Going Through with It

Lynette wished that people would stop telling her, “Of course we would understand completely if you didn’t want to go through with this,” and then promptly, in those bright well-meaning voices, try to persuade her exactly why she should. I know all about persuasion, she thought, and you’re not even very good at it. She hurriedly reminded herself that it was to their credit, and to her benefit, that they weren’t very good at it.

Only Gran-Jan seemed to genuinely respect her views. Even long after putting aside childish things (many of which she had taken up again later one) she had carried on using that pet name for her Grandmother Janet. Lynette was a person who didn’t give her trust or affection easily, though she was not as chary of either as she used to be, but she trusted Gran-Jan completely, and loved her dearly.

It hadn’t always been that way. There had been a time when she hated her and resented her and screamed and flailed and called her the cruellest names she could think of, and when you had been one of the Witnesses of the Dawn you had a pretty good repertoire of cruel names. Yet she had borne it all, from two-faced whore to Satan’s Lackey with equanimity. Though of course, as Lynette realised later she must have been in despair and inner turmoil.

Lynette was, effectively, a motherless child. But she could honestly say it had never bothered her, and in that instance, it wasn’t cruelty. She had never known her mother, who died soon after she was born of a strain of septicaemia that people thought was more or less resigned to history in Western Europe.

She had now read books, and articles about real life, where a grieving husband in those circumstances turned against the baby. But her Dad hadn’t turned against her. He adored her, and she was his solace and hope. He was also sensible enough to know that she did need a female presence in her life, and she didn’t lack for that. Gran-Jan only lived a couple of streets away, and her Auntie Glenda in the next town. Though she didn’t see her Dad’s mum, Grandma Elaine, as much, she knew that she cared for her and thought of her. So she grew into a happy and confident little girl. Though she was an early and fluent reader, her Dad carried on reading aloud to her, and her nickname, his special name for her, was rooted in one of the favourites from her early childhood. She had loved Henny-Penny and he called her Linny-Pinny.

Gran-Jan told her later that she had been pleased, to start with, when her dad started spending time with Joyce. “I was sure your Mum would never have wanted him not to know a woman’s love again,” she said, “She was a generous and loving woman.” But even at eight years old, Lynette heard a note in Gran-Jan’s voice that made her wonder. She doesn’t really like Joyce, she thought, and it’s not because she minds anyone going out with Dad!

It wasn’t long before she began to notice subtle little differences in her dad. Though she had never been spoilt and was expected to behave, he was a tolerant man and an easy-going father. For instance on the subject of bedtimes. She was nominally supposed to be in bed at 9, but he knew full well she often kept the light on and read long after that, and as long as she didn’t seem over-tired and kept up with her schoolwork he turned a blind eye. But one day he told her that there was to be no reading after bedtime, and that he wasn’t sure the books she was reading were suitable either.

The next day she found that at least half of her books were removed, and in their place were some books with pictures of children praying and oddly menacing angels, not a bit like the ones in the school Nativity play.

She told Gran-Jan all about it, and she was put in a difficult position. She had always maintained that though she worshipped the ground Lynette walked on, and would always help out when needed, and be delighted to do so, on matters of discipline she would never go against Lynette’s dad’s wishes. But this time she went so far as to say, “Joyce is very religious, I think.” Later she told Lynette that she realised that was probably the worst thing she could have said, and yet she didn’t regret it.

“I don’t want her to be my Mum. EVER.”

“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, lovey. Just mind your manners and make sure your dad carries on being proud of you.”

Lynette had never gone to church very often, but when she had, she hadn’t minded at all, whether it was for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve (oh, how grown up and magical it was!) or for her little cousin Archie’s christening, or for the school Harvest Festival. She thought she wouldn’t mind going more often. Well, when Joyce entered their lives, she changed her mind about that. Joyce didn’t go to a nice church like St Anthony’s with beautiful stained glass windows and a kindly vicar like Reverend Jack. Joyce took her and her dad to a place she called a House of Mission where there were no beautiful windows, and no lovely music, and no kindly vicar. There were endless sermons, and endless warnings.

Then came the day when her Dad said, “Lynette, Joyce and I are going to get married. Will you wish us blessings?”

She remained mutinously silent. He went on, “And we’re going to live in a special house out in the countryside.” At that Lynette perked up, just a little, just for a few minutes. She loved the countryside. But some precocious prescience told her that this wouldn’t be at all like the countryside on holiday or in story books.

