Sofka Zinovieff - Putney

In the arid wastelands of mid-afternoon, when Jelly was back, sewing was out of the question, and she was jittery from the dullness. An email arrived from Jane containing a link to the BBC website with a brief statement saying that the composer Ralph Boyd had been arrested on charges of historical child abuse in the 1970s. Daphne had already told Jelly, but hadn’t mentioned any details.

‘Wow!’ said Jelly, when Daphne couldn’t resist showing her. ‘He’s famous, isn’t he?’ Now that this was in the news and Daphne’s rapist was worthy of media attention, a macabre glamour attached itself to the ensuing scandal. ‘So… the shit hits the fan.’

Daphne didn’t reply. It struck her that maybe this was an opportunity.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Actually, not that great.’ She tried to strike the right balance between plucky courage and the need for compassionate leave.

‘Want to go home early?’

‘Would that be OK?’ She knew she must receive this little bonus with gratitude.

That night, she was so tightly wound she couldn’t sleep. After Libby went to bed she spent hours cutting up fragments of fabric. When that got tiring, she stretched out on Connie’s frayed sofa with its landslide of material creating a colourful nest. At about 3.30 a.m. she jumped up and pulled down Putney from its dominating position covering a whole wall. What had been an act of homage to a riverside utopia in the 1970s had become a perverse endorsement of the way Ralph came along and shat all over them. Recalling how she’d carefully sewed sweet little figurines of Ralph and herself in affectionate poses was so alarming that she wanted to stamp on it, spit at it, burn it, or fling it into the river. Or perhaps she should stick spikes and pins through the male figures. Then she stopped, afraid of her ferocity and, at some level, protective of her work. Perhaps Vivien would have a suggestion at their next session.

She bundled Putney up in a black rubbish sack and tossed it to the back of the hall cupboard, the same place where she’d kept a bag with childhood diaries, letters and the carefully-retained objects that stood as physical markers of her youth and of Ralph’s role in it. In order to assist Gareth, she had placed yellow stickers in the notebooks to indicate where crimes were chronicled. Several pressed petals had fallen out like evidence of guilty secrets.

She felt so bad in the morning that she rang Jelly and said she was ill. ‘Must’ve caught a gastro thing,’ she lied. ‘Running to the loo all night.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Jelly, evidently enjoying her magnanimity. ‘Rest up and keep me posted.’ In any case, late September was always a quiet time at Hell. Few were planning a trip to Greece and the Greeks themselves were drawing breath after the great summer onslaught.

‘Thanks, darl. You’re my guardian angel. Promise I’ll be back tomorrow.’

After Libby went to school, Daphne dozed fitfully for a couple of hours. She did feel unwell, as if she was bruised and damaged, as if her muscles and internal organs had been hurt. My body has been holding on to this pain since then, she thought. It’s part of my fibre. Those experiences created me. And I continued the abuse on myself. I cut my skin, starved myself and filled my mind with chemical dreams. And worst of all, I blamed myself for everything.

When she woke, there was an email from Jane with an online article from the Daily Mail . ‘Successful “wild child” composer Ralph Boyd arrested for preying on underage girl.’ There were several photographs, including one where Ralph stood grinning, surrounded by a large group of children from his Youth Music Festival in Hackney. Some had their arms around him. A picture from the ’70s showed him as a young man holding an African lute. Grainy, faded colours, unkempt hair, a sheepskin jerkin and ludicrous bellbottoms conspired to create a mood of creepiness. Apparently, he had been released on bail.

When her father rang, her first thought was that he’d heard the news, but he was merely confirming that he and Margaret had arrived the previous evening and were now ensconced in a friend’s empty mews house in Holland Park. They’d be there for the next couple of weeks, with various celebrations planned around his eightieth birthday. There was to be a dinner at the Garrick Club, just like his seventieth. ‘Feels like it was last year. I can’t believe it’s been a decade,’ he mused. He told her which family and friends he’d invited: ‘Those that haven’t died.’ His sadness was undercut by the burgeoning pride of someone who had made it this far. ‘They’re dropping like flies.’ Theo was flying over from Boston specially, he said. His first trip back to Blighty for several years.

‘With chilly Lindsay?’ she asked, and his wicked, falsetto cackle confirmed the eternal pleasure of blood-based collusion against an incomer.

‘She’s just mistrustful,’ he said. ‘The beady-eyed disapproval of a broody hen. Don’t know what she’s scared of.’

‘Us, probably.’ They both laughed.

The more they spoke the more Daphne was daunted by the prospect of telling him about Ralph. She didn’t have the words to inform her father that his old friend was a paedophile and, even worse perhaps, that she had denounced him to the police. She had already tried versions in her head, but she couldn’t get them out. Even before he rang it was like the dreaded brown envelope that lies about unopened. The longer you leave it, the worse the consequences. So you keep it closed, holding its unpleasantness out of sight. She’d had her share of those envelopes in the past, when ignoring bills was often the only possible approach. Once, she avoided her rent demands for so long that bailiffs showed up; two big men with fighting-dog faces, who removed her pathetically meagre possessions and left her holding a couple of plastic bags on the pavement outside her studio flat near Ladbroke Grove. In hindsight, that was probably the famous rock bottom from which she could only go up.

‘So, we’ll bring the wine,’ said Ed. ‘Margaret’s very proud of her little vineyard. Actually, it’s an excellent Merlot.’

‘Perfect. And so you know, I’m not going to cook. There’s a small Turkish place near here with delicious food, so I’ll order from them.’

‘Much better,’ said Ed with tactless relief.

‘Oh life’s too short to go stuffing tomatoes and whipping up sauces.’ She pictured her mother nonchalantly throwing together vast pies filled with spinach and feta, while entertaining friends, drinking wine, bringing up children and plotting against dictatorships.

‘Too true. So long as someone else will.’ He laughed. Apart from the brief wilderness immediately after Ellie’s death, there’d always been someone else doing all that for him.

She understood that holing up in the Dordogne with Margaret had been her father’s method of running away from his wife’s death, but it still provoked a childish sense of abandonment. Without Ellie, the house at Barnabas Road quickly became a dried husk, emptied of the vitality that made it a home. Even the building reflected their psychological state, as cracks appeared across walls and there was talk of subsidence and dry rot. Daphne hadn’t been willing or able to take on the role of housekeeper to Ed, and when he flung himself back into writing, she slithered down the silver-lined rabbit run of mind-altering substances. After her Athenian marriage was over and she returned to London, there was nobody to care for her – a phantom from the underworld. Ed occasionally wrote a well-phrased letter in his elegantly flowing script and, very rarely, they spoke on the phone, but in those days before emails, mobiles and Skype, the cut was sharp and the scar was still tender.