A Love Story for Bewildered Girls Read online

  Emma Morgan

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  A LOVE STORY FOR BEWILDERED GIRLS

  Contents

  A Love Story for Bewildered Girls

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  ‘Regret is like a carpet stain – scrubbing at it is not going to help.’

  – Great Aunt Beatrice

  This is Grace Marshall Eppington

  Grace liked her earrings. That was the first thing she noticed about the woman: the long silver earrings that grazed her neck as she turned her head. Grace was attracted to earrings like magpies are attracted to shiny things, which could be blamed on the few nice memories that she had of her mother, a ballet dancer who always wore pairs that swayed from side to side as she walked, as though she was a Bedouin woman wearing her dowry in her ears as she rode atop a camel across the desert.

  ‘I like your earrings,’ Grace said, and would have put her hand up to touch one except that she was holding her nearly empty wineglass between both hands as a shield against the man next to her, who was trying to discuss drains.

  ‘Thanks,’ the woman said as she flicked her eyes over Grace and turned away. Her long neck. Her sixties blond pixie cut like Mia Farrow. Her earrings swaying. The woman presented her back to Grace and Grace wanted to lean forward and kiss the mole on the nape of her neck. But she didn’t believe that would be appropriate with someone whom you had just set eyes on for the first time. Grace believed that would be classed as really quite strange.

  Was Grace really quite strange? Was she the sort of person who normally kissed strangers on the backs of their necks? No, she considered herself quite ordinary, with the oval face and dark eyes of an early photo of a sensible Edwardian lady, a bluestocking given to bicycling, plain wholesome food, and improving lectures. Her short mousy hair had been badly cut and then buzzed at the back by her sister Eustacia with blunted clippers and she had a permanent stoop from years of being over-conscious of her five-foot-ten lankiness, but she was not bothered about being Jane Eyre plain at all, although it seemed that the woman with the earrings obviously was. Grace stood looking at the woman’s back in a black top tight enough to show that she was not wearing a bra, and tears came into Grace’s eyes as though she had stubbed her toe.

  Grace had, up to that point, been enjoying herself; she was slightly drunk, in the early phase when you felt voluble and cheery, the phase before you started either crying, fighting, or snogging unsuitable people in the cupboard under the stairs, and she had been talking to a group of friends before the drain man had trapped her in a corner. She could see one of them, Andy, whom she had been having a good discussion with about whether Juliet Binoche or Nicole Kidman was the more talented, signalling across the room now to ask her if she needed another drink. She liked parties, although, as a child, she hadn’t gone to a lot of them; her family was a hermetic world that never invited outsiders in apart from the bin men and the postman at Christmas for sherry. And, of course, the hunt sometimes met at the bottom of the drive but that didn’t count, surely. Beforehand she had combed her hair and tried not to spit toothpaste down the T-shirt she had put on that if seen in a bad enough light would appear to have been ironed. She was wearing clean jeans. What more could she do? She straightened her eyebrows carefully with the tips of her fingers and spit. That was the reactive effect on personal grooming that growing up with three sisters had had on her.

  ‘Yes,’ said the drain man, whose name she had forgotten, ‘it’s the pigeons that keep dying on the roof that block the drainpipe,’ and Grace tried to reabsorb her tears by sniffing and then, when this didn’t work, wiped her eyes quickly on the back of her sleeve. She turned so that the woman disappeared from her sightline completely. Her friend Dolores, the party’s hostess, tapped her on the shoulder. Dolores was under five foot, her bosom upholstered to sofa-like proportions with ‘patting’. She wore American tan tights all year round and her navy handbags always matched her shoes. ‘Classical, my style is classical, like Margaret Thatcher.’ She’d ended up in England because she’d married a Yorkshireman she’d met when she worked as a blackjack dealer at a casino in Alicante. ‘Nicky, he was so handsome, but he was bad, bad, bad. Like the devil. He went with the girl from the Four Crowns. The barmaid. She had big tits and who knows about her vagina,’ and she had mimed this on their very first meeting, when Grace had moved in down the street four years ago. Dolores liked to regale her with intimate details about her sex life that Grace didn’t want to know, and had, on more than one occasion, shown Grace her appendix scar. She also enjoyed forcing large quantities of Spanish foodstuffs on Grace to take home with her, as a result of which Grace had a chorizo habit.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ said Grace.

