by Patrick Gale
‘Sorry,’ Sophie said, not understanding. ‘Was he a lord?’
‘No, no,’ his widow explained hastily. ‘Lord of the Manor just means the family had duties in the community and would have received tithes.’
‘Landed gentry,’ Charlie said, with a curious tightening of his mouth. ‘I mean it was all long ago. His grandfather was the last to own the house and even he didn’t live there but we retain the title. Americans have tried to buy it.’
‘And those awful people who live there now,’ one of the Girls said.
‘And as the eldest son,’ Charlie finished, ‘Tim is now Lord of the Manor and I think it’s only just dawning on him.’
Sophie was fascinated. It all made perfect sense now. Charlie’s combination of confidence and subdued resentfulness. They were like marooned officers losing sight of their glorious ship. She looked at the pictures again. It wasn’t a castle but the house was very old and fine, a manor house, a house that would immediately confer standing on its owners. But they lived in this house in a Fulham terrace, where small rooms had been knocked together to produce a long, thin room that was still, somehow, small.
‘Goodness, we’ve been so rude!’ Jenny exclaimed, stifling a yawn. ‘We’ve talked about nothing but us all evening. Tell us about your family, Sophie.’
Sophie tried to focus but realized she was a little drunk. She pretended Jenny was one of the inquisitive Daughters at school and gave her standard reply. ‘Oh, you know. Nothing very interesting.’
But she hadn’t worded her response quite right or must have looked sad or something because Emma chipped in, ‘Have you got lots of brothers and sisters?’
‘What is it your father does again?’ Mrs Somborne-Abbot asked.
‘Well …’ Sophie started.
‘Hey!’ Charlie said. ‘Don’t interrogate her. Who wants coffee?’
‘Oh but it’s fun,’ Jenny said. ‘I love families. They’re always fascinating, like novels, even when people think they’re normal and ordinary, they’re always odd in some way.’
‘Mine really isn’t,’ Sophie assured her.
Jenny’s eyes were gleaming and dark, like a hawk’s. ‘I bet it is,’ she said.
Sophie found she could hardly answer. Her tongue felt thick. The candles seemed to have burned up all the air in the room. ‘It really isn’t all that …’ she began.
‘Sophie’s parents are both dead, okay?’ Charlie suddenly said. ‘Happy now?’
‘They’re not dead,’ Sophie told him, startled.
‘But you … You’re in an orphanage, aren’t you?’ he challenged her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But it’s called a children’s home because lots of us aren’t orphans.’
There was an appalling pause during which Tim distinctly groaned that Layla had got him on his knees.
Sophie had looked down at her cheese plate as she spoke but looked back at Charlie now, suspecting two things: that Lucas had betrayed her and that to bring an illegitimate girl to stay was an offensive in a private family battle. He was suddenly absorbed in scraping the pip from a grape which seemed to confirm the second.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Mrs Somborne-Abbot asked at last, all concern. ‘Are there many of you in there?’
‘No,’ Sophie said, forcing herself to smile, ‘it’s not like Dickens. There are never more than ten, so it’s just like a very big family.’
‘And your parents aren’t dead?’
‘They could be. I don’t know. I can’t know anything about them until I’m older and I’m not even sure I’ll want to know when the time comes.’
‘Oh but it would be fascinating,’ Emma said. ‘Aren’t you dying to know?’
‘I don’t think they’ll turn out to be Lords of the Manor,’ Sophie told her. ‘Life isn’t like that, is it?’
Somehow she managed to deflect the conversation back off herself, perhaps through mention of landed gentry, then pleaded tiredness to escape them all to soak in a bath.
Charlie was sitting on her bed when she came back to her room. The bath had been too hot and she was sweating.
‘Sorry about that down there,’ he said.
‘How long have you known?’
‘End of term.’
‘Lucas.’
‘Yeah.’
She thought of the lies she had told him, the implicit lies, the veiled, fleeting references to Wilf and the others, her practised way of describing days out to the seaside in such a way that they could be mistaken for references to holidays with a smallish family.
‘You shouldn’t be ashamed of it, you know,’ he said.
