15. Simply Irresistible

1988 July 30
Saturday

It’s a dangerous thrill, being outside, and still rather a novelty. And she can’t keep doing this forever: they fixed the rusted lock on the conservatory door and two weeks ago they finally replaced the loose pane in the front hallway. Today she took the back route, slipping out of the window halfway up the rear stairs and dropping onto the water tank, and while she doesn’t think anyone saw her, it’s very nearly the last escape route she has left, and every one has an expiry date.

Better make tonight count, then.

At least it gets easier every time. When she first struck out on her own, months ago now, she was so scared she could barely meet the gaze of the girl behind the bar in the Student Union, had to keep looking away, hiding her face with her fingers, in case her recent past was somehow obvious, was written on her skin — and it is, in burns and scars and in the very shape of her, but she dresses to hide the obvious marks and, as for the rest of it, she thinks she looks more or less like a girl. Enough to pass. Enough to start learning to get by with smiles and nods and bashful looks. Enough that when she ties up her hair and exposes her slender neck she’s treated like something beautiful; of such experiences a facsimile of confidence is born.

It’s her ninth time out of the house, and she’s a seasoned explorer now. She smiles at a couple of girls and they greet her in kind, easing the extant remnants of her anxiety. It’s exciting to be normal, and it’s all good practise for the day she finally follows through on the promises she makes herself, takes up the handful of stolen coins and paper money she’s hidden away, and leaves, never to return.

A light breeze picks up as she passes the old Chemistry building and she laughs, wants to dance with the wind, and so she does: she skips, spins, lets it billow out her sleeves and play with her hair, and when the brief burst of energy it granted her fades she leans for a moment against the wall, breathes it in, fills herself with it, relishes it, delights in the grassy odour it’s picked up from the mown college green and the damp edge it’s skimmed off the lake. It feels alive; nothing like the perfume-clogged haze of the dining hall, which primes her for humiliation and degradation and cigarettes stubbed out on her back; nothing like the stale and bitter air of the bedrooms, which invades her dreams and tastes of uncountable nights spent underground, carrying in its stulted grip the bloody remnants of every wound inflicted upon her.

She’s supposed to be serving drinks tonight — waiting on those old bitches and trying not to choke on their stink, accepting from them without complaint any vice they might choose to indulge upon her body — but the last time she got out she found a flyer and for the whole week she’s thought about nothing but the party by the lake. Music! Dancing! Girls drink for free! She’s not invited, she’s not a student, she’s not even a woman, but for one evening she can play at being all three, for a while.

The lakeside promenade doesn’t belong to the university and doesn’t share its character. It reminds her instead of the places she grew up, all of which came into her life aged and shabby and growing more decrepit every year; bricks crumbling dusty into the weeds at the edge of her childhood playground. Iron posts driven into cobblestones and strung together with chain follow the riverbank to an overgrown car park and a squat little building, remnant of a gentlemen’s club that closed down in the early seventies and which these days is held together more by dirt than mortar. It is, by virtue of being the last plot of land in the area that hasn’t been lavished with money and inflicted with architecture, undeniably the coolest place around.

Music and raised voices drift towards her as she descends.

Someone’s rigged up a gadget that broadcasts the signal from a tape deck out through a portable radio, and she passes a car as she enters the promenade, tuned in and bellowing through its open doors a song she doesn’t recognise. Dotted here and there are other cars, and between them they surround the makeshift dancefloor with music. There’s a bar set up against the outside wall of the gentlemen’s club, and she pushes through a throng of drinkers to get there, borrowing the swagger and confidence she’s seen in the best of the real girls, and waves to catch the attention of one of the men handing out bottles.

So many people!

She wanted to wear a dress for this, but the box of scavenged outfits they’ve spent the last year carefully assembling had none that fit, so she’s doing her best in a denim skirt and a cream top with loose sleeves and a scoop neck that sits wide on her shoulders and makes her breasts look fantastic.

That’s what Val used to say, anyway, in the moments they stole together. If she could see her now…

So many men!

Back at the house they regularly throw her at men and she’s tried to enjoy it, she really has, and she’s gotten pretty good at faking it, but here, where her choice actually matters, she turns away three guys in the first ten minutes, and stops disguising her irritation after the second one. All she wants is to have a drink and listen to music and pretend to be someone she’s explicitly forbidden from becoming; how hard is that to understand? So when the fourth guy comes strolling up she’s ready to yell at him, to take out the last four years on him, but before she can, a girl, walking over with a ready-made sneer, takes the sleeve of his shirt between two delicate fingers and tells him in no uncertain terms to piss off.

He protests.

“She’s not interested, mate!” the girl says, making shooing motions.

He leaves them alone and she smiles, nervous.

“I’m right, though, aren’t I?” the girl says, turning back to her. “You weren’t interested, yeah?”

She shakes her head.

“Good. Right. I’m Anita.” Anita presents a brusque hand. “Call me Annie, though. Everyone does.”

She swallows, tenses up her throat, and hopes like hell that Val’s illicit midnight voice lessons aren’t about to let her down. “Hi, Annie,” she says, and takes the girl’s hand.

Annie cocks her head, waiting, grinning. “Isn’t this the part where you introduce yourself?”

“Usually!”

“But you’re not going to, are you?”

“I shouldn’t,” she says. There’s no way to tell Annie that she has only one name, that it ceased to describe her long ago, and that she hasn’t yet had the courage to choose something new.

“Hah! A girl with a bit of mystery to her; fantastic!”

They’re still holding hands, and Annie does something that causes her to lose her grip, and then grabs her by the wrist instead, the better to pull her away from her ineffective hiding spot. She tenses, almost tries to shake her off, but all Annie wants to do is drag her out onto the promenade; she follows, revelling in the thrill of granting consent, of not fighting the hand on her. Annie turns halfway, walks backwards, looks her up and down with a half-smile that makes her chest tight, and then laughs as the song ends and a new track thumps against the cobblestones.

“I love this one!” Annie shouts, releasing her hand and toasting her with a beer, lips playfully lingering around the rim of the bottle. “It’s so cheesy!”

“I don’t know it!” she admits. She doesn’t know anything much.

“It’s Robert Palmer! It’s new!”

She shrugs, laughing, and drains her own beer to the line She’s anything but typical. Discarding the bottle on the grass at the edge of the promenade, she skips back to Annie who greets her with a wicked grin and a hand on her skirt.

