by Jenny Eclair
‘What I’m trying to say, Annabel,’ Natasha slurred, ‘is that it’s not fucking easy being a woman, and most men are complete shits.’
With that, her mother drained the rest of her glass, removed the cherry from the golden sword with her fingers, put it in her mouth and sucked on it like it was a gobstopper. Her cheek bulged with the thing before she swallowed it, then she reached for the glass again and knocked back the non-existent dregs.
‘That’s all I wanted to say – goodnight, dear.’ And with that her mother staggered out of the room.
Annabel wanted to call her back: there were things she needed to know, like how many sanitary towels was it normal to use in a day, what were you supposed to do if they didn’t flush away and there was no bin, how many days should it last and when does the tummy ache go away? But her mother had gone downstairs before she could get a word out. Annabel could hear her getting the ice out of the freezer and slamming the tray against the worktop with more force than usual.
Lance was in bed, Mrs Phelan had gone home and her father was yet to return from work; he was having to ‘work all hours’ at that time, something about a difficult case. He kept missing his supper.
An hour or so later, when the period cramping became unbearable, Annabel crept down to the bathroom where the Anadin was kept and as she crossed the landing, she heard a strange noise from downstairs: her mother was crying in the kitchen.
She would have liked to comfort her, but she didn’t have a clue how and anyway this was a side of her mother she didn’t recognise.
The Natasha that Annabel knew didn’t stumble around in her stockinged feet, waving drinks around and talking about dead babies.
A moment later the acrid whiff of burning wafted up the stairs, followed by a metallic clatter as something crashed onto the sink unit and a hysterical high-pitched voice screamed, ‘Blood and shit.’
It sounded like a stranger in the kitchen, but it was Natasha, and as her mother opened the back door and ranted into the night sky, Annabel ran back to bed, turned on her radio and fell asleep. When she woke up the next morning, the batteries in her transistor were dead and her mother’s eyes were red-rimmed at the breakfast table.
It was Lance that eventually broke the silence. ‘What’s the grill pan doing in the back garden?’ he asked.
Annabel looked to where he was pointing. Lying on the grass next to the burnt-out grill pan were two charred and blackened fillet steaks. A single magpie picked at one of them in a desultory fashion. One for sorrow, thought Annabel.
That Christmas Annabel received books and stationery, a diary, a Kiku bubble bath set, the Fleetwood Mac album Rumours, a lava lamp and a navy-blue pinafore dress with red heart-shaped buttons, which was actually too young for her and worn with her ever-increasing bosoms looked faintly ridiculous.
A couple of days after Christmas, Annabel was at home alone while her parents took Lance to a pantomime. Once the coast was clear, she tried phoning Clare but there was no one in, and Annabel returned to her lonely seat in front of the Two Ronnies Festive Special where, much to her delight, she caught sight of Clare’s sister in a comedy sketch. Camilla didn’t actually say anything but it was definitely her. Annabel practised how she would casually drop this shiny golden nugget of gossip into conversation once she got back to school. ‘Well, actually, my friend Clare, the one who goes to St Paul’s School for Girls in London, well, her older sister, you know the one that went starkers on stage, well, she’s on the telly now.’
Hugging the information like a hot-water bottle to her chest, Annabel took herself off to bed. She was seeing Uncle Benedict for lunch the next day; she could tell him about Camilla, he loved gossip. What a good job she hadn’t gone to the panto, she’d have missed The Two Ronnies if she had. Not that she’d been invited.
‘I’m fifteen,’ she reminded herself. ‘I don’t need pantos, I have periods and breasts and everything.’
36
Benedict and Bel Go Out for Lunch
London, December 1978
Benedict and Annabel’s annual Christmas lunch had been a tradition for as long as Annabel could remember. He always took her somewhere ‘jolly’ before he went off skiing. Benedict loved skiing. ‘Some men like golf,’ he would say to Annabel, ‘but they tend to be goons.’
Benedict made Annabel laugh more than anyone she had ever met, even Clare.
