The Queen of New Beginnings (15 page)

“Alice, how could you think that?” He encircled her waist with his hands, pulled her to him and kissed her fiercely. She kissed him back, long and hard, wanting to make up for all the kisses she had been denied. She pressed her body close to his, wanting to melt right into him.

When they finally pulled apart, he said, “I’d say that was definitely worth coming back for.”

Suddenly light headed, she could feel herself swaying, as if she was about to fall off a cliff. Or was it the sky that was falling in? There was an ocean of blood pounding inside her head. “I think I’m going to faint,” she murmured.

He held her firmly. “I’ve got you, Alice, and I’ll never let you go.” She looked into his face. His dark eyes glittered like the twinkling fairy lights that were strung through the trees around them.

“Rufus? Is that you?”

They both turned to see Tasha standing a few feet away.

“Oh, my God, it is you, Rufus!” But then the expression of delight at seeing her brother slipped and was replaced with an expression of confusion. “Why are you holding Alice like that? What’s going on, Alice?”

Alice didn’t know what to say.

But Rufus did. Still keeping an arm around her, he said, “I couldn’t
not
come to my girlfriend’s eighteenth birthday party.”

Tasha laughed. “Rufus, you say the stupidest things sometimes.”

Rufus tightened his hold on Alice. “I’m being serious, Tasha.” As if to convince his sister, he bent his head and kissed Alice, his tongue exploring her mouth in a way that made her knees go weak and her heart thump wildly.

“Stop it, Rufus!” Tasha shrieked.

Embarrassed, Alice wriggled out of Rufus’s arms. “It’s true,” she said shyly.

“Since when?” Tasha looked horrified.

“Since Easter,” Alice said. “We’ve kept it a secret, though.”

“Why?” Tasha demanded. Alice’s mind went blank. Suddenly she couldn’t remember why it had been so important to keep their relationship a secret.

“Because of Alice’s father,” Rufus said matter of factly. “He’s hardly likely to approve, is he? But I’ve decided he can stick his disapproval.”

“What about you, Tasha?” Alice said, nervously. “Do you approve?”

“Of course she approves,” Rufus said.

Tasha looked uncertainly between Rufus and Alice.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s weird. I mean, it’s practically incest.”

Rufus suddenly laughed. “Hey, if I didn’t know better I’d say my little sister is jealous.

“I’m not! Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Only joking, Tasha,” he said, “but can’t you be happy for us?”

Not answering the question, Tasha said, “since you’re here, you’d better come and say hello to Mum. She’ll be furious if you slip away without seeing her.

“I’m not slipping away anywhere,” Rufus said. “Didn’t you hear me when I said that I’ve decided dear old Bruce can stick his disapproval?”

Rufus was all for marching straight off to find Bruce and Julia. But not wanting anything to spoil the moment, least of all an angry exchange between her father and Rufus, Alice tugged at his sleeve and held him back. “Let’s go and see them later,” she whispered in his ear. “For now I want some time on my own with you.”

Smiling, Rufus grabbed her hand. “I know the perfect place.”

The perfect place turned out to be his bedroom. As soon as he had the door shut, and not bothering to switch on the light, he pressed her to the wall and kissed her hard, his teeth crashing against hers. Their mouths locked tight, he somehow managed to fling off his jacket, then his bow tie. When he started to unbutton his shirt, she suddenly realized what he was planning to do. She panicked. How would she know what to do? Oh, God, what if she got pregnant? He was kicking off his shoes now. She broke the seal of their mouths. “Rufus,” she murmured anxiously. “I—”

“Oh, Alice,” he said gruffly, misunderstanding her. “I want you too.” One of his hands slipped round to the back of her dress. He found the zip and pulled on it. She felt the silk fall away from her body. She shivered. She wasn’t sure if it was from the sudden cold, or desire for him. He stared at her in her underwear. She withered under his gaze, grateful for the shadowy darkness. He smiled, picked her up and carried her over to his bed. He stood over her and ripped off his trousers.

