Chapter Five
Late August 1975
Cord wriggled in bed, her toes bent by the over-tightly tucked-in sheets. She looked across at the pale lemon wall where the slatted blinds cast light and dark shadows and knew it would be another white-hot, cloudless day.
In the bed next to her, Ben snored gently. Cord glanced at his resting face, nose peeling and covered in freckles after a summer at Worth Bay, and then hugged herself, feeling the delicious smoothness of the sheets on her bare arms. Sheets at home were never silky like this, the weather was never kind like this, food didn’t taste like this at home: delicious, fresh, even if covered in sand. Leaving here every year was, she’d come to see, unbearable. Yesterday, she’d promised Ben he wouldn’t have to go to the dreaded new school. And Cord never broke her promises.
They had hidden the food and the suitcases in the beach hut the previous afternoon. The suitcases wouldn’t be needed until the Saturday after the August Bank Holiday, when summer was over, the house shut up and they were dragged into the car for the drive back to London. But Cord had reasoned that it was wise to hide the provisions now: it would avoid suspicion closer to the date. Daddy always said he had to get the shoes of a character right first to know how to play him. These days, it seemed to Cord as though she were wearing the right shoes all the time: she felt invincible.
They’d hatched plans before, silly plans really: the lemonade stall had hit the skids after only a day, and the sponsored sing-along last year had been cancelled after Daddy actually put masking tape over Cord’s mouth when she entered her second hour of singing a combination of songs from ABBA and The Sound of Music on the porch. There was, too, the dog-napping plan earlier in the summer which had not ended well. This, however, was the boldest yet. Ben was still afraid but Cord knew they could pull it off.
They were going to run away.
Run away and stay here, rather contradictorily. They’d never have to leave Worth Bay again and Ben wouldn’t have to go to the big boys’ school in Sussex, which he was dreading and which Daddy was adamant about, even though he himself had hated it. Antony and Cleopatra had finally finished and so Daddy had arrived two days ago to spend the last week with them and they had tried to talk to him about it. But Daddy, normally so reasonable, wouldn’t brook any discussion on the subject. ‘You’ll love it when you’re there, Ben,’ he’d say.
Ben was getting more and more desperate. He’d stopped sleeping, he was hardly eating – he’d even abandoned work on his model aeroplane. Cord thought it was utterly heartless; you only had to look at Ben to see he wasn’t supposed to be sent away. He was nothing like her: small for his age, shy, diffident. He’d be eaten alive at boarding school, that or worse, Mrs Berry, their housekeeper in London, had said grimly, though Cord didn’t think there was much worse than being eaten alive.
She had even discussed it with Simon, when he’d been down to stay. She’d found him sitting on the porch one afternoon while Mumma was napping, ostensibly doing the crossword, though in fact he was chewing a pencil and gazing into space.
‘Can you talk to Mumma and Daddy?’ she’d said. ‘About Ben going to school because he really doesn’t want to, and they won’t listen.’
Simon was ever so good to talk to when you managed to get his attention. The rest of the time he was almost as bad as Bertie, who was great at doing silly impressions and telling the children dirty jokes, but absolutely hopeless at things like finding hair ribbons or making sandwiches – he’d looked after them for an afternoon the previous year and Cord had actually got stuck in the toilet bowl, bottom almost touching the U-bend, hands, head and legs waggling frantically, crying out for help while Bertie was on the phone to someone called Johnny for half an hour about some silly play. But Simon could at least listen, and give advice.
‘Cordy, all I know is your old dad’s very keen on it,’ he said. ‘Mind you, I can’t see why.’
‘He hated it! Poor Ben. It’s horrid.’
‘He wants what he had for himself, that’s it, Cordy,’ Simon had told her, lighting a cigarette. He’d blown out the smoke and stared, ruminatively, out to sea. ‘He thinks he ought to fashion Ben in his own image. I’m afraid you won’t change his mind.’
Cord had stuck out her chin.
‘I will.’
Simon had simply laughed, and gone back to his paper. ‘And woe betide anyone who gets in your way. You do what you want. That’s my girl.’
This Cord took to be almost a tacit approval of their plans, which accelerated as a result of this conversation. A can here, a packet there, over the course of the summer and now there was more than enough for them to live on. Still in bed, Cord ran through the inventory, memorised in her head:
She reckoned this should provide enough for them to live on for at least a week in the beach hut, by which time she hoped her parents would have stopped searching for them and gone back to London.
