by Jenny Eclair
Benedict shook his head and told himself to stop dwelling on the past. It was over, nothing he could do to fix it. Best look to the future instead. He lifted the bottle of Johnnie Walker to refill his glass, only to find it empty. Sod it, he wasn’t in the mood to stop drinking yet. So he staggered into the kitchen where he found a dusty bottle of port tucked behind the ironing board. He’d swiped it some time ago from the Kittiwake cellar, drunk half of it at Christmas and forgotten about it, Hooper’s Ruby Vintage 1937, the same year his brother Ivor was born. He opened it clumsily and, swaying now, proceeded to fill a tiny port glass until the viscous liquid spilled all over the work surface. That was the trouble with port glasses, silly fiddly things. Benedict put his lips to the spillage on the countertop and slurped at it, managing to inhale most of it into his mouth. From now on, he would simply swig from the bottle, much less wasteful. And he needed every drop after the day he’d had: seeing his mother, all thin and brittle in her expensive clothes, hearing himself at the font spouting all that mumbo jumbo, all those promises he had made to Baby Lance while pretending to believe in a God he knew hadn’t existed since the day Ivor fell to the bottom of the pool.
Benedict’s eyes began to prick and next thing he knew the tears were flowing. Stupid to cry, but that’s what he was doing, crying over spilt port, a sticky red stain all down his brand-new shirt, dark and bloody. Then, with a mighty heave, Benedict began to wail. He cried harder than Baby Lance after the cold water splashed his little blackbird head. He wept for his dead father and for his drowned brother and, oddly enough, for Serena, the girl who’d fallen from the sky.
He had been there, he had held her hand as she had taken her last breath. Poor Serena, he hadn’t known her very well and she had done a terrible thing in abandoning Annabel, but she was only twenty – far too young to die.
An accident, they said, those words, a horrible echo of when Ivor died. A silly, stupid, unnecessary accident and it was ridiculous to think anyone else might have been involved.
Benedict wiped his nose on his sleeve, hauled himself to his stockinged feet and staggered up the narrow stairs to bed. Hopefully things would look better in the morning. If nothing else, at least his mother would have gone by then.
As he stumbled around, tripping over his pyjamas, Benedict had no idea that he would never see Peggy alive again. Not that it would make much difference, he would never forgive his mother whether she drew breath or not. In fact, in his opinion it was incredible she had managed to live so long, considering there was scant evidence that the woman actually possessed a functioning heart.
28
At the Hairdresser’s
London, May 2018, three months before the party
Bel is at the hairdresser’s. She is trying a new place that offers a 25 per cent discount on a Wednesday morning, although, as the girl on reception said when she popped in to make the booking, ‘It’s even cheaper on a Friday morning for senior citizens.’
‘But – I’m not a senior citizen,’ Bel stuttered. Oh great, this was a new low.
‘I wasn’t saying you was,’ the girl muttered defensively.
Bel resisted the temptation to correct her grammar and eventually managed to secure a cut and colour with Milo at 11.10 a.m.
Bel has never bothered with hair dye before, but last week Maisie had rather clumsily pointed out that she was going grey.
‘Mostly at the back, Bel, that’s why I thought I should tell you. Only I thought, well, like, what if she doesn’t know? If that ever happened to me, I’d want someone to tell me, so I could do something about it before it got like really bad.’ The girl had smiled sweetly at Bel as if she were doing her a favour.
So now she is sitting in a black leather chair wearing a black nylon gown which is fastened at the back like a straitjacket. ‘We’re not going to turn back the tide,’ Milo informs her, ‘so what I’m thinking is some light marmalade streaks.’
‘Haha,’ Bel laughs, ‘I shall feel like Paddington.’ Milo, who is tattooed up to his chin and has holes in his ears that you could stick pencils through, doesn’t crack a smile, so she makes the mistake of trying to explain herself. ‘You know, as if Paddington’s marmalade had spilt under his hat.’ But the blank look on his face reflecting back at her in the mirror suggests he hasn’t a clue what she is talking about. Rather than make an even bigger fool of herself, she keeps quiet while Milo paints stripes of something that looks suspiciously like Agent Orange onto segments of her hair before encasing them in tinfoil ‘parcels’.
