by Jenny Eclair
And that’s precisely why you have done this, she reminded herself. You ran away so that you wouldn’t end up like your mum. And she drifted off into a confused and sweaty sleep, dreaming of playing topless bingo with Miriam Perkins, Giulia and Mrs Shenley.
She woke up at around ten o’clock in the evening to the sound of laughter and the chink of glass. For a while she hovered at the top of the stairs, listening in and peering over the banister rail into the hall where a heap of strange coats and alien luggage had been discarded. Who were these invaders, she wondered, even though she herself was an interloper, a cuckoo in this freezing nest. The temptation to go down and join them was overwhelming; there would be a fire in the dining room, and food and drink. She hadn’t eaten all day and having sweated off her fever she was starving, so she threw an Aran sweater over her silk nightie (yet another attic find), pulled on a pair of long woollen socks that Rhiannon had knitted and made her way downstairs.
Even with her poor blocked ears, the decibel level increased with every step: jazz music and voices, people talking over each other, guffaws and shrieks. How many of them were there? In the hall, candles guttered in the icy draught and the grandfather clock with its hands forever stuck at twenty to four seemed to give her a disapproving look as she tentatively opened the heavy oak door to the dining room.
Strange men in evening dress sprawled around a long central dining table on mismatched chairs. Even Karl was wearing a bow tie, his collared shirt looking chokingly tight around his throat.
Further round the table, which at second glance she realised was both the kitchen and billiard tables shoved together and covered in a white bedsheet, she spotted Gervaise and Giulia. They were sitting side by side, chiffon scarves tied in bows around their necks, faces elaborately painted, kohl-rimmed eyes, rouged cheeks and crimson lips, each with a matching beauty spot, the show-offs.
Ashtrays brimmed with cigarette butts and even through her cold Serena could smell the acrid scent of cigar smoke. The room was a blue haze of smoke and candlelight, the bedsheet tablecloth was splattered with red wine and an unfamiliar woman was spitting olive pits expertly into her delicate hand, a diamond bracelet sparkling around her tiny wrist, while a body in ornate black lace lay slumped on the window seat, asleep or possibly unconscious?
The carcasses of three chickens lay splintered in the middle of the table, picked clean of meat and surrounded by empty vegetable dishes. The only untouched food was a plate of celery piped with creamed pearl barley and sprinkled with paprika – Rhiannon’s vegetarian contribution, Serena guessed, as she edged around the door and crept silently into the room. No one noticed her apart from a chocolate brown Labrador who emerged from under the table and proceeded to waddle over and sniff at her crotch. It was as though the animal knew she wasn’t wearing knickers and she could feel the dampness of its nose through the flimsy fabric of her nightdress. She pushed the thing away with her knee and he growled.
‘Well, look who it is,’ slurred Gervaise. ‘Little Miss Southend-on-Sea.’ She felt instantly cheap, like a novelty gewgaw hanging off one of the stalls along the seafront.
‘The shop girl,’ brayed the olive-spitting woman – opening her hand and discarding the pits onto the carpet. ‘Benji, stop sniffing the poor girl’s vagina.’ Serena had never heard anyone say ‘vagina’ in public before and she blushed deeply on the other girl’s behalf.
Frozen with self-consciousness, Serena noticed a young man strutting towards her from the far end of the dining table, clutching an oversized bottle of champagne. There was something about him, an energy, a life force, that drew her towards him like a magnet. He was slightly shorter than average, dark-haired and tanned, and there were creases around his eyes. He looked as though someone had recently told him a very good joke.
‘I’m Benedict,’ he said, expertly shoving the dog aside and handing her a brimming glass of bubbling pale gold liquid. And as he grinned, Serena wondered whether she’d ever seen a grown man with dimples before.
Across the room, Antoine smouldered and coughed over his filthy liquorice roll-ups. Later he came to her room and made phlegmy love to her; both of them were running a temperature and their love-making was slick with the sweat of sickness rather than passion. He must have a bath tomorrow, thought Serena, before he abruptly withdrew and collapsed on top of her. She hadn’t come, but he had, she could feel the cold slime of his sperm as it spread under her buttocks. Surely someone must be able to get hold of condoms, even in this godforsaken place. ‘You did – you know – in time . . . didn’t you?’ she asked.