Simply irresistible, the song goes, and she takes the cue, leaning in for the kiss Annie is obviously inviting, and Annie reciprocates, pressing soft against her and nipping lightly at her lip. A group of onlooking men whoop and whistle at them, probably thinking it’s a show meant for them, but Annie’s tongue in her mouth, Annie’s hand on her hip and Annie’s low moans confirm to her that it’s anything but.

It’s the first kiss she’s chosen in her life.

The lyric She’s so fine, there’s no telling where the money went makes her laugh, makes her giggle hysterically against Annie’s lips, because if there’s one thing that’s been made explicit to her it’s exactly where the money went: when she woke up, almost two years ago, in pain from all corners of her body and with dressings cocooning her face, they told her she was beautiful and they made sure she understood just how much her beauty cost, what each part of her altered body was worth and how much money each donor had contributed, and where once that knowledge made her feel like a possession, now she throws it to the wind with the glee of someone who is, for tonight, free.

 

2019 November 9
Saturday

When someone’s washing out they lock all the doors that connect to the cells and they keep it dark. It’s tradition, and like many traditions its origins are a little stupid: fifteen years ago, when she was still finding her way, still writing the new rules, a fuse blew on the night of their first failure, blacking out the whole cell wing. And you have to honour traditions in a place like this, no matter how silly, or you’ll eventually lose your mind.

These days, they leave one light on for the condemned man.

The cell wing is completely different now: minimally comfortable with a bed and a toilet in each room, and the girls have been instructed, in all cases but the most severe, to escort the residents to the bathroom every two or three days, to shower. It was rebuilt along with the rest of the underground, a process that took years and required some complicated juggling to keep operating during the disruption, but every ounce of effort expended to wipe Grandmother’s scars from the walls was worth it.

She might have done it with her nails, gouged them into illegibility herself, if it would have helped.

The years since have changed the place as much again. The walls have new marks now, new scars, relics from a new regime that is, she hopes, cruel only when it has to be.

The shudder of glass reminds her why she’s here and she quickens her step, comes face to face with Declan, leaning against the door of his cell, kicking it idly, illuminated ugly by the single light.

“Who the fuck’re you?” he says.

“I’m here to tell you how it ends,” she says.

 

2004 August 8
Sunday

It’s difficult, coming back, walking amongst these buildings again, assaulted by memories. But she’s older now, more experienced, less easily shaken; and she came in via the new entrance by the lake, the one that leads her through the parts of the university that have changed the most, the one that backs onto the new lecture theatre complex that students nicknamed the Anthill, the one that was built over the demolished remnants of an old gentlemen’s club and a decaying promenade where she once kissed a beautiful girl.

Like all good things back then, it didn’t last.

Her sponsor caught up with her in the end. Frankie — short for Frances or Francesca or something; she doesn’t actually know, and the one time she asked she got a ringed fist in her mouth for her impertinence — yanked her out of Anita’s arms just as the evening was winding down and dragged her away to the edge of the promenade, forcing her to wave Anita away, to act as if Frankie was just a friend saying hi, and not someone likely to lock her underground for a month to teach her a lesson.

“David! Such a surprise to see you away from home.”

“That’s not my name.”

“Funny, because I’ve got your birth certificate, and guess what it says on it?”

“What do you want?”

Frankie leaned in, imitated with impish glee the closeness she’d been enjoying with Annie just moments before, and whispered, “To remind you of what you are, of course!”

“And what am I?”

“You’re mine, David. Mine, until I say otherwise.”

“I could scream!” she’d hissed back, full of foolish defiance but tired of being touched and used and claimed and never getting to have a body or a moment that was truly her own. “I could shout out for Annie to save me from the pervert molesting me!”

“Oh, David,” Frankie whispered. “David, David, David.” Frankie’s hands tightened around her hips, fingers digging in. “You don’t want to do that. Because if you do—” Frankie tugs at the fabric, “—I’ll pull down your skirt and show them all, including Annie, which of us is the pervert and which is the innocent girl.”

They could have bulldozed the place twice and it wouldn’t have been enough.

She takes her time walking the university grounds, calming herself. She’s dressed as she prefers these days: loose trousers, a light jacket over a cami, low heels, hair up. Subtle makeup. When she left she had to learn how to dress, style her hair and make herself up almost from scratch, like a teen would. It was hard, and humiliating in its own way.

She walks with real confidence now; of all the things she had to learn, later in her life than most, that was by far the hardest.

But she’s still a little shaken by the approach to Dorley Hall.

It’s insultingly unchanged, wearing the years in nothing more than a few extra vines, a handful of cracked flagstones, and double-glazing in the entryway. It remains six storeys of brick monstrosity, mostly empty, a fake finishing-school-within-a-school, an aristocratic wart on an already unpleasantly upper-class university. It backs onto the forest behind and wears the tree cover like a cloak, under which it hides its worst excesses.

The entryway is held open, a concession to the August heat, and as she strides up the steps she carefully doesn’t look down, doesn’t let her eyes stray to the spot in the corner where she and Val hugged on Val’s last night, gripping each other with the fear and the rapture of those who will never meet again.

Grief never quite fades; it lingers in the spaces it was first forged, and she can’t afford, today of all days, to be weak. She dismisses the memory. Dismisses them all. All she needs is the hatred.

Deep breath.

The kitchen doors slam open in front of her and a pleasure she thinks she’ll never forget blooms in her belly when, toast slipping from hands and glasses spilling their contents across the table, Grandmother and her assorted cronies look up and face the beginning of the end of the easy lives they’ve enjoyed.

Frankie, at the far end of the table, contorts her face with familiar disgust.

Grandmother recovers first. “David!” she says, gathering all her wizened bonhomie. “Where have you been?”

The name doesn’t hurt any more, and as a barb it’s pathetic: first on the list of things she expected the old woman to say. No originality to her cruelty.

She takes two quick steps over to the table, glares at one of Grandmother’s underlings until she consents to get the hell out of her way, and drops a folder, open at the appropriate page, onto the table. At the top of the facing document her name is spelled out in bold: BEATRICE QUINN.

“I’ll thank you to call me my name,” Bea says, “in my house.”

