The Inverts
He smiled devilishly at her and offered the bottle of rum. ‘Go on, don’t let me drink alone.’
‘I’ve got to pack for school tomorrow.’
He pushed the bottle in front of her face. ‘Then let’s celebrate the end of the holidays.’
‘No, let’s not.’
‘Let’s. Please. We haven’t got long to have fun like this; we should take our opportunities. Soon you’ll be a horrid debutante and you’ll acquire a horrid husband and I’ll never get to see you again, and it’ll be fucking horrid.’
‘You are relentless. I loathe this quality in you. I absolutely loathe it.’
The wind outside blew against the canvas flaps and they made a loud thwap-thwap sound. ‘Drink, my goddess,’ he said. ‘Drink.’
She felt something cold and wet under her ankle – a ribbon of seaweed. She tossed it at him and took a sip of the rum. It was warm and disgusting. She didn’t have a taste for alcohol, not really, except the creamy liqueurs her mother sometimes let her have at Christmas, and even these she would weaken with extra cream.
‘Cigarette?’ said Bart, taking two out of a silver case with a falcon engraved on the lid (it’d been his father’s) and lighting both before she could answer.
‘Thank you,’ she said – she did in fact want one.
He snapped the case shut and leaned on one elbow, tilting his head back to blow out the smoke. ‘I can’t believe you were willing to leave without saying goodbye.’
‘I was planning to say goodbye on the way to the station. I was going to wave my hanky out of the carriage window in a mournful fashion.’
‘Bugger off. A proper goodbye, I meant.’
‘So this is a proper goodbye? Drinking stolen booze under a mouldy canopy?’
‘Indeed.’ He squinted as though through a monocle. ‘A jolly good send-off. The sea air in your lungs, what could be better, old chap?’
‘My bed.’
He wiggled an eyebrow. ‘We could do that.’
‘Don’t be disgusting.’
‘Drink more,’ he said.
‘No. I’ve had enough.’
‘Go on – drink more.’
She rolled her eyes and drank more. Bart could never take no for an answer. Better to get it over and done with. Once, when she was six and he seven, he’d persuaded her to eat a worm. He’d gone on about it for ages, dangling it in front of her face and coming up with a never-ending supply of reasons for why she should do such a thing, almost managing to package the idea attractively (only a very brave girl would eat a worm, only the very best, bravest, most boy-like girl would dare), and she finally accepted the challenge. The governess, Madame Choubert, a mean old toad with an entire forest of nose hair, caught her with the worm half in her mouth and slapped the back of her head to make her spit it out, slapped it hard, and all the while, Bart’s hand was over his mouth to keep the hysterical laughter from exploding out, and the governess turned to look at him like a St Bernard spotting a squirrel, and she grabbed his ear and forced him to his feet and dragged him across the garden with her almighty buttocks swishing the train of her skirt and him wriggling in pain but still laughing, his earlobe stretched like warm toffee, and the next day he’d shown her the red tear under his ear. This was a typical memory.
‘So Daddy Dearest wouldn’t relent?’ he said, taking the bottle from her.
‘No. I’m going to take another crack at him tomorrow though.’
‘Well. It is a damned good school. For a girls’ school, I mean. Unless you’d prefer to learn etiquette at Lady Foster’s Academy for Dead-Eyed Shrews.’
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘But what’s the point?’
‘Education is the point.’
‘Yes, an education! Think of all the Aristotle I shall quote to impress my future husband’s family. I shall order my scullery girl in only the best Latin. And Bart – I shall write my shopping lists in iambic pentameter. Give me the rum.’
Bart had picked up a cockle shell and was twisting the hot end of his cigarette against its serrated surface, twisting it into a point, ash and sparks flying off.
‘Bart?’
‘Hmm?’
‘I said—’
‘Are you going to miss me?’ he said, a queer, thoughtful look in his eyes.
‘Miss you? Well, I should think so, a little. In the same way that one misses a boil on one’s nose after it’s been lanced.’
‘I’ll miss you. Awfully.’
Bettina looked down at the sand. She dragged her finger through it, making a spiral. She and Bart were so seldom ‘nice’ to each other. She drank from the bottle, still avoiding his eyes.
‘I always look forward to the holidays,’ he said, ‘because it means I’ll get to see you. I always think of you, at school.’ He laughed suddenly, and she glanced up, relieved. He was smiling. The lantern’s flickering light cast shadows across his face, spreading his smile in a dark and clownish fashion. ‘I love to make you squirm.’
