Rory's Boys

by Alan Clark

  As she spoke, I’d rifled my memory to find Cristina Gomez. I’d managed to get a snapshot of a small dark girl but the face wouldn’t come into focus. She’d worked as a temp in the ad agency where I’d started out. I’d scarcely known her. After Matty had gone, she’d just been one of the bodies with whom I’d tried, yet again, to prove myself. A member of that honourable line begun by Morag Proudie in the luggage-shed at Glenlyon. Nothing more. She’d not crossed my mind in centuries.

  ‘Why didn’t you just write to me or call?’ I’d asked. ‘Why all the stuff with the job?’

  ‘After Mum died, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to track you down or not,’ she’d replied. ‘My Dad, Mr Potts that is, was all for it when he found out you were loaded. In times like these, farming really is a heap of shit. I’d still not decided when, surprise surprise, I heard about this job on the grapevine. Wicked one for the CV. I couldn’t resist.’

  ‘Why the fuck didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘Because I still hadn’t made up my mind whether I’d tell you at all,’ she’d said. ‘But I’d not reckoned on your making a pass. What was all that about? You’ve got your footprints in the Poofters’ Hall of Fame now surely?’

  ‘So you just came to take a look at me? Is that it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dolores with a shrug. ‘I suppose that’s about it.’

  The conversation had sort of stalled there. She’d gathered my soaked clothes from the bathroom and stuffed them in a bin-liner. I’d bolted down the last of the wine. At her front door, I’d wondered again if I should embrace her and sensed she’d been wondering the same. She’d stopped being cool and looked like an awkward kid. Then she’d extended her hand.

  ‘Bit of a shock right? You okay?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m fine. Thanks.’

  I’d shaken her hand and opened the door.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ I’d said.

  ‘Yeah, you too.’

  *

  This morning, I stood drinking coffee at the picture window. Dolores was in the Italian Garden, grooming a box pyramid. I noticed again how gracefully she moved, despite those breasts. Madonna With A Trowel. I watched her for a full ten minutes, then dressed quickly and went outside. The grass was still damp from the deluge, but the sky was a fresh-blown blue. We were both awkward again, hiding it behind nonchalance. I said hi. She asked what was up. I wondered if she were free tonight and she said she might be. Would she like to have dinner?

  This evening I took my daughter to The Ritz. We had a window table looking onto Green Park, still crowded with people lolling in the sun. It was a ludicrous confection of a room, its femininity at odds with the all-male tables of Japanese businessmen, but I wanted to flag that this was a celebration. To my amazement, the waiter greeted Dolores by name. She didn’t fancy anything on the menu she pleaded, grabbing his hand as if her life depended on it. Could he possibly rustle up an omelette and chips? I ordered the same. My kid might have grown up in the sticks but she had style.

  ‘They seem to know you here,’ I said, a tad deflated.

  ‘Yeah, a friend brings me quite often,’ she replied ‘A property developer. I design his gardens for him.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Hey, I’m not a hooker on the side,’ she said, with a needle-sharp look. ‘I just like men a lot.’

  ‘Something we’ve got in common then.’

  ‘In your case not exclusively, it seems,’ she said, ‘or I’d not be here.’

  ‘That was all a long time ago,’ I replied.

  ‘And now it’s back to haunt you,’ she smiled. ‘How you coping?’

  ‘I’m just fine,’ I said.

  I ordered champagne, but the wine waiter remarked that Mademoiselle usually preferred Pouilly-Fuissé. We raised our glasses.

  ‘What’s the toast then?’ I asked.

  ‘My mother, maybe?’ she said.

  I paused. In the ragbag of feelings I was dealing with today was a cold blade of resentment at Dolores’ mother for hiding my child away from me. Even before the internet, I’d have been easy to track down. I’d become well-known in advertising, the agency in Sydney could have told her how to reach me. How dare she not tell me I had a daughter? It had been my right surely? Last night Dolores said her mother had known I’d not loved her. What sort of fucking excuse is that? I’d have given my kid everything. But at least Cristina Gomez had done the right thing in the end. I raised my glass.

  ‘To your mother then,’ I said. ‘And to you and me too.’

