The Daughters of Foxcote Manor Page 10

  The bar is a crowded trestle table near the toilets. It takes Robbie an age to get served. She has to stand alone, feeling like Exhibit A. Only one gangly man with an explosion of blond-white hair and pinkish eyes smiles and waves at her across the room. She smiles back, grateful for a friendly face.

  “Careful. Or you’ll never shake him off.” The bicycle girl in the red dress leans over and whispers behind her cupped hand. “Fingers Jonson.”

  “Oh. Right. Thanks.” The Green Man? He’s white as a grub. She feels a bit sorry for him, standing there alone, fidgeting, cracking his knuckles.

  “You’re most welcome.” The girl takes a sip of her drink, little finger fancily extended from her glass, showing off her flamingo-pink varnish. She’s robustly pretty, not beautiful, and the more attractive for it, with an uncontainable embonpoint. She smiles like she knows her own worth. “I’m Casey, by the way.”

  “Rita.” She notices how cotton threads hang from the hem of Casey’s dress, giving the impression she’s sewn it hurriedly herself the night before. The only thing Rita sews is children’s buttons. Or holes in their school socks. An awkward longing to make herself a flirty red dress like Casey’s rises in her. She quickly dismisses it. Whatever she wears she looks like herself anyway. Graceless and big. Made badly.

  “Got yourself a good job there.” Casey’s left eyebrow, lined in oily black, lifts. (It’s never once occurred to Rita to do anything with her eyebrows: now she wonders if she should.) “With the Harringtons. Nice and respectable. Not some wacky forester family who’ll pay you in chickens.”

  Rita laughs. If only you knew, she thinks.

  “Wouldn’t want to work with little ’uns myself, though.” She shudders. “We’ll all end up with pramloads of our own screaming brats soon enough, won’t we?”

  Rita’s smile freezes. That future has gone, wiped out. She’s simply a heart for hire.

  “If we stay here, at least. I won’t, though.” She taps her nose. “Not me. I’ve got big dreams. And plans. Hollywood. Broadway.”

  Rita can see Casey’s name up in lights. Casey on a red carpet, blowing kisses. And it makes her feel inadequate, as if she should have a big dream too, a plan to make her mark on the world beyond the Harringtons. She’s relieved to see Robbie steering the drinks through the crowd, sloshing his beer as he goes.

  Casey nods toward Robbie. “You make a right odd couple, you two.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing like that,” she says quickly, embarrassed, patting her cowlick. Still pinned into submission. She tries to think of a funny girlie aside to change the course of the conversation, but she can’t.

  “Well, you be careful.” Casey speaks over the rim of her glass, staring out at the hall with an air of amusement. “There’s something in the water here.”

  Rita smiles blankly, not understanding.

  “Easy to get into trouble, like. In a forest. I’m not sure there’s a baby in this village conceived in a proper bed.”

  “Oh.” Her blush spreads from her cheeks to her neck and then splatters across her décolletage like a red-wine stain. She thinks of the forlorn baby’s bootee she found in the forest and glances around at the other girls in the hall. She can only imagine how a pregnant unmarried girl might be shunned in such a rural community. (Poor pretty Penny McGuire from school: you learned what happened to her and you kept your legs crossed.) She and Fred did it twice—a few juddering minutes; then he’d pull away and she’d try to finish the job with her hand—but only once they were engaged. He was old-fashioned like that, he’d said. Even though she knew he’d been less old-fashioned with other girlfriends, which made her feel depressingly resistible.

  “Three’s a crowd.” Casey winks at Robbie and sashays away in that red dress.

  Robbie’s eyes don’t track Casey, unlike every other man’s. He hands Rita the drink and watches as she sips, as if the sight pleases him in some secret way. She half wishes Casey would come back and grease the silences with her easy chatter. But Casey is dancing now. Most of the forest girls are dancing: passionate and feisty, they steer the boys across the floor, the boys clearly in thrall, their eyes blotted with . . . No man has ever looked at her in that way. Ever. Then the music slows and the men rope their arms around the girls’ waists and tug them closer, pelvis to pelvis, and it looks, frankly, extremely rude. But she finds she can’t not watch. Or wonder what it must feel like to be held so close.

