Unhallowed Ground (2 page)

‘Isla. This isn’t fair. You’re supposed to be trying to cheer me up.’

‘I’m just wondering how you imagine you can depend on them, for anything.’

‘They’re polite enough.’

And here Suzie smiled in the same disbelieving way as Isla. ‘Oh, yes, they mutter the odd miserable good morning when you meet face to face and there’s no avoiding it.’

‘Oh, that’s silly,’ Georgie snapped. ‘They just believe in minding their own business; they probably think I don’t want people nosing, prying into my affairs. They probably think I’m like my brother, a recluse, an artist, an eccentric who wants to be left alone. I bet Stephen bit their heads off in the past.’ And she could feel that annoyance which itched whenever the conversation got too close for comfort. ‘Anyway, what choice do I have? I’ve made my bed, as my mother would say.’

Isla met her stare, sifting through a dozen responses to find the most suitable one. In the end she said in a weak, troubled voice, ‘You should never have come here in the first place. Out of the frying pan…’

‘You think I’m a bloody fool, don’t you?’

Isla looked away and picked up her drink. She lay on the messy sofa, surprisingly comfortable despite its amorphous nature, next to the crackling fire that winked on her overlarge tortoiseshell spectacles. ‘I think you over-reacted, yes. I think you are punishing yourself as usual. God said, “On all their heads shall be baldness and every beard cut off,” and you, my dear Georgina, secretly want to be bald.’

Not funny. Georgie wound a curl around her finger and rubbed her sloppy socks together—curiously nervous gestures for her—as she stared thoughtfully into the flames. She suddenly felt an urge to lean forward and arrange a few untidy sticks in the enormous hearth. A cold draft spun down the massive chasm of a chimney. Crossly she reminded them both, ‘There wasn’t much time for thinking! Not then, dammit. This place felt like a refuge then, a friendly lair in a hostile world,
but why am I wading through this shit again?
You know how it was. You were there for God’s sake. You know what it was like for me then.’

‘It was bloody hell,’ agreed Suzie, as frizzy-haired as a freshly gathered fleece, her complexion smooth as a china doll’s with cheeks painted a soft pink and a cold nose bright and shiny. The evenings were already chilly and Suzie was almost entirely cocooned in a baggy, knee-length purple fleece. ‘But even so, you could have used the cottage as a temporary hideaway and put it on the market in the meantime. Nobody dreamed you’d end up living at Furze Pen, Georgie, nobody thought you’d take it this far.’

No, neither had Georgina, but she’d never dreamed it would get that bad.

‘If I’d put it on the market I would have had to be here all the time to show the punters round. And I couldn’t have faced all those strangers. I couldn’t put that sort of false smile on my face or cope with anything so fake. Hell, Suzie, I couldn’t put my mind to anything like hoovering or dusting or sorting out the garden.’

‘That is ridiculous.’ Isla, on the sofa, pounded the limpish cushions and rearranged them behind her back. A feathery aura of age and dust floated into the atmosphere. ‘The solicitor would have sold it for you; you had an offer right at the start. They’d have had no problems selling this as a holiday cottage, bang in the middle of Dartmoor; it would have made a fortune, untouched, original beams, original windows, flagstone floors…’

‘No central heating,’ Georgie interrupted, shivering slightly as she crossed the small sitting room to the even colder, more primitive kitchen to add mushrooms to the stew. She felt like a piece of lettuce walking into the salad crisper. Perhaps she should not have chosen whitewash, a warmer shade might have done wonders. The cheery rugs did help a tad, and the paintings that covered the walls, of course.

From her place by the fire, Lola snored loudly and woke herself up.

‘And we’re just very concerned you’re going to feel terribly depressed and lonely, way out of your depth, surviving like this in the winter,’ Suzie called through the narrow doorway with a meaningful look in Isla’s direction. ‘All your perceptions of the world are fuddled. It’s not as if it’s too late. You could come back to London with us, put this place on the market and start searching for something more practical.’