  ‘No! No! Don’t go! It’s so early. There is a very nice girl over there in the corner. You need sex, I know you do, or you will dry up like an old sponge.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ said Grace.

  ‘I will fetch her,’ said Dolores.

  ‘Please don’t,’ said Grace, but Dolores had already gone.

  As the drain man reached past her to get a bottle off the nearby table, Grace slipped out of the hot room while her other friends’ backs were turned, avoiding Dolores, who was trying to drag a woman across the room towards her. In the street she gulped for fresh air and went six doors down to her own house. She ran upstairs to the bathroom and, bending over the sink, turned on the cold tap hard enough so that when she bent towards it water sprayed on to the floor. As she doused herself she realized that she didn’t even know the woman with the long earrings’ name. She stood up straight and looked in the mirror, water dripping down her face and on to her T-shirt. Oh, she thought, and watched her mouth form the sound, oh.

  Her sister Eustacia was right when she said that one day it would hit Grace like a tonne of bricks.

  ‘You’ll just know,’ she told her.

  ‘How?’ asked Grace.

  ‘When you know you know,’ said Eustacia, putting her arm around her, and Grace thought that her sister must be having a funny turn.

  ‘How long did it take you?’ Grace asked her sister Tess.

  ‘About ten minutes. Give or take.’

  ‘And you, Bella?’ she said to her other sister Arabella.

  ‘What?’

  ‘To fall in love with Ray. Did you know immediately?’

  ‘Oh God no! When I had sex with him for the first time I found he was covered with a layer of hair like a gorilla.’

  ‘But you married him!’

  ‘I gave him an ultimatum. Monthly waxing or no more shagging.’

  ‘And he agreed?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he?’

  ‘But I still don’t get it, how will I know?’ said Grace with frustration.

  ‘You won’t have a choice,’ said Tess.

  ‘That’s an addiction,’ Grace said. ‘Or a compulsion. Neither of which are good.’

  ‘One day it will just happen,’ said Eustacia. ‘It’ll be so quick you won’t have time to think about it.’

  ‘Not unlike losing your virginity,’ said Bella.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Grace, with a degree of sarcasm that was not lost on her sisters.

  Tess put her arm around Grace from the other side to Eustacia and Grace felt squished.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, sweetheart,’ she said, ‘it won’t be painful, it’ll be easy.’

  ‘Quite unlike …’ said Bella.

  ‘How would I know?’ said Grace.

  ‘Fair point,’ said Bella.

  Grace was thirty-two and so had been waiting for love for a long time while pretending not to wait at all. At convent school she had been used to unrequited crushes on girls
called Rebecca and Camilla, the snooty ones she had mooched around after, girls who at best ignored her and at worst ridiculed her and called her ‘a creepy lezzer’. In adulthood, she had recovered from this bad start but none of her relationships had worked out as she had hoped. The truck driver she had liked a lot but who had turned out to have poor personal hygiene and Grace had had to make her excuses. The nurse she had met at a lesbian walking group called Pack of Dykes with whom she had enjoyed several months of sex and hiking, until the nurse decided to emigrate to Australia and had not even enquired if Grace wanted to go too. The personnel officer who said, ‘My girlfriend’s in Bridlington this weekend,’ and, although abashed, Grace went home with her anyway. The postgraduate psychology student who wore braces and chewed on marshmallows, her mouth a mass of metal tasting of sugar, who had said she had thought about it and decided she would prefer a man. The economics lecturer whom Grace wanted to get up and leave in the middle of the night because the woman had made noises not unlike a seagull’s.

