Spider Light(30)
‘Oh, perfectly,’ murmured Donna. ‘But you can’t absolutely make me do any of that, can you? I’m eighteen–I can do whatever I want. I can live where I want.’
‘With no money? No job?’
‘I’d manage.’ Donna did not say she would scrub floors for a living because that would sound immature and adolescent which were the last things she wanted to sound. Also, she did not think she actually would scrub floors if it came to it. So she said, ‘I could get some kind of job. In a shop or an hotel–something like that. And a flat. I could get a flat of my own.’ And Don could be with me…She did not need to look at Don to know he would be thinking the same thing.
‘You won’t do any such thing,’ said Donna’s father, still in the same cold hard voice. ‘You and your brother will live apart for as long as I can manage it.’
Live apart? Donna and Don to live apart? There are times in life when the power of a desire can be extraordinarily–almost frighteningly–strong. Donna, lying sleepless in her bed that night, knew absolutely and utterly, that she and Don would not be separated and that they were not going to live apart. Something would happen to prevent it. She did not yet know what it would be, but something would happen.
The last few days of the holiday were a nightmare.
They could not return home at once which was what their father wanted to do, because their mother had arranged for their house to be redecorated during the holiday and for the main bathroom to be refitted. There would be decorators and plumbers crawling all over the rooms, and the water would be turned off, she said. She was not going to camp out among ladders and dust sheets, even if her children had broken every law known to man and God.
So they stayed on at Charity Cottage. There were a couple of squalid conversations between Donna and her mother who tried to find out with ridiculous roundabout phrases if they might have to deal with any consequences of what had happened. ‘You know what I mean, Donna,’ she said, and Donna, who by that time would not have put out a hand to save her mother from drowning or being burned alive, had pretended not to know at all.
‘Well, might you be–I mean, did it—Did he manage to—’
‘Did he withdraw in time or did he come inside me?’ said Donna in a hard cold voice and was rewarded by her mother’s flush of embarrassment. Serve you right! ‘Or were you simply wondering if I’m on the pill or anything like that?’
‘Well, yes. Yes, that is what I meant.’
‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ said Donna, and went furiously out of the room. Let her mother stew over that one for the next two or three weeks! In fact she was not on the pill, and Don, poor inexperienced boy, had been much too far gone to think about the old-fashioned method of withdrawal. Donna thought they would be the unluckiest pair of lovers ever if that one encounter resulted in pregnancy.
For the last few days of their stay, their parents dragged them to various places in order to fill up the time and to avoid having to talk to each other more than absolutely necessary. They trekked out to stupid tourist centres, boring craft displays and to dull-as-ditchwater museums. It was all more tedious than Donna had imagined anything could ever be. If one of them moved more than five yards, either their mother or father followed. It was ridiculous and unnecessary, and it showed a complete lack of understanding of the deep passion Donna and Don had shared. Probably by the laws of the land–absurd manmade laws–what they had done together was wrong. Donna could accept that.
But she could not accept that she and Don were to be split up.
Two days before they were due to leave Charity Cottage, shortly after five Don came into the kitchen, and said, ‘Where are the jackboots? They haven’t finally gone out somewhere and left us on our own, have they?’
‘No idea.’ Donna had been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea and staring out at the rain that had just started to fall. ‘D’you want some of this tea?’
‘Thanks.’ Don had been lying in the garden reading for most of the day, but the sudden rainstorm had driven him indoors a quarter of an hour ago. He took the cup and slumped moodily at other end of the kitchen table. He did not say anything else and he did not look at her. Donna felt a fresh wave of hatred against their parents who had created this painful restraint.
She said, offhandedly, that perhaps the jackboots had gone into the village, to get an evening paper. ‘They haven’t taken the car–it’s parked outside.’
‘Both of them out together, though? Leaving us alone for as long as an entire fifteen minutes?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Donna impatiently. ‘I’ve been lying down with a headache all afternoon.’
‘Perhaps they left a note. Have you looked?’
‘No, I couldn’t be bothered.’
But by six o’clock they were both sufficiently bothered to look for a note. When they failed to find one in any of the ordinary places–tacked to the fridge, or propped up on the dining table–they went into their parents’ room to see if things like jackets or wallets or handbags were gone.
‘Dad’s brown jacket’s not here,’ said Don. ‘Nor is his wallet–he always leaves it on the dressing table.’
‘No. And Ma’s handbag isn’t here either, or that blue linen thing she had on yesterday.’