Savage Atonement

Once outside she tried to tug herself free, anger lending a faint colour to her otherwise pale face.

‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’ she hissed angrily at her captor. ‘I have no intention of going anywhere with you or saying anything to you.…’

‘Well, at least that’s an improvement on the ice-cold maiden I saw back in that office. It’s a relief to know you’re not entirely subhuman, Laurel.’

‘Is it?’ Her wrist was caught in his free hand, the intimate contact of his flesh against hers shocking her into silence. No man had touched her since… since.… She made a small whimper of protest in the back of her throat, her eyes giving away more than she knew.

‘Don’t touch me!’ She got the words out between clenched teeth, surprised to see how white he had gone.

‘You don’t like being touched, do you, Laurel?’ he asked with quiet emphasis, reading his answer in the sudden tightening of her features. ‘Dear God! I’ve been looking for you for five years, do you know that?’

Her wooden expression seemed to defeat him and she felt a momentary flash of triumph that she had been able to reduce him to a loss of words; he who had always been so clever with words, made them do his bidding, made them destroy her life.

‘Laurel, we must talk.…’

‘I don’t want to talk to you!’

Someone jostled them accidentally, and he released her momentarily. It was enough. Deftly twisting away from him, Laurel ran, mingling with the crowds, allowing herself to be swept away with them, her heart thudding like thunder as she waited for him to catch up with her.

A taxi slid to a halt in front of her and disgorged its passenger. Without hesitation, Laurel leapt in, giving the driver her address, and as they pulled away from the kerb she had a fleeting glimpse of Oliver Savage’s angry and disbelieving face

CHAPTER TWO

SHE couldn’t eat, couldn’t even drink the cup of tea she had made for herself, and she paced her small flat restlessly before coming to a decision. Like a sleepwalker she went into her bedroom and opened the wardrobe, lifting the cardboard box out of the bottom. They had given her this when her mother died. She had been at the convent then and Sister Theresa had wanted to burn them, but the social worker had murmured the magic words ‘mental therapy’ and she had been allowed to keep the box. She had looked at them again and again in those first few months, reading and re-reading until her head was full of the words.

Now she was going to look at them again.

Her hands shook as she lifted first the album and then the newspaper cuttings from the box. Yellowed and slightly faded now, they were all clipped together in date order. Drawing a shuddering breath, Laurel looked at the first one.

‘Teenage girl accuses stepfather of attempted rape,’ screamed the headline.

There was a blurred, grainy photograph of her at fifteen, her long russet hair windswept and untidy. Rachel Hartford, the social worker in charge of her case, was holding her hand. Poor Rachel, she had been as bitter about the outcome as Laurel herself and had given up her job.

Beneath the first cutting were others, gutter-press cuttings, with stories made up of the gleanings of whatever the reporters had been able to learn from their neighbours.

Then there was the court case. Laurel started to tremble as she remembered the ordeal, the cuttings disregarded on the floor. That should have been the worst she had to endure. Rachel had been disturbed when she learned who the defence counsel was, he had a formidable reputation and was extremely expensive. Neither of them had known where her stepfather found the money to afford such a lawyer—at least, not then; and Laurel had gone straight from his clever mauling almost literally into the arms of Oliver Savage, who had skilfully soothed and questioned her. So skilfully that she hadn’t even realised that he was a reporter until his article appeared. And he didn’t write for the gutter press; his articles carried weight, and what he had written about her was something she couldn’t endure to contemplate even now.

For her own sake the social services had sent her to a children’s home after the hearing; her mother was already seriously ill and unable to look after her.

She glanced at the small bundle of cuttings clasped in her hand, the past hovering over her like a dark shadow.

‘Don’t shut it away,’ the psychiatrist who had seen her at the children’s home had told her, ‘talk about it—work it out of your system.’

But because she had always been over-sensitive, because of her self-loathing and hatred of everything that had happened, she had locked it all away, becoming withdrawn and repressed.