Georgie, chewing on her fingernails, watched the hypnotically floating mushrooms, allowing the steam to caress her face, enjoying the hot smell of the stew, taking comfort from the warmth and the feeling of something well made with love. Since she’d been down here her cooking had developed a wetter, more mixed consistency… so much free fruit, so many vegetables… it was easier to use only one pot because of the cramped kitchen. Home-grown potatoes from the farm and a home-made apple pie with fresh cream to follow.

Yet everything Isla and Suzie said made sense, while every argument she put forward fell apart full of holes. And if she was trying to prove something by standing out and being so stubborn, then for God’s sake what was it?

She had been so frightened, so intimidated by everything. But most of all by the way she had, in a few short months, been so easily destroyed, shattered, all confidence gone, the confidence she had built up over forty-two years, melted away in a moment. Until she felt, as she lay in bed night after night weeping, that all the time there’d been nobody there, that Georgina Jefferson was a ‘let’s pretend’ person from childhood, a face miming with nobody behind it. As unsubstantial as soap worn to a frightening slither, gargling off down the plughole.

Was she so naive as to believe that by enduring life on her own for a while, a hermit existence with only Lola for company, she would find herself again? Could she grow large and firm again as simply as that?

I will lay me down in green pastures. She wanted her soul restoreth.

Oh, I am a strong and sensible person…

Well, this was what she returned to her friends in the sitting room and told them. And they said, tipsily, that they did understand her motives, they saw how easily a person could be demoralized and torn apart under such attack from every quarter.

‘Even people I’d trusted as friends turned their backs on me,’ she wailed, tormented by an alien self-pity. ‘
Can you honestly imagine what that’s like?
Ringing people up—oh yes, feeling bad enough about ringing people up—so damn needy, hands in a sweat, heart aching, so desperately wanting reassurance, and being told by quiet, polite voices that they weren’t in, they’ll ring you back, they were away when you knew they were not.’ She played with Lola’s soft ears as a child might play with a comforter. The dog opened one eye. It was soft and brown and liquid with love. ‘And all the while, to add to the horror, the newspapers crucify you.’

‘It could have happened to any one of us.’

‘
Don’t tell me that one more time!
I can’t bear hearing that! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know it could have happened to anyone, but it didn’t, Suzie, did it,
it bloody well happened to me!
’

And Georgie wanted to shout that, above all, she needed time on her own to mourn for the child with the wise grey eyes who had ended up in a grainy frame with shaggy hair on the front pages of all the papers. The child that had depended on her for its life. The child she had, through her own ineptitude, betrayed and allowed to die. But such a protest would have been unnecessary because Isla and Suzie knew that very well, and yes, as social workers, it could have happened to either of them, and it would happen, again and again as it seems to, every few years, and every time it would be equally terrible…

‘What should I have done,’ had become such a wizened old question that she had stopped asking it, even of herself. If only she could have taken time back. But what was the use of any of this? She had known there was violence at that wretched flat, it oozed out through that cold yellow front door with the thin metal letter box through which she had stuffed note after note, time after time, through which her lips had called so often. Hopelessly. Tiredly. Fearfully.

And back then, as she leaned forward from her sunken chair that even in late summer smelled of damp, wringing her hands and sharing her feelings with her friends, aware of her secret resentment, she would have liked to have screamed, And I am grateful for your continued friendship, can you sense that, dear God? Because that meant that their friendship, once on equal terms, once as honest as friendships could be, was flawed, even though they would have received this as an affront and answered, ‘That is absurd.’ Yes, that resentment, that bitterness, it was there now and nothing could alter it. And what would they have thought if Georgie had screamed across their cosy pink drunkenness, as she longed to do,
This outrageous, diabolical thing did not happen to either of you, but my God how I wish that it HAD
. I wish it was me sitting where you are giving advice and sympathizing.
I wish I was you and that either of you were over here in my position.

Yes, she was giving them too little and they were giving her too much.

She re-embarked on her train of thought. She said, ‘I wish I’d been able to go to court and stand trial. It would have been fairer, and they were trying me anyway.’

Wretched. Despairing.
And guilty.

‘No, they were not. The inquiry never expected to find you guilty, Georgie. Nothing is that simplistic. You did all that was humanly possible. You are not a fortune teller. The inquiry found you blameless.’

