What Have I Done? (9 page)

‘It’s the same colour as a rainbow, Mummy!’ her daughter had squealed.

‘Yes it is. That’s because it’s magic, Lyds.’

‘What’s it made of?’

‘Tiny pink shells are made from mermaids’ fingernails.’

Kate dug her toes into the sand and nursed the cool beer between her hands; she could hear the shouts from an impromptu ball game on the adjoining beach and the repeated thwack of a ball against a bat. The sounds of the children shouting and laughing with careless abandon took her mind back to that holiday when Dominic and Lydia had been small.

They had gone to Padstow for a long weekend, and to outsiders it must have looked like an idyllic summer break. The young family wandered the rock pools by day, caught tiny crabs in brightly coloured buckets, wolfed down fish and chips on the sea wall and ate every other meal al fresco. As the sun set and the temperature dipped, the children were tucked into miniature beds, exhausted by their seaside adventures.

By day, they made the beach their playground, lying on the sand, digging a hole, and making repeated trips to the shoreline to retrieve unwieldy buckets of freezing sea water that would be soaked up as soon as they were tipped in. Despite the futility, trying to fill their hole with water kept the kids occupied for hours. Their tiny feet pounded the mud-like sand back and forth, leaving smudged footprints that would be sucked back into the beach, disappearing in minutes.

It was only anyone close enough to hear who would have caught the unpalatable topic of conversation. As the family sat on the tartan blanket and shared sandwiches, Mark decided to open a debate with his baby children.

‘So, Dominic, who do you love the most, Mummy or Daddy?’

The three others had looked on as his little face had crumpled in contemplation.

‘Both the same!’ the little boy declared as Lydia clapped her hands at this happy resolution.

If only it had ended there. Mark, however, was far from satisfied.

‘No, Dominic.’ His voice was firmer this time. ‘You can’t say both the same; you have to love one of us more than the other, you have to love one of us the best. Is it Daddy? Do you love Daddy the best?’

Dominic had wrinkled his nose and looked from his mum to his dad and back again. His mummy was looking down at the ground and didn’t seem to be joining in. This made his decision easier; he could give the answer that he knew his dad wanted to hear.

‘You, Daddy. I love you the best.’

Mark was elated, jubilant; Dominic’s reward was a tight hug in his daddy’s arms.

‘That’s right, my clever boy! You love your daddy the best because your daddy loves you the best!’

This alerted Lydia, who even at a young age did not miss a nuance.

‘Who loves Lydia the best?’ she enquired.

Mark gathered her to him and kissed her face. ‘I do, Lyds. Your daddy, I love you the best!’

‘And who loves Mummy the best?’ Lydia was not finished trying to analyse and understand the situation in which she found herself.

Mark looked her directly in the eyes. ‘No one can love Mummy the best, Lydia, because she is a miserable, skinny cow. She wants to spoil all of our fun and make us all feel miserable with her miserable face and her miserable voice and we don’t want that, do we, Lyds? We want to have fun! Do we want to be miserable?’

‘No!’ Of that and nothing else Lydia was sure; we didn’t want that at all.

Kathryn had cried as she propped her head on her raised knees, keeping her face forward and looking out to sea so as not to alarm her children.

That night as the children slept soundly in their nautical-themed nursery, with anchors painted on the floor and billowing sails on the walls, Kathryn prepared to climb the stairs and meet her fate. She hesitated before drawing together all her courage. Reaching out, she touched her husband’s arm.

‘Mark?’

‘Yes, Kathryn?’

‘I want to ask you something.’

‘Ask away!’

He said this with such joviality that for a second she wondered if she had imagined the whole horrid exchange. Such was his ebullience that if anyone overheard, it would be her that sounded unreasonable, with her formal tone and nervous, hesitant air. A miserable cow.

‘I would like to ask you, Mark…’

‘Yes?’ He gave a slight nod, encouraging her to speak out.

‘I… I would like to ask you not to turn the children against me.’

He didn’t respond and it was this silence that she mistook for acquiescence. It gave her a small jolt of courage, enough to continue.

