Human Croquet Part 14

'Yes, yes, I'm coming,' I reply hastily and pull the front door shut behind me. As I climb into the car I glance back uneasily at the door and its magnificent, ideal, holly wreath what if I have just shut myself out of heaven? What a ghastly thought. But the engine is running, my handsome boyfriend is waiting for me and so away we go down the drive.

'I thought', Malcolm grins (this is a more cheerful and carefree Malcolm than I've seen of late. Hardly the same person at all, in fact), 'that we might go for a little spin first? Get some time on our own.' Does he mean s.e.x? At the very least he must mean kissing surely?

'Yes, why not? Sounds like a good idea to me.' This is a dream, a very good one, and I may as well make the best of it.

I catch a glimpse of Audrey at the front window of Sithean, her hair returned, a cloud of fire around her head. In every window we pa.s.s, a Christmas tree displays its cheerful lights. How strange to think that all the houses on the streets of trees are full of happy, not-dead people. Perhaps the turkeys and geese and ducks and chickens on the Christmas tables are also rising up and their bones are knitting together and their flesh is being regurgitated and reforming and their feathers are flying backwards and sticking into their bodies like arrows and any moment now they will fly out of the suburban windows and up into the night sky.

'Isobel?'

'Mm?'

'I was thinking, why don't we get engaged in the New Year? I mean I know I'm still at med school and everything, and I know you're only sixteen and you want to go to art college and there's no way I would stand in your way, I think women should be more than housewives if they want to and would respect any decision you make ...' (This is definitely, without any shadow of a doubt, a dream.) It starts to snow, great flurries that hit the windscreen as if someone had thrown them from a bucket, like pantomime glitter. Hang on, something's wrong here. 'Hang on a minute ...'

'What?' Malcolm laughs.

'Are we going to Boscrambe Woods?'

'I thought so, why not?'

'You're Malcolm Lovat!' I say to him accusingly. He laughs uproariously. 'Guilty,' he says, taking his hands off the wheel and holding them above his head.

'Don't!' I yell at him. 'Don't do that, we could have an accident. We're going to have an accident anyway. Don't you understand? Stop the car!'

'OK, OK, keep your shirt on.' He stops laughing and says softly, 'Izzie, what's the matter?' But it's too late another car is careering down the hill from Boscrambe Woods, skidding helplessly on the ice. I'm dazzled by the headlights, a dozen suns in my eyes. 'Christ!' Malcolm Lovat cries and pushes me over to the car door, trying to cover me with his body, trying to push me out, but it's too late and the other car hits us with an explosive bang, followed by an infernal shrieking and grinding of metal as it shoves us along, off the road and down an embankment.

An avalanche of white snow seems to envelop the car and we're plunged into a white world of silence, the silence of absolute deafness. I am doomed to relive this experience again and again, each time the details are different, but the ending is always the same.

Perhaps this is an ordeal I have been set perhaps I am Janet to Malcolm Lovat's Tam Lin. Perhaps the Queen of Elfland instead of turning him into a snake in my arms, or a lion or a red hot bar of iron is trying to wrest away her human t.i.the from me by constantly killing him. Again and again.

But it's no enchantment. Flights of invisible angels crowd the car-crash scene waiting impatiently. Malcolm Lovat's skin is as white as the snow, his lips as blue as ice. They open slowly, an ice hole from which emerges the only words possible. Tears are streaming down my cheeks, freezing as they leave my eyes, hanging on my cheeks like chandelier drops. 'Help me,' he says, refusing to be silent. 'Help me.' But I am helpless to help, this story must always, always, end badly.

A pair of warm lips cover my own icy ones. Someone begins to kiss me, but then I'm washed over by the cold, cold wave and dragged down, under the thick-ribbed ice and into the watery world below. Here is an iceberg as big as a cathedral, here are the long-dead bones of ships crushed by pack-ice. Shoals of silver fish shimmer and flicker and whales like great stately barques pa.s.s overhead as black shadows.

