THE INVERTS
Crystal Jeans

Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

HarperCollinsPublishers

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Dublin 4, Ireland

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

Copyright © Crystal Jeans 2021

Crystal Jeans asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design and illustration by Andrew Davis

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008365875

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2021 ISBN: 9780008365882

Version: 2021-02-09

Dedication

To Renn

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Crystal Jeans

About the Publisher

Prologue

They were quiet for a while, sipping their drinks and smoking, Bart’s leg draped over Bettina’s. Two empty champagne bottles lay on top of the bedsheets, dripping out their dregs onto the purple silk and creating perfect dark circles.

‘Wouldn’t it be awful,’ said Bart, eventually, ‘if we ended up hating each other?’

‘Oh, I would hate that,’ said Bettina.

‘You would hate the hate?’

‘Yes, I’d abhor it. You’re my absolute favourite person.’

‘Same,’ he said, smiling. ‘I am my absolute favourite person.’

‘Bart!’ She nudged him with her elbow, causing his drink to slosh inside the glass. ‘You pretend you’re joking but you aren’t really.’

‘I was joking,’ he said. ‘Possibly.’ He puffed on his cigarette with little smirk creases along the side of his mouth. ‘In any case, I fucking adore you and if things ever soured between us I think a part of my soul would shrivel up. The scant ember of optimism in my heart would go out and I’d become an altogether bleaker human being.’

‘Likewise,’ said Bettina. ‘I would become a crone, living in the shadows. A hag. I’d never be invited to parties.’ She pulled a sad face and he laughed. ‘We must promise to be kind to each other, always,’ she continued. ‘Kind and tolerant. And we mustn’t be dreadful hypocrites about everything.’

‘No,’ agreed Bart. ‘And we must always try to have fun. Because otherwise, what’s the point?’

‘Cheers to that.’

They clinked glasses and drank.

‘Cheers to the queers,’ said Bettina.

‘Hurrah for the inverts!’ said Bart.

They splurted out laughter.

‘I love that we’re funny,’ said Bart. ‘It’s my favourite thing about us.’

‘Me too,’ said Bettina, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘And I love that I’m the funnier one.’ She turned onto her side, as did he, wiggling his behind into the dip of her crotch. He grabbed her arm and wrapped it around himself. ‘You be the big spoon.’

Chapter 1

January 1990, Silverbeach Residential Home, Brighton

The snow was settling thick and deep, in a way it rarely did this close to the shore. Tabitha was not a good driver, had never been a good driver, and driving in snow gave her a sinus headache. But her son was drunk. Look at him, she kept saying to herself. He was side-slumped in the passenger seat, his face smearing the window. Just look at him. She pulled up onto Silverbeach Drive. The car ahead was parked at a 90-degree angle to the kerb and most of the snow on its bonnet had been scooped off. She lit a menthol cigarette and shook her son by the shoulders. ‘Freddy. Freddy.’

‘OK, OK, I’m awake.’ He had a crease like a bracket around one eye from where his cheek had been pressed to the glass.

‘Look,’ she said, pointing through the windscreen. There was a news crew gathered outside the home – three men and a woman standing near a BBC van, all wrapped in winter coats and scarves with puffs of fog coming out of their mouths.

‘Fucking vultures,’ said Freddy.

‘Well, of course they’re vultures, darling. Will you comb your hair, please?’

He looked in the rear-view mirror and ran his fingers through his greying curly hair. He needed a haircut and a shave. Probably a wash. He’d been blessed with such lovely looks, his grandfather’s looks, and now his stomach bulged out like a darts player’s and his earholes were clogged with thick black hair and dead skin cells. Frankly, it was wasteful.

‘Do eat some breath mints,’ she said. ‘You know they’ll want to talk to us.’

Frowning, he helped himself to one of her cigarettes and tucked it in the corner of his mouth. ‘How shocked they’ll be that Bettina and Bartholomew Dawes spawned a bunch of pissheads. What a gobsmacking revelation.’

‘Speak for yourself.’ She went into the glove compartment and pulled out some Mint Imperials. ‘Please,’ she said, holding out the tin.

‘After my fag,’ he said, taking a handful. ‘Can the heating go any higher?’

‘No.’ She watched as the front door of Silverbeach opened and a care worker stuck her head out. She said something to the reporters and closed the door. ‘Probably telling them to bugger off,’ said Tabitha. ‘I don’t know what they’re hoping to achieve. I mean, are they honestly expecting my eighty-five-year-old mother to Zimmer her way out into the snow and confess to a murder that happened half a century ago? Preposterous. Freddy?’

‘I’m listening.’ He was fiddling with the heating knob.

‘I told you it was on full. Why don’t you ever—’

‘OK. Just checking.’ He rubbed his hands together, blowing on them. ‘I personally would love to see Nana swan out here and confess to murder. In a Givenchy gown and her old fox fur, with a piss-bag strapped to her ankle.’

‘Don’t be mean.’

‘With a cigarette holder longer than her arm. Remember that one with the diamonds going in little spirals? “I, Bettina Dawes, wife to the great thespian of yesteryear, Bartholomew Dawes, have a confession to make.”’ He tilted up his chin and smoke wafted from his nose in an oyster-white plume. ‘“The gun belonged to me! I murdered him. And goddammit, I’d do it again! Oh, bother, one seems to have shat oneself. Nurse!”’ He hunched over laughing, spilling the mints onto the floor of the car.

