Acclaim for
eskimo kissing
'Skilfully crafted, with an underlying tenderness, heart-breaking at times, Eskimo Kissing is a fearless and stunning debut'
Bernice Rubens
'Part coming-of-age, part first love, part detective story, Eskimo Kissing has a resolution so extraordinary and disturbing, it makes most adoption stories seem mundane'
Melissa Bean in the New Statesman
'Kate Mosse achieves the tension of a detective story, the tender eroticism of first love and the painful reality of family life in one gripping passage'
Maeve Haran
'Kate Mosse writes well, using a keen ear for dialogue and sharp eye for human behaviour'
Jessica Mann in the Sunday Telegraph
'Utterly engrossing and beautifully constructed'
Bel Mooney
'Heart-warmingly unpretentious, modest and involving'
Syrie Johnson in the Literary Review
'Mosse takes the emotional temperature of a family in turmoil, with extraordinary insight, compassion and accuracy . . . there is something very persuasive about her clean, confident style'
Kate Saunders in the Sunday Express
About the Author
Kate Mosse is the author of two non-fiction books, Becoming a Mother and The House, published in 1996 to accompany the award-winning BBC2 series on the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This is her first novel. She is also a founder of the Orange Prize for Fiction and was the 1996 Chair of Judges.
Copyright © 1996 by Kate Mosse
First published in Great Britain in 1996
by Hodder and Stoughton
a division of Hodder Headline PLC
First published in paperback in 1996
A Coronet paperback
The right of Kate Mosse to be identified as the Author of
the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means without the prior written
permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The places in this novel are places I know well - although
certain liberties have been taken - but the story and the
characters are entirely imaginary. Any similarities to real
events or real people, alive or dead, are coincidental. And
should be ignored.
Mosse, Kate
Eskimo kissing
1. English fiction - 20th century
I. Title
823.9'14 [F]
ISBN 0 340 66619 6
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Polmont, Stirlingshire
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire
Hodder and Stoughton
A division of Hodder Headline PLC
338 Euston Road
To my sisters, Caroline and Beth, with love
But we have different voices, even in sleep,
and our bodies, so alike, are; yet so different
and the past echoing through our bloodstreams
is freighted with different language, different meanings —
Adrienne Rich, 'XII/Twenty-One Love Poems',
The Dream of a Common Language, Poems 1974-77
part one
The joys of parents are secret, and so are
their griefs and fears.
Francis Bacon, 'Of Parents and Children',
Essays
Green is the colour of history. Not the black and white of books or photographs. Not the frozen grey of tombstones and cathedrals. It is green that is the colour of time passing. Olive moss, sable in places, covering the crow's-feet cracks in the wall. Like fur. Emerald weeds that spring up along a path long unused.
The gabled house stood alone, shabby and still, as if holding its breath. Nothing moved. For two days and nights, rain hid fallen from the unbroken sky and melted away like snow into the ground. There was no wind, no frost. More like an endless April than the tail-end of winter.
The house looked as if it had been waiting in its cypress silence for years, patient and unblinking. No lights were on, only a weak gleam from the dirty bulb in the porch. Mid-afternoon was starting to creep up on the four irregular walls and the complicated sloping roof, turning the greens and naked browns of the garden to black.
In the tiny box-room under the eaves sat a man. Striped South American rugs, an empty amber vase, woodwork painted cream, it was a room of life and colour. Cheap gold hooks on the back of the door, an unpolished brass ashtray and a couple of wine bottles for candlesticks.
Someone — not him — had lovingly melted wax over the necks of the bottles. He stared out of the window, watching the light fade. His face was troubled.
'They'll be back soon,' he whispered.
The words crackled softly in the air for a moment before the silence closed back over them.
'I must go.'
Her breathing was soft. She lay sleeping on her side, head balanced on the white underside of her right arm. Her left arm rested over her pale body, as if draped there haphazardly by somebody else. She looks so young, he thought, so perfect. Love twisted in him. He felt drugged and infatuated, tortured by a passion that swamped everything in its path. Desperate to close out the world, he tugged roughly at the homemade curtains. The material dug its heels in and stuck halfway along the tiny rail.
'I should go,' he whispered again.