  At least, unlike the straight friends of her age who were being looked at pityingly for being left on the shelf, Grace’s single life seemed to be envied. She had lost count of the number of women who had called her ‘lucky’ because she was supposed to have no biological imperative. Grace was not running out of time, it was presumed, her eggs were not mouldering, there was no internal clock ticking away. The statistics that she knew from her friends about post-thirty downhill rates of conception. She could draw herself a graph. At least she was free from the competitive stereotypes of ‘cupcake-baking earth-mother’ versus ‘cold, venal and childless career woman’ that seemed to be foisted on her friends. Straight people are ridiculous, she thought when they complained about this but didn’t say it. It had often occurred to her that she wasn’t forced to fit into the narrow strictures that they were, didn’t have the external pressures to present a perfect image to the outside world at all times, and this made her grateful.

  Grace owned a redbrick house on a back street in an area of Leeds that had become far too fashionable for her liking, a house with wooden floors she had stripped herself and whose radiators she knew how to bleed. That was another thing that straight people seemed to assume about her – that she was good with tools, and it annoyed her that this was true. She had a meaningful and stimulating job as a psychotherapist, a job which she had worked hard to gain, and which she was, she liked to think, adept at. She had plenty of friends with whom to do the social activities of an engaging sort that were planned into her week. She had, of course, her large family spread across Yorkshire and she saw her favourite sisters often. As lives went it seemed to be flowing along nicely. But, as it turned out, all the time she had been waiting in secret for something or someone to hit her so hard that she would run out of breath, like the way a wave in a rough sea bowls you over, slams you into the sand, and nearly drowns you.

  Grace didn’t sleep with the woman that night, although she wanted to. She wanted to more than she had wanted anything else in her life before. So it seemed that some of her sisters were right all along. They were absolutely bloody right.

  This is Violet Amelia Mayweather

  This morning Violet had woken up with ‘the fear’ and had remained in its vice-like grip all day. As a result, she was not only in her pyjamas at 6 p.m., but also still in bed, and was by now extremely hungry, having not yet been able to put her feet on the floor, let alone get as far as the kitchen. If only Annie had been home, she could have texted her from under the covers, ‘Please could you possibly bring me some Marmite toast?’ and Annie would probably have brought her some, even if it did come accompanied, at the bare minimum, by the sternest of expressions. Unfortunately though, she hadn’t woken up until Annie had left the flat to go to work that morning and so she hadn’t eaten and all she had had to drink was the stale water in the glass on her bedside table. This was probably just as well, because the bathroom also seemed too far a journey to make. It was pathetic, this inability to move, she kept telling herself. She was a healthy twenty-eight-year-old woman and it was as if she had lost the use of her legs. She hadn’t even phoned Starchild to say she couldn’t come to work. She hadn’t done anything at all, except sleep and wake dry-mouthed to spend several hours staring at the ceiling trying to repress all thoughts and then giving up and burrowing back down into her bed to find the relief of sleep again. Her bed had become her entire world, it was a flimsy boat in the black sea of ‘the fear’ that surrounded it. There might as well have been monsters under her bed with long suckered tentacles which would reach out and grab her if she so much as put a toe from under the duvet. These are the imaginings of a child, she thought, in the hope that castigating herself might work as a motivational force. It didn’t. ‘Pusillanimous’, she thought, that’s the word for me, and wished that she could remember what book that was from.

