Olivia’s Luck (2000)

by Catherine Alliot

  During this time we more or less lived at Johnny’s parents’ house, which, like son and heir, was something of an eye-opener. I’d never seen anything quite like the McFarllens’ estate, and probably never will. It was huge, it was Jacobean, it was turreted – it was even moated, for God’s sake – in short, it was the sort of place where you suppressed a ‘bloody hell’ as you went up the drive. Here they talked of land rather than garden, watered the orangery rather than the conservatory, and had a clock tower instead of a weather vane. The lifeblood of the place was, of course, the stables, or ‘the yard’, as I came to call it, which was adjacent to the house, and run like a slick, well-oiled machine – just like the thoroughbred racing machines it housed, who nodded their elegant, arched necks over every green stable door.

  Inside, the house was full of colour and drama. There was a blood-red dining room, a pale blue morning room, vibrant chintz in the sitting room, murals in the bathrooms and, at every window, curtains as thick as duvets hung from fabulous, coro-neted pelmets. Every bedroom was painted a deep jewel colour – sapphire, ruby or emerald – and as I crept around upstairs one day on a rather spurious search for a loo, I was also startled to note that each bed had a huge crucifix hanging over it. This, it transpired, was down to Oliver, Johnny’s father, who, born a Protestant, had apparently seen the light in later life and made a sweeping and dramatic conversion to Catholicism. Like most born-agains he was messianic in his belief and, insisting that the rest of his family should join him on his road to Damascus, had filled the place with the trappings of his new-found religion. Huge church candles and prayer books loitered in the most unlikely places – next to a pile of Horse and Hound in the loo, or in the case of the candles, chewed to bits by the latest puppy in its basket, because for all Oliver’s religious fervour, one didn’t have to look far to find signs of a hedonistic lifestyle. A velvet curtain, ripped accidentally during a raucous party a few years ago, still hung forlornly by threads from its pelmet, there were shot gun cartridges in the bath, empty whisky bottles behind the loo, and betting slips in every overflowing ashtray, all of which, I thought, gave the place a thrilling air of debauchery.

  Oliver McFarllen, tall, handsome and urbane as he strutted about the place in his breeches in an impossibly Mr Darcy-like manner, was altogether a glamorous, if formidable figure. We were all rather in awe of him and kept out of his way, but he wasn’t unfriendly and always shot us a cheery “Hello there!” and a flashing smile if he strode by us in the yard. His moods were mercurial, though, and having once been shocked to a standstill as we heard him bawl out an unfortunate stable girl for not mucking out a filthy stable, we knew better than to hang about in the yard for too long, particularly if clients were viewing their horses. Johnny also told us that the barns at the back of the house, which held Oliver’s prized collection of classic vintage cars, were quite simply out of bounds.

  The sisters, all younger than us, were terrifyingly good-looking in a pale, consumptive sort of way, and I distinctly remember being introduced to them in the icy splendour of the morning room as they lolled around reading Tatler and Harpers, glossy blonde hair spilling on to the equally glossy pages. The three of us, Molly, Imogen and I, had stood in the doorway awkwardly, fully prepared to be coolly appraised, then whispered about as we left the room, but to our surprise the McFarllen girls jumped up, pounced on us and dragged us off to the stables, insisting we see their ponies. Once in the privacy of the stables they’d grilled us rigid, bitterly disappointed that none of us had had our tummy buttons pierced, tattooed our bottoms, or at the very least, had sex with their brother. They pretty much ran wild about the place, and rode bareback like demons, and I remember once watching them race their ponies around the gallops for a laugh, waving and shrieking to their father, who was standing up in his ancient, convertible Bristol, binoculars to eyes, playing ‘the trainer’ for them. As he laughed and roared them on, I remember thinking how alien their world was to mine.