He was the only adult who genuinely seemed to care whether she was happy. She didn’t really understand it – he hadn’t any children of his own and, despite being Lance’s godfather, he never singled her brother out for any special attention. On the contrary, he seemed to have chosen her as his ‘special girl’, which was both thrilling and a bit nerve-racking.
Every time Benedict phoned Natasha to arrange a lunch date with Annabel, she lived in dread of her mother saying, ‘Oh yes, and this time, he wants Lance to come with you.’
She couldn’t bear the idea of Lance tagging along. Lunches with Benedict were sacrosanct – he always took her somewhere slightly glamorous and didn’t bat an eyelid when she ordered a milkshake and a pudding.
On this occasion, he was taking her to Joe Allen’s, which he promised her was ‘terribly trendy’. Annabel thanked her lucky stars for Benedict; now she had something else to talk about at school, probably in the girls’ toilets where they would all huddle around the radiators for warmth.
‘Have you ever been to Joe Allen’s?’ she’d ask. ‘It’s terribly good fun, you see quite a lot of famous people there, even at lunchtime.’
On this particular occasion, they sat two tables away from Rula Lenska. Benedict nodded at the famous redhead and silently mimed an appreciative wolf-whistle under his breath.
‘My friend’s sister is an actress,’ a bog-eyed Annabel told him. ‘Have you heard of Camilla Holbrook?’
They were eating burgers and chips at the time and Benedict choked on his burger and had to drink all his vodka and all Annabel’s Coke before he could stop coughing.
Rula Lenska looked slightly annoyed.
Once Benedict recovered, he ordered a fresh round of drinks and they continued as usual to catch up on each other’s news.
Annabel told him she was neither happy nor unhappy at Downley Manor, that she was pretty good at some subjects but a bit bored in others, she acknowledged that she wasn’t unpopular but that she didn’t have a best friend and she missed Clare, who she never saw any more because her father didn’t approve of her, mostly because of her sister.
Benedict raised his eyebrow at this, but let her carry on.
This was why she liked talking to him: he never interrupted her or told her what she should think, he didn’t criticise her table manners or demand she put her shoulders back – he let her be.
Sometimes he confided in her too, things she wasn’t expecting to hear. Once, when she was about twelve, he told her that his own mother, Grandma Peggy, had despaired of him and that he and Natasha had had a ‘perfect’ older brother who died when he was twelve. He didn’t tell her how, he simply said, ‘His name was Ivor.’
The dead brother information shocked Annabel and she never repeated it to anyone, especially not her mother. It wasn’t that it was a secret, it was more that the words were too sad to say out loud.
After he told her about Ivor, Annabel was determined to be nicer to Lance. Much as he annoyed her, she couldn’t imagine life without him.
Benedict was allowed to ask her questions that no one else was. He asked her about boys and she told him that she pulled out pin-up pages of pop stars from Jackie magazine, but because they weren’t allowed to put pictures on the walls at school she kept them in a file under her bed and put gold stars on the ones she fancied the most.
Benedict told her it sounded like a very efficient filing system and that she should come round to the mews house one day and put his girlfriends in some kind of order.
Last year Annabel made a list of Benedict’s girlfriends in biro on a paper napkin. Beside each name she
wrote down the hair colour and build. In the end she had had to ask for two more napkins, because the tally came to over thirty.
At this lunch, Benedict told her he was seeing a girl called Alannah who had a very charming long neck, like a swan.
‘Swans mate for life,’ Annabel said.
‘In that case,’ he replied, ‘Alannah is not like a swan, she is more like a giraffe,’ which made Annabel laugh until Coke came out of her nose.
They laughed a lot when they were together and Annabel noticed that, when they laughed, women looked at Benedict and smiled in the same indulgent way they smiled at babies in prams.
Her uncle was both dishy and adorable, if a tiny bit fat around the middle. ‘It’s the cheese,’ he admitted, prodding his own gut. ‘Brie is my downfall.’
His paunch didn’t seem to matter. Once, when they were having lunch at the Savoy Grill, a young woman tiptoed over while her partner had gone to the gents and passed Benedict a scrap of paper with her telephone number on it. She was called Glenda.