‘I’m not ashamed. But it’s a private thing. I just don’t like being different from everyone else.’
‘But you are different. You’re rather amazing.’
‘Crap. You won’t tell people, will you? Other people?’
‘Why on earth should I?’
‘Same reason Lucas told you …’
‘Phi! Of course I won’t. As you say, it’s private. Lucas isn’t very … Well, he doesn’t always know how people should, you know, behave …’
Listening to this cool disloyalty, she considered kissing him. It felt even riskier there than in the library so would be exciting. If she kissed him and his mother caught them it would punish Charlie for using her so callously to score points against his family and would punish his mother for being a snob. There was also a good chance he would find a way to brag about it to Lucas, which would punish Lucas. She needed to hurt Lucas badly.
However, Charlie looked ridiculous in dressing gown and pyjamas, more deserving of a bedtime story than a snog, so instead she sat at the dressing table and told him, as casually as she could, pretending to be more interested in towelling her hair, ‘Lucas was Jonty Mortimer’s little man all last summer. But I expect he told you. Didn’t he? Oh Christ, he didn’t!’
This felt good, better than one of Charlie’s slobbery kisses. Better yet, Charlie didn’t know and it was hard to tell whether he was more shocked at the news or at his friend keeping it from him. The well-fed pinkness of him drained away and he actually paced the room. He was nervous, she saw, more than disgusted, worried for his own reputation.
‘I’ll tell you what else he’s been doing that’s really creepy,’ she said. ‘You know that telescope in his bedroom?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Well he uses it to spy on a family in the next house down the hill from them. He watched them having sex, and watches the son playing with himself.’
‘You are kidding!’
‘It’s pretty weird. Actually it’s a bit pathetic,’ she added, setting aside her towel and proud of managing to sound so like Weatherall at her most dismissive.
Now Charlie was even more anxious in case people would talk about him in the same way, or think him gay too because of all the times he’d gone home with Lucas so she reassured him.
‘Everyone knows you’re not really friends. Even Kimiko knows you go home with him to be polite to Heidi and because Headbourne expected it of him.’
Distancing himself further, he did a deadly parody of Heidi, a kind of improvised riff in which she talked about eating disorders even as she encouraged Sophie to eat the luxurious contents of her double-doored fridge. He was brilliant. He turned the wardrobe into a walk-in larder. He even made himself look a bit like Heidi, suggesting the plucked eyebrows, the raised-heel walk. Even though Heidi had nothing like the Yiddish accent he was putting on – her voice was as elegantly neutral as a newscaster’s – he somehow suggested that this grotesque version was her real voice, the voice of her thoughts.
Sophie laughed as she hadn’t laughed all evening, knowing they were trampling on something precious to her, and when Mrs Somborne-Abbot suddenly opened the door without knocking, she felt as guilty as if they’d been caught in a full-on snog.
‘Now, now, Charlie. Give this poor girl some rest and let her sleep,’ she said. Ignoring his protests, she herded him from the room as though he was fo
ur, not fourteen.
The next morning Charlie had to go for his extra maths lesson. Used to idleness and solitude, Sophie had assumed she would be left to amuse herself or given a chance to spend time with the mysteriously attractive Tim. She had started an interesting conversation with him about Hindu mythology over breakfast – he was reading Siddartha – and sensed he was not far off inviting her up to his room to listen to records. Instead of which she had the alarming experience of being taken under Mrs Somborne-Abbot’s bony wing. Even Charlie protested loyally that Sophie would be fine just reading or watching TV.
‘Nonsense,’ his mother replied. ‘We’ll go to the sales.’
So Charlie was dropped off at his crammer’s which, judging from the girls gathered on its steps, was full of people just like his sisters, only younger, then Sophie was whisked off in Mrs Somborne-Abbot’s car. She drove extremely fast and, it seemed to Sophie, aggressively.
‘My father was a racing driver – not professionally you understand – and we all had to pass our advanced tests. I can handle a lorry through a skid pan,’ she added darkly. ‘Get out of this lane, you stupid little man!’