  And of course I drank it all in thirstily, parched as I was of this sybaritic lifestyle. It spoke to me, released something pent up and suburban in my soul, as indeed did Angie, Johnny’s mother. Bright-eyed, copper-haired and beautiful, with Johnny’s brilliant, languid smile, it was she who held the whole chaotic shooting match together, she who was the pivot around whom the household revolved. The kitchen was her domain – although I don’t believe she ever cooked in it – but she treated it as her salon and welcomed everyone to it. I can see her now, sweeping saddles from the vast oak table and calling for everyone to sit down together around a steaming pot of soup, placing a trainer next to an old soak, next to a schoolgirl, next to an elderly widow. Once her table was full she’d sit at the head, satisfied that everyone was about her, and then entrance us all, telling stories – but listening too, leaving no one out – and inviting our confidences, until I think I’d told her more about myself than I’d told any adult. I believe Peter and Ben were secretly in love with her, and her husband certainly was, liking nothing more than to show her off.

  After a typically liquid lunch with fourteen or so of us around the kitchen table, Oliver, plastered, his pale blue eyes swimming rheumily, would stagger round to her end and try to persuade her to sing.

  “She’s got a bloody good voice, you know; trained as an opera singer before she met me. God, she should be captivating the front row of Covent Garden instead of a crowd of reprobates like you! Come on, Ange, the girls would love it, wouldn’t you, girls? Ask her to sing, Molly; she’ll do it for you.”

  “Bugger off, Oily,” Angie would laugh, swatting him good-naturedly with her napkin and not moving from her chair. “Why is that when you’re in your cups you have to have everyone on their feet hollering ‘Flower of Scotland’?”

  “Don’t tempt me!” he’d shout, “Oh God, it’s too late – help me Johnny – ‘Oh fl-o-wer of Sco-tland…’ and off he’d go, standing up on his chair, belting it out, head back, roaring at the ceiling, with the rest of the table – son, daughters, family, friends – joining in the bits they knew.”

  My mother had raised delicately plucked eyebrows when I’d foolishly let this slip back home.

  “Singsongs,” she’d murmured. “How delightfully rustic. Do they light a campfire too, I wonder?”

  But she could sneer all she liked, I’d fallen in love with the entire family, the whole, compulsive package. Never in my life had I come across such warmth, such unbridled fun for the sheer hell of it, such a house that rocked, almost literally, with laughter, and in the middle of it all, of course, the golden boy, Johnny.

  But the summer didn’t last for ever, and that October, after a final, wild goodbye party at the McFarllens’, Johnny and the boys went off to university. Molly and I still had another year together at school, but Imogen, being bright as well as beautiful, went up to Oxford a year early to read Fine Art. Coincidentally, Johnny also went up to Oxford, to read Classics, and funnily enough, within a week or two of term beginning, he’d asked Imogen out.

  Looking back, I wonder why on earth it hadn’t occurred to us before, why it came as such a huge shock. He’d waited for her, you see, waited all summer to make a move, to claim his prize, but being too much of a gent to pluck her right from under Molly’s nose in full view of everyone, had hung on until the right moment. And that moment had to be away from the rest of us, out of the spotlight, far from the madding crowd, where Johnny could swing into full, wooing mode, and let the romantic, thirteenth-century hallowed cloisters of Balliol do their damnedest.

  Naturally it came as a severe blow to me, losing, as I suddenly had, my partner in rejection, but it was a colossal blow for Molly. She was distraught, understandably, and spitting blood for a while too. She wouldn’t speak to Imogen or Johnny when they first came back at Christmas, wouldn’t even acknowledge Imogen’s letters. Gradually, though, after a couple of months, it all calmed down. It had to. Molly, Imogen and I had known each other since we were seven. We’d played in each other’s bedrooms, been i
n the same netball teams, copied each other’s homework, listened to each other’s records, borrowed each other’s clothes, and Molly was neither stupid nor vindictive. It was easy to forgive Imogen because she loved her, and she wrestled with her pride to forgive Johnny too, which was harder, because she loved him more.

  Imogen and Johnny went out for three years, all their time together at Oxford, whilst Molly and I kept watch from less traditional, more redbrick, seats of learning. And they were surely the golden couple: Imogen, tall, slim, with her sheet of blonde hair slipping silkily down her back, slanting blue eyes and high forehead – cruising for a First with an icy cool nerve – whilst Johnny held up the more extrovert, exuberant side of the partnership. A raucous rugby blue, a man’s man, partying and drinking till all hours, playing sport until he dropped, scraping a Two-two – “A gentleman’s degree,” he told us with a broad grin, “means I’ve had a good time” – and always with the serene, unflappable Imogen on his arm. Deliriously happy, yes, but when they came out of university together, still very young, Still only twenty-one. And, of course, no one had even given a thought to marriage.

