HOLLY
19 June 1993
Twenty
She returned home soon after that. Slunk back. Her body language, when her mother, Lynda, met her at the station, spoke of dejection and failure, for that was exactly what she felt. That she was a failure for being unable to negotiate her way sexually and socially; and for being unable to communicate something so crucial – the fact she did not want her body to be invaded by another – adequately.
‘Too snobby,’ she explained whenever anyone asked why she wouldn’t be returning in October. Manda, who could barely disguise her glee that the sister who had dared to overreach herself had had her wings melted by the sun, kept pushing. ‘Leave it, will you,’ Holly answered. ‘It just wasn’t for me.’
‘I think she was just homesick,’ her mother had elaborated when her friends probed. ‘She found it a bit different down south.’ Far better to do a course at Liverpool University where she could return home whenever she wanted, for something had shaken her up, Lynda wasn’t stupid; she could see that. A boy. Or a man, more likely.
And so she had started again. September 1993. Liverpool University. The reports from her Oxford tutors had been exemplary, though she hadn’t done as well in her exams as expected. She had a full grant and there was no question of this being withheld now that she was changing direction and studying law.
‘Far better to do something vocational,’ she told Manda, who had nodded before pointing out that she had said this all along.
‘No point namby-pambying around with novels. I wasn’t going to achieve anything like that.’
‘Whatcha want to achieve?’ Manda had chewed on a piece of gum and affected a nonchalance belied by her interest in this newly career-minded sister.
‘Oh, you know,’ she said, affecting a flippancy she did not feel, for to speak from the heart would be to expose herself. ‘Bringing down the bad guys. Getting justice.’ And for the first time since she had arrived home, she gave a proper smile: one that reached her eyes and lit them so that her severity, her seriousness, briefly disappeared.
When she enrolled for her degree, it was under a different name: Kate Mawhinney. Kate, a harder, sharper form of her softer middle name, Catherine; Mawhinney, her mother’s maiden name, which Lynda had recently reverted to after discovering that Pete and his 28-year-old girlfriend were going to have a child.
Holly Berry – a joke of an individual with a joke of a name – was shed entirely; like a skin shorn from a bedraggled, raddled sheep to reveal a clean, brutally cropped one.
Her metamorphosis continued. The hair she had cut just before going down to Oxford grew back and, over the years, grew lighter, the Sun-In that Manda had liberally applied that first summer being replaced by highlights that were so convincing only her mother and sister ever remembered that she wasn’t a natural blonde. She shrank: those problematic breasts and the stomach that bulged beneath it melted away and her body was honed, contained, controlled by weights and running. The war with her body was constant: her soft yieldingness, her unnecessary sexiness fought until she became almost androgynous; her look, slight and fierce. Her heavy, near monobrow was pruned and plucked and, as she grew increasingly willowy, her cheekbones emerged: high, sharp and distinctive while her once-plump cheeks were pared down, her face becoming a heart.
‘She’s a looker,’ Lynda remarked, at her daughter’s graduation, as she photographed her outside the city’s Art Deco Philharmonic Hall, her mortar board perched jauntily on her head but her smile still a little severe. ‘If only she’d realise and let someone take her out.’
For her Liverpool student years were almost entirely devoid of boyfriends: Kate Mawhinney being a woman few would dare to ask out so complete was her contempt for men. Which was why it was such a surprise when she gained a boyfriend, who briefly became a husband, when she started Bar School in London. Alistair Woodcroft, a genial young man who deferred to her at all times, and was never taken on by chambers after his pupillage.
She had so wanted to trust someone again; to drop the brittleness that she knew had entered her soul and to let herself be loved, just a little. But she couldn’t handle the intimacy, though she managed the sex. She didn’t want him to pry into her deepest thoughts or to try to help. And so she snapped; scored points; put him down; pushed him away whenever there was a risk of him getting too close. She would see his eyes flare with hurt and she would stay late in the wine bar or the office, only creeping home when she knew he would be asleep, or pretending to be asleep.
The marriage lasted eighteen months and left her with a disinclination to live with anyone else ever again and a new name, with which she began her legal career. She liked it for its simplicity: the hard, no-nonsense consonants; the three stolid syllables; the impression of sturdiness.
Kate Woodcroft had arrived.