Clouds among the Stars

by Clayton, Victoria

  There was a general, plaintive call for food. I tried to poach some eggs but it was more difficult than I had imagined. A plate was piled high with failures – too hard, broken yolks, stringy whites like rubber bands – and I was heated with feelings of inadequacy and annoyance, when a row broke out at the front door. The bell rang repeatedly, the knocker banged violently and Dirk let the front door know what he thought of it in a succession of ear-splitting barks. All the journalists had gone home hours ago, no doubt to write lurid exposés of everyday life in a famous actor’s narcotics den. I went up to see.

  On the doorstep were two figures of sinister appearance, disguised in swathes of clothing so as to conceal their features.

  ‘Cut along now!’ said the policeman who had replaced poor Dicky. ‘Let’s have no argy-bargy, madam, if you please. The family doesn’t want to be disturbed.’

  ‘Now, look here, my good man,’ said a male voice that was familiar. ‘This lady lives here and if you know what’s good for you you’ll let us in without delay.’

  ‘A likely story,’ said the PC, who seemed to have learned his lines from Dixon of Dock Green. ‘You reporters have plenty of cheek, I’ll give you that.’

  ‘But this is my daughter!’ said my mother’s voice from behind a veil. A gloved finger emerged from among the wraps to point at me. ‘Harriet, tell this blundering fool who I am!’

  TEN

  ‘Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!’ said my mother, with feeling. ‘Ronnie, I need a drink. No, Harriet, Macbeth! You can’t think,’ she continued to address me, ‘what a frightful time we’ve been having. Ow-how! Gently!’ I drew back in alarm, having attempted to kiss the veil masking her cheek. ‘What is this dog doing in the house? Can no one stop it barking?’

  ‘Sorry. Be quiet, Dirk! At once!’ Dirk barked on. ‘Shall I take your coats? There’s a bottle of wine open in the drawing room. I’ll get more glasses.’

  ‘I think double Scotches would be more the thing.’ Ronnie helped my mother out of her coat and then took off his own. They retained their scarves, hats – a smart blood-red turban in my mother’s case, pulled well down over her ears – and sunglasses. ‘It’s chilly, isn’t it?’ He shivered, though the house felt warm to me, and drew his scarf tighter round his face. ‘I think I’ll hang on to this for the moment.’

  ‘Me, too.’ My mother went into the drawing room.

  I ran down to the kitchen and poured two generous whiskies. ‘Ma’s home,’ I said to Portia and Cordelia.

  ‘Your eggs have boiled dry,’ said Portia. ‘Was that meant to happen?’

  There followed a short scene of which I was immediately ashamed. After I had apologised we went up together to the drawing room.

  My mother seemed touchingly pleased to see her children but repelled affectionate overtures with cries of pain. She and Ronnie crouched by the fire in their mufflers and head-dresses, like Russian peasants round a samovar. Dirk was evidently worried by their suspicious appearance, for he flashed his eyes from one to the other and kept up a continuous growling.

  ‘I hope Maria-Alba has something good for supper,’ said my mother as she gulped down the whisky. ‘That bloody clinic has kept us on famine rations. Only the thought of getting home and having something decent to eat stopped me from throwing myself into the river.’

  ‘Maria-Alba isn’t well,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to poach some eggs. But it’s trickier than I thought. I’ve got two out of the eight that are probably edible. You should have telephoned.’

  ‘Naturally we’d have done so if we’d had two pennies to rub together. When we arrived at the clinic – Ronnie decided, as the prices were so favourable, to have a little work done too – they made us strip down to the last hairpin and put on their overalls. They took away our clothes and locked them up. Then the minute we came round from our operations they presented us with exorbitant bills. Eighty pounds for champagne that was scarcely drinkable! Of course we refused to pay. Had Ronnie not been very resourceful and stolen the key from Matron’s desk we’d be there still. All our pockets had been emptied and there was no sign of my bag or Ronnie’s notecase. We had to walk all the way from Bethnal Green. I had no idea that London could be so unpleasant. The inhabitants were positively abusive and some of the children threw things at us. Poor Ronnie received a nasty blow on the shoulder from a brick. Not a policeman in sight, naturally. They are all too busy obstructing the doorways of the upper classes.’