In the darkening afternoon light, he traced the outline of her shoulder blade with his knuckles. His man's hands seemed so clumsy to him, so big. Like a bear caressing a dove. He ran the tips of his fingers down one of her cheeks, then dusted over the flickering lids of her eyes. In her sleep, instinct turned towards the familiar touch.
He touched the printed cotton bedspread, unconsciously pulled up to her waist to keep out the draught. Bold, Aztec triangles. Its folds looked like a voluminous skirt, a dirndl in which a girl could dance and spin.
With the backs of his hands, he brushed the delicate hairs on her arms, a hypnotic and rhythmic pattern. His fingers skated on to the blue-white skin of her breast, without warning, just glancing the nipple. Her breath was coming faster now. She shifted, rolling the flimsy material over with her. He could see the outline of her legs, distinct one from the other. There's so much noise, he thought to himself, as the little room filled up with the sound of his blood beating, thick and heavy.
Trying not to trap the cover under his leg, he knelt on to the bed. Skin and bone touched the top of her thigh, intimate and startling. As he shifted his weight from the floor, the bed rocked like a raft. She opened her eyes and held him in her gaze. Eyes the colour of autumn, he marvelled, of chestnut tumbling into brown.
They looked straight into one another's faces, unblinking and focused. He breathed out. She lifted the bedspread to let him under, watching his red mouth as he carefully lowered his body into the triangular space between her bare legs. Still they stared. The room waited. Pushing gently, he eased himself inside her, little by little, until he could go no further. For a moment he lay still, as if resting.
The hairs on the back of her neck prickled, alert, as warmth seeped through her body like blotting paper. She felt she was being swallowed up. Very full, very powerful, as if her body had grown and grown. A giant woman, one hundred feet tall now. She had no sense of time, of space, just those two blue eyes watching her in the black dusk.
Slowly, he began to move.
'My love.'
The words slipped from between his lips.
She caught her breath. And allowed her weightless eyes to close. Neither of them heard the slam of the front door, nor the radio being turned on in the kitchen two floors below. Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Like smoke, the sound of 'The Young Ones' wound its innocent way up the stairs.
1975
CHAPTER 1
A November morning, sunny after dawn, mist and fog patches, about fifty degrees Fahrenheit. East wind, cloudy later. A pleasant enough modern estate on the outskirts of a pretty mid-Sussex town, no more than fifteen minutes from the city centre. Two-, three- and four-bedroomed terraced houses, staggered to give the illusion of privacy, designed with a touch of variety for the families of teachers and accountants and junior IBM executives.
'Nineteen down,' said Tom Whittaker, scratching his beard with the end of his biro. ' "They've had it as storytellers" Four, three.'
Sam scowled at her father's paper. The Times. Wednesday November 12 1975. No 59,551. Price ten pence. Boring. A photo of two men smiling. The one with the silly name had resigned. Who cares, she thought, banging her right heel over and over against a leg of her chair. She twisted her head slightly to read the man's name. Gough Whitlam. Goff like cough? Gow like bough? It was night in Australia. If they were Australian, their birthday would almost be over.
'Dead men,' said her sister Anna.
'Sorry?'
' "They've had it as storytellers". Dead men.'
'What a brilliant daughter,' muttered Tom, counting out the spaces. 'OK, twenty-four across: 'The habit of girls in the swim'. Seven letters. B something K something, something, something . . .'
'What is Mum doing up there?' interrupted Sam. 'Can't we start without her?'
Anna smiled. The clock above the kitchen door tapped out the time. Tick. Tick. Nearly eight o'clock. Tom folded his paper in on itself, then flapped it down in the middle of the table.
'No, PB2, we can't,' he said firmly. 'Why don't you go and see if she's coming? Or has the shock of turning thirteen taken away the use of your legs . . . ?'
'Ha. Ha,' grimaced Sam, shunting back her chair and sloping out into the hall.
'Mu-um! Mu-um!' she bawled up the stairs, as if she'd been a teenager all her life. 'What are you doing? I'm really, really bored of waiting.'
'Twenty-four across is bikinis,' said Anna, tucking her hair back behind her left ear.
A blob of marmalade, its five-minute journey down the side of the jar over, oozed onto the face of the dismissed Australian Prime Minister.
