Unhallowed Ground (3 page)

She sank on all fours, her lips trembling, her eyes welling. She pressed one hand to her mouth and squeezed her eyes closed. And she thought, At least it was quick, dear God, at least the end came quickly. She would not let herself think more of the child, no, not at that time. She blocked little Angela out, and that was another small betrayal.

As if she had never known her.

And that’s how the dreadful story began.

S
ILVERED WITH AN IMPOSSIBLE
beauty, like viewfinder slides of
Heidi
, and scented by her vanilla car tree, that was Georgina’s first impression of Furze Pen Cottage. It was a chilling sort of beauty, sharp, more like a sound.

It was February, a pearly, tear-stained month, and Angela Hopkins had died that December. Christmas did not happen for Georgie, and nor did new year. All the horror was busy going on so the fact that her brother, Stephen, had died of liver rot added to her total destruction in a way which was quite irrational. Why such a traumatic effect?

Because she had never known him.

A healthy liver was horrible enough, even when dipped in batter, and Georgie imagined his gone brown like those in a butcher’s window in summer. And to hear of such a tragic event in such an impersonal way, by solicitor’s letter, seemed to reflect to Georgie the terrible sterility of her life.

Forty-two and what had she got to show for it? That was the way her thinking was going. It wasn’t as if Stephen had left her the cottage intentionally either, a kindness perhaps, a last act of remembrance. No. He had died intestate and, as Georgie was his only family, the cottage and contents were hers if she wanted them. It was as cold and clinical as that.

She wept and then she wept some more.

Alas. Poor Georgina.

She felt bereft, as if something had been forcibly removed from her person. Confidences saved up for too long tend to turn to hysteria so, ‘I never even met him,’ she cried to Helen Mace, the social services director’s wife, as she sat in their Victorian sitting room done out in wood and heritage paint, with paper by Laura Ashley. ‘Stephen was twenty years older than me and nobody ever mentioned him. Black sheep and all that.’ Georgie’s hair stuck to her tears. ‘I grew up believing he was dissolute, a drunkard who turned his back on society and became a recluse.’ She sniffed, wiping her nose unpleasantly with the back of her hand. ‘He ran away from home,’ sniff sniff, ‘when he was sixteen years old, and they cut him off, I suppose, mentally and financially. Anyway, he never tried to come home.’ Sniff sniff. ‘Contact with his family was the last thing Stephen wanted, that’s what they said. I often thought about finding him and writing him a letter, but time goes by and you don’t. I thought one day I might trace him. He might not even know I was born. And yet he was my brother,’ she sobbed, ‘and after Mum died my last surviving relative.’

How she detested behaving like this.
So needy. So lacking control. So like poor Millie Blunt when they took away her dead baby. But at least she didn’t stamp her feet. At least she didn’t scream and yowl. She wasn’t chained to the churchyard door, but you could tell poor Helen was taken aback.

‘This is all you need right now,’ she said kindly, looking anxiously at Georgie’s blotched face, the exhausted, dark-rimmed eyes, the wet, shaking hands. This wasn’t the capable Georgina she knew. ‘And it’s no good saying what’s done is done, there’s no point looking back and wishing…’

‘But it’s just one more bloody thing, isn’t it?’ cried Georgie desperately, kicking rhythmically at the chair leg. ‘Just one more bloody thing I wish I’d done differently, but time gets between you and then it’s too late.’ But no words were sufficiently powerful to convey the distress she felt.

Cosy, comforting Helen, with the wooden solidarity and shape of a Russian stacking doll and the plummy public-school accent. Even the air seemed to move slowly around her, so calm and unflappable was the director’s wife, a sporting product of Wycombe Abbey. She never panicked. She could balance two kids on her lap, feed a third, pot a fourth and conduct a sensible conversation all at the same time. Helen was a Grace Darling, the kind of heroic woman who might once have lived in a lighthouse. Helen was an oasis in Georgie’s acrid desert of grief, to whom she went for comfort, humble as a kneeling camel with a large and trembling lower lip.

‘Liking him or not liking him isn’t the point. The point is I never knew him. I never knew my own brother.’ And the sadness and self-pity of that last poignant remark collapsed her like a jelly taken too soon from its mould. ‘Oh God, I do loathe feeling like this! Perhaps this is my nemesis for having life too easy. Perhaps I am facing The Truth at last.’