  ‘Why are the myrmidons of the law encircling the house?’ Ronnie sat cradling his glass in one hand while the other tenderly massaged his upper arm.

  ‘It’s all Portia’s fault,’ said Ophelia. ‘Her penchant for rough trade has had its inevitable consequence. This house is now notorious for every vice and vileness in the Thieves’ Almanac.’

  ‘That’s unfair.’ I looked at Portia but her chair was empty. When, later, I went up to her room she explained that two pairs of sunglasses were too much for her and she would forgo supper. I descended to the kitchen with the forlorn hope of making something of those wretched poached eggs. Ronnie was already there, his features still hidden by scarves and sunglasses, but with his shirtsleeves rolled up and wearing Maria-Alba’s apron. He was chopping an onion with speed and expertise.

  ‘We cannot all afford a cook,’ he said with a degree of hauteur when I expressed surprise. ‘I am going to make a cottage pie. It will be simple but good. Your mother needs nourishment.’

  ‘How kind you are, Ronnie.’

  ‘Not really.’ Ronnie’s lenses flashed as he bent to crush a clove of garlic. ‘I’ve always adored her. I simply can’t help wanting to do things for her. It’s as natural as tides being drawn to the moon or the hen returning to her coop at dusk. Irresistible forces compel each of us to our destiny …’ I sat down, my hand on Dirk’s head to dissuade him from growling as Ronnie continued his speech to the end. ‘And how is your poor papa?’ he asked when he had finished, his good humour apparently restored. ‘You know, your mother’s feelings have been so painfully lacerated by his misfortune that she cannot bring herself even to mention it. Some people might misunderstand this but we, who know her delicate, sensitive nature, will not condemn it as weakness. Great artists are as different from us ordinary mortals as a Ming vase from a flowerpot.’

  I wondered if he really believed this. My mother had not acted for ten years. Not since a reviewer wrote that her portrayal of Lady Macbeth put him in mind of an exasperated society hostess burdened with unmannerly guests who had lost the new tennis balls, left the bathrooms in a mess, and finished the gin. My mother was inclined to recite the review verbatim accompanied by peals of mordant laughter, when she had had a little too much to drink.

  ‘But surely you are no mean actor yourself?’ I said politely.

  ‘I was, in my day, a skilled journeyman of the stage. I could charm and I could menace. Girls, the length and breadth of England, dreamed of being taken in my arms and bent to my will. My performance as Lord Sylvester Steel, the Man in the Scarlet Hood, was, I believe, definitive. But I could not have played Hamlet to save my life.’

  ‘Ma has always said you’ve the best profile of any man she’s ever met.’

  ‘Really?’ Ronnie sounded pleased. What she had actually said was that Ronnie had done very well with nothing to recommend him but a handsome profile, but it was nearly the same thing. He offered Dirk the remains of the leg of lamb he was cutting up. ‘That’s a nice puppy you’ve got there.’

  ‘He is sweet, isn’t he?’ Dirk did not at that moment look specially sweet, tearing the flesh from the bone with huge white teeth. ‘But he’s fully grown, thank goodness.’

  ‘Mm.’ Ronnie considered him. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure.’

  I fetched potatoes and carrots from the larder and together Ronnie and I chopped and scraped and scrubbed in a warm, steamy atmosphere of domestic harmony. From time to time I looked at Dirk as he lay slumbering, one ear folded across the glistening picked-clean femur. Now Ronnie had draw
n my attention to it, Dirk did seem larger than when he had arrived.

  ‘I’m afraid the clinic wasn’t all it was cracked up to be,’ I said. My father and I sat facing each other, in the middle of a long row of prisoners and their visitors. Two prison officers patrolled the room, looking bored. Between Pa and me was a battered table, over which crawled an out-of-season fly. Neither it nor my father looked well. ‘The bruising’s very bad. They’re still refusing to take off the scarves and sunglasses. You remember The Invisible Man? It’s almost the same except for the turban and Ronnie’s purple hair. Apparently because it was so cheap and the surgeon was awfully persuasive, they got carried away and had far more done than they’d originally planned.’ I was chattering on in this inconsequential way, hoping to cheer Pa up. His skin looked colourless, almost flabby. I wondered if he was eating properly. I paused, then plunged on. ‘Ronnie’s staying with us for the time being. He’s being very useful because he knows how to cook. Maria-Alba has had to go and stay with the nuns again.’