  Fred never wanted to dance. He said she’d show him up. What with her size and all that.

  Robbie’s not asked her to dance, either. While this is a blessed relief—he’s four inches shorter!—it still makes her feel bad and wonder what she’s doing there. She’s beset by a sudden terror she might cry. She considers feigning sudden illness to put both of them out of their misery. A stomach upset from Marge’s fruit loaf, for example. Plausible.

  “Rita.” Robbie leans closer. His breath smells of hops. And, very oddly, prompts a distant hazy memory of her father. “Want to dance?”

  Not bloody likely. But girls can’t say no, not if they’ve already said yes to going to the dance in the first place: she’s trapped; he’s trapped. They both have to pretend. “Okay.”

  Robbie doesn’t move. He watches her some more. Something about her seems to settle in his mind. “Or we could just finish our drinks and walk in the woods?”

  * * *

  A bramble snatches at her skirt. As she bends to unpick it, Robbie whips a penknife from his pocket and slices through the tough stem as if it were a celery stalk, then starts sliding the thorns out of the fabric with surprisingly deft fingers. “We can’t let this ruin your lovely skirt.”

  It appears he isn’t joking, that he genuinely can’t see how frumpy the C&A skirt is or how she hides in it. When a finger accidentally, fleetingly, brushes against the skin of her calf, a tingle travels up her leg.

  In her head, she hears Nan’s voice: Has she taken plain leave of her senses? What’s she doing walking home with this rough knife-carrying man in the middle of a forest, of all wretched places, letting him put his hands on her skirt?

  On the bright side, at least she won’t get lost. (Neither will she have to dance in public.) And she should get back to Foxcote: she can’t suppress her worries about the bonfire for much longer. Is Jeannie to be trusted around fire? Is Hera?

  They quickly fall into step with each other. As other people’s shyness makes Rita shyer, Robbie’s ease in this environment, his trust in it, flows into her. She starts to relax. She allows herself the small satisfaction of wearing flat shoes. (How far would the woman in the fancy green heels have got? Exactly.) Even her skirt develops a sensuous swish as she walks, the stiff fabric seeming to soften. Pied wagtails loop the air, hunting flies. Above the tree line, a goshawk rises, like a giant coat hanger.

  It’s easier to talk in motion too, without all that eye contact. Robbie nudges questions into the conversation, like notes under a door, so she doesn’t really notice them. And she finds herself answering them in far too much detail. Mostly about growing up in Torquay: the derelict beach hut she’d hide in as a child and read her library books; her first cactus called Burt. She catches herself, but not before he turns to her and says, with a huge, delighted smile, “Burt?”

  “Tell me about the forest,” she says tightly, changing the subject.

  But he doesn’t show off his knowledge, like Fred did. (Fred could bowl anyone over with gruesome facts about abattoirs.) Rather, it spills out of Robbie, like coins from a hole in his trouser pocket. He picks a bit of antler velvet from a branch and rubs its fuzz against her hand, sending strange tingling sensations shooting up her arm. He blows on the edge of a beech leaf to imitate a roe deer’s mating call. (She blushes stupidly at the word mating.) He tells Rita how the dead bits of a forest are as important as the living, the rotting matter home to millions of insects, all essential food for the birds. In a forest, “Lif
e and death kiss one another.” (Her blush intensifies.) “It’s an ancient place, Rita,” he says with quiet reverence, “once a royal hunting ground for the Anglo-Saxons, Normans, and Tudors, where history nests among the owls and wood warblers. The oak timber here was used for shipbuilding from the seventeenth century, and Nelson, worried about a dwindling supply, ordered the planting of thirty million acorns, which is why there are so many oaks here now, Nelson’s oaks, still alive.” He explains how tree trunks are structured like spider’s webs; how rooks can be eaten, like rabbits, and very tasty they are too, with a good dollop of ketchup; about poachers and culling, and how shooting in a forest is difficult because the trees break the sight line and a bullet can pass right through the body of a stag and keep on traveling. You should never fire a gun without knowing where the bullet will end up.