‘Blameless?
Jesus Christ!
A child is murdered and how can any of us be blameless? And I could have done more. It is always possible to have done more.’

Isla removed her dramatically circular spectacles and rubbed the lenses on the arm of the sofa, as if to polish them and study Georgie simultaneously. ‘You can’t stop dwelling on all this, can you? Punishing yourself over and over? I can see you doing it. One minute we’re talking normally and the next you sink into yourself, clam up, your expression changes, you go miles away.’

During this terse exchange Georgie attempted a stoic smile, her teeth must have looked like false ones, clenched so rigidly, in a jar. She tightened her hands in her lap. ‘How the hell can I get this out of my mind? Five minutes is the longest time I’ve been free of it so far, and at night I have such nightmares about it.’ She might as well admit it. Yes, yes, punishing herself over the smallest details, all those ifs and buts and if onlys, any device to add to the torture.

‘What on earth is that rank smell?’ Thank goodness the subject was changed.

‘There must be a dead rat in the wall.’

‘Last night, in bed, I thought I heard scratching. Maybe one of your more experienced neighbours could put some poison down.’

So you see how uncomfortable Georgie felt with her visitors, some of them colleagues from work, some old friends who went back to Toby, others picked up, like most friends are, while thumbing their way along the hard shoulder of life. They came in a steady stream, like memories, so that, incredibly, there had been no complete week from June through to September when she had been alone for longer than forty-eight hours. They kept her busy. They entertained her. But at the end of the day it did not matter how hard they worked with her on the cottage, it made no difference what fun they shared as they laboured in the sunshine repairing the fences, patching the thatch, turning over the rock-hard soil or unblocking the stream. It mattered not what picnics they shared or how many bottles of wine they drank, she could not overcome that grim stumbling block however hard she tried. They were the blessed, she the damned. They brought car-loads of supplies, they worked with a will, paying their way, but they overdid the kindness bit. Their visits were of condolence, of support in her hour of need, just as hers would have been if the boot was on the other foot. They pitied her and her sad predicament. They thanked her for her hospitality, they thanked her for their holiday, but they were being kind and
Georgie was grateful.
And that put something unpleasant between them, something she found hard to deal with. Poor old Georgina, psychologically standing up while everyone else remained sitting down.

Perhaps she was oversensitive, but she could suddenly easily understand why the troubled resent do-gooders so. And there’s only so much support you can get before you see yourself as a cripple.

In some perverse way their well-meaning presences prevented her from healing herself. And yet, look at this, one week after their departure and already she wanted them back. She feared for the roots of her being. She thought she was going mad.

The shaking first started…

It was Roger Mace who broke the news that Angela Hopkins was dead. Over the phone for God’s sake, a most personal call. The ringing woke her in the morning—a mental alarm in her head—she heard the freezing-cold news in a hot crumpled bed. ‘Georgie. I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you myself.’

She had to know, shoulders hunched to guard breathless conversation. ‘How did she die?’

‘They’re not sure yet… a blow to the head…’

‘When?’ She hugged the duvet to her stomach. She could feel death’s proximity. Her ankles were white as bleached bones, thin as a child’s, thin as a skeleton’s.

‘Last night.’

‘And Patsy and Carmen?’ She spoke with deliberate, polite calm.

‘There’s a place of safety order, but no sign of abuse so far.’

‘What will happen?’

‘Well, I’m no expert, but the case will be given a high priority. There’ll be an enormous public impact.’

Her hair fell forward to hide her face. ‘I’ll come straight to the office.’

‘No, Georgie, stay where you are. There’ll be time for all that later.’

A warning kindly given. A glimpse of the scalpel of scrutiny. She hadn’t asked for an explanation. And then it was suddenly
déjà vu
, she’d always known this was going to happen and what would happen next. Oh God, let it not be true.
She had always secretly known and yet done nothing about it.
Guilty as that bastard, Ray Hopkins himself, the man with the bullet-shaped head and the earful of sleepers, who lived behind the yellow door and swore blind that his five-year-old daughter had fallen down the stairs.