Paradise End Page 3

  ‘Ah there you are, Carly,’ says Mrs Litvinov. ‘Hope you’re feeling energetic. We’re going to work today.’

  If anyone else tells me they’re going to make me work, I slump down and feel bored, but I don’t with Mrs Litvinov. She makes me want to click and clack and bebop a do ba till my rhythms are perfect and I can do a hundred wings on a roll. She’s got to be the best teacher in the universe. (If ever I had to fill in a questionnaire on ‘Who do you admire most in the world?’ there’d be no problem for me. Mrs Litvinov would up there at Number One.)

  That’s how it ought to be on a Saturday morning. That’s how it used to be, till the day when Lauren began in Miss Tideswell’s class.

  ‘Mum,’ starts Lauren, while I’m rushing through my breakfast, ‘can I go in the front seat, seeing it’s my first time at tap and I’m really nervous?’

  ‘In the front seat?’ says Mum. She’s still in her dressing gown and her hair’s a bird’s nest (that last perm was a mistake, in my view). ‘Oh, you mean in the car? Look, darling, I know I said I’d take you, but I just can’t. You’ll have to go on the bus with Carly. If I don’t get the washing done this morning there won’t be a thing in this house for anyone to wear come Monday morning.’

  ‘But you said!’ whines Lauren. ‘You promised!’

  Dad looks up from behind his paper.

  ‘The road’s up anyway between here and Torminster,’ he says. ‘The queues will be backing right into the village. We’ve had to put someone on duty to sort out the traffic’

  I didn’t explain this before, but my dad’s a policeman. It’s not the sort of thing you say straight off. Some people can be really funny about it.

  ‘That’s definitely it then,’ says Mum. ‘I’m not spending the whole of Saturday morning stuck in a jam. You and Carly will just have to go on your own.’

  I shut my eyes. I can’t trust myself to speak. Dad looks at his watch.

  ‘I’d give yourselves an extra half hour at least if you don’t want to be late.’ He waggles his eyebrows at Lauren. ‘Go on, fairy princess. Get your act together and buzz off. And don’t forget your magic wand.’

  Then he starts munching on another piece of toast.

  I usually really love my dad. I mean, he’s good-looking, tall, with great muscles and a neat haircut, and he even looks quite hunky in his uniform, but when he calls Lauren his fairy princess, I want to kick his shins.

  Lauren gives me a look. I can see she doesn’t want to go by herself with me any more than I want to go with her. I have a micro-second flashback to my first tap class and how I had this mad urge to hide behind Mum, and an unusual feeling comes over me. It could be that I feel a sort of something like sympathy.

  ‘Dadd-ee,’ wheedles Lauren, ‘couldn’t you take us? Please? Ple-ease?’

  ‘Can’t,’ says Dad, swilling his toast down with a slurp of tea. ‘On duty. Got to be out Sturbridge way by half-past ten. You’ll be all right. Twinkle-toes here will look after you.’

  I scowl at him. Calling Lauren his fairy princess is bad enough, but calling me Twinkle-toes is the end.

  So there it was. That was it. It was Lauren and me, on our own, going to tap, on the bus.

  And for once, would you believe it, Lauren decided to be nice. She fetched her new tap shoes, wriggled into her skinny denim jacket, got her money off Mum and followed me out of the front door without a single wisecrack.

  There was only one lapse. To get to the bus stop, we had to go up to Paradise End and turn left down Church Lane. I couldn’t help slowing down a bit, looking out for Tia and remembering how I’d gone in through those gates a couple of days earlier, when Lauren says, in a really loud voice, ‘That’s where she lives then, is it, your friend, Tia? In there?’

  ‘You know it is, Sneaky-ears,’ I say. ‘You were listening at the keyhole, remember?’

  ‘Can’t see her,’ says Lauren, pretending to peer in through the gates.

  ‘Well, you won’t, will you?’ I say, grabbing her by the sleeve and pulling her on. ‘She’s inside, waiting for her private tennis coach to come. She has her tennis lessons on a Saturday morning. Just her and him. He’s an Olympic champion.’