  Rita listens, hungry to be educated. And slowly he takes apart the forest for her, chipping it into smaller pieces. He points out the skyscraping Douglas firs at the top, then the oaks and sweet chestnuts hovering over what he calls the understory—she loves this, since stories aren’t always about what you think at first, either—of hazel and silver birch and elder. She finds herself peering through the forest’s lacy lattice of twigs and branches into the layers of undergrowth and seeing the tiny life-forms folded within—the liverworts, bugle and moss, the lichen stars on a nub of bark, the furry underside of a leaf. Even the bacteria spores on the ground, digesting the dead into a rich black paste.

  “Look up,” he says, stopping on the path. He points. The fine gold hairs on his muscular arm catch the low sunlight. She wants to run her fingertips over them. His love of this place moves her. “Nest. See it?”

  Her body tilts back and into him as her eyes bore into the uppermost branches to what looks like a wicker laundry basket rocking in the wind. Everything spins then, the branches wheeling, she and Robbie the only still point. She giggles.

  “You’re swaying.” There’s a smile in his voice. “You’d better sit down.” He gestures toward a branch growing horizontally across the ground.

  “I’m not used to Babycham,” she says, even though she senses it was something else that made her head turn and has made all her blood rush to her inner thighs. Maybe it’s the forest that’s cast a spell on her this evening, filling her with a funny sort of euphoria, and . . . this wanting, as if she’s hungry or thirsty, even though she’s neither of these things.

  “Not the fanciest route home. Sorry, Rita.” He doesn’t look very sorry. He has an unexpectedly good smile. His lips are full and curved and he has unusually pointed incisors, high in the gum. She commits the smile to memory, scared she might fall into it, and pretends to be fascinated by the spotted fungi on the ground.

  “I’ll drop you home in my truck next time.” He picks up a small stick from the ground, then pulls the knife out of his pocket; it no longer worries her, the knife. (Next time does. Is she leading him on? Does it matter?) She watches his hands idly skinning its bark, the green wood emerging, pale as the inside of a pear. He has nice hands. “You must miss London, the parties and things?”

  She’s too embarrassed to admit she’s never been to a party in London, not as a guest anyway. So she says, “Yes, very much,” then wonders if things is a code for boyfriend.

  Robbie stands up and tosses the stick into the undergrowth. “I’ll get you back, then.”

  They walk on in silence. Something has changed. Something adjusted, a tiny possibility snuffed like a candle flame between fingers. They are no longer strangers at least. She hopes they can be friends. It’d be nice to have a friend here.

  Light rain releases the Christmasy smell of pine needles. She starts to recognize landmarks: the charred lightning-struck tree; the wigwam of sticks Teddy built yesterday. Then the smoldering remains of a bonfire, still pulsing orange in its center. Not an inferno, thank goodness. She was worrying for nothing.

  When the garden wall appears through the trees, a feeling she doesn’t quite understand spreads cool in her chest, like a shadow. She’s glimpsed another world of red dresses and young people dancing, pelvis to pelvis, and a man’s hand picking thorns from her skirt, and she wants to grab Robbie and say, Take me back. In a moment the garden gate will click shut. The sunlit evening will be over. Robbie will be gone. She’ll be stuck inside the big brown house, with her duties and her job. Washing up. Counting out Jeannie’s pills. Fending off Marge. Calls from Walter. Writing in that hated notebook.

  “Shh.” He touches her arm lightly, making her skin tingle. “Hear it?”

  She stops too. She listens. The sound is faint. It winds toward her, through her body, fishhooking under her skin: a neh-neh-neh cry, an inhaling pause, then . . . just the drip of raindrops.

  “What is that?” She’s not sure why she whispers. Or why the hairs on her arms are raised, straight as pins.

  He squints into the trees, frowning, filtering through all the sounds of the forest that he knows. “Young,” he says, after a beat. “A lot of animals sound like babies. And it’ll have a fierce old mama nearby. Come on.”

  Rita glances over her shoulder: there’s nothing to see. Whatever infant animal was there has gone. But the cry hangs in her ears. For her own peace of mind, she has to check. “Robbie, I’m going to turn . . .” she starts saying. But his hands are already on her hips, tugging her body toward him. His mouth on hers.