  ∗

  As I sat in my tiny, makeshift scullery kitchen, I blew a stream of smoke at the faded old photo on the fridge. Yes, it was funny really, I reflected. Molly had claimed him, Imogen had loved him, but at the end of the day, it had been me who’d married him.

  3

  There wasn’t a great deal of joy in the house I grew up in. My father had left home when I was four, but before he’d flown off to Canberra with Mum’s best friend, Yvonne, he’d thoughtfully provided for my education by leaving the wherewithal for me to stay at The Sacred Heart Convent School until I was eighteen. I wasn’t too sure if he was even a Catholic – in fact I wasn’t too sure of any of the details about my father, aside from a blurred old photo I’d found in Mum’s dressing-table drawer of a man in RAF uniform – but the convent was no doubt a last-minute, guilty sop to Mum, who was as devout as they come.

  Whether her religious fervour was as strong before Dad’s departure as it was after, I’m not sure, but I do know that once deserted, alone and grief-stricken, she’d transferred any passion she had left in her soul to God, the Royal Family and Jean Muir, and not necessarily in that order.

  The bizarre Jean Muir fixation had come about because in her previous, normal working life – before she took up tormenting teenagers – she’d worked as a fitter in the fashion world. During this period she’d spent some time in Miss Muir’s couture house, and such was the impression it had made, that from that day on, she dressed solely in navy-blue shift dresses, with only a single string of pearls and earrings as adornment, her hair styled neatly in a dark, black bob, all very chic, all very à la Jean.

  She was also half French, as she never failed to remind me, picking me up from school and greeting me with a cool “Ça va?” – to which I was supposed to respond accordingly. Mostly I did – every day in fact – but one day it got on my nerves and I snapped, “Oui, ca va bloody bien, OK?” She never said it again and that memory fills me with remorse.

  Mum’s standards were high, and, frankly, I found it hard to live up to the Almighty, the Royals and Jean, and privately staged my own mini rebellion, deliberately skipping my Hail Marys, wearing a ‘Sod the Royal Wedding’ T-shirt under my jumper, and dressing as sloppily, and as unlike her mentor as possible. All very adolescent and futile, but I think because I looked very like Mum – small-boned, dark and petite – I was rather afraid of ending up like her, and made a supreme effort to be different. Genes will out, though – Parisian ones particularly – and however baggy my clothes I still had an unhappy knack of whipping a scarf around my neck and tying it just so, adding a good, chunky leather belt, some unusual earrings, some witty little shoes, so that according to Imogen and Molly I always looked ‘together’.

  Looks were everything to Mum, and she hoodwinked the world quite successfully, so that it always came as a surprise to people to realise we were poor. After all, I went to an expensive private school and Mum looked like she’d fallen out of Vogue, so it was only when people came to the house – a tiny, Victorian terraced villa with threadbare carpets and cheap furniture – that the dawn came up. On the flip side, though, Mum equally loathed ostentation. I remember one occasion, just after I’d left university, when, as usual I was off to a party at the McFarllens’ and hastily bolting a cheese sandwich at the kitchen table, waiting for Johnny and Imogen to pick me up. She’d stood over me, fingering her pearls more nervously than usual.

  “You’re off to those McFarllens again then, are you?” she sniffed.

  I didn’t bother to look up. “You know I am, Mum,” I muttered, stuffing in the sandwich, knowing she was rotating the earrings now, radiating disapproval.

  “Well, you know my views.”

  I chewed on in the silence, and at length she tried again, walking around the table so she was facing me on the other side. She rested her palms on the Formica.

  “You haven’t met many nouveau riche people, have you, Olivia?”

  I cleared my throat. “Quite a lot of the girls at school had money, if that’s what you mean,” I said smoothly.

