Читать книгу Naked Angels - Judi James, Judi James - Страница 10

The Bentley was a pretty good drive – maybe even better than the Oldsmobile. Evangeline had made quite fair friends with the chauffeur on the school run and she knew the car had power steering and a sixteen horse-power engine – which meant that even if you had sixteen real horses harnessed to the front of the chassis the car wouldn’t have gone any faster than it did.

Grandma Klippel had paid good money to get her into that school. She could tell from the other grand cars in the drive and from the way the kids spoke without moving their lips much, but despite all that money they still had sneers and secrets leaking out of those mean little mouths.

Evangeline knew something else, too – a secret not even the know-all-miss-snotty kids knew. A secret even her grandmother wasn’t aware of. A terrible thing. She knew that her parents were dead.

They were all dead: Thea, Darius, baby Lincoln – maybe even Patrick, too, though she wasn’t sure about that. The chauffeur had told her by sheer mean mistake. He hadn’t meant to, she knew that. It had sort of slipped out while they were talking one day. It wasn’t his fault and she never found out how he knew, because Grandma Klippel had no idea – she knew that for sure.

‘My grandmother told me they’d gone away,’ she’d said. Grandma never lied; it just wasn’t possible.

The back of the chauffeur’s neck had glowed strawberry-patch red.

‘Maybe that’s what she thinks,’ he’d told her after a while. It had been difficult for him to say it at all. The words seemed caught somewhere in his throat.

‘Maybe she’s right.’ Evangeline didn’t know what was worse: that they’d gone away or that they’d died. There didn’t seem a whole mess of difference if they were never coming back. Dead sounded worse, though. She felt that snot in the back of her throat again, distorting all her words when she tried to speak.

‘Maybe,’ the chauffeur echoed.

‘But they are dead.’

‘Yeah. I’m sorry. Don’t tell your grandmother. Please.’

It was a while before Evangeline could talk at all. Dead: like the fish and the seagull, and empty, like the quahog shells. Floating on the oily surface of the water with their eyes all white like pearls, and blind.

‘Did they drown?’ she asked.

‘I doubt it.’ So he didn’t know either.

‘Why doesn’t my grandmother know?’ she asked.

The chauffeur shrugged. She could see his eyes in the rear-view mirror. He looked scared.

‘Maybe because she’s old. Maybe the shock …’ his voice faded away. Evangeline nodded. The shock would make her ill. The thing was to keep it from her. It sounded like a useful plan. Darius would be proud of her when he got back. She was confused, or was she? She still felt they were all coming back, that was the problem. She still felt it as much as when she knew they were gone. It just didn’t happen. Nobody left their kids alone for too long.

The good thing was she hadn’t cried properly – not in front of the chauffeur and not in front of the other kids, anyway. The chauffeur would have been embarrassed about telling her all over again if she had. She didn’t want him feeling awkward over such a stupid mistake. It could have happened to anybody. And she definitely didn’t cry in front of her grandmother. Keeping it secret was important; if she’d cried as much as she wanted to the old lady would have known something was up and maybe even have died herself.

She’d known the other kids were watching her at school, she could feel their squinting eyes on her back throughout each and every class. Did they know too? She always sat up straight as a post, just like her grandmother had been teaching her, and she never let anything show on her face. She knew they felt cheated, somehow, and she was glad. The secret made her special; important, even. She had to be special, Grandma Klippel said that over and over. Make Darius proud of her. Make Thea proud of her. It was something to do. It was a way of working to get them all back.

Evangeline watched the coastline go by as they drove back to the house. The sea looked so different with a slick of sun on it. It didn’t scare her when it looked like that. She didn’t think her parents were on the other side of the sea any more, either.

‘Do you know if Patrick died too?’ she asked.

‘Who?’ the chauffeur’s voice started to sound queer again.

‘The dog. Patrick.’

The chauffeur cleared a frog from his throat. ‘Maybe. I don’t really know. Sorry.’

Evangeline nodded again. That made sense. If they were all gone then Patrick would have gone with them. Otherwise he’d have sniffed her out by now. It was worth asking, though. He might just have been roaming the grounds of their old house somewhere, howling and looking for her. At least he wasn’t lost somewhere, starving. A sudden thought came to her.

‘Old Mr Carstairs’s heart gave out when they told him his wife had died,’ she said. ‘I think maybe that’s why Grandma’s been told they’re all away on holiday somewhere. I wouldn’t want her to be sick too.’

