by Jenny Eclair
When Bel asked why a baby should be unwanted, Mrs Phelan said she was too little to understand, but that sometimes mummies died because childbirth was a difficult and dangerous thing and that it was very sad. Then she went on to explain that sometimes big girls did silly things out of wedlock and as a punishment God took their baby off them and made sure it went to a decent God-fearing home where the poor wee innocent wouldn’t be brought up in sin, and that Annabel should thank her lucky stars.
So Annabel tried to be grateful and wondered if her real mummy was dead or silly. In the end she decided she was probably dead, because, according to Daddy, Annabel was always doing silly things and a baby had never come out. So no, her real mother had to be dead. She must have died doing the difficult and dangerous childbirth thing, poor dead Mummy.
Annabel never once considered her real father’s role in all this baby business. It wasn’t at all clear to her what daddies did, apart from go out to work every day, then come home and be strict and make Mummy cry and smoke cigars and drink something that smelled funny called whisky. It was the mummies that mattered, it was the mummies that grew the babies in their tummies and looked after them when they came out all red and screaming.
Annabel knew this because she watched it happen with her very own eyes. She watched Mummy get big and fat with the baby inside, she even saw Mummy’s belly move when the baby kicked, which made Mummy laugh even though if Annabel kicked her she would be angry.
She was taken to meet the baby the day after he was born, all red and wrinkled and small like a shrivelled party balloon.
The baby came home to live at Claverley Avenue. He was a boy like Daddy had said and Mummy got lots of flowers and cards from her friends. One of the cards had a picture of a bird called a stork on the front, carrying the baby in its beak, and Mrs Phelan told her that it was the stork who brought babies home after they were found behind a mulberry bush, which confused Annabel because she knew that the baby had come home from the hospital in Daddy’s car.
The baby’s birth was announced in The Times newspaper: ‘To Hugo and Natasha Berrington, a much longed-for son, Lance Christopher Ivor Berrington.’ Natasha ordered several spare copies of the paper and sent a cutting from one of them to her mother, who lived a long way away in America and whom Annabel had never met. ‘But she’s my grandma too?’ Annabel had asked.
Even though Lance was only a tiny baby, he already had a box of special things that Mummy kept under her bed: the plastic name tag he’d worn in hospital, a card with his recorded head circumference, length and birth weight, his first booties, and a withered carnation from the bouquet Hugo had bought her the day she’d delivered his son.
‘Do I have a special baby box?’ Annabel asked, but apparently because she was adopted she didn’t. So she made one of her own; she even cut a hank of blond hair off one of her dollies, and put it in a matchbox and pretended it was her real mummy’s hair. Poor dead Mummy.
Annabel wasn’t sure how she felt about Baby Lance. His face was all creased up like a goblin and now that he’d come home and would be living there permanently, Annabel had had to change bedrooms because ‘big girls don’t sleep in nurseries’. But neither did Lance. At the moment he slept in something called a ‘basin’ in Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom so that Mummy could get up and feed him in the night. It’s not fair, thought Annabel. How come that baby got night-time snacks when she wasn’t even allowed to take a biscuit up to bed?
Annabel’s new bedroom was called a ‘box room in the attic’. It was bit gloomy, ‘But we can always decorate it,’ her mother told her.
‘First things first,’ Hugo said. ‘My son’s nursery has to take priority.’
‘A son is a boy baby,’ Natasha explained to Annabel while she was changing Lance on his special plastic mat. ‘And all baby boys have willies.’ Annabel watched Lance’s willy, a terrible blue-veined worm that lay twitching between his chubby white legs. Once, when Mummy was changing his nappy, some wee-wee came out of the terrible worm and Mummy laughed even though it nearly got her in the eye. It seemed the kicking, weeing baby could get away with anything.
The nursery had to be decorated ‘pronto’ because Lance was a son and a boy and Daddy didn’t want him sleeping in a yellow room in case it turned him into something called ‘a sissy’.
