Crystal Jeans - The Inverts

‘Oh, I can make it easier for you.’ Bettina laughed, shaking her head, and stabbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. ‘I’ll make it very easy for you. Remember that French chap who was staying with us for a while? The one you thought was a footman? Tell me, Mother – why do you think he was staying with us?’

‘I can’t remember.’

Bettina smiled – she was enjoying this. ‘He was a friend of Bart’s.’ She spoke the next bit very slowly, savouring each word. ‘He was more than a friend of Bart’s.’ She sank back in her chair and lit a fresh cigarette.

‘Are you saying… is he a—’

‘Yep.’

‘No.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes.’

‘Are you honestly saying—’

‘Mother. This should not come as some great revelation. Father knew. He might not have voiced it, but he knew.’

Venetia swatted the air. ‘Monty thought everyone was hiding some deep, dark secret.’

‘Well, most of us are.’

Venetia was frowning, one ruby-ringed hand clasping her cheek. ‘God’s honest truth?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you knew this when you married him?’

‘Naturally.’

Venetia stared at her daughter – it was comic, it was lampoonish, the way she was staring at her – like she was rehearsing for a play and the director had just told her to perform shock-horror. ‘What the hell is this world coming to?’

Bettina shrugged. ‘Hitler’s going to destroy it all soon, so might as well let the perverts have their fun, eh?’

On the third night, Ivy and Bettina had an argument – one that appeared trivial on the surface but underneath was crawling with… well, with… it was like picking up a large flat pebble on a beach and turning it over to look at its murky, sea-darkened belly to find a fossil, its curlicue gaps crawling with sea scabs and the crushed bones of baby crabs – this dark history, this ever-pervasive—

Bettina was drunk. She’d been walking on the beach for three hours. The argument had been about Bart. Ivy, like Étienne, was adept at playing devil’s advocate, and was constantly forcing Bettina to consider the feelings of others, which was noble, she supposed, but also exasperating. ‘It sounds to me like you’ve both been equally horrid to each other.’ That’s what she’d said. ‘It sounds to me,’ replied Bettina, ‘that though Dilys was indeed exploitative and manipulative, you were clingy and overbearing.’ Dilys was Ivy’s old best friend, the one she’d fallen in love with. ‘Therefore, you were perhaps as horrid as each other.’ There. See how she liked it.

She returned from the beach and went straight to Ivy’s room, and they both apologised at the same time. They kissed and were soon naked, and they went at each other savagely, deliriously, all niceties gone. Neither would ever forget it – and neither would forget what came after. Because as they were lying together, slick with sweat and lined with scratch-marks and slap-prints, the door was flung open and there stood Henry, holding a bundle of clean bedding.

‘Oh, I thought you’d left this afternoon,’ he said, unperturbed, as if he’d walked in on them brushing each other’s hair. ‘Sorry, my mistake.’ And he gently closed the door.

The clouds were two-tiered, with bright silvery ones on the bottom and dark ones the shade of dry coal at the top. The air had that static feel to it that went right up the nose and always reminded Bettina – for some reason – of woollen cardigan sleeves. She and Ivy tiptoed through the morning, neither speaking. At eleven o’clock, the rain came – torrential and absolute.

Henry busied himself in his usual languid way, polishing silverware at the kitchen table while humming ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’. Giving out nothing. Lucille came in soaking wet (she had been caught in the downpour while bringing in the tea towels from the line), daring Venetia to just try laughing, just bloody try it, a gritty black droplet of mascara hanging off the end of her chin, and then Bart came in, also wet, with a sodden newspaper over his head. Bettina and Ivy went back upstairs.

‘What’s the worst he could do?’ asked Ivy, up in her room. ‘Everyone already knows.’

‘Yes, but it’ll be unpleasant all the same if he chooses to talk. Messy.’

Ivy closed her window and the rain became a dull roar.

‘How would he profit from spilling?’

‘He doesn’t like me. He’s never liked me.’

But Henry did nothing and said nothing that day.

Ivy had started her monthlies in the night and wanted to stay in bed – she was prey to cramps, often paired with a migraine, and sometimes it got so bad that she found it impossible to do anything but lie down with the curtains drawn. Bettina decided to go for a walk in the woods and perhaps take a look at Wadley House. She put on her boots in the kitchen. Her mother was leaning against the counter, smoking a cigarette, the sleeves of her housedress rolled up to the elbows.

‘Careful where you head off to,’ she said. ‘There’s been lots of doomy whispering in the village. They think we’re due a bit of trouble.’ She shrugged. ‘Probably nothing.’

‘I’m always careful,’ said Bettina.

The sun was out, the grass, still sodden, full of bright-white glitter. The songbirds twittered and chirped hesitantly, as if distrustful of the sudden lull in the weather.

The woods covered a dozen or so acres and ran parallel to the beach. The path from Longworth House was wild and rarely used. Somewhere along it there was another path, branching right, which led to Wadley House. The family who’d taken it over all those years ago were supposedly a ghastly lot who squabbled pettily with the surrounding households and had once shot the McCarthys’ family dog because it had encroached their boundaries by a mere ten feet.

Bettina hopped over the small rubble wall, crossed the lane (there were indeed lots of lipstick-stained cigarette butts) and entered the wood through a gap in the trees. Her father had loved the woods, taking her and Jonathan for long strolls on dry Sundays. He’d crouch down to show them patches of mushrooms, saying which were safe to eat and which weren’t. He’d grown up poor, he reminded her, and used to pick mushrooms and wild garlic for his mother, who’d then bake them into delicious pies, sometimes with meat, usually without.

The path was boggy and slippery but clear of obstruction. How marvellous it was that she could hop this way and that, her feet sure and light, without falling into a gasping fat sweat. And how much easier to do it in trousers. She came to a large silvery birch – the marker. Just after it was the right turn which led to the other path. The way the tree branched, it’d always reminded her of an upside-down naked woman – there was the little pouch of her belly and the meeting place between the thighs, overgrown with moss. She and Bart had had plenty to say about that. She turned onto the side path, lighting a cigarette. Hadn’t they had a name for that tree, she and Bart? Lady… something.

A crunch close by – a branch being stepped on. She looked behind her, cigarette gripped between her lips, its smoke curling into her eye. She went to take it out but the paper had glued itself to her bottom lip and her fingers slid along its length all the way to the glowing tip, and she gasped, taking in an unsolicited throatful of smoke. Coughing, she snatched the cigarette from her lip and clutched her burned finger.

‘Only fools smoke,’ came a voice.

Next to his corned beef sandwich was a bowl of dried prunes; since Bettina’s arrival he’d been constipated. His stomach felt hard and bloated and whenever he farted it smelled like faecal matter. Because, very simply, it was having to pass through tiny gaps in a shit-logged canal. He put a prune in his mouth and chewed it slowly.