conjure up Dominic again and her short time with him—dream, wish, regret, weep, yearn and touch herself with the reverence he had used when he’d touched her.

That first time she realized that he had free time and was not seeing her.

Then the agonizing rumour that he was quite brazenly seeing somebody else.

The unbearable knowledge that he would be saying the same things, doing the same things, laughing at the same things as he had done with her. Making love to the same sweet summer fragrances, their lovers’ kisses resting on the same still air.

But he loved me.
He loved me!

Ah, Holy Mary Mother of Jesus.

Her anguish had only been bearable because it was too much to suffer at once. She learned by heart these last lines from ‘The Betrayal’:

Under the mountains there is peace abiding,

Darkness shall be pavilion for my hiding,

Tears shall blot out the sin of broken faith,

The lips that falsely kissed, shall kiss but Death.

Mad with distress, suicide leapt to mind; it seemed such a natural thing to do and brought with it such a feeling of peace. The awful discord would be resolved, a jumbled-up kaleidoscope would be given the right turn and the harmonious pattern it made would bring serenity and calm. The thought of her wanting to die would bring Dominic back, for sure, never mind that it was a mortal sin even to make the attempt. She didn’t consider it blackmail. To her great surprise she had a feeling that she wouldn’t mind if it really worked; if she died then some great burden not yet shouldered would never have to be borne.

Now the long sweep of the drive.

What is this place?

The same question is on everyone’s face as the little group alight from the minibus.

There are woodlands on either side—oaks, birches and dark firs filled with silence. The air is heavy with the resinous scent of pines after rain, woodsmoke and the crushed perfume of bracken. There are a few desultory shrubs and dark-brown flower beds. There is loneliness here, intense and hidden, like the massive high, grey cliff of a wall, towered and castellated like a fortress, that rises into a starless sky, up, up and up. The Burleston Hotel. Following the ancient driver, a big, sad hulk of a man, obviously some retarded retainer with stains all down his corduroys, they pass through a door at the back of the building, traipse along a dark passage and then into a large, dull room with windows along one wall, looking out on to a drab yard. The walls are painted with a dark-green dado up to a height of about four feet, with a lighter green above. It is like an old-fashioned, dusty schoolroom cluttered with stale furniture; a table-tennis table in the centre is laid out with rolls, cold meat and cheese.

‘I hope I’m with you,’ Avril sidles up to say. ‘If we have to share rooms, that is.’

‘Merciful God. What?
Share rooms
?’ This appalling thought hasn’t crossed Bernadette’s mind. ‘I haven’t had to share since we lived in the cottage in County Clare when there were three of us to the bed. By the time we arrived in Liverpool there was only me and Frances left so we each had a bedroom to ourselves.’

Bernadette knew very well that the affair was cooling, it started that autumn weekend when Dominic’s parents came up from Surrey to visit and stayed at the Grosvenor in Chester. ‘You’ll have to come and meet them,’ he said. She didn’t have a ring then, although they were unofficially engaged. Dominic said he would ask his father for some extra funds from his trust so he could buy her something decent. To be truthful she would have been just as happy with something shiny from Top Shop but she knew how Dominic loathed bad taste.

Her heart was leaping and scuttling. The hotel was a dazzling palace with murmurs of perfume and cigars, all chandeliers and carpets and velvet, pristine tablecloths, silver cutlery, glamorous women and prosperous men. The sherry she had to start with gave her a warm, happy glow. ‘Just be natural,’ Dominic told her. That was the only caution she got. Dominic’s father, who was in cardboard boxes but a top barrister in his own fantasy, was tall, heavy-bodied with unlaughing eyes and a firm-set mouth which turned down at the corners. His mother was an aged Barbie doll, like an American president’s wife, shrill-voiced and brittle all over, and around her neck she wore green diamonds. Throughout the meal they were perfectly charming and Bernadette thought she was doing so well, but a trial had begun and she hadn’t the nous to realize she was the defendant. Her nervousness quite disappeared as she drank more and more of the wine that flowed and, in response to Mr Coates’s soft, friendly questions, she was soon telling them funny stories, so clever, so witty. She was so flattered by their interest. She failed to see it as a cross-examination, or to notice Dominic staring, saying nothing. It wasn’t until the morning after that she’d realized her audience had not been laughing and had judged her as jumped-up Irish scum.

