by Jenny Eclair
‘Look who I found dithering over the pickled eggs,’ she announced.
It was Antoine.
Sandy opened the passenger door and instantly the small car was flooded with damp air and the tangy scent of malt vinegar. Tipping the front seat forward, she gave Antoine a slight push and the next thing Serena knew, his face was inches from hers. He was almost close enough to kiss her, but he didn’t. He didn’t even look at her, he simply folded up his body as if it were an Anglepoise lamp and settled himself on the seat beside her, his duffel bag and her small suitcase separating their two bodies.
Beneath the fish and chips, Serena detected a sour whiff of BO. Antoine was sweating, his face was covered in a film of perspiration, he didn’t look very well and by the time the lights of Southend Pier had faded behind them he was fast asleep, a pickled egg clutched in his hand.
21
A New Life
Cornwall, late February 1962
Serena had been at Kittiwake for several weeks before it finally stopped raining. She and Antoine had formed a kind of uneasy truce: sometimes he slept with her and she would wake up and stare at his face in the moonlight, staggered by his beauty. His head was like a newborn foal, he was perfect but untamed. Sometimes he let her stroke him for hours; sometimes he avoided her, hiding round corners, slinking away like a cat.
She had got used to him, or rather she had got used to everything being different from what she’d expected. Not that she’d known what to expect; any information she’d gleaned about Kittiwake before arriving had mostly been picked up during the interminable drive down from Southend, eavesdropping on Sandy and Karl’s conversation while pretending to be as fast asleep as Antoine.
According to Karl, Monty’s Cove, where the house stood, belonged to a man called Benedict Carmichael. ‘Actually,’ Sandy had interrupted, ‘it belongs to his mother. I know someone who went to his sister Natasha’s wedding – very la-di-da, by all accounts. She’s good looking – big nose, mind – married Hugo Berrington.’
‘Otherwise known as the shit,’ Karl had replied. ‘Don’t know him myself, but a stinking reputation by all accounts.’
From what Serena could gather, Karl knew Benedict because his father had been the Carmichael family’s wine merchant, ‘before they lost all their money’. Karl had sighed at this point and rubbed his ginger whiskers. ‘All rather tragic. Mind you, they’ve still got a pretty decent cellar at Kittiwake, though at the rate Benedict’s going through it . . . ’
Sandy had laughed. ‘He went out with a mate of my cousin’s for a while, girl called Lulu Harrison. Said she had a hangover for six months, called it off before she got permanent liver damage. Everyone says he’s an absolute sweetie though.’
‘Oh, he is,’ Karl nodded, ‘tremendous fun, and he’s incredibly generous. I mean, who else would open his doors to . . . well, you know.’ And even though Serena had her eyes screwed tightly shut, she was perfectly aware of their mutual glance at the rear-view mirror.
‘He’s a bit fragile again, it seems,’ Sandy had whispered, obviously referring to the gently snoring Antoine.
‘Oh, a complete crackpot,’ Karl had whispered back, and they both laughed rather meanly, Serena thought, before she finally allowed herself to fall as deeply asleep as her back seat travelling companion.
Looking back on that journey, Serena can’t believe how naive she was. She’d had absolutely no idea what she was letting herself in for. Even now, Monty’s Cove still took her breath away, the sheer size of it, the isolation, the fact that on days when the sea mist comes down the entire place was enveloped in a thick fog and one couldn’t imagine ever seeing the sea again.
The house itself was magnificent, with its thorny overgrown rose gardens and Sleeping Beauty turrets – but she was constantly bewildered by the maze of wood-panelled corridors and endless dilapidated rooms, where ornate wallpaper drooped from the walls and plaster flaked like pastry from the ceilings.
Everything was falling to pieces and it was impossible to find a dry towel. Damp pervaded every inch of the place, through cracks in the window panes and missing tiles on the roof. When it rained heavily they had to rush around placing buckets and saucepans under the leaks, until the entire top floor resonated with the sound of water dripping onto metal, plink-plink, and the stair carpet grew thick with mould.