If only she had known who Jonathan Graves was—but she hadn’t, and now it was too late to stop the memories crowding in on her, taking over her mind, forcing her to remember.…

She had been thirteen when her grandparents died, just on the threshold of womanhood. She had missed them dreadfully. To supplement the family income her mother had decided to take in lodgers; the big house near the Heath was too large and expensive for the two of them, and yet both were loath to leave it.

Their first lodger had been a teacher. Laurel had liked her. She taught at a large comprehensive school and Laurel had listened wide-eyed to her stories about it, comparing it with the small convent school she attended.

Miss Sayers had got another job and had left, and for a while Laurel had watched her mother’s face grow pinched and worried. But then one day she had returned home from school to find her mother smiling at a strange man sitting on the kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea.

Laurel had disliked him on sight and had shrunk away when her mother introduced him as their new lodger.

He was some sort of salesman and seemed to work odd hours, because whenever Laurel returned home from school she invariably found him in the kitchen with her mother. This had always been their special shared part of the day, on which even her grandparents did not intrude, and Laurel had resented his presence. She disliked him altogether. He was only an inch or so taller than her mother, but powerfully built, and slightly balding. Laurel didn’t like the way he watched her mother, or the way his eyes rested on her sometimes, as though he was aware of the feminine budding of her body beneath her school uniform. Always acutely sensitive, her defence system sprang into action whenever he was in the vicinity, the tiny hairs on her body prickling with dislike.

She longed to tell her mother how she felt, but somehow a gulf had sprung up between them. Her mother seemed to like Bill Trenchard. Her cheeks and eyes glowed whenever she was talking to him, and one afternoon when Laurel came home from school a little early, as she walked into the kitchen they seemed to spring apart, guilt written large in her mother’s eyes, satisfaction in Bill Trenchard’s.

His air of satisfaction made Laurel feel sick. He had been kissing her mother; she sensed it with all the outraged instinct of her own growing sexuality.

She was just beginning to learn about sex at school from her friends; Laurel had always been slow to make friends and had no ‘best friend’ in whom she could confide her growing dislike of their lodger. All she could do was to acknowledge in her own mind that to think of her pretty mother and ‘that man’—as she mentally thought of him—doing those things she had heard about at school made her feel physically ill.

She hadn’t known then that it was a normal part of growing up to feel a certain amount of disbelief and revulsion towards the sexual act on first learning about it, and she had remained locked in a world of misery, hating herself for loathing a man her mother so obviously liked and yet unable to do a thing about it.

At night she prayed fervently that he would be transferred elsewhere, that he would leave; and then, as though to punish her, her mother announced that she and Bill Trenchard were to marry.

‘Please understand, darling,’ she appealed, seeing the disbelief and dismay in Laurel’s eyes. ‘I’ve been alone so long, and Bill is such fun. We’ll be like a real family,’ she promised. ‘Bill adores you.… I know it will seem strange at first, because you’ve never had a father.…’

‘Bill isn’t my father,’ Laurel said bitterly, just as the door opened and he walked in.

For a moment she thought he was going to strike her, he looked so furious, and she cringed back instinctively, hoping against hope that her mother would change her mind.

As she shot out of the kitchen she heard Bill Trenchard comforting her mother. ‘Don’t worry about it, she’ll come round. You know what they’re like at that age. She probably fancied me herself.…’

Fancied him! Alone in her bedroom, Laurel shuddered with loathing, hot tears of misery sliding down her cheeks. How could her mother marry a man like that? How could she bear the thought of him touching her, of…? Like a nervous colt her mind skittered away. Bill was not a particularly fastidious man. She had seen him coming from the bathroom, draped merely in a towel. His torso was thickset and covered in coarse dark hair, as were his back and arms. The sight of his partially naked body revolted her, and she couldn’t understand how her mother could endure to look at it, never mind touch it.

They were married within the month—a quiet register office ceremony. Laurel had had a new outfit for the occasion. Her mother and Bill had taken her shopping. She had hated it. Bill had chosen her dress, a brief mini which exposed the fine length of her legs. It was far shorter than anything she had worn before, and she had felt acutely selfconscious in it. She had worn her hair down; and it was only later, looking at the photographs with the eyes of an adult, that she had realised how provocative she had looked; the tight, short dress with its scooped neckline; her hair, long and thickly unruly, but at thirteen she hadn’t been aware of such things and she had merely known that her new stepfather was looking at her in a way she didn’t like.