  She didn’t answer but we clinked the crystal. Then, over the next hour, I made Dolores Potts talk; though in my mind I’d already deleted that cloddish surname and replaced it with my own. I bowled every question I could think of. The farm she’d lived on, the school she’d gone to, the Catholic church her mother had marched her to every Sunday in a town miles away. I found out about the names of her dogs and cats, the GCSEs she’d taken, the attack of meningitis that had nearly killed her at the age of twelve, how she’d only got into gardening because of a teenage passion for Diarmuid Gavin. He’d presented her first-prize medal at horticultural college. She’d done it all for him she’d told him and attempted seduction at the reception afterwards, the only time she’d ever been rebuffed. She’d been taking revenge on married men ever since.

  I listened, missing all that stuff which, till last night, I’d not known I should have had. All those years when I’d felt my life had been at full throttle, the awards, the travelling, the parties, the shagging; in truth, nothing of consequence had been happening at all. And all those years, just fifty miles up the M40, Dolores Blaine had been happening.

  It was only when I asked more about her mother and, as I now thought of him, her stepfather that she clammed up a bit. No, she didn’t see that much of Mr Potts now, though she phoned regularly to check he was okay. Yes, he was a decent sort of the whole. No, she had no Spanish relatives still alive; her mother had been an only child. And if I had any more questions, would I submit them in writing and she’d get round to them when she’d finished planting out the kitchen garden.

  I asked to be allowed one more. She seemed to go ‘up West’ almost every night of the week. Was there a serious man in her life?

  ‘Serious? Shit no,’ she laughed. ‘I’ve seen the damage that can do.’

  She gave me another of her long unsettling looks.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course,’ I replied ‘Extraordinary question.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But you and the pretty doctor. Wasn’t quite sure what the score was.’

  ‘Well we’re living under the same fucking roof.’

  ‘Bit of an odd couple though, aren’t you? Hard to see the connection.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Well he’s sort of there, but not there,’ she said, ‘if you see what I mean. He’s quite hard work isn’t he? Only ever speaks to me when he’s bumming ciggies.’

  ‘But Faisal doesn’t smoke.’

  ‘I think you’ll find he does,’ she said.

  Pudding came. A quartet of overweight Latino musicians began to play sleepy cha-chas and rumbas. Over-dressed elderly couples crept around the floor. I asked Dolores if there was anything she wanted to know about me. Not really, she said. Not right now anyway. The internet had already filled her in on me, the Blaines and of course Granny.

  ‘The resemblance is amazing,’ I said ‘That was why I always thought we’d met before. But it just didn’t click.’

  ‘A bit of a horror, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Not always,’ I said. ‘Only later.’

  At the next table, two bishops in full purple were having a fierce debate on the morality of giving money to beggars. Dolores was irritated. Addressing them as ‘guys’, she ordered them to pipe down, saying her Dad here was just back from Afghanistan where he’d got shell-shock and was hyper-sensitive to noise. The bishops were contrite, muttered, ‘Jolly good show,’ and sent us over two brandies. I
’d been searching for some trace of me in her and there it was. Cheeky wee bitch.

  ‘Is that what you’re going to call me from now on then?’ I asked, staring into my coffee. All day long I’d imagined her using the word.

  ‘Let’s stick to Rory for now,’ she replied, knocking back the brandy in a couple of gulps. This girl would be dead by thirty. ‘And I‘d rather we kept this to ourselves for a while, yeah? Get to know each other a bit more? Nobody else’s business after all.’

  ‘Cool,’ I said, trying not to show my disappointment. In the shower tonight, I’d mentally composed a notice for The Times. To Rory Blaine, a daughter. I was gagging to tell Vic, Elspeth, Bruce Willis, anyone who passed me on the street. As I followed Dolores from the restaurant, the waiter gave me a man-of-the-world smile.

  ‘You’re a lucky man, Sir,’ he murmured.

  ‘She’s my daughter, arsehole,’ I said.

  ‘Yes indeed, Sir’ he replied.

