The Yellow Villa

by Amanda Hampson

  Once all the serving dishes are on the table, Susannah sits down and Dominic opens the wine he has chosen for the main course, a Languedoc red – and proceeds to give their guests an unnecessary lesson in wine appreciation. He raises his glass to propose yet another toast. ‘I’d like to offer a salutation to myself, actually. This morning I completed the writing of my memoir.’

  Susannah realises with a jolt that he won’t be confining himself to his study now, which will make her escape a little more complicated. ‘Surely that’s just the first draft, Dominic? You can’t have finished it already?’

  ‘I write carefully, Susannah,’ he says, enunciating each word.

  They all raise their glasses, even though Roxy is the only one who seems to genuinely share his enthusiasm. ‘I can’t wait to read it! Congratulations!’ she says.

  ‘And so you shall,’ says Dominic. ‘You might like to take it back with you when you go, and have it copied for me while I decide where to send it. Guard it with your life, obviously.’

  ‘You must be excited to read it, Susannah?’ asks Roxy. ‘I wouldn’t say excited. I don’t know what he’s said about me. And I’m not sure I want to know.’

  ‘Ahhh,’ says Dominic. ‘Once a prima donna, always a prima donna. Perhaps the success of my book could pave the way for that elusive acting career you’ve been pining after for the last couple of decades. Then you’d be pleased, wouldn’t you? Put you back in that spotlight that you crave so much.’

  ‘Okay, Dominic …’ Susannah begins. ‘Let’s not go there —’

  ‘It’s something of a misnomer that Susannah even identifies as an “actress”. It’s really for want of being able to identify as anything else. She’s a pampered pooch who was put through the best acting school in London by her slightly daft daddy, and given a couple of stage roles at the behest of her even more indulgent former husband who has been hovering over her ever since like her fussy old guardian angel.’

  ‘You’re very cruel sometimes, Dominic,’ says Mia. ‘That’s really not nice. Susannah doesn’t deserve that.’

  Ben looks at Susannah as though wondering if this is normal banter. No one knows how to stop Dominic and Roxy doesn’t want him to stop. She practically crackles with interest, her gaze bright and attentive.

  Susannah burns with humiliation. ‘You are cruel. And that’s not true.’ She hasn’t even told Dominic that Maxwell is gone. She doesn’t want to have that conversation; it’s not as though he would offer any comfort. More likely he’d crow about his ability to outlive Maxwell.

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake, don’t take it all so seriously. Have some more turkey, Ben. Plenty there,’ Dominic says, piling more meat on Ben’s plate.

  As if intuiting that her owner needs rescuing, Lou scratches at the rug. Susannah excuses herself from the table to attend to the dogs. She closes the dining room door behind her and opens the front door just wide enough for the dogs to get back in while she slips into Dominic’s study.

  The manuscript sits in a neat pile beside his typewriter. She glances through the first page, and then skims quickly through the following pages. He has reinvented himself. His parents are exaggerated versions of themselves; caricatures. Dominic has a skill for description that is by turns florid, contemptuous and excessive. He prides himself on his ability to employ an unlikely adjective or metaphor. His descriptions of Michelle are ludicrous – pure fantasy. He’s transformed a plump little hausfrau from South London into Aphrodite herself. Michelle is a social worker now; she’ll be mortified by these intimate revelations. Happy Valley, what on earth? Oh no, that’s just disgusting.

  Susannah flicks quickly through to her own meeting with Dominic. Reading it, she feels a flush of hot shame. His description of their first tryst, which admittedly did take place in an under-stairs cupboard at a party, is described in the most lurid terms. They had done none of the things he details – practices she was probably unaware of at the time. It was a drunken fumble of clothing pulled aside followed by a damp coupling in the most traditional sense. Sordid. Thank God Maxwell isn’t alive to read this description of him amusing guests mere yards away from his treacherous wife. He will be posthumously humiliated.

