Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (37 page)

‘Simon, if my father knew! Swear you won’t ever tell him I was here.’

‘What shall we say to them, then?’

‘Say that we—say that we were walking along, say we were coming home from the Singing Café, that’s harmless enough, along the river path. And just by that bench, the bench in front of Mardon’s hotel, say it was there; we must stick to the same story exactly—say there were these three boys and they jumped up and started making passes at me. And you fought them off—I’ll say you were terribly brave—but it was three to one and one of them got me away. Here, pull out your tie, mess up your clothes, look as if you’d been in a fight.’ But he’d have no scratches and bruises, no black eyes, he wouldn’t look a bit as if he’d been in a fight; and what was more, he didn’t look as though he were taking in a word she said. Anyone would see that he was stoned, even her innocent father would recognise that much. He’ll be at the zombie stage, she said to herself, he’ll never stick to anything. She said: ‘No, after all, skip it. I’d better go alone.’

Her light summer coat covered her ripped clothes. She got home at last, going the direct way, not along the river path. It was late, but the later she got home, the more likely her father would be anxiously waiting to see that she was safe. And, sure enough, at the first scrape of her key in the lock, the landing light went on and he was creeping downstairs so as not to wake her mother, wrapped in his old brown checked dressing-gown, the tassel of his cord following him with tiny muffled bumps from step to step.

‘Daffy? Where’ve you been? You’re awfully late.’

The coat covered her clothes but the pale, bruised face told its own story and the torn, tousled yellow hair. She had been thinking all the way home what best to say. His face, always so thin and worn, now turning to a bad colour she too well knew, gave her her cue. She tumbled into his arms. ‘Oh, Daddy!’

‘What is it, darling, what’s happened? Oh, my God—you haven’t been…? They haven’t…?’ He led her, as she sobbed and shuddered, into the sitting-room, lowered her on to the sofa, fell on his knees before the electric fire to switch it on, as though offering a prayer to it for warmth and comfort for her; came back to sit beside her on the sofa, circling her shoulders with a trembling arm.

‘Don’t cry, sweetheart. You’re safe now, sweetheart. Tell Daddy, darling, it’ll be better when you’ve told.’ But he left her again for a moment, ran to the door, called up the stairs: ‘Hester!’, darted back to the cupboard, found brandy and a glass. ‘Here, darling, try, just a sip. Then you can tell me.’

His hand was shaking as he held the glass, his face was a terrible colour, that ugly blue-grey, rather frighteningly patched with a dusky red. He fumbled almost surreptitiously in the breast pocket of his pyjamas, shook a small pill into his hand and swallowed it.

She sobbed and shivered and at last burst out with it all. ‘Oh, Daddy! It was Simon.’

‘Simon?’ he said; stupefied at the sound of that name.

‘On that bench by the river, Daddy. You know, the bench in front of Mardon’s Hotel—’

‘Mardon’s?’ he said. ‘That’s not on your way home.’

‘No, but he—he wanted to go there. So we went and then we stopped and sat on the bench and we were just looking at the river and talking—at least I was just talking; and then…’ She buried her face against his shoulder. ‘Don’t make me tell!’

‘Oh, my God, Daffy!’ he said; and you could sense reaction to her plea, humble and gentle: it’s her mother she needs, not me. He left her again for a moment and went out into the hall, calling more urgently up from the foot of the stairs. ‘Hester! Wake up, come down! Hester, it’s Daphne: come down.’

And she came, hurry-scurrying, anxious, trembling, her dressing-gown clutched with a shaking hand tight up against her throat as though to shut out some bitter cold wind in that well-warmed house.

‘What is it, my darling, what’s happened? Oh, God, darling!—your face, all those marks—your hands, your hair.’ And she cried out, as the father had cried out, voicing the nameless fear never far from their hearts: ‘You haven’t…? They haven’t…?’

‘It was Simon,’ she said dully.

‘Simon? What Simon? Which Simon? You can’t mean your cousin, Simon, Daffy?’

‘Mummy, I
tried
not to let him.’

The mother could not—would not—take it in. ‘Simon? He’s only a boy, he’s only seventeen.’

‘Boys of seventeen nowadays…’ said her husband.

‘But Simon?—he’s her own cousin, he’s like her brother.’

