‘Don’t let her upset you, love,’ said Uncle Barry, pulling Gabrielle into his shoulder. His head twisted nastily towards Marnie. ‘Go on, get out. You’ve done what you always do, ruin it. I see the years haven’t changed things. Once a liar, always a liar.’
Liar.
If any word could have sprung the lock on Marnie’s self-control, it was that one. She could have taken the sneers, the asides, the withering looks. But not that word. Not now when she was a grown-up who could fight back. This time she wasn’t going to be sent away to the naughty step to think on her actions.
‘Liar?’ she threw the word back at her uncle.
‘She’s trying to cause another family rift, as if one wasn’t enough,’ Diana announced to the room. ‘I didn’t speak to poor Judith for years because of this one.’ She pointed to Marnie as if she were exhibit A and years of repressed anger and injustice started to fizz up inside Marnie as if she were a shaken-up bottle of warm cola. It wouldn’t be settled. There was only one way for it to go and that was out.
‘You didn’t speak to poor Judith for years because of this one!’ Marnie yelled back at her aunt but her finger was extended towards Barry. ‘Yes, this piece of shit that you accused me of trying to seduce.’ She took a leaf out of her aunt’s book and addressed the slack-jawed audience. ‘Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this paragon of virtue, this fine specimen of manhood standing before you – my Uncle Barry – who said to his fourteen-year old niece “It’s fine, it’s not as if we’re related, is it?” and “It’s not as if you’re a virgin”.’
Marnie turned on her aunt then, who strangely wasn’t so vocal any more. ‘And you know exactly what you saw, however much your booze-addled brain tried to convince you otherwise. And so you know why I kneed him in his scrawny bollocks. Because he’s a letch, a perv, a sex-pest, a dirty, filthy paed—’
‘Get out,’ screamed Gabrielle, tearing herself away from Uncle Barry whose head was growing so red it was in danger of melting his comb-over. ‘No man could ever resist you, could they, that’s what you think, isn’t it? You’re the disgusting one. You ruined my life because you couldn’t keep your knickers on.’
‘You spoilt, evil, little . . .’ As Marnie stepped forward with her fists clenched in hard knots, the whole of the Salt family, including the despicable in-laws, closed around her sister in a defensive wall. The moment crystallised, and Marnie felt the tenuous thread between herself and that loathsome cluster break. She had never been one of them, would never be one of them. Why had it ever been on her list of aspirations?
‘I think it would be better if you left,’ said Duncan, his voice level but hostile.
‘So do I,’ said Marnie. The walk to the door was a matter of twelve steps but it felt like twelve hundred.
‘I never, never want to see or hear from you again,’ bawled Gabrielle as Marnie opened the door.
‘Fucking ditto,’ Marnie threw back over her shoulder.
‘And I’m not sending you any of Mum’s money. She told me not to give you any anyway,’ screeched the woman who had been her sister.
‘Stick the money up your arse, Gabrielle. Or buy yourself a personality. Either way, I don’t bloody care.’
The fresh air felt like the first breath of oxygen after emerging from a sealed box. Her whole body was shaking with rage, with upset, with emotions she couldn’t untangle.
She stalled the car in her eagerness to set off and knew she wasn’t fit to drive. Her plastered Aunt Diana would be safer on the road. The young vicar knocked on her window and scared the bejesus out of her. He asked if she was all right and though she said she was, it was an obvious fib. He invited her to follow him to the vicarage and have a cup of tea and a chat and his kindness brought tears to her eyes that her mother’s death hadn’t. She declined and said that she wanted to go home but she appreciated his concern, and she really did. She would probably have crashed if he hadn’t taken those few minutes to help calm her and make her realise that the whole world wasn’t on her back.
She pulled in at the first café she came to on the A1 and ordered a coffee and sat down in a booth sipping it and thinking, pulling apart what had just happened but as usual, where her family were concerned, it didn’t make much sense. Her aunt had always looked down on them all. She wanted to the be the one the Joneses kept up to. She lived a life of show and illusion: a brand-new Range Rover on the drive – bought on HP; dressing room full of Jacques Vert whilst her visa bill was in quintuple figures. Double-fronted detached house with ornamental pond – crippling second mortgage. Golf and Rotary club membership, hob-nobbing with councillors – the fur coat and no knickers brigade. They went on a yearly cruise on a cheap inside cabin yet bragged to all and sundry that they’d booked a suite and had dined at the Captain’s table. They’d polished out the stains on the veneer of their marriage by editing the manuscript of their life. Fourteen-year-old Marnie Salt – no blood relation – had come on to her uncle and the subsequent rejection of her advances had induced her to knee him in his knackers. Even the fact that Diana had witnessed her husband’s hand slipping down the front of his niece’s shirt, a second before she turned into the Karate Kid, hadn’t made any difference. If anything, it made matters worse, because Marnie had to be quashed completely for the truth to go away. Obliterated.
It hadn’t been the first time his hands had wandered, either. Marnie had managed to jump away from him before, but he’d caught her off-guard that day as she was concentrating hard, sitting at the table doing her maths homework, trying to catch up with all the work she’d missed. Come on, love. It’s not as if you’re a virgin, is it? And though there had been two years of non-communication between her mother and Barry, Judith had said to her once – after they had finally been reconciled – ‘I know my brother, Marnie. And he would not have been capable of such a disgusting act.’ Lying to herself was always more preferable than believing uncomfortable truths.
Lilian’s voice came to her as she looked at the bill for the coffee, ‘Your family are shits of the highest order, Marnie.’ And Marnie laughed and a tear escaped from her eye at the same time. Still, there was a bright side to today, she never had to see Uncle Barry or Aunt Diana again. Or Gabrielle. She knew she wouldn’t be invited to the wedding, and what a relief that was. She couldn’t wait to tell Lil—
Just for a second there, she imagined going back to the manor, sitting in Lilian’s lovely conservatory with the view of the lake and telling her old friend about what had happened today. She wouldn’t be able to demonstrate to her the smacked-arse expression on her Aunt Diana’s face when she’d hit her with both barrels from the home truths gun. They would never again put the world to rights over a slice of cheesecake and a glass of Lionel’s raspberry wine. She knew as the days passed she would feel the loss of Lilian far more than she ever would her mother. Lilian, who had made her feel as if she really were the person she’d always wanted to be. Lilian who had given her a home that she had settled into as surely as if it had been a nest custom-built around her. Lilian who had decided, along with the new owner of her beloved Wychwell that she – Marnie Salt – was the person who should manage the estate, rescue it, unbugger it up, and love it as she had done.