‘Right,’ Julia said, consulting a piece of paper, ‘we have to ask for one burger with fries and one chickinlickin burger with no fries, a large Coke, a banana milk shake and a strawberry slurry.’
‘Which is?’
‘An ice cream. More or less.’
‘I’m not asking for a chickinlickin burger,’ Amelia said. ‘I wouldn’t ask for a chickinlickin burger to save your life.’
‘Yes, you would. But you don’t have to, I’m going to ask for it all. And it’s not to take away. It’s to sit in.’
‘That’s not even grammatical,’ Amelia said.
‘There’s nothing grammatical about this meal. Grammar isn’t the issue. We’re looking for attitude. We’re assessing quality of service.’
‘Can’t I just have a coffee?’
‘No.’ Julia started sneezing again. It was always embarrassing when Julia had a sneezing fit, one after the other, explosive, uncontrollable sounds, like a cannon firing. Amelia had once heard someone say that you could tell what a woman’s orgasm would be like if you heard her sneeze. (As if you would want to know.) Just recollecting this thought made her uncomfortable. In case this was common knowledge, Amelia had made a point ever since then of never sneezing in public if she could help it. ‘For God’s sake, take more Zyrtec,’ she said crossly to Julia.
Amelia was acutely uneasy in places like this. They made her feel old and elitist and she didn’t want to feel either of those things, even if they were true. Julia, on the other hand, was a chameleon, adapting immediately to whatever were her circumstances, shouting her order to the spotted, callow youth behind the counter (did any of them wash their hands?) in a kind of Essex accent that she probably thought was plebeian but that sounded completely at odds with the way she was dressed. The coat Julia was wearing was bizarre, like something from a Beardsley drawing. Amelia hadn’t looked at it properly until now. It was such a bright colour that it would be impossible to lose sight of Julia, unless she were to lie down on a hill of green summer grass, which would have rendered her invisible. When Olivia became invisible she was wearing a cotton nightdress that had belonged to each of them in turn and had once been pink but by the time it reached Olivia it was a washed-out no kind of colour. Amelia could see her as clear as day, climbing into the tent, in the washed-out nightdress, the pink rabbit slippers, one arm clamping Blue Mouse to her chest.
Julia’s coat was too big for her. It flapped open and trailed on the floor as she manoeuvred the tray of food through an impassable wad of foreign students. Amelia kept saying pointedly, ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ but it was no good: the only method of having them move was by elbowing them roughly out of the way.
When they finally got a seat Julia began to tear into the burger with a kind of primitive gusto. ‘Mm, meat,’ she said to Amelia.
‘Are you sure?’ Amelia said. She would have been sick if she’d eaten any of this food.
‘It’s definitely meat,’ Julia said. ‘What animal it’s from is another question. Or what part of the animal. We used to eat tail, after all. Oxen – what kind of a plural is that?’
‘Old English, I think. There must be a whole generation of children thinking “chicken” is spelt “chickin”.’
‘There are worse things.’
‘Such as?’
‘Meteors.’
‘The possibility of a meteor colliding with the earth doesn’t mean that we should embrace the Americanization of our language and culture.’
‘Oh, shut up, Milly, do.’
Julia ate the chickinlickin burger but the strawberry slurry defeated even her. Amelia sniffed the milk shake tentatively. It tasted completely artificial, as if it had been made in a laboratory. ‘This is made entirely of chemicals.’
‘Isn’t everything?’
‘Is it?’
‘Come on,’ Julia said, ‘enough of the chit-chat, let’s get to work.’ She took out a form and began to fill it in. ‘Did your server greet you? I’m sure he did.’
‘Why don’t you wear your glasses? You can’t see a thing without them.’
‘What did the server say?’
‘You’re so vain, Julia.’
‘I think he said, “G’day there”.’
‘I don’t know, I wasn’t paying attention. Julia?’
‘They’re all Australian. The entire British workforce is Australian.’
‘Julia. Julia – listen to me, when Victor went over your homework with you in his study – did he ever, you know, do anything? Did he ever interfere with you?’
‘Who’s doing their jobs in Australia, do you think? Come on, Milly, we have to get on with this. Now, Did your server smile? Did he? Gosh, I really can’t remember.’
