Those Whom the Gods Love

Chapter 5

Next day Ginty couldn’t remember exactly what they had talked about, but she felt as though Nell’s affection had stacked cushions of reassurance around her. They’d swapped e-mail addresses and promised not to lose touch again. But now she’d gone, along with all the other guests, the musicians and Gunnar himself, leaving Ginty alone with her mother.

They were sitting under the cedar at the edge of the lawn, having lunch. Sunday was Mrs Blain’s weekly day off, so Ginty had made sandwiches from some of the leftover beef, layered with asparagus and dollops of cold Béarnaise sauce sharpened with extra lemon juice. Trying to think of everything her mother might want, she had brought out an ice bucket with a bottle of fizzy water and a half-drunk bottle of claret from the pantry.

‘Tell me what happened to you out there,’ Louise said, tilting her head back against the padded head-rest of her chair to look up through the dark layers of the tree. Her left hand trailed against the grass, occasionally rising to stroke the icy glass of water.

‘Why do you think anything happened?’ Ginty heard herself sounding defensive and wished she had more self-control. Her mother’s question wasn’t that different from Nell’s, however critical it had sounded. Ginty tried to see kindness rather than judgement in her mother’s face, and failed.

‘Because you’ve changed, even since Easter. I was watching you at the party last night. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so confident. Happy, even. Are you in love again?’

Ginty thought about the days when she’d still brought boyfriends to Freshet and watched them elegantly demolished by one parent or the other. Sometimes, looking back, she thought she might have been able to make it work with one or two, if she hadn’t been made to feel an undiscriminating fool for even liking them.

‘No. I still see a bit of Julius, but we’re only friends these days.’

‘Just as well. He’s not reliable, I’m sure, and all that exaggerated charm! Rather cheap, really.’ Louise shuddered delicately. ‘So it must have been something that happened to you out there in the refugee camps. Tell me about it.’

Ginty described a little of what she’d seen and heard, always watching for signs of boredom. Louise listened carefully, but made no comment, so Ginty ploughed on.

‘And he sat there in the room where he’d clearly been torturing the man I saw as I arrived, explaining to me that the things his men did to women were perfectly normal.’

Louise sipped her water and watched Ginty over the rim of the glass. Ginty had no idea what she was thinking.

‘So I suppose if I do seem tougher, it may be partly because I finished the interview, in spite of being such a hopeless coward.’ She paused, not sure whether she wanted denial or compliment. She didn’t get either. ‘And partly because he made me so angry.’

‘Angry about the beating you nearly witnessed, or about what they’re doing to those women?’ Louise’s voice was different now, almost breathless. Of course it was very hot, even under the tree. Ginty picked up the bottle of Vichy to refill her glass, but there was still plenty there.

‘All of it,’ she said. ‘But particularly the rapes. In fact I was on the radio yesterday, talking …’

‘About date rape. I know. Mrs Blain came running upstairs to tell me you were on. I heard most of it.’ Louise’s voice was hard. ‘You think that talking about “date rape” diminishes victims of “the real thing”.’

‘Don’t you?’

There was silence as they both stared out at the faintly blue distance. A heat haze was making the air shimmer. The cedar above them smelled heavily spicy. Ginty brushed a passing fly off her damp forehead and bent to pick up her glass, resting the cold wet surface against her forehead. It soothed the ache.

‘Ginty?’

‘Yes?’

‘You ought to know that date rape isn’t so trivial.’

Surprised at the thinness of her mother’s voice, Ginty turned. A muscle was fluttering under the slack skin beneath her mother’s left eye. She swallowed, then coughed as though there was no saliva in her mouth. Her lips parted, but she said nothing. She licked her lower lip, then coughed again.

‘Ginty …’ There seemed to be a plea in the sound. Unprecedented.

Oh God, Ginty thought, far too late: it happened to her. But how could I have known?

‘I’m sure it’s horrible,’ she said carefully, wanting to make peace without giving in yet again. ‘But it can’t ever be as bad as what’s happening to the women out there.’

