Tuck Your Skirt in Your Panties and Run: Book Club & Reader Guide

Betty is pleased she executed the cartwheel well; her hips had stayed straight as they rolled in a neat circle.

The Unforgotten | Book by Laura Powell | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster

She glances sideways at George, who is cramming broken gingerbread from his trouser pocket into his thick lips. Something about him makes her stomach curdle. She turns away from him and notices the girl on the promenade. You only dared me because you wanted a look at my knickers. Betty turns away and kicks up a toeful of sand. Jennifer waves her arms madly. She gives a small nod and skips off across the sand. Her voice is raspy, as if the words have been pulled out of her throat and over a grater. She tries to look calm, but she feels sick.

His left arm blocks out half of the hotel sign. Eden, it reads now. Inside, the big room is misty with tobacco warmth. Men stand shoulder to shoulder, still wearing their overcoats, and Mother wriggles between them doling out cups of tea and cinnamon slices of loaf cake and toothy smiles. His face is stern, but he slips Mother a wink. Betty pretends not to notice. As Betty squeezes between them, making for the kitchen, she glances at him, too. He seems to want to keep himself in a separate bubble.

He skims through a stack of papers, each covered with black words inked in tight orderly shapes.

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He has narrow shoulders, she notices. A long face, too. He looks strangely streamlined. She stares at him, fascinated at how the teacup still balances while his right hand holds a pen and the other supports the wad of papers. He cocks up his left eye and locks onto her. His voice is deeper than she expected, startling her to silence.

His eyes are glassy blue puddles of cold water, and pink capillaries thread across his face. She fumbles for something to say. She is usually so composed around hotel guests. His face looks younger the more she stares. Pleasure to see you. Or perhaps meet you. He looks down at his papers, pausing before he glances up again. He picks up his pen and writes something in those blockish letters. His curls bob as his hand moves. The room is very hot suddenly. The air is yeasty, and Mother is up to her elbows in greasy dishwater. She sings along to Fats Domino on the wireless, not quite keeping up with the words.

And look, what a day! Sun shining, birds singing just for us. The only days Mother talks this fast and wakes this early are the days before a crash, before her mood springs high and crumbles, leaving her in bed for days, weeks sometimes, until she can pull herself upright. Betty clears an empty gin bottle and a lipsticked tumbler from the floor. She is wondering whether to ask Mother about them, when a cough cuts in.

Gallagher is standing in the kitchen doorway staring at her. Kippers all right for you? Suddenly there is a loud pop, as boiling water spits out of the kipper pan. He sits at a breakfast table, his long back facing her and his head pointed at the window covered with yellowing net curtains. Only Gallagher has his own bedroom. He paid triple rate for it, so Mother said.

Betty watches his face as she pours. He jumps to his feet before the tea runs into his lap. Betty mops the tea with her handkerchief and pulls across a teacup from another setting. Her finger has a red dent from the heavy teapot, and her hand pulsates with pain.

She sets down the teapot, stunned by the question. Did your mother never teach you manners? Then she realizes with horror that she has spoken aloud. Her tongue seems to swell and fill up her mouth. Gallagher raises an eyebrow. She would like to run back upstairs, to remake the bed, wash her face again, pull on a different skirt, and start the morning over.

It is as if some strange spirit possesses her and causes her to behave quite out of character around this man. Eden found out, Mother would lose her manageress post and their home at Hotel Eden. She pours tea carefully into a fresh cup and is about to apologize again when the bow-tie man strides in.

He rubs his chin, curved like that character from The Dandy, and takes the chair opposite. Betty looks from one to the other. He turns to Gallagher. Just the ticket to perk up a dull day. Reggie turns back to Betty. She blinks them back. Steele last year after she saw something so black in the leaves, she almost choked on her gumdrop.

She wishes she had a clever phrase that would defuse the awkwardness, the way Mother would. A camellia bush, confused by the early summer, had already bloomed and spilled its fat blossoms onto the lawn, where they lay browning and sated, halfway to ugly. Megan headed to the lichen-spotted sundial in the middle of the lawn. Three more foil-wrapped eggs sat on top of it and she brushed them into her basket with the side of her hand. She heard Bethan tripping down the steps behind her in her flamenco shoes.