If the chauffeur said anything in reply then Evangeline missed it. His neck was getting hotter by the minute, though. She could fry eggs on that neck now, she thought, with all that grease there, too. You could see the grease in a line on his collar. She wanted to pull her photo of Lincoln out of her school bag to look at but she didn’t dare because she didn’t want to cry in front of him.

When they got home Grandma Klippel was outside waiting for them. At certain times it was hard to imagine how tough the old lady could be, and this was one of those times. With her linen skirt flapping about her knees and her skinny, saggy-fleshed arms hanging out of her cardigan sleeves, she looked almost frail. The light was going and her expression was hard to gauge. There was a smell of beach plum blossoms and Evangeline remembered it was nearly spring.

There were circles of dark skin around her grandmother’s eyes, as though she’d been rubbing, or reading without her glasses, or something.

‘Hello, dear. And how was school?’ she asked.

Evangeline looked back at the chauffeur. ‘Fine.’

Grandma Klippel smiled. ‘Do you know you are at the same school that my son went to? Darius was at that school for four years and he adored every minute of his time there. I used to wait for him to come home each afternoon just like I am standing here waiting for you. Isn’t that wonderful?’

She was the only person Evangeline knew who could smile without looking happy. She tried to smile back but the right look just wouldn’t come. When she started to shiver she pretended to her grandmother it was the wind making her cold, even though they both knew there wasn’t any more than a breeze blowing that afternoon.

She fell ill on that day; the fever lasted a week or more and she was off school for a month. When she got up again it was almost summer and her grandmother took her on a berry hunt just as though nothing had ever happened.

On her first day back at the school Evangeline got sent home early for fighting. She’d got angry over nothing much other than her unhappy life and she’d jumped on the girl with the most know-all face in the class for little more than the fact that the girl had a father and she did not. When she jumped the girl went down like a pile of old paper, instead of fighting back. So the car had been summoned to pick her up.

The chauffeur’s name was Cecil. It was a strange name and she didn’t know if she dared use it. He came from Manchester in England, which was why he talked so funny. He had a colour photo of his family in his glove compartment. She wondered if he missed them as much as she missed her own.

This time Cecil stopped the car. Not quickly, but just slowing down onto a verge as though stopping to point out some tern that dotted the sky overhead. The windows came down automatically and they both sat there a while, listening to the wind cutting through the dune grass. There was a rock nearby that was covered in creamy-white shells dropped by the gulls. Beyond the rock was a lonely-looking yellow sandbar that the tide was busy trying to cover up.

Evangeline’s nose caught the smell of fresh smoke and when she looked around Cecil was drawing on a weedy-looking roll-your-own.

‘Do you mind?’ he asked, and she shook her head, flattered by his manners. He had lowered the glass between them so that his voice didn’t sound so funny. It was nice, sitting there quietly. After a while Evangeline started to cry but he didn’t make a fuss, or try to stop her. He just let her cry until her eyes were empty of tears and then he took his own hankie down to the water and brought it back wet, so she could wash her face with it.

‘She might know, you know,’ he said, meaning Grandma Klippel. Evangeline shook her head.

‘If she knew she’d have said. She never lies, she told me so. She wouldn’t say anything unless she believed it. Why do people die?’

‘God knows.’ Cecil spat a fleck of tobacco. He was not a philosopher. Evangeline thought the answer was fair enough. She never asked the question that was really troubling her, though: why did they die without her? Why hadn’t she gone as well? Didn’t they want her with them? Thea, Darius, Lincoln and Patrick. All together. Without Evangeline. The thought came into her head that they had hated her. Why? Was it her school grades? Was it because she was so ugly? It just didn’t make sense unless you looked at it that way.

Maybe they did hate her, after all. She would never have considered doing anything without them.

‘Why don’t you take a run on the beach for a bit?’ Cecil asked. ‘Your grandmother’s not expecting you back yet. Get a bit of colour into your cheeks.’

She took Cecil’s advice, running wild till her legs ached, and the air did feel good. Then they drove back to the house.

‘We have whole baby chickens for supper, Evangeline, with herby gravy,’ her grandmother said. ‘Go and wash up, there’s a good girl.’ She was wearing a lilac-flowered dress and a matching duster coat, as though she’d been out. She never told lies. She would have said.