‘She’s nothing like that, Freddy. And she’s not incontinent. Hurry up and finish your cigarette.’ She took her lipstick out of her purse and reapplied – her lips in their natural state had lost entirely all their colour. She was getting pouchy little flabs under her mouth, at the corners, and she hadn’t enjoyed a jawline in twenty years. So bloody what? She was a sixty-one-year-old lawyer specialising in wills and probate. Nobody would expect her to look fantastic. Except … well, they might. Because look at her parents.

Freddy stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Showtime.’

As they pushed open their doors and got out, the female reporter’s head snapped around.

‘Oh, look out,’ said Freddy. ‘She’s got a whiff of carrion.’

‘Don’t you dare say anything rude,’ said Tabitha. ‘Take my arm, please.’

‘What am I supposed to say to them when they ask questions?’

‘No comment. Say you don’t know anything. If they mention the gun, say you knew nothing about it.’

‘I don’t know anything about it. Nobody knows anything about it.’

‘If they ask about your grandfather—’

‘Which they undoubtedly will—’

‘No comment. Just say no comment. Like in the films. And for God’s sake, don’t let them smell your breath.’

The snow under their shoes gave way in a flumpy-soft crunch. Tabitha almost lost her footing on a wedge of crystallised snow and Freddy held her up, barely, his feet skidding. The houses in this street were huge, with three levels and long, ploughed drives within beautiful landscaped gardens. Not too dissimilar to the sort of house she’d grown up in, actually. Possibly even a little inferior. The reporters watched their slow approach. She’d had dealings with reporters before, but never the predatory sort. Just magazine journalists wanting to ask the same tiresome questions about her parents. ‘Retrospective,’ was the word they often used. The last one had been trying to draw parallels between her mother and Zelda Fitzgerald, which was ridiculous and trite. Most asked about her father, who after all had been the more well-known of the two, and were often a smidge sycophantic, trying – quite transparently – to make her feel like an important person: but that was to be expected, and she didn’t mind indulging them. Only it all felt a little pointless. Because everything had already been said. Until now.

They were roughly six car-lengths from the home. ‘Do you think she did it?’ said Freddy, quietly.

‘Of course not.’

‘She did hate him though.’

‘So? You hate your wife and your boss. Do you plan to murder them?’

‘I don’t hate Theresa. I intensely dislike her.’

‘I just can’t imagine Mum doing such a thing. I’ve thought about it and thought about it and—’

‘Maybe he took her gin away.’

‘Oh, shut up, Freddy.’

‘Prised it out of her vice-like alky grip.’

‘Shhh.’ Two car-lengths away now. The reporters were still watching, but not with much interest. There were a dozen or so public photographs of Tabitha with her parents, but most were ancient; Christmas family portrait shots of the Joan Crawford variety: oh, how her father had hated – positively loathed – posing for those! His sarcastic quips to the photographer: ‘Look how fucking wholesome we are!’ His whisky within reach on the bureau, just out of shot. The most recent picture of Tabitha with her mother, published in Tatler in 1958, showed them at the Royal Opera. Tabitha’s face was partly obscured by her hair, deliberately so, and of course she looked so much younger, with her once-cherished jawline and a pair of lips unstripped of their rosy melanin. It was possible these reporters wouldn’t even recognise her.

And they didn’t.

‘Morning,’ said one of them, a young man – a child, practically – with his hair worn in bleached-blond curtains.

‘Morning,’ said Tabitha.

The female reporter was looking down at a clipboard, a steaming cup in her gloved hand.

A care worker let them in, glancing peevishly at the reporters before closing the door with admirable placidity. The home was warm, as it usually was, and this sudden change in temperature set off a tingle in Tabitha’s toes.

‘They’ve been here since six,’ said the carer, whose name might have been Lindsey.

‘Eager little beavers,’ said Freddy, kicking the welcome mat to shake the snow off his shoes.

‘The police were here earlier, too,’ said the carer. ‘For questioning.’

‘Yes, we were informed by the manager,’ said Tabitha.

‘Cup of tea?’ said the carer.

‘Coffee,’ said Freddy. ‘Strong, three sugars.’

‘Not for me, thanks,’ said Tabitha. ‘Can we see her?’

‘Of course. She’s in her room. Fancied some alone time – can’t say I blame her. Give us a shout if there’s an issue.’

‘Can I have some biscuits with my coffee?’ said Freddy.

A playful smile. ‘I’ll see what I can do, my love. Two tics.’

‘She prefers men to women,’ said Tabitha, beginning to climb the stairs. ‘I can always tell. I hate women like that.’

‘I love women like that.’

Her mother’s room was on the second floor at the back of the house, with a view of the garden. She was often found in an armchair by the window, reading a large-print book through her pearl-handled magnifying glass, a plastic beaker full of sherry – sometimes gin – on her tray-table and a cigarette smouldering in an ashtray next to the whining, squealing hearing aids she refused to wear. The carers had tried to ration her alcohol once and she’d threatened to go on hunger strike (which was laughable), and the senior carer decided that since Mrs Dawes was still in full possession of her faculties, she was free to drink herself to death.

