by Jenny Eclair
It’s been years since Bel has thought about that ciné film Benedict showed her when she was a troubled teenager, but immediately she is back in her uncle’s funny little mews house watching Serena’s lovely face loom up in front of her. Bel half closes her eyes and the memory floods back: a beautiful blonde, laughing and dancing in a previous incarnation of the same room that Bel had gorged herself on fish pie in less than twenty-four hours ago. She has to fight back the tears; Serena, her real mother. Serena, with her green eyes and golden earrings. What if she hadn’t abandoned her here, what if she had taken her with her when she left, and what if she had never gone to that party?
Without warning, all the ‘what if’s crowd Bel’s imagination until she feels dizzy. She’s reminded of a poem she learned at school when she was very young. They’d written it out in class, ‘in your best handwriting please, girls’. It was by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and it went:
What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?
They’d been allowed to draw a flower underneath the poem. ‘The most beautiful flower you can possibly imagine, girls,’ and Bel had used every single coloured pencil in her pencil case. The pencils that were all engraved A. Berrington, even though deep down she knew that once upon a time she could have been someone else.
Bel drags herself back from the past and looks around in vain for a small figure in a well-ironed linen shirt and immaculate pair of white trousers. She feels an unexpected pang of guilt. It’s been a while since she has even seen Natasha, let alone spoken to her. She has noticed the woman cuts a rather lonely figure here at Kittiwake, the place seems to dwarf her. And Bel recalls there are ghosts here that her adoptive mother must face too, and for a moment Bel’s heart aches for Natasha, for the little girl that lost her brother and the young wife who thought she would never be a mother and for the widow whose life had never been hers to control. It can’t be too late to be honest with each other, she resolves, finishing her drink while something of a commotion breaks out over by the tennis court. Children’s voices are raised in anger – young children with high-pitched voices. She turns to look and briefly catches sight of a red-faced Luna and Ludo yelling at each other before something hits her, something hard on the side of her head, and it all goes dark.
49
Natasha at the Party
Natasha sits and seethes. She told them she was going upstairs for a rest, but in reality she needs to get away from all those ghastly people for a while. All that talk, yap, yap, yap.
Natasha isn’t used to people talking so much. If only there was a volume control that she could turn down, like one of those dimmer switches, only for sound rather than light. It’s all too much. The children shriek, the dog barks, strangers mingle with familiar faces, guests and caterers, she doesn’t know who is a friend and who is a mere waitress, so she doesn’t talk to anyone.
They have put her in a small single room at the side of the house. Last night she had been too tired to be insulted, but now she is furious. No doubt it was Freya’s idea.
Lance said she wouldn’t recognise the place, but she does, Kittiwake is horribly familiar. You can plaster it and paint it and throw cashmere cushions all over it, thinks Natasha, but she knows exactly where she is sleeping.
This was Blake’s room, her father’s butler, the man who pressed his mouth against Ivor’s lips, then pumped at his chest with his fists. Blake’s panic-stricken voice will reverberate off these walls for ever. ‘An ambulance, for God’s sake, get an ambulance.’
Next to this room was her father’s dressing room and next door to that was the master bedroom. It still is, she supposes; it’s where Lance and that horse-faced wife of his sleep.
Natasha decides she has never liked Freya and today that feeling has hardened like enamel.
Freya thinks too much of herself, she has got her claws into this house, acting as if it belongs to her. As for her ghastly family, that overbearing mother with her ugly big feet in hideous Birkenstocks, her bossy sister breastfeeding that baby in front of everyone, as if the world wants to see her ugly blue-veined tits, she could at least put a shawl around her or find somewhere private, it’s all so unnecessary.
She has barely seen Lance alone since she arrived. She was late, the plane had been delayed, but no one seemed to notice, they were already eating supper. Someone she didn’t recognise moved up to make a space for her. She was nowhere near her son, she could only see him from a distance.
The fish pie was too rich, she couldn’t possibly eat it. She managed a handful of grapes but had felt bilious all night.