Anna and Sam were not identical twins, although physically they were alike. They both had blue eyes, paddling-pool blue, and British mousy-blonde hair. Anna was slightly the taller, all skin and geometric bone to her sister's flesh and curves. Her hair was cut into a symmetrical bob and a precise fringe. It did not hide her crimson birthmark, which splashed across the right side of her forehead and eyebrow. As if someone had thrown red wine in her face. It was the first thing strangers noticed. The second was that Anna was beautiful. Actually beautiful, the lines of an adult rather than a pretty child.
Everything about Sam, on the other hand, was round. Her shoulder-length haystack hair filling the air around her head like a wiry halo. She already had the body of a young teenager. The navy-blue school skirt strained slightly across her tummy and hips, and the second and third buttons of her yellow shirt gaped under pressure. She was emotional, impatient and energetic, a passionate yo-yo of a girl zooming from one obsession to another.
The twins fought and competed and bickered like any other sisters. But beyond the tick-list characteristics, Sam and Anna felt that being one of two was special. If they'd been asked to put their feelings into words, they'd have said that having a twin was like having a lucky angel. Anna would always be there for Sam, and Sam for Anna, come what may. Their love for one another was unconditional, even when they didn't like each other very much.
Their mother, Helen, had never dressed her daughters in the same clothes when little, avoiding the same colours even. The only exception to the rule was bridesmaids dresses and, as twins, they'd been greatly in demand It was at their first wedding reception, swathed head to satin toes in peach, that Sam announced she was going to marry Anna when they grew up. All the grown-ups had smiled.
Their childhood nicknames were still used too. For their sixth birthday, Tom had come home with two Paddington Bear toys, one under each arm. Nobody could remember how or when the girls started to be called PB1 and PB2. But the pet names had stuck. Seven years later, Sam's bear still sat propping up her growing collection of singles, preventing Leo Sayer, David Essex and Slade from tipping over like dominoes and crushing the Osmonds. Anna's sat more primly on the little shelf above her bed, next to her complete collection of Paddington Bear books arranged in chronological order. She was PB1, by virtue of having been born twenty minutes before her twin. Sam didn't think it was fair.
Tick. Tick. Twenty past eight. The arrival of their mother had been the catalyst for an orgy of present- and card-opening, Helen suggesting in vain that they should check the envelopes for postal orders before slinging them on the floor.
The girls opened presents like they ate. Sam devoured everything in double-quick time, finishing up with indigestion and a sense of having been slightly let down. As if she'd nearly — but not quite — got the perfect present. Anna savoured everything, jotting down who'd sent what on her thank-you letters list. The girls were united, though, in despising those relatives and family so-called friends who sent a joint card. Even though they always thought of their birthday as a shared celebration, with the graceless hypocrisy of youth they hated anyone else lumping them together. Auntie Joy — humiliated for ever on Anna's list — had only sent one present. A single copy of the Junior Pears Encyclopaedia inscribed to THE TWINS. Like they were still children. God, thought Sam, how mean. And boring. She looked at the four waxy colour photos on the front cover, a collage of 1975 so far: some politician — ugly — holding up a little red case; Mohammed Ali, quite dishy; a train, yawn, yawn. The last photo was more interesting, though. Sam frantically tapped the top of Anna's hand, just in case she hadn't noticed the totally nude statue, penis and everything hanging out. Peering more closely at the photo, the two mousy heads shook, giggling with embarrassment at the ways of the world. Thirteen today.
Spotty wrapping paper, striped wrapping paper, pink bows lay discarded like husks on the floor. Green and white and fuchsia envelopes. The kitchen looked shocked. Despite the paper mountain, though, there was an air of unfinished business.
'Dad?' whined Sam, fanning herself with her new LP 'I don't want to be rude, but . . . well, is this my main present?'
'Captain Fantastic,' read Anna, thinking that Elton John's silver boots looked like the top of the kitchen taps.
Sam twisted the record, front, back, front, back, looking for an answer to her question in their father's eyes. Anna saw there were sludgy paintings of frogs that turned into flights of stairs and octopus legs and skulls. She wouldn't want something so creepy in her bedroom. She glanced down at the benign profile of Yehudi Menuhin on her birthday album, violin under his chin.
'This record is really ...
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