Savage Atonement

She found it hard to concentrate on her lessons. The last two of the day were gym. Half way though them the headmistress arrived, accompanied by a man—a school inspector, Laurel had later learned, but at the time all she had known was that he was a man and that for some reason he wanted to see her vaulting over the ‘horse’. The mere fact that someone was watching her was enough to destroy her shaky confidence. She mistimed her leap and half fell over the horse, and might have injured herself quite badly if he hadn’t leaped forward to catch her. But all she was aware of as his hands grasped her was that this was how Bill had held her last night, forcing her to the floor, touching her intimately, and as the world swirled and darkened around her, she was dimly aware of herself screaming, no, no, don’t touch me!

When she came round she was in the headmistress’s office. Miss Kellaway was there, but there was no sign of the man. Matron was also there and another young woman whom the headmistress introduced as Rachel from the Social Services Department, the significance of which didn’t dawn on her until much later.

‘Now, Laurel,’ the headmistress began kindly, ‘don’t be frightened. We’re here to help you, you know, my dear.…’ She paused, coughed and looked a little embarrassed.

‘Laurel, Miss Kellaway tells me that some time ago you came to school with a bad bruise on your arm. And now today, when you fainted… your body is very badly bruised, my dear, and.…’

The social worker interrupted gently, ‘What Miss Laker is trying to say, Laurel, is that we believe you may have been sexually abused.… Yes, I know you don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to admit it even to yourself, but you aren’t the first girl it’s happened to, Laurel, and you won’t be the last. We only want to help you, and there’s nothing to be frightened of. You do know, don’t you, that it’s illegal for someone to have sexual relations with a girl under sixteen? And it’s silly to get involved with such a rough boy-friend. Have you got a boy-friend, Laurel?’

She managed to shake her head, her whole body burning with the shame of what was happening to her. How could they understand? How could they know how she felt; how guilty and tainted; how much she hated her body?

‘Matron will have to examine you, Laurel,’ Rachel, the social worker, was saying in a soothing voice. ‘Nothing to be afraid of. If you’ll just go with her now.…’

Like a limp rag doll, Laurel went with her. The examination was painful and to Laurel humiliating, although she knew that Matron was deliberately trying not to hurt her, but afterwards she was sick, and she was still shivering when she was taken back to the headmistress’s study.

‘Matron tells us that you’re still a virgin, Laurel,’ Rachel announced, ‘But I don’t believe that you were a willing participant in whatever happened to you. We want to help you, dear. Why don’t you tell us about it?’

She wanted to, but Bill had warned her that if she told anyone they wouldn’t believe her.

As though she knew what she was thinking Rachel said softly, ‘You have a stepfather, Laurel—was it him?’

She started to cry then and Rachel had comforted her, gently drawing the whole story out of her.

‘Now listen to me, Laurel,’ she said when she had finished. ‘You are in no way to blame, in no way at all. You mustn’t think that.’ Over Laurel’s head her eyes met Miss Kellaway’s. ‘Men like him ought to be shot,’ she said bitterly. ‘When I think of the damage he might have done.…!

‘Now, Laurel,’ she said quietly, ‘for your own sake it might be better if you lived away from home for a while. Not for punishment,’ she added quickly, ‘but to protect you.’

‘My mother.…’

‘Don’t worry, we’ll explain everything to her.’

Laurel hadn’t argued, thankfully believing that her ordeal was over, but it was only just beginning.

CHAPTER THREE

THE Social Services Department installed Laurel with foster-parents; the start of the summer holidays meant that she didn’t have to endure the curious questions of her classmates, and Miss Kellaway visited her regularly.

The only person who didn’t visit her was her mother, and when Laurel asked repeatedly why, Rachel explained that she wasn’t well.

‘Try to understand, Laurel,’ she explained. ‘Your mother feels unbearably guilty because she exposed you to Bill Trenchard, and because she can’t face up to that guilt she had shifted it on to you. In her eyes you’re the guilty one, even though in her heart she knows that isn’t true.’

‘You mean she doesn’t want to see me?’

Rachel sighed. This was one of the most heartbreaking cases she had had to deal with, and she longed to be able to do something concrete to help Laurel. The poor child’s life lay in ruins around her, while the man responsible.… Her mouth tightened and she took hold of Laurel firmly, noticing as she did so how the thin shoulders flinched. Later on Laurel might benefit from talking to their child psychiatrist, but for the moment the scars were too new, too raw.

‘Try to understand, Laurel, your mother has always been weak, has always needed someone to lean on.’

It was true, Laurel acknowledged, but she needed someone to lean on too. It came to her then that the only person anyone could safely rely on was themselves; that it was foolish to place any trust or reliance in another human being.