She could tell Jackson thought she was foolish, a foolish woman. He had that masculine dourness about him that was so infuriating – the type that thought that women were in thrall to their periods and chocolate and kittens (which was quite a good description of Julia), when Amelia really wasn’t like that. Well, perhaps the kittens. She wanted him to think better of her, she wanted him to like her. Oo-la-la, how serious you look, Mr B., like a Secret Service agent. Julia was so obvious. ‘Oo-la-la’, for God’s sake.
‘Do you want tea?’ she asked Julia, when she floated into the kitchen, an empty glass in her hand.
‘No. I’m going to have more gin,’ Julia said, searching through the kitchen cupboards for something to eat. Did Julia always drink this much? Did she drink on her own? Why was that worse than drinking with someone?
He liked Julia, of course, all men liked Julia, which was no surprise when she offered herself on a plate to them. Julia had once told her that she loved giving a man oral sex (which was undoubtedly why she wore that red lipstick) and Amelia had a distressing vision of Julia on her knees in front of Jackson’s – she wanted to say ‘cock’ but the word wouldn’t really form in her mind because it was too obscene, and ‘penis’ always sounded so ridiculous. Amelia didn’t want to be this prudish – she felt like someone who’d missed their way and ended up in the wrong generation. She would have been much more suited to a period with structure and rank and rules, where a button undone on a glove signalled licentiousness. She could have managed quite well living within those kinds of strictures. She had read too much James and Wharton. No one in Edith Wharton’s world really wanted to be there but Amelia would have got along fine inside an Edith Wharton novel. In fact, she could have happily lived inside any novel written before the Second World War.
She could hear the bath running upstairs (it took for ever) and she knew that Julia would take her gin up to the bathroom with her (and probably a joint as well) and lie there for hours. Amelia wondered what it felt like to be so self-indulgent. Julia tore a piece off a loaf of bread and stuffed it into her mouth. Why couldn’t she use the knife and cut it? How did she manage to make eating a piece of bread look sexual? Amelia wished she hadn’t had that vision of Julia giving Jackson – say it – a blow-job. She’d never given anyone a blow-job in her life, not that she would ever tell Julia that, she would just start rattling on again about ‘Henry’ and his sexual needs. Hah!
‘Are you sure you don’t want one?’ Julia said, waving the gin bottle around. ‘It might help you to relax.’
‘I don’t want to relax, thank you very much.’ How did this happen to her? How did she become this person she didn’t want to be?
Amelia didn’t understand how being ‘good at literature’ had warped into teaching ‘communication skills’. She’d applied to Oxbridge when she was in the sixth form at school, she wanted to show her teachers and Victor – mainly Victor – that she was clever enough. Her teachers had been dubious and hadn’t helped her to prepare at all so that she’d muddled her way through the entrance papers with their impenetrable questions about The Faerie Queene and The Dunciad – neither of which she’d read – and their absurd plots to test ingenuity in essay writing. ‘Imagine you are proposing the invention of the wheel’ – fancy giving that to the
slaters and brickies as an assignment. They would bring sex into it somehow, of course, they brought sex into everything. Amelia didn’t know whether they did that because they knew it embarrassed her (it was ridiculous to be over forty and still blushing) or because they would do it anyway.
To Amelia’s surprise, Newnham had given her an interview. It took her a long time to realize that Victor had probably pulled some strings, or the college, recognizing the name, had given her an interview as a courtesy. She’d wanted to go to Newnham as long as she could remember; when they were children they used to peer through the gates into the garden. She always imagined heaven looked like that. She didn’t believe in heaven, of course. She didn’t believe in religion. That didn’t mean that she didn’t want to believe in heaven.
Before her interview she imagined walking through those self-same gardens, admiring the beautiful herbaceous border, discussing Middlemarch and War and Peace with an earnest new friend or being punted along the river by some handsome, no-good medical student, or being someone that people wanted to know – ‘Oh look, there’s Amelia Land, let’s go and talk to her, she’s so interesting’ (or ‘such good fun’ or ‘very pretty’ or even ‘absolutely outrageous’) – but it hadn’t worked out like that at all. Her interview at Newnham was mortifying – they were kind, concerned even, treating her like she was slightly sick, or suffering a disability, but they asked her questions about works and authors she had never heard of, worse than Spenser and Pope: now it was Rasselas, Prince of Abisinnia and Ruskin’s Unto This Last. That wasn’t what Amelia thought of as literature, literature was big books (Middlemarch and War and Peace) that you could fall in love with and lose yourself in for ever. And so she’d ended up at a far-flung, mediocre red-brick with no intellectual cachet but where at least they let you write long essays about your love affair with Middlemarch and War and Peace.