For the first time in her life, Serena had chilblains. Her beehive had collapsed into two beige curtains that hung limply either side of a badly cut fringe, but whenever she caught sight of herself in some fly-spotted mirror she could still convince herself that she was the prettiest girl in Monty’s Cove, though she did have stiff competition from an Italian girl who would be a complete ringer for Sophia Loren if she didn’t have such a dramatic squint.
Poor Giulia, her left eye resembled a ball bearing ricocheting around a pinball table – one could never be sure where it might shoot next.
Once Serena had noticed this defect, she was able to relax. Yes, Giulia had arguably better legs, but seriously, that eye? Poor cow.
As for bossy Sandy, despite having a mass of coppery ringlets and an incredible bosom, she was too sour to be properly attractive, continually barking orders at Karl and treating him like a dog on a leash. Fortunately for Serena, the fourth female member of what Antoine referred to as ‘the coven’ couldn’t compete in the looks department. Rhiannon was a plain creature from the Welsh Valleys, an emotionally fraught young woman who disapproved of most things, particularly the eating of meat. The mere sight of a rasher of bacon, rare enough at Kittiwake, would cause her to hyperventilate. ‘Just leave it on the side of your plate,’ Serena once snapped, turning for a second into her own mother.
Rhiannon’s reaction to this comment had been to cry until she retched. ‘You have no idea,’ she informed Serena, ‘what it’s like to see animals being slaughtered.’
Serena had to admit she didn’t. In fact, when she thought about it, a lot of meat she’d eaten at home had arrived fresh from Keddies in a tin. Corned beef had been a big favourite, served most Sunday afternoons with beetroot, tomato, lettuce and salad cream. Ida brought the tea into the sitting room on a trolley and they usually had jelly after. Nanna T liked it with tinned mandarins and carnation milk.
Serena pushed the memory firmly away. She wasn’t homesick, it was more that this new chapter of her life wasn’t quite as exciting as she’d hoped. She was also starving half the time. The kitchen range was temperamental, there were no shops within walking distance, Karl’s car was forever letting them down, and if they hadn’t received deliveries of groceries from a neighbouring farm every week they’d have starved. Thank goodness, then, for Robbie, the monosyllabic local farmhand who came every Tuesday morning to drop off hessian sacks of vegetables – soil-caked potatoes, worm-riddled cabbages and frost-bitten carrots – that could be turned into stews and soups. Milk and eggs were left daily at the end of the drive by a van and the kitchen pantry was well stocked with what looked like endless sacks of lentils and something Rhiannon identified as pearl barley. There was also plenty of sugar, salt and flour, which Rhiannon mixed with her precious supplies of yeast and managed to transform, like a disappointing magic trick, into large flat sullen loaves of bread.
She also insisted on making porridge. The sight of that big pot of grey slurry bubbling like a geyser of mud on the stove never failed to have Serena craving some bright pink Bird’s Angel Delight. Everything in Kittiwake tasted of the earth and Rhiannon insisted that the few remaining jars of preserves and pickles be used sparingly until summer came and they could make some more. Why would you want more, thought Serena, as she struggled to taste the difference between the jars labelled plum jam and those labelled plum chutney. Sometimes she dreamed about Keddies, the shelves of scarlet jam, jars of bright yellow piccalilli, the brightly coloured tins of biscuits.
She missed sweets too, she missed the pick-and-mix counter and the tangy peppermint sweetness of seaside rock, she missed Nanna’s crumpled paper bag of
cola cubes tucked down the side of her armchair and Ida’s secret stash of Pontefract cakes which she hid from her mother in her sewing basket. Did they miss her?
Sometimes she wondered why she stayed. Pride, mostly. The food was awful, the weather atrocious and Antoine was a lousy lover, physically clumsy and emotionally cold.
She was also rather sick of the fact that he refused to bathe. He might be beautiful in his starving Parisian artist in a garret way, but he didn’t half pong. The man was also domestically selfish, refusing to lift a finger around the huge house, opting instead to wander off to find his ‘muse’ or sit for hours playing the hideously out-of-tune piano in the entrance hall. He said he was composing – decomposing, more like, thought Serena, removing yet another pair of his socks from under her pillow. Why did he do that?
