The Outcast (18 page)

He made it easier for her. He started first. ‘You behaved abominably today, Katherine.’

Her heart started a slow dreading thud. I’m not going to apologise, she thought, I’m not.

‘I’m sorry you think so,’ she said.

Her mother sat by the fire and lifted her head slightly, sensing it coming.Will she leave now, wondered Kit, or will she wait till it starts? Claire had been exempt from the beatings since Kit had been big enough to take them, but Kit didn’t think she particularly liked to see it, or to get in the way.

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‘It’s not what I think; you know what you did.You know what will happen.’

Claire got up and put her tapestry on the arm of her chair and left the room and didn’t look at her daughter. Dicky undid his belt.

‘Kneel there.’

‘No.’ She was damned if she was going to kneel for it. ‘I said, kneel there.You will be disciplined.’

Kit couldn’t swallow and she prayed her eyes wouldn’t start crying and let him see how she felt. He pulled the belt off his trousers and it made a slipping sound as it came. He held the buckle and wrapped the leather around his hand. Her fear was too physical; she could control her mind, but her body was terrified, it was shaking inside, it was shrinking.They looked at each other for a moment and she suddenly thought she might laugh. He lunged for her and it stopped being funny and he grabbed her arm at the top so hard she thought it was going to break in two, and she made a sound, but then the belt caught her around the back of her legs and the end of it whipped around. It wasn’t a hard blow, the first one, but he had her now and pushed her down on the ground with one hand, easily, and held her there with his foot. She knew there was no point fighting and she tried to go limp, but the fear made it impos- sible.

‘You will learn to behave!’ he said, exerting himself, working up his fury.

Now that he could thrash her with the doubled-up belt along the back of the thighs, he did it until his arm felt quite tired and then he hauled her up and smacked her twice across the face, flat-handed, and then twice again because he liked to do it.

‘Get to your room.’

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She went and wasn’t sure she’d make it to the door because of the panic making her legs weak. Dicky stood and put his belt back on with trembling hands. It had to be done, he thought, it had to be done. He felt ashamed of how excited he felt, but pleased he hadn’t really hurt her. He hadn’t lost his temper.

Claire stood in the drawing room and waited. She knew Kit was never really hurt; sometimes he used his stick, but he’d never broken Kit’s arm like he had hers. Children should be disciplined. Hitting one’s wife was irrational and had always seemed shaming to both of them, but punishing one’s daughter, even so harshly, was within the realms of proper behaviour. Perhaps Kit would be improved. She just didn’t want to see it.

Kit lay on her front on her bed so that the backs of her legs wouldn’t touch the cover. She closed her eyes and turned her mind away.

At first she couldn’t make herself think of anything at all and was only distressed, but she worked at it, at making pictures, and soon she could.

She made clear, pale pictures in her mind. She imagined she was travelling to the North Pole and was between camps, and had to drive the dogs hard to get to shelter before nightfall. She imagined herself wrapped in furs and the swish of the sled on the hardened snow. She imagined a vast black sky, all flooded with stars, above her.

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C
hapter
S
even
‌

April 1955

It had started like any other Sunday. Like any other desperate, hate-filled, pointless Sunday in the stream of Sundays as long as he could remember. Everybody was out, everybody playing their parts in a play he didn’t understand and didn’t want any part of.There had been nothing to indicate how the day would end.

The weather had been mild and soft for days and the church was filled with spring flowers, and the dresses and the hats and the flowers made new colours out of everything.

They had sung a hymn and said a prayer and the vicar was talking and there was stillness while he spoke, except for the rustle of skirts and the scrape of shoes on the stone floor.