‘Remember Glenda,’ Annabel reminded him and the two of them sniggered for ages, while the waiter took away their ketchup-smeared plates and handed them both a dessert menu.
But before she could choose, Benedict put his serious face on. ‘And how are things at home?’
If he hadn’t asked the question, she wouldn’t have given it any thought, but now she did, she had to admit that her parents seemed to be shouting at each other more than normal and that her mother was sometimes weepy and too tired to get up in the morning, and when she did, her face was puffy and she had to put on a lot of make-up to look normal.
‘Mummy keeps saying she’s getting old,’ she told Benedict. To which he replied, ‘Well, that’s ridiculous, she’s not much older than me and I’m in the prime of my life.’
And he looked it. Benedict was enjoying life as a thirty-eight-year-old bachelor (but not of the confirmed type) who lived in a mews house in Belgravia, cleaned daily by a bad-tempered Mexican woman who loved him more than life itself. He bought his groceries from Harrods food hall but mostly ate out around Kensington and Chelsea; his social diary bulged; he dabbled in antiques but didn’t have to work full-time any more because he rented out Kittiwake to a small hotel chain. In short, he managed to maintain a lifestyle that was the envy of his peers, most of whom were now saddled with neurotic wives, mouths to feed and school fees – like Hugo, in some respects.
He nodded when Annabel told him about her father working late and the rows that ensued. ‘I think sometimes Daddy can be a bit mean to Mummy,’ Annabel confessed.
Benedict rubbed his face with an invisible flannel and lit a cigarette, even though he normally didn’t smoke until after they’d had their pudding.
‘It’s very important that you are kind to Natasha – I mean your mother,’ he said. ‘She needs our support. Sometimes when women reach forty they stop feeling attractive and start wishing they were younger.’
Annabel hadn’t a clue what Benedict was talking about – why should her mother care how old she was and what she looked like? It wasn’t like she had anything really horrible to worry about, like homework or school dinners.
Bored by the subject of her parents, she turned her attention to dessert.
‘Can I have chocolate ice cream today, please?’ she asked.
It was only when she finished her double scoop with extra whipped cream that Annabel decided there was something she wanted to ask her uncle; something her mother had mentioned that kept coming back to her, like having a drawing pin stuck in your shoe. She couldn’t ignore it any longer.
‘Did my mother . . . ’ she began, before pausing and starting again. ‘Did Natasha know my mother?’
Benedict looked slightly taken aback. ‘What on earth makes you ask that?’
‘Oh, just something she said. It sounded like they may have met.’
Benedict wiped his invisible flannel over his face again. ‘They didn’t exactly mix in the same circles, but it’s not impossible.’
‘Then you knew her?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
But Annabel was not stupid. ‘If you say “They didn’t exactly mix in the same circles”,’ she argued, ‘then you must have known what kind of circles my mother mixed in.’
For once Benedict couldn’t meet her eyes. ‘That’s not the point.’
Suddenly Annabel needed to know something very urgently, once and for all.
‘But she is dead, isn’t she, my mother – she is dead?’
‘Yes,’ Benedict exhaled as if he’d been holding his breath. ‘Yes, your mother died when she was very young and Natasha and Hugo adopted you and I for one have been grateful every day of my life that they did.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you are very dear to me, young lady. Now let’s finish up here and see if there’s a small treat I can buy for you.’
In the end he took her to a tiny place in Soho where a man in leather trousers chopped her bunches off and gave her a long ‘Purdey’ bob. Annabel’s hair, if unfashionably putty-coloured, was thick and took to the style immediately.
‘Next time I’ll put a few streaks in it for you, darlin’,’ the hairdresser gushed.
Annabel could have wept with relief – not only was she going back to school after the Christmas holidays as a fully menstruating woman, she had seen a mate’s sister on the telly and had lunch with Rula Lenska, but to top it all off, she had a trendy haircut as well.
That night Natasha and Hugo rowed about whether Benedict should have asked their permission before cutting Annabel’s hair.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Hugo,’ was the last thing Annabel heard her mother scream before she placed a pillow over her head and willed herself to fall asleep.
