said in her most matter-of-fact voice. ‘He seemed so gentle that I’d always trusted him. But that night he used his strength to hold me down and force my legs apart. He raped me.’
And I came from that, Ginty thought. She should have told me. She should.
She looked at her mother and saw that she was about to say something else.
‘No,’ Ginty said. ‘Not now. I can’t take any more.’
The huge red-bound volumes of back copies of The Times were too heavy for Ginty to carry comfortably. After the weekend’s revelations, she felt like a sock plastered to the drum of a washing machine at the end of its cycle: beaten, limp, slightly ragged, and good for nothing. But even in normal times she’d have had trouble with these. They were nearly half her height.
It hadn’t helped to get back last night to read outpourings of hate in her e-mail from people who’d heard her on the radio. There had been thirty separate messages, accusing her of betrayal, cruelty, stupidity, and every kind of sexual perversion. Now, it seemed, she was a frigid cunt and a sado-masochistic bitch, as well as the incubus who’d ruined her mother’s life.
When she’d identified the right volume, she put her shoulder to the others on the same shelf to heave them upright so that she could tug out the one she wanted. She broke a nail on the four-inch strap across its spine, but managed to haul the vast leather-bound book up on to the metal table. Who needs a gym, she thought, still fighting to keep the tattered remains of her sense of humour, when they can have this?
Fluorescent lights made the library’s basement uncomfortably bright, but at least it was peaceful. No one could get at her here. The only sounds were the occasional wheeze and ping of the lift and her own breathing. Outside in the hot bustle of Piccadilly there had been revving engines and a cacophony of mobile phones and burglar alarms that had sharpened her headache so much that she’d been tempted to abort her mission and go home.
Abort. The word sent her mind lurching round the questions she’d been asking herself all night: Why didn’t she have an abortion? It was legal by then. Why did she let me go on existing if she was going to hate me so?
‘It wasn’t my fault you were raped,’ she said in her head, keeping up the imaginary conversation that had hardly stopped since she’d left Freshet. She had to provide both sides of it, but at least now she knew what she was talking about. That was a first. ‘Or that you were accused of driving your boyfriend to death.’
‘Someone has to be punished for it,’ came the answer. ‘There isn’t anyone else.’
‘There must be,’ Ginty said aloud, in her own voice.
All the way back from Freshet yesterday, and every time she’d woken in the night, she had thought of more things her mother’s story explained. But every answer led her only to more questions. And more anger.
She’d tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter that she wasn’t Gunnar Schell’s daughter. Or that her real father had been a rapist. But of course it did.
‘Don’t be melodramatic, Ginty,’ Gunnar’s voice boomed in her mind as loud and foggy as it used to sound when she was about to be car sick as a child and already miles apart from reality.
He’d have said that the only sensible way of dealing with her mother’s revelation was to ignore it and get on with her life. But Ginty had discovered that she was not as sensible as either of them had thought. Maybe it was her real father who had endowed her with the drama queen tendencies Gunnar had been so concerned to stamp out. And maybe there was more, too, that she hadn’t yet uncovered. Maybe all Gunnar’s lectures about proper behaviour and self-control had had less to do with making sure she didn’t embarrass him in public, as she’d always assumed, and more to do with ensuring that whatever her nature might drive her to commit could be counteracted by learned behaviour. Maybe the iron suit he and her mother had been forging around her true character for as long as she could remember had been to keep in something horrifying.
Oh, stop it, she told herself. You know you’re neither evil nor dangerous. Grow up.
She opened the great red-leather volume, determined to find out the truth about herself and her father – and why he’d died and whose fault it had all been. She didn’t want to do anything to the guilty, but she wanted to know who they were. Only that, she thought, could completely free her from the iron suit.
The old newspapers smelled of biscuits. As she turned the fragile pages, trying not to tear them, she let herself be distracted by the price of houses for sale in the summer of 1970. One advertisement seemed particularly astonishing, asking eleven thousand pounds for a five-bedroomed listed house with a big garden in Berkshire. Her eyes moved and caught sight of a headline on the opposite page, announcing ‘Women’s Appointments’ at the top of advertisements for secretarial posts.
‘Prehistoric,’ she muttered, surprised that even in 1970 women looking for work had been assumed to be secretaries.
Apart from the price of property and attitudes to women, there was plenty in the paper that seemed positively familiar. Mr Jonathan Aitken had offered to resign his parliamentary seat because of his involvement in a case concerning the Official Secrets Act. An international ring had been smuggling in immigrants. Brian MacArthur was writing on ‘Firms Feeling the Pinch’; Philip Howard, on London. Mr David Irving had apologized in the High Court. No evidence had been found to suggest that television caused juvenile delinquency. There was new hope for the Northern Line. Deaths on two tube lines had brought big delays. A foetus bank providing material for scientific experiment had been discovered in an NHS hospital. Fears were expressed that new big district hospitals would turn out to be white elephants.
At last she found it, in a small headline on the far right of page 3, which read ‘Undergraduate suicide at Oxford.’ The paragraph beneath, only five short lines, told her that Steven Flyford had been found hanging in his room in Christ Church. The police were not looking for anyone in connection with the death.
She lifted the pages gently, holding them by the top right-hand corner and sliding her other hand along the bottom to make sure they didn’t rip, as she searched for the report of the inquest. Occasionally there was the sharp cracking sound when the edge of one sheet did split a millimetre or two, in spite of all her care. Each time she looked round guiltily, but there was no one watching, waiting to point out her failings and the damage they might cause.
There was a photograph at the top of a column reporting on the inquest. All her instincts pushed her to reject it. Her imagination had been full of violence and men like Rano, but here was just a boy, happy and slight and quite unthreatening. Ginty remembered Doctor Murphy’s views on rape, and wished she could believe them.
‘He held me down and forced my legs apart and raped me,’ her mother had said.
This boy did that? Ginty thought, pressing down on the paper with her index finger until the blood was forced away from the nail, leaving the whole top of her finger pale yellow and dead-looking. I don’t believe it.
The photograph must have been taken on a beach somewhere. There were cliffs in the background, and the boy was only half-dressed. His hair looked wet and thick with salt. His eyes, dark like hers, looked straight at her, trusting, affectionate and easy. But, apart from the eyes, there was nothing in his face to remind her of the one she saw in the mirror every day. So where did hers come from? And her character? What was it she might turn into, if Gunnar’s training ever failed completely? She forced herself to read on.
Steven Flyford, 19, was so distressed by his relationship with his girlfriend, Virginia Callader, also 19, that he killed himself last week. Mr John Milk, whose room was beside the deceased’s, gave evidence of seeing the couple walking upstairs on the night Steven Flyford died. They had their arms around each other and at one moment stopped to kiss.
Later