  Dominic’s gleeful tone makes her wonder if it was jealousy of Maxwell’s success that fuelled the relentless pursuit and seduction of his wife. Dominic was always careless with other people in a way that Maxwell never was. Yet here, woven into the sub-text, Dominic has managed to make himself sound almost admirable as a man of passion and action. She feels fury and disgust both at him and herself for her collusion in this conceit. Why had she betrayed Maxwell so brutally? It occurs to her now, for the first time, that she too was jealous. Jealous of the time Max invested in other people. She was punishing him for being so loved by all around him. She doesn’t even want to find out how Dominic worms his way out of the Farash affair. She picks up the entire manuscript, fans out the pages and pushes it into the dying embers of the fire. She prods it with the poker until the flame catches and, one by one, the pages curl into blackened transparency and collapse as ash.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Dominic is rather enjoying his place at the head of the table, envisaging himself as a man of substance. Given she has become so slovenly around the house, Susannah has pulled out all stops. The dining table is festooned as though for a themed dinner on a cruise ship with jolly red-and-green napkins, bunches of holly and mistletoe. The Royal Doulton has been dusted off, the candelabras gleam, dignified despite the garish red candles stuck in them at odd angles. It’s all a little tasteless and excessive but guest-appropriate (the antipodeans have probably never experienced a traditional Christmas) and, all in all, creates a pleasing ambience.

  Without offspring, he and Susannah have never experienced a family Christmas of their own making. One of the bonuses of leaving England was not having to spend Christmas with Rebecca and her supercilious husband, or listen to Reggie’s interminable stories about the washing-machine business and his dead relatives. Now here is Dominic, with his clan gathered around him.

  Mia, with her pent-up expression, adds nothing to the joie de vivre. Susannah has been simmering with resentment all day, and even Ben is in the grip of a gloomy mood. Roxy is the only one who sparkles at this gathering. Her father’s daughter, able to rise to any occasion.

  He knows he overstepped the mark openly criticising Susannah like that, and when she returns from letting the dogs out, he will set things right with a fulsome apology. Despite the odd contretemps with Her Ladyship recently, he’s been very content tucked away in his study working on his book. It has been transformative to re-examine his whole life and discover that he has achieved far more than he realised. It’s been a quiet time of reflection and he will miss living each day in the comforting embrace of his own story.

  Right now he is actually feeling a little under the weather, probably as a result of drinking too early in the day, having got a head start prior to the arrival of their guests. The art of pacing is something he prides himself on. Timed right, he has the ability to drink steadily for hours without ill effect. Perhaps another indignity of old age is a loss of capacity.

  Now that Susannah has disappeared, the conversation seems to comprise snippets of unrelated topics, as if no one has the energy to pursue vigorous discourse. God knows where the woman has gone. She must have taken the mutts out for a ramble, leaving him to shoulder the social burden and her guests all sitting at the table none the wiser. She’s become positively feral in the last year, appearing to have lost touch with what is socially acceptable.

  ‘Ben was telling me you have a valuable Jacobean chair,’ says Roxy, apropos of nothing as far as Dominic can make out. He notices Mia shoot Ben a look of disbelief for some reason. Odd girl.

  ‘Yes, it’s a family heirloom …’ Dominic gets up, slides opens the double doors and looks around the living room. ‘Where is it? Bloody Susannah, always changing the room around.’ The chair is definitely not in the room. In fact, he
can’t remember when he last saw the thing. Someone tried to sit in it recently, when was that? His head swims as he tries to remember the details of the incident. ‘Where’s my chair?’ he asks when Susannah reappears.

  ‘I put it upstairs, out of the way,’ she says, sitting back down at the table.

  ‘I’d love to see it before I go,’ says Roxy. ‘I’m leaving early doors tomorrow.’

  ‘You obviously have some private timetable you’re working to,’ says Dominic. ‘Here today, gone tomorrow.’

  Roxy laughs. ‘Work to do. Do you think you’ll come back to the UK at some point?’

  ‘We may be forced to if the British government stops paying pensions overseas,’ says Dominic.

  ‘Dominic can’t go back, but I think you already know that,’ says Susannah. Dominic gives her a warning frown, gesturing dismissively in her direction in an attempt to brush the comment away. Typical of her to start trouble five minutes after negotiating a truce.

  ‘Yes, I am aware of the story; we’ve talked it through,’ says Roxy.

  ‘Dominic’s version —’ says Susannah.

  ‘And I saw the story in the papers too, of course,’ adds Roxy.