Helen was not the sort of woman to be dragged into that soul-scarring cul-de-sac. The Truth was not the issue here. Something more positive was needed or this discussion could last until dawn and reach no resolution. She buttered a toasted teacake, automatically spread it with Marmite, and handed it to Georgie who took it. ‘Stephen was an artist?’ she asked slowly and thoughtfully.

‘Yes, that’s what they said.’

Helen shrugged. She went straight to the heart of the matter, created a direction to head in. ‘Well, in that case his paintings must be somewhere around.’

Georgie dabbed at her red eyes mournfully. She stared, perplexed, at the teacake before rotating it in its blackened butter. ‘I have never seen any of them.’

Helen warmed to her topic, sensing a growing interest, a lull in Georgie’s agitating brain. ‘You’d probably find quite a lot down at this cottage in Devon. It might be too late to know the man, but maybe you could understand him, his pictures might tell you more about him than knowing him ever could.’

She clutched at this straw. Helen’s words were an invitation. She walked restlessly to the window, hands cradling elbows. ‘
D’you think so?
’

Helen nodded sensibly. ‘Yes, I really do. And you know as well as I do, Georgie, that if Stephen had a problem with booze then his inability to contact you was nothing personal at all, it was all part of his illness, poor sod, and by going along with his wishes you were respecting him, too.’

Georgie returned to her chair, fingers of warning tapped the plate. Helen gave her a napkin. The teacake jumped. ‘Don’t patronize me,’ Georgie snapped. ‘The reason I did nothing about him was because I never got round to it. There was no respect about it.’

‘Just because you didn’t plan it doesn’t mean you didn’t do right by him,’ reasoned Helen patiently. ‘You left him alone which was what he wanted. And now he’s dead you can go and find him. A journey of discovery. A pilgrimage to Lourdes.’

‘D’you think I should go?’ Drained of all initiative, Georgie needed gentle prodding. In the state of mind she was in, a journey to Devon might as well be the moon.

‘Why don’t you go this weekend. I’ll come with you, if you like. Roger can mind the kids.’

But if Georgie decided to go, she wanted to go alone. She began to view the venture as a kind of exorcism, holy, in a special way, and the more arduous the journey the better she would feel. For almost two endless months she had endeavoured never to be alone, the thoughts that came in were just too terrible. But this state of affairs could not be allowed to continue, and a journey might be the best way to get used to her own company again. Time was so hard to fill. Given leave from work meant long empty hours, and those which were filled were quick and dreadful. She felt like a prisoner in a cell listening for the torturer’s footsteps. And they came unremittingly, to ask more questions, to listen to excuses, to take notes and make comments as again and again she told her side of the grim story.

The tabloid headlines shrieked out at her.
HOW MANY MORE TIMES MUST THIS HAPPEN BEFORE THESE PEOPLE COME TO THEIR SENSES? AND, TWENTY THOUSAND A YEAR TO CALL BACK LATER. MORE FATAL DECISIONS TAKEN.
And outside her flat they were waiting, scores of men in black jackets and macs, with microphones, cameras and delighted eyes.

‘Mrs Jefferson, this way, please, how do you feel about…?’

‘Will you stay in social work if you’re cleared…?’

‘Why did you ignore all the evidence and take the fateful decision to leave Angela at home?’

‘Is it true that you have no kids of your own?’

She faced them all with steely control.

To begin with, naive as she was, Georgie tried to explain, even though she’d been advised by the union to make no comment at this early stage. But she had to defend herself against the grotesque things they were saying, and why the hell should she keep quiet? They ought to be told how many children at risk she had in her caseload, the shortage of staff in the area and how many hours they put in. They had to be made to understand the atmosphere of that tenement building at night, and what it was like to call back again and again when the vandals had put out the lights, discarded their dirty needles and the place was eerily silent save for the soft sound of TV sets, the occasional bark of a dog, the cry of a child, the curse of a man. They ought to imagine the impact on a child of being removed from home, what happens to the dysfunctional family and how easily mistakes can be made. Before they went on printing their lies they should damn well know that Ray Hopkins and his little wife, Gail, were convincing liars, convincing to even the most professional, and that violence was always a fearful thing and difficult to approach in the daylight let alone in the dark.

