The Unexpected Education of Emily Dean Read online

  With Fanny gone, she was a reformed character, and to prove it to herself she decided to undertake some housework without any prompting from Eunice. She began in the dining room, dusting and polishing the dining table and sideboard, before moving to the sitting room. Kneeling at the sitting-room hearth, she was reminded of Cinderella and was overcome with self-pity, forgetting that it was, in fact, her own choice. She took the hearth brush and began to sweep up the sooty ash that had fallen from the chimney.

  ‘You could just say no.’

  She twitched at the sound of Lydia’s voice.

  ‘I find it works.’ Her aunt approached.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘All this housework. You don’t have to do it.’

  She could feel the familiar prickling and knew her neck was turning a blotchy red. ‘Father said to pull my weight.’

  ‘That sounds like him. I suppose he said don’t be a burden.’

  He had, more than once.

  ‘Anyway, I don’t mind.’ She was hoping to impress Lydia with her stoicism, but even to her ears it sounded pitiful, and the expression on Lydia’s face confirmed it.

  When her aunt opened the credenza cupboard and took out a bottle of whisky, she looked away, not wanting to be accused of being a stickybeak. But Lydia held up the bottle.

  ‘For William.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you …’

  ‘… had taken up drinking whisky during the day?’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that.’

  Lydia cocked her head, waiting.

  ‘I thought you and William … after what happened at lunch. I thought you’d fallen out.’

  Lydia’s face tightened, as if reacting to a sudden pain. ‘We had an argument. I suppose it’s because you’re a singleton, you don’t understand what it’s like to have brothers. We fall out, and then we fall in again.’

  She wanted to ask what the argument was about but feared being rebuffed. She was already a little stunned by how many words Lydia had addressed to her.

  ‘Anyway,’ Lydia went on, ‘given the choice, I’d rather take him a bottle of whisky and let him get drunk, than help him …’ But instead of finishing the sentence, she waved her hand as if waving away whatever it was that remained unsaid. She frowned, as if realising she’d said more than she wanted to. ‘Well, don’t let me stop you from pulling your weight.’

  ‘You’re not,’ Emily tried to assure her, but her aunt was leaving. When the door had closed, she abandoned the hearth and sat down on one of the replica Queen Anne chairs. Her enthusiasm for housework had completely evaporated. The revelation that William and Lydia had fallen in again had taken the wind from her sails. It meant she was not the only one to visit him. She was not as special as she’d thought, even though she had only now discovered that she wanted to be special. Which did not even make sense, as so far her experiences with William had been mainly unnerving and unpleasant. She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to go back. But was that really true? He had asked questions that she hadn’t stopped thinking about. How else would she find out the answers if she didn’t return? And what had Lydia meant? Given the choice between taking William whisky and helping him to do … what? If only she’d been able to hear what they’d been arguing about that day, but all she had was Lydia’s enigmatic fragment. You can’t. You mustn’t.

  Empty pea pods lay in a pile on the outdoor dining table. She split open a fat pod, popped two peas in her mouth and dropped the rest into a tin bowl. It was early evening, time for Claudio’s lesson, but she had given up hoping that he would come. She’d scarcely seen him since Roy’s departure and, in that time, Uncle Cec’s forehead had developed permanent corrugations.

  ‘The place is going to the dogs,’ he’d said at lunch that day. ‘Claudio does his best, but he’s not a stockman’s bootlace and he couldn’t crutch a hogget to save his life. Just as well I’ve got Lydia. Good as any man.’ He’d given Lydia an approving nod before ruining the compliment by adding, ‘But you can’t run the show with a couple of ring-ins.’

  A familiar litany of complaints followed about the lack of rain and the plague of rabbits, and the hand-feeding of stock, which cost a fortune. ‘If things don’t improve soon, I’ll have to start selling the ewes,’ he’d declared.

  It was the same at every mealtime, and Emily was sick of hearing about it all. After she’d been called a ring-in, Lydia seemed to be sick of it too, and as soon as Uncle Cec began to complain she tried to drown him out by reciting ‘Said Hanrahan’ in an exaggeratedly tragic tone.

  ‘We’ll all be rooned, said Hanrahan, in accents most forlorn. Outside the church ’ere Mass began, one frosty Sunday morn.’

  Now, sitting outside at the table, the chorus to the poem was going round and round in Emily’s head in an infuriating way, and it was only when Claudio suddenly appeared with his notebook and pencils that it stopped. He sat down opposite and began to shell the peas with her.

  ‘Quicker this way,’ he said, ‘and then we have school.’ Like Della, he had begun to call it school.

  When all the peas were podded and delivered to the kitchen, she told Claudio that she would go and get her books.

  ‘Is a beautiful evening – we can walk instead and make conversation lesson?’ he suggested.

  They walked through the garden and into the orchard. Claudio was right: it was a beautiful evening, warm and still. She asked him the usual questions to make sure his grammar was improving.

  As they circled around the south side of the house, they saw William on his crutches, moving slowly down the path from the kitchen towards the gate leading into the yard. After he’d gone through the gate, they lost sight of him.