She only persisted with him because there was no one else to fancy. Karl was round-shouldered and covered in a pelt of orange hair like something in a zoo; his whole body was slightly out of proportion, with a pair of surprisingly short bandy legs attached like an afterthought to his oversized torso.
Far more physically impressive was Gervaise, a slim dark imp of a man with exquisitely chiselled features, who danced like a dream, made delicious sponge cakes and was hiding from his father for something he did in London that had made Papa very angry indeed.
Serena couldn’t imagine Gervaise being guilty of anything too awful. What on earth had he done?
‘Offered a copper a blow job in some toilets off the Old Kent Road,’ Karl explained.
‘His father was livid,’ added Sandy. ‘Couldn’t understand what on earth Gervaise was doing down the Old Kent Road.’
Apart from Gervaise the homosexual and Karl, whom Sandy kept her beady eye on in case he should look too long in the wrong direction, there was only Robbie the dishy farmhand, who was too shy to even look at her. Not that she’d be interested if he did; she hadn’t run away from stacking shelves in a supermarket to be a farmer’s wife. She pictured herself barefoot on a cold flagstone floor with a carving knife, cutting the tails off mice, and shuddered. No thanks.
February was a blur of freezing fog days followed by black ice nights and Kittiwake seemed suspended in time, as if waiting for things to get better, the weather to improve, someone to tune that bloody piano, for Rhiannon to bake an edible loaf.
In the meantime, Serena picked cobwebs off damp crime thrillers and prowled around, idly opening random doors and finding odd relics of the past: a leather button from an overcoat, a chair belonging to a doll’s house, a scrap of hair ribbon and a collection of cigarette cards featuring famous cricketers.
Nothing of any worth had been left at Kittiwake. Following the accidental drowning of young Master Ivor, all the good silver, glassware and furniture was removed and put into storage in London, only to be sold when Teddy Carmichael ran headlong into financial difficulties. All that was left in the house was the second-rate, moth-eaten and uncared for.
Garden furniture had been brought inside to fill some of the essential gaps, a billiard table took pride of place in the dining room, and on the rare occasion a decent meal with meat and wine was served, they dished it up on the ripped green baize. In the hallway, a long-broken grandfather clock stood silent enough for one to almost hear the woodworm gorge their way through its mahogany guts.
Over a decade of neglect had taken its toll on Kittiwake. Pipes had burst and floorboards rotted. Serena slept in a bedroom off the top corridor. The rose-print wallpaper was faded and scuffed, Peggy’s grand chrome deco bed was long gone. She slept on a mattress on the floor with or without Antoine and kept half an eye open for mice. Her belongings were stashed away in a vast mahogany wardrobe, which she wished she could padlock.
Giulia, in particular, didn’t believe in privacy or indeed ownership, and couldn’t be trusted. She would wander from bedroom to bedroom, helping herself to anything she fancied. Not that Serena wasn’t guilty of some casual pilfering herself. On one occasion, imprisoned by the weather and bored by the radio, she’d joined Giulia and climbed a rickety ladder into the loft where they discovered a stash of travel trunks under the eaves. The locks were shut fast with rust, but they’d hacked at them with knives and chisels until they could be prised open.
The largest case contained a collection of fur coats packed tight and reeking of camphor. Mink, rabbit, beaver, leopard and the dearest little white fox fur shrug, which the girls fought over until Serena gave up her claim on the leopard skin, which Giulia took to wearing as a dressing gown.
Predictably, Rhiannon had been sickened by their haul – until the temperature dropped below freezing, at which point with great reluctance she gave in to the practicality of a floor-length beaver-skin coat with pockets big enough to house hot-water bottles.
One of the other trunks had contained items designed to be worn on a summer cruise; many had labels bearing the names from some of the world’s leading couture houses. Serena had spent hours trying on flared palazzo pants and beautifully cut linen jackets with impossibly nipped-in waists. It brought back memories of primary school and playing with a dressing-up box in the corner of her classroom with her friend Susie, trying on cloaks made from curtains, and old ladies’ quilted bed jackets. Clearly, she hadn’t grown out of the thrill of playing dress-up, if only there was something to dress up for.