Lewis looked around the people he had grown up with and thought of their childish lives and of their mothers and sisters and birthdays and lunches, all pleasant, with games, manners, rules you could understand. He wanted to make everybody feel what he felt. None of these children knew anything, and they thought tiny things important and cried over test results and cricket scores. He was locked out of it. He couldn’t even remember when he’d had any idea how to live like other people seemed to live. He looked at the people in the church and imag- ined black gaping holes in their chests where their hearts should

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be, big ragged holes blasted out of them. After this there was a lunch party at somebody’s house, the Johnsons’ he thought, and he’d promised his father he’d be there, and he was there, and he had a hangover – the hangover he called his church hangover he’d had it so many times – and this rage, and he was less and less able to freeze it out. He’d rather just be quiet, but it seemed recently it was either hurting himself or hurting somebody else and there was less and less quietness in between. But he had promised his father, and even though Gilbert didn’t think that meant anything to Lewis, it did. The only reason he was here, and trying so very hard to be invisible and handle himself, was his father and not wanting to let him down; not wanting to let him down, and yet always seeming every, every time to do it.

The vicar had stopped talking.The congregation stood up to leave and Lewis stood up, too.There was the usual slow shuffle to the door when everybody wanted to push, but nobody did. The vicar stood in the doorway and once they were past him, and outside, people began to talk. Lewis wasn’t released from the church feeling yet and was looking at the ground and people’s feet when he heard his name. It was Dicky Carmichael

who had said it, and he said it again now, louder.

‘Eh, Lewis? You’ll be behaving yourself at the Johnsons’ house, will you?’

Other people stopped and looked too, because Dicky was talking across them. Lewis was aware of people staring at him. Dicky shoved his hands into his pockets and waited for an answer, but Lewis, pinned and examined, said nothing. He heard his father say, ‘Dicky—’

‘No, come on, Gilbert! David?’ David Johnson turned. ‘It’s your party – happy to have Gilbert’s boy there, are you?’

David said something, but Lewis didn’t hear it, and then

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somebody else spoke and Dicky coughed, loudly enough for it to make silence, and said,‘Just watch yourself, Lewis, we’ve all got our eyes on you, boy. I was talking to the vicar earlier; he agrees. It’s best out in the open how everybody feels about you.’

The vicar, spoken to earlier or not, wasn’t to be seen; he was back in his church now, and safe.

Dicky kept his eyes on Lewis a moment longer and then looked at Claire.

‘All right? Come along,’ he said and took her arm, pushing her ahead of him, like a missile, through the people.Tamsin and Kit followed them and the other people turned away, too.There was embarrassment and some laughter before the resuming of conversation. Gilbert and Alice and Lewis didn’t move.

Alice made a sort of laughing, breathy sound. ‘I’m not going,’ she said.

‘Yes.You are.’

‘No, Gilbert. Not with him.They don’t want him.You heard.’

Lewis wasn’t sure they knew he was still there. Gilbert was very firm.

‘And you heard what David said. We’re all welcome. Dicky should never have done that – I don’t know, I’ll have to speak to him – but the worst thing we could do would be not to go. How would I face him? What would we say to David and Hilary?’

‘Gilbert—’

‘No! If I can manage, Alice, then you can.’

He held his hand out to her and she took it. They walked towards the road and, after a moment, Lewis followed them.

At home Alice did her make-up again while Gilbert and Lewis waited in the hall, and then they drove over to the Johnsons’.

* * *

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The weather had changed and a cold wind blew huge clouds across the sun that cast dark shadows onto the earth below. It had been so mild that drinks were being had on the terrace, but now it was bitter. They all came in and crowded into the drawing room and the fire was lit.

Alice and Gilbert were standing shoulder to shoulder and Alice was shivering and Gilbert had a bland, affable stare as he looked for somewhere to go. After a while Lewis couldn’t watch his father and stepmother being politely ignored because of him any more, and he went out into the hall.

The twins’ house was an Edwardian one, with square rooms and bare walls. The hall was olive green with ugly stairs going up to a shabby landing. Behind him he heard cries of wonder and delight and, looking out of the hall window, he saw it was starting to snow. In the drawing room the people all turned in joy to the windows to see snow in April, and Lewis let himself out of the front of the house.

The day was dark now, and stormily lit, and he looked up into the sky.

Kit was pressed against the wall of the house and she saw Lewis come out. He walked a little way from the door and put his hands in his pockets and looked up. She had been looking up too. She had been waiting for the snow to fall on her. He turned and saw her.