After the ceremony Bill had taken them all out for a meal. They had had wine, and Laurel had a vivid memory of her mother looking flushed and happy. If only she could have stayed like that!

They weren’t going away on honeymoon, but her mother had arranged for Laurel to spend the night with one of their neighbours. When she came downstairs with her case, after their return to the house, Laurel was surprised to find her stepfather alone in the kitchen.

‘Your mother’s just gone upstairs,’ Bill informed her. His face was darkly flushed and when he came near her Laurel could smell the wine on his breath, sour and unpleasant.

‘Well, now that you’re my little girl, how about a kiss for your new dad?’

Laurel froze and stared uncomprehendingly up at him. She had kissed her grandparents, of course, and her mother, but some deep protective instinct warned her that kissing them was different from kissing Bill Trenchard.

‘Still sulking, are we?’ Bill demanded aggressively when she remained mute. ‘Well, don’t think I don’t know why! Wishing you were getting a little of what’s in store for your ma, is that it?’

Not really understanding what he was saying, but knowing that she didn’t like the tone of his voice, nor the look in his eyes, Laurel started to move away, but Bill moved faster, trapping her against the sink.

‘No need to get jealous, there’s plenty to go round,’ he told her thickly. His hands were large and sprinkled with dark hairs, and Laurel shuddered as they closed on her shoulders, his breath hot and sour against her face.

‘Now.…’ He was breathing heavily, as he brought his face down to hers. ‘How about a kiss for your new dad?’

Laurel longed to scream, but she was too frightened. If only her mother would return! She hated the way Bill was touching her; the red moistness of his mouth. If it touched her own she would be sick, she knew it.

She heard her mother outside, and shook with relief as Bill released her, grabbing her case and rushing out of the room before her mother could see her fear.

All that night she barely slept. How could her mother marry a man like that? She longed for someone to confide in; someone to talk to, and she bitterly regretted the death of her grandparents. Slow painful tears coursed down her cheeks as she contemplated her future.

Some instinct made her say nothing at school about her hatred of her new stepfather, or the unwanted intimacies he forced upon her. Sometimes it was nothing more than touching her skin, other times it was worse, disguised as ‘fooling about’ so that her mother looked on fondly, while she was forced endure his hand on her body as he ‘tickled’ her—but at least he had never tried to repeat that horrid kiss.

Laurel thought he was doing it to punish her because she wouldn’t accept him as her father, and to placate him and stop him from continuing to touch her she started to call him ‘Dad’. But it didn’t seem to have any effect, and she was always glad when his job took him away—sometimes for days at a time.

Then he lost his job. He had been married to her mother for six months when it happened, and she seemed to grow pale and worried overnight.

There wasn’t enough money now for her to stay on at the convent school, she explained gently at half term, and when school re-started Laurel would be attending the local girls’ school.

It was ten times larger than her small private school and she felt lost in the huge classes and anonymity of the place. They were on a different syllabus and she was completely out of step. To make matters worse, Bill had started drinking, and she frequently heard him shouting at her mother and her mother crying.

One afternoon she came home from school to find Bill slumped in front of the television and her mother in bed.

‘Sulking because she doesn’t want me to go out tonight,’ Bill pronounced, slurring his words the way he always did when he’d been drinking. ‘Perhaps if she was a bit more fun to be with I wouldn’t need to go out. Two of a kind, aren’t you, you and your mother; neither of you know how to give a man a good time. Perhaps I ought to do some man a favour and teach you before it’s too late.’

Laurel fled, seeking sanctuary in her mother’s room. Her mother looked pale and tired, and Laurel couldn’t bring herself to add to her worries by telling her what Bill had said.

Going to the larger school had opened her eyes a little, and she knew now that Bill shouldn’t talk to her or touch her in the way that he did, but she knew that to complain to her mother would bring Bill’s wrath down on her head. Her mother was too loyal to complain, but Laurel knew that she wasn’t happy.