She was in her armchair now, looking out of the window. Her book lay closed on the carpet, the magnifying glass placed on top. She looked like she always did – fat and sunken with one oedemic leg propped up on a footstool, but her silver hair immaculate and all her best jewellery on, a floral silk scarf tied around the neck that hung fat and super-soft like a post-pregnancy apron. An uneaten breakfast of poached eggs on toast was on her tray-table, pushed away. With warped fingers she held her beaker of sherry tight to her stomach, as if afraid someone was going to take it away. The room smelled of bananas going bad.

‘Tabby, darling. I’m so glad you could make it. Freddy, oh! I didn’t know you were coming. Come and have a drink! Tabby, where’s your brother?’

‘Still in the States. How are you feeling?’

‘Bloody awful.’ She pointed out of the window. ‘The bastards keep sneaking round the back to try to get photos of me. They won’t leave me alone.’

‘Empty your bedpan over their heads,’ said Freddy.

‘What did he say?’ said her mother.

‘Nothing.’

Freddy leaned in closer. ‘I said, empty your bedpan over their heads.’

She laughed. ‘I should, shouldn’t I? Only I don’t have a bedpan, darling. I have my own en-suite lavatory. Sherry?’

‘I shouldn’t,’ said Freddy, grinning. ‘But I will.’

Tabitha made a point of looking at her watch – it wasn’t even lunchtime yet, for God’s sake – but Freddy didn’t notice. He took the sherry from the cabinet and poured himself a glass. Hanging above the cabinet was an original Hannah Gluckstein of an androgynous woman in a beret. On the opposite wall was a Romaine Brooks watercolour – not a very good one – and underneath, a bookcase full of her mother’s books.

‘Top me up, there’s a good boy,’ said Bettina, holding out her beaker. She gave her daughter a defensive look. ‘Well, it’s either drink or cry. Don’t judge me – I’ll be dead soon.’ She picked up her cigarette from the ashtray and took a puff, her jaw wobbling as she let the smoke out. ‘They won’t leave me alone, darling, honestly – it’s awful. I feel like Quasimodo up in his bell tower. I think they’ve been throwing gravel at the window. Mind you, better the BBC than those fatheads at ITV. They’ve been here since early this morning, darling. In the snow. Honestly. It’s either drink or cry. Drink or die.’

Tabitha sat down on her mother’s bed and lit a menthol. ‘You can hardly blame them, Mum. It’s juicy stuff.’

‘It’s absolute horseshit. What would I be doing with a gun? Really? Your father would—’

A smattering of tiny stones hit the windowpane and her mother startled, spilling her sherry onto her crotch.

Chapter 2

September 1921, Wadley House, Brighton

It couldn’t be – he wouldn’t bloody dare. She opened her window and squinted out into the granular black night. He wouldn’t dare though. He’d have to be blasted off his father’s spirits, throwing stones and shouting his head off like that, with Heinous Henry just yards away, him with his nose like a beak, like a huge disgusting puffin’s beak, rummaging around in everyone’s business, plucking out grubs.

‘Who’s there?’ It might even be one of the drunks from the munitions factory her father owned, someone recently fired. One of them had once shat into the bird bath and lopped all the rose heads from their stems.

‘I would speak with you!’

It was him. Bart. Under the giant oak with his back to the trunk and his whole form in shadow.

‘“Love grew apace, rocked by the anxious beating of this poor heart, which the cruel wanton boy took for a cradle!”’

He was doing Cyrano de Bergerac again. ‘What are you doing?’ she hissed. ‘Go home!’

‘Never in a trillion years!’ Yes, drunk. His late father had left behind an impressive collection of liquors and spirits, the bottles carefully arranged, labels facing out, on top of two large bureaus in his dank and terrifying study. Some were imported from countries as far away as Japan and South Africa (and some dating back to the eighteenth century). Bart’s mother Lucille had felt reluctant to part with them or drink them, so there they still stood, testament to Frederick Dawes’s passion for accumulating rare and exotic fancies, the big joke being that he’d been teetotal; he might as well have been a cripple who collected running shoes or a whore who collected chastity belts. Bart was always taking a nip here and there of the less rare stuff. And he was annoying enough when sober.

‘Go away,’ she said again, glancing at the butler’s dim window – the servants’ quarters stuck out of the main house like the bottom of the letter L and Heinous Henry’s room was across from her, diagonally so. He was most likely still downstairs, seeing to the accounts or bullying the cook, but you could never be sure. She imagined him – the awful creep – crouched below his windowpane, eyes greed-shiny in the gloom, ear cocked, hands down his trousers. And why imagine him with his hands in his trousers? What did that have to do with anything? Anyway, he was an awful, awful creep. ‘Go away,’ she repeated. ‘I’m bored of you already. Genuinely.’

Bart stepped out from the dark, stopping under the high lantern. ‘Come down to me or I’ll wake up the whole fucking house, Bettina.’

Another glance at the butler’s window. ‘The house is still awake, you turnip – it’s only ten. Go home.’