I pop up suddenly, like a cork through a hole in the ice. In the arctic world above it is snowing, the grey sky is full of snow. Mother Carey's chickens flock overhead, polar bears pad softly on the ice, but I don't stop, I carry on rising upwards, flying over the ice-cap on the top of the world, higher and higher, set free of gravity, set free of everything.

I am circling the globe of the world, I am visiting the round earth's imagined corners, the ice-locked northern wastes, the Lithuanian Forests, the great Tibetan Plateau, the cold deserts of Asia and the hot deserts of Arabia, lifted on thermals above the steaming jungles of Africa, skimming above the South China Seas like a flying fish, skating the endless Pacific blue that floods the southern hemisphere, racing the sunset to the Bermudas, down the spine of the Andes, down to the bottom of the world, and more ice, ice so clean and blue that it must have been frozen at the beginning of time when everything was new.

But I am leaving the earth, higher still, up into the inkiness of night, leaving the earth spinning down below, a blue and green ball. Now I am a new constellation in the night sky, spread across the northern hemisphere, Sagittarius on my left shoulder, Scorpio rising on my right the metamorphosis of yet another hapless girl into something rich and strange. Blessed Isobel full of light, as bright as a million diamonds, soon I will turn into a supernova and explode in glittering fragments and spread to the edges of the universe. I am as full of ecstasy as an archangel I am my true self. For a long time ...

... then something dark and painful begins to pull me back to earth. I close my eyes.

When I open them I am in the fearful place, the heart of the heart of the forest. It isn't very good in the middle of the wood. Not very good at all. Twigs snap under the weight of unseen feet. Leaves rustle like predatory wings. Invisible claws flex, inches away from my skin. I can smell the mould of the forest floor and the blackness of night. I know I will never find my way out of the forest, never find the path that will take me back to the lit-up windows of the village; the friendly gossip of the Thursday marketplace; the village virgins in their tablecloth-checked dresses, gathered around the well; the handsome rustic youths in their leather jerkins; the brave woodcutter dressed for best in green velvet and silver buckles; the honking of the geese as the goosegirl harries them up the hill.

The only path I will find will be the one that leads deeper and deeper into the wilderness of fear. I lie down at the foot of a tree and close my eyes. Leaves drift down and cover my face. Small animals scrabble, digging up the soil and burying me, hiding me from the terror of the wood. I cannot open my eyes, my eyelids are the lead lids of coffins, soldered shut, I am buried in the deep in the cold ground, earth stops up my nostrils, gathers in my ears, my mouth is full of sour soil.

Something is pecking at my skin, someone is digging me up, pulling me up from my earth tomb, into the light. People loom in and out of focus, they seem to be aliens, white and fuzzy s.p.a.cemen without faces. They are experimenting on me, poking me with needles and sticking tubes in and out of me, probing me to discover my secrets. They are obsessed with my name, 'Isobel, Isobel,' they call out to me softly, urgently stroking my cheek, pinching the skin on the back of my hand, 'Isobel, Isobel,' moving my toes and tapping my wrist, 'Isobel, Isobel.' They are trying to make me myself by naming me. But then I will disappear. I keep my eyes closed. Tightly.

One day, one of them acquires a face, a human face. Soon they all have faces and then they lose their alien nature and turn into nurses in blue-and-white stripes and frilled caps, serious doctors with coats and stethoscopes who swim in and out of focus.

My head hurts. My head feels as if someone's blown it up with a bicycle pump. It throbs dangerously, someone has cut the top off my skull and scooped out my brains and replaced them with a bag of tangled and frayed nerves, but I can't tell anyone because I have been robbed of the power of speech. I don't want to be in this metallic world of pain, I want to go back to the cold Antarctic and play with the mermaid seals.