‘Those who take pleasure in the displeasure of others are generally regarded as evil,’ she said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘I meant what I said though.’ He took her hand and laced his thin, dry fingers through hers. ‘I really did.’
She could feel her face tightening. She really should say something kind back to him, something real and true, a collection of words forming a stark, nude emotion, a collection of words like a brand-new baby. But she needn’t have worried about it, about words, because suddenly Bart was plucking his cigarette out of his mouth, stabbing it in the sand and coming for her, his face for her face, his lips for hers, a look of brave focus in his grey-green eyes, like the look of someone who resolves, finally, to enter the burning building to rescue the child, and there was no time for Bettina to decide what she should do and what she wanted to do and what she might do, because his mouth was on hers and his body upon hers, and the weight of him was pushing her back to the sand, and as his soft lips wrestled against hers and his soggy tongue found entry, two distinct thoughts uttered, voice-like, in her mind:
I’m going to get sand in my hair.
And:
I might as well try this.
His breath came out of his nose as he kissed her, a warm zephyr from each nostril, in and out. His spit was a ghastly soup of liquor, smoke and onion. He rotated his hips, pressing his groin into hers. He put his hand on her breast. On it, just on it. He did not build up to this and he did not caress it or squeeze it. Just put his hand on it. And left it there, neither loose nor clamping. She blasted laughter into his mouth, wild shocked laughter, and he pulled his head away and looked down at her, gormlessly. She brought her arm over her face, pushing her nose into the fleshy crook of her elbow and laughed hard, her body shivering under him.
He rolled off and his arm reached out piston-like for the bottle of rum.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. But the laughter was still bubbling wickedly. She wiped her eyes and stretched her cheeks down and tried to breathe. ‘Genuinely, Bart, I’m sorry.’ He was looking down at the sand with his face in shadow. ‘Please don’t be angry with me. Please don’t, Bart. I didn’t mean to laugh.’
He glanced up finally. Expressionless. He took out two cigarettes and lit them slowly, his hands shaking. He chuckled. Shook his head. Handed her a cigarette. ‘You’re going to think I’m being vengeful now, but I promise you I’m not,’ he said. ‘But this is the thing of it: I didn’t—’ He shook his head again. ‘You’ll think I’m being mean. You’ll think I’m feeling rejected and want to hurt your feelings.’
She sat up straight. ‘Well, you can’t leave it unsaid now.’
‘I promise you, my motives aren’t petty.’
‘Bloody well say it then.’
He nodded. ‘Here’s the thing. I didn’t really feel anything, Betts. I thought I’d feel something. But I didn’t. I mean – sorry to offend your delicate female sensibilities and all that, but not even half a cock-stand—’
‘Bart!’
‘I’m sorry. I thought you could handle the fact that I possess male genitalia. I’m just being honest. I felt nothing. Sweet fuck all. And look at you – you’re Aphrodite. I wonder what could be the matter with me.’
She considered this, smoking her cigarette slowly. ‘That’s all right. I didn’t feel anything either.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘You’re not just saying that because you feel slighted?’
‘No! I mean, I suppose I would lie if I felt slighted, wouldn’t I? To save face. But I’m one hundred per cent not lying. I felt nothing.’
‘Save amusement?’
‘Save amusement,’ she agreed, nodding. ‘And profound embarrassment.’
He gave her a look she knew well – he was about to say something rude, something that tested her. And he did: ‘So in effect, you gave me the flop and I, in turn, turned your vagina to ice?’
‘Bart!’ She slapped the side of his head. ‘Why do you always have to take everything too far?’ She hated the v-word, and he knew it.
He was hunched over, laughing. And soon – she couldn’t help it – she was laughing too, clutching her stomach and shaking, both their glowing cigarette ends dancing under the pavilion’s dark arms.
‘I’ve never admitted this to you,’ she said, once the laughter was spent, ‘on account of your overflowing vanity, but I do think you’re handsome. Very handsome, actually. Bizarre, isn’t it?’
‘Maybe we’re too close friends, do you think?’ he said, lying down on his side, propped up with an elbow. ‘Like siblings?’