It had to be done very carefully, of course: Mumma was surprisingly adept at spotting mischief-making. Behind the huge paperbacks or the Sunday Times magazine, behind the put-on languid hand-waving ‘run-along dear’-ness of her, under the great black sweep of that expertly applied eyeliner were sharp green eyes that noticed everything.
Ben was already in trouble, being rude to Simon when he stayed, then being rude to Daddy when he arrived, and then for the great dog-napping incident when he’d ‘borrowed’ a nice dog and taken him to the beach hut before alerting Cord to his actions. They’d called him Sandy, wittily, and played with him all afternoon and he’d been ever so friendly, wagging his tail and letting them feed him biscuits, and then the owner had gone past and seen Sandy in the open door of the beach hut and had called the police, accusing them of kidnapping his dog from up the road at Worth Farm and all hell had broken loose. He was not a kind farmer with a tweed hat and a piece of wheat hanging out of his mouth. He was thin and angry and kept saying how Sandy was a working sheepdog and a she, not a he. He pulled Sandy around a lot by the collar. And it turned out she laboured under the truly depressing name of Spam. Ben had been more furious about that than anything.
‘Such an undignified name to give her. Horrible. She should be called Hermione or Larch or something. Spam is so nasty.’
After it was over Ben brooded on Spam and her depressing life working for the horrid farmer, whom they’d seen about before, once carrying a dead kitten down the lane near the farm by the scruff of its neck and throwing it away like rubbish. He mentioned it to Cord several times, how unjust it was, how foul that man was.
But it was the dog-napping which had planted the seed in Cord’s head about running away. If they’d only kept the door of the beach hut shut Spam might not have been found and they could have kept her for ever. The grown-ups never went into the beach hut. Daddy was always saying they should sell it, but somehow he never seemed to get round to it.
The beach hut was the children’s private world, where they could keep all their beach kit – spades, sieves, windbreakers that made excellent tents and dens. It had the legendary points system and rules for Flowers and Stones stuck to the wall. It was where she and Ben would live in their own private world when the grown-ups had finally gone back to London. They could put up posters of Wonder Woman and some cricketers, there’d be tinned tomato soup and jelly and pineapple chunks for tea, and in the winter, when it was cold, they would burn the old theatre programmes of Mummy and Daddy’s which they kept in a big box under the stairs and which Cord had also secretly been transporting across to the hut. She knew how chilly it could be; they had come back in winter for Mrs Gage’s mother’s funeral; it was quite different here, out of season, the sand grey, the meadow dead and the branches bare, berries instead of green leaves. There were pine cones littering the lane and the fields behind; she’d never seen them there for they had always vanished by summer. Gone where? She didn’t know; she had collected a handful of them and stuffed them into the pockets of her winter coat and, once back in River Walk, had lined them up on her window sill, where they rattled when the winds blew, a reminder of the Bosky in winter, its other life she knew nothing about.
Ben had cried signing the letter – but Ben was utterly wet, so useless. Cord told herself she’d be strong and tough about it. She wouldn’t miss Mumma, not even Daddy . . . She gritted her teeth.
‘Cord! Ben!’ Their mother’s voice outside the door. ‘Darlings, breakfast’s ready. Get up, I’ve a surprise for you.’
Cord stiffened, and looked over at the slumbering Ben in alarm. She didn’t like surprises and she knew from Althea’s voice it wouldn’t be a puppy-and-ice-cream surprise, more of a someone-awful-coming-for-tea surprise. Uncle Bertie was already here – who else? They’d had friends to lunch yesterday, Kenneth the actor and his girlfriend Lavinia who was a model. Kenneth had a beard and Lavinia drank too much fruit punch and flirted with Daddy till Mumma suddenly went inside for a nap. Their friends were always coming to stay at the Bosky, or motoring down for the day, bringing gin and gramophone records and keeping Mumma and Daddy up late with too much noise and stupid raucous laughter.
‘Darlings! Wake up!’ her mother called, still nearby. ‘The surprise is in the beach hut.’
‘Ben,’ Cord hissed, urgently shaking her brother awake. ‘Wake up. The beach hut. She’s found us out.’