With a sigh of despair, Serena went down for her pearl barley and potato soup supper that night in a beaded twenties cloche hat.
22
The Prodigal Returns
Cornwall, March 1962
The telegram arrived on Wednesday. It was addressed to Gervaise, and simply stated ‘Friday night. Kill the fatted calf.’
‘So that means Benedict’s coming down?’ queried Antoine. He looked anxious, his eyes were bloodshot and he couldn’t stop coughing.
‘Yes, Benedict’s coming,’ shrieked Gervaise. ‘At last we are going to have some fun. And about time, it’s been too, too dull here without him.’
And he skipped off to the cellar to bring up some fizz and a few bottles of decent red.
‘I could do my vegetable gratin,’ ventured Rhiannon.
‘Che palle,’ snapped Giulia. ‘Are you deaf or stupido? Benedict is coming – and we shall have meat.’
The next day Karl and Sandy managed to bump-start the Mini and set off to fetch provisions from Penzance. Donations were required and Serena wondered why she was handing over her cash.
‘Who are these people anyway?’
‘Benedict and his sister own this place and the land all around,’ Giulia reminded her. ‘This is his house – well, it will be when his madre dies.’
Serena was puzzled. ‘Then where’s he been all this time?’
‘He have a place in London, this is family holiday home.’
‘But no one ever comes here. I mean, it’s not set up for families.’
‘Because the place is unlucky, a child die here. Who knows?’ shrugged Giulia. ‘Anyway, I am having bath, I must shave legs.’
Karl and Sandy returned with bags of salted peanuts, prawns and chickens, frozen peas and brandy snaps, thick double cream, lemons and olives. Serena had never tasted an olive before. Intrigued, she put one in her mouth and instantly spat it out.
‘What are you doing?’ queried Gervaise. ‘You only spit out the pit. Honestly, where did you go to school?’
‘It’s the filthiest thing I have ever put in my mouth,’ Serena spluttered.
Gervaise smirked. ‘Then you have never been down the Old Kent Road.’ And he waltzed off to share Giulia’s bath, as he often did.
The first time Serena walked in on them, naked and semi-submerged in exotically scented water, she had been shocked. The bathroom was candlelit and they were both smoking. Gervaise was reading a book of poems by Byron – more for effect than any great literary thirst, she decided.
There was a lot of this kind of behaviour going on at Kittiwake, a sort of bohemian posturing – particularly from Giulia, who would slink
around like a polecat, climbing into any bed she felt like. She’d even tried to slide in next to Serena once, but Serena had immediately switched on the overhead light and asked her what the hell she was playing at. To which Giulia rolled her eyes even more dramatically than usual and flounced out muttering curses in Italian.
She thinks I’m suburban, Serena realised. And indeed she was; a small-town girl who had worked variously in a cinema, hair salon, shoe shop and supermarket, she had never been abroad or eaten a croissant (or a prawn, for that matter) and she certainly wouldn’t have a clue as to what a girl was meant to do with another girl under the bedclothes. And nor did she want to know, she told herself indignantly. However, try as she might, she couldn’t forget the sight of Giulia’s coffee-coloured nipples peeping out of the bath water, how extraordinarily large they were. Serena’s own nipples were very much smaller and the pale pink of English rosebuds.
She recalled a girl at school who’d had a reputation for eyeing up the other girls when they got changed for PE, blatantly checking out the contents of their white cotton Playtex bras. Miriam Perkins was a couple of years older than Serena and everyone called her names behind her back. Some years later she joined the police force and no one was very surprised when she set up home in a bungalow with two Alsatians and a woman called Mrs Shenley, who was supposed to be a widow.
‘Widow, my foot,’ Nanna spat. ‘More queers than you can shake a stick at round here.’
By Friday morning, Serena had come down with Antoine’s cold. She felt awful and at five o’clock in the afternoon she retired, shivering, back into bed. Back at Allam Street, her mother would have been bringing her tinned tomato soup and Jacob’s crackers on the Eiffel Tower tray with the wicker handles. Serena ached with both illness and a sudden desire to see Ida – poor old put-upon Ida, stuck at home with nutty old Nanna and a dead-end job.