This morning hadn’t been any better. She had gone downstairs in a starched navy linen shirt and immaculately pressed white trousers to find the kitchen full of half-dressed strangers and she had sat, ignored, under the clothes pulley, hanging where it always has. So far as she’s concerned, keeping that pulley is an affectation, a typical piece of set dressing from her son’s wife.
When she was a child they never ate in the kitchen, that was where the staff ate, but Freya has knocked down the wall between the kitchen and what was the old dining room and the resulting space is as big as an aircraft hangar. ‘It will be cold in the winter,’ she commented to Freya’s mother, who merely laughed at her and said, ‘Under-floor heating, Nathalie, that’s the solution. If you get asked back at Christmas, this place will be as warm as toast.’
If you get asked back – the cheek of the bitch. As for the ‘Nathalie’ . . .
It’s been a long time since anyone has got her name wrong. She hadn’t bothered to correct the troll woman; as it happens she has no idea what she is called and she has no intention of finding out.
‘There was a wooden table here with a meat mincer clamped to the edge,’ she muttered to herself. ‘A woman called Brenda came to do the cleaning and we had a governess who became hysterical when Ivor died.’
‘Sorry, what’s that, Grandma?’ One of those ape boys of Bel’s had looked at her as if she were completely losing her marbles.
Grandma, what an unlikely role to find herself playing.
‘I’m remembering the past,’ she told him. His breath was very strong. His mother should make sure he cleaned his teeth properly. He had toast crumbs in his beard and he didn’t offer to help her to anything.
Breakfast was done buffet-style: smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels. Such a chewy consistency, the bagel; Natasha longed for the flaky ease of a croissant and seeing her struggle Bel offered to cut hers into small pieces as if she was incapable of doing it herself.
‘I’m not quite gaga yet,’ she had snapped and that old familiar look of hurt clouded her daughter’s eyes.
Bel is fatter than ever, she noticed, but then, Bel has always been greedy. She had two bagels at breakfast, Natasha watched her and counted them. She’d always had to watch what Bel ate, she’d warned her what would happen if she ate too much and now it has.
Natasha eases off her Tod’s suede loafers and makes herself as comfortable as possible on the single bed. A single bed – could there be anything more coffin-like?
Deep down it’s the watch that has upset her the most. Once everyone had eaten their bagels and Freya and her big-footed yeti mother had cleared the plates, everyone was summoned to the sitting room for the ‘opening of the gifts’. A mound of brightly wrapped parcels lay heaped up on a cream leather footstool in front of a vast velvet sofa the deep blue of a Greek sea. Ludo and Luna and those pug-faced Norwegian cousins were leaping around the furniture shrieking. They were overly excited, in Natasha’s opinion, and she would have liked to banish them from the room, but she dutifully kept quiet and added her small parcel to the pile.
The children would get their presents later, she decided, when all the fuss had died down. They are still in her suitcase, no doubt those will be wrong, too.
Lance had opened a gift from his old college friend first, a bald man whom Natasha was told she had met several times over the years. Toby someone, who has moved on to wife number two, a wisp of a thing who kept popping outside and coming back in reeking of cigarettes.
Natasha has left her menthols back in France, she could do with one now. She would like to see Freya’s face if she filled the little onyx trinket holder on the bedside table with her Marlboro Green cigarette butts.
It was a cricket bat, the gift from Toby and Lucy, but signed by someone famous. Lance seemed delighted and he began batting the abandoned wrapping paper until Freya yelped and said, ‘Actually, darling, maybe you should play with that thing outside before you take someone’s head off,’ and Toby and his new wife had exchanged looks, as if to say ‘miserable cow’.
Freya should watch it, thinks Natasha. If Toby, who is fat and bald, can get a younger prettier second wife, then Lance certainly can.
Bel’s gift came next. She flushed and sort of preened as she passed it to him, gushing that she had commissioned it specially, ‘a woman in Dulwich Village, bit of a reputation’. It was hideous! A viciously garish oil painting of a poppy field. Freya visibly winced, but Lance was kind – he has always been kind to Bel; ‘I love it,’ he lied.