‘We intend to prosecute Bill Trenchard,’ Rachel informed her. ‘He’s guilty of sexually molesting a minor, and he must be punished for that, Laurel. You understand that, don’t you?’ Because if you don’t help us some other girl will suffer—perhaps worse.’

Rachel meant that she still had her virginity, but her entire body and soul felt scorched, all emotion and feeling burned out of them.

‘Would I have to tell people what happened?’

‘Yes, but it will be worth it, Laurel, I promise you that.’ And because she liked and respected Rachel Laurel believed her; believed that for the sake of some unknown girl Bill had yet to meet she had to see that justice was done. In those days she had still been naïve enough to believe that the truth must always be believed and respected, and even though her soul cringed from the thought of having to tell anyone about what had happened, because she knew not to do so was taking the cowardly way out, Laurel agreed.

It got into the papers—how, she didn’t know, and although her foster-parents wanted to keep the articles away from her Rachel and the lawyer she brought to see her insisted that she must read them.

‘Your stepfather obviously intends to claim that you led him on,’ the lawyer explained to her, ‘and I have to ask you, Laurel, did you?’

The look of sick revulsion in her eyes convinced him.

‘I hate these cases,’ he told Rachel later. ‘And I’ve heard the stepfather intends to use Rowland Blandish. He’s red-hot on defences for this type of case. I doubt if he’ll get him off, but he’ll really put her through it. I’ll try to prepare her as much as I can.…’

‘But he’s guilty,’ Rachel protested, ‘and he might have destroyed her as a woman for ever. If you could have seen the look on her face when the school inspector touched her!’

‘She’s a sensitive child, which will make it ten times worse for her, and I agree with you, he’s got to be brought to justice, but it’s the mother I’m worried about. I tried to see her, but apparently she’s confined to bed with a heart condition.’

‘She refuses to see or communicate with Laurel, but then that’s quite usual. In these cases the mother normally knows quite well what’s going on and chooses to ignore it, but of course we aren’t talking about incest here, we’re talking about attempted rape.’

‘Far harder to prove,’ he warned her. ‘And the courts and the public are hardening their hearts more and more against the victims; there’s been too much press coverage on the subject; too many “claims” that have proved to be lies.’

‘But in Laurel’s case.…’

‘Rowland Blandish will try to persuade the jury that Laurel led Trenchard on. She’s a very attractive girl, Rachel, and whether we like it or not there are men who are always eager to convince themselves that teenage girls are eager for sex. You know that.’

‘Yes,’ Rachel agreed soberly, ‘but Laurel isn’t like that. I’m frightened for her.’

Mercifully Laurel knew none of this. She had withdrawn completely into her shell, unbearably hurt by her mother’s defection and plagued by self-hatred. Had she in some way encouraged her stepfather? If she had she didn’t know about it, but she had developed a fierce dislike of her body, to the extent that she would only wash in a darkened room. Despite the heat of summer she refused to dress in anything but thick sweatshirts and baggy jeans.

Mrs Lee, her foster-mother, reported this to the social services. A psychiatrist came to talk to Laurel, but she refused to respond.

The day of the court hearing arrived. The court was packed with reporters, and as her lawyer had predicted, the defence counsel tore her to shreds. Several times she broke down in tears, muddling her story, looking helplessly at Rachel, who could only listen with black murder in her heart, as she witnessed what was happening.

On the second day of the trial Rowland Blandish insisted that Laurel was to be dressed in teenage fashion clothes rather than her enveloping jeans and sweatshirt. He even produced an outfit for her. She put it on as the judge had instructed in a small room at the rear of the court.

It was a pink and white striped mini-skirt and a matching tee-shirt. The tee-shirt pulled tautly against the thrust of her breasts, the skirt showing off her long legs. Rachel bit her lip when she saw her. The judge had also instructed that she was to wear her hair down, and this she did. A glance in the mirror before she was escorted from the room showed her a stranger; a tall, slender girl with a mass of dark red-brown hair and a curvaceous figure.

She disliked the defence counsel’s smile as she re-took the stand. ‘Look at her,’ he instructed the jury. ‘Add make-up and the provocative manner of teenagers the world over and can any man be blamed for losing his temper a little, which is what happened to my client. As he is not her natural father isn’t it also only natural that mingled with his anger should be desire? A desire any man might naturally feel.…’

And so it went on, question upon question, innuendo upon innuendo, until Laurel was ready to believe herself that she had encouraged him; that she was to blame.

The jury gave a verdict of guilty but with provocation, and Laurel left the court feeling besmirched and tainted.