‘Of course,’ he gasped, and then he proceeded to cough all over her until she was tempted to creep off down the corridor and crawl into bed with Giulia.
23
Japes
Cornwall, April–September 1962
Benedict’s presence lit up Kittiwake. The place came alive when he was around. It helped that for the entire duration of his visit the sun shone and Monty’s Cove finally revealed herself in her true sparkling-sea-and-golden-gorse-covered glory.
With Antoine confined to bed on the master’s orders – ‘I’m not having that consumptive maniac infecting the rest of us. Tell him if he gets out of bed, I’ll shoot him’ – Serena, who was still rather pink around the nose, was free to observe the Carmichael party at close quarters for the rest of the weekend.
For some reason, Benedict included her in all their activities: the walk down to the private beach, complete with hip flasks and a box of Belgian chocolates; the three-hour lunch on Saturday that morphed into evening cocktails followed by the first curry Serena had ever eaten, cooked by the first Indian man she had ever met. ‘Bloody good cricketer and all,’ confided Benedict, spilling prawn biryani down his front. He dabbed it off with his napkin, ‘See, that’s the joy of a paisley shirt, you can throw as much food down it as you like and everyone thinks it’s part of the pattern,’ and he re-filled Serena’s wine glass to the brim, yet again.
After dinner she was drunk and found herself telling wildly exaggerated stories about working in Keddies, doing impressions of Mr Salmon’s wife, and revelling in the ensuing laughter. ‘I’ve never met a till girl before,’ Benedict’s friend Lucinda told her. ‘And I’ve never met an Honourable before,’ Serena quipped and everyone laughed some more.
Before she went to bed, Benedict made her a hot toddy: whisky, honey and lemon. It was the kindest thing anyone had done for her since she ran away from home.
‘It’s what Blake always did for my father,’ he told her.
‘Who’s Blake?’ she asked.
‘Our old butler.’
Of course.
In the morning, Serena was hungover. By the time she ventured downstairs, all the Honourables and cricketing curry chefs were packing up to leave. At 3 p.m., a procession of brightly coloured sports cars, horns blaring, weaved their way out of the rusting iron gates at the end of the drive.
Back at the house, those with nowhere better to go huddled on the front step and waved somewhat forlornly as the storm clouds gathered above Kittiwake’s peeling yellow façade.
He reappeared in late spring, when the weather began to truly warm up and the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea reminded Serena of being a little girl and painting pictures of the seaside.
Gervaise had found a large box of watercolours; there were three different blues in the box, he told her, ‘cobalt, ultramarine and cerulean’. Serena was learning all kinds of things, all the colours of blue, what the word canapé meant, and how to mix a decent vodka martini.
She began to realise that her background was as exotic and mysterious to society types as theirs was to her. OK, she’d never tasted lobster before, but how many of them had eaten jellied eels or pie and mash?
Occasionally Benedict brought a girlfriend down, but as far as Serena could tell, it was never the same one. They all sounded alike and were uniformly beautiful with exquisite clothes, but Kittiwake held limited appeal for them. It wasn’t London, the w
ind was vicious, the plumbing awful and so many glasses broken that most of the crystal had been replaced by Green Shield Stamp tumblers courtesy of the petrol station down the road.
‘I haven’t a clue what I’m going to do with the place, the roof is in shreds,’ Benedict once confided in her. They were smoking outside on the terrace, a full moon suspended over the sea like a golden coin. ‘Can’t your sister help?’ she asked, but he ground his cigarette under his glossy leather boot and said, ‘She hates the place. It’s all a bit complicated,’ and went indoors, leaving her to shiver on her own.
Benedict’s birthday was the first weekend in May. He would be twenty-two. By all accounts, his twenty-first had been a huge week-long celebration which annihilated the wine cellar and resulted in one suicide attempt, a broken leg and the ceremonial burning of a stuffed grizzly bear down on the beach. There’d been reports of gunshots being fired, and the local constabulary had turned up on the doorstep.