‘I’m going to start singing. I’m going to sing. I really will – you know I will. I’ll tell everyone that you tempted me with your flame-red tresses and your gorgeous wobbly boobies. You tart. I’m going to start singing.’

‘Christ.’ He was always trying to get her into trouble. He minimised the consequences because he had in his head that her parents were these easy-going, liberal-minded poodles, when in fact they were just playing a part and cared deeply what the old guard thought of them – even those they made fun of, such as the parson and his wife, who had ‘such sticks up their backsides, they were basically God’s lollipops’, but heaven forbid that Venetia and Montgomery Wyn Thomas ever express a contrary opinion in their presence, atrocious frauds that they were.

‘Go to our spot, I’ll come and meet you. If I get caught I shall kick you where it hurts.’

He fell to his knees, hand on his heart. ‘Oh, please don’t make promises you cannot keep, my goddess.’

‘I actually hate you.’

A small wood stood between Wadley House and the beach. Bettina loved this wood and as a child had considered it her own private playground, imagining faeries and wood-imps and will-o’-the-wisps behind every tree, and sometimes spying on the maids as they swam half naked in the waterlogged ditch they mistook for a lake. The moon was bright and the clouds sparse, allowing just enough illumination to see by. Bettina knew her way perfectly well, having made this journey thousands of times over her life and many of these in the dark (thanks to Bart), but still her slippers stumbled over rocks and into dips in the dry cracked mud – she hadn’t dared bring a light of her own; there were too many eyes around here, twitching bright eyes like gold coins. She picked up a snapped-off branch and used it like a blind man’s stick. Her robe was red. But it had no hood. And wolves did not exist in this part of England, not any more.

‘Absurd,’ she said to herself, in a whisper. ‘Absolutely raving.’

Soon the wood faded, its trees growing sparser, its tangled undergrowth turning to pale, shorn grass. The sea lay ahead of her, its dark rolling mass swallowing the panorama. The moon was bright out here, in the open, without its pauper’s beard of trees, causing a silvery gleam to coat the flat pebbles which preceded the sandy beach. She followed the thin boardwalk, seeing a small light up ahead, coming from under the pavilion. Her father had had it erected on Armistice Day, and for days afterwards it was kept lit through the night and was filled with drunk, exuberant people who tossed booze from their glasses as they danced uninhibited to live brass music or sat shivering in their winter coats and scarves with slippery smiles on their faces. One man had got so drunk that he went in the sea for a swim – this in the early hours of the morning – and got stunned by the freezing waters and was swept out with the current and drowned. Idiot. He’d been an unmarried schoolteacher, supposedly, from the boys’ college. His death had been like a bucket of slop thrown over the party and the revellers went home finally and returned to their daily, sober miseries.

This was three years ago and still the pavilion stood, its steel rivets super-rusted by the salted air, the canvas awnings covered in gull shit, one half drooped and sulking. Bart was sitting on the ground inside with a paraffin lamp at his side, casting a defiant orb of light around him. In his lap was a bottle of rum, which was apt, since he looked as drunk as a sailor, his blond-tipped lashes bobbing under the weight of collapsing eyelids.

She’d played with Bart from a young age, since they were babies practically, and still they were monkey-nut close, writing daily letters to each other during term time and meeting by night in the holidays (her father, being a hypocrite and a tyrant, didn’t approve of their spending time alone together). They had the same sense of humour, affecting a dry, ironic outlook, and they eschewed exclamation marks in their correspondence and looked down on earnest people. Sarcasm, contrary to popular belief, was the highest form of humour. Everyone else was wrong. Everyone else was stupid.

Bettina sat down opposite him, legs crossed, and fixed him with her most withering look (she practised these looks in the mirror). ‘Bartholomew, you bastard,’ she said, punching his shoulder. ‘Dragging me out here at this hour.’ She hit him again and he tried to bat her hand away. ‘I could’ve been eaten by wolves, you awful nightmare.’

He smiled devilishly at her and offered the bottle of rum. ‘Go on, don’t let me drink alone.’

‘I’ve got to pack for school tomorrow.’

He pushed the bottle in front of her face. ‘Then let’s celebrate the end of the holidays.’

‘No, let’s not.’

‘Let’s. Please. We haven’t got long to have fun like this; we should take our opportunities. Soon you’ll be a horrid debutante and you’ll acquire a horrid husband and I’ll never get to see you again, and it’ll be fucking horrid.’

‘You are relentless. I loathe this quality in you. I absolutely loathe it.’

The wind outside blew against the canvas flaps and they made a loud thwap-thwap sound. ‘Drink, my goddess,’ he said. ‘Drink.’

She felt something cold and wet under her ankle – a ribbon of seaweed. She tossed it at him and took a sip of the rum. It was warm and disgusting. She didn’t have a taste for alcohol, not really, except the creamy liqueurs her mother sometimes let her have at Christmas, and even these she would weaken with extra cream.

‘Cigarette?’ said Bart, taking two out of a silver case with a falcon engraved on the lid (it’d been his father’s) and lighting both before she could answer.

‘Thank you,’ she said – she did in fact want one.

He snapped the case shut and leaned on one elbow, tilting his head back to blow out the smoke. ‘I can’t believe you were willing to leave without saying goodbye.’