I want this, Alice told herself. Wasn’t it what she’d fantasized all this time? Hadn’t she imagined this very moment? He lay on top of her, then as if by magic, her underwear was gone. She felt the hardness of him against her. Another wave of panic assailed her. How on earth would it fit inside her? And how would she not cry out if it hurt? His mouth and hands were exploring her body. His hands seemed to be everywhere. She tried not to think of what he was doing. She imagined herself on a beach, the hot sun blazing down on her, waves gently caressing her body. Her panic began to fade. She moved against him, enjoying the touch of his skin on hers. Maybe it would be all right, after all.

Abruptly he leaned over her and yanked open a drawer on the bedside table. “I’m sorry, Alice,” he said, “but I can’t hold on any longer.” Next she heard him tearing something open. Her nervousness returned in an instant. She closed her eyes and waited. She felt something hard nudging against her. She braced herself. “Relax,” he said.

Relax
, she told herself. He pushed gently at first, then as if losing patience he pushed harder still and forced his way in. She pictured a large battering ram and gritted her teeth. She wrapped her arms around him, trying to ignore the burning sensation. He started to move, his hips working slowly against hers. He picked up speed, his breath quickening. She lay there not knowing quite what to do. Nothing much, it seemed. With his eyes closed, Rufus seemed in a world of his own. She couldn’t even tell if he was enjoying himself. One of her legs was beginning to cramp. She badly wanted to change positions but sensed Rufus wouldn’t welcome the interruption. How long would it go on for? She wondered. Oh, God, why was she even thinking that? Why wasn’t she enjoying herself? Why wasn’t she making the kind of noises women in films did? Why wasn’t she crying out with rapturous ecstasy? She and Tasha had often competed with each other to see who could make the most convincing sound of a woman having an orgasm.
Oh, yes, yes, YES!
They would pant, then fall about laughing hysterically. Why wasn’t that happening to her now? Well, not the hysterical laughter, but the glazed over eyes, the head thrown back, the breathlessness.

Above her, Rufus groaned and suddenly reared up, his back arched. He let out a long, shuddering moan then collapsed against her, his body hot and sweaty. Was that it? Was it over? A part of her was relieved. She stroked his clammy back. “There,” he murmured into her messed up hair. “I’ve claimed you now, Alice. Now you’re mine. Happy birthday.” He lay there heavily in her arms and just as she was about to shift position so she could stop her leg from cramping, the door flew open and the light flashed on.

Now she did cry out.

• • •

Perfectly framed in the doorway was her father and there was nowhere to hide; both lying on top of the duvet, their nakedness was fully exposed. Alice tried to get behind Rufus, but he rolled away from her. He sat up and casually dealt with the condom. “Hey, Bruce,” he said, “a little privacy if you don’t mind. How would you feel if I burst in on you and my mother?”

Alice trembled.

Her father made a low grumbling sound. He came into the room and bent down to where her discarded dress lay puddled on the floor like a pool of blood. He scooped it up and flung it at Alice. She clutched it to her. “When you’ve got a moment, Alice,” he said, “we’re ready to cut your cake.” He turned and left, slamming the door after him.

Mortified and close to tears, Alice held her head in shame. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

Rufus rested a hand on her leg. “Please don’t cry. You’ll spoil your party face and that would never do.” He moved his hand to her chin and lifted her face to his. “You’re eighteen now. You’re not a child. You’re going to have to learn to stand up to him.”

• • •

Nothing was said the next day until their guests had all left.

At Rufus’s insistence, Alice had spent the night in his room. “You’re a grown woman,” he’d said. “You can sleep with whom you want and where you want.”

She hadn’t said what was in her mind, that actually she wanted to sleep in her own bed. Alone. But she’d gone along with him. She had hardly slept, though. Within minutes of being in bed together, he was opening his bedside drawer. “You’ll enjoy it more this time,” he’d said. She must have been doing something wrong because she didn’t enjoy it any more than the first time. She had been tense, horribly aware that her father, as well as all the guests, might hear what they were doing. Frankly, she couldn’t see how they could miss it. Throughout it all Rufus had made loud grunting noises and had as good as yelled out her name at the top of his voice in a crescendo of—
Oh, oh, oh, Alice!—
when he’d exploded inside her. The bed had played its part, too. The headboard had thumped against the wall and the bed itself had creaked and squeaked so loudly she wouldn’t have been surprised if George had heard the commotion, never mind anyone in the house.