‘On the station the last word Mammy said was, “Eat. The Lord won’t forgive you a second time for He is a terrible, stern judge.”’ Mammy looked fraught and old these days, much older than she ought to, and that was mainly Bernadette’s fault for putting her through such purgatory—her own daughter, a cursed soul lying in St Mary’s hospital, damned by God and despised by the nurses because they had better things to do with their time than pander to a silly, love-sick girl who curled and uncurled so miserably in her bed, all because of some fella. Better to be afflicted by the most appalling disease than to commit a mortal sin and be shut in a fiery tomb for all eternity. ‘I am living,’ said Mammy with hurt indignation, ‘in a cloud of shame, thanks to you.’

So Bernadette had been found, of course, just as she’d intended to be. After all, she had left her ‘note’ on the kitchen table where they’d be bound to find it when they came home from work. It had said merely ‘forgive me’. She hadn’t been able to write more.

Still half asleep, she then found herself mechanically chanting responses to the sad-eyed priest who sat beside her hospital bed murmuring quietly. The bright light hurt her eyes; she had taken the pills in soft candlelight, a whole pack of the anti-depressants Mammy kept beside her bed. With his manner subdued and his voice low, Father Murphy muttered, ‘Well, here’s a pretty kettle of fish.’

‘Am I in hell, Father?’ she asked, terror-stricken.

He looked round the hectic, soulless ward. ‘Dear child,’ he said, ‘thanks be to God there’s a wide turning circle, for we meet at the very gateway.’ And he slipped her a packet of Superkings.

There followed a winter of heartbreak.

Something had to be done or the shrunken Bernadette would pine away to nothing. Dominic must have heard by now, but the months went by with no response and her wounds continued to suppurate.

It was Bernadette’s friend Maggie who saw the advert for the job at the Burleston, sent for the forms and accompanied her to the Adelphi for an interview.

And so now here she is…

‘Now then, ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention please.’

‘It’s Mrs Danvers,’ whispers Avril, giggling and nudging Bernadette in the ribs.

‘Who in God’s name is Mrs Danvers?’

‘
Rebecca
! Surely you know
Rebecca
? The book?’

‘I don’t read books,’ says Bernadette, eying the tall, reptilian woman with the paper in her hand, who manifested herself like plasma from one of the corners of the room. She must be 100 years old if a day.

‘You’ve all met Colonel Parker, the owner of this hotel, so no introductions are needed there,’ and all eyes flicker to the minibus driver who sits in a chipped Parker Knoll chair with a cup of tea in his palsied hand making catarrhal sounds. ‘But I am Moira Stokes, the hotel housekeeper, so I am the one you’ll be dealing with in your everyday work. There is no time now for a preparatory meeting, it being almost midnight, so I will read out your room numbers, then you can all get a good night’s sleep. We will meet again tomorrow at eight o’clock here in the staff recreation room.’

With that a list of names is read out, followed by the relevant numbers. ‘You will have no trouble finding your rooms,’ barks Mrs Moira Stokes, the tortoise, buttoned up to the neck in grey. ‘They are up the back stairs straight ahead of you, right to the top of the house, first corridor on the right.’

‘So I’m to be with you.’ Kirsty approaches Bernadette and Avril, to whom by now she feels she’s almost related. ‘Room one-four-three. Three of us to one room. Let’s hope it’s a big one. I never imagined it would be like this.’

‘Nor did I,’ says Bernadette, listlessly picking up her bags and cursing her interfering friend Maggie whose idea had brought her to this. ‘But Mother of Jesus, it can only get better.’ And she realizes, with some astonishment, that these are the first positive words she has uttered since she attempted to take her life. ‘Listen to me now,’ she says. Perhaps God is working His infinite mercy as only He knows how.