‘I was planning to say goodbye on the way to the station. I was going to wave my hanky out of the carriage window in a mournful fashion.’

‘Bugger off. A proper goodbye, I meant.’

‘So this is a proper goodbye? Drinking stolen booze under a mouldy canopy?’

‘Indeed.’ He squinted as though through a monocle. ‘A jolly good send-off. The sea air in your lungs, what could be better, old chap?’

‘My bed.’

He wiggled an eyebrow. ‘We could do that.’

‘Don’t be disgusting.’

‘Drink more,’ he said.

‘No. I’ve had enough.’

‘Go on – drink more.’

She rolled her eyes and drank more. Bart could never take no for an answer. Better to get it over and done with. Once, when she was six and he seven, he’d persuaded her to eat a worm. He’d gone on about it for ages, dangling it in front of her face and coming up with a never-ending supply of reasons for why she should do such a thing, almost managing to package the idea attractively (only a very brave girl would eat a worm, only the very best, bravest, most boy-like girl would dare), and she finally accepted the challenge. The governess, Madame Choubert, a mean old toad with an entire forest of nose hair, caught her with the worm half in her mouth and slapped the back of her head to make her spit it out, slapped it hard, and all the while, Bart’s hand was over his mouth to keep the hysterical laughter from exploding out, and the governess turned to look at him like a St Bernard spotting a squirrel, and she grabbed his ear and forced him to his feet and dragged him across the garden with her almighty buttocks swishing the train of her skirt and him wriggling in pain but still laughing, his earlobe stretched like warm toffee, and the next day he’d shown her the red tear under his ear. This was a typical memory.

‘So Daddy Dearest wouldn’t relent?’ he said, taking the bottle from her.

‘No. I’m going to take another crack at him tomorrow though.’

‘Well. It is a damned good school. For a girls’ school, I mean. Unless you’d prefer to learn etiquette at Lady Foster’s Academy for Dead-Eyed Shrews.’

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘But what’s the point?’

‘Education is the point.’

‘Yes, an education! Think of all the Aristotle I shall quote to impress my future husband’s family. I shall order my scullery girl in only the best Latin. And Bart – I shall write my shopping lists in iambic pentameter. Give me the rum.’

Bart had picked up a cockle shell and was twisting the hot end of his cigarette against its serrated surface, twisting it into a point, ash and sparks flying off.

‘Bart?’

‘Hmm?’

‘I said—’

‘Are you going to miss me?’ he said, a queer, thoughtful look in his eyes.

‘Miss you? Well, I should think so, a little. In the same way that one misses a boil on one’s nose after it’s been lanced.’

‘I’ll miss you. Awfully.’

Bettina looked down at the sand. She dragged her finger through it, making a spiral. She and Bart were so seldom ‘nice’ to each other. She drank from the bottle, still avoiding his eyes.

‘I always look forward to the holidays,’ he said, ‘because it means I’ll get to see you. I always think of you, at school.’ He laughed suddenly, and she glanced up, relieved. He was smiling. The lantern’s flickering light cast shadows across his face, spreading his smile in a dark and clownish fashion. ‘I love to make you squirm.’

‘Those who take pleasure in the displeasure of others are generally regarded as evil,’ she said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

‘I meant what I said though.’ He took her hand and laced his thin, dry fingers through hers. ‘I really did.’

She could feel her face tightening. She really should say something kind back to him, something real and true, a collection of words forming a stark, nude emotion, a collection of words like a brand-new baby. But she needn’t have worried about it, about words, because suddenly Bart was plucking his cigarette out of his mouth, stabbing it in the sand and coming for her, his face for her face, his lips for hers, a look of brave focus in his grey-green eyes, like the look of someone who resolves, finally, to enter the burning building to rescue the child, and there was no time for Bettina to decide what she should do and what she wanted to do and what she might do, because his mouth was on hers and his body upon hers, and the weight of him was pushing her back to the sand, and as his soft lips wrestled against hers and his soggy tongue found entry, two distinct thoughts uttered, voice-like, in her mind:

I’m going to get sand in my hair.

And:

I might as well try this.

His breath came out of his nose as he kissed her, a warm zephyr from each nostril, in and out. His spit was a ghastly soup of liquor, smoke and onion. He rotated his hips, pressing his groin into hers. He put his hand on her breast. On it, just on it. He did not build up to this and he did not caress it or squeeze it. Just put his hand on it. And left it there, neither loose nor clamping. She blasted laughter into his mouth, wild shocked laughter, and he pulled his head away and looked down at her, gormlessly. She brought her arm over her face, pushing her nose into the fleshy crook of her elbow and laughed hard, her body shivering under him.

He rolled off and his arm reached out piston-like for the bottle of rum.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. But the laughter was still bubbling wickedly. She wiped her eyes and stretched her cheeks down and tried to breathe. ‘Genuinely, Bart, I’m sorry.’ He was looking down at the sand with his face in shadow. ‘Please don’t be angry with me. Please don’t, Bart. I didn’t mean to laugh.’