 

2019 November 9
Saturday

Grandmother left scars everywhere, not just on the walls of the Hall, and her other legacies have been much harder to live with, impossible to cover with concrete. But even those fade with time: Bea hasn’t felt the need to hide her back from her lovers for years, and Maria, who’s always been sensitive, started wearing short-sleeved tops a few years ago — and even a swimsuit, once or twice, in Saints’ expensively equipped swimming pool.

Scars fade; memories remain, and mingle with the outraged boy she left behind in the cell, screaming her name.

Bea’s second gin of the evening finds a home alongside the first.

“If you’re going to drink,” Maria says, from the doorway, “can’t you at least use a glass? It’s more dignified.”

Bea hadn’t noticed the door open. Too absorbed in her own worries; a pattern, lately.

“What’s wrong with my mug?” she says. She doesn’t pay much attention to the mugs, unless one of them has a particularly good joke on it. She certainly didn’t think to look at what was printed on this one when she grabbed it from the kitchen on her way up. She’s not even sure who buys them, and in her more fanciful moments might believe that no-one does, that a house this large and this old just acquires them, like spiders.

Maria raises an eyebrow, steps over to the desk and picks it up. Holds it out wordlessly; it’s printed with the text, Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age, or an aunt what’s in her basement.

Bea laughs, at least partly because of Maria’s silent exasperation, and her reward is for her senior sponsor to swipe the bottle off her desk and return it to the liquor cabinet in the corner.

“Hey, I needed that!” Bea says, half-serious.

“Really? How was it helping, exactly?”

“It was telling me that the fate I just promised that boy is justified.”

Maria pours herself a single shot of vodka and necks it. “He’s not a boy, Auntie. He’s a man. And a rapist. And unrepentant.” She wipes the glass with a cloth and sets it back on the cabinet. “Cruel, violent, and a bad influence on the little squad he assembled down there. The world is better off without him.”

“And who are we to decide that, Maria?”

“You’d rather someone else took responsibility for him? I don’t see a queue forming. Aaron called them the ‘mean girls’, by the way. I’m beginning to think everyone in that bloody basement is getting a little too self-aware.”

“Mean girls? Like the movie?”

“Yes, but I don’t think he or any of them have seen it. Correction: I’m pretty sure Stef has, actually. The kid keeps locking eyes with me every time Aaron says it.” She frowns. “I suppose now we get to find out what the other two do without their Regina George.”

“Oh, Maria,” Bea says, scolding. It’s a little early to make jokes about Declan’s absence.

“That’s me,” Maria says, walking back to the desk and gently pushing Bea’s chair back on its castors. “Come here, Auntie.”

There’s little choice but to accept the hug, and so she does, sinking into the girl’s arms. No-one here knows her like Maria; no-one else can spot when the responsibility is getting to her. Admittedly, no-one else tends to see her drinking gin out of a novelty mug.

“My beautiful Maria,” she says. “Are you okay? Has your supervisor stopped bothering you? Because you know you don’t have to bother with his nonsense; we can increase your salary here—”

“Auntie,” Maria says sharply, and punctuates her rebuke with a squeeze to Bea’s ribs, “I’m fine. Just take the hug? You don’t have to be in charge all the time, you know.”

“Fine,” Bea says, hiding her smile and closing her eyes.

Eventually Maria releases her, sits her down, and relaxes into the chair on the other side of the desk with a stretch and a moan of discharged discomfort. A long day for both of them. Bea glances at her phone and is startled to realise it’s not even eight in the evening yet; considerably more day still to go. A cereal bar and a bottle of water appear suddenly on the desk in front of her, and when she looks up Maria is dropping her bag onto the floor and swigging from a bottle of her own.

Bea looks at the cereal bar. It has cartoon hazelnuts with faces and full sets of limbs on it.

“Eat,” Maria says.

“You’re sponsoring me,” Bea says. “Stop sponsoring me.”

“As soon as you stop wallowing in guilt.”

Bea unwraps the cereal bar and takes a bite. “Never,” she says, through a mouthful of oats and nuts.

 

2004 August 8
Sunday

Grandmother reacts predictably: “What is the meaning of this, David?” But Bea, distracted, can’t stop staring at the thick age lines around her mouth, as if the woman spent so long contorting herself with contempt that her sneer etched itself permanently into her face. “David!” Grandmother repeats, banging her mug on the table.

“I told you to use my name.”

“Fine, ‘Beatrice’. What is the meaning of this?”

Bea taps a finger on the folder, laid open on the table, sheafed papers spilling out. “The meaning, I think you’ll find, is spelled out quite clearly on pages one through six of this document.”

“You can’t take the Hall away from me!” Grandmother snaps, but undermines herself by leaning forward and snatching up the folder. She reads, flips through, and laughs bitterly. “This is signed in a fake name; it can’t be valid.”

“My identity is watertight, I assure you.”

“Nevertheless,” Grandmother says, leafing through the papers, “Dorley Hall is mine.”

“Actually, it’s the property of the Lambert family — or it was.”

“David, you can’t—”

“Beatrice,” Bea snaps, opening a folder of copies and turning it around so her name, printed clearly atop the first page, is visible to everyone in the kitchen, including the line of girls standing nervous and confused against the far wall. “My name is Beatrice. It’s right there. You can read, can’t you, Grandmother?”

One of the girls snorts and quickly covers her mouth.

“Beatrice,” Grandmother says, “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, but there is no way that any of this is legal. This… stunt serves nothing more than to deliver you back into our hands. A mistake, by the way, in case you were wondering.” She raises a thumb and middle finger, ready to snap, a gesture that would, sixteen years ago, wordlessly require sponsors to step forward and restrain Bea, to prepare her for punishment, but Bea’s ready for this, and drops a hand into her bag as soon as Frankie stands. Holds it there, just for a second, to make them worry about what kind of weapon she might have, and takes advantage of their hesitation to step back, out of reach.

She pulls out her phone, snaps it open with her little finger, and hits the speed dial. When it picks up she says two words: “Your turn.”

Frankie, awkward and half out of her chair, looks at Grandmother, waiting for instruction, and Grandmother irritably waves a hand, sitting her down again. Wise: if Bea’s bluffing, if she’s alone, then another few minutes indulging her won’t make a difference, and if Bea’s not alone, if she did indeed summon a friend with her brief phone call, then it’s best for Grandmother if she doesn’t start a fight she might lose. The thought of being taken is enough to revive the butterflies in Bea’s belly, though, and she wonders briefly what the cells look like these days; remembers waking for the first time locked up in one, naked, confused, castrated.

