Rosie Thomas - A Simple Life

‘Where is she?’ Ed growled. The creases in his face were no longer genial.

Sandra picked up an intercom and pressed a button.

‘Milly? Brunch is ready, darling.’ She replaced the handset. ‘She’s coming,’ she said.

The six of them were standing behind their chairs, as if waiting to say grace.

A door slammed shut on another level. A moment later a girl appeared framed in one of the upper windows and stared down at them. There was a silence, and then an awkward clatter as they all pulled back their chairs and hurried to sit down. The girl was coming slowly down the stairs.

There was nothing pink or wobbly or plump about Camilla Parkes. Nothing so familiar or explicable.

She was thin and dark and her small pointy face was dead white. Her lustreless hair was matted and spiked and knotted into dreadlocks that hung around her cheeks and down her thin neck. Her eyes were painted with thick black lines and her mouth was outlined in vicious crayon. Her clothes were layers of shredded knits and torn and faded black drapes, and her spindly legs were thickened by black woollen tights with holes at the knees. On her feet she wore huge Doc Marten boots with steel toecaps. Her right nostril was pierced with two small silver rings.

Camilla did not look at any of them, or at Sandra’s scrambled eggs and smoked salmon and bagels and the baskets artfully heaped with raisin breads and croissants. She went to the fridge and took out a small dish covered in clingfilm, tore off the film and screwed it into a ball and aimed it towards the sink. Then she sat down at the far end of the table and began to eat, spooning up a gluey mixture of rice and beans without lifting her eyes from the dish.

‘Camilla is a vegan,’ Sandra explained. ‘Milly, please say hello to Professor and Mrs Steward.’

She raised her head briefly. Her eyes were full of anger.

‘And this is Jack, and Merlin. Some company for you.’

Milly didn’t favour the boys with so much as a glance.

‘Where do you go to school?’ Jack asked, refusing to be intimidated into silence.

‘Milly doesn’t go to school right now. A teaching assistant from UMass comes here to tutor her.’

Milly put down her spoon. There were dirty silver rings on every finger of both hands and her nails were painted black. She turned her burning stare on her mother.

‘Why do you answer everything for me, as though I’m a moron? Why do you think I can’t speak for myself?’

Her voice was pure glottal North London.

‘If you can speak, why don’t you?’ It was Ed who asked, with surprising forbearance. There was a flush of colour mottling Sandra’s lovely face.

Dinah had been watching Milly with terrible fascination, half-greedy and half-apprehensive. But as soon as the child opened her mouth familiarity embraced her and Dinah smiled, without thinking.

‘You make me remember London. It’s like hearing a piece of home.’

Oh, what a crappy thing to say , she reproached herself immediately the words were out.

But Milly only shifted her gaze in her direction.

‘Where you from?’

‘London.’

‘Yeah. London’s okay.’

‘Did you go to school there?’

‘Camden. Only I got expelled.’

Dinah and Milly looked at each other. In the child’s face, as she made her boast, Dinah read the habits of defiance and aggression, and also saw from the soft and uncontrollable pout of her lower lip that she was vulnerable, and deeply unhappy. Milly was very young, however hard she might try to pretend otherwise.

‘Tough,’ Dinah said.

But she was already becoming aware that Milly and her assumed disguise – fourteen-year-old part-punk, part-Goth and part-Dickens street-urchin – called on some hungry instinct ineffectively buried within herself. She was drawn to the child, and she also felt a cold stirring of fear brought on by the intensity of these feelings.

Merlin put down his bagel. ‘Ben Burnham was expelled from my old school. He used the phone in the secretary’s office to call the Fire Brigade. He told them the science room was on fire, and two fire engines came with ladders and hoses and about twenty firemen.’

The adults laughed and Jack sighed, but Milly gave no indication that she had heard the story. She ate the last grains of rice from her bowl and then left the table as silently as she had come. The tails of her wraps flapped behind her as she mounted the stairs and disappeared the way she had come.

‘Do you see what I mean?’ Sandra murmured to Dinah. ‘Somehow it’s easier just to let her …’

Ed shrugged and ran his fingers through his hair until it stood up in a rakish crest on top of his big round head.

‘They’re parents as well, honey. You wait, you guys,’ he warned Dinah and Matthew. ‘They get past twelve years old and all bloody hell breaks out.’

‘I’m nearly eleven …’ Jack said meaningfully.

The adults laughed again and the boys were given permission to go back to the pool table. Coffee was poured and the baskets of croissants passed round, and the mellow Sunday morning talk was resumed. From time to time Dinah found herself glancing upwards to the frame where Milly had first appeared in the half-apprehensive hope that she might materialise again. But she did not, and there was no sound or movement to indicate that she was even in the house.

After the meal Ed proposed a walk. He wanted to show the Stewards the full extent of the property, and some thinning and replanting that was under way in his woodland. Ed liked to be physically involved in the work. He emerged for the expedition in a lumberjack’s coat and boots with a bow-saw slung over one shoulder. Sandra had already announced that she was not much of a walker, and would stay behind to have a nap.

Ed was leading the way through his woodland garden when an outer door slammed in the house. They all turned. Milly had put on a man’s long tweed coat over her ragbag clothes. The afternoon was mild but she was wearing gloves with the fingers roughly sawn off and a shapeless knitted hat. The Dickens urchin effect was complete.

‘Great,’ Ed called to her. ‘Glad you’re coming. Which way shall we go, Deer Path or along the ski trail?’

‘ I dunno,’ Milly shrugged. The route was of no interest to her. She stood pointedly waiting until her father and Matt and the boys moved on again. She was not quite looking at Dinah, but almost. Dinah resisted the urge to turn and look at whatever it might be in the air six inches to the left of her own head. Ed’s voice faded in the distance. He was explaining something about cross-country skiing. The boys were running, chasing each other, their feet in the years’ depths of dead leaves sounding like waves breaking.

‘Shall we follow them?’ Dinah asked.

‘We’ll have to, I suppose. I don’t know the way, otherwise.’

The lack of familiarity with her own home ground was deliberate, Dinah thought. Milly didn’t want to know this place.

They began to walk, not quite side by side, along a wide path through the trees. The air was still scented with resin and leaf-mould. Dinah imagined how if she were to be lifted up over the treetops she would see the undulating woodland stretching in every direction. She had seen a pattern of leaves, a carpet in chemical approximations of these colours, somewhere, a long way …

No.

She asked Milly, not waiting to consider her words, ‘You live in London for part of the year, is that right?’

‘Yeah.’

I won’t make her talk if she doesn’t want to. She may just want to walk, not necessarily with me. I’m glad she came out . The thoughts skittered through Dinah’s head. She wanted Milly to continue beside her, not to frighten her off.