Once Milo has finished, she is left to ‘cook’ for forty-five minutes. Having accidentally on purpose left this month’s book club choice at home, she rifles through a selection of magazines on the shelf in front of her, one contains an entire double-page spread of ‘spot the side-boob’. In despair, she discards the celebrity rag and picks up an interiors magazine instead.
Bel sighs. She is hot in her nylon gown and they haven’t even offered her a glass of water, never mind a tea or coffee. This self-improvement lark is not only expensive, it’s time-consuming and boring, and for what? For one weekend in August when God knows what the weather will do and no one will be looking at her anyway because it’s Lance’s big day, his chance to shine, like he always does. The whole thing is an opportunity to show off his beautiful wife and his gorgeous children and his fabulous home.
Bel flicks through her copy of Better Homes magazine so crossly that she almost rips the glossy paper, until she turns the page and there it is. Kittiwake, her Kittiwake, the yellow of a pale egg yolk, covered in the silver purple bloom of an ancient wisteria, its gnarled limbs running riot around the house.
Instantly she feels an odd sensation deep within her womb, a stirring, a feeling of anxiety, a sudden need to clench her bowels. Above the turrets of the house, written in a white curly font against a blue Cornish sky, are the words ‘Heirs and Grace’.
Bel has always been a fast reader and without drawing breath, she quickly absorbs the first few lines:
When wine bar impresario Lance Berrington and his Norwegian interior designer wife Freya inherited Kittiwake House from Lance’s maternal uncle, neither of them knew what challenges lay ahead.
‘It was pretty brutal,’ acknowledges Lance, and his pretty wife nods in agreement, adding, ‘I don’t think either of us had a clue quite how much work needed doing.’
But happily, beneath years of neglect and a ruinously leaking roof, lay the bones of one of Cornwall’s finest coastal houses.
Originally built in—
Oh, spare me the history lesson, Bel thinks impatiently, I know. I know who originally built that house and who bought it from whom, and I know what happened there too. I know that if a young boy hadn’t drowned there, then the house would have probably ended up in someone else’s hands, rather than those of my rather smug adoptive brother.
Bel continues to skim through the article.
Approaching fifty, Berrington has the youthful looks of a man ten years younger, but there is a determined glint in his eye and one gets the impression that once Master Lance has made his mind up to do something, not much is going to stand in his way.
Talking about the two years he and his wife spent renovating the turreted ten-bedroomed mini-mansion, Lance laughs, ‘It almost killed us! It was so terribly gloomy, we used to call it the mausoleum!’
‘Let’s just say Kittiwake has a lot of ghosts,’ Freya adds, offering around a plate of home-made rhubarb strudel.
Ghosts that are both living and dead, thinks Bel. Her scalp tingles as she speed-reads the rest of the piece, but there is no mention of her, not the slightest allusion to an abandoned baby left in a drawer and adopted into the Berrington family. Why would there be? Lance has always been slightly dismissive of Bel. Even when he was a little boy, five years younger than her, she felt patronised by him, and this feeling has never gone away. As an adult, her brother has a knack for making her feel socially inferior and gauche. She’s always had the impression that h
e doesn’t think she matters – and why should he? It was obvious from the day he was born that he was the favourite.
Lance does, however, mention their mother, ‘society beauty Natasha Berrington née Carmichael, who holidayed at Kittiwake as a child’, but he doesn’t reveal how she witnessed the death of her elder brother while visiting Kittiwake in the Easter holidays of 1950, how she saw him drown in an indoor pool even though he could swim.
Poor twelve-year-old long-dead Ivor has no part to play in this celebration of good taste. Instead the focus shifts to the exquisite design solutions of ‘the talented Freya, who has made quite a name for herself on the interiors scene’. It’s only towards the end of the article that the journalist jokingly refers to the ‘curse of Kittiwake’:
. . . Lance chuckles expansively and says, ‘Well, as long as we can keep the old girl standing for my fiftieth later this year, then I shall be quite happy,’ adding, ‘Kittiwake has had her fair share of misfortune, but you know what they say: lightning doesn’t strike twice. Good job too, because the last time it did, we lost most of the roof.’