‘Maybe not.’ Louise pulled a clean handkerchief out of her trouser pocket and wiped her dry lips. ‘But it can have repercussions. Serious, damaging repercussions that last for ever.’

‘I …’ They had never discussed anything messily emotional, and Ginty had no idea how to deal with this. But she had to say something. ‘I’m getting the feeling that this conversation is turning rather personal.’

Louise said nothing. Ginty drank for courage. ‘I had no idea you might ever have … If I’d realized, I’d …’ What would I have done? she wondered. Not raised the subject here, anyway.

Louise swung her feet to the ground so that they were face to face. ‘I know,’ she said quickly. ‘You’ve never been prurient or gratuitously unkind.’

There was a sudden sharp pain in Ginty’s calf. She brushed her trousers, felt something move under the cloth and pulled it up. A huge horsefly flew off her skin, leaving a swelling red patch and a spreading ache beneath.

‘Ugh,’ Ginty said. ‘A cleg. Sorry, but I think I’m going to have to put something on this.’

‘Yes, you’d better. Stay there; I know where the Sting Relief is. I’ll get it. Don’t put your leg up; that makes it worse. Leave it there. I’ll be back in a minute.’

Louise ran towards the house so fast that her hat dropped behind her. In spite of the pain in her leg, Ginty was grateful to the horsefly for ending the impossible conversation. By the time her mother came back the sharpness had gone from the bite, but the ache it had left was throbbing still. The swelling was now nearly three inches across, raised like a boil.

Louise subsided gracefully on to her knees in front of Ginty and began to anoint the bite. It was strange to feel those long fingers caressing her skin through the salve.

‘There!’ Louise sat back on her heels as she screwed the top back on the neatly rolled blue tube. ‘I hope that’ll help. I’m sorry it took me so long to find. Someone must have moved it.’

‘That’s fine. It’s much better.’ Ginty smiled to show that she wasn’t going to ask any more questions about the date rape, but her mother had already turned away.

‘I’d never intended to tell you anything about it,’ she said as she lay back in her chair. This time her eyes were closed. ‘But now I’m not sure. Ever since I heard you on the radio, sounding so authoritative, so condemnatory, I’ve been thinking perhaps … Perhaps you do need to know.’

‘Don’t say anything if you’d rather not. I’m not …’

‘No. I think it’s time.’ Louise opened her eyes and let them slide sideways so that she could look at her daughter. Ginty couldn’t see any hint of affection or even tolerance in them.

‘Pour me some wine, will you? I don’t think water will be enough to get me through this.’ Louise sipped the richly tannic claret. She looked utterly in control, but she said: ‘I don’t know where to start.’

‘Perhaps with what happened, and how,’ Ginty suggested, noticing that her voice was as calm and polite as usual. Odd that, with the feelings battering at her. ‘If you really do want to tell me.’

‘It was when I was in my first year at Oxford, and …’

‘But you were at Cambridge.’

‘That came later.’ Louise moved so that she was sitting on the edge of her long chair. Her knees were slightly apart and her hands hung down between them. She picked up her glass, only to put it back on the ground without drinking. She gripped her hands together, then wound them in and out of each other as though she was washing. The rings moved so that the big stones ended up inside one hand, where they must have scratched the other. But her voice was formal and nearly as clipped as a wartime radio announcer’s:

‘I went up to Oxford – St Hilda’s – when I was nineteen. There was a boy in one of the other colleges. He used to take me out sometimes. We weren’t sleeping together.’

Ginty blinked. Her mother had never talked about her emotions, let alone her sex life.

‘I hadn’t been to bed with anyone. But one night, when we’d been out to dinner and had gone back to his room for coffee as usual, he raped me. After I’d gone, he hanged himself.’

‘Because of you?’

Louise’s face could have been made from plaster of Paris. Her lips were so stiff they hardly moved. ‘It was not my fault he died.’

‘Of course not,’ Ginty said, slipping to her knees in front of her mother, longing to help. Louise moved back. Defeated all over again, Ginty returned to her chair, saying: ‘That’s not what I meant, either now or in what I said on the radio. I was only talking about terminology. You were a victim, whatever the offence is called.’