And here is Gordon, leaning over me, whispering in my ear, holding my hand, 'Isobel, Isobel.' And Vinny, poker-backed on a hospital chair, saying, 'Better yet?' impatiently. 'Orite?' Debbie asks, worry creasing her eyes so that they almost disappear. And Eunice and Mrs Primrose with grapes and white chrysanthemums the flowers of death, Mrs Primrose saying anxiously. 'Can she hear us, do you suppose?' and Eunice saying, 'Hearing's the last sense to go.' And Carmen munching her way through the box of Maltesers she's brought with her. Mrs Baxter and Audrey, Mrs Baxter dabbing her eyes with a tissue from my locker and Audrey saying, 'It's all right, everything's going to be all right, isn't it, Izzie?' and kissing my forehead, her breath smelling of the Parma violets she's been eating and her rope of hair falling on the sheets. I want to ask about Mr Baxter, is he dead or alive? But my tongue is like a roll of carpet in my mouth and all I can move is an eyelid that flutters and shakes.

'Izzie? Izzie?' Charles says, his face oddly solemn so that I feel like cracking a joke to make him put on his clown-face.

'There,' Mrs Baxter beams, 'you look so much better!'

'Where is Mr Baxter?' Mrs Baxter's face clouds over and she gathers herself to say, 'He's no longer with us, I'm afraid, Isobel.'

But where is he?

Slowly, slowly, everything begins to fall back into shape, like a kaleidoscope at rest, a jigsaw finished. The lips that came and kissed me, that felt like the kiss of death, were really the kiss of life. The first time I was ever kissed by a man must have been by the resuscitating lips of an ambulanceman, fighting to keep me alive. The cosmic journey I took was the world of the comatose.

The pain is better now that I'm in the soft poppy world of morphia. Everything is very white, the sheets, the walls, the starched nurses' ap.r.o.ns. There is another white bed in the white room, the sheets are fields of snow, the pillows crackling with ice. On the edge of my field of vision I can see that there is someone in the bed. Nurses come and go and talk to the other patient, their voices boom and fade. 'Just a minor wee op,' a nurse says smiling, as if the woman is being given a treat.

I know this other patient from somewhere. I hear her voice, strange and hypnotic, weaving its way through the white cotton wool that they've wrapped my gla.s.s body in. Her voice fills in the intervals between nurses and consultant's rounds, visitors and sleep. After days, possibly weeks, maybe years, I realize that she's telling me a story. She is my own Scheherazade, she knows everything, she must be the storyteller from the end of the world. But how does it begin? Why it begins, as it must, she says, with the arrival of the baby PAST.

THE BONNY BONNY ROAD.

The London house was a hive of activity as the staff got ready for the return of Sir Edward and Lady de Breville from abroad. Not alone, but with their new baby. Sir Edward de Breville had sent for his own nanny to come up from the family's country residence. Although Nanny had been enjoying her retirement in the heart of the country all that gossip and rhubarb wine she responded well to the call of duty and hauled herself up to town from Suffolk, tempted by a second-cla.s.s railway ticket and the opportunity to shape another generation of de Brevilles. What's more, she had been promised a nursery staff of four a dogsbody, two nursemaids and a second nanny underneath her and was looking forward to throwing her weight around in her old age.

'All those people for one little baby,' the parlourmaid whispered to the footman, 'and to think, my mother brought up six of us single-handed.'

'Ah, but the rich are different,' the footman said, 'they take a lot more looking after.'

The de Brevilles had always been rich, ever since they came over with the Conquest and were handed lands left, right and centre by the b.a.s.t.a.r.d (conqueror and king), for their zeal in subduing the stubborn English. Since then they had just got richer and richer, with their huge tracts of farmland in Wiltshire, their orchards in Kent, their fields of barley in Fife, their fields of coal in Yorkshire, a swathe of elegant buildings in Mayfair.