That was back in the eighties, thinks Bel, when Uncle Benedict was living abroad and renting the place out as a conference centre. One night during an electrical storm, a blaze had broken out at three o’clock in the morning. The small delegation of double glazing salesmen who were staying there at the time had wandered out onto the lawn debating whether the fire was a team-building exercise that had gone too far, or the real thing.
‘Let’s rinse you off, shall we?’ says an impossibly tiny girl and Bel, feeling like a plastic-cloaked giant, allows herself to be led to the backwashes by this elf.
The girl shampoos and massages her head and Bel wishes she wouldn’t. She knows she is meant to relax but her neck is killing her and now all she can think about is her first childhood memory of the house.
It wasn’t long before Lance was born. Her mother was heavily pregnant and emotionally overwrought, what with Hugo being at work and Annabel on her school summer holidays, and a doctor was called who recommended complete and utter bed rest.
Normally when Mummy wasn’t well Mrs Phelan looked after her and gave her jelly with sweet milk that came out of a red tin, but Mrs Phelan went to Ireland every August – it was something called tradition and there was no persuading her to change her mind.
Her father had been furious, it was all highly inconvenient and after a lot of shouting on the telephone, Bel had ended up at Kittiwake.
Daddy had driven her down and then almost instantly disappeared. Bel recalls having a suitcase, which her father had packed, and discovering that he’d forgotten to put in any underwear.
Uncle Benedict was staying at the house with a nice pretty lady, only they were in bed most of the day and Bel wondered if they had the same illness as Mummy, but the pretty lady said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding, honey,’ and Uncle Benedict laughed.
So another nice lady looked after her, only this one was quite old, like a grandma, and her name was Brenda and she did the same job at Kittiwake at Mrs Phelan did for Mummy in Claverley Avenue. She was a cook and a housekeeper, but most of the time, she sat in the kitchen drinking tea and chatting with her daughter as they podded peas at the kitchen table.
Bel was sitting on the floor by their feet; another little girl had come to play with her, they had some wooden bricks and a doll that Bel had brought down from London, which the other girl kept taking off her.
‘She’s the one I found in the drawer.’
‘The baby . . . ’
‘Not such a baby now, she’s a strapping thing.’
‘Thanks to you.’
‘That’s right, love. Half-dead she was when I found her, poor little mite. If I’d not gone back into that room . . . ’
‘You thought it was a cat, didn’t you, Mum?’
‘I did, love. I thought one of the ratters had had a litter.’
‘Not a kitten though, was it?’
‘No, love, not a kitten. A little scrap of a thing, half-starved.’
‘Not even a bottle of milk made up, nothing.’
‘By the grace of God, that’s what I say.’
‘You brought her back to our house, kindness of your heart, Mum.’
‘Well, I couldn’t leave her, could I? That’s the thing I can’t understand: what kind of a woman leaves her own child?’
Bel was five years old at the time and had no idea the old lady had been talking about her. Half a century later, with her head bent awkwardly over a backwash, she finds herself overwhelmed with sorrow for the little girl that she used to be.
The elf is leaning over Bel and dabbing at her eyes with a tissue.
‘You’re not allergic, are you? Only some people find the smell of the toner a bit strong.’
Bel sniffs and blinks hard. She never did get that doll back off the other little girl.
29
Chicken Tikkagate
London, May 2018
Bel returns from the hairdresser’s and flinches at her reflection in the hall mirror. The orange isn’t particularly subtle; all that money to look like a parrot.
Sinking into the chair next to the console table where a threatening pile of brown envelopes awaits, she tries to suppress the flicker of temper that burns in her chest. Who is she trying to impress anyway? Andrew couldn’t care less what she looks like as long as she occasionally buys sausages, the boys probably wouldn’t recognise her in a crowd of middle-aged women unless she wore a name badge, and as for Lance and Freya . . . How can she and Andrew compete with those two, with their glossy-magazine lifestyle and their casual glamour?