The stiffness eased very slightly. ‘No one thought that at the time.’

Ginty grabbed the wine bottle and slopped more into both glasses.

Louise shook her head, feeling for her handkerchief. There was no sweat to wipe off, but she passed the thin white square backwards and forwards across her lips.

‘Who was he?’ Ginty asked when the silence had become unbearable.

Back went the handkerchief, back and forth. Ginty’s mind began to crank slowly into gear. She did the sums.

‘And when exactly did it happen?’ She wished the question hadn’t sounded so harsh, but it was hard to speak ordinarily with what felt like a bird’s nest stuck in her throat.

Louise looked at her. ‘Nine months before you were born, Ginty. I’m sorry.’

A high, thin, buzzing sound filled Ginty’s head. Heat rushed through her body. A second later she was freezing, with sweat lying clammy in the crevices of her knees and elbows. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t think. She asked the first question that came into her head:

‘He was my father? This rapist? Not Gunnar?’

‘Yes.’

‘No wonder you’ve always hated me.’

‘Ginty, don’t be absurd.’ Even now, Louise sounded no more than mildly impatient.

Ginty drained her glass and refilled it, splashing wine over the side on to her hand. Seeing it drip on to the grass, she brought it up to her mouth and sucked loudly. The pain in her leg was dulling, but the swelling was as wide and pink as ever, with a dark red dot in the centre.

‘Who was he? I think I ought to be told that, at least, don’t you, since I owe half of everything I am to him?’

‘He was called Steven Flyford. Steve.’ Louise’s voice was as bleak as an empty room. ‘And he was the best friend of your new employer.’

Ginty felt as though there was a huge black cliff looming only metres in front of her. She wasn’t sure whether it was her own fury or the passion that must exist behind her mother’s perfect mask.

‘John Harbinger, the editor of the Sentinel,’ Louise added in case she hadn’t understood.

‘Yes, I’d got that much.’ The cliff loomed even bigger, decorated now with flags of humiliation. ‘Does he know who I am?’

‘I’ve no idea, but I doubt it. No one knew I was pregnant. My family sent me to France. Gunnar rescued me, decided to call me by my middle name, married me in Vienna, and so brought me back to England as Louise Schell. Who’s to know I was ever Virginia Callader, the girl who …?’ She choked, as though trying to bring up words that were buried somewhere deep in her guts.

Ginty’s head felt so tight it seemed about to crack open. All she could bear to think about were practicalities. ‘But there must be all sorts of official records. Your birth certificate for one.’

‘And my marriage certificate.’ That didn’t seem hard to say. ‘But why would anyone bother to look them up?’

Ginty thought of her own birth certificate. ‘So, how come I’m registered as your and Gunnar Schell’s daughter?’

‘Gunnar decided that would be best. He wanted you.’

And you didn’t? Ginty didn’t voice the question. There didn’t seem any point when the answer had always been so obvious. At least now she knew why. It was a small, cold satisfaction, but it was better than nothing.

‘And no one’s ever recognized you since?’ she said aloud. ‘I find that very hard to believe.’

‘Not as far as I know.’ Louise looked as though Ginty’s questions were almost unbearable, but she struggled to answer them. ‘We took a certain amount of trouble to make sure that didn’t happen. And in any case, people see what they expect; if they’re expecting Louise Schell then that’s who they recognize. But I’ve never felt particularly safe, which is why I don’t go about much or have my photograph on my book jackets.’

‘Don’t you think you – and everyone else – might have been happier if you’d told the truth?’ Ginty tried not to feel bitter and failed. ‘I certainly would have.’

Louise swung her legs up on the chair again. She stared up at the tree.

‘After the inquest, I overheard a man say that I was “a nasty little cock-tease who drove a man to death.” I don’t think either you or I would have been particularly content if I’d had that embroidered on my bosom for the rest of my life.’