Julia came back into the kitchen and poured more gin. She was getting on Amelia’s nerves. ‘I thought you were having a bath,’ she said, irritably.
‘I am. Who rattled your cage?’
‘No one.’
* * *
Amelia took her tea through to the living room and turned on the television. Sammy joined her on the sofa. There was some kind of celebrity reality show on. She didn’t know any of the ‘celebrities’ and there didn’t seem to be anything real about the predicaments they found themselves in. She didn’t want to go to bed, didn’t want to sleep in Sylvia’s cold bedroom which caught the light from the street lamp outside and had damp creeping down the walls from the roof. Maybe she could move into the guest bedroom? To Amelia’s knowledge no one had ever slept in it. Would it call down a curse on her head from their mother? If their mother was a ghost, not that Amelia believed in ghosts, she thought the guest bedroom would be where she would take up residence. She imagined her lying on the narrow bed, its white coverlet now spotted with mould, lazing away her days with magazines and boxes of chocolates, discarding the wrappers on the floor now that she was no longer in thrall to housework. And what about Olivia’s room, could Amelia bear to sleep in there? Could she lie in that small bed and stare at the peeling nursery-rhyme wallpaper and not feel her heart break?
Who took Olivia? Did Victor come creeping across the grass in the night and dig her out of the tent with his big shovel hands while Amelia slept? Her own father? Why not, it happened all the time, didn’t it? And did he keep Blue Mouse as some terrible souvenir? Or was there a more innocent explanation? (But what?)
They had always found refuge in thinking of Olivia living a different life somewhere else, rather than being dead. For years and years the three of them had woven a story for Olivia – snatched in the night by a figure very like the Snow Queen, only kind and loving and coming from a more temperate kingdom. This empyreal creature had been desperate for a little girl of her own and had chosen Olivia because she was perfect in every way. The fictional Olivia was brought up in the most luxurious paradise their girlish imaginations could conceive of – wrapped in silks and furs, fed on cakes and sweets, surrounded by dogs and kittens and (for some reason) peacocks, bathing in golden baths and sleeping in silver beds. And although they knew Olivia was happy in her new life they believed that one day she would be allowed to return home.
As they grew, so did Olivia, and it was only when Julia reached adolescence (her hormones releasing enough energy to power a small town) that Olivia’s other, fabulous life faded away. Yet it was so strongly embedded in her consciousness that even now Amelia found it difficult to believe that Olivia might actually be dead and not a thirty-seven-year-old woman living in an Arcadian bower somewhere.
Julia came into the living room and squashed herself on to the sofa between Amelia and Sammy, where there was clearly no room for her. ‘Go away,’ Amelia said to her. Julia produced a bar of chocolate and broke a piece off for Amelia and a piece for the dog.
‘I mean, it’s not impossible that Olivia’s still alive,’ Julia said, as if she had been listening to Amelia’s thoughts (what a horrible idea). ‘Perhaps she was kidnapped by someone who wanted a child, and they brought her up as their own, so she forgot about us, forgot she was Olivia, just thought she was someone else – say, Charlotte …’
‘Charlotte?’
‘Yes. And then when the kidnappers were on their deathbed they told her who she was. “Charlotte, you are really Olivia Land, you lived in Owlstone Road in Cambridge. You have three sisters – Sylvia, Amelia and Julia.”‘
‘How likely is that, Julia?’
Amelia changed the channel until she came across Now Voyager and Julia said, ‘Oh, leave that on.’
‘Your bath will overflow.’
‘Milly?’
‘What?’
‘You know what you were saying about Victor?’
‘What?’
‘If he ever interfered with me. That’s such a stupid term, such a euphemism, what it means is did Daddy ever make you suck his cock or did he ever stick his fingers inside you while he jerked himself off—’
Amelia couldn’t bear this. She concentrated on Bette Davis looking tragic and tried to block out the obscenities Julia was spouting.