This year Benedict had decided to keep the gathering down to a manageable thirty or so guests, with a buffet supper, drinks and dancing.
‘He’s mellowing,’ complained Gervaise.
‘He’s growing up,’ snapped Sandy. ‘Benedict’s had a shitty time of it, what with his cow of a mother and losing his brother and his father shooting himself. Maybe it’s time he settled down, no one can party ad infinitum.’
Serena couldn’t imagine losing a father or a sibling, but then she’d never had either. As for what ‘ad infinitum’ meant, she hadn’t a clue.
Rhiannon looked horrified at the idea of Benedict settling down. ‘But what if he wants to move back here, what will happen to us?’
‘Well none of us can stay here for ever,’ Sandy replied, slowly and carefully, as if explaining something to a small child. ‘We all know this is a temporary arrangement, it could end like—’ And she clicked her fingers and stared long and hard at Karl.
Only then did it dawn on Serena that Sandy wanted Karl to make an honest woman of her. Well, good luck with that, mate, she thought, as Rhiannon headed off in tears, followed, very much to everyone’s surprise, by Karl.
Benedict arrived for his birthday weekend with a ciné camera. ‘It shoots colour film,’ he professed proudly, ‘my sister and her husband bought it for me.’ He immediately set off on a tour of Kittiwake, going from room to room with the camera attached to his face, instructing his guests to ‘do something marvellous’. Serena turned a perfect cartwheel on the landing – she’d completely forgotten that she could – and Benedict was so delighted he made her do it again and again until she felt quite dizzy and collapsed laughing on the floor.
‘Will you help me record the party tonight?’ he asked Karl. ‘Only I’m aiming to be completely sloshed by nine and I don’t want to drop the thing.’
Karl blushed with pleasure at being singled out as Kittiwake’s official ciné-photographer and spent the rest of the afternoon earnestly reading the instruction manual, something Benedict would never have the patience to do, conscientiously learning how to load the camera, turn the reels over and pull in and out of focus. Presumably he was hoping that, if he did a good job tonight, Benedict might lend him the equipment to record some of the nesting birds on the cliffs below Kittiwake that summer.
‘Is your sister coming?’ Serena asked Benedict as they pushed the furniture back against the walls in the main sitting room and rolled up various threadbare rugs.
His face clouded over. ‘No, she’s not a hundred per cent, she’s . . . um, women’s problems,’ he mumbled vaguely before adding, ‘Anyway, as you know, she loathes Kittiwake, I’m not sure I could trust her not to burn it down.’
Serena thought Natasha sounded a bit crazy, but she didn’t say so. Instead she headed off to the kitchen where even sulky Antoine was joining in, helping to make ‘the world’s most powerful punch’. He was in his element, his pallid cheeks were flushed with excitement. ‘I had a mate at uni,’ he told them, ‘a medical chap, who used to put a splash of ether into the mix – people would be passing out all over the place.’
Serena was getting bored of Antoine. He was always ill, he was very smelly and he was forever disappearing off to write stupid poetry, usually when there was something more boring but essential to do around the house. None of the men helped out domestically, not if they could help it. Karl would occasionally wash up when Sandy told him to, but Antoine and Gervaise were hopeless and the house had become even filthier when Karl and Sandy, citing their socialist principles, banned Brenda the cleaner from entering the premises. At least, with Benedict visiting more frequently, Brenda had been reinstated, much to Serena’s relief. Without Bren, the place threatened to be a bit of a health hazard. True to form, as Serena looked on in horror, Antoine began decanting his punch into a rusty old tin bathtub someone had found in one of the outhouses.
Having decided to avoid Antoine’s concoction and drink wine instead, Serena went in search of a bottle. There was a certain red, the one with the old-fashioned writing on the label, a Château Latour 1949, that she’d become rather partial to. Given the chance, she’d have it on her cornflakes.
The mood that night was giddy. Cars had been arriving all day and by 10 p.m. the house was heaving. A Fortnum’s chocolate cake had been reduced to crumbs on the billiard table. At Benedict’s request, the rest of the buffet was more children’s tea party than sophisticated supper spread, with thickly buttered triangles of bread sprinkled with hundreds and thousands, paper plates of iced party rings and a potato hedgehog covered in tinfoil and studded with sausages on sticks. Serena was in her element – not a lentil or clove of garlic in sight.
