‘I went up to Oxford – St Hilda’s – when I was nineteen. There was a boy in one of the other colleges. He used to take me out sometimes. We weren’t sleeping together.’
Ginty blinked. Her mother had never talked about her emotions, let alone her sex life.
‘I hadn’t been to bed with anyone. But one night, when we’d been out to dinner and had gone back to his room for coffee as usual, he raped me. After I’d gone, he hanged himself.’
‘Because of you?’
Louise’s face could have been made from plaster of Paris. Her lips were so stiff they hardly moved. ‘It was not my fault he died.’
‘Of course not,’ Ginty said, slipping to her knees in front of her mother, longing to help. Louise moved back. Defeated all over again, Ginty returned to her chair, saying: ‘That’s not what I meant, either now or in what I said on the radio. I was only talking about terminology. You were a victim, whatever the offence is called.’
The stiffness eased very slightly. ‘No one thought that at the time.’
Ginty grabbed the wine bottle and slopped more into both glasses.
Louise shook her head, feeling for her handkerchief. There was no sweat to wipe off, but she passed the thin white square backwards and forwards across her lips.
‘Who was he?’ Ginty asked when the silence had become unbearable.
Back went the handkerchief, back and forth. Ginty’s mind began to crank slowly into gear. She did the sums.
‘And when exactly did it happen?’ She wished the question hadn’t sounded so harsh, but it was hard to speak ordinarily with what felt like a bird’s nest stuck in her throat.
Louise looked at her. ‘Nine months before you were born, Ginty. I’m sorry.’
A high, thin, buzzing sound filled Ginty’s head. Heat rushed through her body. A second later she was freezing, with sweat lying clammy in the crevices of her knees and elbows. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t think. She asked the first question that came into her head:
‘He was my father? This rapist? Not Gunnar?’
‘Yes.’
‘No wonder you’ve always hated me.’
‘Ginty, don’t be absurd.’ Even now, Louise sounded no more than mildly impatient.
Ginty drained her glass and refilled it, splashing wine over the side on to her hand. Seeing it drip on to the grass, she brought it up to her mouth and sucked loudly. The pain in her leg was dulling, but the swelling was as wide and pink as ever, with a dark red dot in the centre.
‘Who was he? I think I ought to be told that, at least, don’t you, since I owe half of everything I am to him?’
‘He was called Steven Flyford. Steve.’ Louise’s voice was as bleak as an empty room. ‘And he was the best friend of your new employer.’
Ginty felt as though there was a huge black cliff looming only metres in front of her. She wasn’t sure whether it was her own fury or the passion that must exist behind her mother’s perfect mask.
‘John Harbinger, the editor of the Sentinel,’ Louise added in case she hadn’t understood.
‘Yes, I’d got that much.’ The cliff loomed even bigger, decorated now with flags of humiliation. ‘Does he know who I am?’
‘I’ve no idea, but I doubt it. No one knew I was pregnant. My family sent me to France. Gunnar rescued me, decided to call me by my middle name, married me in Vienna, and so brought me back to England as Louise Schell. Who’s to know I was ever Virginia Callader, the girl who …?’ She choked, as though trying to bring up words that were buried somewhere deep in her guts.
Ginty’s head felt so tight it seemed about to crack open. All she could bear to think about were practicalities. ‘But there must be all sorts of official records. Your birth certificate for one.’
‘And my marriage certificate.’ That didn’t seem hard to say. ‘But why would anyone bother to look them up?’
Ginty thought of her own birth certificate. ‘So, how come I’m registered as your and Gunnar Schell’s daughter?’
‘Gunnar decided that would be best. He wanted you.’
And you didn’t? Ginty didn’t voice the question. There didn’t seem any point when the answer had always been so obvious. At least now she knew why. It was a small, cold satisfaction, but it was better than nothing.
‘And no one’s ever recognized you since?’ she said aloud. ‘I find that very hard to believe.’
‘Not as far as I know.’ Louise looked as though Ginty’s questions were almost unbearable, but she struggled to answer them. ‘We took a certain amount of trouble to make sure that didn’t happen. And in any case, people see what they expect; if they’re expecting Louise Schell then that’s who they recognize. But I’ve never felt particularly safe, which is why I don’t go about much or have my photograph on my book jackets.’
‘Don’t you think you – and everyone else – might have been happier if you’d told the truth?’ Ginty tried not to feel bitter and failed. ‘I certainly would have.’
Louise swung her legs up on the chair again. She stared up at the tree.
‘After the inquest, I overheard a man say that I was “a nasty little cock-tease who drove a man to death.” I don’t think either you or I would have been particularly content if I’d had that embroidered on my bosom for the rest of my life.’
Ginty felt as though her blood had been poisoned and was clotting in her veins, slowing her down, making her legs ache unbearably, threatening to stop her heart beating.
‘Even my father told me I’d as good as killed Steve by the fuss I made. I’d asked for it, after all, and should’ve kept my mouth shut. Men can’t stop, you know. If a girl goes back to a chap’s room and lets him kiss her, she can’t start crying “rape” when he does what comes naturally.’ Louise’s voice had taken on a bluff male severity; now it sharpened with her own bitterness. ‘Just the sort of thing you said on the radio, Ginty.’
Ginty couldn’t take any more. As she stood up, her right trouser leg unrolled, tickling her skin. She ignored it as she walked away.
The river seemed to be in spate, which was odd in this heat. Water rushed down it, bubbling in the shallows and pouring over the few rocks Gunnar had had put in it to make it more interesting. Ginty leaned on the edge of the bridge.
Through the roaring of the river, or perhaps the roaring in her own head, she heard Louise’s voice calling her. She took a step back, then stopped, remembering the powerlessness, the terror, she’d felt in the Jeep. Nothing had happened to her at the hands of Rano’s men, and she’d been terrified. Louise had been raped. Or believed she had.
Ginty turned back, to see her coming down through the yew walk, a slim swaying figure, immaculately dressed in white against the darkness of the trees, fragile but determined. Trying to see her as a victim who needed sympathy, Ginty could only remember the years she’d spent struggling to be good enough to be loved. Now she knew that she’d been running up an escalator that was going down. Every time she might have got near the top, the downward pull had been increased. All that effort, she thought, all that misery, and I was clobbered before I started.
Louise stopped. Her hands were in her pockets, but she didn’t