by Jilly Cooper
Although over eighty, the Brigadier was tall and upright, with a high colour which tanned quickly and thick hair, brushed back in two wings, in the same steel grey as his moustache.
Lily had refused his invitation to dinner at first because Dora was staying, so the Brigadier had invited them both to the Dog and Duck, where Dora admired the ‘gorgeous springer spaniel’ on the inn sign, and where it was sheltered enough to eat outside and admire an orange moon floating free of the darkening woods.
Dora, as usual, was brimming over with chat as she fed crisps to Cadbury and tucked into roast chicken, chips and peas.
‘Only time to grab a sandwich at lunchtime,’ she announced in her piercing voice. ‘Patience and I have been getting Paris’s room ready. He loves Liverpool, so we put posters of Owen, Gerrard and Emile Heskey on the walls and she’s bought him a Liverpool shirt and a red Liverpool mug which says ‘You’re not drinkin’ any more’ on the bottom, and a lovely bookshelf and a tuck box with a key, so he can keep private things.
‘He’s so lucky,’ went on Dora, dipping a chip in tomato ketchup. ‘That room’s got a terrific view of the stables and Patience has painted it a lovely warm corn colour. Ian’s been so preoccupied letting the school to a bishops’ conference, and getting fees out of parents like my mother who won’t pay up, that Patience has been able to splurge. Fortunately, her aunt kicked the bucket and left her some money.’
The Brigadier, famished after no lunch, had nearly finished his shepherd’s pie; Dora, getting behind, began feeding strips of chicken to Cadbury.
‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘Patience has also bought him a television, a radio, a laptop, a tape deck, a mobile and loads of uniform. Ian wanted her to buy it secondhand. Patience wasn’t having any of it, so it’s all new.’
‘Eat up, Dora, darling,’ chided Lily, ‘it’ll get cold.’
‘I’ll eat your chips if you like,’ said the Brigadier, filling his and Lily’s glasses with an excellent red.
‘And he’s got a double bed,’ added Dora, aware the entire pub was now listening, ‘so he can have women in, with a patchwork quilt. Patience put lots of Emerald and Sophy’s old children’s books in the bookshelf: Babar and The Happy Prince, which is what Patience wants Paris to be. I think he’s more like Little Kay in The Snow Queen. We mustn’t let his heart turn into a block of ice. Can I turn my fork over to eat my peas? It’s quicker.’
The rising moon had grown paler.
‘Not too cold?’ asked the Brigadier.
‘I’m fine. That was gorgeous. Thank you so much.’ Dora shoved her knife and fork together. ‘I’m truly full up.’ She beamed at him. ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind some chocolate ice cream, if you insist.’
A second later, she was back to the subject of Paris.
‘I only hope he’s very grateful because Ian and Patience have gone through so much to become foster parents – oodles of medical tests, and they’ve got to practise safe sex – sounds like a duet’ – Dora pretended to play the piano on the table – ‘so that Patience doesn’t get pregnant. She’s a bit ancient for that, I would say.’
A woman at the next table choked on her quiche. Lily’s eyes met the Brigadier’s and, as they tried not to laugh, she attempted to steer Dora on to safer subjects.
‘How many bishops has Ian let the school to?’
‘Millions,’ giggled Dora. ‘The Bishop of Cotchester’s sleeping in Cosmo’s study. I hope he’ll remember to water Cosmo’s marijuana plants.’
58
Head boy at Rugby, a rugger blue with a second at Cambridge, commanding officer of a tank regiment, managing director of a highly successful Yorkshire engineering company, Ian Cartwright had had few setbacks in life until ousted by a boardroom coup staged by directors fed up with his brusque, despotic manner.
He then fell on desperately hard times, lost everything through foolish investment, descended into heavy drinking and nervous breakdown, only surviving on the money his staunch wife Patience earned working in a bar. The nightmare had ended two years ago, when Ian had landed the job as bursar of Bagley Hall, a Hengist appointment, which had been an unqualified success: the previous incumbent having cooked the books. Ian, who was utterly straight, industrious and excellent with figures, soon got the reputation of a man who could ‘get things done’, which was also a euphemism for being at everyone’s beck and call.