  It was one of the many things that Violet envied about her best friend Annie – her lack of ‘the fear’. In the past Annie had questioned her about it but it was like trying to explain the feel of a snowball in your hand to someone who had been brought up in the tropics. The complete absence of fear of anything or anyone was part of Annie’s make-up. ‘But what exactly are you afraid of?’ Annie had asked her soon after they first met. ‘I think,’ Violet had said, ‘the question is – what am I not afraid of? And the answer to that is dachshunds, coffee cake, and little old ladies with lipstick on their teeth. That’s about it.’ Annie had looked at her with that ‘what on earth are you rabbiting on about you daft cow’ expression that Violet now knew often preceded one of the stock phrases that Annie had, unconsciously, got off her mother. ‘You’ve just got to get on with it.’ That was one of the most common. ‘Pull your socks up, they’re not going to pull themselves,’ was another. But Violet’s favourite was, ‘Other people have it much worse than you, you know,’ followed by an example of someone who did have it much worse than her. From anyone else Violet might have found these phrases abrasive and completely lacking in empathy, but from Annie she found them comforting in their familiarity and sometimes repeated them to herself, not as maxims to live by, but as tiny talismans against the darkness. They didn’t sound the same in her accent though.

  Hopefully Annie would be home soon, and Violet was pleased about that because she was increasingly hungry and thirsty. Annie, the moment she stepped into the room, would cause the creatures with the tentacles to shrivel back into their gloomy holes and therefore Violet might finally be able to get up. There was no one else apart from Annie who could come to her aid. Her mother was in Cheshire with her stepdad, which might as well be a million miles away from Leeds. She had grown up a shy and socially incompetent only child whose fantasy world involved an imaginary friend called Zazou, and it wasn’t until she met Annie that she learnt what a real friend was. And as for the men in her life, well, they came and went with the speed of motorboats. What her mother described as ‘flings’ and Annie as ‘borderline promiscuity’. But she didn’t care about that because Annie was her anchor in an unstable world. There was no way, though, that she was going to that party they had been invited to this evening, given by some woman that Annie knew who worked in HR. She feared an argument about this. Annie liked arguments even more than parties but Violet was an argument incompetent and found parties awkward at the best of times. The word ‘party’ still conjured up an afternoon when she, aged six, had been forced to eat red jelly in the shape of a rabbit by a bossy mother and had thrown up something that looked like bits of bloody lung on to the woman’s shoes. She had been sent home in disgrace. It wasn’t that she didn’t find other people interesting, but that they always asked you questions like, ‘And what do you do for a living?’ and the banal answers she had to give dispirited her and made her ashamed of herself. And how could she go to a party when she couldn’t even brush her teeth or get dressed? What was she supposed to do? Wear her pyjamas?

  Not only having failed with Annie, she had never managed to explain to anyone else e
ither what it felt like if she went outside when she had ‘the fear’. Everything was amplified – all the sounds came at her through loudspeakers, it all seemed horribly strip-lit, the texture of the softest surfaces was sandpaper rough, and the prospect of having to talk to anyone or obey any demand made upon her was terrifying. She could hardly cross a road or go into a shop, the potential for imminent disaster was so great. It felt as if ordinary people had knives in their pockets which they might produce at any moment. She feared for her life. It sounded bonkers, she knew that. ‘I am probably bonkers,’ she said to herself. From the kitchen the phone rang and her heartbeat increased. It might be Annie, telling her she had to work late, and Violet tried to weigh up whether this was a good thing or not. It would mean that she didn’t have to go through the argument about the party but on the other hand it would also mean that she remained without food. Annie would have deliberately left the phone on the kitchen island to make sure that Violet had to leave her bed to get it, and Violet’s mobile was in her coat pocket in the hall and therefore also unreachable. Her stomach growled. What she would really like was some chocolate raisins. She thought about going and looking out of the window on to the street and whether that would make her feel better. It might, or it might make her feel like a princess trapped up here in a castle with no hope whatsoever of escape. The phone stopped and then started again. That was likely to mean that it wasn’t Annie at all but Annie’s mother, a woman she found in equal parts comical and ogreish. There was no way she was talking to her. She pulled the covers back up over her face.

  This is Annie Barnes

  ‘Get up,’ said Annie, an hour later, trying to pull the duvet off Violet.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Violet, holding on to it with both hands as hard as she could.