  ‘Where he was fighting?’ Claudio wanted to know.

  ‘Where was he fighting,’ she corrected him. ‘New Guinea.’

  ‘The Japs?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Very sad for Lydia. Her brother.’

  ‘Yes.’ It was sad for her, but she couldn’t help wishing that he had not brought Lydia into the conversation.

  ‘She is a beautiful woman. Molto bella,’ he added with an admiring half-whistle.

  They had been walking in step but, on hearing these words and, worse still, the whistle at the end of them, she faltered, her arms and legs losing their rhythm.

  ‘Indeed,’ she managed to say, almost tripping over her own feet.

  Claudio didn’t seem to notice anything odd and kept moving.

  ‘But she’s terribly untidy. Her room is an awful mess.’ She heard herself speaking and wanted to stop and, at the same time, she wanted to say something much worse, although she couldn’t think what. Something that would obliterate Lydia’s beauty. They kept walking and the conversation moved on to other things, but she could no longer concentrate. The spectre of Lydia’s beauty, and Claudio’s enthusiastic appreciation of it, had ruined her mood.

  27

  EMILY SAT DOWN IN THE wing chair that she had just dragged across from a dusty corner of the workshop. She was sick of sitting on the footstool. William was smoking and took no notice, his meal untouched on the side table.

  Almost a week had passed since she’d first taken down his dinner and she knew what to expect now. There was an order to things. William liked to eat his dinner in silence. Food was fuel, needed to keep him alive and not something pleasurable, an idea that she found disturbing. She wondered whether he’d always been like that or whether it was the war but, so far, had not dared to ask. She was still trying to work out a way to ask him about his question: whether she was different from all the rest. The hope of discovering an answer had continued to draw her back to the workshop. An answer that would reveal something about her to herself, although she had not quite admitted to being the object of her own interest. It was not the done thing to be interested in oneself. One had a duty to think of others, as her father often said.

  In that light at least, she had done Florrie a favour, for delivering William’s dinner should really have been h
er job. Florrie had developed a phobia. The sight of William swinging his crutches and hopping across the courtyard as she stacked the firewood for the stove was enough to send her fleeing into the kitchen, emitting little cries of fear. She couldn’t cope with his missing limb, and Della was fed up with the whole palaver. ‘You’re getting on my quince, Florrie,’ she’d say. ‘It’s just William, same as ever, ’cept for missing a bit of leg.’

  Although he’d still not begun to eat, Emily knew from previous visits that when he had finished his meal, it would be time for talking and a glass of whisky. This was the moment she looked forwards to, although not without trepidation as it was impossible to second-guess his mood or what he would talk about. She was grateful, however, that he’d never again mentioned Fanny Hill. He swore quite a lot and had even once said ‘fuck’, which shocked her more than she cared to admit. She’d tried to cover it up, to no avail. ‘Off you go, Miss P, back to the nursery,’ he’d said sarcastically.

  William was not like an uncle and sometimes, when she thought about it, she could scarcely believe that he was her father’s brother. He was more than a decade younger. But it wasn’t just that. For instance, she had never heard her father swear. But perhaps the war had changed William. Perhaps before the war he hadn’t sworn either. He’d told her that he was a different man now, one-legged and busted up to buggery. ‘Twenty-five going on a hundred,’ he’d said morosely.

  Apart from that he did not talk about the war, and she did not ask him, even though she had questions. She wanted to know what exactly had happened to his leg. She knew he had been wounded in New Guinea and wondered if Harry had been with him then and where Harry was now? Sometimes she could feel herself wanting to tell him about Lydia – how she didn’t love Harry. Something always stopped her. The vision of a furious Lydia.

  Sitting in the wing chair, waiting, she broke the silence. ‘Aren’t you hungry?’

  Since she’d put the tray on the side table, he had made no effort to slide it onto his lap. He had barely seemed to notice that she was there at all. He leaned down and picked up the bottle of whisky from beside the armchair. He took his glass and began to pour. His hands were steady, and he filled it to the top without spilling a drop.

  She knew what this meant – he had been drinking. She had seen how the first glass was always the hardest to fill; his hands shook so much that the whisky spilled. The second glass was a little better, but it wasn’t until the third that his tremors stopped. And yet he did not seem to get drunk. Or at least, he didn’t slur his words or laugh too much, or even turn red in the face the way she had seen Uncle Cec do once or twice. It wasn’t like that. Instead he became darker and more concentrated, as if inside him everything was black as pitch.

  She watched as he tossed back the contents of the glass in a single action.

  ‘No woman’s ever going to want me now. That’s it for me.’

  She waited, but he said nothing more and filled his glass again. How could she console him when, in truth, she could not really imagine what sort of woman would want a man who spent most of his time in a semi-dark workshop, smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky, whether he was one-legged or not. Admittedly she did not know a lot of women, apart from family members. There was her mother’s best friend, Pearl, but she was married. And Miss Maunder, who was a lesbian and ancient. And her teachers – Mrs Martingale and Madame Dubois and Miss Falugi. Perhaps Miss Falugi, being unmarried, was a possibility. She wore her hair in an attractive French roll, but her earlobes were pierced, which was a black mark against her, pierced ears being considered déclassé. Now that she thought about it, Emily wondered why that was the case and whether it was an immutable rule. And if Miss Falugi were Italian as she suspected, and quite probably a Catholic, was that also to be counted against her?