She distracts herself by inspecting the line of girls standing ready against the wall, all but one of them confused and nervous. The one she’s looking for stands at the end, an East Asian girl, trying and failing to hide her smirk. She also keeps her arms folded, in an attempt to hide the marks. Some of them look recent and quite deep, and Bea wishes for a moment that she’d come today for a massacre and not a coup.

“Maria,” Bea says.

Maria nods, takes a smart step forward, and crosses the room to stand next to Bea. She’s as beautiful as Bea imagined she would be — for all her perversions, Grandmother has a good eye and good surgeons — but the malicious, satisfied gleam in her eyes is a welcome surprise. Bea knows a fighter when she sees one.

“Nic!” Grandmother gasps. “How dare you step out of line!”

“My name is Maria, you sadistic old hag.”

“Fantasies,” Grandmother dismisses.

“That’s not your legal name, though, is it?” Frankie says, sounding confused, as if recalling Bea’s frequent excursions outside and wondering if Maria somehow left and filed a deed poll without anyone finding out.

“It’s at least as legal as anything else under this roof,” Maria says, and gives her the finger. Bea, inside her own head, gets out the pom poms and starts cheering.

“You’ll regret your insubordination, young man,” Grandmother says.

“No, she won’t,” Bea says, and waves her folder. “You don’t run this place any more.” Bea turns, dismissing Grandmother, and says to Maria, “It’s good to finally put a face to the voice. How have they been treating you?”

“Appallingly,” Maria says. One of the girls can’t hold in her giggle, and wilts for a moment when Frankie glares at her, only to start up again straight away. How quickly authority crumbles when challenged! “But that’s nothing new.”

“And your friends?”

Maria makes a show of surveying the girls. If Bea’s information is accurate, most of them are younger than Maria; they certainly seem less confident. Several bear marks from recent physical punishments. Every one of them looks as if all their holidays have come at once. “They hurt us,” Maria says, “over and over. But they don’t break us.” She looks at Grandmother for the first time: blank, disinterested, as if examining an insect. “And they never will.”

“You will have a month in the dark for this, Nic!” Grandmother spits.

“I don’t think so.”

“What have you been doing, Nic?” Frankie says.

“I’ve been passing information to Beatrice, obviously. That wasn’t clear?”

“What kind of information?” Grandmother asks, noticeably paling.

Bea extracts another folder from her bag. This one is considerably thicker, and makes a satisfying thump when she drops it on the table. “Everything we could possibly need,” she says.

 

2019 November 9
Saturday

“How did it go with Declan?” Maria asks. They’ve settled into something less like an intervention and more like one of their regular briefings, and Maria’s leaning back in her chair, having wheeled it over to the side of the desk, kicked off her boots and put her feet up next to Bea’s laptop, daring her to push her off, daring her to make her behave like an employee or a subordinate. But Maria, like Bea, has been at Dorley for more years than either of them care to count, and formality doesn’t last. The other girls who stayed on when Bea took over have all gone, one by one — Barbara, the old nurse, straying farther away every year and finally taking off for Canada, being the last — but Maria’s the oldest, the most tied to this place: she was, in a sense, born here; she found her family here; she’ll probably die here. Just like Bea.

And so they sit together in Bea’s flat, connected by their experiences as much as their long association. They both live in the house of their abusers, still flinch occasionally at the ghosts around each corner, still find themselves incapable of leaving.

Bea finishes her bottle of water. “The way it always goes,” she says. “He gave me the big blah blah, the strong-man-weak-woman speech; I chastised him for throwing away all his last chances; he called me a bitch. I told him when he could expect his last meal under our roof, and I left him to it. Last I heard from him, he was yelling and kicking the glass again.”

“When do they come to pick him up?”

“Monday. You’ll keep everyone out of the cell corridor until then?”

“Of course.”

“He was making a lot of noise,” Bea presses. “It could be distressing to the others if they know he’s still—”

“I’ll look after it, Auntie.”

Of course she will. Bea couldn’t ask for anyone better in her corner. Even though she’s cheeky. Even though she’s sometimes almost too practical for her own good. Even though she’s the reason everyone calls her ‘Aunt Bea’, a nickname she found distasteful at first — Grandmother’s familial affectations were calculated to manipulate and disgust in equal measure, and the last thing Bea wanted to adopt for herself — but eventually grew to tolerate. You accept the name your family gives you.

“How’s Pippa?” Bea asks.

“She’s fine. More than fine: she’s ecstatic. And a little smug, actually. She’s been convinced since Stef got here that she’d been assigned a nice boy by mistake — with all of us constantly trying to persuade her otherwise — so she’s delighted to find out that she was very nearly right all along. She told me to ‘suck it’, although she was smiling at the time, so I didn’t take too much offence. She’s, uh, planning to shout at you, though.”

“Oh? And what have I done?”

“You should hear it in her own words. Hold on a second.” Maria fumes with her phone for a moment. “I have the recording right here.”

“Recording?”

“I suggested that this might not be the best night to pick a fight with you, but she still wanted to say her piece, so.” She waggles her recalcitrant phone: evidence.

“Because of Declan? Am I so fragile?”

“In the face of Pippa with a bellyful of fire? Fragility isn’t the issue; ductility might be. Ah, here we are. I hate the file system on these things…”

She sets the phone down on the table and taps a button on the screen. Pippa’s voice, tinny over the speakers, says, “Aunt Bea. It’s Pippa. Hi. Um.” The pause is just long enough to spark a smile from both of them. “Look. I’m grateful you’re letting Stef stay. I don’t know what I would have done if you’d, uh, done something drastic, but I’m glad I don’t have to find out.” Bea raises an eyebrow at Maria, who just grins at her. “But,” Pippa’s voice continues, “Aunt Bea, stay out of her way, would you?”

“Are you sure you want to say it quite like that?” Maria’s voice says, on the recording.