The record player was set to full volume and a big bowl of red jelly quivered to the beat. Sometimes the stylus jumped when someone danced too close, the needle skipping abruptly from one track to the middle of another, which for some reason was the funniest thing anyone had ever heard.
And there in the background was Karl, circling the partygoers like a hairy ginger shark with the Kodak ciné camera firmly clamped to his left eye. All night long he filmed everything, capturing the night for ever on celluloid, including the moment Benedict’s eyes met Serena’s and together the two of them disappeared from the party.
Inevitably, by the time the film was developed in London several weeks later life at Monty’s Cove had already moved on. In the middle of June, the car, Karl and Rhiannon disappeared and no one twigged what had happened until Serena found a note propped up against the toaster. Signed by them both, it apologised for hurting anyone’s feelings, while explaining that their love for each other was insurmountable and that they had gone to Wales to get married.
Apart from Sandy, no one was that fussed. Losing the car was a much bigger blow than losing either Rhiannon or Karl, and at least no one would have to eat Rhiannon’s porridge ever again.
Sandy, however, was inconsolable. She began spending entire days down at the beach, trying to pluck up the courage to drown herself, but as she explained to Serena, ‘It’s almost impossible when you’re a strong swimmer.’ In the end, she removed the stones from her anorak pockets, packed her cases and headed back to Oxford to enrol on a teacher-training course. When she left, she hugged Serena and swore she’d see her again, but Serena knew she wouldn’t. Kittiwake was falling apart, everyone was leaving and Benedict, rather than risk an unreliable English summer on the Cornish coast, had opted to take a holiday on Cap Ferrat. And who could blame him, the weather was predictably awful and by the beginning of August, after ten days of solid rain, Giulia and Gervaise had bailed out too, having received an invitation to spend some time with Giulia’s uncle in Padua. Typically, on her departure, Giulia took Serena’s hairbrush and her second-best set of eyelashes, which upset Serena so much she felt sick – so sick that she actually vomited into the umbrella stand in the hall.
As for Antoine, he had departed the morning after Benedict’s twenty-second birthday party, leaving Serena with a pillowcase full of poetry written in green ink, charting th
e demise of their relationship and describing her as a shop girl who pretended to be a mermaid. He had used a lot of swear words in his poetry. One verse simply read ‘fucking whore’, over and over again.
It was the first time she had ever slept alone at Kittiwake, and with the house echoingly empty, even her favourite red wine didn’t help her relax. In fact, after sampling a few bottles from the cellar it seemed like the whole lot had gone off and she poured bottle after bottle down the sink, gagging at its vinegary stench.
Once the weather got colder, Serena lit the fire with Antoine’s poems and watched with satisfaction as the green-ink scrawl turned to flames. She would have to move on soon, but where and when and how, she hadn’t got a clue. Tomorrow, she told herself, I’ll decide tomorrow.
As autumn turned to winter she realised she could no longer fit into the trousers that once upon a time she had run away in, and the voice of doubt in her head became a nagging certainty. Serena looked down at the convex swell of her belly. If she thought she couldn’t go home before, she certainly couldn’t now. She couldn’t go anywhere. She would have to wait here until Benedict came back. After all, this was his fault, wasn’t it?
24
The Invitation
Île de Ré, France, April 2018
Natasha stares at the envelope for a while. The handwriting is familiar but she cannot for the life of her . . . think.
She doesn’t get much mail these days, people have become very lazy about pen and paper. She remembers sitting at the writing desk at Claverley Avenue with a whole heap of envelopes in front of her, licking stamps for what seemed like hours; she and Hugo used to have such a long Christmas card list that it would take her an entire day to work her way alphabetically through their social circle.
A is for the Abbots, June and Bernard – she still has the red leather-bound address book old Mr Blatt presented her with when she left his luxury goods shop. ‘To Natasha with the beautiful hands,’ he wrote.