  He was right of course. I went to the loo and returned to find Dolores waiting in the Palm Court, perched on a tiny gilt chair. She’d taken off her shiny black stilettos and was gently massaging her feet. Every eye was on her. Where was Mario Testino when you needed him? In that moment I knew that I would give myself totally to her. I felt no reservations or fear of getting hurt. There was no agonizing, no endless weighing up of the pros and cons as there had been, and still were, with Faisal. I presumed it was just a reflex, the natural instinct of a parent towards a child. But what did I know? I realized that there might many new emotions heading my way now; good or bad I didn’t care. That old feeling of having been short-changed in life had suddenly gone. Whatever was coming, bring it on.

  We got a cab home; I’d left the Merc as I’d not wanted to risk my daughter with a drunken driver. I asked Dolores to come inside the house for a minute. I led her across the Gilded Hall till she stood beneath the portrait at the foot of the staircase. Apart from the eyes and hair, where her Hispanic genes had triumphed, she was Granny to the life.

  ‘You’re a Blaine now; an Ashridge too, of course. The lines go on with you,’ I said quietly.

  ‘No,’ she replied ‘I’m just Dolores Potts. And I was Dolores Potts first.’

  ‘Well maybe one day,’ I said. ‘Give it time.’

  We smiled at each other, the awkwardness there again. Then I made my second pass at Dolores Potts. Naturally it was more hesitant than the first but this time she didn’t leap back. I kissed her forehead then put my arms around her. But though I held her lightly, I felt her body stiffen. Maybe it was just the unfamiliar fit of our new relationship, but I sensed something else too, something that hadn’t yet been said but would need to be.

  As I rested my cheek against the spiky black hair, trying to breathe her in, my glance drifted up the staircase. Vic was standing on the top landing. I wondered how long he’d been there and, despite the fifty feet between us, what he might have heard. Behind Dolores’ head, I smiled up at him. But he didn’t smile back or call down to us. He just turned away and disappeared inside his room.

  *

  By ten o’clock, removal vans were drawn up round the carriage circle like wagons in a Western. Bruce Willis was trying to make about thirty grumpy Neanderthals grasp that they couldn’t all park right outside the front doors. Some seemed to go into mild shock; others were calling their bases to check on their terms of employment. Big Frankie tried to cool things down by going out with jugs of barley water and expressions of endearment.

  ‘I never have guessed you did this work,’ he boomed to one wizened Cockney. ‘You got the hands of a concert pianist. Do you play at all?’

  ‘Only a bit … Chopsticks an’ that.’

  ‘Well you be takin’ care of those precious hands today, you hear?’

  Professor Curtis Powell and Beau Styles had been the first to arrive. At the front door, Curtis knelt down and kissed the step.

  ‘Did you find that vulgar, Mr Blaine?’ he asked. ‘Well that’s just the way I feel today. I was part of the Stonewall riots in ’69 on the day that Judy died and now I’m part of this. Wherever there’s a barricade, you’ll find Curtis Powell right there, ready to break it down.’

  Beau called to a removal man with a black bag stuffed precariously under his arm.

  ‘Careful with that babe, it’s Professor Powell’s colonic irrigation kit.’

  ‘If it wasn’t for me, Beaumont,’ said Curtis with a desiccated smile, ‘you’d not be moving into this magnificent mansion but a home for clapped-out chorus-boys in Yonkers.’

  ‘Yeah, grampa, and without me you’d be sitting alone in that gloomy apartment in The Dakota with your tits covered in cobwebs like the old broad in Great Vibrations.’

  ‘Expectations.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  The residents weren’t the only new faces at Mount Royal today. The team we needed to make the place work was now up and running. Under Elspeth’s charge was a squad of general helpers. Working in shifts, their duties would combine cleaning the apartments and public rooms with waiting at table. I’d sent Elspeth off to House Proud!, a gay domestic agency. She’d been looking for evidence of maturity and stability she said later, so had given preference to clean fingernails, religious convictions or live-in relationships of over six months’ duration. It hadn’t been easy, but she’d eventually hired ten such paragons. To a man, or rather boy, they were Scottish. She called them her Chamber-Laddies.

  Down in his state-of-the-art kitchens, Big Frankie now had five shaven-headed urchins under his command. He took no shite from anyone, firing and replacing three of them inside twenty-four hours. I’d once interrupted a lecture on the preparation of broccoli. He’d glared at me and pointed to that day’s T-shirt. ‘Fuck Off. Man Cooking’, it read. So I had.