“Absolutely sure, Maria! Aunt Bea, I want you to know, whenever you listen to this: I’m honestly disgusted with you! Stef’s had enough to deal with, what with losing Melissa, and coming here, and the nurse, and the thing with the showers, and— and me, let’s not forget me and all the awful things I said to her and all the awful things I let happen to her, and the last thing she needed was for you to start implying— no, actually, outright stating that she’s somehow responsible for all that stuff! That she should feel guilty for giving me a bad time! That’s not just cruel, Aunt Bea — although it is, it’s really cruel — that’s setting us up against each other, and— and— Why? Why would you—?”

Maria taps the phone again and Pippa goes silent. “That goes on for a while.”

“I get the gist,” Bea says. “You’re frowning at me, Maria.”

“The thing with Stef? Not your finest hour, Auntie.”

“No,” Bea says, pushing back in her chair and examining the ceiling, so she doesn’t have to face Maria’s glare for a moment. “No, probably not.” ‘The problem of Stef’, which just a few hours ago had seemed so urgent, is now clear to her: the girl wants help with her transition and has a vested interest in keeping the secret of Dorley, for Melissa’s sake if no-one else’s; they help her, she helps them. Such an easy equation.

Bea’s got too used to manipulating people. Show her someone simple, someone with straightforward and clearly stated needs, and she looks for the lies.

“Sod it,” she says, sitting forward. “Pippa gets what she wants. She gets full autonomy and I’ll stay out of the way. As long as they both stick to the rules, I won’t stick my oar in. Sound good?” Maria nods. “Good. You’ll keep an eye on them both, yes?”

“Of course.”

“We’re not going to tell Melissa, I imagine.”

“I don’t think it would be a good idea,” Maria says. “Not yet, anyway. She was always very attached to Stef. Talked about him— about her all the time. When we tell her we have the girl who was basically her little brother down in our basement, being coerced into listening to Taylor Swift medleys, I want it to be in a controlled environment. Like defusing a bomb. Maybe with Stef in the room, or at least on WhatsApp or something, so Melissa can see she’s okay, that she wants to be here.”

“Strange to have someone using she pronouns after a month. I suppose we’ll have to get used to a lot of firsts, before the year is out.” Bea laughs. “Our first walk-in!”

“You should know,” Maria says, “Stef prefers he for now. Hence my… pronoun confusion.”

“Oh?”

“It’s this thing about not wanting to be a she until— God, I don’t even understand it, and I’ve seen the video where she explained it to Pippa. Guilt, self-loathing, et cetera. Pippa’s already decided she’s having none of it: something about showing the girl it’s okay to be a girl.”

“Good,” Bea says. “You’ve got to nip that sort of silliness in the bud, early.”

“Have a lot of experience with trans women, do you?”

“Enough to know that if you give them an inch they’ll steal ten years from themselves.”

“Well, Pippa’s got a real bug up her arse about it, so I think she probably agrees with you.” Maria brushes the back of her hand against her forehead, as if warding against a headache. “She had a whole thing, up on the roof. I told her I’d defer to her judgement. It’s almost like she’s trying to beat Vicky’s record for the fastest self-claimed she pronoun.” She giggles and says, in a voice that suggests Bea should know what on earth she’s talking about, “Awesome Girls Done Quick.”

“I’m sure that’s very funny, but I don’t get the reference.”

“It’s a speedrunning joke.”

“Speed-running? As in, exercise?”

Maria sighs. “Where’s Christine when you need her?”

The worst thing, for Bea, about surrounding herself with millennials and zoomers is that occasionally they’ll be outright incomprehensible and then act as if she’s terribly old and out of touch when she surreptitiously has to Google new terminology under the table. “Actually,” she says, putting the joke out of her mind, “what about Christine? What did she say?”

“She’s thinking about it.”

“Do you think she’ll accept?”

“She likes the idea of you paying her.”

“Did you tell her the money comes from a trust?”

“No,” Maria says. “I think it helps her to imagine it being dragged reluctantly from your pockets every month. I think the image will encourage her to accept.”

Bea rolls her eyes. “When did I become such an ogre, Maria?”

“Somewhere around 2005, Auntie.”

“Brat.”

“Harridan,” Maria says, and sticks out her tongue.

“Tell me,” Bea says, “why didn’t we think of the letter thing before?”

“The letter thing?”

“The idea Christine cooked up with Stef, to pretend the boy — the girl, in this case — has run off to soul-search and make a nuisance of themselves in another country.”

Maria shrugs. “We can’t exactly use it often. Once every few years at most. More men fall drunkenly into freezing lakes than spontaneously go backpacking.”

“Still. Put it in the handbook. Save it for the ones with close familial relationships.”

“A lever,” Maria says, nodding. “It’s a risky manoeuvre, though. You’ve always said, and it’s been borne out by my observations, that they have to be completely removed from their old support networks. That the complete isolation is part of what makes it work.”

She has a way of repeating Bea’s own instructions back to her, phrased to make them both sound like terrible people. “I think,” Bea says slowly, “that hope can be similarly powerful. For the right boy. From time to time.”

“Fair enough. Oh, I thought we’d do the all-hands tomorrow, at lunch? Get the second-year girls to cook, lure everyone in with the promise of free food and wine, and hit them with the news just as they’re getting sleepy.”

“You’re planning to tell the second years, too?”

“Yes? I wasn’t going to send them away from a meal they just cooked.”

“You don’t think that will erode their trust in us?” Bea says. “We locked up a genuine trans girl, closeted but fully aware and actively exploiting our facilities, and it took us a month to notice.”

Maria counts on her fingers. “One, they’ll find out sooner or later, and it’s better that it comes from us and not rumour. Two, don’t forget, the kids come in knowing more gender terminology than had even been coined back in my day; we just tell them she’s both an egg and an idiot and they’ll understand. And, three, it was Christine who brought her in and Christine who helped her hide from us, and the second years love Christine.”

“They do?” Bea laughs. “They beat us to it, then.”

“You ever wonder if you’re getting old and slow?” Maria says.

“No,” Bea says, with such certainty that she forces a smirk out of Maria; admittedly not a terribly difficult thing to do. “I’m as canny and alert as I ever was.”

“Of course.”

“Why do the second years love Christine so much?”

“Remember the thing with Faye’s sponsor and her inappropriate rage-outs?” Maria prompts. “It was Christine who calmed Faye down and Christine who brought the matter to you.”

“Of course,” Bea remembers. “Maybe I am getting old.”

“Hell, Christine even roped Paige into getting Faye all dressed up. Arguably helped actualise Faye’s gender.”

