Thursday 19th October
And so Jane wandered back to the house, her mother was out – probably just shopping, but it didn’t stop her wondering. She walked through the rooms touching surfaces, stroking the curtains, gliding her hand over the furniture. She inspected every room, even their bedroom where Harriet had caught them at it, the eiderdown now neatly spread over the bed. What was she doing, making some sort of record, some strange inventory of her life so far? She didn’t know. She was in some sort of a dazed state, not really consciously thinking at all. She ended up in Harriet’s room, the one at the front with the big dormer window, and she sat for a while gazing down the drive and out into the street, then she went over to the bed, pulled back the blankets, crawled inside and drew the covers right up and over her head, feeling such comfort in this dense darkness, warm and safe. She was harboured at last and she drifted off into a deep deep sleep.
She slept right through until the next morning, and only woke up as the sun began to stream into Harriet’s little room. Jane was still fully dressed and not sure of the time, she stumbled downstairs to find her mother sobbing at the table.
She asked her mother what was wrong and she told her the awful news. Jane had missed it all in her blanked-out sleep; she had slept through it all. Her father hadn’t come home last night. He had apparently left his office about eleven in the morning and simply disappeared. The police had been called because his secretary noticed that the safe in his office was ajar, and he hadn’t been in for most of the day. The safe was empty of course, and though there would have been little cash, there had been cheque-books for several accounts that were missing, and now this morning the police were going to speak to the town’s bank managers.
He had somehow managed to slip back to the house unobserved and had taken the Bentley. Jane’s mother didn’t say, but Jane could tell she knew. She knew their father only too well, all those late-night visits to his cronies – she knew deep down that he was shady, that he worked on the edges, the very dubious regions of the law. And she was really scared now, she knew the depths he was capable of, she knew that something was wrong, seriously wrong.
* * *
16 – Alone in the midst of all this chaos…
Chaos, that’s what Jane felt. A panicky sort of chaos, as if anything might happen, she just didn’t know what, and everywhere she looked she could only see that in the midst of it all she, Jane, was alone. It just seemed as if there was nothing to hang onto anymore. In the space of two days her whole life had been thrown into chaos. Just two days before she had been part of a family, ‘Okay’ Jane thought ‘We weren’t that close, but we sort of knew who we were, how the jigsaw fitted together and now all the pieces arre either scattered or missing.’ She had no idea who any of them were anymore. The family she knew, or thought she knew, had changed in two days; her mother had had a secret lover all the years of Jane’s life, and it was her Uncle Ted of all people, so now even the surety of who her closest relations were was shattered as well; her father had suddenly run off, and probably with a lot of other people’s money too; her sister, who (only Jane knew) was a secret junkie, had gone back to university, and was so disillusioned with them all that Jane really doubted she would ever return.
And worst of all Jane really had no idea who she was anymore. Jane Wilkinson, aged sixteen, and she really had no idea who she was anymore. Surely these people who called themselves her parents couldn’t have done these stupid things, could they? Who were they, that they were capable of such treachery? And it felt just like treachery too. It wasn’t as if they were unintelligent, her father was really clever; that was why he was a solicitor, so why had he been so stupid as to steal other people’s money, or to run away and leave the impression that he had? How would he ever be looked up to again after this; what could have possessed him? Was it some sort of sexual jealousy he felt for Jane’s mother, or was he just seeking attention for himself, or was he simply at his wits’ end and could see no future at all by remaining?
Which said precious little about Harriet and her of course, but she was only now beginning to fully realise how little the girls had really counted in their parent’s eyes. That was why her mother’s protestations about how much she cared about the girls and hadn’t wanted to hurt them, simply didn’t ring true; if she had cared about them half as much as she insisted she would have never put their whole happiness at such risk. She would have put them before her own desires, before her own selfishness, surely. She must have realised what all this would do to everyone if she were ever discovered. And they would have to be discovered one day, wouldn’t they? But maybe she had been doing it so long that she (they) thought they were impregnable, that they would just carry on carrying on until they were old and feeble. ‘Who knows what went on in that pretty little head of hers, how she squared her sexual desires for Ted with our family life together, how she boxed it all up so neatly.’ reasoned Jane. Even now, with her crying in front of her, Jane wasn’t sure if her mother were just crying for herself all along.