Once the yellow walls had been repainted pale blue and the frieze of silly geese replaced by jaunty sailing boats, Annabel asked if her room could be painted too, but Hugo said Annabel had to learn that she couldn’t expect to click her fingers and get what she wanted.
Annabel didn’t understand what her father was talking about. Try as she might, she couldn’t click her fingers. And as for getting what she wanted, all she wanted was for Baby Lance to go back to wherever he came from, so that she could sleep in the nursery again and be near Mummy and Daddy, not stuck all the way up the horrible dark stairs in a room with a window that was too high up to see out of.
Sometimes Annabel was so frightened of the night-time that she crept down the scary stairs and sat on the landing below, listening to everyone else breathe in their sleep.
26
Lance’s Christening
London, February 1969
A christening was to be held for Baby Lance with a service in church, followed by a ‘buffet lunch’ at Claverley Avenue. It was ‘high time’ Hugo said, Lance was six months old now and had three teeth.
For days before the event the kitchen was out of bounds while Mrs Phelan ‘slaved’ over vol-au-vent cases, rice salads and trifle sponges. A cake had been ordered from a special patisserie and arrived in a red-and-white-striped box tied up in gold ribbon like a precious hat.
The entire house smelled of beeswax and carpet shampoo. Everything had to be ‘spick and span’, her mother told Annabel, because there was going to be a very special visitor, Grandma Peggy was coming ‘all the way from America for Lance’s special day’. Her mother looked feverish, her eyes were wild and she had tied her hair back with a pair of old tights.
‘Where will she sleep?’ asked Annabel, hoping that the grandmother woman would take her place in the box room and she could sleep in Mummy and Daddy’s bed like Lance usually did. But it turned out Grandma Peggy was going to stay in a hotel called Claridge’s because she wasn’t over for long and she wanted to make sure she was ‘properly comfortable’, at which point Annabel could swear she saw her father roll his eyes.
On the ‘very special day’, Lance wore a dress which was called a robe, a froth of cream lace that emerged from a cardboard box layered with sheets and sheets of tissue paper. The robe was very old and terribly delicate, so she mustn’t touch it, because it was something called a ‘Berrington family heirloom’.
So she didn’t touch it, she simply stood back and watched Lance be sick down it.
The christening was the first and only time Annabel ever encountered her American grandmother. Peggy was a white-faced woman with black eyebrows and red lips like the wicked witch in Snow White. She looked at Bel on the steps outside the church and said very quietly, ‘Well hello, little cuckoo in the nest, I’ve heard all about you,’ and then she raked her hands across the little girl’s scalp and in doing so, some of Annabel’s thin sand-coloured hair got tangled in the woman’s diamond bracelet and had to be wrenched from the root so they could both be freed.
After the boring bit in the freezing cold church with Lance hiccupping at the font, they all returned home for ‘a spot of lunch’. Annabel was wearing new pink leather shoes. She had wanted black patent in the shop but her mother shuddered and said she couldn’t abide black patent and that black patent was for funerals.
Her dress was pale pink and stiff with petticoats, and beneath it she was wearing her best white nylon lace tights, which were excellent for sliding up and down the freshly polished parquet flooring in the hallway.
The pink shoes were almost exactly the same colour as the poached salmon, all set out on a silver salver on the dining room table.
Mrs Phelan had decorated the giant fish with cucumber scales and black olive eyes, and Annabel could tell that she was as proud as punch of her handiwork, even though some of the cucumber scales had fallen off.
The housekeeper was wearing a black dress with a starched white pinny over it; it was her job to slice up the fish and serve the salads. She kept her head down and concentrated on the task and barely looked at Annabel, who wondered why Mrs Phelan’s hands were shaking so much.
It was all a bit boring. Lance had fallen asleep, ‘the little angel’, and the grown-ups stood around talking. The ladies, still in their fancy hats, were all gathered in one room, trying not to drop food on the pristine carpets and sipping from champagne flutes. While the men stood together near the drinks table, occasionally laughing and clapping each other on the back.
There were no games or balloons but there were presents, a big pile of them on the hall table, all for Lance.
