Cry of Children

Emma Dally

Description

It is 1968. Nine-year-old Lucy Butler, a lonely child, is the daughter of a GP in London's Kentish Town. When Lucy encounters the huge, boisterous Valentine family, from the big house up the road, she is instantly enthralled. Throughout that summer, she longs to be one of those eight children with their famous liberal parents, their streetwise confidence and wonderful freedom. How much it contracts with her onw, narrow-minded and over-protective family!Over the weeks, Lucy forges an intense friendship with the two Valentine sisters, Vita and Perdita. With then she tastes excitement and a new way of looking at the world and its rules. On the surface it is perfect; the Valentines are the ideal. Yes odd things happen. The housekeeper's manner unnerves her; strange behaviour is never explained. And why does everyone dislike the housekeeper's son so much?Then it is over. A child dies. Lucy's father is blamed. The Butlers move away, and contact is lost.Over twenty-five years later, Lucy is now married and trying to have a baby. Her younger brother is terminally ill. When she comes across Vita Valentine again, her memories of that childhood summer are stirred. Slowly they sharpen and fall into place. But parts of the picture are still blurred. When her brother asks her to repeat an act she carried out as a child, the terrible truth of what really happened that year is finally revealed. But worse than that when Lucy discovers the background to those events, she learns that the bewitching family she had idealized as a child, was, in fact, a harrowing place where abuse and wanton cruelty were taken for granted.This is the story of life and death, of how children survive or don't survive in families. It is about the power of adults, the vulnerability of children, and what happens when the children's voices are ignored.'It is impossible to read The Cry of the Children without being moved.' Times Literary Supplement'A compelling story, straightforwardly told, and ultimately very rewarding.' Nina Bawden