‘No, Mum,’ said Daphne. ‘He isn’t. He’s never been.’ But how would she, innocent blossom, have recognised that? ‘I mean, he was always sort of—sloppy, sort of lovey-dovey, you know.’ And she searched in her keen little mind for a phrase from her mother’s own courting days. ‘I mean he’s always sort of carried the torch for me.’

‘But, Daffy, what happened?’

What had happened? He hadn’t taken her to that place, no; for any investigation might produce someone who had observed her going off outside, so flirtatious and willing, with the sailor, Butch. But Simon would soon admit that they had been there: would confess to having taken her there—to having given way to her entreaties and taken her there. And to having smoked that wicked pot and so been unable to control her when she had insisted upon leaving him. Simon in his silly innocence would give it all away. Well, then, Simon must be discredited in advance. ‘He was stoned, Daddy. He didn’t know what he was doing. He was stoned out of his mind.’

They picked up these dreadful expressions from the television. ‘You mean he’d been drinking?’

‘He was on hash. On hashish. Of course, I didn’t know. I couldn’t understand him. He kept talking about some awful place, some sort of dance place, you know, where sailors went with women, awful women, and everyone was on hash or something, even on the hard stuff; Simon told me that, he said lots of them were “on the hard stuff”. He said he’d take me there, he wanted to take me there. I believe in the end,’ said Daffy carefully, ‘he almost thought he
had
taken me there, he was in a sort of dream, a sort of nightmare, he thought he was there, he thought I was one of those—those women…’ She broke off, shuddering and whimpering; looking into their white, stricken faces, searching for any sign of doubt. But there was none. Simon could protest and deny but would be obliged to admit that he had been under the influence of an unfamiliar drug—he was far too stupid and honest not to tell the truth; and might, in the end, even be brought to half believe her story himself. No one in that place was likely to have taken any notice of them; let alone to admit to having stood by and watched her, so young and obviously unaccustomed, being taken out to be raped and beaten up by the man even they called The Butcher.

‘We were going to the folk-singing café—you know, you all sit round and have coffee and listen to the singing. Well, we did go and we were sitting at the back of the cafe, away from the stage, and suddenly the man next to Simon passed him a cigarette and Simon said “Thank you” and smoked it and then he said had the man got any more that he wouldn’t mind selling him, because he’d run out; and the man said, “It’ll cost you bread, man,” but, of course, that can mean only “you’ll have to pay for them”. At least, that’s what I thought; but anyway, he sold Simon a few loose ones and Simon was smoking away and he seemed to go a bit dreamy, not to say zombie, but of course I thought it was only the music. But on the way home, we went and sat on the bench like I told you, Daddy…’

‘She didn’t want to go,’ he said quickly to her mother.

‘It wouldn’t matter, darling, if you did,’ said her mother, gently. ‘I mean, just sitting on a bench in the moonlight, just…’ You could see her thinking that one mustn’t be square and narrow-minded, things had changed these days. ‘Just doing a bit of necking, darling.’

Honestly, thought Daffy, they were so naive it was almost sickening. She said: ‘Oh, yes, I know, Mummy; but actually I was tired. I wanted to come home. And then he—he was so strange and insistent and then he started trying to kiss me and then—then…’

‘Oh, Daphne, he didn’t—?’ Her mother sat staring at her, one hand fisted against her mouth as though to plug in the little moaning, whimpering sounds that would force their way out. Her father was silent and his silence was worse than the whimpering.

Into that frightening silence, she began to gabble; and with the gabbling, memories came flooding back. ‘Then he… I fought and struggled…’ Real memories, genuinely terrifying, genuinely vile, the shock and horror of that onslaught by a man savage with drink, and frustration of a perverted passion. The earlier passages of her acquiescence were passed over: the rest, with genuine sobbings and bleatings, blurted out in a genuine sickness of frightened and disgusted recollection. The thin summer coat had all this time remained wrapped about her. Now she stood up and let it fall.

That slender white body like a lily, swaying within its ragged enfolding leaf of the little green dress: livid weals scoring the delicate skin, throat, arms, breast, great patches of red which tomorrow would be purple bruises, dried blood where filthy nails had scratched: marks of teeth on a soft round shoulder… The mother gave one horror-stricken glance and fell back, half fainting, into her corner of the sofa. The father said, in a high, harsh, scraping voice: ‘Daffy. You must answer. Did he? Did Simon—’

If any investigation arose, it could be proved all too surely that here was no dear little virgo intacta. She collapsed, sobbing afresh. ‘Oh, Daddy, please! Don’t ask me.’

