Read Online Losing Nicola by Susan Moody - Free Book Online Page B

said. ‘If you want to give them to her, do it yourself.’ I felt hot and frightened. I wasn’t used to challenging authority. Nor, despite the benign negligence with which we were brought up, were we accustomed to spite or nastiness. I could easily imagine Fiona’s reaction if she knew what Nicola was proposing and how embarrassed and hurt Miss Vane would be.
    â€˜Okey doke,’ she said. ‘I will.’ She glanced at the watch on her wrist. ‘Anybody want to come with me?’
    Even the boys in her thrall were uneasy about administering such a direct insult to an adult. They kicked at the loose stones of the beach, coughed, stared about them. They were thinking of what their mothers would say if they were caught in such a piece of discourtesy.
    â€˜God,’ said Nicola, eventually. ‘You’re all such wankers. I’ll do it myself.’
    And she did, because I watched her do it, go up to Miss Vane, put her head engagingly on one side, offer her the package. I saw, too, Miss Vane’s shy smile of pleasure and wanted to run up, snatch it from her hands, throw the horrible corsets into the sea. But of course I didn’t, and was punished later by seeing Miss Vane’s face turn pale, her eyes water, the way she dropped the package into a litterbin. At that moment, I hated Nicola.
    One afternoon, things took a different turn. After my music lesson, I came out of the gate of Number Seventeen to find them swinging on the bars across the road.
    â€˜How’s the Groper?’ Nicola asked.
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜Hands everywhere,’ said Nicola. ‘Or is it just with me?’ She widened her eyes at me. ‘Maybe he likes them a bit more mature than you, Alice.’
    â€˜How exactly are you defining mature?’ asked Orlando, giving the word an ugly sneer. ‘Do you mean like
you
, Nicola?’
    â€˜He’s a pervert,’ said Julian, glancing up at Mr Elias’s open window. He feinted an elaborate shot with the golf putter he’d taken to carrying around, since he had started golf lessons earlier in the holidays.
    â€˜What’s perverted about him?’ Blushing with embarrassment, I hoped he couldn’t hear them. Was that him lurking up there, watching us from behind the dusty folds of crimson velvet?
    â€˜He’s a beastly Hun.’ said Charles
    â€˜A bloody Kraut,’ Julian said daringly.
    I’d never heard either of them use such words or express such sentiments. ‘You shouldn’t say things like that,’ I said. Thunderheads were building up in the distance, and the air danced and crackled with electricity. An equally powerful surge of energy arced dangerously between the seven of us. ‘He’s a refugee.’
    â€˜He can’t help being a foreigner,’ Orlando said.
    â€˜Kraut lovers, kraut lovers . . .’ Jeremy jeered at us.
    I stared at him in astonishment. Over the years I’d known him, he had always been the quiet one, the fatherless boy with the straight-cut blond hair and red cheeks, who usually maintained a timid silence.
    â€˜There’s definitely something funny about him,’ said Nicola. I sensed that while they waited for me, she had been playing them off, one against the other, and that now they were jockeying for position, each of them trying to outdo the other, each of them fearful that he would be elbowed out of Nicola’s charmed circle.
    Was I frightened of rejection too? Was I trying to make up some of the ground that had been lost that summer? Or did I feel some deeper alarm? Whichever it was, I suddenly said, ‘Maybe he’s a spy.’ Immediately I knew, Judas-like, that I had sacrificed Mr Elias, made him a burnt offering laid upon the altar of conformity. I passionately wished the words unsaid, but it was too late.
    The boys pounced. ‘A spy? What do you mean? How can he be? How do you know?’
    My credibility was at stake.