Having been delivered from the hell of poverty, Ian was passionately grateful to his deliverer and in truth it was partly to impress Hengist that he had been keen to foster Paris.
Ian had also longed for a son with whom to discuss internationals, test matches and nineteenth-century poetry, who would look up to him, replenish his whisky, bring in logs and share manly tasks.
Although apprehensive, he was determined to do right by Paris and kept quoting Timon of Athens: ‘’Tis not enough to help the feeble up, But to support him after.’
Alas, Paris, already in explosive mood, arrived at the Cartwrights’ at Ian’s busiest time. Bills for school fees had been dispatched on the first day of the holidays and should have been paid – in theory – before the children set foot in school for the autumn term.
This had resulted in a flood of furious letters from parents outraged not only by the increased fees but at having to foot the bill for the demolition of Gafellyn Castle – letters which Hengist, having buggered off to Umbria, had left Ian to answer.
The majority of staff had swanned off on long holidays, leaving Ian to oversee the installation of new kitchens and damp courses and replace faulty windows in their houses and classrooms. No-Joke Joan rang every day from Lesbos to find out if Ian’s maintenance men had unjammed the Tampax machine in Boudicca and whether he had looked at her suggestions for a second young women’s boarding house.
Little Vicky Fairchild, on whom Ian had a crush, had already wheedled herself a charming flat overlooking the playing fields with a new en suite bathroom; whereupon all the young staff followed suit and wanted one too. In addition, it was Ian’s duty in the holidays to let the school to bring in revenue. For the fifth year running, the Church of England had held their conference at Bagley, charming chaps who all wanted to play golf and ride Patience’s horses, which ran away with them, which added to the pressure.
In the second half, the school had been taken over by a group of Orthodox Jews, charming chaps too, a source of excellent jokes, but who as part of their religion insisted that their quarters should be plunged into darkness at ten o’clock. They had therefore wrenched out and mislaid most of the infrared lights that automatically came on in the passages as night fell.
Any conference involved a lot of tidying up for Ian’s ground staff and maintenance men to prepare the school for the new term. Ian didn’t mind, he relished hard work and found Hengist, who only raised hell if his expenses were curbed and the pitches were not mown, a dream boss. The job would have been perfect except for the endless bullying interference of Alex Bruce. Hell-bent on modernizing the school, Alex had insisted Ian learn to use a computer so he could do his own letters and figures and dispense with Jenny Winters, his kind, pretty and brilliantly efficient PA.
Ian was subsequently having a nightmare mastering the beastly machine, which seemed to have tripled his workload.
Normally, as bursar, after he had chased up the parents for payments and settled in the school, he and Patience would have taken their annual three-week holiday in the second half of September. This year, with all the expense of kitting out Paris, they couldn’t afford to go.
In late August, when the Cartwrights finally got permission to foster, an exhausted, uptight Ian was hardly in the right mood to welcome and make allowances for Paris. Patience as a reaction became over-conciliatory and dithery, filling every silence with chat, until Ian put her down out of nerves.
Paris was equally uptight, at moving to both a new home and a new school. He loved his new room. He loved his bathroom and, after the fight for often cold showers at Oaktree Court, luxuriated fo
r hours reading in scented baths. He loved his laptop, tape deck and mobile, but since he’d fallen out with the Wolf Pack and Janna, he had no one to ring. The bliss of reading and writing in peace and being able to watch Richard and Judy or Top of the Pops to the end, without someone throwing a punch or snatching the remote, rather palled when you had all day in which to do it.
After the permanent din of the home where inmates shouted and screamed and were shoved in the quiet room, he found the repressed formality of the Cartwrights unnerving. Nadine had urged them to provide a stable environment with clear boundaries. Ian, tetchy and at full stretch, would return in the evening and order Paris around like an errand boy.