Informations

• Publié par: Hornbeam Press
• Date de parution: 19 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780956523648
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Cry of the Children
EMMA DALLY
© 2012, 1997 Emma Dally
Emma Dally has asserted her rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by Hornbeam Press First published in eBook format in 2012 eISBN: 978-0-956523-64-8
Cover photograph and design: Jack Boniface Styling: Rebecca Ehrlich
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
All names, characters, places, organisations, businesses and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, Ere the sorrow comes with years? They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, And that cannot stop their tears.
from ‘The Cry of the Children’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 1
May, 1997 Distant Voices
Lunchtime in Shepherd’s Bush, London. It is a sunny May day. A tall, lean-limbed woman walks down the street. Her flat leather sandals slap on the hot pavement. On her slender body she wears a simple white sleeveless blouse, and a dusty pink denim skirt swings around her long legs.
Two bare-chested builders sit on a flight of steps eating thick fried egg sandwiches. They simultaneously eye up the woman as she goes past. One of them, a chunky young man with curly blond hair, wipes the egg yolk off his rough chin and is tempted to whistle. He particularly fancies older women.
But something holds him back. Perhaps the look on this woman’s face prevents him from doing what usually comes so spontaneously to him. Today, however, even he is sensitive enough to guess that perhaps a cocky message from him is not appropriate.
The woman has a pleasant face – still pretty, even though she must be in her late thirties, the young builder reckons. She has large chocolate-brown eyes, wide cheekbones, small chin – framed by a well-cut bob of brown hair.
As she walks by, the woman’s dark brown eyes do not notice the presence of the admiring builders. Nor do they take in the smile from Mehmet, the gentle Asian grocer who is stacking his fruit and vegetables in artistically shaped piles on the wooden shelving outside his small, crowded corner shop. Mehmet is used to exchanging greetings with the woman, but he, too, knows that she is troubled today. He thinks she looks a little less worried than she did when she walked past an hour earlier but he can tell that all is not well with her.
In fact, Mehmet has been thinking for some time now that something was up with her. The sparkle in her eyes is less bright, her smile less ready than when she and her handsome husband first moved to the neighbourhood three years ago.
A devoted family man with four healthy children (three sturdy sons and a daughter), Mehmet is fairly sure of the reason for the woman’s troubled expression, and when he discusses his theory with his placid fecund wife, she agrees with him.
The woman turns into Melrose Gardens. If she could read Mehmet’s thoughts, she would tell him his theory is right. She is a woman in crisis. Until recently, she has always regarded herself as a perfectly normal person. Now she feels herself turning into a very abnormal person. At the moment she does not think that life can get much worse.
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), she does not realise that it can indeed get worse, and that it will. She also does not know that the telephone she can hear ringing as she turns the key in the lock marks the beginning of the next stage of her life. And that this stage is going to be far harder than anything she has ever encountered before.
The telephone was ringing as Lucy came in through the door of her flat. By the time she reached it, the ringing had stopped. Never mind. If it was important the person would ring again. She retrieved the bag she had flung down in the hall and began to unpack her shopping in the small fitted kitchen.
She made herself a tomato sandwich and settled down at the kitchen table to read the newspaper with conscious satisfaction. Lunchtime was her favourite time of day. Her husband, Simon, who had worked in a newspaper office for over ten years, laughed at her for it. For in spite of being freelance and able to organise her days as she liked, Lucy liked to stick to office hours, starting work promptly at nine am and working through until twelve forty-five pm. She would look forward to catching up with the news during her lunch hour.
Simon thought she was absurd. ‘The whole point of being your own boss is that you can work when you like,’ he laughed. ‘You can work at night and go to the cinema in the afternoon and avoid the crowds.’
Lucy disagreed. ‘It still makes me feel as if I’m bunking off school,’ she replied.
‘You’re just not a natural freelance. Perhaps you should work in an office again,’ Simon said.
‘I didn’t become a freelance by choice,’ she reminded him sharply.
This morning, of course, had been disrupted by the visit to the doctor, so she had not got much work done. She was copy-editing a dreary consumer guide to family law and had promised the publisher that she would finish it by the end of the week. She would probably have to work late into the night.
The telephone rang again just as she bit into her sandwich.
Damn! She hated to be disturbed while eating, and she had forgotten to put on the answering machine. She could not just let it ring, she was incapable of ignoring it.
To her relief, it was Rosie.
‘Lucy Montague! I’ve been trying to get hold of you all morning.’
‘I’ve been out. I had to see the doctor.’
‘Everything okay?’ Rosie was briefly, but genuinely, concerned. ‘At least, nothing serious?’
‘No, nothing serious. I just felt I had to do something about the fact that I can’t get pregnant. I can’t go on like this for much longer and I’ve asked to be referred to a specialist.’
‘Ah. Oddly enough, that’s what I was ringing about,’ said Rosie.
Lucy sensed a suspicious cheerfulness in her voice. She waited.
‘I wondered if you would mind doing a small interview on just that subject for me. Please say if you really don’t want to, but we’re desperate to get hold of someone. The person we lined up let us down at the last minute and it occurred to me that you might just agree to do it... Of course, I’ll understand entirely if you don’t want to do it,’ she added disingenuously.
Lucy smiled. She was used to helping Rosie out at the last minute. Rosie was Associate Editor on a woman’s magazine, in charge of features, and she shamelessly used her friends as interviewees whenever necessary. Over the past two years, Lucy had been interviewed about six or seven aspects of her deeply interesting life experience. How the children of doctors view their own health; being made redundant; freelancing; one was about having a homosexual brother (that was strictly anonymous, as was the one about oral sex). In fact, Lucy’s life could be mapped out through the pages of High Spirits. As could the lives of most of Rosie’s friends.
At least Rosie did talk to real people nowadays. She had found herself in big trouble with her editor last year when it was discovered that she had written a series of articles without interviewing a single real person. She had simply made them all up.
‘Real people never say the right things,’ Rosie defended herself. ‘I can think up much more interesting and apt quotes than your average person. Sometimes you find people who’ve done something interesting but when it comes to talking about it, they might as well be pond life.’
‘That’s not the point,’ snapped her editor. ‘Do that again and you’re out.’
Of course, the editor knew and Rosie knew that this was not true. Rosie was far too valuable to the magazine. She was full of ideas for every section, from features to fashion, she wrote like an angel about any subject, and she worked all hours. Rosie was headed for stardom, and everyone knew it. She was frequently approached by rival magazines and she was clearly just waiting for the right offer to come along. Indeed, when Rosie won a major media award for that same series of articles (submitted before the misdemeanour had been discovered), nothing was said about it. Proud to have an award-winning journalist on her team, the editor put up Rosie’s salary, gave her a generous clothes allowance, and prayed that Private Eye never found out the truth.
‘You can be interviewed anonymously, Lucy,’ Rosie continued. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to put your name to it... we’ll just describe you as Milly, a thirty-five-year-old lawyer.’
‘That’s what you called me in that article on blow jobs,’ laughed Lucy.
‘No, I’ve never used the name Milly before.’
‘I mean the thirty-five-year-old lawyer.’
‘No, you were thirty-four last time.’
Lucy sighed wearily. ‘Yeah, from blow jobs at thirty-four to IVF at thirty-five. Except that I’m thirty-seven.’
‘That’s a small detail,’ replied Rosie. ‘Oh, go on, sweetheart, say you’ll do it, please. I’m really desperate. This last woman got cold feet at the last minute. I told her she’d be anonymous but she’s terrified her mother-in-law will recognise her