Megan turned and smiled. Sometimes when she looked at her little sister she felt overcome with love. Her worst enemy and her best friend. Meg and Beth looked identical. Apple cheeks, high foreheads, wide smiles. Rory and Rhys, the twins, looked like their mum. The boys let go of her hands and ran towards the slide at the bottom of the garden that had yellow handles.

Bethan ran towards an upturned bucket that was actually orange. But Megan knew exactly where her mother meant. She walked towards it and let her eyes roam over the clouds of yellow flowers abuzz with fat bumblebees before they came to rest on a row of terra-cotta pots underneath, overflowing with eggs and small yellow puffball chicks with glued-on eyes. Dad was pouring juice into beakers at the kitchen table. The dog was dozing on the window seat. It always amazed her to think it had been stuck to the wall there, in the very same place, with the very same piece of Sellotape, for six whole years.

She could barely remember being four. She certainly could not remember sitting and drawing this portrait entitled megn and mumy, composed of two string-legged people with crazy hair, split-in-half smiles and hands twice the size of their bodies, suspended in a gravity-free world of spiky blue trees and floating animals.

The wall of art was a conversation piece for anyone coming into the house; it spanned all three walls, spread itself over cupboard doors, over door frames, around corners and even into the pantry. And remember, keep the foils for the craft box! It had once been a small plastic toolbox neatly filled with sequins and pipe cleaners and sheets of gold leaf. Over the years it had expanded into an ever-growing family of giant plastic crates that lived in a big cupboard in the hall, filled with an impossible tangle of old string lengths, knots of wool, empty sweet wrappers, toilet-roll middles, old underwear cut into rags, packing chips and used wrapping paper.

She pulled the egg foils eagerly from the children now as they discarded them, smoothing them flat with her fingertips into delicate slivers, her face shining with satisfaction. And of course, they will always make me think of today. This perfect day with my lovely children when the sun shone and shone and all was right with the world. Megan and Bethan had both weighed over nine pounds. Rory had been the first twin out, weighing in at a healthy six pounds and fifteen ounces.

And then, as her mother often recounted, out popped poor Rhys like a plucked quail, a little under four pounds, blue and wrinkled and just about able to breathe on his own. Lorelei still worried about him more than the other three. At just six years old he was smaller than Rory, smaller than most of the children in his class, with a pale complexion and a tendency to catch colds and tummy bugs.

He seemed happy only when he was here, at home, brother on one side, mother on the other. Rhys just dragged them down. The heat wave continued and the Bird children came indoors only for beakers of juice, slices of bread and butter and desperately needed visits to the toilet.

He never could throw anything away.

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Tags from new clothes. She had a shopping bag full of it under her bed. It was quite gruesome. The older she got the less she found it funny and the more she found it peculiar. Because she was now the age that her mother had been at the time of these strange childhood collections and she could no more imagine herself collecting old hair than she could asking to go to school on a Saturday. The blueness of it. Makes me want to snatch out handfuls of it and put it in my pockets.

As though he was aching to say something unspeakable. Totally and absolutely bulging. Lorelei served them in the garden with tea from a pot and scones and cream. The twins ran barefoot back and forth from the hosepipe to fill their water pistols, which, after countless tellings-off, they were using to squirt only each other. Tom and Ben had retired to the bottom of the garden to smoke cigarettes in the hammock and share secret jokes together.

Megan and Bethan sat side by side, listening to the grown-ups talk. They lived in a honey-colored house that sat hard up against the pavement of a picture-postcard Cotswolds village and stretched out beyond into three-quarters of an acre of rambling half-kempt gardens. Their mother was a beautiful hippy called Lorelei with long tangled hair and sparkling green eyes who treated her children like precious gems. Their father was a sweet gangly man called Colin, who still looked like a teenager with floppy hair and owlish round-framed glasses.

And even as a child, Megan knew this to be paradise. Because, she could see with hindsight, her mother told her so.

