‘Marnie, tell me. This is killing me.’
Don’t. A kind voice inside her urged. He is yours. Let him love you. And she felt that voice despair when the words moved up her throat and into her mouth and were then released into the air.
‘We went to the best school in the area, my sister and I. All girls. Not a fee-paying one but really good,’ began Marnie. ‘There was an English teacher there, Mr Trent, married with a young son, all the girls fancied him. Me included. I was thirteen and we were reading Wuthering Heights and he was my own personal Heathcliff in my imagination. He offered to give me extra lessons after school because I was “bright”, he said. I didn’t think I was, really. There was one girl in my class destined for Oxbridge but she didn’t get extra lessons. Still, it was something to tell my mum that I’d been selected. I thought I’d impress her with that.’ She stalled, gauging Herv’s reaction, waiting for his mind to gallop ahead and for that look of revulsion to appear on his face, but found only that he was listening carefully.
‘You can probably guess what happened. Plain girl full of new sexual hormones, handsome teacher giving her attention she’s never had, knowing all the right things to say, looking into her eyes as he reads poetry. I thought I was being loved, not groomed. It only happened twice. I didn’t like it. I knew it was wrong . . . it hurt, I felt sick. He said that was natural the first time and it would be better after, but it wasn’t. Textbook stuff, I was special, he said. He’d never felt that way about anyone before. I didn’t want to go to any more lessons after that. I told Mum that he’d stopped them, she wasn’t surprised. She put my weight gain down to comfort eating because I’d been dropped. I put my weight gain down to comfort eating because I felt ashamed. I didn’t know I was pregnant until I went into labour. Three months after my fourteenth birthday.’
Herv’s eyes were on the ground now, his hands knitted tightly together.
‘I didn’t know what was happening to me. I thought I was dying. It was the school holidays and I was arguing with Mum about something when the pains came from nowhere. She thought I was putting it on until my waters broke.’
Her voice gave up and she had to cough to clear away the frog that seemed to have taken residence there.
‘I gave birth to a beautiful tiny little girl. She had to go straight into special care because she was so early. Mum said I couldn’t keep her. She said that even if I didn’t sign her over to be adopted, she’d be taken away anyway. She told me all sorts of lies and I was fourteen and confused and believed them all and she wouldn’t let anyone give me any alternative. Mum said what sort of life would she have with a schoolgirl mother and a father who was already married? I’d ruin hers as well as everyone else’s. So I let her go and then I found out that I could have kept her, I could have gone into a home and let social services help us but it was too late by then. One of the nurses took a polaroid of her and Mum found it and tore it up because she said I had to forget her, but I never did, how beautiful she was, how perfect. And on the sixth of August, the day of Emelie’s funeral, she would have had her eighteenth birthday. She would be a woman, a grown-up.’
Marnie sensed Herv getting up from the seat and she thought he would start walking away but then she felt his arms around her, pulling her to her feet, holding her tightly.
He was talking into her hair, words in his native language, words she didn’t understand but she knew that they were tender, loving.
‘I’d ruin a man’s marriage, his career, his family if I told, Mum said, but there had been rumours in the school and the police came to see me and . . . Oh God, I felt so guilty after I said his name. He was sacked, prosecuted. His wife left him. We moved away, to another town and another school and she never forgave me for the mess. Then I found out he’d done it before. In a private school. He’d had to leave but they’d hushed it up to avoid the scandal and sent him on his way with a good reference. The girl wrote to me but I didn’t find the letter until after Mum died. She’d kept it from me.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said Herv, holding her tighter. ‘Kjære jenta mi.’ Oh my darling.
Her legs were shaking, she sat back down before she fell.
‘I try not to think of her, but I do. What if she was adopted by a woman like Judith and has been unhappy all her life?’
‘More likely a couple who have loved her as if she were the most precious child in the world. Like my parents loved me,’ he smiled. ‘Marnie, you were especially unlucky.’
‘What if she’s turned out like me, Herv?’
He didn’t leave a beat before he answered. ‘Then I think that it’s not such a bad thing. Obviously without all the hang-ups.’ And Marnie couldn’t help the blurt of laughter that escaped her.
Herv sat down beside her, put his arm around her and pulled her close. The moon had sunk into a quilt of clouds; Time for bed, the sky said. Time to sleep for a final time in your old life and waken in a new one.
‘You are the perfect man,’ said Marnie. ‘You really are.’ He was way out of her league, not the other way around.
‘Whaat?’ said Herv, throwing his head back and giving a hoot of incredulity at that. ‘Anyway, Lilian once said to me that perfection was an imperfection in itself.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I have no idea, she was . . . gæren.’ And he rotated his finger near his temple to indicate that Lilian was slightly bonkers, but he was smiling and it made Marnie smile too. Imperfection personified, that’s what Lilian’s father had labelled her. And he was right, because she was the most perfectly imperfect woman Marnie had ever met. The mother she had grown in her heart.
‘My God, Marnie, look at that,’ said Herv. ‘What the . . . ?’
A light in the gallery window of the manor claimed their attention. A pink dot hovering. But it couldn’t be? Because Emelie was the Pink Lady, wasn’t she?
They sat mesmerised, watching the light bounce in gentle arcs from left to right.
‘You’ll be living with a ghost after all,’ chuckled Herv as it halted for a long moment and then melted into the darkness.
‘I don’t mind,’ said Marnie. ‘I can learn to share.’
‘Can you?’ asked Herv. ‘Can you learn to share yourself with me then?’
Marnie turned to him, saw the tenuous smile on his mouth, pinned there by hope. His hand rose to brush against her cheek, such a gentle touch yet she felt the reverberations shoot all the way down to her fingers and toes and beyond as if they were too big and powerful to stay within the confines of her skin. His head bent towards hers, tentatively, expecting her to edge away at any moment, but she didn’t. As he placed his lips softly on hers, she felt a warmth bloom in her heart as if his love was slipping between the many breaks and cracks in it, gluing it back together, mending it like liquid gold.
Kintsugi.
Her lips pressing back against his answered the question perfectly.
THE UPDATED HISTORY OF WYCHWELL
Author’s Note
At the other end of Yorkshire, Denby Dale has its crowd-drawing giant pie. Wychwell now has its crowd-drawing giant cheesecake. Brainchild of the present Lady of the Manor, Miss Marnie Salt, the Wychwell cheesecake even overtook the popularity of the May Queen, who this year is Mrs Una Price.