  Poor Maria-Alba had had upsetting flashbacks from her involuntary experience with LSD and her doctor had decided that she should have a rest. She had a love-hate relationship, mostly hate, with the sisters at the Convent of St Ursula, in Bushey Heath, whose guest she had been several times in the past. She was convinced they wanted to get possession of her soul so they could barter with God to improve their own lot in the life to come. The more Maria-Alba raged the more saintly the sisters became, which inflamed her to greater heights of scurrilous invective. On the other hand Maria-Alba’s sanity was invariably restored by the peaceful rhythm of conventual life.

  Maria-Alba had been in no state to survive a long journey on public transport so I had bribed Bron – with the offer of doing all his laundry for the next six months – to drive us to the convent. I was pretty sure I would be doing it anyway, so it was cheap at the price. Despite what Maria-Alba said, the sisters who welcomed us seemed much saner and sweeter-tempered than my old schoolmistresses, no doubt because they didn’t have horrible little girls to look after. It was a closed order so we would not be allowed to visit her, but as she was a guest, she would be allowed to send and receive letters.

  ‘Poor Maria-Alba,’ said my father in a lacklustre way.

  I wondered what I might say to cheer him up. I had met Marina Marlow at the prison gates. She had been posing for photographers and giving an impromptu interview. I heard her say that it was a matter of indifference to her whether my father was guilty or not. Friendship meant commitment through thick and thin. I got the impression she would prefer him to be guilty as this would show her in a more praiseworthy light. Her hair was a bright shade of platinum, like tinfoil. A low neckline and a thigh-length split in her skirt seemed tactless when visiting men obliged to be celibate. But she was magnetic. I felt a shudder of apprehension and pretended not to see her matey little wave.

  The truth was, no matter how many affairs my parents entered into, I always bitterly resented their paramours. I was wounded on behalf of whichever parent was left out in the cold and I was fearful each time that the temporary sexual attachment might turn out to be something more important. No matter how hard I tried to be an obedient daughter and teach myself the lesson that monogamy was unnatural, illogical and deplorably lower middle class, my feelings of insecurity were painful. One of the things I had loved about Dodge was that he held fiercely puritanical views about everything, which included constancy in love.

  ‘I saw Marina outside.’ I tried to sound matter-of-fact. ‘It was good of her to visit.’

  ‘She brought me a bottle of L’Equipée Pour Hommes. Very expensive. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Marina that making oneself smell attractive is the last thing one wants to do in a place like this.’

  ‘You mean –’ I lowered my voice – ‘the other men?’

  ‘You bet. I go in fear of my virtue. That’s why I got the barber to cut my hair.’ I had managed to suppress a gasp when I first caught sight of his shaven head. It made his eyes and jaw look much bigger. ‘You see that bloke with the scars and the broken nose two tables down?’ I looked surreptitiously at a man who seemed to have spent his whole life running his face into sharp and dangerous objects. ‘That’s Slasher O’Flaherty. He’s offered me a whole month’s snout – that’s tobacco – if I’ll drop into his cell one evening to discuss acting techniques.’

  Unluckily the man happened to glance in my direction before I could look away. He winked and smiled, exposing a solitary brown tooth.

  ‘Oh, Pa! Do be careful! Can’t the prison officers protect you?’

  ‘Some of the screws are worse than the prisoners.’ He laughed in a depressed way. ‘So Ronnie’s seized the opportunity to lay siege to your mother. Not that it will do him any good. He’s about as virile as a pink-eyed rabbit in a conjurer’s hat.’

  I thought he was entitled to be catty in the circumstances. ‘Ronnie’s really very domesticated. He’s hardly ever out of apron and rubber gloves. And I think he’s enjoying it.’

  ‘He always was an old woman.’ My father looked gloomy and rubbed his hand over the bristles on his head. ‘I suppose you’re all having a wonderful time without me.’