She shrugged. Bart had once had a sister. Tabitha. Bettina could still remember her, just about – a fat, ringletted little thing, very sweet, always eating. One of her earliest memories, in fact, was of standing in the Dawes’s stables, staring down at a dark-stained spot in the hay and noticing a scrap of bone with dried blood on it. From Tabitha’s skull? She’d been about to prod it with her foot when the stable hand saw what she was looking at and quickly scooped her up in his arms and took her back to the house. ‘Oh, the poor little thing just wants a sister again,’ Venetia would say, whenever Monty caught Bart sneaking in through the servants’ entrance to play with Bettina. ‘Even so, it’s a bit off, those two being so tight,’ he’d say, or something like this. As if six-year-old girls and seven-year-old boys were in the habit of eloping. Idiot.
‘That was the first time I’ve kissed a girl,’ Bart said. ‘Don’t say anything unkind.’
‘I wasn’t going to.’
‘I thought I should try it, you know?’
‘I thought I should go along with it.’
‘That’s why I got so bonkers drunk. Because I was going to try it.’
She stubbed out her cigarette in the sand. ‘Well. Perhaps it’s a good thing you tried it. Because now we know. Now we don’t have it hanging over us. Did you feel it hanging over us? Because I did.’
He nodded. ‘I meant what I said about missing you and all that.’ He reached out with grasping fingers and she took his hand. He brought his head down and kissed her knuckle. ‘I suppose we’re just not meant for each other, in that way. Perhaps I only long for blondes or brunettes. Or older women.’
‘Or livestock,’ said Bettina.
He laughed with his mouth wide open, all his teeth showing. He really was very handsome, even considering his eyebrows fighting to get to the centre of his face and the cluster of pimples on his forehead. He was probably right; they were too much like siblings. One day she’d be kissed by a man she did not know so intimately, one she hadn’t known all her life, who hadn’t made her eat worms. This strange unattached man from the future would grab her as Bart just had, kiss her as Bart just had, and she’d feel the quickness in her bosom like the women characters from a penny dreadful.
‘One day we shall swoon for others,’ she said, squeezing his hand.
He nodded, squeezing back.
‘I think that would make a good poem,’ she said. ‘“One day we shall swoon for others.” Don’t you think?’
He wrinkled up his face. ‘God no. Do the world a favour and never write a poem as long as you live. Ugh.’
Chapter 3
She damn well hated him. Spread-eagled on the wicker lounger, his belly a hard dome beneath his ugly royal-blue swimsuit, his thick, arrogant fingers – yes, even his fingers were arrogant – tapping cigar ash into the sand. And his face, that look on his face – boredom spreading into something like – no, not disgust, not quite, because disgust was so taxing an emotion and she wasn’t worth the energy required. ‘I am not arguing with you any more,’ said her father. ‘You will do as I say.’
She pictured that cigar in his eye, the red tip sizzling through his retina. ‘Yes, Daddy.’
He squinted up at her, his moustached lip pulled into a sneer. ‘“Daddy?” For heaven’s sake, Bettina, are you five?’
She shrugged, her hands clasped behind her back, toes flexing into the warm sand. Her head itched against the band of her straw hat.
‘I mean, don’t be so transparent, darling. You obviously haven’t been paying close enough attention to your mother.’ He lay his head back down and laughed, shaking his head from side to side. ‘Amateur.’
She stared down at his sun-bright body; his large bald thighs and shiny shins, the narrow pale feet with conjoined toes on the left side, the springy orange hair, the same as hers, spilling over his forehead. Placed next to the lounger was a tumbler of lemonade and a hardback book which, she guessed, was awfully clever. He was a fat old bastard. A fraud. God, she hated him.
She swung her leg back and kicked sand. And she turned and ran, gritting her teeth and wincing as if expecting his arm to somehow reach out to some ludicrous length and his hand to clasp around her ankle, she ran, heels sinking into the sand, knowing that he wouldn’t follow – he had other ways – but all the same waiting, feeling that same ticklish dread that she’d felt, as a small girl, when exiting the small, dark outhouse at the end of her great-auntie’s garden (hands reaching for ankles – she’d always been plagued by hands reaching for ankles); she ran until she reached the scalding boardwalk. Turned back to look. He was dusting the sand off his body and she could see, by the jerking of his head, that he was furious. Good.
Her mother was in the games room playing gin rummy with Bart’s mother, Lucille. They were hunched over the poker table amidst a dense cumulus of smoke, their ankles crossed under their chairs, glasses of sherry at their elbows. Two cigarettes smouldered in the emerald-green ashtray in the centre of the table. Each woman stared at her respective hand with a shark-like focus, neither glancing up when Bettina sloped into the room. Lucille plucked a card from the deck, setting her bracelets to tinkling, and inspected it, her mouth a slick pink line, before scanning the fanned cards in her other hand. She was wearing a purple silk scarf tied around her head and her jewelled ears glinted with every tiny movement.