Edward de Breville, last of his line. Twenty-nine years old, tall and handsome, as was the birthright of all first-born de Breville sons. A responsible man, he didn't leave those orchards and coal-fields unvisited, or fail to keep an eye on his overseers. The rich do not get richer by neglecting their money. A war-hero, a captain of men, with a distinguished scar running the length of one handsome cheek where a German bayonet caught him. A man who believed in King and Country, despite everything he'd witnessed in the fields of Flanders. A man who believed in cricket on the village green and humility in the company of men of the cloth, even lowly vicars.

And the most eligible of bachelors well-behaved girls swooned for him, society girls pretended innocence for him, fast young things slowed down and boasted about their domestic skills. 'Such a catch,' the society matrons whispered furiously over the lobster in aspic and the claret jellies.

In the first season after the Great War Edward de Breville was the most competed-for man in London. Which of the lovely, and not so lovely, well-bred English roses would he choose for a consort? He would not, surely, look across the Atlantic to all those upstart daughters of press barons and bankers and vulgar shipping millionaires, all of them dying to be d.u.c.h.esses?

No indeed, for Sir Edward's eye had roamed a little further south than New York or Boston to somewhere more exotic, more outlandish had been charmed by the lovely form of an Argentinian cattle heiress, Irene Otalora. 'Beef?' the society matrons gasped in horror.

Sir Edward didn't have to travel as far as the pampas to find his Argentinian bride, for she had a French mother and was quite the European, summering in Deauville, where Sir Edward discovered her, daintily sipping a citron presse. They married abroad, quietly, to avoid interest in her problematic Catholic religion.

Sir Edward watched his wife on the night of their wedding, dropping her silken clothes around her ankles like Botticelli's Venus rising from the waves. She unwound the long black hair that curled to her waist and stepped out of her clothes and raised her arms above her head to display her body to her new husband and Sir Edward thought of Salome and Jezebel and the Queen of Sheba and thanked G.o.d for French mothers-in-law who educated their daughters so well.

For an untimely second, Sir Edward had a vision of a roomful of stone-cold English roses lying stiffly between the nuptial sheets like effigies, an entirely unwelcome vision immediately banished by the sight of his new wife gliding towards him. The grandee tilt of the head, the coquettish smile, the thrusting b.r.e.a.s.t.s with their darkbrown aureoles, the firm grasp of those brown fingers on his manhood ... Sir Edward melted into his honeymoon bed and his honeymoon wife.

And now there was little Esme. 'A very pretty child,' was Nanny's pleased verdict. 'We'll make a real de Breville out of her.'

Lady de Breville visited the nursery every day and cooed prettily over her lace-clad baby and spoke high-cla.s.s nonsense in French while Nanny smiled patiently and waited for her to go so she could get on with giving the child oatmeal and Scotch broth. Lady de Breville had the baby's ears pierced when she was only a few weeks old, so now she had tiny gold hoops in her little brown ears. Like a gypsy, Nanny thought, but managed to hold her disgust in. She was only a servant after all.

Every evening little Esme was brought down, long after Nanny would have had her in bed, and paraded in the drawing-room to be admired by Sir Edward and Lady Breville's dinner guests as they glittered and fluttered in their sequins and feathers drinking 'c.o.c.ktails'. Being foreign, of course, Nanny thought, Lady Irene didn't know how to treat servants. Nanny didn't like the patrician line Lady Irene took with the nursery staff. Nanny didn't like it at all. Nanny began to mutter under her breath.

Lady Irene had cut off all that sensual hair and now had a sleek androgynous bob that didn't entirely go with her voluptuous Latin American figure. She showed more leg and very good leg it was than any other London hostess, and danced the Charleston as well as any chorus girl. Sir Edward had begun to notice the overbearing nature of his Buenos Airean brahmin, beginning to wonder if this marriage was such a good idea after all. He looked at girls like Lady Cecily Markham and Lady Diana de Vere with their pale well-fed skin and horse-riding hips and regretted rejecting them so peremptorily. They would have handled the servants so much better.