  One by one the removal vans regurgitated their contents.

  ‘That is a Rossetti, young man,’ trilled Lord Billy Vale to a tattooed juvenile lugging in a frame. ‘Not a Rolf Harris.’

  Wee Mr Lim, the Chinese dentist, showed me his Smile Album, page after page of extreme close-ups of celebrity bridgework. He couldn’t tell me their names he said; the tabloids would kill to get hold of it. Pride of place was given to the lip-sticked mouth of an elderly woman. Mr Lim was sure I’d recognize that smile anywhere, perhaps when opening a computer-chip factory, drinking tea with a council house tenant or, at its most fixed, watching a display of bare-breasted Patagonian dancers. He still had the mould he’d taken; he kept it in a velvet-covered casket. Perhaps I’d like to hold it sometime? I said that’d be great.

  From the top of the stairs, I watched a fat oaf bash upwards with two ancient suitcases that could’ve been up the Euphrates with Wilfrid Thesiger.

  ‘That panelling’s seventeenth-century,’ I yelled. ‘Not fucking MFI.’

  A mistake. The fat oaf seemed to be of a nervous disposition and dropped both cases. The geriatric locks gave way and at least a hundred DVDs were scattered like confetti the length and breadth of the stairs. With that unerring sense of inconvenient timing for which she’d been renowned among the boys of Glenlyon, Elspeth had just appeared on the lower steps and now had gay pornography licking round her ankles.

  ‘Mercy upon us,’ she cried, raising her eyes to heaven like Joan of Arc at the stake.

  The fat oaf bent over and picked one up.

  ‘PIG-malion,’ he declaimed from the box. ‘“An upper-class muscle-daddy searches for sleaze among the street-boys of Covent Garden. The ultimate in inter-generational action.” Takes all sorts, dunnit?’

  I hurried down the stairs as Archdeacon Brownlow walked into the Gilded Hall. His face turning the same red as Elspeth’s, he rushed to help me stuff the filth back into his broken cases. Elspeth looked down at him as if he were a cowpat.

  ‘No wonder they never made you a Dean,’ she said and marched out of the front doors. I imagined her in her bathroom, scrubbing her ankles with a loofah.

  It was two weeks now since that morning Vic had dubbed The Day
Of The Long Knives. The day after, Faisal had finally got round to calling me back. Things hadn’t been that great in Slough. Mr Khan had wandered off at Heston Services and been nearly knocked down by an Eddie Stobart lorry. Once home, he’d had a complete collapse at the sight of his distraught wife. He was now in a psychiatric ward under suicide watch. Faisal was staying at home to look after his Mum and shield her from their horrified relations. He’d not been sure when he’d be able to get back. Was there anything I could do to help, I’d asked? No, he didn’t think so. He’d not even asked about my shoulder. I’d left supportive voicemails every day since then, but he’d not returned them.

  I’d hardly cared. Isn’t that awful? For the last fortnight, all I could see and think of was Dolores. After the Ritz, our actual encounters had been casual and hurried as, day by day, the atmosphere in the house had become more febrile with the imminent arrival of the first punters. I’d tried to find excuses to slip out into the gardens, but Vic, Elspeth, Big Frankie and a hundred others had been leeched onto me from dawn till dusk with endless questions or demands for arbitration. I’d powered through it all, fuelled by a new sense of purpose. This project really had to work now; there was an heir to Mount Royal. At night I dreamed of Dolores, ten years older or so, strolling in the gardens with a litter of well-scrubbed kiddies scampering around her legs. She smiled indulgently and spoke to them in a voice which, miraculously cured of its bucolic vowels, sounded exactly like that of her great-grandmother. I was there too, sitting by the Great Fountain, remarkably unaltered, receiving the posies of buttercups my grandchildren had picked and patting their shiny wee heads.

  But perhaps these frantic days had been a good thing, giving us both time to tread water, to soak up the presence of the other without the need to move anything forward. Though I still yearned to tell the world, I knew Dolores had been right in forbidding it. As I flew around the house, from the cellars to the cupola, the glow of our secret had warmed me like sunshine.

  ‘You sickening for something toots?’ Vic had asked one day.