It prised its way each morning like a chisel through the crack
between Jane’s flowered bedroom curtains and between the eyelids she squeezed
tightly shut in an effort to stay inside her dreams. It wasn’t acceptable in
Jane’s kind of family to complain about good weather, yet the strain of it told
on them, parents and children: they were remorselessly cheerful, while secretly
they longed for rain. Jane imagined herself curled up with a bag of licorice
beside a streaming windowpane, reading about the Chalet School. But her mother
said it was a crime to stay indoors while the sun shone, and Jane couldn’t read
outside with the same absorption; there was always some strikingly perfect
speckled insect falling onto your page like a reminder (of what? of itself), or
a root nudging into your back, or stinging ants inside your shorts.
The morning of the abduction, Mrs.
Allsop—dishevelled in a limp linen shirtdress—was wielding her secateurs up a
ladder, pruning the climbing roses. She was immensely capable; tall and
big-boned with a pink, pleasant face and dry yellow hair chopped sensibly
short. Jane admired her mother greatly, especially when she transformed herself
at night, for a concert in London or a Rotary Club dinner, with clip-on pearl
earrings and lipstick and scent, a frilled taupe satin stole. Jane coveted this
stole and tried it on when her mother was at the shops, making sultry faces at
herself in the mirror—although sultry was the last thing her mother was, and everyone
told Jane that she looked just like her. She certainly seemed to have her
mother’s figure, with not much bust, no waist to speak of, and a broad flat
behind.