‘I put up with a lot, Mark, and I don’t care what you do to me, but I beg you, please, please do not be mean to me in front of the children because they are everything to me and it’s not fair on them or me. They are all that I have and it’s the one thing I can’t cope with, I really can’t.’

He moved quickly and without warning, striking her hard across the mouth with the back of his hand. It was the first time that he had properly struck her. Her mouth filled with the
iron-tasting liquid that she recognised as her own blood and her lip felt enormous against her teeth as it swelled in response to its lashing. A round splat of scarlet stained the pristine floor.

Mark bent to where she had fallen at the bottom of the white-painted stairs with their thick, rope banister. He stroked her hair tenderly, removing the stray tendrils of her fringe that had stuck to the blood which oozed from her split lip. He shook his head gently from side to side as though placating a clumsy child who had hurt themselves by accident.

‘I am very pleased that you don’t care what I do to you and with that in mind you have got yourself a deal, missy.’

He reached out and gently took her hand before leading her along the narrow cottage corridor to their holiday room. Kathryn sat on the edge of the bed and slowly unbuttoned her shirt with trembling fingers. Shock rendered her numb.

Mark removed his socks from his feet and with almost choreographed precision he stepped forward and stuffed one of them into her mouth. She gagged, fighting to control the automatic reflex, knowing that if she were sick, she would surely choke.

He laid her face down on the mattress and whispered into her ear through gritted teeth. ‘You are a very, very bad girl and you have amassed eleven points for offences too numerous for me to recount. But considering that you don’t care what I do to you, this is all well and good, isn’t it?’

He proceeded to punish her. Within seconds it was evident that he needn’t have bothered with the gag; she wasn’t going to scream or make a noise. She lost consciousness almost immediately.

When she awoke in the early hours of the morning, he had removed the sock from her mouth and for this she was grateful. Her lips were dry, her throat sore and parched. She stretched
her hand out towards the glass of water that sat a fingertip’s reach away.

‘Would you like a drink, Kathryn?’

She nodded that yes, she would like a drink.

‘I bet you would. But no. No drinks for you, my darling, not this morning.’

She tried to swallow, her tongue swollen, her spit thick with thirst, her throat raw from being suffocated and her lips swollen and encrusted with blood. She rolled onto her side and cried into her pillow, trying not to think about the pain in her thighs, not wanting to look at how he had damaged her this time.

Kate shook her head, trying to erase the image of that particular weekend. Every vaguely happy memory or event that she associated with her children was tempered by the dark shadow of her husband’s abuse. It was as if she were an actress in a play: whilst on the stage, lots of wonderful and exciting things would happen to bring her joy, but she couldn’t stay on the stage forever and as soon as she hit the wings, Pow!, dreadful things would befall her, things that she had no hope of avoiding, ever. All she could do, day after day, was face the audience and grin, trying to hide her misery whilst secretly hoping that one of them might see through her smile and rescue her.

Kate looked at the grinning child in front of her and pictured her own little girl placing the magic gift of a mermaid’s fingernail inside her pocket to keep it safe. She blinked and swallowed the tears that threatened to spill.

‘Thank you so much. Is this for me?’

The little girl gave a small nod.

‘Well, this is certainly the best present that I have been given in a very long time. I shall treasure it!’

‘There you are, Matilda!’

Kate looked up in the direction of the voice. The man strode towards them; he was tall and broad with braided hair hanging uniformly to the nape of his neck. His black skin gleamed under the sun, giving definition to each muscle; he was beautiful. He strode through the sea, which washed over his bare feet and soaked the bottom of his cargo pants. He was no stranger to beach life.

‘Ah! I see she has made a friend!’

He smiled at Kate, revealing dazzling, perfect white teeth. Kate could see where Matilda got her smile from.

‘She’s fabulous.’

‘Yes she is.’ With his hands on his hips, he nodded in agreement.

‘And she brought me a present; some treasure, no less.’ Kate opened her palm to reveal her gift.

‘Treasure indeed!’ His eyes twinkled.

‘I shall keep it forever; it will always remind me of here.’ She meant it.

‘That’s good. You are obviously a person that recognises real treasure when you see it. Where you from?’

‘The UK. Just here on holiday, three weeks of escape.’ She laughed, aware that she sounded slightly giggly.