‘Whichever way you look at it, it’s rape,’ Julia concluded. ‘And no, since you ask, he didn’t. He tried though.’
Amelia wanted to put her hands over her ears, she wanted to be deaf.
‘He tried? What do you mean he tried?’
‘He tried to stick his hands down my knickers once but I just screamed the place down. He was trying to explain fractions,’ she added as if that was somehow relevant.
That would be Julia, she would scream, but Amelia would simply have let him do it. Only he didn’t, he’d never tried to do anything with her. He’d never interfered.
‘What did he do to you, Milly?’ Julia asked gently, putting her hand on Amelia’s forearm as if she was sick or bereaved. Amelia had caught him once with Sylvia. She had walked into the study without knocking, which was absolutely forbidden, so she must have been in one of her dreamy moods, and there had been Daddy with Sylvia and ever since she had tried to forget what she had seen. Sylvia face down on Victor’s desk, like a half-crucified martyr, her skinny white buttocks exposed and Victor preparing himself—
Amelia shook Julia off and said harshly, ‘Nothing, he never did anything. I would never have let him. Go and get your bath, Julia.’
Amelia woke up with a start. It was dark and silent in the house, no ghosts walking, only the slight electrical buzz of the street lamp outside. Amelia couldn’t remember if Julia had got out of the bath and had to get up to check that she hadn’t drowned silently. The bath was empty, the bathroom dripping with cold condensation. There were towels thrown around everywhere. Julia was safely in her bed, her bedclothes in the usual disorder and her poodle hair still damp. Her breathing was heavy and regular, although Amelia could hear a gurgling in her chest. Julia’s lungs always sounded as if they needed wringing out, like dishcloths. What would she do if Julia died bef
ore her? If she was the last one left? (Sylvia didn’t count.) Sammy, asleep on Julia’s bed, woke up when Amelia came in the room and wagged his tail. Amelia straightened Julia’s covers and the dog slipped clumsily off the bed and followed her out of the room.
On the way back to her own room Amelia paused outside Olivia’s closed door. Sammy looked at her enquiringly and she turned the doorknob and walked into the room. Moonlight shone diffusely through the filthy window. She lay down, on her back, on the small bed. Sammy flopped to the floor and the effort made him groan.
On the last day of her life, Olivia had woken in this bed, looked at these walls. Would she have died if she’d slept here and not in the tent? If only Amelia could go back, take Olivia’s place that night, fight off whatever evil it was that had taken her. If only Amelia could have been chosen instead.
10
Theo
THE GIRL HAD A TUBE OF SWEETS CLUTCHED IN HER HAND – garish-coloured things that were probably made entirely of chemicals and E-numbers. She offered one to Theo and he took it out of a sense of politeness. It tasted vaguely of petrol or lighter fluid. It didn’t taste as if it could do any good to growing bones and minds. Theo never bought sweets, and although he loved chocolate he didn’t like buying it in shops because of the disapprobation this always attracted. Fat people weren’t supposed to eat anything, but they were especially not supposed to eat confectionery, so instead he belonged to an online ‘tasting club’ which meant that every month a chocolate company sent him a new selection to try and in return he sent back a review (‘creamy and delicious, the hazelnut praline gives just the right amount of contrast’) that felt oddly onerous, like doing bizarre homework. That was how he rationed his chocolate consumption, just the one box of something creamy and delicious every month.
He didn’t really care about his cholesterol and his blood pressure, he would be happy to die of a stroke or a heart attack. ‘Strokes don’t necessarily kill, Dad,’ Jennifer e-mailed crossly from Toronto. ‘They’re more likely to leave you incapacitated. Is that what you want?’ Perhaps she was afraid she would have to look after him, but he would never do that to her – as far as Theo was concerned the parent-child relationship was one way, you gave them all your love and they were under no obligation to pay a penny back. Of course, if they did love you then that was the icing on the cake with cherries on top. And chocolate shavings and those little silver balls that cracked your fillings. Laura used to love those. He always used to decorate the cakes he made. Cakes, pastry, scones, he’d learned how to make everything after Valerie died. He turned out to be a much better cook than his wife.