Ever since Bel received her brother’s invitation, she has been questioning his motives for inviting them. They aren’t close, so why should he decide to include them now? To show off, she suspects; to gloat and dangle Kittiwake under her nose.
But deep down she knows that isn’t Lance’s style. He has always had that public schoolboy sense of entitlement. He has never needed to show off. Lance has always been oddly gracious about his good fortune, nonchalantly accepting his natural prowess at everything– swimming, tennis and even skiing, dammit. And now here he is, approaching fifty, playing lord of the manor and celebrating his big landmark birthday as befitting a man with a large Cornish estate. Anyway, it’s not as if he can’t afford to be generous. There are plenty of bedrooms, he doesn’t have to worry about costs per head. Perhaps, as Andrew said, ‘He probably thought it was a nice thing to do. Especially for your mum. After all, she’s getting on a bit.’ And her husband’s right. Natasha is almost eighty – not that anyone would guess, her mother has always been remarkably well preserved and is the type of woman who gets a kick out of people presuming she is a decade younger than her years.
Come the dreaded party, Natasha will no doubt look more glamorous than I will, Bel admits ruefully, knowing that if proof were ever needed that she isn’t Natasha’s real daughter, one need only look in her wardrobe.
Her mother is chic, everyone says so, as befitting the daughter of Peggy Carmichael, a woman who was famously fond of the couture houses. ‘But then Mama had the figure for that sort of thing,’ Natasha always boasted, adding Peggy’s mantra: ‘Bread and potatoes, darling – you can never look good in clothes if you eat starch. Starch belongs on collars, not on the plate.’
Natasha would visibly cringe if she could see what Bel was wearing now. There are moth holes in her jumper and a marmalade stain on her trousers. ‘Which is all very well if you’re nipping out to walk the dog.’ Her mother’s voice floats all the way over from France. Only, I haven’t got a dog any more, thinks Bel, fighting back the tears and feeling unsure as to what is upsetting her most: the prospect of seeing Natasha, Benji’s death, or her hair, her horrible hair.
Don’t be so silly, she reminds herself, running her hands through the offending ’do. It will wash out before the party. There’s a few months to go yet. Plenty of time to lose at least half a stone, find something decent to wear, a
nd if her hair still looks ridiculous, then she can always shave it off. With any luck, people will think she’s having chemo and be nice to her.
Bel’s reflection has the grace to look shocked at this notion. What a horrible cow she is, why would she even think that having cancer would be preferable to a few stupid marmalade stripes?
You need to get things into perspective, she admonishes herself, and then she bares her teeth in the mirror and makes a succession of ugly faces. Sometimes she hates herself and everyone else so much that it’s difficult not to go round the house breaking things.
She reminds herself that there is a simple solution to all this agonising: she could politely decline the invitation, citing some fictional holiday, apologies and all that. Even better, they could actually book a real holiday and not even have to lie. She can go online this afternoon, see what’s available (self-catering obviously, hotels are far too expensive for the four of them).
But all of a sudden she feels exhausted at the prospect. Does she honestly want to waste money on yet another lousy holiday let, somewhere miles down a dirt track with the boys bored and mutinous and rather too big for a domestic back garden swimming pool? The last one three years ago in Mallorca had been a nightmare. She and Andrew spent most of the week in the supermercado buying cases of beer for their sons, who started drinking as soon as they finished breakfast and didn’t stop until they belligerently fell into bed. And who could blame them, when the sleeping accommodation had comprised two bedrooms rather than the advertised three, with the second bedroom featuring a kiddie-sized bunk bed and a big box of toys in the corner? No wonder they’d drunkenly regressed into a fetid knot of constant boozy bickering.
So it’s decided: they will go to Lance’s party. Even if she has to pay the boys, they will go, put up a united front. Show Lance, Freya and her mother that they are a happy functioning foursome. And with this in mind, Bel boots up the old Dell laptop in the kitchen and fires off a delighted-sounding email to her brother.