Annabel took a plate of potato salad. She didn’t like the look of the pink fish and she wasn’t allowed pudding yet, because that was ‘rude and greedy, Annabel’.
She wished she had someone to play with, but no other children had been invited, because her parents ‘didn’t want any silliness in the church’.
In fact, her father said she was only allowed to attend ‘on sufferance’ because she was Lance’s sister and ‘woe betide’ her if she did anything naughty. He said ‘woe betide’ quite a lot, and when he said it, Annabel knew that she should be quiet or hide.
She felt shy all of a sudden and, seizing her moment when no one was watching, she slipped under the buffet table and picked at the potato salad with her fingers. Sitting cross-legged hidden away behind the heavily starched tablecloth, she heard snippets of conversation.
‘So pleased for dear Natasha, it’s been such a long wait, poor thing.’
‘Have you seen the mother?’
‘Yes, simply terrifying, and very like Wallis Simpson.’
‘Going back to America first thing in the morning. Says she can’t bear to be in England, too many memories.’
‘Yes, well, it must have been ghastly.’
The voices moved away and, peeping from under the cloth, Annabel recognised Uncle Benedict’s shoes, brown suede and pointed, drawing near. She was tempted to reach out and tug at his trousers before disappearing under the table again. Uncle Benedict would find that sort of thing funny, he loved jokes and he laughed at everything.
He was one of Lance’s godfathers. Lance had two godfathers and a godmother, which seemed quite a lot, considering Annabel didn’t have any, but that’s because she hadn’t been christened, Mummy told her, and it wasn’t likely to happen either because, ‘Well, it’s a bit too late, darling.’
Annabel loved Uncle Benedict. He’d brought Lance a silver rattle with an ivory bear-head handle for his christening gift, but he’d given Annabel a present too.
As soon as he’d arrived at the house he had dropped to his knees and produced a package from behind his back. It was all wrapped up in silver paper with lots of Sellotape, and once she managed to tear it open she found a small beige rabbit inside with a sad face and long ears.
The insides of the ears were lined with pink velvet, which was ideal for stroking while she sucked her thumb.
She had the rabbit with her now under the table and she reached for him as she heard the witch woman say to her uncle, ‘I hear this is all your fault, Benedict.’
‘I beg your pardon, Mother?’
‘The girl, the fat little thing.’
‘Not entirely my fault, Mother, it seemed to be a good idea at the time.’
‘Really?’
‘I’m very fond of her, and Natasha—’
‘Doesn’t need her now. Oh well, what’s done is done.’
Under the table, Annabel lay down on the carpet. She felt very tired and her dress was too tight. Putting her thumb in her mouth and stroking sad rabbit’s ears, she watched the woman walk away; her heels were high and shiny and black, she shouldn’t have worn them to a christening.
Benedict’s brown suede shoes stayed still for a second and then she heard him mutter, ‘Give me strength . . . and a proper fucking drink,’ as her eyelids began to droop.
27
After the Christening
Benedict left his nephew’s christening as soon as decency allowed. He needed to get away from his mother, he needed a proper drink.
He headed back to the mews house that he knew he should feel grateful for and promptly finished off a bottle of Johnnie Walker.
He wished he knew how to handle the situation better. Maybe he should have arranged to meet his mother for supper at Claridge’s, attempted a proper adult conversation with the woman, allowed her to tell her side of the story before she flew back to the States, listened to her and tried to understand.
But as soon as he’d seen her at the christening, his immediate instinct was to scream, ‘You abandoned me when I was ten years old and I had lost my brother.’
Benedict felt again the hollowness of those months that followed the accident at Kittiwake and how he’d assumed that his mother would soon be coming home from her ‘holiday’.
He recalled imagining her returning with exotic gifts from America, Disney toys and Hershey bars that he could hand around to his classmates, but instead it had been left to his aunt to break the news that Peggy wasn’t coming home and that his parents were getting divorced.
Peggy had left him and Natasha and his father to face the misery of losing Ivor without her, and in doing so had ruined Teddy.