The papers were flooded with articles on raising or lowering the age of consent for sexual relations; on the provocation of teenage girls in general, on rape and its side effects on the victims, and through it all Laurel remained silent and withdrawn.

The court had ordered that for own sake she was to be taken into care, which had resulted in her being sent to a home several miles away.

All through the court hearing she had heard nothing from her mother, and one afternoon when she could endure it no longer she left the school grounds and caught a bus for Hampstead.

She found her mother alone, lying in bed, looking tireder and older. Her face paled when she saw Laurel and she turned away.

‘How could you come back here after what you’ve done?’ she gasped. ‘Shaming me, telling all those lies!’

‘But Mother,’ Laurel’s mouth was dry. Her mother had seen with her own eyes, ‘you saw.…’

‘Your stepfather is right,’ her mother said weakly. ‘You’re a wanton, Laurel. It’s your father’s blood coming out in you. No decent girl would dream of doing a thing like that! From now on you aren’t my daughter.’ She moved the bedclothes and Laurel saw the newspaper cuttings. Sickness welled up inside her. Her mother was right: she wasn’t fit to live. She ran out of the house, not seeing the car parked by the kerb, nor the man lounging against it, and ran full tilt into the road, oblivious to the blare of the horn of the oncoming car.

Strong arms grasped her, snatching her back from death. Furious, she pounded angry fists against the broad shoulders, gasping for breath when she was suddenly set free.

‘You could have been killed!’

I wanted to be! The words trembled on the tip of her tongue, but remained unuttered.

‘What’s wrong?’

The man glanced from her to the house, and then frowned. He was taller, much taller than Bill, with a dark thatch of hair, tousled by the breeze. He was wearing jeans and an open-necked shirt. Dark hair curled at the base of his throat, and sickeningly Laurel remembered Bill’s body; Bill’s hands. She swayed and he caught her.

‘Please.…’ She shuddered as she pushed at his restraining hands. His eyes were grey and curiously blank, and yet she had the feeling that he was studying her minutely; the faded, baggy sweatshirt, the jeans, her hair tied back in a ponytail, her too fragile body and shadowed eyes.

‘Live round here, do you?’ he asked, releasing her and shifting his weight so that he was leaning against the car—a small powerful sports car, Laurel realised now.

‘No!’ The denial was quick and instinctive, but the raised eye brows insisted on some explanation.

‘I was just visiting someone.’ Unknowingly her eyes clouded ‘Now I’m going… home.’

‘Can I give you a lift?’

Strangely she knew she had nothing to fear from him. She shook her head, glancing towards the bus stop before feeling in her pocket for her money.

Appallingly, it wasn’t there. She remembered she had had a pound note, but she had taken it out of her pocket in the house when she reached for her handkerchief to dry her eyes. She glanced uncertainly towards it. She couldn’t go back there now, not after.…

‘Are you sure? I can put the hood down, and you can feel the breeze in your hair.’

‘I.…’ Should she tell him that she’d lost her bus fare? But what if he asked why she hadn’t borrowed some from the friends she’d been visiting?

It would be a long walk back to the home—several miles, and they had no idea where she was.

‘If you’re sure it won’t be any trouble?’

‘On the contrary.’

There was an irony in the words that went over her head, and neither did she see the cynical smile he gave her as he opened the car door and pushed down the canvas hood.

As he had said, the cooling breeze was pleasant. He drove well, but Laurel was unprepared for him to stop suddenly in a quiet lane several minutes away from the home, and completely deserted.

Panic flared as he turned towards her. He seemed to have changed somehow, his face, which she dimly recognised as handsome, hardening.

‘You’re Laurel James, aren’t you? he demanded.

She didn’t even think of lying. ‘Yes,’ she admitted huskily. ‘Who are you?’

‘Oliver Savage,’ he told her briefly, but his name meant nothing to her then.

‘How did you know it was me?’

‘I recognised your picture. You were going to see your mother, weren’t you?’

‘Yes.’ To her horror Laurel felt the tears filling her eyes and sliding helplessly down her cheeks. ‘She hates me,’ she blurted out, suddenly overwhelmed with pain and desolation. ‘She said it was my fault.…’

‘And wasn’t it?’

Oliver Savage had turned towards her, one arm along the back of her seat, but there was nothing threatening about him, in fact he seemed to exude the same sort of dependability as her grandfather.

‘I don’t know.’ Anguish and pain mingled in the words. ‘She says I encouraged him, but I didn’t… I didn’t!’

‘Not even the tiniest little bit? You’re a very attractive girl… very sexy too,’ he said with a glimmer of a smile. ‘Or rather you would be out of those baggy clothes. You must have known that he desired you?’