  ‘Do we need this conflict now?’ asks Dominic. ‘It’s Christmas. Goodwill to all men, including this one. That’s the last topic we need to discuss.’

  ‘You won’t get the truth out of him,’ says Susannah.

  ‘You don’t need to bore everyone with the details, Susannah. Perhaps you’re overtired and in need of a nice lie down?’

  ‘The papers don’t know the half of it,’ continues Susannah, undeterred. ‘It was a war over a parking space. The lovely and blameless Mr Farash died because of a parking space.’

  ‘Shut up, Susannah. You’ve obviously had too much to drink and now you’re making a fool of yourself.’

  ‘Woah, Dominic,’ says Ben. ‘I know you’re a bit drunk, man, maybe you both are, but —’

  ‘It’s not as though I murdered the man, for Christ’s sake! I didn’t know a thing about it until people started laying wreaths outside the place.’

  ‘What do you mean about the parking space?’ Roxy asks Susannah. ‘That wasn’t in the papers. There was something about the Farash family disputing whether Dominic ate there —’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, take no notice. Susannah is a rich repository of conspiracy theories. “Nothing is quite what it seems”.’ Dominic mimes the quotation marks with his fingers, a gesture he despises. ‘Let’s move on to lighter subjects.’

  ‘I think we’d better go,’ says Mia, turning to Ben, who immediately pushes back his chair.

  ‘No, no,’ Dominic insists. ‘I apologise for our silly squabble. My fault entirely. We haven’t even had dessert yet, our pavlovian masterpiece created by Mia, Queen of the Dessert.’

  Roxy at least laughs at his little joke but the Tinkers are still poised to flee. Susannah’s scowl is the full Churchill, only needing a fat cigar and a homburg to complete the bulldog look.

  Insisting everyone relax, Dominic gets up and gathers the plates neatly, the way he’s seen a thousand waiters stack them over the years, and takes it all to the kitchen in a teetering pile. But it’s not dessert that’s on his mind.

  Dumping the plates in the sink, he goes straight up the stairs and checks the spare room. Nothing. Susannah’s door is locked. He feels around the top of the door frame. Looks under the vase on the hall table, tips the vase upside down and the key falls into his hand.

  In contrast to downstairs, where she has recovered the situation, her room is chaotic with the bed unmade, clothes and all her belongings strewn about. No sign of the chair but it appears his wife will shortly be going on a long journey across the sea. And not for a holiday, either. There are two large suitcases and several boxes half packed.

  There’s a stack of papers on her desk. He rifles through them, discarding as he goes, no need to be covert since he’ll be confronting her the moment their guests depart. They’ll have this out for once and for all. In his hand is a bank statement, the account in Susannah’s maiden name with almost six thousand euros in it. There’s a dozen deposits and two withdrawals. His first thought is that Reggie has come through with some funds after all. He sits down on the bed trying to focus but he’s had far too much to drink and the figures skitter across the page. No, that can’t be right. If it came from Reggie, the deposits wouldn’t be in these varying amounts with odd cents.

  He notices a manila folder propped up at the back of the desk and picks it up. There’s half-a-dozen printouts of statements from selectwinesales.com. She’s secretly buying wine! He’s impressed by her good taste, some of his expertise must have rubbed off. There’s a Domaine Romanée-Conti! He owns two bottles of Romanée-Conti, a gift from Serge’s when it first opened to pave the way for the glowing review that put them on the map. Some might call it a bribe but it was well deserved and he has no regrets in that regard.

  Then all at once the sober reality hits him. She’s not buying, she’s selling. She’s selling his Romanée-Conti. And here’s his Vieux Château Certan and his Dujac Clos de la Roche!

  He takes a deep breath and tries to marshal his thoughts and calm himself. It’s as though he’s just dropped acid and is having a very, very bad trip. It’s not visions of sugar plums that dance in his head but wine bottles walking their way out of his cellar. His mind expands and contracts, information rises to the surface but before he can grasp it, it’s gone. He’s losing his own grip on reality.

  Finally, one clear thought makes itself known. She is not doing this alone. She has the help of someone and that someone is one of the Tinkers – or both. He is surrounded by traitors; in a nest of scorpions. He’s startled by the trill of the phone beside the bed. Oh, so the telephone is apparently back on as well!

