Vee waited. She didn’t want to hear the rest but now they’d come this far, there was no going back. The gentle clucking of the hens as they pottered around the garden scratching at patches of bare soil and fluffing up their feathers would have been soothing if she hadn’t felt so wound up. Yolanda refilled Vee’s cup and took a big gulp of her own coffee.
‘You’ll probably call me a busybody but after the camping trip I made it my business to find out exactly what went on there. Your mum was preoccupied with… well, you don’t need me to tell you what was bothering her, do you? She hated the thought of leaving Willowbrook and she’d gone into a kind of downward spiral. She was depressed and anxious and she wasn’t paying much attention to what either you or your sister were up to.’
There was another pause, longer this time. ‘Go on. I’m listening,’ said Vee.
‘He assaulted you, Venetia.’
The words were out and there was no going back now. Vee swallowed hard.
‘You’re saying… Patrick raped me?’
‘Well, technically, no. He tried to, there’s no doubt about that, but it was a cold night and he didn’t manage to get through all the layers of clothes you were wearing. You fought him off as best you could, my dear, but you didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I always thought you must have blamed yourself for some reason, which was crazy, of course, but there’s no other explanation for why you didn’t report him to your teachers.’
‘I didn’t tell them because I didn’t remember anything about it after I got better.’
Vee took a few deep breaths. It was all coming back, bit by hideous bit. The chilly night with rain pouring down yet again, the way she’d turned on the white-faced boy in front of her, yelling at him for… for what? Yes, that was it. She’d caught sight of Patrick hiding behind her tent, soaking wet but still intent on spying on her, as he had been doing for weeks. As if it wasn’t enough that he’d ended the previous evening by falling… or jumping… into the nearby lake. Nobody had seemed to know what really happened. And here he was once more. Did he not mind being freezing cold and completely drenched yet again?
Seeing Patrick lurking around and still watching her, after all she’d said to him, had pushed Vee’s patience – never her strong point – to its limits. Before the trip, she had pretended for a while not to notice his crush in the hope that he would get bored and find someone else to obsess about, but eventually she’d rounded on him and told him in no uncertain terms to leave her alone. That should have been the end of the whole sorry business, but Patrick had completely ignored her harsh words. It was as if she’d never uttered them. Seeing him lurking out there, dripping with rainwater, Vee lost her temper in a big way, and desperate to rid herself of Patrick’s attentions once and for all, went in with all guns blazing in the hope of stopping the relentless, tiresome pursuit. It had only taken moments for him to flip and to start to tear at her clothing.
‘He was suddenly so powerful,’ she murmured, as flashbacks of that awful night shot sharp pains into her brain. ‘I think he wanted to show me that he was a real man after all. I never saw him as a danger before that. Annoying, so very annoying, but there was never any harm in him until then.’
‘That’s what most people thought. That he was tedious and needy but not a bad soul.’
‘Exactly.’
Yolanda looked as if she was about to say more but then changed her mind. Vee carried on when the pause became uncomfortable. She was shaking now. It was all flooding back, moment by painful moment.
‘We’d already had the brandy earlier. I was feeling wobbly and not very well by then too. Patrick was stronger than he looked. He got me by the shoulders and wouldn’t let me go. Then he tried to get my coat off me. I’d been sneezing and coughing all day, and I couldn’t get warm, so I was wearing two jumpers under my coat plus a scarf and hat. I bit him and kicked him, Yolanda, but it wasn’t until he heard someone coming towards us that he stopped and ran away. I can’t remember what happened next… my stomach heaved, and I think I was sick then. I must have blacked out.’
Her aunt moved her chair closer and took both Vee’s hands in hers, as she had when they’d met earlier. The warmth was soothing, and gradually Vee began to stop shaking. They sat together like this for what seemed like a long time but could only have been five minutes. Then Yolanda sat up straighter.
‘I sussed there’d been something dodgy going on when I picked you up, but I couldn’t hang about for long because I needed to get you home. You were in a bad way. They’d rung me to tell me you were too ill to stay at the campsite and your mum and dad weren’t due back for another couple of nights, so I just got in the car and came to get you.’
‘That part’s still a complete blank.’
‘I’m not surprised. The teachers were all set to call an ambulance, but I decided that your own bed and me there to look after you would be better. Your mum used to get flu really badly when she was younger and all she ever needed was rest and lots of fluids.’
Vee wrapped her arms around herself. The kindness of her aunt had never been in doubt, but why had she kept away from Vee for so long if she cared enough to nurse her back to health so tenderly? Yolanda was still talking, and Vee tried to focus. This was important and she mustn’t miss anything.
‘The teachers were more than happy for me to take responsibility,’ said Yolanda. ‘They looked shell-shocked. Everyone was frozen and some of the girls – and a couple of boys too – were wailing. But later, I did some digging.’
‘And?’ The one word was all Vee could manage. Her throat was dry, and her heart was pounding.Please let it not have been Rick who saw what happened, was all she could think.If it was, and he didn’t help me, I don’t know how I’ll cope.
‘I had a friend who fostered teenagers at the time. Her name was Anneka, and I remembered she was looking after a girl who’d been on that same trip. They called her Shazzie. I don’t know what her proper name was. I pretended to bump into the girl accidentally when she was on her way home from school soon afterwards. I told her I was your aunt and that you’d mentioned her name. We started talking. I think she was glad to blurt it all out to a grown-up, to be honest, but she made me promise not to tell anyone.’
‘Tell anyone what?’ Still Vee felt as if she didn’t have words to say much more than this. Her mind felt numb. More splintered fragments of the heaving emotions of that night were coming back to her now, in shocking waves. How had she buried them for so long?
‘Shazzie was the one who saw Patrick attacking you. He dropped you and ran away when he realised that he’d been rumbled. She could hear someone else approaching who she assumed would be bound to look after you, so she ran after him. She was livid, and she wanted to warn him off ever trying anything like that again. She’d already fished him out of the lake the evening before, and she was heartily sick of his antics.’
At last, the mist that had been dogging Vee’s memories for so long was clearing. With a jolt, she knew who it was that had appeared as Shazzie left, chasing Patrick towards the lake and shouting at him to come back. She remembered as clearly as if it had only happened yesterday. It had been Rhonda. She was the one who’d turned up and found Vee lying on the ground in a pool of mud, sobbing uncontrollably and already in the throes of the virus that had felled her. Shivering and shaking, she’d felt sicker than she ever had in her life. Since that day, Vee had experienced odd times when she’d been unwell, even had Covid twice, but nothing had brought her down in the same way as that illness had done. Rhonda had done what Rhonda did best. She’d laughed, and shifted the blame, telling Vee she’d brought all this on herself.
‘You should have stopped him in his tracks much sooner,’ Rhonda said. ‘This is what you get for leading guys on and then not coming up with the goods. Right, on your feet, let’s get you to where the teachers are hanging out. Much use they are, but I don’t know what else to do with you.’
‘I know who it was now,’ Vee said. ‘I mean, the one who found me. But there must have been another person nearby because Rhonda shouted to them to go after Patrick and stop him pulling another stunt like the previous night’s lake fiasco or we’d all end up being interrogated. Whoever was there didn’t do it, though, or if they did, I was too far out of it to notice. It’s all a muddle after that. The problem is, I’ve got an awful feeling that there’s someone else who still very much wants to know the details of that night.’
Yolanda nodded sadly. ‘Beryl,’ she said.
‘I’m going to have to go back to join the others for dinner now,’ said Vee, glancing at her watch, although she couldn’t imagine being able to eat anything, the way her stomach was still churning.