But upstairs in the kitchen, everything was normal, and Cord relaxed, wondering if their mother had just made a mistake. Althea had fixed them their special treat breakfast – Weetabix with golden syrup and a slight moistening of milk. Their father sat studying a script and drinking coffee. The day was fine, but blustery.
Outside on the porch, Uncle Bertie was smoking and reading The Times. He had been with them for a week and he got on Daddy’s nerves and so was often to be found on the porch. Bertie always had something new on the go to fascinate the children. This time it was his new shoes with antique gold compasses sunk into the back of each heel which swivelled as he changed direction. He’d got them from a fellow in World’s End, he’d told them, and this had impressed them mightily, though they weren’t entirely sure whether World’s End was real or a magical place, like Narnia.
Althea was humming to herself, tapping the children’s spoons together. Her hair was twisted up on her head and she was wearing a smart green dress. Cord said suspiciously, ‘Why have we got a special breakfast?’
‘Do I need an excuse to be nice to you?’ said her mother, laughing. ‘Well, that’s a damning indictment, isn’t it, darling?’ She looked over at her husband. ‘Tony? I’m off now, and I’ll be back tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Ben’s lip trembled slightly. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To London, for an audition, and Uncle Bertle’s driving me, so I’ll be safe, Ben.’ Ben had taken to laboriously reading the newspaper when the adults had finished with it, and was convinced that anyone parted from him would be blown up by the IRA or die in a train, car or plane crash, depending on what was in the news that day, and despite the efforts of his parents to explain the likelihood of accidents to him.
‘An audition? Why?’
‘For a part in a TV series,’ said Althea. ‘If I get it, it’ll be very exciting.’
‘But you don’t really act any more,’ said Ben, sounding cross. ‘Daddy’s the famous actor.’
‘Oh!’ Althea looked at Tony, who shrugged his shoulders, grinning, and took a sip of coffee. ‘Well, I do, darling, I just haven’t done much for a while, because I’ve been waiting for the right part.’
‘And looking after us.’
‘Oh – that too, of course. But this is the right part. Bertle’s convinced it’s mine.’
‘What’s it for?’
‘A drama series. And – gosh, it’d be . . . Never mind,’ she trailed off, staring into space.
Ben furrowed his brow. ‘Uncle Bertle drives like a maniac, Daddy said so.’
Daddy stroked Ben’s soft, pink-and-cream cheek. ‘Bertie’s a fine driver, and your mother’s going to have a wonderful night in London and make them fall in love with her at the audition so they give her the role and take her out for champagne afterwards. Don’t you think they will?’ Daddy was standing up now, and had wrapped his arms around Mumma, who was flushing pink.
Cord, scandalised, nudged her father. ‘Daddy. You shouldn’t be wanting men to take her out for champagne.’
‘Oh, I should,’ said Daddy, gaily. ‘Everyone falls in love with your mother because she’s very, very lovable.’
‘That’s enough, what nonsense,’ Mumma said, suddenly sounding Scottish. ‘I’ll – Tony, you’ll be all right, won’t you?’
‘My love, of course,’ he said, and he kissed her hand, almost formally, and they stared at each other for a split second until Mumma turned aside.
‘Althea,’ called Bertie, appearing in the French windows, waving his cigarette behind him. He ran a speculative tongue in between his lower lip and teeth. ‘I say, darling, we’ll be cutting it fine if we don’t leave soon.’
‘I’m ready this moment.’ Mumma had picked up her silk jacket and was giving forlorn-looking Ben another kiss. ‘I love you, sweet boy. Cord darling, look after Ben. Yes, there’s a lovely treat in the beach hut, and I want you both to be very, very good for Daddy. Are you listening to me?’
‘What’s the treat?’ said Ben, stabbing furiously at his Weetabix, syrup clotting on his spoon.
‘Well . . . Oh, there she is!’ Mumma’s voice rose a notch. ‘She said she was too shy to come up here. I thought she wanted to wait for you both in the beach hut. Come in, darling! Tony, she’s here.’
Through the door came Madeleine. She stood on the threshold, not moving, and gazed around at them all, with a strange look on her face: Cord didn’t know if it was fear or excitement. Her cheeks were flushed. Her hair was in uneven bunches, ribbed and bumpy where it hadn’t been brushed beforehand. She was a sort of grey-sand colour, because, as Cord was to discover, in summer no one ever told her to have a bath. She wore some tiny apple-green linen shorts, made for a child half her size. The flies were strained open in an O to reveal blue knickers. She had on a large woman’s denim shirt and sandals with strange mustard-coloured socks. Her grey eyes were large and round, her small oval face pale.