Then came the children’s presents: socks, books, a silk handkerchief, a framed photograph of the pair of them on a beach, followed by a huge Nordic sweater from Freya’s mob, which Lance promptly pulled over his head and then thanked each of them individually, even Baby Aksel who at that precise moment chose to puke all over his mother’s giant tit – disgusting.
The pile had rapidly diminished until there were only a few parcels left. Freya should have left hers till last, but she lunged forward and handed Lance a box-shaped parcel, and he had ripped the paper off in a pretend frenzy. It was a watch. Of course it was a watch, it was exactly the watch Lance had wanted: ‘Wow, Freya – the Bell and Ross BR-X1!’ he exclaimed, thrilled, and Natasha felt her heart close as tight as a clam.
She was about to snatch her gift from the footstool, tell him she’d wrapped the wrong thing and that it was a mistake, but her son reached for it before she could.
‘And last but not least, from my favourite mother,’ he had grinned and kissed her on the head. He smelt of lime and basil and toothpaste – those sons of Bel’s should look, sniff and learn.
The Caravelle Sea Hunter with its small black face looked mean in comparison to the watch Freya had given him, a miserable inconsequential thing, exactly like his father had turned out to be, Natasha thinks bitterly.
Naturally, Lance had been very good about it, made room for it on his wrist, strapped it on next to the gleaming titanium thing his wife had bought him with its dials and gadgets and face as big as a camera lens.
‘It was your father’s,’ she had murmured, but he pretended not to hear her and ten minutes later, she saw him take it off.
It will sit in a drawer now, as it had done since Hugo died twenty years ago. May he rot in hell, what a dance that man had led her, all those dreadful things he had made her do . . .
Natasha is distracted from her reverie by a commotion on the lawn beneath her bedroom. Watching from her open window, she gathers that Ludo has thwacked a stone with a tennis racket and it has caught Annabel on the side of the head.
Children need watching, their games can be dangerous, Natasha knows this only too well. Many years ago she was playing a game with her brothers in this very house, a silly game involving a golf club, but Ivor had cheated and she had got angry and she had swung the club hard and the next thing she remembered was her mother screaming.
It was an accident, she hadn’t meant any harm, but he shouldn’t have cheated, he didn’t need to cheat, he was getting everything anyway.
Natasha pulls herself back to the present. Back down on the lawn, Annabel – or Bel, as she likes to call herself these days – seems to be staggering slightly. How much has the woman had to drink, for goodness sake? And then she falls.
Natasha watches as voices are raised and a crowd huddles around her adopted daughter. Eventually a middle-aged man in pink trousers takes charge and he and a tattooed waitress carry Annabel like a sack of potatoes into the house, one pudgy thigh exposed for all to see. How embarrassing.
‘She’ll be as right as rain in a minute, no need to panic,’ she hears the man say, and Natasha lies back on the bed and tries not to think of that Easter holiday when everything went so disastrously wrong and set off a chain of events that kept on going wrong for years to come.
The last thing she remembers before sleep drags her under is that when Ivor died he hadn’t finished all his chocolate Easter eggs. Many years later, Benedict told her that the night after they lost their brother he had found the eggs under Ivor’s bed, and even though he couldn’t stop crying, he had eaten them all until not a single chocolate button was left.
50
The Main Event
Kittiwake, Saturday evening
Freya looks anxiously at the darkening sky. The gathering clouds have turned the colour of tarnished knives and the evening light is a curious metallic yellow.
It might be her imagination, but with the change in the weather, a slight whiff of rotting bladderwrack and dirty clam shells seems to have rolled in from the sea. Even indoors, with a Diptyque candle in every corner, she can smell it.
Freya shudders as a current of foreboding threads across her shoulder blades, but she pulls herself together immediately.
There is nothing to worry about, apart from Bel playing the drama queen and pretending to faint when she got hit on the head by a tiny piece of flying gravel, and Ludo flouncing off in a sulk because his father embarrassed him by telling him off in front of his cousins. Oh, and Natasha being distant and peculiar – but apart from that, things are going well.