‘What are you trying to escape from?’ He looked at her earnestly.

‘Oh, I don’t know really.’

Kate chewed her bottom lip. Her tears threatened to fall despite her best efforts to control her emotions. The memories of her kids on the beach were so strong, it was agonising. She missed them so badly that it had become a physical ache and now that someone was being nice to her, it made it all the more unbearable somehow.

‘I’m so sorry. Seeing you here with your daughter… I haven’t
seen my own daughter or my son in quite some while and it’s the little things that remind me.’

He slumped down next to her on the sand.

‘I’m sorry to hear that. Matilda isn’t my daughter, but I do get to look after her and twenty-five like her.’

He stretched out his hand. ‘I run the youth mission up at Dennery. My name is Simon.’

Kate shook his hand.

‘It’s lovely to meet you, Simon. I’m Kate Gavier, just Kate.’

She sniffed the creep of tears back to their source.

‘Wow! Twenty-six kids? That takes some doing! Is it like day-care, a nursery?’

Simon smiled. ‘It’s a bit more than that. Day and night care, three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. It’s their home.’

‘Are they all little like Matilda?’ Kate was fascinated, picturing rows and rows of cots and cribs.

‘Well they were once! But, no, a mixture of ages; sometimes they come to us as newborns, but more often it’s when they get a little older, when things get too tough for Mum or Dad, various circumstances. We get teenagers too, in need of guidance and a place to stay.’

‘I think the mission sounds amazing.’

Simon nodded, quietly. Kate felt her cheeks blush, aware that she could have easily substituted ‘you’ for ‘the mission’. It disconcerted her that there were calm, good men like Simon, with such capacity for kindness, whether to a child in need or a stranger on a beach, and yet men like Mark also had a place in the world, men who were the exact opposite.

‘Your accent is hard to place, where is it from?’

Simon laughed, a low, deep chortle. This obviously wasn’t the first time he had been asked that.

‘Ah, therein lays a tale. I shall give you the twenty-second
version; are you sitting comfortably?’

Kate nodded.

‘I was born in south London, Battersea to be precise, illegitimate, mixed race and in those days, this did
not
bode well. I was put up for adoption as soon as I was born and someone was smiling down on me! I was adopted by a Canadian couple who were living in the UK at the time. We then lived in Canada from when I was eight until my thirties, until I was called home. My birth father is St Lucian and here I have been ever since.’

‘That’s quite a twenty-second tale!’ Kate smiled, thinking that her own could match it in terms of intrigue and adventure. ‘“Called home”, that’s a nice phrase. Nice to be needed.’

‘Oh yes, and needed I was, although I didn’t know quite what my purpose was when I first arrived.’

Kate found his slow speech and warm tone quite hypnotic.

‘Did you come back because of your father?’

Simon laughed again loudly and open-mouthed. ‘Yes, yes I did, Kate. That is exactly why I came home – because of my Father, but not in the sense that I am sure you intend it. I was called here by God. You can call me Simon, but on the island I am known mostly as Reverend Dubois.’

‘Jesus!’

‘Exactly. Amen.’

‘No, I mean, I would never have guessed. You don’t look like a man of God!’

His ready laugh again boomed into the surf.

‘I see. And what are we supposed to look like?’

‘I don’t know really.’

Kate pictured the bald, sober chaplain at Mountbriers and the ancient decrepit vicar of her youth with his faint aroma of formaldehyde, his hand shaking against her mother’s best china teacup and the spit gathered at the corner of his mouth. He
had elivered each word, sermon or not, as if he was bestowing the gift of insight. Whether the phrase being uttered was, ‘
Yes, Mrs Gavier, I would indeed like another biscuit,
’ or ‘
You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and all the powers of hell will not conquer it,
’ his voice and tone had been unchanging.

Kate considered her response. ‘In my experience, you tend to be quieter, contemplative, not wearing beautiful beads or walking barefoot on the beach.’

‘We do things a little differently on this island.’

‘I can see that!’

Matilda teetered backwards and came to a stop, plonking herself bottom first into the sea. She wailed. The temperature was a little cooler than her pioneering toe-dipping had suggested.