There was the disastrous occasion when Ian asked him to dig some potatoes, and Paris by mistake dug up all the precious half-grown artichokes. Or when Paris was ordered to collect the Sunday Telegraph from Bagley village and, settling down to read the football reports on a gravestone in Bagley churchyard on the way home, had crumpled and muddled up all the pages.
Ian, in addition, felt it was his duty to improve others. He started off on Paris’s appearance. Sleeveless T-shirts were to be discouraged when they showed off a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower. Soon he was nagging Paris to remove his jewellery. As Paris’s ear studs, plaited leather bracelet and necklace of wooden beads, threaded on to a bootlace, had all been presents from Feral, Paris had no intention of complying.
Mealtimes together were also a torment as Ian corrected Paris’s pronunciation and table manners.
‘It’s beetroot, not bee-roo, Paris, and bu-er has a double “t” in the middle. Spoons go on the right and forks on the left and try not to hold your knife like a pencil.’
Patience’s erratic time-keeping often meant Paris was summoned to lay the table in the middle of EastEnders or Holby City. Asparagus lost any initial charm when you were reproached for taking a knife and fork to it.
Even worse horrors occurred at breakfast: plunging your silver spoon into a cavern of phlegm because Patience had under-boiled your egg. It was also impossible to make conversation if your table manners and pronunciation were constantly criticized.
‘Leave him alone,’ pleaded Patience. ‘You’re making the poor boy self-conscious.’
‘I’m only doing it so he doesn’t get teased when he goes to Bagley.’
So Paris left his food and fell into silence. Plates brought to his room when Ian was away were found untouched and gathering flies.
For the first few days he sat with them in the evening, listening to the Proms, watching programmes on archaeological digs and wrecks being brought up from the bottom of the sea. One evening they borrowed and watched a tape of Brigadier Woodford’s excellent programme on Dunkirk.
‘Woodford lives near Lily Hamilton and Janna Curtis. Evidently he’s an awfully nice chap,’ observed Ian.
Paris felt the inevitable stab of anguish on hearing Janna’s name. Patience felt reproachful. Both Hengist and Janna had promised to be around and help ease Paris’s first weeks at Bagley but neither had been near the place, not even a telephone call.
Paris missed the Wolf Pack and Janna dreadfully. Patience couldn’t stem his loneliness. She felt she was looking after someone’s dog who pines constantly for his master. Trying to make Paris feel at home, she showed him family albums of her daughters Sophy and Emerald from when they were first adopted, through schooldays and eventually marriage and grandchildren.
‘My life is recorded in social service files, not family albums,’ said Paris bleakly.
‘Not any more,’ said Patience brightly. ‘You’ll be in our albums.’
Not if your poxy husband has his way, thought Paris.
The stingy bugger, furious that his wife had spent so much money on mobiles, laptops and new clothes for Paris, insisted Patience sew the name tapes on herself, rather than avail herself of a school service that only charged 50p a tape. Paris watched her pricking her big red fingers, straining her eyes as she threaded needles.
‘At least you’re not called something long like Orlando France-Lynch, or Xavier Campbell-Black. Bianca and Xavier are adopted,’ bumbled on Patience.
‘I know.’
‘Bianca’s such a happy little soul,’ sighed Patience. ‘Mind you’ – she lowered her voice – ‘Sophy was always much happier and easier than Emerald. Maybe it’s younger children.’
To make Paris feel at home, Patience had asked Emerald down for the weekend – sadly Emerald’s charming, larky husband Jonathan was in Berlin and unable to accompany her. And the baby Raymond, who might have broken the ice, was left in London with the nanny. Paris found Emerald as beadily bitchy as she was beautiful. She clearly hated seeing him ensconced in the spare room with Liverpool posters rather than her own paintings on the walls.
The evening was chilly, and Ian, showing off, had ordered Paris to fetch logs and coal for a fire. Paris, engrossed in Great Expectations, had told Ian to ‘piss off’ and been sent to his room.
A furious Emerald had followed him.
‘How dare you cheek Daddy after all he’s done for you, you horrible brat.’
‘You could be horrid as a teenager,’ protested Patience when Emerald returned downstairs.