Violence.

Yes, the rat pack on guard outside her flat knew quite a bit about violence.

She spoke to them. She reasoned with them. She tried to explain.

They twisted her words and hurled them back like stones. Georgie had once watched a video which showed a woman in a biblical land on her way to be stoned to death. The horror of that had stayed with her ever since, she wished she’d never watched it, the way the victim clutched at a dagger as she passed a market stall and held it pathetically against her aggressors (she would probably normally go shopping for a nice bit of fish), so hopelessly and with such desperation, knowing the torment she faced. Daggers, words, what difference when your enemies were so determined?

They called her a woolly liberal, and wet, with flowers of ignorance in her hair.

But it wasn’t like that.
She wasn’t like that.

‘No comment,’ came the official instruction. ‘You see what happens. Don’t say you weren’t warned.’

There had to be a scapegoat. Everyone could see that Ray Hopkins was a totally inadequate slob, and it wasn’t as if the authorities hadn’t been told.

‘Time and time again, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rung that emergency number in the middle of the night,’ gloated a toothless neighbour in front of the cameras for
The Nine O’Clock News
. She was backed by a little coven in curlers. ‘I dunno how many times.’ But there was no record of her calls and when the police went round she refused to explain.

‘The country’s gone to the dogs. Too many bleeding do-gooders if you ask me.’

Georgie began to get letters from people she’d never heard of. Vicious letters, mostly unsigned, and she was scared because somehow these fanatics had found out her address. They knew where she lived and they wanted her dead. They phoned her up in the middle of the night and breathed obscenities into the phone. ‘
Bitch.
’ ‘
Murderess.
’ ‘
Childkiller.
’ ‘
Whore.
’

And she wanted to scream back at them, ‘There’s no sodding point!
Can’t you see?
You can’t bring Angela back to life. I can’t bring her back to life!’ But she didn’t scream, she listened, and she understood that this was part of a natural reaction, a hopeless scream from an anguished and violated world. As if there was just no way of thinking about it gently.

Which there wasn’t.

None of the support she was given could put up a strong enough barrier because no matter how often she was told she had behaved correctly, no matter how many times she was assured it could have happened to anyone, no matter how many people said she was the best social worker in the team, loyal, hardworking, caring, experienced, THE FACT was still achingly apparent, THE FACT no-one could take away, THE FACT the nightcallers knew very well… I, GEORGINA JEFFERSON, AM RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DEATH OF THIS CHILD.

It began to be intolerable. Georgie became intolerable. She could hardly live with herself.

She began to imagine, in a paranoid fashion, that people turned round and stared whenever she walked down the street, whenever she rode the tube. She began to imagine fellow drivers glared angrily through her car window when she waited for traffic lights to change. She glanced around her uneasily. To stand still was to be vulnerable. She breathed a sigh of relief when the green light released the cars. She fervently believed that shopkeepers served her deliberately slowly. The fellow residents in the flats where she lived edged away and cast their eyes down when she passed. And all the while she knew she was sick—she might be news but she wasn’t notorious—her face wasn’t that well known. And yet, purely and simply, that is what it felt like.

But worse than that, and this was the reality, some of her friends distanced themselves. Oh yes. Of course they used subtle methods so it took some time to realize the truth, to absorb exactly what was happening.

Others, sweetly, came closer. But that was threatening in itself.

Of Angela Hopkins she would not think.

Because, quite simply, she couldn’t.

G
EORGINA JEFFERSON WAS SCARED—
how pitiful! Scared to be making such a journey alone. She wished she hadn’t given up smoking. And why had she bothered to clean the car?

The hard shoulders and central reservations were chunky with wedges of old snow, tacky like badly set fudge. The countryside was the colour of her windscreen, spattered and grey. She was frightened when she first set out on so lonely a journey with no familiar end to it—no-one would kiss her, pour her a drink, show her her room, give her a towel. Like boarding school for the very first time and Mummy said, with a simplicity that was astonishing, ‘Run along and make friends, Georgina.’ Make friends?
How?
Everyone else had a friend. She was the only one standing alone. Had she missed something essential in her early development? The ability to make friends to order? Perhaps there was something wrong with her smile, perhaps it was too full of tears to count.