  19

  Hera

  A fox’s scream. Something that isn’t a fox. The sky is streaky with dusk and the forest is darkening, its shadows like caves. Tiny birds zip between the branches, like they’re trying to find a safe place before night collapses and the owls start to bomb down, button-eyed, talons outstretched. I sort of regret leaving my bonfire, a triumph of twigs, pinecones, and balled-up pages of newspaper.

  But there didn’t seem much point in staying after Mother and Teddy left. She stood up suddenly, her hands in her hair, all lost and bewildered-looking, like she’d no idea how she’d got there. She brushed down her dress, saying she felt tired and wanted to go back to the house. Needed her cardigan and a hot cup of tea. I bit the inside of my cheek, realizing we wouldn’t lie back together on the grass, holding hands, picking out the star necklaces of the Plough and Orion, like she’d promised. She took Teddy’s hand and said I could stay if I wanted, as long as I didn’t eat too many more marshmallows.

  I ate the marshmallows, wanting to get fat to spite her, sucking off their crinkly charcoaled skin and blistering the roof of my mouth. After that I hated myself a bit more and worried about Big Rita’s night out. You can catch love more than once. It’s not like measles. So sending her off to a dance with Robbie Rigby was a stupid thing for Mother to do. What if Rita likes him? What if she likes him more than us? And that’s when I heard the funny cry. A sound that didn’t belong here.

  I followed it like bread crumbs through the wood. I followed it here. Almost to the house. To the big tree stump, a few yards from the front gate.

  There’s a blankety bundle on top of it. The bundle is moving. A sack of unwanted kittens or puppies? A tiny arm sways unstably in the air.

  I look around for a mother. A nanny. A pram. Anything to make sense of this real live baby, who is glowing in a cone of midgy evening light, like she’s been beamed down by God. But there’s no one. The only hint of a grown-up having been here at all is a grocery bag at the base of the stump. I wonder if both baby and bag have been left behind, after the shopper got lost in the woods. This seems unlikely. But then so does the baby.

  The air closes in, electric with trouble. My shadow stretches out, corn dolly long. I wonder if I’m being watched, if this is some kind of test. The French nanny would leave out ten-pence coins on the sideboard to see if I took them. (I did.) Whatever happens next will be my fault. I know I should walk away, leaving the baby for someone else to find. I move toward the baby anyway.

  A girl, I think, since she’s dressed in pink.
Her monkey face is nettle-rash bumpy with insect bites. She’s crawling with ants. There’s a hollowed dip of skin on the top of her head that is not bone. It’s pulsing.

  I touch her hand. Her skin is silky and firm, like the white of a hard-boiled egg. Her fingers wrap around my thumb and don’t let go. “Hello, you,” I whisper.

  At the sound of my voice, the baby chokes on her cry. She fixes me with glossy blackbird’s eyes. Her face changes color, patchily, pale to red and back again, like weather’s moving underneath it. I want to stare at her forever. But it’s getting dark. I don’t know what to do or where Big Rita is. And I’m not ready to share the baby with Mother.

  Also, a little voice inside is saying, Finders, keepers. She’s mine. Like my little sister never was.

  I snatch the scrappy note that’s attached to her blanket with a nappy pin, stuffing it into my pocket to read later and pick up the bag at the base of the stump. She screams and screams, her body rigid, her feet punching out of her blanket, like wooden blocks. “Shh!” I plead. “Someone will hear you. They’ll find us.”

  Her neck wobbles, like it might snap, and I suddenly remember that you have to support babies’ heads. The skin of her scalp is cold. I press her tighter against my T-shirt, my heat. She feels really nice, like a pet.

  But the crying starts up again, quiet at first, then louder, brighter, like a flame traveling along a string to a cartoon bomb. I jiggle her up and down. No good. I stick my finger into her mouth, mustaching her upper lip with bonfire soot. Her tongue folds around my finger and she sucks. Silence. The absence of scream.

  I start walking away, my finger in her mouth, humming under my breath. For some reason, I can’t remember the words to any lullaby. It’s like in a dream, when you grab at words and they run away from you.