Again, Cord would always remember the first proper sight of her, not obscured by doors or window frames or running away, and the feeling of falling, of struggling to remember her.
She hung off the side of her chair. ‘That’s not a surprise. That’s Madeleine,’ she said, rudely.
‘Oh,’ breathed Ben. ‘Her.’
Their mother’s tone was firm. ‘Cord. That’s enough. Now you two, listen.’ She glanced at their father and he nodded. ‘Daddy met Madeleine at the beach shop yesterday. Her daddy is . . . ah . . . away, so she’s been alone.’
‘All on your own! You lucky thing,’ said Ben. Madeleine looked at him blankly.
Althea put her arm around her thin shoulders. ‘I’ve asked Maddy to play with you, because she’d like some friends.’
‘We don’t want friends,’ Cord said, folding her arms.
‘No, we don’t,’ added Ben, emboldened.
Their mother sighed in harried frustration. ‘Tony. Tony,’ she hissed into her husband’s ear. ‘You deal with this. She needs a bath, and some food – she was practically feral by the time I found her, just out on the lane, and she hadn’t been in all night because she says she’s too scared . . . I have to go, I really do . . . You talk to that man, Tony. Bloody talk to him.’
‘Sweetheart,’ said Daddy, smoothly to Madeleine. ‘Come in and sit down, we’ll give you some breakfast.’ He held out his hand to Madeleine and she smiled shyly back. He clutched her fingers. ‘It’s all right. We don’t bite, I promise. I’m your friend, aren’t I?’
‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘Even if you did try to run me over.’ Tony put his hands over his mouth and laughed, his eyes half-moons of mirth.
‘What?’ said Cord, but Madeleine folded her arms again and wouldn’t speak.
‘Gary, if you could keep an eye on her—’ Mumma was saying to Mrs Gage, using the pet name Mrs Gage hated. ‘Look out some of Cord’s old clothes, poor lamb—’
‘Oh, of course,’ Mrs Gage answered, heavy sarcasm in her tone. ‘Because two of them’s not enough is it, and . . .’
Althea ignored her. ‘Ben! Don’t kneel on your chair. And button up your shirt.’
‘I wasn’t kneeling, I was doing something Cord showed me. The Bay City Rollers had no shirts on, just jackets on Top of the Pops last week, sequinned jackets, and—’
‘Don’t blame me for it,’ Cord bellowed, angrily. ‘Don’t make it sound like I’m making you behave badly at the dinner table, Flash—’
‘I’m starting the car, Althea darling.’ Uncle Bertie reappeared in the doorway.
‘Uncle Bertie, can you do that thing when you pop your eyeball out?’ Ben knelt up on the chair again.
‘Ben—’
Suddenly, a clear voice cut through the babble.
‘Excuse me. Excuse me!’ They all stopped, and stared over at the small figure. She was pointing at Ben and Cord. ‘I don’t want to play with either of you. I’m used to playing by myself. It’s much better, in fact, playing by myself. I wouldn’t have come at all only your mum and dad were nice to me and there’s only dried rice in our kitchen and I get scared there. I think you two are simply awful. So spoiled and you’re so pleased with yourselves.’
Cord stared at her, eyes narrowing. ‘Well,’ she said, trying to think of a good answer. ‘We – are pleased with ourselves, so there,’ she said eventually, and then she screwed her face up in annoyance as Madeleine gave a superior smirk.
‘Cord!’ her mother said, sharply, and a car horn sounded at the front of the house. ‘Oh, Maddy darling, I’m sorry to have to leave you. Cord and Ben are so excited to have you with them, poppet . . . I do hope you all become friends and – goodbye!’
She dashed down the stairs, slamming the front door, and was gone.
‘I say, you three,’ said Daddy, heartily, into the silence. ‘Isn’t this lovely. Now, shall I take you down to the beach? Or shall we all play Happy Families?’ There was an awkward pause. ‘Or any old game.’
‘You don’t have to look after me, Mr Wilde,’ Madeleine said. ‘I’m going now too. Oh, you left the beach-hut door open,’ she added in a clear little voice. ‘All those tins and piles of food and everything that you’re keeping in there, shouldn’t go to waste, Mr Wilde, could I possibly take something for my lunch?’