To make matters worse, Rufus had wanted a repeat performance in the morning. “Practice makes perfect,” he’d joked as his hands and mouth had started work again on her sore and aching body.

When they finally emerged downstairs for breakfast, everyone had stared at Alice. The girls sniggered and smirked, with the exception of Tasha who looked at her as though she was smeared in something unspeakable, and the boys, with the exception of Magnus, gave Rufus lewd winks and thumbs up gestures. Some even slapped him on the back. It was all so embarrassing.

She had wondered how her father had known where to find her last night—why, of all the places he could have searched for her, he had chosen Rufus’s bedroom. It turned out that Tasha, annoyed that they had given her the slip—when they were supposed to be finding her father and Julia to tell them that Rufus had shown up unexpectedly—had seen them sneaking off inside the house and had put two and two together and had helpfully pointed Alice’s father in that direction when he’d asked her if she knew where Alice was.

She was glad when the last of the guests had left. Now all she had to cope with was her father. Leaving Rufus to talk with his mother, she went to look for him, wanting to get the inevitable over and done with.

She found him sitting in his car. She went round to the passenger’s side of the Jaguar and climbed in. For a long moment they sat in silence. Alice thought of all the journeys they’d taken together. The destination wasn’t important, he used to say, it’s the journey that counts. Was there a chance, just the merest chance, he would think the same about the journey she was currently embarking upon?

“I forbid you to see him again, Alice,” he said.

“I don’t think you can do that, Dad,” she said quietly.

“He’s not good enough for you.”

“He said you’d say that.”

“He’s…he’s only doing this to get at me.”

“Oh, Dad, not everything’s about you.”

“Is that something else he’s filled your head with?”

She turned and looked at her father. Really looked at him. When was the last time she had done that? She let her eyes travel the familiar, yet at the same time unfamiliar track of his profile. His nose was a bit on the beaky side, but as her friends had teased her yesterday, he wasn’t a bad-looking man for forty-five. His hair needed cutting—Mum always used to do it for him, but since he’d married Julia, and when he remembered, he went to a barber. He hadn’t gone grey yet and his hair was still the same dirty blonde it had always been. She’d been proud of him last night, all dressed up in his ancient dinner jacket, even if he had annoyed Julia by refusing to wear a bow tie. Sitting beside Alice now, he was dressed in faded jeans and a woollen sweater over a pale-blue denim shirt that matched the blue of his eyes. The collar of his shirt was askew: she could see he hadn’t buttoned it correctly. She remembered how Mum used to say he couldn’t be trusted to get himself dressed of a morning. She thought of him dressed as a pirate when she’d been little—the moustache he’d glued to his top lip, the peg leg he’d strapped on, the eye patch. He’d gone to so much trouble. And all for her. She felt her throat tighten. “I love him, Dad,” she said.

He turned to meet her gaze. “Then why do you look so miserable?”

“It’s not Rufus who’s making me miserable, it’s you.”

“Is there nothing I can do to make you see sense?”

“What have you got against him? You’re not still angry about him asking for a car, are you?”

Her father snatched his gaze away from her and gripped the steering wheel. “I don’t trust him. I never have. I once caught him snooping through my desk.”

“Perhaps he’d lost something and thought it might have got caught up with your things?”

He snorted. “The worst part is, I blame myself entirely. And don’t think for a single moment that the irony of my actions is lost on me.”

“What do you mean?”

“That by marrying Julia I as good as invited a pernicious cuckoo into our nest here at Cuckoo House. I’m scared he’ll push you out of it, Alice. That…that you’ll be lost to me. Swear you’ll never tell him about the house, that as of yesterday you now own it.” He whipped his head round. “You haven’t told him already, have you?”

“No, Dad, I haven’t.”

They sat in silence again.

Until her father said, “If you won’t heed my warnings, you will be careful, won’t you? I’m talking about contraception. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. A baby would screw it up.”

She reached out and touched the hand that was nearest to her. “I’ll be careful. I promise.” He stared at her hand.