Benedict looked at the amber-coloured liquid in his glass. His father had always been a drinker, but once his mother left he didn’t stop. Now Teddy was dead and Peggy was at least partly to blame. She might be his mother but she was a bitch and Benedict was suddenly consumed with sorrow and rage at everything that had happened.
He was also angry with his sister, who’d been so delighted that their mother had deigned to cross the ocean for her precious son’s christening. The way she’d smiled beatifically throughout the ordeal, oblivious to Peggy’s objectionable behaviour, infuriated him. And he recalled the sour grimace on their mother’s face and her shudder of distaste when she tasted her first sip of champagne at Claverley Avenue. The way she had refused anything from the buffet, apart from the tiniest portion of salmon, and how she’d looked at Mrs Phelan as if the housekeeper were offering her dog shit rather than a spoonful of Waldorf salad, a dish which Benedict knew had been made specifically in her honour.
She did look incredible, he supposed, in a fitted pink crêpe knee-length dress with a black-and-white houndstooth bouclé check jacket and a little black pillbox hat with matching shoes. The woman was in her late fifties and probably weighed no more than when she walked up the aisle to marry his father. But that didn’t alter the fact that she wasn’t very nice, he decided, as the nasty remark she’d made about Annabel being fat flitted across his increasingly inebriated subconscious. How spiteful! Yes, the child was well rounded and he knew Natasha worried about her tendency to over-eat, but she was only six. As soon as she grew a few inches, the weight would redistribute. It was puppy fat, nothing more.
Benedict couldn’t help feeling a pang of guilt over poor chubby little Annabel. How could he have stood up in church and publicly promised to undertake the duties of a godparent for Baby Lance, when he had made no such public declaration for the child who might be his?
Mind you, the likelihood of him being Annabel’s father seemed to shrink daily, with the girl looking less and less like him the older she got. The arrival of Baby Lance had only served to highlight this fact. At six months, Lance, in stark contrast to his adopted sister, was pure Oppenheim with his abundant dark hair and prominent nose.
Benedict decided to keep a close eye on Annabel. The little girl needed someone on her side. Never mind Baby Lance, he had a doting mother and a besotted father, whereas Annabel had . . . well, who did she have, apart from him?
Hugo,
he noticed, was particularly short with her, forever barking orders at the child, telling her to pipe down and shush. It made Benedict uncomfortable. Was it his imagination or did she actually cower in front of the man? Then again, Hugo always had a mean streak. Benedict knew some chaps who’d been in the same year as Hugo at school and they were terrified of him, and he loathed the way his brother-in-law had always dismissed Annabel’s mother as ‘that filthy little scrubber’, as if she were some two-bit King’s Cross whore, when in reality she hadn’t been anything of the sort.
In any case the woman was dead. She’d died tragically young in awful circumstances and still Hugo continued to call her names. It made Benedict’s blood boil. What sort of man spoke ill of the dead? So what if she wasn’t a virgin, so what if she slept with other men; Benedict’s mind wandered back to that night when she had taken him by the hand and they had made love in a room with another man’s boots by the bed, and even the smell of them hadn’t put him off.
Oddly enough it wasn’t the sex that Benedict remembered with such fondness, it was the laughter. She was one of the few girls he had slept with who made him laugh, in bed and out of bed. Serena had a way of making everything more fun. She was the only woman who had ever made him feel like he could actually dance. Not that she was girlfriend material, obviously, not with that accent and the way she held her knife as if it were a pen, but that didn’t make her ‘a filthy little scrubber’.
Benedict decided he didn’t like Hugo. In fact, he’d come to the conclusion that the man was a loathsome bully, and ruthless with it. God knew what he was capable of . . .
Benedict shook his head, he had to stop letting his imagination run away like this. Just because he didn’t like Hugo didn’t mean to say that he was guilty of doing something awful. Anyway, he hadn’t even been there that night. What was it his sister had said? Something about her father-in-law having a heart attack the night of the party and Hugo having to leave to be with him. No, he was nowhere near Mayfair the night Serena died, he wasn’t even in London. Poor Serena. How awful to go to a party and die.