But he repeated it, sick, dull, with that horrible grey-blue look on his face, though now, thanks to the medicine, the flush had died down. ‘I must ask you, Daffy. Did he…? Dear God!—Daffy, did Simon succeed in—raping you?’

She lifted her head and looked back into his face; the small flower-face looking back into the haggard thin face with that blue-grey, ash-grey skin. She bit on an already bleeding lip and turned away her head.

A simple man: with a serious heart condition, perhaps with but little time left to live. A man with one passion, with one hope, one idea, one total, blinding perfection of happiness in his life—so young, so fresh, untouched by the dirty world about her, so starry innocent—his golden girl, his golden Daffodil… A gentle man who for the rest of his life had retained the symbol of the hideous years of enforced ungentleness: his old Army revolver. He went to it now: went with a sort of automatism, turned back to that symbol of the red rage that had in those bad days consumed him at the sight of friends and comrades lying shattered into hideous stillness at the hands of the enemy; the red rage that then—as now again it must—had borne him on the only wings that would carry him to the duty that must be done: the wings of an unthinking, revengeful fury. Like an automaton, he loaded the gun with a single shot, left the house, walked the short distance to his brother’s home: stood in the darkness outside the white painted door and called out, sharp and harsh, hardly knowing that he lifted his voice: ‘Simon! Come out here!’

The front door opened. Framed in the light from the hall, still reeling a little, shocked, sickened by the memories which, with a terrifying clarity, were now returning, the boy stood there and looked out into the night. Looked out and saw where the stream of light caught the barrel of the revolver in a black gleam: and cried out: ‘It wasn’t my fault, Uncle John! She
made
me take her there.’

Like a man deaf and dumb, he lifted the gun, took aim at the boy’s left breast and fired; and stood quietly aside through the ensuing uproar till the police came to take him away.

And so the Golden Daffodil—the press had latched on to her pet name in one minute flat—was on all the front pages. Only, Mummy—true to form—had fought off the reporters and photographers and there was always the same photograph and it was an awful thing—taken quite early on the following morning when she was still drenched in tears about poor Simon being dead and poor Daddy being in prison; no make-up, hair in the most frightful mess because, of course, there’d been no time to go to Freesia’s to get it done; face patched with bruises, and still in one’s dressing-gown, though fortunately the lovely new one that had been Mummy’s last birthday present. And things were quite dicey. Policemen kept coming and asking her questions—or policewomen, rather: it was all so delicately handled that really it almost made Daffy giggle—though of course it was too awful about Daddy and Simon. Mummy made her stay in bed and she lay propped up on pillows and wanly lived again through the recital of Simon’s attack and Daddy’s reaction to what she had told him about it. That all went all right, went fine, and after all now at least Simon could never contradict her. But after that…

First Maureen and Lindy turned up. Allowed to visit her after anxious telephone calls between the Mums. ‘You won’t—well, tell them anything about all
that
, darling? They might not understand. Of course they’re older than you are, but still…

So it all had to be told in whispers; not about the Blue Bar, of course, best to keep that entirely to oneself—it was quite rivetting enough just pinned on to poor Simon (who ever would have thought that proper little cousin of Daffy’s would have had such kinky ideas?). But when she mentioned Mardon’s bench, Maureen responded immediately: ‘You can’t have been on that bench, because
we
were. We were there half the night with the Frazer boys.’

She didn’t think of the come-back quick enough. She drew a red herring. ‘I didn’t know you even knew the Frazer boys.’

‘Good lord, Daffy, Maureen and Roddy Frazer have been having it off for weeks. Haven’t you, Maureen?’

‘He’s terrific,’ said Maureen.

‘Eddie’s not too bad,’ said Lindy. ‘But inexperienced.’ She wouldn’t have bothered with him, she added, but they wanted to make up a foursome.

‘I went with him once and I thought he was absolutely dreary.’

‘Oh, well, we know your standards, Daffy,’ said Lindy laughing:

‘But anyway, why all this drama with your cousin, Simon? Why not just let him?’ And she laughed again and said that heaven knew, kinky or not, Daffy hadn’t exactly had anything to lose by it.