She knew better than even to attempt to take the mascara off the other eyelashes. She dropped the cotton wool pad where it lay and let him take her hand and lead her back into the bedroom. He stripped her clothes off, kissing her shoulders, neck and her mouth. She put her arms around him and did her best to make it seem as if she was joining in. Because this was the way to make things better. He wanted sex. She would give him sex or passion or whatever it was he desired; he could have anything. Anything but her soul, her heart. She’d locked off those parts of herself long ago.
‘You’re so beautiful,’ he said, ‘so beautiful.’
Suddenly she was lying on the bed and he was on top of her. And she felt so dry inside because how could she feel anything else? Arousal was a thing of love and desire, not of fear.
He pushed inside her, pumping away, ripping into her arid body, Savannah holding on to his back and quivering with fear and pain. Her eyes were wide open, staring up at the ceiling but not even seeing it because soon this would be over and he’d sleep. He’d be happy.
For Calum, sex was winning.
Forcing her to have sex was a control mechanism and it excited him beyond belief.
‘Don’t go behind my back again,’ he grunted.
‘No.’ Her voice was automatic. No. Yes. Anything.
‘Tell me you want me.’
‘I want you Calum,’ she said mechanically.
As he moaned and moved over her body, grinding himself into her, she wondered if he could hear how like an automaton she sounded. She wondered if he could feel that her body was a vibrating carcass that had nothing to do with sensuality.
She was nothing but a vessel to be used.
He thrust into her, again and again, getting more aroused.
Savannah kept staring at the ceiling. This was paying a price, nothing more. Anything to keep him happy.
When he was finished, he rolled off her.
‘I love you, you know that,’ he murmured, and she replied, ‘Yes, love you too.’
Her reply was as mechanical as the whole act because she was acting the way he wanted her to act.
He wanted the obedient wife who took his angry words, his commands, his insults, his cruel silences. Fear made her that woman.
Her sisters wouldn’t do it, she thought, a flare of wet in each eye.
Eden would have screamed back at him in the kitchen. Rory might have hit him. Would have hit him. With the copper saucepan, perhaps. On the side of the head.
Indy – Indy would never have married him because she’d loved wonderful Steve for so long. But Savannah couldn’t. So she paid with her body. Anything to keep the peace. To keep the fear at a minimum. To keep her and Clary safe.
‘Wonderful, I’m going to go to sleep, OK?’ he said and planted a kiss on her cheek, as if none of the scene in the kitchen had happened.
She lay there a minute more and got up, went silently into the bathroom to take the make-up off the other eye. She could hear his snores. He fell asleep instantly after sex, always had. So she took off her make-up slowly, creamed her face and her neck and the tears dripped down into the sink. But she didn’t wipe them away. All that mattered was that it was going to be OK in the morning. Things would be better; she’d seen to it.
12
The Third Photo
Eden stood in her bedroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Her outfit was totally different to the one she’d worn for last year’s photo. In fact, she was so totally different from the person she’d been last year. So different, it was hard to imagine that the girl from then and the girl from now inhabited the same body. She’d been eighteen then, whereas now she felt about a hundred. She felt changed by life and knowledge. Changed by the secrecy. She wished she’d been able to tell people, but, how could she? There were some secrets people didn’t want to know. Secrets that therefore made shame bloom around them. When, in reality, Eden thought sadly, there shouldn’t be shame, there should be understanding and kindness. But secrecy flattened all that. It was like damp mould creeping through life the way it crept along her now blackened windowsill. Damp was clambering over the Sorrento again. Old homes were the worst, her mother said.
She tied her hair back and looked in the mirror again. Gone were the cute breast-enhancing shirts she used to wear. She didn’t want to be associated with that Eden. She wanted to start again, be the person she had been years ago, before excitement and craziness had been a part of her life. The manufactured girlband, which she’d joined after reading about it on a college noticeboard, had given her elegant, sedate clothes because that’s who she was in their vision. And now she wore those clothes in normal life too. It was like trying them on for size: high-neck blouses, long skirts. She felt like a suffragette from the turn of the last century, ready to fight for her cause.
Where she’d fought for her cause, but she had had to fight it alone, because Jimmy was no use.
She’d known he wouldn’t be. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she could see it on his face: shock and a desire to be as far away from her as was humanly possible was what she’d seen.
She adjusted her hair a little now and found her necklace. She liked the citrine. It was an unusual stone, could stand in for a yellow diamond. But then she wasn’t really into diamonds. No diamonds for Eden, she thought grimly. She’d have to buy them herself. She went downstairs out the back into the late summer sun.