Superficially they went to Regent Street, to the New Year sales, to Jaeger’s and Liberty’s and Dickins and Jones. Superficially because, had anyone watched them, that was what they were doing. Actually Mrs Somborne-Abbot was subjecting Sophie to a gruelling combination of etiquette tutorial, interrogation and warning.
‘Somborne-Abbots have no imagination,’ she began, twitching through a bin of clothes. ‘No, it’s true,’ she insisted, although Sophie had said nothing in the family’s defence. ‘We have no imagination. It’s why we’ve always produced scientists and engineers or administrators. Charlie’s much better off on the C ladder. The other artsy subjects are too … What’s the word?’
‘Subjective?’ Sophie suggested.
‘Exactly. All that interpretation and choice. Far too difficult. At least with maths and science there’s always a right and a wrong answer so once you’ve done the revision you know where you stand. But Charlie lacks application sometimes. And this maths O level is so crucial. It’s really most important that he has no other distractions or demands on his time.’
‘Mrs Somborne-Abbot, I’m not Charlie’s girlfriend,’ Sophie told her. ‘If that’s what’s worrying you.’
‘You’re not?’ Mrs Somborne-Abbot looked up, lovely hands twitched clear of bargain underwear.
‘No.’
‘Oh. Oh!’ She laughed and came over quite girlish. ‘Oh, I’m so glad. I don’t mean that … It’s just that … You’ll think me so foolish. As I say, Somborne-Abbots have no imagination. So you’re just his friend?’
‘Yes,’ Sophie laughed.
‘Well, isn’t that fun? I think it’s so exciting nowadays the way boys and girls can be just friends without it meaning more. Though with the chain of men Jenny’s introduced over the last five years, I do get rather confused, I must admit. It’s so good, you know, that you’re a Daughter at Tatham’s. People like to be able to place people. They like to be able to say He’s Dick Somborne-Abbot’s boy or She’s Christine’s daughter. And having you there means that people will be able to say She’s a Daughter at Tatham’s, you know, fearfully bright! and that will help balance out the awkwardness of your not knowing who your parents were. Did she give you up because she was unmarried, do you think? Your mother?’
‘Er, I don’t know. Probably. People do. I’ll know when I’m older.’
‘But you might not want to, you said.’
‘Yes. I mean, what’s the point? So I can turn up on their doorsteps and say remember me?’
Charlie’s mother laughed at that. Now that they had established that Sophie was not about to lure her great white hope off the true path to a sensibly unimaginative science qualification and a career in industry, she became entirely frank and, with it, almost likeable. Curiously, given that she was no longer dealing with a potential daughter-in-law, she also began to give Sophie pieces of blunt social advice. They slipped out between comments on clothes and special offers. Don’t say serviette, say napkin. Don’t say toilet, say lavatory. Don’t say pardon, say what. Anything, anything but pardon.
‘Don’t ask me why, but it’s the kiss of death.’
Sophie had the strange sensation of being taken in hand for no other reason than that this woman recognized something in her that made her protective, something of herself perhaps. As she moved the car to a new spot to avoid a traffic warden, parked with speedy precision and whirled Sophie through more shops, she went through the motions of asking Sophie’s opinion of this or that item of clothing she would twitch off a railing and hold against herself or even, with a critical stare, against Sophie. But under cover of that she offered her countless little nuggets of sisterly advice. She told her to grow her hair longer and wear it back off her face in a chignon or Alice band.
‘Either that or switch from Phi to Sophia so people know where they are.’
She showed her how wearing shoes with a little more heel would appear to narrow her calves and ankles while adding that soupcon of height. She suggested Sophie wear pearls, once she was eighteen, to show off her skin tone, and bought her a string of false ones to demonstrate. She taught her a little cluster of deadly acronyms, not just N.Q.O.C.D. – Not Quite Our Class Darling – but P.L.U. and non-P.L.U., U and non-U. She referred several times to something or someone as ‘a bit Petey M. Whitey’, which Sophie later learned from Charlie stood for Pleased to Meet You, Toilet.