“Why isn’t she a sponsor already?”

Maria snorts. “She’d never do it. Getting her to run our tech is a hard enough sell.”

“True. And it’s been good to see her becoming close with Paige again. Roping her into things, sitting together at breakfast.”

“Close? Auntie, they’re together.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Maria says, sounding wistful. “Paige has been besotted with her since, I don’t know, their first year, maybe, and never stopped. But the difference this time is that Paige has learned how to ask for what she needs, and Christine’s learned how to listen.”

Year by year, the girls become new. Find themselves and find love. It makes it all worth it. “That’s genuinely wonderful,” Bea says.

“It’s disgustingly sweet, is what it is,” Maria says, and Bea is reminded that Maria’s been stepping out in the evenings herself, discreetly, but not so quietly that an old busybody like Bea wouldn’t notice, eventually.

“And what about you?” Bea asks. “I’ve seen you with Edy, lately; how is she?”

Maria, as always, deflects: “Disgustingly sweet.”

 

2004 August 8
Sunday

Bea’s had a long time to perfect her womanhood, to understand it, to claim it and inhabit it, but Elle Lambert has a way of making her feel like an ingenue. Her heels announce her presence, crisply clicking on the flagstones outside, and by the time she reaches the kitchen doors, Barb — another one of Maria’s circle, who adopted the rather old-fashioned name Barbara with an enthusiasm entirely familiar to Bea — has already stepped smartly forward to let her in, as if she’s royalty, and the abused girls of Dorley her retinue. Elle steps elegantly through the door and smiles at the girl, inspiring in Barb a blush Bea thinks could probably cook an egg, and hands her a shopping bag.

“Gifts for the girls,” Elle says to her, and Barb rushes back to the women standing by the wall, who look equal parts delighted and scandalised.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Barb says, as the other girls rifle through and pull out tops, skirts, shoes. She performs an exaggerated curtsey, which earns her a glare from Frankie that no-one bar Bea seems to notice.

“Please call me Elle.”

Elle steps forward and deposits a portable hard drive on the kitchen table. She’s short — shorter than Bea and the younger Dorley graduates; shorter even than Grandmother and most of her people, too — but she commands the room effortlessly, with a manner that belies her twenty-five years and which Bea, despite being over a decade her senior, has been trying to emulate since the day they met. She’s pale and subtly made-up, and her rich, thick waves of dark hair break on the shoulders of a suit worth enough, in Bea’s judgement, to feed a family of four for a year. The only woman in the room who doesn’t look dowdy in comparison is Maria, who has today assembled with unexpected skill an elegant outfit from the meagre scraps allowed the girls; Grandmother’s coterie, already given to a particularly English variety of rural tweed anti-fashion, look positively antique. “Elle Lambert,” she continues, addressing the room. “My grandmother is — was — guardian of the family holdings and, with her death, that responsibility has passed to me. My first action upon reviewing the portfolio was to note that this house, Dorley Hall, has been severely underutilised, and the decision was taken to transfer the deeds to the newly formed Dorley Hall Foundation, of which Beatrice Quinn is sole trustee and administrator; though she will, naturally, be free to hire her own staff.”

“Maria, Barbara,” Bea says, on cue, “welcome aboard.”

“Thank you, Beatrice,” Maria says.

“Um, yes, thank you, Beatrice,” Barb says, after a nudge from Maria.

“I’m not leaving,” Grandmother says. “I have assurances from—”

Elle forces Grandmother back into silence by clearing her throat. “Yes, yes,” she says, “we know all about your assurances. Only one remains; insufficient for you to retain control, but enough to permit you to retire with… some dignity.”

“That’s not—”

“I represent sixty-four percent of your current — excuse me; my mistake — your former funding, which as of this morning is no longer available to you. Account access revoked, credit lines withdrawn, et cetera, et cetera. And the majority of your other benefactors were most displeased upon reviewing portions of the information vouchsafed to us by our contacts.” Elle leans on the table, palms flat. “You’ve been very selective with the truth, haven’t you, Dorothy?”

Grandmother shrugs. “Say what you came here to say.”

“Only the Smyth-Farrow grant is still available to you,” Elle says, standing upright again, “for the time being. Per Mr Smyth-Farrow’s request, you will be allowed to retain your flat on the premises and act as consultant during the… administrative transfer. Your influence over day-to-day operations will be limited, but your valuable experience may, of course, prove useful to the new custodian.”

Elle’s dismissive hand-wave is intended to suggest that this constitutes a triviality of business that she, the money, does not care about. In fact, the Smyth-Farrow grant represents their one failure. Had they convinced the old bastard to withdraw his support then Grandmother would be out on her ear tomorrow, but their intelligence going in had been incomplete: they’d thought him another clueless aristocrat, but the man knew everything that went on under Dorley; he even played them videos of his favourite cruelties, and looked upon Bea with a hunger that made her want to climb out of her skin. He dismissed their legal threats — “I’m too old to care; by the time you scale the mountains my lawyers will erect in front of you, I’ll already be in the ground.” — and he’s too well-protected for Elle’s other measures to stand a chance. In the end, the best they could do was tie up his grant renewal with red tape, and thus restrict his lease of the flat on the first floor to the two years remaining. He still complained, and vowed to fight them: Grandmother’s shipped him many playthings over the decades, and much gratitude is owed.

Bea wondered aloud to Elle, when they were safely away from his mansion, how many of her sisters were buried there.

Elle brushes her palms together, as if removing a few specks of bothersome dust. “The Lambert family and our considerable holdings will be providing the Dorley Hall Foundation with a yearly grant, to be administrated by Beatrice Quinn and her staff. Dorley Hall will be operated as a dormitory for exceptional but disadvantaged young women who might otherwise miss their chance at an education at this first-rate college. Your people will leave; ours will replace them. You will be free, Dorothy, to sulk in your flat for the two years left on its lease. And that—” she smiles pleasantly at Grandmother, “—is that.”

Grandmother glares back, fists stiffening on the table, and for a moment Bea wonders if she’s going to go for it, to throw everyone she has at them — which would be interesting, considering the four armed men from Elle’s organisation who’ve been waiting outside for such an eventuality — but instead she stretches her fingers, unclenches her jaw, and says with a growl, “You can’t do this. I don’t care how much money you control. I know people.”