Bettina could hear the women breathing through their noses. She walked up to the billiards table and ran her palm along the soft felt. She saw her mother bring her sherry to her lips and heard the sound of glass knocking lightly against teeth followed by a dainty glug. She picked up a red ball, felt its weight and then tossed it back on the table where it clattered against another. Both women jerked their heads up.
‘Betsy, darling,’ said her mother, ‘if you carry on like this I’ll have to insist you start wearing a bell around your neck.’
‘Moo,’ said Lucille, laughing into her glass.
Bettina wasn’t sure if she liked or disliked Lucille.
‘Sorry,’ she said to her mother. And then to Lucille: ‘It’s all that ballet she made me take. Turned me into quite the sneak.’ She tiptoed clownishly to the table and peered at her mother’s cards. ‘Who’s winning, then?’
Her mother eyed her with wary bemusement, bringing the cards to her chest. With her free hand she picked up her lipstick-smeared sherry glass and held it out for Bettina to take. ‘Be a sweetie, eh?’
‘Where’s Gerty?’ Gerty was her mother’s maid. She was a mean-looking, roll-necked woman with the face of an exhausted turkey, but was in actual fact a very tender-hearted person deep down. Supposedly. Her mother was always mythologising the serving classes like this.
‘I’ve given her the afternoon off. Her sister is dying, poor thing.’ She shook the empty glass.
Bettina headed over to the bar. Her father had had it installed just before the start of the war and very much enjoyed hinting at its cost. A special kind of mahogany had been imported all the way from Bangor – the American Bangor, not the Welsh one – and he also very much enjoyed bringing this detail to the attention of whichever awful twit he was entertaining, running a lethargic hand along the wood. ‘Not the Welsh one, of course – haha!’ Large front teeth flashing underneath the giant foxbrush over his lip. ‘Not the Welsh one,’ she quietly mimicked, pouring the sherry into a fresh glass.
‘Thanks, dear,’ her mother said, eyes still burning into her card hand. She glanced up at Bettina. ‘Do put some clothes on, won’t you? You look like something the tide rejected. Are all your things packed for school yet?’
‘Uh-huh.’ Bettina curled her foot around the back of her sand-crumbed calf and watched them play. Lucille and Venetia had been best pals since early adulthood. They came from similar social backgrounds (wealthy but not stinking rich, as they saw it) and lived only one mile from each other. Since Lucille’s husband had passed away five years ago, she was over most days. Only once had they properly quarrelled; Lucille had by all accounts been a ‘know-it-all interferer’ when it came to child-rearing, offering unsolicited advice at every turn. Venetia bore this with patience, since Lucille had not only suffered the loss of Tabitha, who had been kicked in the head by a shire horse, but also a stillbirth, and so her incessant commentary was of course motivated by loss. Venetia took her resentment and sat on it, like a letter she never wished to read. But one day, after Lucille had personally taken it upon herself to issue instructions to Bettina’s piano tutor, Venetia snapped: ‘If he wants her to do Chopin, she’ll bloody well do Chopin! It’s none of your business. I don’t tell you how to raise your brat of a son.’
Lucille had covered her mouth with her hand and walked in a wordless daze to the front door. She stopped coming around and Venetia vented about her for weeks, usually over breakfast. ‘She’s spoiled, that’s the thing of it, so just one cross word is enough to send her whimpering to lick her wounds like some pathetic mongrel.’ Angry knife-hand slashing butter thickly over her pikelet. ‘She should’ve tried growing up with three older sisters, then she’d know what it is to grow a thick hide.’ A spoon rammed into the jam pot, striking the glass at the bottom; a peeved glance from Monty over his teacup. ‘And I’m sorry, but he is a brat! Don’t look at me like that, Betts – he is, for a fact, a brat. For. A. Fact. His name is even an anagram of brat.’ She barked out a laugh. ‘You can’t argue with the alphabet, darling.’
But she missed Lucille and eventually turned up at her house with flowers and a bottle of her best claret, and Lucille had clearly missed her in return because she only made her grovel for two hours. ‘I know you didn’t mean that awful thing about Bart. After all, Bettina and my Barty are the same in nature, so to call him a brat’ – a sly look over her wine glass – ‘is to call your own daughter a brat.’