  Which was all my imagination, of course, but it might have been true.

  It shut Lauren up anyway. She was as good as gold after that. She hardly said a word as we sat on the bus and it crawled slowly down the main road to Torminster. And when we got to the Wellesley Centre, in the middle of Torminster High Street, she actually took hold of my hand and held it, and I actually held hers back. I even squeezed it as we walked up the steps. And I didn’t leave her in the front hall to find her own way, which I’d decided I was going to do, but took her over to Miss Tides-well’s class in the annexe, and told Miss Tideswell she was my little sister, and she’d come to start with the beginners.

  You won’t believe this, but when I went to the door and looked back, and saw her standing by herself in the middle of the room, looking as if she wanted to die, I even blew her a kiss.

  I must be going soft in the head.

  Someone up there must have clocked that blown kiss, because I had my reward as soon as the lesson was over. Mrs Litvinov asked me stay behind.

  ‘That was good, Carly,’ she said, looking up from the notebook she’d been writing in. ‘You’ve come on a mile since last term. I can tell you’ve been practising. I’m putting you down for the Black Shoes Display at the Performing Arts Festival.’

  I had to stop myself squeaking out loud with triumph.

  ‘There’ll only be the three of you doing solo numbers,’ Mrs Litvinov went on. ‘Lizzie and Simone are doing hip-hop routines, quite straightforward, but I want you to work on a retro-jazz dance. Modern steps, lots of energy, plenty of technique, but in a classical style. Not easy, but we’ve got till the end of June, so there are two months to go. It means not missing a single Saturday morning for the rest of this term. There’ll be extra practices on Wednesday evenings starting in June. Think you can commit to that?’

  ‘Yes.’ I was grinning like a clown from ear to ear.

  ‘Good. There’ll be your costume to sort out, of course. I’ll have a note for you to take home next week. The display’s going to be at the town hall. Wellesley won two medals last year. We’re going to beat that this time, and you’re one of my best hopes.’

  Don’t worry, Mrs Litvinov, I won’t let you down, I said, but only in my head, because it would have sounded nerdy out loud.

  Lauren was waiting for me outside. I could see at a glance that she’d got her bounce back and was her irritating cocky self all over again.

  ‘Miss Tideswell says I’ve got excellent posture.’ She was skipping along the edge of the kerbstone, close up to the cars, the way Mum always tells her she shouldn’t. I wasn’t going to bother. ‘She says I’m promising. Did she say you were promising on your very first day?’

  ‘Look, there’s our bus.’ I grabbed her arm and made her run for it. I wasn’t going to let Lauren spoil my triumph.

  On the way home from the bus stop, when we passed Paradise End, I slowed down a bit, and looked in through the gates, but there was no sign of Tia. After we’d turned down into our street though, we heard the roar of a powerful engine, and a silver sports car swept past us. I looked back, and saw the gates of Paradise End swing slowly open and then shut behind it. It was too late then to see who was in the car, except that a man was driving it, a young man. I caught a glimpse of a headful of swept-back tawny hair, and saw a pair of black gloves on the steering wheel.

  4

  It was pouring all the next day, on the Sunday, and the following weekend Dad took us all down to the coast to visit his mum and his two old aunties. During the weekdays, of course, I was at school.

  I don’t know why, but I didn’t tell anyone at school about Tia. They wouldn’t have believed me anyway, or they’d have sent me up for being a snob.

  Normally, on my way to and from school, I don’t pass Paradise End. I turn left instead
of right out of our house and wait at the bottom of the road for one of my friends’ mums, who gives us a lift into Torminster on her way to work. But on the second Friday, on my way home, I went the long way round, on a kind of loop, and found myself outside the big gates again.

  If you’re there, why don’t you show yourself ? I thought crossly, slowing down and looking in through the bars.

  And she did. It was as if she’d heard me. The front door of the great house opened, and she came flying down the long drive, gravel shooting out from under her feet.

  She stopped at the gate. She didn’t say anything for a moment and I could see she felt embarrassed, as if she was scared she’d looked too keen.