Ginty felt as though her blood had been poisoned and was clotting in her veins, slowing her down, making her legs ache unbearably, threatening to stop her heart beating.

‘Even my father told me I’d as good as killed Steve by the fuss I made. I’d asked for it, after all, and should’ve kept my mouth shut. Men can’t stop, you know. If a girl goes back to a chap’s room and lets him kiss her, she can’t start crying “rape” when he does what comes naturally.’ Louise’s voice had taken on a bluff male severity; now it sharpened with her own bitterness. ‘Just the sort of thing you said on the radio, Ginty.’

Ginty couldn’t take any more. As she stood up, her right trouser leg unrolled, tickling her skin. She ignored it as she walked away.

The river seemed to be in spate, which was odd in this heat. Water rushed down it, bubbling in the shallows and pouring over the few rocks Gunnar had had put in it to make it more interesting. Ginty leaned on the edge of the bridge.

Through the roaring of the river, or perhaps the roaring in her own head, she heard Louise’s voice calling her. She took a step back, then stopped, remembering the powerlessness, the terror, she’d felt in the Jeep. Nothing had happened to her at the hands of Rano’s men, and she’d been terrified. Louise had been raped. Or believed she had.

Ginty turned back, to see her coming down through the yew walk, a slim swaying figure, immaculately dressed in white against the darkness of the trees, fragile but determined. Trying to see her as a victim who needed sympathy, Ginty could only remember the years she’d spent struggling to be good enough to be loved. Now she knew that she’d been running up an escalator that was going down. Every time she might have got near the top, the downward pull had been increased. All that effort, she thought, all that misery, and I was clobbered before I started.

Louise stopped. Her hands were in her pockets, but she didn’t bring out the handkerchief this time.

‘Try to understand, Ginty. He terrified me,’ she said in her most matter-of-fact voice. ‘He seemed so gentle that I’d always trusted him. But that night he used his strength to hold me down and force my legs apart. He raped me.’

And I came from that, Ginty thought. She should have told me. She should.

She looked at her mother and saw that she was about to say something else.

‘No,’ Ginty said. ‘Not now. I can’t take any more.’

Chapter 6

The huge red-bound volumes of back copies of The Times were too heavy for Ginty to carry comfortably. After the weekend’s revelations, she felt like a sock plastered to the drum of a washing machine at the end of its cycle: beaten, limp, slightly ragged, and good for nothing. But even in normal times she’d have had trouble with these. They were nearly half her height.

It hadn’t helped to get back last night to read outpourings of hate in her e-mail from people who’d heard her on the radio. There had been thirty separate messages, accusing her of betrayal, cruelty, stupidity, and every kind of sexual perversion. Now, it seemed, she was a frigid cunt and a sado-masochistic bitch, as well as the incubus who’d ruined her mother’s life.

When she’d identified the right volume, she put her shoulder to the others on the same shelf to heave them upright so that she could tug out the one she wanted. She broke a nail on the four-inch strap across its spine, but managed to haul the vast leather-bound book up on to the metal table. Who needs a gym, she thought, still fighting to keep the tattered remains of her sense of humour, when they can have this?

Fluorescent lights made the library’s basement uncomfortably bright, but at least it was peaceful. No one could get at her here. The only sounds were the occasional wheeze and ping of the lift and her own breathing. Outside in the hot bustle of Piccadilly there had been revving engines and a cacophony of mobile phones and burglar alarms that had sharpened her headache so much that she’d been tempted to abort her mission and go home.

Abort. The word sent her mind lurching round the questions she’d been asking herself all night: Why didn’t she have an abortion? It was legal by then. Why did she let me go on existing if she was going to hate me so?

‘It wasn’t my fault you were raped,’ she said in her head, keeping up the imaginary conversation that had hardly stopped since she’d left Freshet. She had to provide both sides of it, but at least now she knew what she was talking about. That was a first. ‘Or that you were accused of driving your boyfriend to death.’

‘Someone has to be punished for it,’ came the answer. ‘There isn’t anyone else.’

‘There must be,’ Ginty said aloud, in her own voice.