Nanny declared that she was very sorry but she was going to go back to Suffolk if Sir Edward didn't mind, it wasn't that she wanted to make trouble or anything but she didn't really see eye to eye with Lady Irene foreign ways and so on she had known Sir Edward as man and boy but really- 'Thank you, Nanny,' Sir Edward interrupted kindly, 'of course you may go.'

What a delight little Esme was. Sir Edward had started to visit the nursery almost every day. The second-in-command nanny Margaret was now in charge and doing a very good job. She was a very plain girl, very religious with lots of modern ideas about fresh air. The nursery dogsbody had broken an ankle, tripping in the muddy street, and was staying with her sister until she was better. There were two nursemaids, Mina and Agatha. Agatha was pretty in a very English way, blond curls, hazel eyes, snub nose. Edward's mother, the dowager Lady de Breville, had always had very strict rules about interplay with the servants, it simply wasn't done.

'This simply isn't done,' Sir Edward murmured through the blond curls as he caught Agatha on the back stairs and sank his hands into her ripe flesh. Sir Edward didn't mean to shout out quite so loudly as he shuddered to a climax somewhere inside the fustian petticoats of the nursemaid and Agatha certainly didn't mean to squeal quite so much when the aristocratic member penetrated her plebeian hymen certainly neither of them intended to draw the attention of the mistress of the house. But in no time at all there was a terrible commotion on the back stairs and a dark avenging angel had whisked Sir Edward upstairs out of the servants' sight, but not their earshot, and was screaming in a polyglot language that p.r.o.nounced Sir Edward a d.a.m.ned cochon loco.

The town house was in a certain disarray. Lady Irene retired to Paris for a few weeks to think things over. Not that she had the slightest intention of ending her marriage but Sir Edward needed to suffer a little, show a little repentance an emerald necklace perhaps, or a racehorse. Agatha was dismissed without references. The nanny, Margaret, came down with a dreadful dose of flu. Mina was put out by the amount of work she had to do. 'When did I last have a day off?' she asked Esme, who gurgled and waved her tiny fists around in the air.

Mina was in love with one of the footmen, a callous, callow youth called Bradley. Mina had lately been rejected by Bradley. Mina's heart was breaking.

'I'll take you out for your walk then,' Mina sighed, carrying Esme down to the back hall where the huge baby carriage was parked. Mina, in her dull nursemaid's uniform, pushed the baby carriage along the leafy London streets, turned through the huge wrought-iron gates to the park, took bread from her pocket and threw it for the ducks, sat on a park bench and sang a little nursery rhyme, watched a drowsy Esme fall helplessly into sleep, ate a dry biscuit from her pocket, caught sight of Bradley across the other side of the pond surely not? But it was his day off after all, she knew that Mina knew what Bradley should be doing every second of the day. He had spurned her, used her and spurned her, taken her virtue and discarded her like an old rag (Mina read a lot of cheap fiction), but Mina still loved him, her heart would always belong to him.

Quackquackquackquaaak! went the ducks as Mina stood up suddenly, shedding biscuit crumbs and tears there was another woman with him. Not just any other woman, but Agatha, the disgraced nursemaid a scarlet woman. A fallen woman. Behaving in a very familiar way with Bradley. How long had she been behaving in this familiar way with Bradley? Mina strode off to question, to berate, to cling tearfully to Bradley and beg for the return of his affections, and if not the return of his affections then at least a little money to help bring up the disgrace he'd seeded in her neat, round nursemaid belly. For Mina was also a fallen woman. Unbe-known to Mina and Bradley, Agatha is also a seed-pod, carrying Sir Edward's baby. So many fatherless babies concentrated in one London park. Baby Esme sleeps on peacefully.