37
Finances
1979
The week after Annabel turned sixteen she was summoned to see the headmistress. As she sat outside Miss Clements’s room on a hard wooden chair staring at a display of dried hydrangeas on a polished console table, Annabel couldn’t for the life of her imagine what she had done to merit this ‘little chat’, as her form teacher called it.
It couldn’t be her behaviour, she wasn’t particularly noisy or disruptive; in fact you could accuse her of being the opposite, considering she had a tendency to fall asleep, face-down and dribbling on the desk, when a lesson bored her.
She wondered idly if something had happened to Natasha or Hugo, or maybe even Lance? What if Lance had died, what if history had repeated itself and Lance had drowned or been run over or had a deadly allergic reaction to something?
By the time the school secretary popped her head out of the office to say that Miss Clements was ready for her, Annabel was convinced that Lance was dead. She could see herself by his tiny grave, an inconsolable Natasha wailing beside her, clutching a glass of amber-coloured liquid in her black-gloved hand.
Her eyes were already brimming as she stepped into what the sixth formers called Miss Clements’s lair.
The headmistress was an elderly woman, overdue for retirement, her room was stuffy and Annabel noticed the bin was full of toffee wrappers. She sat up very straight so that whatever had happened no one could accuse her of slouching.
‘Ah yes, Annabel Jane Berrington,’ intoned the head. ‘Let me see, yes, here we are.’ She peered into a ledger. ‘Termly fees . . . unpaid.’ Her lips pursed with disapproval as she continued, ‘Normally I would contact your parents in the first instance, but it has been brought to my attention that the fees are usually paid by a Mr Benedict Carmichael and I wanted to check with you that nothing untoward has happened to this Mr Carmichael.’
‘He’s my uncle,’ Annabel explained. ‘I saw him the other week, he had a burger and chips and was as right as rain.’
‘Well, that’s a relief,’ smirked Miss Clements, as a cat curled itself around her swollen ankles. ‘Then I shall alert your parents to the situation and let’s hope it can be resolved before further action needs to be
taken.’
Annabel felt herself burn bright red. ‘Does anyone else know?’
‘Oh, we are very discreet,’ muttered Miss Clements. ‘Although obviously if the fees remain unpaid, a pupil cannot stay, no matter how remarkable her academic record – and yours, I might add, does not fall into that category.’ And with a wave of a puffy ringless hand, Annabel was dismissed.
Back at Claverley Avenue a few days later, Natasha held a piece of paper under Hugo’s nose. She was trembling with rage and the paper shook like a leaf. ‘The school fees – Benedict hasn’t paid them. He always pays her school fees, it was part of the agreement. We can’t afford these on top of Lance’s. Why hasn’t he paid them?’
Hugo knew why but he couldn’t tell his wife. ‘It’ll be some silly oversight. I’ll go and see him. You mustn’t get like this, Natasha, it’s not good for you.’
If only he still had some of those little white pills the doctor had given him earlier on in their marriage – whatever they were, they were like magic beans; within thirty minutes of taking one ‘like a good girl’, his wife had become docile and biddable. Unlike the shrewish woman in front of him now.
She was too thin these days, exactly like her mother, Peggy, had been. Natasha wasn’t eating enough and her scrawniness was a turn-off. Hugo liked his women to have plump arms and fleshy hips, all the better for biting and pinching. He liked tits that filled bras. She had over-fed Lance, that was the problem. So thrilled at last to have a living child, she had let him suck the shape out of her, and now there was nothing left for him.
Hugo arranged to meet Benedict in a pub across the road from Victoria train station. It was a rough kind of place, where they were unlikely to accidentally bump into anyone they knew – a vital consideration when discussing private matters like these. The pub was all sodden beer mats and pockmarked dartboard, the kind of dive where exhausted commuters had ‘one too many’ before facing the long slog back to the suburbs, and office girls in sweaty nylon tops hung around hoping for another gin and orange before wobbling home alone.
