Unhallowed Ground Read Free

too late. You could come back to London with us, put this place on the market and start searching for something more practical.’
    Georgie, chewing on her fingernails, watched the hypnotically floating mushrooms, allowing the steam to caress her face, enjoying the hot smell of the stew, taking comfort from the warmth and the feeling of something well made with love. Since she’d been down here her cooking had developed a wetter, more mixed consistency… so much free fruit, so many vegetables… it was easier to use only one pot because of the cramped kitchen. Home-grown potatoes from the farm and a home-made apple pie with fresh cream to follow.
    Yet everything Isla and Suzie said made sense, while every argument she put forward fell apart full of holes. And if she was trying to prove something by standing out and being so stubborn, then for God’s sake what was it?
    She had been so frightened, so intimidated by everything. But most of all by the way she had, in a few short months, been so easily destroyed, shattered, all confidence gone, the confidence she had built up over forty-two years, melted away in a moment. Until she felt, as she lay in bed night after night weeping, that all the time there’d been nobody there, that Georgina Jefferson was a ‘let’s pretend’ person from childhood, a face miming with nobody behind it. As unsubstantial as soap worn to a frightening slither, gargling off down the plughole.
    Was she so naive as to believe that by enduring life on her own for a while, a hermit existence with only Lola for company, she would find herself again? Could she grow large and firm again as simply as that?
    I will lay me down in green pastures. She wanted her soul restoreth.
    Oh, I am a strong and sensible person…
    Well, this was what she returned to her friends in the sitting room and told them. And they said, tipsily, that they did understand her motives, they saw how easily a person could be demoralized and torn apart under such attack from every quarter.
    ‘Even people I’d trusted as friends turned their backs on me,’ she wailed, tormented by an alien self-pity. ‘ Can you honestly imagine what that’s like? Ringing people up—oh yes, feeling bad enough about ringing people up—so damn needy, hands in a sweat, heart aching, so desperately wanting reassurance, and being told by quiet, polite voices that they weren’t in, they’ll ring you back, they were away when you knew they were not.’ She played with Lola’s soft ears as a child might play with a comforter. The dog opened one eye. It was soft and brown and liquid with love. ‘And all the while, to add to the horror, the newspapers crucify you.’
    ‘It could have happened to any one of us.’
    ‘ Don’t tell me that one more time! I can’t bear hearing that! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know it could have happened to anyone, but it didn’t, Suzie, did it, it bloody well happened to me! ’
    And Georgie wanted to shout that, above all, she needed time on her own to mourn for the child with the wise grey eyes who had ended up in a grainy frame with shaggy hair on the front pages of all the papers. The child that had depended on her for its life. The child she had, through her own ineptitude, betrayed and allowed to die. But such a protest would have been unnecessary because Isla and Suzie knew that very well, and yes, as social workers, it could have happened to either of them, and it would happen, again and again as it seems to, every few years, and every time it would be equally terrible…
    ‘What should I have done,’ had become such a wizened old question that she had stopped asking it, even of herself. If only she could have taken time back. But what was the use of any of this? She had known there was violence at that wretched flat, it oozed out through that cold yellow front door with the thin metal letter box through which she had stuffed note after note, time after time, through which her lips had called so often.