Who was coming along the path now? A shabby woman, overweight and old for her years. A dingy brown coat that had never been in fashion, a big man's umbrella, a big Gladstone bag. Here was Maude Potter, wife of Herbert Potter, a clerk in a shipping company. The Potters had no family, only each other. Mrs Potter had lost four babies in the womb and had just come out of a charity hospital where she'd been delivered of the fifth, a dead little girl. Mr Potter's employers would not even give him the morning off work so he could come and accompany her home. In her big Gladstone bag she had her hospital nightdress and the baby clothes she'd hopefully taken in with her. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were leaking, her fat empty belly was wobbling, she was utterly distracted, thought she might throw herself in the boating pond.

Quackquackquack, went the ducks. Here was a turn up for the books, thought Maude Potter, a big posh baby carriage like you would see the royal family's babies in. Maude Potter looked inside the baby carriage. Lo and behold a baby! Poor baby, surely it belonged to someone? She looked around, there on the other side of the pond a man and two women, one of them a nursemaid by the look of it, shouting and screaming and spouting language that no decent person would ever use. 'You wh.o.r.e!' Mina screamed at Agatha, 'You s.l.u.t!' Agatha screamed back, while the footman tried to make himself invisible. Such people were clearly not fit to be in charge of a baby. Poor Baby.

The baby gave a little whimper in its sleep. Maude Potter thought she would just lift it out and give it a little cuddle. The baby opened its eyes and smiled at her. 'Oh,' said Maude Potter. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s ached, her womb contracted. This baby didn't really belong to anyone, she thought, lifting it gently out of its covers, had maybe been abandoned? Had maybe been put in this park by G.o.d himself, to give Herbert and herself the child they deserved (Maude was very religious)? Yes, the baby had come down to earth like a fallen cherub. Or, now Maude becomes very fanciful, a gift child, like little Thumbelina, a present from the fairies ... nightclothes tumbled from the Gladstone to make room, a little nest, a walnut sh.e.l.l ...

Mina could hardly see for the tears in her eyes. Nearly fell in the pond as she marched away from Agatha and the footman, head held high trying to regain her dignity. She would not look back and see them arm in arm, walking away together, the seducer and his fallen woman. Mina stumbled back to the baby carriage, pulled the brake off, took it by its handle, felt its well-sprung rocking, pushed it off along the path stopped. Brushed the tears out of her eyes in disbelief NO BABY!.

Mina gasped, pulled all the blankets and covers out of the pram, the baby must be hiding somewhere in the depths of the baby carriage. Mina threw the pillows out, would have turned the carriage upside down and shaken it if it hadn't been so heavy. Mina's screams were so ghastly, so unearthly, that even Agatha and Bradley realized they must have been caused by something more than a jilted heart and came running across the park.

Herbert had seen the newspaper headline the day after the baby was first brought in the house, BABY HEIRESS KIDNAPPED. Maude told him she'd found the baby abandoned in the park and he'd wanted to believe her, he hadn't seen the lacy clothes or the aristocratic baby carriage, nor the earrings (taken out straight away by Maude, rather to the baby's distress), was willing to believe that poor Maude had done a good deed by rescuing the poor little thing, but then he'd seen that headline and he'd had a funny feeling in the pit of his stomach.

He bought a copy of the paper and read the description. 'Four months old, dark hair, dark eyes?' he said, waving the paper in front of Maude's face. 'Was this the baby?' She ignored him, rocking the baby on her knee, singing a little song to it. 'Was it?' he shouted, and the baby began to cry.

'Father,' Maude said in a gently reproving voice, 'don't upset Baby.'

Maude lay in her bed, propped up on her pillows, the baby feeding at her breast. Herbert averted his eyes. 'G.o.d has been very good to us,' Maude sighed happily. 'Now a name, Father what shall we call her? Violet Angela, I think,' she said, without waiting for an answer. 'That would be a lovely pretty name, for a lovely pretty baby.'