‘He’s a yob,’ said Emerald. ‘He comes from the gutter and he’ll go back there.’
Paris much preferred Emerald’s plump, jolly sister, Sophy, Janna’s friend, who was going to replace Vicky at Larks in the autumn term. But feeling Sophy might be spying or trying to heal the breach between himself and Janna, whose letters he had continued to tear up, he shut himself in his room whenever she dropped in.
Lying in the bath Paris watched a snail, which had climbed all the way up the wall of the house to escape the incessant rain, its trail glittering in the morning sun, its horns hitting the buffers of the gutter.
Like me, he thought, from the gutter to the gutter.
Term approached. Paris grew more edgy and withdrawn as Bagley staff, back from their holidays, also popped in to check if their windows and sinks had been repaired and to register if he had two heads.
‘You’re a saint, Patience, adopting at your and Ian’s age, and looking after the horses as well. You look exhausted. I hope you’re getting paid. Of course he does have a free place.’
And Paris, who’d perfected the art of eavesdropping in care, lurking on stairs and doorways (which was the only way he could learn if he or his friends were being moved on), heard everything.
Watching Patience struggling across the yard with buckets and haynets, he longed to help, but didn’t know how to offer.
He would never have survived without Dora, back from a turbulent week in Spain with her brother Dicky, her mother and one of her mother’s admirers, a High Court judge.
‘Although he was paying for all of us, Mummy didn’t want to sleep with him so she insisted on sharing with me, which was so pants. He barged in one night plastered, forgetting I was there, so I whacked him with a black plastic bull.’
Dora’s round face and her plump little legs and arms had caught the sun and, rather than plaiting it, she had pulled back her long, blond hair into a ponytail. She was still a tomboy, but as she rolled up with Cadbury and took up residence on his bed, Paris reflected that she might one day have possibilities.
When he tried on his school suit for the first time, both Patience and Dora gasped as its dark severity set off to perfection his pale marble features and lean elegant body. Paris liked the slate grey overcoat. With shades on, he’d look like Feral’s Uncle Harley.
‘You look cool,’ admitted Dora. She consulted the list. ‘Two pairs of slip-on shoes. Try a pair on.’
‘What am I going to slip on – a banana skin?’
‘Are they comfortable?’ asked Patience anxiously.
‘Very. Change to have a pair that doesn’t pinch or let in water.’
A din in the yard outside suggested a pupil had arrived early to drop off a horse. Patience disappeared to welcome them. Dora, who was cleaning tack, remained
on Paris’s bed, rather randomly applying saddle soap to Plover’s bridle.
That tweed jacket must be a cast-off of Ian’s, thought Paris. Christ, it was from Harrods, still with the label on, and those pale blue shirts were really cool. It was as though he was being kitted out by Wardrobe for a new play, but who knew if it would be a tragedy or a comedy?
‘Let’s see your duvets,’ asked Dora.
‘Thomas the Tank Engine and Beatrix Potter with Peter Rabbit cock-sucking a carrot,’ grumbled Paris. ‘I am going to get so much piss taken out of me.’
He was now skimming through the Bagley Code of Conduct with increasing alarm. There were pages of rules about not downloading porn.
‘I wanted to download some stuff for Patience about Northcliffe’ – Dora went very pink – ‘but when I logged into golden retriever, it was so disgusting: women actually weeing on men. I don’t understand the human race.’
Paris grinned and read on.
‘“No one can leave the school without permission.” How do they stop me?’
‘Give you a detention, make you do hearty things like digging the garden and not watching television. The second time they cancel your leave-outs.’
‘That’d be a relief, if Ian doesn’t loosen up. “Once a week”, he read, “all scholars must participate in an activity that involves serving others in the community.”’
‘Cosmo helps out at Larkminster Hospital,’ said Dora. ‘He’s shagging one of the nurses.’
‘Servicing others,’ murmured Paris.
‘Best way is to find a nice old biddy, weed her garden, then you get crumpets and cake for tea and to watch Neighbours. Feral’s working for my aunt, Lily Hamilton, mowing her lawn. They get on really well. Janna fixed it up.’