She had learned to become adroit about keeping out of Bill’s way. Unknown to anyone else she had bought and fixed a simple bolt to her bedroom door.

She knew from listening to the giggled confidences of the other girls about their boy-friends that there was more to sex than the basic animal coupling she had first thought, but remembering the revulsion she felt whenever Bill touched her she couldn’t understand how anyone was able to enjoy it.

As far as Laurel was able to see, Bill was making no attempt to find another job, and they were all three having to live off the small capital her mother had been left by her parents.

Bill’s drinking had increased too, coupled with a violence which could manifest itself in broken crockery and on one occasion a livid bruise to Laurel’s arm when she had been too slow to obey his command for a second cup of tea. Increasingly Laurel was finding her mother in bed when she got home from school, her eyes strained and her face pale, but she never allowed Laurel to speak a word against her husband.

Laurel’s fourteenth birthday came and went. Her mother suggested a small party at home, but Laurel had no desire for the other girls at school to be exposed to her stepfather. Unknown to herself she was drifting apart from her peers into a world of her own, where her stepfather stalked through her nightmares, and she went to school listless and drained.

It was the games mistress who noticed the bruise on her arm, and who questioned her about it. The school was a large one and Laurel wouldn’t be the first case they had had of child abuse. Mrs Kellaway had trained at a large Northern school where she had learned quickly to see the telltale signs of beatings.

‘I… I banged it on a door,’ Laurel told her quickly, unable to prevent the deep flush staining her skin. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’

As Mrs Kellaway confided in the headmistress a little later, it could quite easily have been an accident, and Laurel was beyond the age for child battering.

‘On the other hand,’ she added, ‘she’s too withdrawn; living in a world of her own half the time. It might be as well to pay a visit to her home.’

The headmistress sighed and agreed. Mrs Kellaway was something of a new broom, and middle-class parents were apt to be vociferous in their complaints about teachers’ interference in their pupils’ private lives.

There was a week to go before the start of the summer holidays. Laurel had been studying hard for her exams, hating the thundery, stifling atmosphere pervading the Heath. The heat seemed to sap her strength, leaving her drained and tired, and she longed for a proper thunderstorm to clear the air. Her school books weighed heavily on her arm, and the closer she got to home the more her footsteps lagged. There had been a brooding menace about Bill these last few days that sharpened her fear; a look in his eyes that flooded her with an instinctive knowledge she fought against accepting. He wanted her physically. She could see it in his eyes, read it in his touch, and she shrank from the knowledge, deliberately keeping out of his way.

The kitchen was empty when she got home, and she heaved a sigh of relief at crossing this first hurdle safely. Sometimes he was there waiting for her, drunk and truculent, pinning her against the wall while he criticised her mother, his eyes roaming hotly over her body as though he could see the slender feminine shape beneath the school uniform.

She tiptoed past the living room, but it was so quiet she risked a glance inside. There was no sign of him. Perhaps he was out?

Her spirits lifting, she hurried upstairs. Her mother was in bed. She seemed to be shrinking daily, and Laurel had pleaded with her to send for a doctor. She had refused, and since she had no friends in the neighbourhood who called, Laurel had no one in whom to confide her fears concerning her mother.

‘Bill’s gone out,’ her mother told her, in answer to Laurel’s question, but Laurel noticed that she avoided her eyes, as though she too knew of her daughter’s fear and the reason for it.

‘How was school?’

Obediently, Laurel told her about her day, suggesting that she shower and then bring her mother a tray of tea. ‘We could share it,’ she suggested eagerly, ‘just like we used to before.…’ She bit her lip, knowing her mother allowed no criticism of Bill, but for once there was no soft reprimand from the bloodless lips.

‘A tray of tea would be lovely,’ was all her mother said.

A modern shower had been installed in the bathroom, at Bill’s insistence, and during the work the old lock had come loose from the door. Bill had promised to fit it, but Laurel noticed as she walked into the bathroom that it had come free altogether. Closing the door, she stripped off and stepped into the shower, closing the curtain.

These last few months her body had changed dramatically. She was tall and slender with small high breasts and a narrow waist and hips. Her legs were long, tapering to fine ankles, her body almost that of a woman.