“Have I been such a poor father to you?” His voice was low and unbearably forlorn.

“Why would you think that?”

He shrugged. “If he ever hurts you, in any way, I’ll make damned sure he pays for it.”

Not surprisingly, things were never the same again after that weekend.

Alice and Tasha returned to school for their final year, but not as friends. Tasha made that very clear. Bad enough that Alice and Rufus had been carrying on behind her back, but then, in Tasha’s own words, to flaunt their relationship by shagging themselves senseless and for all to hear, was “just plain disgusting.”

A fortnight after the party, with an essay on Andrew Marvell to do, Alice was working in one of the study cubicles in the school library when the door opened at the far end of the room. Knowing she was alone, she leaned out of the cubicle to see who had come in and spotted Tasha with Freya Maynard; they scarcely left each other’s side these days. “Alice is nothing but a two-faced slut,” she heard Tasha say. Her cheeks burning, Alice rocketed forward in her seat to try and conceal herself. The words of Marvell’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” rose up before her from the book of the desk. “
Then worms shall try that long-preserved virginity, and your quaint honour turn to dust, and into ashes all my lust
.”

She snapped the book shut.

Footsteps approached. “Oh, it’s
her
.”

Never had so much contempt been poured into so few words. Alice turned round as casually as she could. It was time for yet another performance of sparkling indifference. Anything but let Tasha think she was rattling her. “Oh, it’s
you
,” she said in return. She picked up a pencil and twirled it for extra nonchalance. “And for your information, Tasha, I am not a slut.”

“Then why do you behave like one?”

“What is your problem? No, really. What exactly
is
your problem? Why does it bother you so much that your brother loves me?”

“Love? Oh, come off it, Rufus doesn’t love you.”

“I’d say I’m in a better position to know that than you.”

“What position would that be? Flat on your back with your legs wide open?”

Freya laughed. She was playing her part of subordinate sidekick well. Alice leaned forward and tapped Tasha on the arm with the pencil. “Careful what you say, Tasha. If you make me out to be such a slut, what does it make Rufus?”

Tasha recoiled from the pencil. “I don’t know how you’ve done it, but you’ve blinded my brother and trapped him. I know what you’re up to. You want to be one of us, a Raphael, and you think by having Rufus you’ll achieve that. Well, it won’t work. You’re not one of us. And you never will be. You’re just a nobody. A weirdo Barrett. I’m embarrassed to be associated with you.” She linked an arm through Freya’s. “Come on, Freya, let’s find somewhere more conducive to study.”

The door closed after them with a wheezing mechanical shoosh, followed by a soft, decisive thud.

Silence.

Exhausted from the strain of her performance, Alice slumped forward and rested her head against her forearms on the desk. Not only was she a slut for loving Rufus, but she was a nobody. What was that all about? And what the hell was so special about being a Raphael? Anyone would think Tasha was a member of the royal family the way she carried on. Alice didn’t know which of them was the more self-deluded—Tasha, or herself for believing this was just a small glitch in their friendship, that once Tasha had got things into perspective they would be best friends again.

Now, though, she was wondering if she wanted to be best friends with someone who could be such a vicious bitch.

Alice had always known that Tasha idolized her brother but now she understood that it was an exclusive right to idolize him. Probably in Tasha’s eyes no one else was good enough for Rufus. Well, tough luck girl! Rufus thought she was more than good enough. Hadn’t he claimed her? Her heart lurched at the memory of him saying,
You’re mine now
.

The day after the party and before he’d left Cuckoo House to return to London, Rufus had asked Alice to go for a walk with him. “While you were talking to your father, I spoke to my mother,” he’d said. “She seems to think that for the time being it would be better all round if we don’t make too much of a big thing about our relationship. She doesn’t want your father to be any more antagonized. As she rightly pointed out, there are your exams this summer to think about. Mine, too.”

“You don’t regret telling them about us, do you?” she had asked him.

“Of course not. But last night I got carried away with the excitement of it all. With hindsight, maybe it’s a situation that needs careful handling. You are my stepsister, after all. Not that that worries me. What’s more important to me is that your father needs to know that he can’t go on controlling you in the way he does. You have to stand up to him.
We
have to stand up to him. We’re not children anymore.