T
HE GOOD OL’ BOY
in the Tavernier’s Arms on Victoria Street rasps his bristled chin with his hand and shoves it determinedly across the table towards his buddy and soulmate, Greg.

‘She’s a silly cow, Trev, she’ll be back,’ slurs Greg. ‘She knows which side her bread is buttered.’

‘You’re telling me she’ll be back,’ burps Trevor Hoskins, one mauve muscle in his forehead beating with anger and booze, ‘and by Christ she’ll know all about it when she is.’

Kirsty craves her children—she weeps and she mourns and she yearns for her children—and with a lesser longing Kirsty craves books. Once again, when life turns dark, books would bring some light, but in this dead end of a place the nearest bookshop is in Truro and Truro is eight miles away. She has read her two new Mills and Boons, re-read them and lent them to Avril. She has read Bernie’s magazines and been shocked by their bizarre proclamations: ‘I sliced off my husband’s balls’, ‘I slept with a male gorilla’. She doesn’t believe a word of it and is amazed that Bernie does.

‘You believe what you want to believe,’ says Bernie tellingly. ‘Or I do, anyway.’

‘Only because you are such a good worker, Kirsty,’ declares Mrs Stokes reluctantly one day, ‘and only because of that am I going to allow you to go to the quiet room in the main hotel and choose some books from the shelves. I can see you have a literary bent, like myself. But be sure not to leave an untidy gap. Rearrange the shelves nicely afterwards.’

‘Brown-noser,’ says Bernie.

But the problem that now besets Kirsty is the cottage she was promised. The Burleston Hotel advised her that it was let through the summer, and so it is, by two unemployed layabouts who call themselves students, and the reason it is let to them is that the place is too much of a shambles to be let to anyone else. With its broken asbestos roof and its mouldy lean-to bathroom, the square breeze-block bungalow is nigh on derelict.

‘It was a smart place once,’ Flagherty, the gardener, remembered with one soily finger poked alarmingly high up his nose. She found him among the rhododendrons, radiant pastels of blues and purples stretching all the way down to the cove and making pathways with their sandy roots. He rolled his rheumy eyes up to the overcast sky. ‘They used to let them to folks from the hotel on a self-catering basis, but that was way back in the Sixties when people were into bluebells and innocence and little stick fires. They used to come down here and go round barefoot, blowing recorders and playing let’s pretend we’re poor. They had blue and white jugs and crockery. Since then,’ he removed his finger and spent one long interested minute studying the sticky result of his search, ‘they haven’t touched it. It’s gone to the dogs, as they say.’

She knocked on the door and got no reply, observed by Flagherty from over his spade.

‘They’re in there all right, the varmints. ’Tisn’t decent, if you ask me, sleepin’ all hours. Walk right in, maid, and rouse the blighters.’

So she did.

It’s bad enough being consigned to a room little better than those at the battered wives’ hostel, sharing her privacy with two others, delegated one chest of drawers and a quarter of one large, ugly mahogany wardrobe. It’s bad enough that the beds and mattresses are obviously part of a cheap consignment from some closed-down hospital, ungiving and springless with their black iron frames. Avril, who knows these things, says the whole staff quarters are like something out of a workhouse. ‘You might be uneducated, but you must have read
Oliver Twist
.’

‘No,’ said Bernie proudly.

The bedside tables have seen years of service, probably in the main hotel when Formica was first fashionable. It is hard enough to stomach the stained iron bath with its formidable geyser which knows no moderation, which boils the water or freezes it, let alone the chipped wooden lavatory seat that serves eight other members of staff, but to discover that her promised cottage is little more than a broken-down pigsty means an end to her hopes.

But Kirsty has gambled everything on this a safe home for herself and the children, far away so that Trev can’t reach them. And where will they go to school? And what friends will they have?

‘You could do something with it,’ wheezed the woollen-haired yob who eventually rose naked from his squalid bed in response to several tentative prods. ‘Lick o’ paint here and there.’

‘I doubt that,’ said Kirsty despondently.