Herbert sat at the table, his head sunk in his hands. Maude gurgled at the baby, whose cradle wasn't a nutsh.e.l.l at all, but the bottom drawer of a tallboy. Herbert wondered if he could just shut the drawer and forget about the d.a.m.ned baby. It wasn't going to go away day after day, the newspapers screamed about the 'Breville Baby'. The same grainy photograph was reproduced of the baby's christening a minor member of the royal family present as a G.o.dmother the baby's parents, so rich, so beautiful.

It was too late to confess, they were too far in it now, they'd go to jail for life. Maude would be destroyed. It was too late to take the baby back, Maude would go mad if she was robbed of the little thing now. Herbert tried not to get fond of it, told himself it wasn't his, but it had his heart in its little plump hand already. 'Them Brevilles can have plenty more,' Maude said dismissively. Herbert sighed, 'The neighbours'll notice. You go into hospital nine months gone and come out two weeks later with a four-month-old baby-' The mathematics of it were a nightmare for him.

'We'll move then,' Maude said shortly. Herbert had never seen his wife so powerful. Maude gave him all the baby's expensive finery and he burnt it on a bonfire in the backyard.

'Pretty little kiddie, in't she?' Mrs Reagan said, looking at Violet Angela playing at 'house' in the corner of the room with Mrs Reagan's daughter, Beryl. Mrs Reagan had just moved into a bottom flat in the big ugly house that the Potters rented a part of now.

'How old d'you say she was?' Mrs Reagan asked as Maude handed her a cup of tea.

'Three nearly four,' Maude answered proudly.

'Bossy little thing, in't she?' Mrs Reagan said, casting a doubtful eye on the way Violet Angela sat on a stool and got Beryl to do all the work in their pretend house. 'Oh, she knows what she wants, our little Vi,' Mrs Potter said. 'It'll be nice for her to have a little friend in the house.'

Violet Angela offered to sing Mrs Reagan a song, which she lisped very prettily, Mrs Reagan agreed. 'Quite a little actress, in't she?' she said stiffly. Personally, Mrs Reagan didn't like children that were allowed to show off, but there you are, each to their own.

Mrs Reagan wondered to herself how two such dull, drab people as Maude and Herbert Potter managed to produce such an attractive child. She was like a little sprite, all quicksilver energy, with those big brown eyes and a head of jet-black curls that made Mrs Reagan very jealous when she saw it next to Beryl's dull brown bob. She was the kind of child who ought to come to no good, but probably wouldn't.

'Pretty little thing, in't she?' Mr Reagan said, taking his braces off after a hard day's work. Mrs Reagan joined him at the upstairs window, looked down on the scrub-by garden where Beryl and Violet Angela and some of the neighbourhood boys were playing a wild, whooping game. 'How old is she?' Mr Reagan asked his wife, who pursed her lips and said, 'Too old for her age, a very forward little thing, eight years old, same age as Beryl, if you must know.'

'What are they playing at? Exactly?' Mr Reagan asked, a puzzled frown on his face.

'G.o.d knows,' Mrs Reagan said.

Violet Angela tied Beryl's hands behind the tree with the old bit of rope they'd found in a shed. 'Now you're going to be a human sacrifice,' Violet Angela told her. 'No!' Beryl wailed. Violet Angela despised little mousy Beryl, she was so weak and stupid, she wanted to make her see how stupid she was, make her sorry for it. She put her face an inch in front of Beryl's and said, 'Oh yes you are,' in a weird voice, rasping and high-pitched, 'because I'm a wicked brigand who's going to tear your heart out and eat it.'

'Steady on, Vi,' one of the boys said, growing worried by Beryl's breathless squeals. Violet Angela stamped her foot and made a fist at him. 'You are such a coward, Gilbert Boyd!' Gilbert steeled himself and said, 'All right then, tell you what, Vi we'll burn her like a witch instead.' All the boys wanted to be liked by Violet Angela, none of them wanted to be thought a coward. 'Stop that silly nonsense, Beryl,' Violet Angela said crossly.