  Claudio was Italian and a Catholic, although if he was also a communist, which he had not denied, then he didn’t believe in God and so couldn’t really be called a Catholic. However, on any scale, a communist was worse than being a Catholic. At the heart of her rambling train of thought was the dawning recognition that, so far in her life, she had accepted a great deal as truth that might, in reality, be simply prejudice.

  Would William object to pierced ears? she wondered, the question returning her to the present where William was saying something.

  ‘Not that you’d know about that.’

  ‘About what?’ she asked.

  ‘The feel of a woman’s breast in the palm of your hand.’

  She felt the telltale tickle of heat rising up her neck and was relieved that he was unlikely to notice in the dim light.

  ‘I’m a useless cripple,’ he continued in a bitter voice. ‘Have a look around. There’s no three-legged animals here. They’re knocked on the head because they’re no damn use.’

  She could think of nothing to counter the brutal finality of his statement, and William too seemed to have run out of words, turning his empty glass around and around, staring into it as if it were a crystal ball and the answer to some important question could be found there.

  And then it came to her. ‘Like Lord Byron.’

  William glanced up with a frown.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘his foot. He was a cripple too, but famous … and handsome.’ She felt herself blushing and hurried on. ‘And he swam the Hellespont.’

  She stopped, wishing she hadn’t mentioned the Hellespont as William had never expressed a desire to swim, let alone strike out across a major stretch of water. Why had she mentioned Byron at all? He had a club foot, but it was hardly the same thing as missing half a leg. If only she could take back her words, and she stared down at her lap to avoid the scornful – or possibly angry – look that William was sure to be directing towards her.

  ‘So you know Bryon,’ he said. ‘I’m impressed.’

  She knew she should reveal the truth: that she did not know Byron at all and had never read a single one of his poems. Her knowledge was limited to what Mrs Martingale had told them in class in one of her increasingly common divertissements. He had sounded wonderfully romantic. They were studying Wordsworth at the time, but Mrs Martingale, for some reason known only to herself, had abandoned Wordsworth for a biographical sketch of Lord Byron, who wasn’t even on the syllabus. But William’s praise was too precious and she could not bring herself to give it up.

  ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a work of genius,’ he added.

  She smiled and nodded – the prospect of a literary discussion on some child called Harold was making her feel sweaty. But at least William was no longer talking about being a useless peg leg.

  The armchair creaked as he levered himself up. He leaned over and felt around at the back of the seat.

  ‘Here,’ he said, and tossed her a small torch.

  She turned it on and together they made their way across the room to the book wall. William knew what he was searching for and it did not take him long to find it. He pulled out a slim volume from high up on the shelves. They returned to their chairs and, once settled, he opened the book and flicked over the pages, searching for something.

  ‘“Darkness”,’ he announced, ‘by Lord Byron.’

  ‘I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

  The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars

  Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

  Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

  Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air –’

  The words wove a powerful spell, and a terrifying death-filled vision of the end of the world unfolded. Cities were burned to the ground and forests extinguished in crackling blazes, men turned into ghouls and fiends, birds shrieked in fear as the natural world devoured itself, and no love was left.

  ‘The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,

  And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need

  Of aid from them – She was the Universe.’

  Upon reading the final lines William closed the book. Neither
of them spoke, still under the devastating spell of Byron’s apocalyptic vision. She could not imagine a gloomier poem – the earth reduced to a lump of death, a chaos of hard clay and the last two surviving men dying in horror at the sight of each other. Her attempt to cheer William up was a dismal failure, and when he picked up the bottle of whisky and poured them both a glass, she felt so miserable and distracted that she gulped hers down without thinking. An explosion of fiery heat hit the back of her throat, sucking the air from her lungs, and making her cough and gasp as tears poured from her eyes. When the coughing had stopped, she made the miraculous discovery that the burning sensation had become a pool of warmth in her stomach.

  After the second drink she began to feel hot, her limbs loose. The outside world was turning into a distant memory and time was slowing down; everything was happening in a stretched-out way. William’s face was stretching out too – and blurring. Or was that her?

  ‘If I could just forget, but I can’t. And no use plucking out my eyes – it’s on the inside, in my head,’ he was saying.

  She tried to concentrate, unsure whether he was reciting another poem. His face was moving in unexpected ways. She hoped he would not ask for her opinion. He filled her glass for the third time, and the whisky slid down her throat even though she had made up her mind not to drink it. Thoughts and actions had become uncoupled. William was still speaking but she could not hear properly – it was as if she was underwater.

  She got up and began to walk towards the door. The room was the deck of a ship in rough seas, and everything was rocking and sliding. If only she could make it to the door – she had to breathe fresh air.

  The journey back to the house seemed to take forever. Her feet would not cooperate and, instead of travelling in a straight line up the path, she listed to the left and found herself stumbling through the orchard in the dark.