Lucille and Venetia mostly played gin rummy and cribbage. Lucille had a croquet lawn in her garden but they never used it because Venetia was a terrible shot and always ended up tossing her mallet into the flowerbeds and returning to her patio chair in a sulk. They ate cakes practically on the hour. On Sundays they chose to start drinking after lunch and got slowly sozzled on whatever drink suited their mood, smoking incessantly. Sometimes they gossiped about trivialities, such as the impossibility of finding a good butcher, or mean-spirited things – Sybil Palmer’s eyes were too close together and she just had this look about her, like she’d do it with anyone, even the blessed gardener. Other times they discussed the suffrage movement or the ‘situation in India’ (‘Bit of a pickle, I hear’), lolling back in their chairs, using unimaginative language and taking unoriginal viewpoints because they were close and comfortable friends who had no need to impress each other.
Once, after a whole afternoon of cribbage and fizz, they’d retired to the sitting room; Bettina had pressed her ear to the door and heard raucous, naked laughter, and one word had leapt out of the fragmented chatter – ‘fuck’ – and her ears heated up like steamed cockles. She caught a partial sentence, from Lucille: ‘… his hands squeezing my throat, just so, it was quite delicious’.
‘You’re loitering,’ her mother said now. She took her eyes from her cards and looked up at Bettina. ‘Let me get this right: you’ve talked to your father and didn’t hear quite what you wanted to hear.’
‘Correct,’ said Bettina.
‘And you think I can change his mind?’
‘I know you can.’
Venetia put her cards down. ‘Darling, I really can’t. Not about this. Every year you do this, and every year he doesn’t budge an inch.’
‘Got his heels in the stirrups,’ added Lucille, blasting thick smoke from the side of her mouth.
‘He really does,’ said her mother, her brows tilted in apology. ‘This is something he feels awfully strongly about. And he is a benefactor. What would it look like if his own daughter dropped out?’
Bettina’s body slumped and she rolled her head back. ‘But they’re all such horrible bitches!’
‘Well, of course they are, darling. They’re sixteen-year-old girls.’
‘You’re not being helpful.’
‘I don’t know what else to say.’
‘Isn’t there at least one nice one you can be friends with?’ asked Lucille.
‘No! Not one!’Actually, Bettina did have one ‘nice’ friend in school. But it was like finding one pearl in a field of sheep droppings. The pearl is lovely, but look – there’s still all this sheep shit and one can’t help but step in it.
‘Perhaps the world is trying to tell you something,’ said Lucille, raising an eyebrow.
‘Oh, do be quiet, Lolly,’ said Venetia, shooting her a cross look. She stood up and took Bettina by the arms – her hands were cold and digging. ‘Look, lovey, it’s only another two years and then you can come back home. Two years really isn’t a terribly long time and you’ve already got through the worst of it. My father made me go to finishing school when I was your age, and what a dreadful bore that was.’
Lucille knocked back the last of her sherry. ‘And just be thankful you’re not a boy,’ she said, dabbing the corner of her lips with her finger. ‘From what I hear, it’s all buggery, buggery, buggery—’
‘Shut up, Lolly!’
‘Please don’t tell me to shut up, Neesh – I’m simply pointing out the positives.’
Bettina stared at the powder clinging to her mother’s downy chin. The skin was soft, like an old woman’s earlobe. She should be thankful she wasn’t a boy, and she was reminded of this every bloody day, from the black armbanded women gusting into Our Lady of the Angels, the leftover mothers, wives, sisters – in fact she’d passed by them just this morning on her way to St Mark’s, watching through the cab screen with blank eyes but a swirling dark mischief in her stomach. And inside her own church it was all the same, just with nicer hats and better teeth.
She didn’t even have to leave the house for a reminder of how thankful she should be: there, across the dining-room table, sat her older brother Jonathan every mealtime, struggling one-armed with his cutlery, face pale, proud and pinched as the broad beans or new potatoes rolled around on his plate or flew across the table. She should be supremely grateful. She should be kissing the trench-blackened feet of every young man in Great Britain, she should be worshipping their mangled stumps before skipping off to her prestigious, wonderful boarding school at the end of every holiday, because she was so privileged, so fortunate, skipping, skipping, white teeth shining, singing to the finches and marvelling over butterflies! Instead she mewled and scratched like a fat, spoiled housecat. She knew it. And she felt guilty about it. And guilt was a boring waste of time.