The wind had stopped and it was still and quiet. There was nobody else.

She came and stood a few feet away from him and smiled at him. He smiled back and they both looked up at the sky again. The snowflakes were huge and there were, at first, hardly any of them. Then they began to fall quite thickly. The snow fell slowly onto their faces in single, big flakes. The sky looked

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deeper for having snow in it, you could see through the big flakes to the far-away ones, which were quite tiny and massed together into space. Lewis looked at Kit. She had a short- sleeved dress on and her little-girl arms were very thin and bare, but quite tanned, even after the winter.

‘You must be freezing.’ ‘I’m all right.’

There was a perfect stillness.Then the wind started up again and first blew the snow and then lightened up the sky and then, very quickly, it was over. It was bright again and moving.They went inside. Lewis shut the door behind them and Kit glanced shyly at him and then went straight back to the party without another word.

He felt better. He felt calm, as if something had been switched off inside him. He thought he’d get through the day all right. He would not think about what Dicky had said and if he tried hard, maybe he could stop himself doing anything bad. That was how he saw the cutting; he never looked at it really because of the shame, just referred to it in his mind as doing something bad, just one of the bad things he did.

He went into the room nearest him, a room he’d played in as a child; it had been called the schoolroom and there had been toys and books in it. Now it was another drawing room and almost unfurnished, but there was still a rocking horse in the corner. He remembered fighting over it with Fred or Robert, and laughing.

‘What are you doing in here?’

Lewis turned around. Tom Greene stood in the door, with Ed Rawlins behind him.

‘Nothing.’

‘What have you been doing?’ Ed sounded like a prefect. He

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was nineteen now and had left school, but would probably always sound like one.

‘Nothing.’

‘Have you been taking things?’ ‘What?’

‘Stealing. Have you?’

‘What’s going on?’This was Tamsin’s voice and she appeared at Ed’s shoulder and looked into the room.

The room was big and had bare floorboards and Lewis was by the window and the other three in the door looking at him.

Ed andTom said something to each other, quietly, that Lewis couldn’t hear.

‘I think you should come out of there,’ said Tom.

‘I don’t think Mr Johnson would like you in here particu- larly.’

‘Come on, boys,’ saidTamsin,‘this is silly.They’d like us all in the drawing room.’

Ed and Tom came into the room and Tamsin hovered by the door and looked out into the hall. She glanced at Lewis and caught his eye.

‘Do come,’ she said to Ed,‘please.’

There were footsteps and Ed andTom turned around quickly, checking. It was Fred Johnson.

‘You found him.What was he doing?’ ‘He was just there. I don’t know.’

Tamsin said,‘Fred, come on, what are you all up to?’

Fred ignored her. He came into the room next to Tom and spoke to Lewis loudly.

‘I want you to get out.This is my house. Nobody wants you here.’

Ed said,‘Go on Tamsin, leave this to us.’

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Lewis smiled to himself, this was how it would go now, after what Dicky had said.They knew they could behave any way they wanted.Well, if they could, so could he.

‘What are you grinning about?’

He couldn’t be bothered with this.They wanted to fight him, but they had to get worked up about it first. They had to get their blood up and find their violence in the heat of it.Well, he felt like that all the time; for him it was just a matter of letting himself. He felt invincible because it didn’t matter if they hurt him and he wasn’t frightened of being hurt and he knew that they were.

He went for Ed first, because he was the biggest and he hated him most, and he managed to hit him hard before the other three grabbed him. Ed punched him in the stomach and winded him, andTom hit him in the side of his face and his head felt like it was exploding, and he loved it.Tamsin had run away to fetch help and the whole thing only lasted a minute. Fred and Tom held him down, with Tom’s knee holding his head onto the boards, and there was some kicking and then Gilbert and David Johnson came in and stopped it. It wasn’t much of a fight. Ed and the other boys were shaking, and Lewis’s rage had got up and it took his father and David and then Ed, who was fussing about his eye, to hold him down.A lot of people came and stood in the doorway and peered into the room, and Gilbert was down on the floor and holding him tightly, with David helping him.