‘The food?’ said Daddy, bewildered. ‘My sweet, there isn’t any food in there.’
‘But there is. And a pile of theatre programmes and a letter that Cord and Ben have signed about running away – is it part of a game?’ She was smiling thinly at Cord now, two spots of pink burning on her grubby cheeks. She hitched the voluminous shirt up over her shoulders. ‘I wasn’t sure but perhaps I don’t really understand about games because I prefer playing on my own.’
Daddy stood up, and without a word strode out down the porch steps and as they saw him weave between the grasses and down towards the beach huts Cord snarled at her brother, ‘You said you’d locked the door, Ben. I’m never trusting you again. You stupid baby.’ She shoved him, harder than she meant to, and he fell against the sideboard and banged his head and cried, and got up and tried to push Cord but missed and cut himself again, and Mrs Gage pulled them apart and called them ungrateful little horrors and actually held Cord by the ear, which hurt a lot.
All the time Madeleine Fletcher stood there watching them, arms wrapped round her tiny frame, uneven bunches and that stupid O in her too-tight shorts showing her blue pants and her seemingly not even caring. When Daddy returned, grim-faced, holding the bag of food and the note in Cord’s handwriting and the spare teddy that Ben had left there, and when he saw the cut on Ben’s head, he sent Cord to her room for the rest of the day.
He came down later on, before lunch, and sat on the edge of the bed, those long sensitive hands that were exactly like hers fiddling with the blancmange-pink fringed bedspread. She pretended to still be crying and he said to her, ‘You must be kind, Cord. It breaks my heart when you behave like this.’
‘Ben doesn’t want to go to school, Daddy.’
Daddy’s hair was thinning on top. His face was sad. ‘I keep telling you both, it’s not till next year. He’s got lots of time to get used to it. Oh, Cord. It’s not the lying, or the making plans behind our backs. Sweetheart, have you any idea how upset Mumma and I would have been if you’d run away?’
Cord said in a tight voice, ‘Mumma wouldn’t care. She told you she never wanted children and you’d taken her whole young life away from her. I heard you both.’
Daddy looked aghast. ‘When?’
‘Easter. When Mumma wanted you both to go to Venice with Guy and Olivia and Simon and you said no.’
‘She – er, well, she didn’t mean it. It was the heat of the moment.’
‘What’s that?’
Daddy suddenly sounded impatient. ‘Doesn’t matter. Don’t change the subject, monkey. I want you to be kind, Cordy. It makes me sad when you’re cruel.’
Cord’s throat hurt. ‘I’m not cruel. But we want you to ourselves. Don’t make me be nice to Madeleine what’s-her-name, that’s all.’
‘Her father has been very unkind to her,’ he said, picking at the bedspread, and his jaw was tight, so that the words hardly came out at all. ‘He left her alone in the house, no food, she can’t even reach the taps without standing on a chair.’
‘Why?’ asked Cord, too young and too securely happy to understand how badly a child can be mistreated.
‘He’s a sad man. Like his father was. His mummy died.’ Daddy gave a big sigh. ‘And the war changed a lot of people.’
‘Your mummy died and it didn’t change you.’
He stroked her hair. ‘It did, darling, I’m afraid. Maddy’s father is a damaged man. We should be kind to her, till she goes back to Bristol, then her – her aunt looks after her and she’s a very nice woman.’
‘Did you know her too in the war?’
‘Yes.’ Daddy paused. ‘I loved her very much.’
‘More than Mummy?’
‘Not more than Mummy. No one more than Mummy.’ He slapped his legs. ‘Now. That’s enough histories. You’ll hurt yourself if you’re not nice to her, Cordy.’ He stroked her cheek. ‘Now, you’ll stay down here while we have lunch, then come up and help tidy the beach hut. Then we’ll all play Flowers and Stones – and that’s an end to the matter. For now. But I’m going to go over and talk to her father. I want you to like Madeleine. I owe her aunt something, and the least we can do is make sure her niece is safe with us. You’re too young for this. I’m telling you because you’re the same as me. And maybe one day you’ll understand.’
‘OK.’ She nodded even though he was right and she didn’t understand. ‘I’ll do my best, Daddy.’
He shut the door behind her and quietly, so she could hear the boards creaking gently, ascended the stairs.