‘Why can’t you just say common?’ Sophie asked. Mrs Somborne-Abbot, flicking through a rack of silk blouses with a hunter’s quick eye, was so shocked she hurried Sophie on in case someone had overheard.
‘People used to,’ she explained. ‘My mother’s generation. When people still had maids and so on. But you couldn’t now. It wouldn’t do.’
As they wove through the crowds and more gloves, belts and dresses than Sophie had seen in her lifetime, she painted a picture of the world as a place full of traps and pitfalls, at once exciting and terrifying, where no one was ‘out of your league’ but where people – always those omnipresent, omniscient ‘people’ – were noting and remembering one’s least lapse.
‘The hardest thing for a girl,’ she said as they tore out of Liberty’s and made through the crowds for Jaeger’s, a shop she spoke of as a kind of safe haven of good taste and good tailoring. ‘The hardest thing for a girl is to have to rely on beauty. You’re so lucky to have brains. This way!’
Trailing behind her, missing the floury solidities of Margaret and her kitchen, Sophie wondered if she meant to imply an ‘instead’.
Mrs Somborne-Abbot found what she said was perfect for Sophie. It was a dark blue woollen skirt. Sophie protested that it wasn’t her and that besides she had no money, to which Mrs Somborne-Abbot murmured that it wasn’t P.L.U. to speak about money. if you didn’t have it, people would know and if they were the right people, would understand and not make you uncomfortable. This was a lesson she had learnt imperfectly herself, it seemed, for she then bought the skirt and insisted Sophie accept it as a late Christmas present.
Sophie was dismayed by both generosity and garment. The skirt seemed ridiculously middle-aged and she would have been far happier with a pair of jeans for half the price or a cheesecloth dress for even less but she knew better than to say so. When she drew it from its bag however to show Charlie back at the house, he was quite serious in saying how well she looked in it, how grown up and so on. She was curious enough to try it on again on her own, in the spare room, and the self that looked back at her was unfamiliar and older-looking, still a schoolgirl with no family but a schoolgirl with a certain poise. She resolved to beg Margaret for some shoes with a little more heel once her current pair wore out.
That afternoon she and Charlie made an excursion to Hampton Court. Sophie had never been and neither, he admitted after he got them to jump off at the wrong bus stop, had Charlie. They had agreed to be bac
k by five to leave time for Sophie to be escorted back to her train but they were late home, as much from talking too much as from the rush-hour traffic. Mrs Somborne-Abbot was not pleased. While Sophie raced to stuff her few things back in her borrowed bag there was a sharp-edged exchange of views downstairs and it was decided that, because there was not enough time for Charlie to go with her and be back for that evening’s engagement, a cab must be called for Sophie to go safely on her own.
‘We can’t set you loose on the Underground on your own at this time of day if you’ve never ridden it on your own before,’ Mrs Somborne-Abbot announced. ‘The cab will take you almost onto the station platform. Much safer and you’ve plenty of time.’
In the rush nobody checked to see if Sophie had enough money. She was simply bundled into the taxi which headed off over Wandsworth Bridge because south of the river would be quicker apparently.
Sophie had rashly treated Charlie to a cake and tea at Hampton Court in return for his buying their entrance tickets. She had only four pounds left and the meter soon reached that. She explained her problem to the driver who said only, ‘Better let you off here, then, while you’ve got enough for a bus.’
He left her on a pavement somewhere, in front of a line of boarded-up houses.
She didn’t have enough money for a bus but it wasn’t raining and she decided to walk, because what else could she do? She remembered noticing that Waterloo was near the Thames so decided to follow the river as closely as the roads let her. She also discovered that there were tiny maps at some of the bus stops which she could use to check her bearings. She set off cheerfully enough, glad simply to be free of Charlie’s mother and her traps and judgements but she soon slowed. It was bitterly cold, her windcheater was thin and the big roads she found herself on had few glimpses of the river and fewer bus stops. It was far further than she had realized and, when she finally made her way along the embankment from Vauxhall to Lambeth Palace and from there to Waterloo, she had long since missed the train she had told Kieran to meet. The train she eventually took was a seedy, late one, full of drunk commuters and smoke, which stopped at every station.