“I am people,” Elle says. “And not only do I know everyone you know, I’m one of them; you’re just a wannabe. A tweed torturer carrying out petty brutality in your sad little castle. They respect me, whereas even the few who accept your tawdry products laugh at you behind your back. I also—” she points at the hard drive, which has been sitting on the table like an unexploded bomb, “—have that. Review it, and the paper summary provided by Beatrice, at your leisure. We don’t just have your names and your financial records, Dorothy; we have photographs, we have video, we have your phone conversations and your text messages and your emails. We even have some of the bones, Dorothy. We have enough evidence to put you away for life. To splash your face across the front page of every newspaper worldwide. And we know some well-connected families who are grieving mysterious disappearances and who would likely be minded to ensure your stay in prison, after your international humiliation, is a short one. And that goes for all of you.” She sweeps a hand around the kitchen, taking in the rapt glares of a half-dozen sponsors. “There’s not a one of you whose life we cannot comprehensively destroy.”

“Then why don’t you?” one of them snaps. Bea recognises the nurse, Karen, from Maria’s files, and forces herself not to shudder: she’s read all about that woman’s proclivities; she seems a worthy successor to the sadistic medical examiner from Bea’s time.

“Because that is our bargain,” Elle says. “You’re free to leave, to return to your lives — or to squat in your flat on the premises until the lease expires, if that is what you prefer — and if you never breathe a word about Dorley Hall to anyone outside these walls you will all die old and free. But if just one of you makes a move against us…” She taps a nail on the hard drive.

“You still haven’t explained why,” Grandmother says.

Elle steps back, places herself by Bea’s side. Brushes the back of her hand against Bea’s: encouragement.

“Because we’re reforming Dorley,” Bea says. “Under your hand, it’s a charnel house. You torture men because you find it erotically appealing. You change them, humiliate them, exercise your vile pleasures on their bodies and then, when you’re done, you spit them out.”

“You deserved it!” Frankie hisses. “You’re a criminal!”

“I was a shoplifter. And the criminality was just an excuse. An excuse to waste people. But we have a different idea. You hurt men for fun.” She looks from Elle to Maria and then back to Grandmother. “We’re going to save them.”

 

2019 November 9
Saturday

They never meet in Almsworth. A deliberate choice: it’s best no-one knows they’re still in such intimate contact. No-one except Maria, who handed Bea her bag and told her, with every appearance of innocence, to have fun. So it’s always a hotel, in a different city every time, and because Elle is Elle, it’s always an expensive hotel.

Dorley Hall is, more than anything else, comfortable, wearing its relative wealth in fittings and fixtures that have become worn and scuffed but never actually broken, despite years and years of often tempestuous new girls using, abusing, and sometimes colliding with them; stepping into Elle’s life for a night is an amusing reminder that other people — a select few other people, granted — are never far from someone who will call them ‘ma’am’ without smirking.

There’s a Lambert family estate somewhere in the country, and various apartments in various cities worldwide, but Elle lives mostly out of hotels, which means Bea, when she wants to see her, has to call for a car, and be delivered. At least it’s relatively close tonight; sometimes there’s plane travel involved.

“Beatrice!” Elle calls, standing up from her seat at the bar and beckoning her over. She’s wearing a loose jacket over something dark and layered, which billows interestingly around her body when she moves and reveals itself to be in two pieces when she raises her arms for a hug and exposes her taut belly. “It’s been too long!”

Bea accepts the embrace when it comes, breathes in her scent and the memories it provokes, and leans back for a kiss, cheek-to-cheek. “Elle,” she says. “I’ve missed you.”

“What you missed,” Elle says, sitting back down and making hand gestures at the bartender, which almost immediately result in fresh drinks being deposited, “is my fortieth. I’m certain I invited you.”

“Apologies. There’s been so much going on—”

“Relax.” Elle places a calming hand on Bea’s, and leaves it there, fingers knotting carefully around fingers. “I’m teasing. It was boring. You would have hated it.”

“You’re probably right,” Bea says, sampling her drink with the hand Elle hasn’t trapped. “I would quite like to make it up to you, anyway, if you’ll let me.”

“I look forward to it,” Elle says, releasing her. “Have you eaten?”

“Nothing especially satisfying.”

“After dinner, then.”

A few minutes later and they’re being seated in what is undoubtedly the hotel’s costliest and most exclusive restaurant. Elle orders a bottle of wine for the table with the detached but knowledgeable air of someone who does this all the time, and Bea looks over the menu for something light, preferably with mushrooms.

“So,” Elle says, when they are alone in their candlelit corner, “how’s life in Almsworth, tall girl capital of Great Britain?”

“Quiet, until recently.”

“And how are the girls?”

“Unruly, as always. How’s your girl?”

“Self-denying, as always.”

Bea smiles. “God,” she says, “look at you.”

Elle places a manicured hand on her chest. “Look at me? What did I do?”

“Aged better than I have.”

“Ridiculous. Those little lines around your eyes rather suit you.”

“That’s very kind of you to say. How’s the world of high finance and international intrigue?”

“Dreadfully dull. And rather annoying. At least in your line of work, when someone gets a smart mouth on them you can, you know…” Elle makes a snip-snip gesture.

“We usually reserve that for the ones whose attitude problem goes somewhat beyond rudeness,” Bea says, grinning.

The waiter returns, pours wine, takes orders, collects menus, and glides away, leaving them alone once more and giving Bea the opportunity to drink in both wine and moment. Elle really has aged magnificently: if Bea didn’t know better she’d swear she looks the same at forty as at twenty-five, and she’s retained her aptitude for rendering Bea fumbling and adolescent in her presence.

“Tell me about this girl,” Elle says. “The one who just showed up one day and got your whole house in a frenzy.”

“Oh, yes,” Bea says, “Stef. The subject of my every other conversation, lately.” She gives her the short version, which takes long enough for her stuffed mushrooms to arrive and partially disappear. Throughout the tale Elle looks on, fascinated, indulgent, offering a comment here and there but content, for the most part, to let Bea talk. She asks to see a picture; Bea has one, from Stef’s first lunch downstairs. The girl is enduring Aaron Holt, and looking skeptically at a veggie burger, eyebrows raised on a forehead that will require, despite her insistence otherwise, minimal alteration. Even in such unflattering lighting, her potential is clear.