People will be talking about this party for months, the juggling cocktail mixologist, the canapés, the hilarious three-legged race on the buttercup lawn.
Freya knocks back a couple of paracetamol and takes one more for luck. She’s got an awful headache, but unlike Bel, she can’t loll around on the bed, she is the hostess and there is still tonight’s hog roast and disco and tomorrow’s (fingers crossed) beach breakfast barbie and evening bonfire to get through.
Freya tries to relieve the tension in her neck and shoulders with a few yoga stretches, but every time she moves her head, her neck grinds like an overfilled peppermill.
On Monday she will get someone up to the house to give her a massage, and in a split second of intense resentment she wonders if Lance would ever go to this much effort for her birthday.
But the moment passes and Freya lifts the corners of her mouth as she catches sight of their ‘his and hers’ fancy-dress costumes laid out on the bed. Tonight Mr and Mrs Berrington will be Poldark and Demelza. What a brainwave that had been, Freya thinks smugly. A friend in London works for a theatrical costumier and the outfits arrived a couple of days ago; she and Lance tried them on, to be on the safe side, but happily, Lance has the calves for breeches and the corset puts Freya’s post-breastfeeding bosoms right back where they used to be.
She hadn’t imagined anyone else would have had the same brainwave, but right now, as she watches the guests stream in from the yurt field, Freya is infuriated to see a quite a number of Poldark and Demelza doppelgängers, dammit. There is also what looks like a giant Cornish pasty holding hands with a size-sixteen bright green pixie.
She checks her watch, the nannies have sole care of the children now, they are having their own private barbecue on the back lawn. Afterwards there will be ice creams from the van parked by the gates and then cartoons in the playroom. She needn’t fret; her mother and Elise have offered back-up should it be needed.
Having her own family here has been a bit
tersweet experience for Freya. Their physical presence is a reminder of how much she misses them; lapsing back into Norwegian, she finds the words of her mother tongue as comforting and familiar as a warm drink on her lips.
She, Elise and Mari touch each other all the time; her mother strokes her hair and kisses the top of her head, her sister chases her up the stairs.
By contrast, she has noticed how distant Lance and Bel are. They may as well be two polite strangers in a lift, there is no hugging and no teasing.
As for Natasha, her behaviour is grotesque. She ignores Bel, while following Lance around like an adoring but unwanted puppy.
Freya feels sorry for Bel, but at the same time she’s infuriated by her. The woman is hopeless. As for that hideous painting she gave to Lance, what had she been thinking? As soon as this weekend is over, it’s going to a charity shop. Freya laughs at the thought of it, how can anyone get anything so wrong?
She immediately feels guilty. The watch situation was a bit of a nightmare – Natasha’s face had frozen when Lance had opened Freya’s gift.
But then turning up with a memento of his father was such an odd thing to do. Lance has airbrushed his father out of his life – the man was, by all accounts, a total shit – so why would Natasha think he needed reminding of him?
Lance has told her that when he was little his father hit his mother and it was only when he died that she stopped wearing sunglasses indoors. He died before they even met, but from the photos she’s seen Hugo was a good-looking man in exquisitely cut suits, with a nasty smirk that played around his lips. Much to her horror, she has occasionally seen that exact same smirk on Ludo’s face.
Freya checks the time on her phone. She has scheduled the next fifteen minutes on her itinerary as ‘changing time’ and needs Lance to come upstairs to help her into her costume. It’s seven fifteen, the hog roast is timed for eight, with the cutting of the cake an hour later, by which time it should be dark enough in the barn for the candles on the confectionery Kittiwake to be at their most effective. Freya is more delighted by the cake than anything, it’s a masterpiece, a perfectly scaled-down sponge-based Kittiwake complete with pale yellow royal icing and tiny fondant climbing roses. It could taste of brick and sawdust inside for all she cares, she can’t wait to see the reaction when it gets carried in, all fifty candles flaming.