  ‘Hi,’ she said at last, blinking nervously. ‘I saw you from the window upstairs. Where have you been?’

  ‘Where do you think? At school.’

  I must have sounded sharper than I meant to, because her eager smile dropped away.

  ‘Yes, of course. I just meant last weekend.’

  ‘Doing stuff. I’ve got a lot on.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘Of course.’

  I eased my bag off my shoulder and dropped it on the ground. It landed with a clunk.

  ‘Weighs a ton,’ I said, flexing my shoulders.

  ‘Have you got mounds of homework then?’ She sounded sympathetic.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Not that much. I did some in break.’

  She was looking sideways and back to me again and I could tell she was just trying to think of something to say.

  ‘Where’s your school? Is it near here?’ she said at last.

  ‘Not that far. In Torminster. One of my friends’ mums gives me a lift in the mornings. I get the bus back. Where’s yours?’

  ‘Wiltshire.’

  ‘Wiltshire? That’s miles away! Must take you all day to get there and back.’

  ‘Only three hours. The traffic’s not too bad on Sunday night.’

  ‘You what? You go to school on Sunday?’ Something clicked in my mind. ‘Oh, I see. It’s a boarding school. Must be ripping fun. Midnight feasts and giggles in the dorm.’

  I don’t know why I was being so horrible and sarcastic. Trying to keep my end up, I suppose.

  Tia flushed and bit her lip.

  ‘It’s not like that,’ she said. ‘Not a bit. Anyway, I only board weekly. I’m here at the weekends. And I hate my school. I hate everyone in it.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  I didn’t know what else to say. She didn’t either. Instead, she pressed the button on the inside of the pillar, and the gates began to swing open.

  ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Come up to my bedroom. I’ve got this . . .’

  She stopped, and I could see she was trying to think of something that would tempt me, something she had that I wouldn’t be able to resist seeing. She caught my eye and realized I’d sussed her, so she started giggling, and I laughed too and heaved my bag up off the ground.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Can’t stay long though. Mum nearly killed me last time. Lauren kept telling her I’d been done in by a perv.’

  ‘Who’s Lauren?’ She was leading the way up the drive, past the silver Ferrari I’d seen before, which was pulled up outside one of the garages on the left.

  ‘You don’t want to know. My little sister. The world’s biggest pain in the bum. Have you got any? Brothers or sisters I mean?’

  ‘A brother.’

  ‘Older or younger?’

  ‘Younger. Much younger.’

  We were nearly at the front door. I felt nervous all of a sudden, as if the rest of Tia’s family was lying in wait inside, ready to look at me scornfully and tell Tia off for bringing such a scruff to the house.

  ‘My sister drives me crazy’ I said, for something to say. ‘She’s the worst thing in my life. Doesn’t yours, your brother I mean, make you totally mad sometimes?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tia, taking the big brass ring on the front door and twisting it. ‘I’ve never met him. He lives in Buenos Aires with my father.’

  The massive white front door swung open on silent hinges and there I was, following Tia inside.

  You know how you make up ideas about places before you go to them? Like when you’re on the way to your holiday, and you have a picture in your head of what your room’s going to be like in the hotel or the holiday cottage or whatever, and what sort of beach there’ll be. And the minute you arrive and see the real thing, the place you’d imagined bursts like a soap bubble, and you can’t ever see it in your mind again.

  I’d spent years and years imagining the inside of Paradise End, but the real thing was grander, older and much, much more beautiful. More everything, in fact. The main difference, of course, the thing I’d never even thought of, was that there’d be another person, other people, in the house that I’d always dreamed was mine.

  We were standing in a great square hall. A wide staircase with delicately carved banisters swept up out of it at the back of the hall to the left, and curved round to become a gallery, that ran above the far end of the hall. There were a couple of enormous rugs on the polished wooden floor, and in the middle stood a table of glowing, polished wood, that was at least four times the size of our kitchen table at home. A bowl of roses, a scarf, a pair of black-leather gloves and a set of keys lay on it. You could have fitted the whole ground floor of our house into that hall easily, with half of moaning Mavis’s as well.