“They’re friends now, actually,” Bea says, when Elle hands the phone back. “Her and the little flasher boy.”

“I can see why. He’s sort of cute.”

“She’s trying to reform him.”

“You think she’ll succeed?”

“No,” Bea says, and rolls her eyes at the face Elle pulls. “I have to say that, don’t I? If she manages it, it calls our whole operation into question.”

“Not from just one boy,” Elle says.

“As long as she stops at just one,” Bea mutters.

Elle chews thoughtfully on the last bite of her omelette. “I’d like to meet her. Not now, of course. I’m sure she’s got enough on her plate without me barging in on her just to satisfy my… professional curiosity. But, later, when she’s ready, I’d like to meet her. And do send me a photo every so often, won’t you? You know how I love seeing them bloom.”

They revert to small talk: upkeep of the Hall, Saints gossip, complaints about some Duke or Lord or something — Elle doesn’t know which and doesn’t care — who thinks Elle can cure him of bachelorhood. Neither of them raise the elephant in the room until dessert:

“I’m concerned about Grandmother,” Bea says. “I think she’s going to try something.”

Elle nods. “I concur.”

“Thank you for dealing with the nurse, by the way.”

“Beyond my pleasure,” Elle says. “People like her give me indigestion.”

“I think she was a shot across the bows,” Bea says. Elle raises her eyebrows, so Bea continues, “I think Grandmother persuaded the nurse to disregard her obligations. A little reminder: I’m still out here, and I’m still watching you. I imagine Karen was only too eager to agree; I bet she jumped at the chance to have a bit of old-time fun with the residents. I suspect Grandmother either downplayed the potential consequences for her, or overestimated her own hand.”

“Do you think Dorothy will leave it at that, when she’s made to understand what happened to the nurse? I’d love to believe she’ll go gentle into that good night, but you know her better than I.”

“Honestly? I don’t know.” Bea chews thoughtfully on her cheesecake; it is distractingly excellent. “If she’s dying, we can’t rule out her pulling the ripcord and taking us down with her. Flooding the internet with information, or sending it to the papers. And you know what the climate in this country is like right now; having what we do exposed? It’d be TERF Christmas, and she knows it. That bloody Frost woman’ll burst a blood vessel from excitement, and going to prison will be traumatic enough without having to see her smugly pontificating on breakfast TV.”

“Exposing you — us — exposes all of her associates, too,” Elle says.

“She can’t care for them that much, judging by the stunt with the nurse. I think she’d happily see them all jailed or dead or bloodily dismembered if it meant seeing us suffer, too.”

Elle nods. “I’ll put someone on it. A full investigation. She’s got to be reaching the end of her funds by now, and all her old patrons are long dead. We might even be able to— Magnificent, thank you!”

Bea manages not to be startled by the sudden waiter, and mumbles something to support Elle’s effusive praise of the food, the service, the decor and the ambience. Elle gives her a significant look and another nod, which Bea reads as confirmation that she will, in fact, have one of her mysterious people, the same people who made the nurse Karen Turner disappear, attempt a similar magic trick on Grandmother, and the subject does not come up again.

At Elle’s door — the elevator leading to the penthouse suite, naturally — Bea fights against temptation and, as always, loses. So when the doors open and Bea doesn’t step away, Elle nods, drags her by the lapel of her blouse into the lift, and presses the appropriate button with an elbow, because as soon as the doors close she needs all hands available to start removing Bea’s clothes.

Backwards they stagger into Elle’s room, Bea’s top layer already discarded, her bra already unclasped. She intercepts Elle as she reaches for her skirt, splays their fingers together and redirects her hands, pushing her upwards, using her considerable extra height to her advantage, controlling her with one hand and reaching out with the other to knock Elle’s jacket off her other shoulder, trapping her awkwardly in the fabric. Elle grins and rolls her shoulders, freeing herself from Bea’s grip and shrugging off the jacket, letting it fall where it may as they keep stepping backwards together.

The lamps are automatically lighting themselves as they move around the suite, illuminating Elle from below, sharpening her features and making her grin seem almost demonic as she takes control again, slipping hands inside Bea’s skirt and pushing it down, causing them both to trip, laughing, landing shoulder-to-shoulder on the bed in the middle of the suite.

Floor-to-ceiling windows surround them on three sides and a skylight spans half the ceiling above them, and for a moment Bea feels the old terror of being seen, of being discovered compromised and near-naked and deserving of punishment, before she realises that the building is the tallest one around, and that the only things watching them are the stars.

Elle, still mostly clothed, lunges for her, and Bea grabs her instead, runs fingers up her arms and into her top, lifts it up and over her head in one movement, and then, finally, they’re almost equal. Elle relents, kisses her quickly on the lips, and stands to drop her skirt to the ground and step out of her boots.

Bea rolls onto her back. Looks up at her, resplendent, half in lamplight and half in moonlight, and Elle matches her appreciative smile and steps back once more, the better to give Bea a view as she reaches behind herself and unhooks her bra.

The bed is in a small, stepped depression, the centrepiece of the room, so when Bea stands up from the bed and reaches forward to embrace her, to push her back and up another step, their faces are near-level, a novelty and clearly a delight to Elle, who laughs and throws arms around Bea’s neck, leaning forward across the space between them as Bea puts one leg up on the bottom step, to steady Elle and to anchor herself.

Elle’s fingers dance across Bea’s back, around her waist and across her belly, and then she pulls closer, dives her fingers into Bea’s underwear and begins slowly to massage her, assaulting her equilibrium with every slow pulse until she falls again, back onto the mattress, and Elle falls with her.

“You’re glorious, Beatrice,” Elle breathes, twitching her fingers, coaxing from Bea a moan that ends only when she kisses her.

Bea, caught in the rhythm, begins moving her hips in time, until the pressure that starts at Elle’s fingers and ends at the tip of every nerve is provided by both of them, as one, a single organism with a single purpose.

Elle kisses her again, finding her collarbone, her neck, her jaw, her chin and her mouth, and when Bea opens her eyes a memory returns, of her first kiss, back before she was free, under a different night sky, in a place that no longer exists, as a person who no longer exists, and she revels in it, exults in it, and laughs against Elle’s lips.

“Simply irresistible,” Bea whispers, a thirty-year echo, and kisses her harder still.