But John wouldn’t say anything more about the guest, and when she quizzed him, all she got was silence and black looks. It wasn’t until a few days before they were supposed to make the trip that Marion said she wouldn’t go with him unless John explained exactly what was going on.
Her brother confessed. He said he had met Sonya through an internet chat room, and they had been corresponding for several months. Marion was shocked when he told her that he had posed as a twenty-one-year-old university student called Adrian Metcalf. He showed Marion the emails and photographs that he had sent to the girl. The photographs came from the Facebook page of one of his former sixth-form pupils at Broadleaf Academy; they showed a handsome blond youth on a yacht with his arm around two friends, playing the guitar at a party and skiing. The boy, he told her, was now deceased. Walking home late after a New Year’s Eve party, he had slipped on ice and fallen into a freezing-cold lake.
Marion couldn’t believe what her brother was telling her. How could a good, decent man like him be capable of lying to a stranger?
“You have to tell her the truth, John, immediately,” she insisted.
“Marion, you don’t understand, we’re in love,” John replied.
“How can she be in love with you? She thinks you’re someone else.”
“You don’t realize how lonely I am, Mar. I feel like I’m dying inside.”
“Then why don’t you be honest with her, John. Come clean. Send her a real picture of yourself, that lovely one you had taken in your good suit for the Oxford reunion bash. You never know, perhaps she’ll still want to come over and stay with us.”
“Look at me, Mar, what young woman would want an old fella like me?”
Then John went down on his knees and began to cry, his face twisting up.
She had seen that stricken look on his face the day they found Sir Isaac Newton in the middle of Grange Road, his thin, tabby body mangled by a car. Nine-year-old John having befriended the stray displayed an unusual degree of tenderness towards it, buying tinned tuna and condensed milk from his own pocket money, yet Mother had refused to let him keep the “filthy creature” in the house on the grounds of its extreme ugliness and the likelihood of it carrying disease.
“I just want to find a nice girl who’ll love me and give me children,” he said. “You know, this Sonya comes from a very poor background. She grew up in an orphanage and has no family. Perhaps if I am kind to her, she won’t mind that I’m older.”
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LYING AWAKE FOR many nights, she went over it all in her head again and again; of course it was wrong to bring the girl all this way on false pretenses. The whole business had to be stopped. She just wouldn’t accept it. Then she would think of the look of suffering on John’s face when he told her how lonely he was. Wasn’t there a chance that the girl might see past his baldness and potbelly and perhaps appreciate him for his intelligence and decency? And if the two of them married and started a family, wouldn’t that be wonderful? Certainly there was no longer any chance of Marion herself becoming a mother, yet she yearned to have a child in the house, a little person who would call her Auntie Mar, someone she could take for walks on the beach and play games with.
She loved her brother, he was her only living family, and wasn’t it her sisterly duty to make him happy? Of course she had doubts about what he was doing, who wouldn’t have? But if she refused to help him, what would happen then? Might he go away and leave her alone in this huge house, wandering from room to dusty room, imagining footsteps and whispers that were not her own? How long before she went quite mad with only teddy bears and ghosts to talk to?
Finally she said to him:
“Please, John, you must promise me this: that you will behave like a gentleman towards the girl. And if she refuses to accept you, if she says she doesn’t want to stay here with us, then you will pay for her to go back home?”
And John had agreed.
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WHEN MARION FIRST set eyes on Sonya’s round, pale face with those large terrified eyes, she was shocked how young the girl looked, perhaps no more than seventeen. She was shaking with exhaustion and too shy to speak when they picked her up at a McDonald’s restaurant near the port. She wouldn’t let go of her suitcase, a battered old thing that had been decorated with stickers of horses and ponies like something belonging to a little girl. When she asked about Adrian, John said that Adrian was their nephew and she would meet him when they got home. Marion was too afraid to say anything at all.
As soon as they got back to Grange Road, John sent Marion upstairs so he and Sonya would have time to talk alone. She lay on her bed with her stomach tightened into a fist. It seemed almost impossible that this young woman and her brother could fall in love, yet Marion did her best to persuade herself that with time and patience, John might win her heart. She recalled May to December: a Heartfelt Production in which the heroine, a young Victorian kitchen maid, rejected a reckless stable lad in favor of a kindly squire with white, muttonchop whiskers who could offer her a good home and financial security.
The next morning when Marion went downstairs, she found John sitting in the kitchen alone.
“John, what happened? Where is she?”
“Marion, I don’t know how to tell you this—but Sonya is an unsuitable sort of person.”
“What do you mean?”
He picked up a slice of Marmite and toast.
“She’s a prostitute. It seems I have been the victim of deception. This young woman has already slept with dozens of men.” He tore at the toast with his teeth and then licked melted butter from his lips. “She offered to perform acts that I wouldn’t dream of describing to you.”
Marion felt her neck and face become fiery hot.
“Is she still here? You have to get her out of our house.”
“I can’t. Not yet. She brought drugs with her on the ferry. She wants me to sell them and give her the money. Of course I refused, but then she threatened to go to the police and say that we kidnapped her.”
John looked at her with such an awful expression in his eyes that Marion thought her heart was going to stop.
“I don’t understand. She seemed like such a sweet young girl. We have to go to the police at once, John, we have to tell them the truth.”
“No, they won’t believe us. Not after what they think happened at Broadleaf.” And then his mouth twisted into a peculiar smile. “You’ll be in trouble too. We both went to get her, didn’t we?”
Marion imagined herself being arrested and then taken to prison; it would be like school again but a hundred times worse. Nasty, rough women making fun of her, calling her names. And she would never be able to sleep if she had to share a room with others. She would most likely drop dead from the stress of it all; in fact, it would be better to die.
John told her he would keep Sonya in the cellar for a few days, just until she calmed down, and then he would send her back home.
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