She showered quickly, enjoying the cool spray of the water on her heated skin. She was just showering off the last of the soap when the bathroom door opened.

‘Well, well!’

She stood transfixed as her stepfather’s eyes searched greedily over her body. He closed the door softly behind him and leaned against it. He had been drinking, Laurel could tell. She reached hurriedly for a towel, but he snatched it away, slurring this words as he said slowly, ‘Not wanting to hide yourself away from your dear old dad, are you, Laurel? You know, the trouble with you, my girl, you’re too repressed, frigid, like that mother of yours.…’

‘You’re not my father!’

Laurel said the first words that came into her head, her stomach crawling with sickness and shame for the way he was looking at her body. It was like the worst of her nightmares, when she was exposed and ridiculed, and she shrank back in horror as Bill reached out a hand and touched her still damp skin. A shudder rippled over her, and too late she saw the rage burning in his eyes.

‘Think yourself too good for me, do you? Just like that mother of yours! Well, we’ll soon see about that. You won’t be so proud when I’m pleasuring that body of yours, my girl, you’ll soon see.…’

‘Get away from me!’

‘Oh, come on, now, don’t give me that innocent act. I know all about you girls. You’re dying to know what it’s all about really, aren’t you? I’ve seen the way you look at me.…’

‘Like I hate you!’ Laurel spat at him, screaming instinctively as he grasped hold of her naked body and lifted her out of the shower, his face livid and mottled as he bent over her.

‘I’m your father, my girl,’ he told her furiously, ‘and you have to do everything I tell you. In my day a father took a strap to his kids if they didn’t obey him. Is that what you want, Laurel?’

Still grasping her arm with one hand, his free hand went to his belt, and Laurel knew with sick certainty that he wanted to beat her nearly as much as he wanted her body. Her thoughts ran in terrified circles, her body tensing against him.

‘Come on, you want it as much as I do. I’ve seen the way you look at me. I’m all man, Laurel,’ he told her slowly, his eyes glittering with feverish excitement, ‘and I’m going to prove it to you.…’

She screamed as his fingers kneaded her breast, his mouth hotly sour on her skin, and kept on screaming even when he shook her like a rag doll, almost throwing her to the floor in his rage.

‘Don’t make me angry, Laurel,’ he warned her as he flung himself down on top of her. ‘You’ve teased and tormented me enough, and I’m going to have you!’

Her body felt heavy and lethargic, crushed by the oppressive weight of his, but some instinct for survival lent her the strength to scream once more, the sound stilled by the sudden pressure of his mouth, making her gag sickly. He was going to rape her and there was nothing she could do to stop him. Tears ran from her eyes, terror making it impossible for her to move, and then outside the bathroom door she heard her mother’s voice calling to her, saw her turning the door handle; saw the look on her face as she looked down on Laurel’s sprawled naked body pinned to the floor by the heavy weight of Bill’s.

Like a surly bear Bill clambered to his feet, but Laurel couldn’t move. She felt frozen with fear and self-shame. She had seen the look in her mother’s eyes as she stood in the doorway; a look that said quite plainly that whatever had happened Laurel was to blame.

‘She drove me to it, Elaine,’ she heard Bill mutter defensively, ‘Always parading about in front of me with next to nothing on—oh, she’s always careful to make sure she doesn’t do it when you’re around, but she’s always been jealous—always wanted me herself. You know what teenage girls are like… sex-mad, the lot of them. I couldn’t help myself… she was begging for it.…’

Laurel wanted to deny his accusations, to plead with her mother for understanding, but somehow the words would not come. She knew she had not encouraged Bill—she loathed him, neither had she flaunted herself in front of him, but her pride would not allow her to beg her mother to believe her.

As Bill followed her mother out of the bathroom, he turned once, giving Laurel a look that warned her that it wasn’t over, not by a long, long way.

Even with the lock on her bedroom door she refused to sleep that night, starting at every sound. She dressed for school in the privacy of her room, leaving early so that she could use the showers there instead of washing at home. Her body was bruised where Bill had touched her, and the sight of the finger marks against her breast made her retch dryly in shivering horror.