“He doesn’t control me,” she’d said indignantly.

“No?” Rufus had given a little shrug. “Well, whatever you say. Now I don’t want you to worry over the coming weeks and months. I’m being assigned to a hospital as of next week, so I won’t be easy to get hold of.”

“Can I write to you?”

“Of course. I’ll do my best to write back, but as you’ve no doubt worked out for yourself, I’m not much of a letter writer. But keep yours coming. Who knows, I might get some time off and surprise you with a visit if I get the chance.”

It was only after he had left for London that Tasha revealed the true extent of her disgust for Alice’s behaviour. Later that evening, Alice’s father had driven them back to school. No one had spoken for the duration of the two-hour drive and Alice had felt nauseous the whole way. It hadn’t been from car-sickness.

Thinking now of Rufus’s rock-sure certainty, Alice decided to write to him. She would tell him how awful Tasha was being; he would sort everything out. He would tell Tasha not to be so stupid. If Tasha was going to listen to anyone, it would be Rufus.

How wrong could she have been?

Not about Tasha, but about Rufus.

• • •

A month after Alice posted her letter—a long, worrying month during which she didn’t hear from Rufus—she received a reply. She and Tasha were at home for half term when his letter arrived.

Dear Alice,

I’ve always been honest with you and so I’ll come straight to the point. I’ve met somebody else and being with her makes me realize that you and I were kidding ourselves when we thought we were in love with each other. Your father would never have accepted me, so this is best all round. I hope you can see the sense of what I’m saying and won’t make any trouble. When all is said and done, you are my sister and we have to get along.

Regards, Rufus.

P.S. At Mum’s request, I’m planning on being at Cuckoo House for Christmas.

Somebody else.

Alice couldn’t believe it. Or the offhand way she had been dumped.

Somebody else.

It wasn’t possible. How could he have done it? How could he have tossed her aside so easily?

She read the letter over and over. If she didn’t know his handwriting so well, she might have convinced herself the letter was a malicious hoax on Tasha’s part. But there was no denying who had written it. No denying, either, that in one sweep of his pen, he had broken her heart.

With each reading of the letter, she began to doubt everything he’d ever said to her since that day when he’d first kissed her in this very room. Had he ever cared for her? To end things so abruptly—to allow himself to “meet” somebody else—had there ever been anything of a genuine feeling in his entire body for her? What had he been thinking when he’d “met” this somebody else? Had she bedazzled him to the point where he lost all memory of Alice? Or had Alice never really featured in his conscious mind? She thought of the many letters she had written to him, of the desperately lonely weeks when she didn’t hear from him. She thought of how she had given herself to him the night of her birthday. Only now to be discarded so cruelly.

Apart from her father, who was upstairs in his darkroom, Alice was alone in the house—Julia and Tasha had gone shopping—and safe in the knowledge that no one would hear her, she lay on her bed and cried herself out. Never had she cried so much in all her life.

There seemed no end to her tears. Each time she thought she might be nearing the end of them, she would remember a conversation with Rufus, a look from him, a smile, or a gesture, and she would be consumed by a fresh wave of desolation. The memory that hurt her the most was the night of her party, when he’d turned up to surprise her. That had to have been real, surely? He couldn’t have gone to so much trouble if he hadn’t cared about her, could he?

Or had Dad been right? Had it been nothing but a carefully constructed plan on Rufus’s part to get at her father, to torment him in the worst possible way? Alice had to concede that given the circumstances—her having sex with Rufus virtually under his nose—her father had acted with extraordinary and uncharacteristic restraint.

A knock at the door had her lifting her head from the pillow. “Go away!” she croaked. She’d lost track of the time and supposed Tasha and Julia were back from shopping. To have Tasha gloat over what Rufus had done to her would be more than she could bear.

The door opened. “Alice?”

At the sound of her father’s voice, she said, “Haven’t you learned yet not to burst in on me?”

Frowning, he came over to the bed. He sat on the edge of it. “What’s wrong, love?”

She thrust Rufus’s letter at him. “See for yourself. Just don’t be too happy about it.”