  ‘Dominic? It’s Michelle,’ says a voice he hasn’t heard for thirty years.

  ‘Michelle? This is unexpected,’ he says, stating the obvious, and realising in the same moment that he’s struggling with the pace of change.

  ‘Dominic, it’s about Roxanne …’

  ‘Roxy, yes, she’s here now, do you want to speak to her?’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. I’ve only just found out about this. It never would have happened if I’d known. I would have put a stop to it. She’s only just admitted it to me and I called straight away.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about it,’ says Dominic. ‘It was a shock but it’s all worked out for the best. Good to get to know my daughter. Should have done it years ago.’

  There’s a long silence on the end of the line. Finally, Michelle says, ‘Dominic, I’m awfully sorry but your daughter’s right here. That woman is not Roxanne. She’s an imposter. Look, I know it’s dreadful and you’ll think badly of Rox but she was offered silly money by the paper. She’s … she’s got a lot of money troubles. I know that’s no excuse. We haven’t really been on speaking terms … well, I won’t go into that but she’s here with me today and … she’s had an attack of the guilts. I don’t suppose you’ll ever want to meet her now.’

  Dominic sits down heavily on the bed, straining to make sense of what Michelle is saying. He’s reached saturation point. Does this have anything to do with the theft of his wine? There seems to be no confluence between the two, not that he can immediately see at least. Unless Roxy is the one conspiring to steal his wine? Why would someone want to impersonate his daughter? Who would do such a thing? Michelle must be mistaken. ‘Wait a minute, are you quite certain this is not Roxy?’

  ‘Absolutely. Her name is Joanna Smyth. Roxanne’s known her forever – they went through school together, that’s how she knows so much about you. She’s a journalist now with one of the trashy tabloids. She put the story forward and Roxy got on board. There’s been renewed interest with the lawsuit and everything.’

  ‘Lawsuit?’ It’s as though he’s watching five televisions on different channels. He’s sweating so profusely he picks up a towel off the floor to mop his face.

/>   ‘The Farash children are apparently taking out a defamation lawsuit against you and the paper. You must know about it. You can probably look it up online. You should get in touch with your solicitor, find out what’s happening. Look, I’m so sorry. Roxanne sends her apologies. She does realise she was wrong. I’m amazed Joanna managed to carry it off. It was her idea to come to you at Christmas; she thought it would be more convincing.’

  Outraged, Dominic finds his voice: ‘“More convincing”? I didn’t need convincing! I’m not in the habit of asking visitors for proof of identity – I was convinced from the start! Why wouldn’t I be convinced? What’s not to be convinced about?!’

  ‘All right, don’t shout at me. I rang you the minute I found out. I’ve rung a dozen times and I’ve rung her but she won’t pick up. Wait a minute … oh dear …’ She covers the microphone so he can hear only muffled conversation. ‘Dominic, look, apparently they’re planning to send a photographer out there, probably early in the new year. So watch out for that. They’re very intrusive. They’ll go through your bins. Keep the doors locked and the curtains drawn. I really am terribly sorry. Good luck! And, well, Merry Christmas.’

  Dominic hangs up the phone and lies down on the bed trying to get his bearings. After a few minutes he gets up and staggers into the ensuite and splashes his face with cold water. A boiling disorienting rage pumps through him, forcing sweat out of every pore. There are so many things to be angry about he doesn’t know where to start. Right now he’s worried about having a stroke. His blood pressure must be through the roof. He sits down. Takes long deep breaths. Calms himself from a boiling fury, down, down, down, to steely resolve.

  As he goes back downstairs, the first part of his plan quickly comes together. He walks into the living room just in time to see Joanna pick up her phone and give it a puzzled look. He has to strike now. The other three are still in the dining room; they’ll keep for the moment.

  ‘Put that down, my dear. Come and help me choose a Sauternes to accompany dessert.’ He wraps a fatherly arm around her shoulders. She looks taken back; he’s never once touched her. But now he is and that’s the risk you take when you impersonate someone’s daughter. ‘What a shame you’re leaving tomorrow,’ he purrs. ‘It’s been a dream come true having you here.’