'Yeah,' the other boys chorused, growing excited. 'Who's got a match then?' a voice said. 'Ere,' another one said. They all crowded around the tree excitedly bringing bits of old wood and packing cases for the pyre. Violet Angela held the matchbox aloft so that Beryl could see it. 'This', she hissed, 'is what people get for being stupid.' The boys were all chanting like savages, they started to do a war-dance round the tree, Beryl began to scream.

'Oswald!' Mrs Reagan shouted to her husband, 'I think you'd better get out there, sounds like our Beryl's being murdered.'

'Changeling,' Maude Potter said out loud to herself as she put the week's laundry through the wringer in the wash-house out back. That's what happened when you picked up a child without knowing anything about it. For all she knew that baby in its lace-clad finery had been placed in that pram, in that park, especially to fool them. As some kind of trap.

Violet Angela was twelve years old and a wicked little thing, she really was. 'She's getting beyond our control, Mother,' Herbert said, shaking his head in sorrow. 'That's what happens when you don't know anything about the history, about the parents they might have been hob-n.o.bs but who knows their character? They might have been liars, murderers, thieves look at her, she's already been brought home once by the coppers for stealing, and that thing with Beryl Reagan ... she could have been killed, and I don't know what she got up to with her fancy ways ... she's a sinful little thing.'

Maude tried to beat the sin out of Violet Angela. 'This is for your own good,' she huffed and puffed up the stairs with 'Father's' leather belt. How could this be right, Violet Angela wondered? To be beaten half to death by your parents? Weren't they supposed to love and protect you?

Deep in the night, the walrus body of Herbert heaved itself between the darned sheets in her narrow little bed. 'Now, Violet Angela,' he said in a hoa.r.s.e whisper, as his ink-stained fingers pushed and pulled, 'this is for your own good, and if you ever tell anyone then I swear G.o.d, who's watching over us right now, will kill you,' and, to demonstrate, his big hands encircled her thin little neck and when he felt how thin she was, how young she was, imagined her bird-bones snapping then Herbert was suffused with shame at what he was doing. But it was too late now, he reasoned with himself, he'd already bought his ticket to h.e.l.l, and hers with it. And, after all, it wasn't as if she was his daughter. He bought her bags of boiled sweets to make up to her.

Really, Violet Angela thought, I must have been stolen from my real parents, I wasn't meant to be with these ignorant, dreary people, I was meant to be a princess wearing expensive finery and beautiful dresses, and living in a castle on top of a hill with hundreds of servants. It wasn't fair.

It was Mrs Reagan who discovered fourteen-year-old Violet Angela with Mr Reagan. In the wash-house. Mr Reagan could fl.u.s.ter and bl.u.s.ter all he liked, but Mrs Reagan knew what she'd seen.

'Why, Vi? Why?' Mrs Potter whined poetically. 'Why have we been given such a wicked monster for a child?' overlooking the fact that Violet Angela was not given but taken.

'I'm not a monster,' Violet Angela sneered. 'Mr Reagan promised me things.'

'Things?'

'Pretty things,' Violet Angela said stoutly. 'He said he'd give me pretty things if I let him have his way.' Mrs Potter slapped Violet Angela's face and Violet Angela screamed, 'And he was only doing what he's been doing [she pointed dramatically at Mr Potter] for years!' Mr Potter slapped Violet Angela's other cheek. 'You little liar!'

'You little wh.o.r.e,' Mrs Potter yelled and Violet Angela ran from the room before she got slapped to death.

Violet Angela was locked in her room upstairs. 'What are we going to do?' Mr Potter asked, his head in his hands at the parlour table.

'Maybe we should give her back,' Maude offered.

'Give her back?' Herbert said, scratching his head.

'To where she come from those Brevilles,' Maude said. 'Let's see them deal with her wicked ways.'

'We ain't got nothing to prove who she was,' Herbert says glumly.

'All I ever wanted was a nice little girl what I could dress up and show off,' said Maude sadly. 'This is all the thanks we get for bringing her up.'