She knew that Gran-Jan wasn’t happy about it. She said she was in two minds about going to the wedding, but Joyce “solved” that problem anyway by saying, “We mean you no disrespect, Mrs Anderson, but only members of our congregation are allowed to attend our services. We make exceptions for under 10s who are close relations of members, though of course we expect them to join us.”

Lynette had never been to a funeral, but she knew what they were, and were pretty sure that they were more cheerful matters than this wedding. Her dad and Joyce wore sombre coloured every day clothes, though the former was wearing a long skirt, and there seemed to be nothing but warnings and condemnation. Except, curiously, right at the end, there was something the minister (a whey faced little man with a voice that reminded Lynette of paper being crinkled up, but paper with rocks and glass in it) called The Rejoicing. There had been no music in the service, and she had noticed that there wasn’t an organ, nor even a piano, but now everyone burst into some kind of wild, discordant song, something at the same time discordant and monotone, and that was the worst part of all.

“Your suitcase is packed,” Joyce told her, “You are coming with us to our House of Mission, like we said.”

“But I want to say goodbye to Gran-Jan!”

“You will obey! And the sooner you are taken away from her malign influence, the better.”

Though she had a good vocabulary, she wasn’t sure what malign meant, but it obviously wasn’t something good. You’re the malign one, she thought.

She had been allowed a glass of orange squash after the wedding, though normally only water was allowed, and much later on, it dawned on her that it had been drugged. She drifted off into a deep, restless sleep in the back of the car, aware of turning round endless corners in a vague, stupefied way, time playing tricks on her.

A whole night must have passed, because dawn was breaking when she woke up in a hard little bed. She was rousing of her own volition anyway, but another girl shook her awake. “Hurry! The first act of worship will soon be beginning.”

“I’m hungry!” she exclaimed, and her stomach rumbled as if on cue.

“You had best see if you can tame that!”

A new recruit (which as she thought after, was hardly the right word as it implied something voluntary) at the House of Mission was given no leeway or time to slowly get accustomed to things. Later on she told Gran-Jan, “I suppose in one way it wasn’t like Lowood or those other schools you read about in books – the food wasn’t great, but there was enough – usually – and it wasn’t rotten or anything. But I didn’t have much appetite, even though I thought I was ravenous.”

She had the sensation of being force-fed though, and not with nourishment. She learnt, in one single day, great chunks of what being a child at the House of Mission meant. There must be no singing, apart from The Rejoicing, and they didn’t call that singing. They were to read no books except the Bible in the Witnesses of the Dawn’s own version, and tracts of the kind that had replaced Harry Potter and even the Narnia books on Lynette’s bookshelves. Birthdays were forbidden. “That sounds like the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Gran-Jan said, “I wonder if they’re some kind of off-shoot.”

“I don’t think so,” Lynette said. And in some ways they made the Jehovah’s Witnesses seem positively liberal. As Lynette understood it, JW families were allowed to keep pets, though there was some debate as to whether they had a soul. Such things were strictly forbidden for Witnesses of the Dawn. They were strict vegetarians, but it wasn’t because they loved animals. All animals except humans (and most of them) were evil and to be spurned. So Henny-Penny would have been ruled out on two counts! They did not play any games, and even an impromptu race up the corridor was immediately stopped and condemned as sinful. Naturally they didn’t go to school. They were required to be literate and numerate, but that was as far as it went, apart from a chosen few who went on to study the group’s own brand of theology.

Now she was older, Lynette knew the phrase “Convert’s Zeal”, and her dad was a prime example of it. She told herself he must still love her, but it often didn’t feel as if he did. He had a weird look in his eyes – it was somehow empty and obsessive at the same time. But she was sure he MUST have his limits. One day she spoke of her mother – of her real mother. She rarely did, and was no hypocrite who pretended that she missed her when she had never known her, but now she thought about how different her life would have been if her mother had lived. Her dad had made sure she had seen plenty of pictures of her – a smiling young woman who looked so kind and full of love. She was pretty, too, and though Gran-Jan had always told her pretty was as pretty did, she couldn’t help being pleased about that. She wanted to think Joyce was ugly, but she wasn’t. She had even features and dark eyes that might have been nice if they hadn’t had that perpetual expression in them. The same expression as in her dad’s – except sometimes there was downright malice. “I don’t want to hear that talk ever again,” she told her. “The woman who bore you is now burning in hell.” Her Dad was going to say something. SURELY! But he didn’t. Not one word.