  I didn’t notice everything that first time, like the heavy deep-yellow curtains at the long windows on each side of the front door, or the pictures in curly gold frames that hung on the wood-panelled walls, or the grandfather clock that stood at the bottom of the stairs, marking off the seconds with deep clunking ticks.

  Tia was standing still and looking at me. I couldn’t think what to say to her, so I went across to the door on the right, which was standing open, and looked into the room.

  It was far, far bigger than any sitting room I’d ever been in before, but what I noticed first was the golden colour, the glow on everything, as if the room had caught hold of a sunset and trapped it there. One end was curved, with the three long windows, which I’d so often stared at from the other side of the front gate, set into the bay. More windows ran along the side. Two of them weren’t windows at all, but glass doors, and they led out on to the terrace that Tia and I had walked along that first time. There was a huge fireplace at the far end, with a mirror above it that reached right up to the ceiling, and two big blue-and-white China vases on the mantelpiece, with scarlet snakes or dragons or something painted on them. Sofas and armchairs and tables and lamps were dotted around, standing on something pale that looked more like a tapestry than a real carpet. The curtains were thick and heavy, the cushions were fat and soft, the wood was polished and shiny and the paint smelt fresh. It looked like a picture from a magazine.

  ‘This is the drawing room,’ said Tia, behind me. She sounded bored. ‘I hardly ever come in here. Come and see my room.’

  But I was already crossing the hall to the other side, and looking in through the opposite door.

  This room was the same shape as the drawing room, with the three windows in the bay at the far end, and four more down the long side. It was a dining room, with a table that stretched forever, a table that you could have seated our whole class at school round, running down the middle of the room, with antique chairs set all round it. The wood shone as brightly as newly fallen chestnuts.

  In spite of all the windows, it was darker in here. There was a red-patterned carpet on the floor, and dark-red wallpaper. You hardly noticed the wallpaper, though, because of the big portraits hanging everywhere, all round the room. It was like being in a museum or an art gallery, with people in ancient costumes staring down at you.

  ‘Who’s this lot then?’ I said, looking round at the pictures. Tia’s silence was beginning to rattle me. ‘Your uncles and aunties, don’t tell me.’

  ‘They’re Mimi’s,’ said Tia. ‘Her family’
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  ‘Who’s Mimi?’

  ‘Oh, sorry. It’s what I call my mother. I used to call her Mummy, but she didn’t like it. It made her feel old. She thinks Mimi sounds younger – like a sister. She really wanted me to call her Dixie, like everyone else does, but I wouldn’t. Come on, let’s go up to my room.’

  She seemed to be dying to get out of there, and kept looking at me nervously, as if she was scared that all this grandeur would put me off her. Actually, her nervousness was making me feel better because I’d started to get edgy. It was all too much. Too strange. Totally over the top.

  I pointed to the biggest picture. It was of a guy in a black suit, looking pleased with himself. I guessed he was a Victorian. The artist had painted a window beside him and outside it you could see an old-fashioned town with factory chimneys rising up out of it. He’d even painted in the smoke.

  ‘That was Mimi’s great-grandfather,’ Tia said. ‘He bought this house. He lived here.’

  ‘Can’t have done.’ I wasn’t really thinking about what I was saying. I just wanted to keep my end up, I suppose. ‘A mad old miser used to live here. Everyone knows that. He wandered around in the buff with his willy hanging out.’

  ‘Oh, there you are, darling,’ said a voice from the door. ‘And who on earth is this?’

  My heart jumped so high it practically shot up into my mouth. I was prickling all over with embarrassment. It had been so quiet I hadn’t even thought that anyone else could be in the house. I’d assumed we were on our own.

  A woman was standing in the doorway. The first thing I noticed was the waft of perfume drifting out from her like an invisible cloud. Then I saw that she was tall and amazingly slim, and that her hair, pale and silky, fell in a soft sheet to her shoulders. I can’t remember what she was wearing – clinging blue trousers, I think, and a top that shone as she moved. I thought she was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen, like someone from a magazine, but fragile too, as if a gust of wind could have bent her over.