She watched him read the letter, his eyes flickering along each line; some of the words were smudged from her tears. When he’d finished, he carefully folded it in half, then in half again. He put it on her bedside table. Next to the framed photograph she had of Rufus. The framed photograph she had kissed good-night every time she switched off the light. “I’m sorry,” her father said. “I’m sorry I allowed him to hurt you. But I warned you. I warned you he was a little shit. Didn’t I say that I didn’t trust him?”

“It’s not him, Dad!” she wailed. “It’s you. You made him do this! He would have loved me if it hadn’t been for you!” She didn’t really believe what she was saying but she needed to blame someone and her father hadn’t exactly helped the situation, had he?

“Oh, Alice, don’t let him do this to you. He’s not worth it.”

“Don’t keep going on about how awful he is. I loved him, don’t you understand that? He was everything to me.
Everything!
”

“For two seconds in your life, he was everything. But not anymore. Now he’s nothing. And don’t think I’ve forgotten the promise I made to you. I said that if he ever hurt you, I’d make him pay.”

• • •

Things went even further downhill from then on. Alice and Tasha returned to school but a week later Alice was diagnosed as having glandular fever and because her father was away in Norway on an assignment, Julia had to come and fetch her home.

Alice had always considered Julia’s presence at Cuckoo House as being little more than that of a shadow. She was a vacuous woman who rarely held an opinion that wasn’t a cliché. Alice’s mother would have hated her; she would have condemned her in an instant as being a neurotic, wishy-washy bore. Doctor Barbara Barrett had been very keen on backbone and ambition. The only task Julia had carried out with any real purpose was when she had arrived at Cuckoo House with Tasha and Rufus and had organized people to cook, clean and maintain the house for her. Since then her input had been minimal. Certainly this was the first time she had tackled the drive to school on her own.

It was also the first time that Alice had spent more than ten minutes in her company alone. Alice had absolutely no idea what to say to her during the journey and so she feigned sleep.

Which would have worked had Julia not been in the mood to talk. “Do you feel very poorly?” she asked Alice.

“Yes,” Alice replied, her eyes closed. She couldn’t recall ever feeling this ill before. She felt leaden, her head too heavy for her neck to support, her throat scratchy and raw, her every nerve zinging. The doctor had said it was unlikely she would return before school started again in January. Even then, he’d warned her she might not feel up to it.

“You’ll probably want to go straight to bed when we get home,” Julia said.

“Yes,” Alice replied again.

“Have you heard from Rufus?”

Alice said nothing.

“Does it still hurt?”

What was this, state the obvious time?

“Love’s a fickle thing, Alice.”

Shut up!

“I can understand why you would have fallen for him.”

Shut up. Shut up. SHUT UP!

“But really, when you look at it objectively, what you imagined you felt for Rufus was nothing more than a teenage crush. You’ll soon get over it. Just remind yourself that a childhood without a crush wouldn’t be a childhood.”

“Could you not talk about it, please?” Alice said hoarsely.

“It’s easy to get confused when our emotions are involved,” Julia said as if Alice hadn’t spoken. “We all make mistakes.”

Yes, thought Alice. My father definitely did when he married you.

“We all do things we regret.”

Yeah, tell me about it.

“Things have recently become very difficult between your father and me. He’s not an easy man to live with.”

Alice opened her eyes and turned to regard her stepmother. “I don’t think he’s at all difficult.”

Julia shot her a sideways look. “How do you put up with him?”

“There’s nothing to put up with. He’s my father.”

Again as if Alice hadn’t spoken, she said, “God knows I’ve tried, but I just don’t seem to be able to make him…” Julia’s voice faded away and she started to cry.

Oh great, thought Alice. Just what she needed; a feeble, weepy Julia. “If you’re going to cry perhaps it would be safer if we pulled over,” she said wearily.

They pulled over into a layby. Cars and lorries thundered by, shaking the Range Rover Dad had bought Julia last year. “I thought you’d be able to help me,” Julia sniffled, her pale face spotted with ugly red blotches. “Bruce never loses his temper with you.”

“That’s because I don’t annoy him.”