And the thing was, she became one of the community. She went along with things. She never liked Joyce, but on the surface she stopped hating her, and blessed with a quick memory, she even became one of the best Bible students in her class, though there was some dichotomy here; they could hardly mind a child knowing her Bible, but being too clever for your own good was frowned on, especially as she was a girl, though they were in the process of reluctantly accepting some girls to theology classes.

She did not have even the vaguest clue of where the House of Mission was. The Countryside could have been anywhere in the country. As the weather was generally relatively mild, she supposed it wasn’t in the far north of Scotland or anything like that, and she didn’t think it was near the sea. Not really near the sea. They were generally never allowed to leave the House, though some of the adults had to, on occasion, but as she knew, still, from fading memories of seaside holidays that faded though she didn’t want them to, in the quiet of the night you could hear the song of the tide, even if it were several miles away, and she didn’t hear it. Nor could she see the contours of any distant hills.

When she was 11 she was accepted as a full member of the Witnesses of the Dawn. The ceremony was as joyless as the wedding, and even the Rejoicing didn’t last long, and she didn’t see it conferred any especial advantages on her but she didn’t mind either. She had stopped minding, or thought she had.

That was also the occasion that she went through the rite of passage of being told what happened to a woman’s body around this time. It was biologically surprisingly frank and accurate, but the dire warnings about losing your purity were far more important.

She was sweeping the hallway when a woman surged in through the open door – she had been sweeping out the dust. This woman, though quite conservatively dressed, was wearing what they called harlots’ clothing in bright colours. I know you thought Lynette, and yet she knew better than to take her eyes off the floor. I know you, the voice nagged at her again. And the woman stopped by her, and put her arm round her shoulders, and Lynette recoiled – public demonstrations of affection were forbidden at the House of Mission. “Oh, sweetheart, don’t you know me!” she exclaimed, “Don’t you know your Gran-Jan? I never gave up trying to find you, you know!”

Well, there was a battle, of course. And Lynette’s dad wanted her to stay at the House of Mission. But Gran-Jan was a determined woman, and didn’t intend giving up now she’d got this far. Lynette wasn’t drugged when she drove her away from the House, but she supposed after that Gran-Jan may have wished she had been. She howled and howled, terrified at leaving the House even though she had never come to love it.

When she reached Gran-Jan’s home (and how could a place be so familiar and so bizarre at the same time) her howling intensified as she saw a cat – a little tabby called Twinks, whom Gran-Jan had got for company. “That’s a creature of the devil!” she wailed accusingly.

“No, she’s a dear little thing, but you don’t need to pay her any heed if you don’t want to.”

That was all eight years ago now. Lynette had been to all kinds of counselling, but her best help was Gran-Jan, whose unwavering love and patience brought her back into the world. Oh, and Twinks! She was a dignified elder states-cat now, still with her gentle way and air of dignity, though she had never stopped loving her games with her catnip mouse.

She was sitting on Lynette’s lap now, and was the first to hear her decision. “I will go and meet Dad,” she said, “Everyone tells me he is completely free of the House of Mission and the Witnesses of Dawn, and he’s divorced Joyce, but I still don’t quite trust him and don’t know if I want to. But I expect this means I’m properly grown up now.”

It was agreed they would meet on neutral ground, at a local café at a quiet time, and Gran-Jan would be there, but discreetly in the background, only intervening if necessary, or if Lynette used an “alerting” phrase they had agreed on to signify that she wasn’t comfortable with the situation. Not that she was comfortable anyway.

He has grown older, she thought, and it shows. She was still at the stage when she was growing up, but he was growing older. He had lost weight, and the first traces of grey were in his hair. He stood up as she approached. “It’s been – a very long time, dad,” she said, speaking first, and keeping her voice, though not hostile, neutral.

“Too long,” he said, plainly fighting his tears. “Thank you for agreeing to this. I would have understood if you hadn’t, Linny-Pinny.”

No, she wasn’t someone to be softened up by the use of a childhood nickname. It wasn’t that simple. But even before she realised it, she had thrown herself into his arms, and both of them were sobbing.