Evie shook her head. “Their very words?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. I suppose the people of High Wycombe might like adders and whatever the hell else lives there. Newts. They’re endangered, aren’t they?”
“Life getting in the way of profit.”
“Quite.”
“Well that’s laudable,” said Evie. “Though I think what you mean to say is the committee turned the application down because you weren’t as persuasive as you’d thought. What happened to the money, Clive?”
That butterfly again.
“I thought the nature of a bribe was it bought you what you wanted.”
“Well, if you must know, I gave Burt half then stuck the rest on an each-way in the autumn weekend at Ascot. Christmas was coming and your mother wanted a new dress.”
“Fucking hell.”
“The rest was supposed to come out of my winnings. Don’t forget, another person in my life’s almost ready for university. The money to keep you in knickers and baked beans has to come from somewhere, you know.”
So it was her fault. Anger rising, Evie thought of the snow outside the chalet, its weight settling, a gust stampeding down the gradient of Mont Blanc as if forced by a great drover on the other side of the valley.
“What possessed you, Dad?”
“Dad now, is it? I didn’t think I was going to lose. The rest of our income went on trying to get the collateral back.”
“They fixed the race?”
“Let’s just say I was led to believe the odds had been consolidated one way in advance.”
“Jesus, you’re not giving an interview. Who gave you the tip?”
Clive crossed his arms.
“I said who?”
“This is what you call a pointed silence, Evie.”
“Meaning you don’t know.”
“Meaning I know who it came from but I’m more interested in finding out why it was wrong.”
That strange eye was hooded by the drink. “For the record,” Clive said. “I have always won far more than I lost.”
“Noted and accredited.”
“And I hope someday that you’ll do me the courtesy of being as candid about your own life,” he said. “Darling, too wit…” God, Evie loathed his lawyer shtick… “I also hope you’ll be as transparent with your own progeny, should you be unfortunate enough to have any yourself.”
This was why he would truly never be Dad. They drank until he fell asleep. Once Evie had grown tired of the snoring, she roused Clive to the bathroom and stood in the hallway listening to him piss. She peered around the creaking door to check he was OK when she heard him gagging on his toothbrush, noting that his trousers were falling down. Even old Etonians had builder’s bottoms.
Finally alone, Evie visited the chalet window. The Alps appeared paranormal in the dimness; each hump could have been Bram lying next to her on a snatched weekend afternoon, when he was bored and she was desperate to be complicit in something secretive and adult, considered as a woman, attended to. That bastard had said nothing about any of this.
She’d pleaded with her parents to be allowed to stay at home but hadn’t been able to say why. This was because the reality was that London was all she knew, change can be horrifying and she was lovesick. None of which are easily articulated sentiments.
“Daddy, please,” she’d said, abasing herself with the informal noun.
“And stay where, Evelyn? You have met your mother?”
So had everybody else. Fiona Swarsby was a size six, aged sixty, who had owned a walk-in wardrobe since the age of fifteen. Evie’s mother had discarded her played-out husband and children like a used tissue. Divorce wasn’t the done thing, far too public. Bram set her up in Highgate. Suitable digs, Evie often thought, for a woman who might as well have lived on a distant volcanic island of velour, sequins and purple drapes, her diet consisting of fox, boar and venison, the cutest children from the villages of the supplicating natives.
So Bram was coming to Evie’s mother’s rescue. Handsome Bram. Dependable Bram. The motorboat had glided up the river while his moisturised hands rested against Evie’s hips, that final time. Evie remembered their silence in the quiet, certain Bram didn’t want to cuddle yet still vainly trying to clasp a moment of closeness before it was time to get dressed again. Bram’s forgotten damp became a gel on the insides of her thighs, his sticky disdain plastered up the uneven shape of a curve-less body that embarrassed her. She had run to the toilet. Nauseous, spent.
She might as well have been moved to the North Pole. “Oh, Evelyn,” Fiona had said to Evie. “You can’t seriously expect me to be looking after you at my age.” Then she let Bram help her to the car, Bram glancing up at Evie from below: a strung-out face in a Muswell Hill window. He’d smiled. Smiled! Although it was Evie who laughed last, because not one of them expected the vodka and paracetamoclass="underline"
Not Duncan with his fingers down her gullet.
Not Clive clucking in the taxi to St Thomas’.
Not Fiona, calling her a silly girl.
Nor Bram, ignoring the phone call, never receiving the letter Evie wrote to him, threatening to go public about their affair. The letter was found the next morning, folded inside the front cover of her copy of Catch-22, rather than mid-way, saving the page as she had originally left it.
“What’s going on? Why aren’t you in school?”
Next to the little red tree, Lawrence was being confronted by a man. The man had his hands on Lawrence’s shoulders. Evie headed over. She was drunk, she realised. She was also furious.
Lawrence spied her first. His face was flushed, mouth as gormless as one of Clive’s Koi carp the day Evie saw them disappear down that heron’s throat. She tapped the stranger on the arm. As the man let go of Lawrence and whirled round to face her, Evie’s heart skipped. The stranger wore a plastic mask that only part-covered his bloated face. He had a convict’s shaven head, the roughness of which was exacerbated by a scraggy beard and a blue stain dotting one of his cheeks.
Evie stepped back. So did the man.
“Jesus,” he exclaimed. “No way.”
She could have said the same thing. He was absolutely ghastly, a guy let loose from its bonfire: the Yorkshire bloody Ripper. He was about to grab her, he must be, so Evie drew her foot back and kicked him between the legs as hard as she could. The man made a funny exhalation and folded over, sinking to his knees, forehead meeting the ground as if in prayer. Evie felt like a little girl again, back on Brighton pier, watching the pennies spewing into the cash flow after she’d shoulder-barged the coin pusher’s glass. The arcade attendant coming her way, scooping her booty into her pockets before escaping to the yielding terrain of the pebbled beach.
You win!
“Come on!” she cried. Lawrence was trying to speak to the man, but it was hardly the time for gloating. Evie pulled him by the hand. “Hurry up!”
“That were my dad!”
“What?” They were really running. Their shoes beat the trail that wound into Barnes’ Wood like a huge unspooled tape measure. Yard by yard, they hurried, through the bracken stage ahead of copse and shade, skipping through leaf and fern, the very air exciting. What was anything? It was everything. Evie slapped Duncan around the head as she passed him, and he fell in behind her and Lawrence, both the boys dead-weights in her wake. Because no man could hold a candle. Evie was the renegade of Litten Hill.
PART TWO
Flattened Stones, Scrambled Heights