  “Yes, but they didn’t flash it about, did they?” she retorted quickly. “Imogen’s parents, for instance – they’re wealthy, but you’d never know. They’ve got far too much breeding.” She shuddered. “Unlike these, dreadful people.” I munched on in silence. New money was quite a theme of Mum’s, as if we had any old. She sat down opposite me, flicking an imaginary speck of dust off her immaculate skirt.

  “I saw him in the paper the other day,” she said tartly, “splattered all over the back page. Tie askew, hair standing on end, holding a bottle of champagne and grinning from ear to ear like an idiot. Now if Dick had won the handicap stakes – ”

  “Hang on.” I looked up. “Who did you see in the paper the other day?”

  “Whom, actually. Oliver McFarllen, of course.”

  “Oh, right, and whom, exactly, is Dick?”

  “Major Dick Hern,” she said patiently. “The Queen’s trainer.”

  Ah yes, of course. Just plain Dick to Mum.

  “Now when Dick wins,” she went On, “he just smiles politely, tips his hat everso decorously, and bows out of the ring to let the owner take all the glory. None of this posing around to get his face in all the papers lark.”

  I nodded. “Quite right. Thanks, Mum. Remind me to give Oliver that little tip.” He’ll be everso grateful, I thought privately, then hated myself for it.

  Johnny hooted his horn from outside. I jumped up. “They’re here,” I said quickly, grabbing my bag and giving her a guilty peck on the cheek. “See you later, Mum,” and I flew off down the passage and out of the front door, leaving her to shut it behind me.

  As I ran down the path to his bright red Morgan, Johnny looked past me in amazement to the vision standing in the doorway.

  “Blimey,” he said as I squeezed in behind Imogen to the tiny space in the back, “is that your mother? She looks like one of those Dior fashion plates.”

  “Oh, she’d love that,” I said, hugging my knees up in the obligatory garden gnome position. “I’ll tell her when I get home. She might change her opinion of you.” As soon as I’d said it, I wished I hadn’t. He turned round, startled.

  “Really? Why, what does she think of me then?”

  “Oh well, she hasn’t really met you, of course,” I said quickly, “but she’s – well, she’s always had a bit of a thing about…” I hesitated.

  “She thinks you’re a flash git,” put in Imogen helpfully.

  He roared with laughter. “Does she? Christ!” He blinked. “Well, she’s probably right!”

  “Probably?” murmured Imogen, raising her eyebrows as he overrewed the car.

  He laughed. “All right, Miss Ice Maiden, I haven’t heard you complaining much.”

  She lit a cigarette and gave him a secret smile, and he reached across and squeezed her knee in retur
n, territorial gestures that Molly and I were still getting used to.

  “Still,” he mused, glancing admiringly at me in the rear-view mirror, “I can see where you get ‘the look’ from, Liv.”

  “Oh, Liwy was born chic,” commented Imogen. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she was doused in Saint-Laurent talc as a baby and snapped into Chanel nappies.”

  I’d laughed, but I couldn’t help feeling pleased, too. I’d spent my entire youth wishing Mum wouldn’t stand at the school gates in navy-blue couture, complete with gloves, hat, and pigskin handbag, and be like the other mums in a tracksuit, trainers, a Sainsbury’s carrier in one hand and a buggy with a toddler in the other, but for the first time in my life, I felt a rush of pride for her. And of course, I liked Johnny all the more for admiring her.

  The venue that particular night was the McFarllens’ barn, and the occasion, the youngest sister, Tara’s, seventeenth birthday. Johnny had rigged the place up in a parody of a seventies disco, with flashing strobe lights and a juke box belting out Abba in the corner, and Tara and her friends were giggling in flares and headbands. Entering into the spirit of the thing, Molly, Imogen and I pranced about around our handbags, whilst the boys played imaginary guitars, shutting their eyes and banging their heads together in mock ecstasy. While we danced, I remember looking out through the open barn doors to the house beyond, which as usual was lit up like a vast beacon in the night sky. Through the dining-room window a dinner party was in full swing, with twelve or so people around a table awash with silver and crystal, and Angie and Oliver at either end. As I watched, I saw Oliver get up, take the decanter around the table, and pause to kiss his wife on the back of her neck before refilling her glass, laughing in the candlelight.