He glanced up finally. Expressionless. He took out two cigarettes and lit them slowly, his hands shaking. He chuckled. Shook his head. Handed her a cigarette. ‘You’re going to think I’m being vengeful now, but I promise you I’m not,’ he said. ‘But this is the thing of it: I didn’t—’ He shook his head again. ‘You’ll think I’m being mean. You’ll think I’m feeling rejected and want to hurt your feelings.’

She sat up straight. ‘Well, you can’t leave it unsaid now.’

‘I promise you, my motives aren’t petty.’

‘Bloody well say it then.’

He nodded. ‘Here’s the thing. I didn’t really feel anything, Betts. I thought I’d feel something. But I didn’t. I mean – sorry to offend your delicate female sensibilities and all that, but not even half a cock-stand—’

‘Bart!’

‘I’m sorry. I thought you could handle the fact that I possess male genitalia. I’m just being honest. I felt nothing. Sweet fuck all. And look at you – you’re Aphrodite. I wonder what could be the matter with me.’

She considered this, smoking her cigarette slowly. ‘That’s all right. I didn’t feel anything either.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘You’re not just saying that because you feel slighted?’

‘No! I mean, I suppose I would lie if I felt slighted, wouldn’t I? To save face. But I’m one hundred per cent not lying. I felt nothing.’

‘Save amusement?’

‘Save amusement,’ she agreed, nodding. ‘And profound embarrassment.’

He gave her a look she knew well – he was about to say something rude, something that tested her. And he did: ‘So in effect, you gave me the flop and I, in turn, turned your vagina to ice?’

‘Bart!’ She slapped the side of his head. ‘Why do you always have to take everything too far?’ She hated the v-word, and he knew it.

He was hunched over, laughing. And soon – she couldn’t help it – she was laughing too, clutching her stomach and shaking, both their glowing cigarette ends dancing under the pavilion’s dark arms.

‘I’ve never admitted this to you,’ she said, once the laughter was spent, ‘on account of your overflowing vanity, but I do think you’re handsome. Very handsome, actually. Bizarre, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe we’re too close friends, do you think?’ he said, lying down on his side, propped up with an elbow. ‘Like siblings?’

She shrugged. Bart had once had a sister. Tabitha. Bettina could still remember her, just about – a fat, ringletted little thing, very sweet, always eating. One of her earliest memories, in fact, was of standing in the Dawes’s stables, staring down at a dark-stained spot in the hay and noticing a scrap of bone with dried blood on it. From Tabitha’s skull? She’d been about to prod it with her foot when the stable hand saw what she was looking at and quickly scooped her up in his arms and took her back to the house. ‘Oh, the poor little thing just wants a sister again,’ Venetia would say, whenever Monty caught Bart sneaking in through the servants’ entrance to play with Bettina. ‘Even so, it’s a bit off, those two being so tight,’ he’d say, or something like this. As if six-year-old girls and seven-year-old boys were in the habit of eloping. Idiot.

‘That was the first time I’ve kissed a girl,’ Bart said. ‘Don’t say anything unkind.’

‘I wasn’t going to.’

‘I thought I should try it, you know?’

‘I thought I should go along with it.’

‘That’s why I got so bonkers drunk. Because I was going to try it.’

She stubbed out her cigarette in the sand. ‘Well. Perhaps it’s a good thing you tried it. Because now we know. Now we don’t have it hanging over us. Did you feel it hanging over us? Because I did.’

He nodded. ‘I meant what I said about missing you and all that.’ He reached out with grasping fingers and she took his hand. He brought his head down and kissed her knuckle. ‘I suppose we’re just not meant for each other, in that way. Perhaps I only long for blondes or brunettes. Or older women.’

‘Or livestock,’ said Bettina.

He laughed with his mouth wide open, all his teeth showing. He really was very handsome, even considering his eyebrows fighting to get to the centre of his face and the cluster of pimples on his forehead. He was probably right; they were too much like siblings. One day she’d be kissed by a man she did not know so intimately, one she hadn’t known all her life, who hadn’t made her eat worms. This strange unattached man from the future would grab her as Bart just had, kiss her as Bart just had, and she’d feel the quickness in her bosom like the women characters from a penny dreadful.

‘One day we shall swoon for others,’ she said, squeezing his hand.

He nodded, squeezing back.

‘I think that would make a good poem,’ she said. ‘“One day we shall swoon for others.” Don’t you think?’

He wrinkled up his face. ‘God no. Do the world a favour and never write a poem as long as you live. Ugh.’

Chapter 3

She damn well hated him. Spread-eagled on the wicker lounger, his belly a hard dome beneath his ugly royal-blue swimsuit, his thick, arrogant fingers – yes, even his fingers were arrogant – tapping cigar ash into the sand. And his face, that look on his face – boredom spreading into something like – no, not disgust, not quite, because disgust was so taxing an emotion and she wasn’t worth the energy required. ‘I am not arguing with you any more,’ said her father. ‘You will do as I say.’

She pictured that cigar in his eye, the red tip sizzling through his retina. ‘Yes, Daddy.’

He squinted up at her, his moustached lip pulled into a sneer. ‘“Daddy?” For heaven’s sake, Bettina, are you five?’

She shrugged, her hands clasped behind her back, toes flexing into the warm sand. Her head itched against the band of her straw hat.

