She turned on her heel and headed for the stairs.
‘Fine, stay ignorant.’ Michael’s shout was so loud, one or two faces looked up. ‘It’s probably for the best. Taking a spoiled kid who can’t stop thinking like her daddy to a meeting intended for adults would make me the idiot anyway.’
She should have known he wouldn’t so easily back down. Her palm itched as she swung round.
‘You’re two years older than me, Michael, not twenty. You can play the big man as much as you like. You’re nowhere close to being one yet.’
But he’d gone and, even though she’d tried to have the last word, he’d won. Despite all Monsieur Bardou’s charming smiles and polished compliments, Michael’s parting shot had chipped the night’s sparkle completely away.
Two
Karen
Aldershot, September 1971
Mummy was dead.
Karen, perched on her bed in her cardboard-stiff school uniform, clutching at words that made as little sense now as they had three months ago.
Mummy was dead because Mummy had drowned. Which didn’t make any sense either. Mummy hated swimming. She wouldn’t go to the lido in the summer, not even to sit on the side. As far as Karen knew, she didn’t own a bathing suit, and besides, who goes swimming at six o’clock in the morning? Certainly not Mummy. Daddy was the early riser and the breakfast maker, not her.
Mummy was dead. Which meant everything that went with her was dead. Her soap-and-roses scent. Her gentle voice. Her silky brown hair that, to Karen’s relief, she had always refused to tease into the peroxide helmet all the other mothers wore. The way they had curled up together when they shared a bedtime story. All of it was gone, snapped away from Karen as if someone had stolen a limb.
‘Best foot forward, Karen.’
Father’s voice rose up the stairs, parade-ground pitched and far too cheery. Was this all she had now? If Mummy was gone, was all the softness gone too?
‘You don’t want to be late on your first morning.’
Didn’t she? Had he asked her whether she cared about being late, or if she even wanted to go to this new school at all?
Aldershot County High School for Girls. The name sounded so regimented and imposing, which was probably why Father liked it so much.
When the letter came to say she had passed the dreaded entrance examination and secured a place at the Grammar School everyone longed to get into, Father had been more excited than she knew he could be. He had patted her head and taken the three of them for dinner at the town’s posh new Berni Inn restaurant, where he’d pushed out the boat as far as pudding. That had been barely six months ago. And now Mummy was dead.
Karen stared at her tightly laced shoes. She wasn’t ready to deal with this new world she was facing; she didn’t know what it wanted from her. She blinked back a tear. At least she knew for certain no one wanted those.
She’s gone, Karen. No use raking it over or getting yourself upset. The coffin was barely in the ground before everyone had decided her mourning period was done.
Perhaps that was how death was always dealt with: done and dusted and tidied away. How was Karen meant to know, when this was the first time she’d been near it? Perhaps everyone carried these hidden holes in their middles and ‘least said soonest mended’ would work if she gave it the time, which was apparently the healer. She just wished someone would tell her how much time it took, and whether there was a way she could speed it up.
More tears fell, splashing onto her granite grey skirt. Karen tipped her head forward and let them drop: if she rubbed her face and made it red, Father would go all stiff and gulpy.
The trouble was that her mother wasn’t simply dead; she had completely disappeared. Father wouldn’t talk about her. The house was scraped clean of her. If Karen mentioned her in a shop, or in the library, or even to their busybody neighbour Mrs Hubbard, who was never out of their house and claimed to have been Mummy’s best friend, voices dropped to a hushed whisper. It was as if no one wanted her remembered except Karen, who was terrified of forgetting.
She had tried very hard to stop that from happening – she had gone to the shops and bought herself a notebook and now she sat up every night with her pen, determined to write down every memory. Mummy making daisy chains in the park on a perfect summer afternoon, festooning the pair of them with flowers. Mummy teaching her to make snow angels when the snow finally fell one Christmas and not caring how wet and messy they got. Karen could see the two of them perfectly clearly, sitting in the grass and lying in the snow, but it was like looking at a photograph, at something frozen. As if the feelings that went with the actions, that Karen didn’t have big enough words for, had already faded.
Everything had happened so quickly, Karen was still struggling to piece the disjointed days back together. The unreality of the day itself. The silent car journey home from Hove to Aldershot and the bleakly frightening finality of the funeral. This summer of tiptoeing around. Bits were too sharp, and bits were too blurry, like one of Father’s never-ending holiday slide shows had slipped out of focus.
The clock in the hall struck seven-thirty.
Karen had taken the battery out of the one that had sat for years on her bedside table. It was so childish – she hated it. Noddy and Big Ears and that stupid smiling bear. She had wanted to change the alarm clock for a sleek square orange one like Laura had brought to school for show-and-tell, but Mummy said that wasn’t suitable for ‘a little girl’ and wouldn’t let her. Well, now the whole world had decided she was a big girl so maybe Noddy and his ridiculous car could finally drive off.
Karen sat up.
Or she could smash it. She could throw it on the floor and see its cheery face crack. Or, better still, throw it through the window and hear the glass shatter. Karen pictured the panes snapping, the shards crashing onto the path. It would make so much noise, the house would surely collapse in the shock of it.
Nothing ever happened inside these walls louder than a door easing shut. Right now, Father was in the kitchen, getting breakfast. Karen could picture him, putting out her cup and bowl, rummaging through the cupboards and the fridge, doling out cereal. Even with all the doors open, she couldn’t hear him. He had always padded around the place like a giant grey mouse. Mummy doesn’t like noise, does she? It had always been phrased as a reminder, never a question. Especially when she has one of her headaches.
Mummy’s headaches. Their rhythms had ruled the house for as long as Karen could remember. Some days the house was so silent, Karen imagined she could hear the sound of the dust motes floating through the air. She used to wonder if anyone passing by would ever have guessed there were flesh and blood people sitting quietly inside.
Maybe that’s why Mummy went to the beach so early, because she was looking for quiet.
No matter how many times Karen tried out that explanation, she could never quite believe it. If her mother wanted some peace, why would she need to go to the beach? They had been staying in Hove; it didn’t matter whether it was early or late, or whether you stood in the street or the park, nowhere on earth was as quiet as Hove. Even in summer, the place was as short on life as those ghost towns in the wild-west films her father loved, the ones that had all emptied out in fear of attack. On the first day of their week on the South Coast, Karen had half-expected cowboys to pop up from behind the wedding-cake houses. If only. Hove was dull. Capital D, underlined twice, dull, and not by any stretch of the imagination Karen’s idea of a holiday place.