  ‘We certainly are not! Portia still won’t go out anywhere, though the police found Dimitri’s house and arrested him and discovered masses of drugs and things and they’re all in prison – luckily not this one – and the police guard’s been called off.’ I knew Portia had written to my father, giving an edited account of her escapade, but I had not seen the letter so I kept the details vague. ‘All except Dex.’

  I felt a sinking of spirits, recalling this disappointment. When Inspector Foy had telephoned to tell me about the successful police raid on the house in Oxshott I had hoped that he might have found Mark Antony as well, but there had not been so much as a bowl of Kittichunks or a clump of ginger fur. Or Dex. The inspector assured me there was a nationwide watch for Dex and he would not be able to leave the country. I had not told my father about Mark Antony being missing. The news could only depress.

  ‘Ophelia’s as grumpy as she can possibly be.’ I wanted to reassure him that we were not disporting ourselves, indifferent to his plight. ‘Peregrine Wolmscott hasn’t asked her to marry him and she’s worried in case her looks are going. She reckons to enslave any man within two weeks.’

  ‘That’s my girl. Your mother enslaved me in less than one. How is Cordelia?’

  ‘At rather a loose end.’ I felt guilty and I expect I looked it. ‘She hasn’t been to school since you were arrested. I had a bit of a row with Sister Imelda.’

  Sister Imelda, headmistress of St Frideswide’s, had telephoned to ask why Cordelia was not at school. When I said I thought Cordelia needed a little time at home to recover from the shock of my father’s arrest, Sister Imelda’s voice had grown cold. It was her considered opinion that children brought up as we had been needed discipline, not coddling. Cordelia already had a distressing disregard for truth and a vulgar tendency to dramatise herself, and if she were to escape a life given over to flagrant immorality it was important that home influences be kept to a minimum.

  ‘Honestly, just because she’s a nun she thinks she can get away with any amount of rudeness,’ I said, feeling aggrieved all over again.

  Though none but the bare facts of the case had been made public, it was obvious that nearly everyone believed that my father must be guilty of the murder of Sir Basil Wintergreen or he would not be in prison. The old adage that there is no smoke without fire was persuasive. What had been admired in Pa before as the eccentricity of artistic genius had been transformed at a stroke to the vicious traits of psychopathy.

  Sister Imelda did not doubt that we were the children of a cold-blooded assassin and therefore she despised us. I had been so hurt by her disparagement of my family that I was prompted to strike a blow in return. I asked her if she was aware that her relationship with Sister Justinia had been the subject of malicious gossip throughout the school. If
so, she would know how painful it was to be condemned without a hearing.

  Sister Imelda had given a satisfying scream of affliction at the other end of the telephone and the line had gone dead. For several hours I had felt quite buoyed up by the success of my revenge. I had said nothing that was not true. According to Cordelia, Sister Imelda’s passion for the novice teacher had been common knowledge for weeks and the more censorious parents were beginning to mutter. But when my indignation had cooled I repented. Sister Imelda was an unhappy woman and her spiteful behaviour was proof of this.

  I wrote to Sister Imelda, saying she was probably right about Cordelia needing more discipline. I would see that she returned to school within a few days. I apologised unreservedly for losing my temper and asked her to put it down to the strain of my father’s arrest and imprisonment, which, naturally, had made us all very unhappy. I received a letter by return of post, which said that the Byng family would be personae non gratae at any future school occasion and would I send a cheque immediately for a term’s fees, in lieu of notice? It concluded with a request for an additional forty-five pence to replace the light bulb that Cordelia had broken a few weeks before.

  ‘She’s an extremely silly woman,’ said my father absently. ‘I’ve always said so.’ This was true. My parents had been consistent in their ridiculing of the school and its preceptors. Their attitude might go some way to explain why – except for English at which we excelled – we were all so undistinguished academically and athletically. ‘You’d better ring up a few schools,’ was my father’s reply, when I asked him what I should do about Cordelia.

  ‘What about the bank?’

  ‘Tell them to do their worst. The worst is not, so long as we can say, “This is the worst.”’

  ‘Othello,’ I said, to please him, though it seemed a singularly discouraging remark. ‘But, really, Pa, we must do something. We don’t want them to take away the furniture.’