‘I mean, don’t be so transparent, darling. You obviously haven’t been paying close enough attention to your mother.’ He lay his head back down and laughed, shaking his head from side to side. ‘Amateur.’

She stared down at his sun-bright body; his large bald thighs and shiny shins, the narrow pale feet with conjoined toes on the left side, the springy orange hair, the same as hers, spilling over his forehead. Placed next to the lounger was a tumbler of lemonade and a hardback book which, she guessed, was awfully clever. He was a fat old bastard. A fraud. God, she hated him.

She swung her leg back and kicked sand. And she turned and ran, gritting her teeth and wincing as if expecting his arm to somehow reach out to some ludicrous length and his hand to clasp around her ankle, she ran, heels sinking into the sand, knowing that he wouldn’t follow – he had other ways – but all the same waiting, feeling that same ticklish dread that she’d felt, as a small girl, when exiting the small, dark outhouse at the end of her great-auntie’s garden (hands reaching for ankles – she’d always been plagued by hands reaching for ankles); she ran until she reached the scalding boardwalk. Turned back to look. He was dusting the sand off his body and she could see, by the jerking of his head, that he was furious. Good.

Her mother was in the games room playing gin rummy with Bart’s mother, Lucille. They were hunched over the poker table amidst a dense cumulus of smoke, their ankles crossed under their chairs, glasses of sherry at their elbows. Two cigarettes smouldered in the emerald-green ashtray in the centre of the table. Each woman stared at her respective hand with a shark-like focus, neither glancing up when Bettina sloped into the room. Lucille plucked a card from the deck, setting her bracelets to tinkling, and inspected it, her mouth a slick pink line, before scanning the fanned cards in her other hand. She was wearing a purple silk scarf tied around her head and her jewelled ears glinted with every tiny movement.

Bettina could hear the women breathing through their noses. She walked up to the billiards table and ran her palm along the soft felt. She saw her mother bring her sherry to her lips and heard the sound of glass knocking lightly against teeth followed by a dainty glug. She picked up a red ball, felt its weight and then tossed it back on the table where it clattered against another. Both women jerked their heads up.

‘Betsy, darling,’ said her mother, ‘if you carry on like this I’ll have to insist you start wearing a bell around your neck.’

‘Moo,’ said Lucille, laughing into her glass.

Bettina wasn’t sure if she liked or disliked Lucille.

‘Sorry,’ she said to her mother. And then to Lucille: ‘It’s all that ballet she made me take. Turned me into quite the sneak.’ She tiptoed clownishly to the table and peered at her mother’s cards. ‘Who’s winning, then?’

Her mother eyed her with wary bemusement, bringing the cards to her chest. With her free hand she picked up her lipstick-smeared sherry glass and held it out for Bettina to take. ‘Be a sweetie, eh?’

‘Where’s Gerty?’ Gerty was her mother’s maid. She was a mean-looking, roll-necked woman with the face of an exhausted turkey, but was in actual fact a very tender-hearted person deep down. Supposedly. Her mother was always mythologising the serving classes like this.

‘I’ve given her the afternoon off. Her sister is dying, poor thing.’ She shook the empty glass.

Bettina headed over to the bar. Her father had had it installed just before the start of the war and very much enjoyed hinting at its cost. A special kind of mahogany had been imported all the way from Bangor – the American Bangor, not the Welsh one – and he also very much enjoyed bringing this detail to the attention of whichever awful twit he was entertaining, running a lethargic hand along the wood. ‘Not the Welsh one, of course – haha!’ Large front teeth flashing underneath the giant foxbrush over his lip. ‘Not the Welsh one,’ she quietly mimicked, pouring the sherry into a fresh glass.

‘Thanks, dear,’ her mother said, eyes still burning into her card hand. She glanced up at Bettina. ‘Do put some clothes on, won’t you? You look like something the tide rejected. Are all your things packed for school yet?’

‘Uh-huh.’ Bettina curled her foot around the back of her sand-crumbed calf and watched them play. Lucille and Venetia had been best pals since early adulthood. They came from similar social backgrounds (wealthy but not stinking rich, as they saw it) and lived only one mile from each other. Since Lucille’s husband had passed away five years ago, she was over most days. Only once had they properly quarrelled; Lucille had by all accounts been a ‘know-it-all interferer’ when it came to child-rearing, offering unsolicited advice at every turn. Venetia bore this with patience, since Lucille had not only suffered the loss of Tabitha, who had been kicked in the head by a shire horse, but also a stillbirth, and so her incessant commentary was of course motivated by loss. Venetia took her resentment and sat on it, like a letter she never wished to read. But one day, after Lucille had personally taken it upon herself to issue instructions to Bettina’s piano tutor, Venetia snapped: ‘If he wants her to do Chopin, she’ll bloody well do Chopin! It’s none of your business. I don’t tell you how to raise your brat of a son.’