The Unforgotten

Her mother existed entirely in the moment. And she made every moment sparkle. Not even for a second. Look at that cloud! It looks exactly like an elephant! Meg pulled them out and dusted the sticky cobwebs from her fingertips. Of course she was okay. Meg was always okay. Meg almost flinched at the tender power of it. It had been that bad. But lately, things had started to change. Lately, it seemed as though her daughter had started to like her again.

You know I want to listen. I want to help. Meg nodded back and fitted it into the lock. She turned the key. She opened the door. March The sky was dark with rain clouds and in the very far distance, thunder was starting to rumble. The York stone paving slabs were still stained charcoal gray from the last downpour and fat droplets of rain clung tremulously to the edges of leaves and spring blossoms.

Behind the cloud was a strip of blue and there on the horizon, the faint beginnings of a rainbow. Lorelei stood barefoot just outside the kitchen door, wrapped in a long multicolored angora cardigan. Her waist-length hair was twisted and held on her crown with three large tortoiseshell combs.

Come and look now! She joined her mother outside, feeling the wetness of the flagstones seeping through her sheepskin slippers. Quick, darling, run in and tell them. She sighed again and headed towards the sitting room. Her three siblings sat in a row on the grubby sofa with the dog lying listlessly between them. They were watching Saturday Superstore and eating carrot sticks.

You can always describe it to the others. As if, she thought to herself, as if I will sit with my siblings and regale them with descriptions of the red and the yellow and the pink and the green, the awe and the splendor of the purple and the orange and the blue, the miracle of distant prismatic stripes.

Lorelei insisted on the egg hunt taking place regardless. Rain or no rain. The twins jumped into their Wellington boots and raincoats, while Lorelei ran around in the rain, planting her eggs in the garden. Meg watched her through the window. She looked like a wraith, long and lean, in a cream muslin smock, faded jeans, green Wellingtons and a floppy-brimmed straw hat, her long hair sticking wet to her back, her small breasts growing visible through the fabric of her top as it dampened. Her face was shining with joy as she hopped from spot to spot, plucking eggs from a straw basket held in the crook of her arm.

The boys stood in the doorway, bristling with anticipation. Just turned eleven years old they could still be held rapt by Lorelei with her enthusiasm and childlike charm.

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Her babies, still, just about. Put on a rain cap, here. Meg stared at it, aghast. Now put the hat on and come and have some fun with the little ones. They were set firm. She found eleven eggs that morning and gave them all to her siblings. Pandora and her husband, Laurence, arrived at midday, without either of their now-grown-up sons but with a new puppy in tow.

Some neighbors were next to arrive, Bob and Jenny and their three young children. The children sat at a plastic picnic table at one end of the kitchen while the adults sat together around the antique pine table in the middle. Megan imagined it to be a glorious explosion of glass shards, as she slammed her fists through the invisible walls around her.

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She imagined fresh air and bright light and dizzying amounts of space. She saw a shiny kitchen, gleaming pans, a white bathroom and a quiet man with clean fingernails and a silver guitar. He wrapped a gangly arm around her waist and Megan smiled across the table at her mother. If I ever found myself stranded on the side of a snowy mountain, freezing to death, I would probably hallucinate about this place.

I mean, I understand all this. I counted them the other day. Just as an experiment. She pulled out examples and held them up as evidence. We also have brand-new tea towels—look, nice ones. We wash them and we dry them and then we fold them and we return them to this drawer which now has nineteen tea towels in it!

I beg of you. How about this one? We do not need any more rags.

Just put it back. You know that and I know that. She looked around and realized that everyone had stopped talking and that they were all staring at her with varying degrees of discomfort. Beth looked at her in an accusatory way from the other table and her father stared at his shoes. Then Meg looked at her mother again, who was smiling nervously and rubbing at the pointy nibs of her elbows. April It was not a kitchen. Not in any traditional or easily recognizable way. It was a structure, a form, an entity, like the guts of a living creature. It was dark, eerily dark, no sense of the bright spring day outside, just a white stripe of light strafing through a gap in the piles in front of the windows.

Meg felt around the wall to her left for the light switch. The lights did not come on. She switched her mobile phone to its torch function and swept the beam around the room.