Cruel Pink by Tanith Lee (uplifting book club books TXT) 📕

I assured him I did not want them especially, was just curious.

“Of course you are.” He gave me a hug and we ate some chocolate.

I must stress here, there was never anything abusively sexual involved in any of my experience with my father. Even my later interrogators, who at times had seemed determined to discover that there was, at last drew this same conclusion.

I was my father’s daughter. He loved me, if rather absently, as my mother and sister realistically must have seemed to. He told me I was his consolation for their loss.

My voice began to break when I was about twelve. Probably I was rather dilatory in that. But concerned once more I sought his advice. I remember so clearly he played me a record—vinyl—of a most wonderful contralto. I forget her name, I regret to say. But my father said that this unevenness of my vocal chords also happened with some young women. It boded well, since I might end up with a wonderful singing voice, like the one just heard from the lady on the record.

I believed every word. Why wouldn’t I? And I had been educated by then, for some time, by—I must deduce—very carefully chosen private tutors. We had no TV. The outer world was over the hills beyond the farmhouse’s verdant boundaries.

What did I lack? Nothing. Was I happy? In my own unambitious way, I was.

Eight or so years, five to thirteen, with few cares. Comfortable in myself. A happy young woman, a girl growing gracefully up.

Were there no sexual feelings? A few. But they never involved persons, or even images. They were serpentine tremors that rippled through my spine and groin, that made my woman’s penis rise up, and if I caressed it, it would explode with joy. That was all. It was enough. No one had told me yet I had been cheated, if even I had been.

And then my bloody fool of a father crashed his plane on the beak of Norway. And the guardian arrived, and seeing me in my rose-pink dress, from which I spoke, I surmise, in the voice of an adolescent boy, froze like a stalagmite.

His tirade, and the adjoining congress of interrogators, can be pictured easily enough, I imagine.

Off came the clothes to their cries of rage and fear, all for me, but knifing me through. Off came the veneer of almost fourteen straightforward and smiling years.

On went the straight jacket of maleness. On went the shackles of learning, all over again, what not, and what to do, to want, to hate.

What would my father have said to me, I wonder, when I began to need to shave my face? “Oh, Rosalind. Some women do have to depilate. We’ll get you something. It’s a nuisance for you, but a sign of physical strength, too.”

And what if, at sixteen, instead of hankering for false, cosmetically-added breasts, I had somehow seen some wonderful young girl, strayed onto the land round the house, and fallen, as they used to say, in love-desire?

“Oh, Rosalind. That can happen, you know. But for now, my dear girl, you should control yourself. You’re too young to be sure what you want. Too, too young.”

63

There had been, to begin with, no further noise, after I’d left the pair of them to their cold supper. Then, about 11 a.m. I caught a faint wafting hum of Bach. George apparently was playing one of his CDs. It didn’t sound particularly loud to me, but then I began to hear a much louder sound. Vanessa seemed to be shouting again. Perhaps George’s music had disturbed her. I had always gathered she went to bed quite early. George’s response to her presumed complaint was to up the volume. And then again. My flat too was soon roaring with Bach, though in the bedroom, with the door shut, the torrent lessened. I wondered what the landlady thought. But I suspected she wasn’t even there at the moment, which might account for the terrible rat stink’s not having been treated.

I slept anyway. Waking around 4 a.m., all was peaceful. And it was Saturday, too, I could lie in.

But I was troubled, of course I was. At a distance these two relatives—both, I had to admit, slightly bonkers—were tolerable. But as next-door neighbours the future didn’t look too bright.

I dozed uneasily and finally got up at six thirty, before the sun. Drinking my coffee I watched the solar disk rise in fact, over the street. How odd everything looked, I thought, in the dawn, the trees mostly bare, and frost pasted on the north and west side of roofs. Not a sign of life anywhere. Years before there would have been milk-carts drawn by horses, and Steptoe and Son rag-and-bone men, also with horse-and-cart. Kids might be out playing in the middle of the road, since cars were relatively few; you could go half an hour or more without anybody driving through a side street. But now, less than a contemporary scene, it looked only deserted. As if everyone had died or gone away in the night.

This notion made me uncomfortable, even now, after the former events of George’s and Vanessa’s disappearances were explained. I was almost relieved when, at 8 a.m. the phone rang.

Relief soon gave in to dismay. It was Forrel. He had, he said, come down on the train from London, hadn’t slept all night. Could he come round at once and see me. He was in a ‘State’, he told me, with a threateningly grim self-importance.

“Well, you see…” I tried.

“No, I really do have to talk to someone. There isn’t anyone else, you see. No one. Not since that slag left me. And I just don’t—I don’t know what to do.”

With a sense of despair, I capitulated. And inside fifteen minutes he was ringing the main downstairs doorbell. I let him in, and up he blundered, stumbling about on the stairs and eventually lurching into my flat.