Lucille had covered her mouth with her hand and walked in a wordless daze to the front door. She stopped coming around and Venetia vented about her for weeks, usually over breakfast. ‘She’s spoiled, that’s the thing of it, so just one cross word is enough to send her whimpering to lick her wounds like some pathetic mongrel.’ Angry knife-hand slashing butter thickly over her pikelet. ‘She should’ve tried growing up with three older sisters, then she’d know what it is to grow a thick hide.’ A spoon rammed into the jam pot, striking the glass at the bottom; a peeved glance from Monty over his teacup. ‘And I’m sorry, but he is a brat! Don’t look at me like that, Betts – he is, for a fact, a brat. For. A. Fact. His name is even an anagram of brat.’ She barked out a laugh. ‘You can’t argue with the alphabet, darling.’

But she missed Lucille and eventually turned up at her house with flowers and a bottle of her best claret, and Lucille had clearly missed her in return because she only made her grovel for two hours. ‘I know you didn’t mean that awful thing about Bart. After all, Bettina and my Barty are the same in nature, so to call him a brat’ – a sly look over her wine glass – ‘is to call your own daughter a brat.’

Lucille and Venetia mostly played gin rummy and cribbage. Lucille had a croquet lawn in her garden but they never used it because Venetia was a terrible shot and always ended up tossing her mallet into the flowerbeds and returning to her patio chair in a sulk. They ate cakes practically on the hour. On Sundays they chose to start drinking after lunch and got slowly sozzled on whatever drink suited their mood, smoking incessantly. Sometimes they gossiped about trivialities, such as the impossibility of finding a good butcher, or mean-spirited things – Sybil Palmer’s eyes were too close together and she just had this look about her, like she’d do it with anyone, even the blessed gardener. Other times they discussed the suffrage movement or the ‘situation in India’ (‘Bit of a pickle, I hear’), lolling back in their chairs, using unimaginative language and taking unoriginal viewpoints because they were close and comfortable friends who had no need to impress each other.

Once, after a whole afternoon of cribbage and fizz, they’d retired to the sitting room; Bettina had pressed her ear to the door and heard raucous, naked laughter, and one word had leapt out of the fragmented chatter – ‘fuck’ – and her ears heated up like steamed cockles. She caught a partial sentence, from Lucille: ‘… his hands squeezing my throat, just so, it was quite delicious’.

‘You’re loitering,’ her mother said now. She took her eyes from her cards and looked up at Bettina. ‘Let me get this right: you’ve talked to your father and didn’t hear quite what you wanted to hear.’

‘Correct,’ said Bettina.

‘And you think I can change his mind?’

‘I know you can.’

Venetia put her cards down. ‘Darling, I really can’t. Not about this. Every year you do this, and every year he doesn’t budge an inch.’

‘Got his heels in the stirrups,’ added Lucille, blasting thick smoke from the side of her mouth.

‘He really does,’ said her mother, her brows tilted in apology. ‘This is something he feels awfully strongly about. And he is a benefactor. What would it look like if his own daughter dropped out?’

Bettina’s body slumped and she rolled her head back. ‘But they’re all such horrible bitches!’

‘Well, of course they are, darling. They’re sixteen-year-old girls.’

‘You’re not being helpful.’

‘I don’t know what else to say.’

‘Isn’t there at least one nice one you can be friends with?’ asked Lucille.

‘No! Not one!’Actually, Bettina did have one ‘nice’ friend in school. But it was like finding one pearl in a field of sheep droppings. The pearl is lovely, but look – there’s still all this sheep shit and one can’t help but step in it.

‘Perhaps the world is trying to tell you something,’ said Lucille, raising an eyebrow.

‘Oh, do be quiet, Lolly,’ said Venetia, shooting her a cross look. She stood up and took Bettina by the arms – her hands were cold and digging. ‘Look, lovey, it’s only another two years and then you can come back home. Two years really isn’t a terribly long time and you’ve already got through the worst of it. My father made me go to finishing school when I was your age, and what a dreadful bore that was.’

Lucille knocked back the last of her sherry. ‘And just be thankful you’re not a boy,’ she said, dabbing the corner of her lips with her finger. ‘From what I hear, it’s all buggery, buggery, buggery—’

‘Shut up, Lolly!’

‘Please don’t tell me to shut up, Neesh – I’m simply pointing out the positives.’

Bettina stared at the powder clinging to her mother’s downy chin. The skin was soft, like an old woman’s earlobe. She should be thankful she wasn’t a boy, and she was reminded of this every bloody day, from the black armbanded women gusting into Our Lady of the Angels, the leftover mothers, wives, sisters – in fact she’d passed by them just this morning on her way to St Mark’s, watching through the cab screen with blank eyes but a swirling dark mischief in her stomach. And inside her own church it was all the same, just with nicer hats and better teeth.

She didn’t even have to leave the house for a reminder of how thankful she should be: there, across the dining-room table, sat her older brother Jonathan every mealtime, struggling one-armed with his cutlery, face pale, proud and pinched as the broad beans or new potatoes rolled around on his plate or flew across the table. She should be supremely grateful. She should be kissing the trench-blackened feet of every young man in Great Britain, she should be worshipping their mangled stumps before skipping off to her prestigious, wonderful boarding school at the end of every holiday, because she was so privileged, so fortunate, skipping, skipping, white teeth shining, singing to the finches and marvelling over butterflies! Instead she mewled and scratched like a fat, spoiled housecat. She knew it. And she felt guilty about it. And guilt was a boring waste of time.

They really were such dreadful bitches, those girls.

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