Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan

Author:Sarah Vaughan [Vaughan, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

HOLLY

19 June 1993

Twenty

She returned home soon after that. Slunk back. Her body language, when her mother, Lynda, met her at the station, spoke of dejection and failure, for that was exactly what she felt. That she was a failure for being unable to negotiate her way sexually and socially; and for being unable to communicate something so crucial – the fact she did not want her body to be invaded by another – adequately.

‘Too snobby,’ she explained whenever anyone asked why she wouldn’t be returning in October. Manda, who could barely disguise her glee that the sister who had dared to overreach herself had had her wings melted by the sun, kept pushing. ‘Leave it, will you,’ Holly answered. ‘It just wasn’t for me.’

‘I think she was just homesick,’ her mother had elaborated when her friends probed. ‘She found it a bit different down south.’ Far better to do a course at Liverpool University where she could return home whenever she wanted, for something had shaken her up, Lynda wasn’t stupid; she could see that. A boy. Or a man, more likely.

And so she had started again. September 1993. Liverpool University. The reports from her Oxford tutors had been exemplary, though she hadn’t done as well in her exams as expected. She had a full grant and there was no question of this being withheld now that she was changing direction and studying law.

‘Far better to do something vocational,’ she told Manda, who had nodded before pointing out that she had said this all along.

‘No point namby-pambying around with novels. I wasn’t going to achieve anything like that.’

‘Whatcha want to achieve?’ Manda had chewed on a piece of gum and affected a nonchalance belied by her interest in this newly career-minded sister.

‘Oh, you know,’ she said, affecting a flippancy she did not feel, for to speak from the heart would be to expose herself. ‘Bringing down the bad guys. Getting justice.’ And for the first time since she had arrived home, she gave a proper smile: one that reached her eyes and lit them so that her severity, her seriousness, briefly disappeared.

When she enrolled for her degree, it was under a different name: Kate Mawhinney. Kate, a harder, sharper form of her softer middle name, Catherine; Mawhinney, her mother’s maiden name, which Lynda had recently reverted to after discovering that Pete and his 28-year-old girlfriend were going to have a child.

Holly Berry – a joke of an individual with a joke of a name – was shed entirely; like a skin shorn from a bedraggled, raddled sheep to reveal a clean, brutally cropped one.

Her metamorphosis continued. The hair she had cut just before going down to Oxford grew back and, over the years, grew lighter, the Sun-In that Manda had liberally applied that first summer being replaced by highlights that were so convincing only her mother and sister ever remembered that she wasn’t a natural blonde. She shrank: those problematic breasts and the stomach that bulged beneath it melted away and her body was honed, contained, controlled by weights and running.

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