Laurel nodded. There was a certain amount of relief to be found in talking like this to a stranger, a certain catharsis, and all at once she was talking quickly, softly, words tumbling over each other as she told her story. He stopped her once or twice, asking questions, which she answered briefly. In many ways he wasn’t there, he was simply a listening post, a substitute for the grandfather she loved; someone she could unburden herself to.

When it was over she was crying, softly and quietly. His fingers touched the back of her neck, drawing her head down against his shoulder. The contact with another human being was strangely comforting. The emotional storm had left her tired and drained, and the slow thud of his heart soothed her.

‘Better now?’ he asked at length. ‘You’re a pretty potent package, you know,’ he added when selfconsciousness returned and she had moved away from him. And there was an oddly strained look to his mouth. ‘I’d better get you back before I’m accused of rape myself!’

His words shocked her, reminding her of how little she knew about him, how foolishly trusting she had been, and she scrambled out of the car before he could stop her—not that he made any attempt to do so. The smile he gave her as he drove off disturbed her. There was something about it that frightened her.

When she got back to the home no one had missed her. Rachel came to see her to tell her that they were moving her to another home—an all-girls one this time, where they thought she would fit in better.

For the first time since the trial she didn’t ask about her mother, and as Rachel told her parents that night over their evening meal, ‘I think she’s beginning to accept that her mother’s deserted her, poor little scrap. That brute Trenchard ought to have been locked away for a lifetime—not simply six months!’

It was the weekend before Laurel knew the truth; a weekend that brought to light Oliver Savage’s real identity in the shape of a colour supplement article about her; an article that purported to be a personal interview with Oliver Savage, in which he tore her reputation and everything she had said to him in shreds. ‘Does any really innocent teenager accept a lift from a stranger and then proceed to practically invite him to make love to her?’ And so it went on, and reading it Laurel was barely able to believe it. Haltingly she explained to Rachel what had actually happened; how Oliver Savage had twisted everything she had said, pounced on her own admission that she had known of her stepfather’s desire, and according to him fanned it.

‘The man must have a warped mind to do something like this!’ Rachel stormed later, when Laurel had been sedated and put to bed. ‘He’s talked to Laurel, seen her—he’s supposed to be an intelligent human being, can’t he guess what sort of effect his article is going to have on her? The first human being she brings herself to confide in, and he does this to her!’

‘He’s a reporter,’ Peter told her dryly, ‘What do you expect? Although I agree it was bad luck on Laurel’s part that she had to meet him when she was at her most vulnerable. He’s renowned for his dislike of the present rape laws; claims that in ninety cases out of a hundred the men have been led on and aren’t totally to blame. No doubt he was waiting there, hoping for an interview with Trenchard, instead he got Laurel, poor little kid!’

Being involved in a rape case was something that clung like mud all through your life if you let it, Laurel reflected as she folded the papers and put them away. Shortly after the trial her mother had died, and then Bill Trenchard had been killed in a car accident several months after he had been released from gaol. Over the years she had learned to bury the past so deeply that it could never be resurrected, but today Oliver Savage had reappeared in her life, ripping the tissue of scars from old wounds, making her relive the past, and he wanted to talk to her. Why? So that he could do a follow-up article? Victim of sexual attack, six years on? What was he hoping to find? That she had lovers by the score? Bitter laughter welled up inside her. Well, he was doomed to disappointment. No man had ever touched her since. How could she let them; how could she offer a decent, moral man the body that had been sullied by her stepfather’s touch; a body that the world told her had actively encouraged that touch? Coming on top of her ordeal at the trial Oliver Savage’s article had driven her completely into her shell. For months she had simply refused to talk to anyone, and looking back now she shuddered to realise how close she had come to insanity. But that was all behind her now, and just as long as she remembered to trust no one, to rely on no one, she would be safe.

A little to her surprise she slept reasonably well, without the nightmares which had plagued her after the article was published. Feeling thankful that it was a Saturday and she had the weekend to recover her composure, she ate her breakfast, made out a shopping list and set out for her local shops, as was her normal Saturday morning ritual. One of her weekly chores was the changing of her library books. She was an avid reader, and the girl behind the desk recognised her.

‘Why don’t you try this?’ she suggested, proffering Laurel a book. Her hand shook as she took it and saw the name Jonathan Graves on the spine.

‘No, I don’t think so.…’ she began, then changed her mind, and clutched at the book until her knuckles whitened. Perhaps she ought to read it? Perhaps it would give her a deeper insight into the man, a clue as to why he would want to see her.

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