‘Ronnie’s going to take Ma away for Christmas. To a little hotel he knows in Cornwall, so they can get used to their new faces among strangers.’
My father continued to look unconcerned, though as he was a good actor this told me nothing. ‘What does Rupert say? He’s footing the bill, presumably.’
‘No. Ronnie’s going to pay. He says he’s got a tiny nest egg he’s been saving in case he becomes quite helpless when he gets old. He’s like that old woman in Our Mutual Friend who had such a dread of the workhouse that she preferred to die under a hedge. In Ronnie’s case it’s the NHS he dreads. But he says he’s prepared to run the risk of filth, degradation and neglect if it’ll make Ma happy. After all, he said, he might simply drop down dead in the street and not need nursing.’
‘Ma said with his mauve complexion and increasing paunch he was certain to have a heart attack or a stroke before he got to be really old,’ put in Cordelia. ‘Ronnie looked a bit put out.’
My father drew his handsome features into a frown and then his eyelids creased and the corners of his mouth turned up and he burst into laughter. Cordelia and I joined in. It was marvellous to be laughing with Pa again. Everyone looked at us to see what the joke was. Slasher bared his tooth in a gesture of solidarity.
‘Your mother’s a wonderful woman.’ My father wiped his eyes. ‘There’s really no one like her.’
‘There’s never anyone like anyone I know,’ said Cordelia. ‘I wish there was someone in the world exactly like me. Someone who doesn’t want to boss me about or gang up against me and who isn’t jealous of my beauty.’
My father looked at her kindly. ‘That’s what we’re all looking for in a way, Cordelia. But I’m afraid we’re destined for disappointment. What about the girls at school? Aren’t any of them soul mates?’
‘Uh-oh, I’d better run to the lav.’ Cordelia got up quickly. ‘I think it was the rissoles at lunch.’
‘She’s hoping I’ve forgotten all about it,’ I explained when Cordelia had gone. ‘Of course I haven’t but so far I haven’t found anywhere willing to take her before the summer term.’
‘Can’t Rupert help?’
‘I don’t suppose he knows anything about schools. Anyway, I don’t like to keep asking him for favours. He’s doing so much for us already. He rang up just before we left. He’s found Bron another job. As chauffeur to someone called Letizia. Apparently she doesn’t have a surname. She’s a fashion designer. Bron said he thought it was rather infra dig to be employed by a woman. But when Rupert told him she had a Ferrari he said he’d give it a go.’
‘Good. How’s the newshawk of Battersea, then?’
‘Brixton. Just about keeping pace.’ I tried to make the account of my doings entertaining but I could see his thoughts were elsewhere. I debated whether to tell him about going out to dinner with Max but decided against it. I was not perfectly confident of carrying off the ‘just good friends’ line. My father could be astute when he was sufficiently interested. ‘Have you been given a date for the court case yet?’ I asked.
‘Should be some time in February, according to Fleur.’
‘Fleur?’
‘Fleur Kirkpatrick. My new barrister. Sickly Grin engaged this turgid old fool, so senile he couldn’t remember my name for two minutes together. So I threw a tantrum and Foy put me in touch with Fleur. What a woman!’ My father shook his head, smiling as though at some delightful memory.
‘What’s she like?’
‘The loveliest eyes you’ve ever seen. Forget-me-not blue but needle-sharp with intelligence. Hair dark and gleaming like a blackbird’s wing. Slender waist but a proper bosom and hips. Skin like ivory velvet. Mind like a precision tool. Incidentally, a great fan of my work.’ I recognised the signs of the violent infatuation to which my father always succumbed on first meeting a new flirt. He was incapable of doing things by halves. If Fleur was the woman of the moment she would obsess his thoughts night and day. While I understood that this absorption would make his life more tolerable, selfishly I felt a sickening disappointment. ‘It’s impossible to convey that kind of beauty in words. The charm of the curve of a cheekbone, the fullness of a lower lip.’
‘I’m starting to get the picture.’
‘How goes it with the budding wordsmith?’ Archie lifted his eyebrows, which wrinkled the white makeup on his forehead and made his widow’s peak more pronounced.
It was Friday, and he and Rupert had come to Blackheath to conduct their weekly inquest on the Byng family’s industry, accounting, and general probity. I had lit the fire in the drawing room, arranged a bunch of wilting chrysanthemums I had bought cheaply from the woman outside the tube station, and opened a bottle of the Sauvignon Blanc Rupert had kindly sent us.
‘After I’d rewritten it about a hundred times I felt I was beginning to get somewhere,’ I said. Though Archie’s manner was always teasing, I was grateful for the interest he took in my career. ‘Mr Podmore said it was promising but when I read it in today’s paper I hardly recognised it.’
‘All newspaper editors are despots. It goes hard with them to let someone else top up the inkwells. Let me see it.’
I handed over the page that bore my immortal prose and watched Archie’s face expectantly as his eyes ran along the lines. The haunted house I described was a rectory in Cricklewood. I had been allowed half an hour to look over it. The owner, a Mrs Newt, pigeon-chested and with bulging, suspicious eyes, prowled close behind me every step of the way lest I should slip a china kitten or an onyx table lighter into my bag. The house, reportedly seventeenth century, had been extensively remodelled and redecorated. Outside it was Victorian. Inside it was Tudor cottage-cum-Regency villa. Magnolia walls and maroon-and-cream striped curtains were enhanced by mock beams and furniture painted black to look like oak and upholstered in dusty-rose Dralon. Mrs Newt said that the ghost of a former rector had been particularly troublesome when they had first moved in, rattling door handles, tapping on windows and sobbing in the dining room. Looking at the horrible reproduction dining suite with fake warming-pans on the walls and a Spanish dancer on the chimneypiece, I could see why.
‘Oho! Aha!’ cried Archie. ‘“At twilight the ghost of the Reverend Blenkinsop can be seen on his knees burrowing at his wife’s womb.” The filthy reprobate! In public, too.’
‘That’s a misprint.’ I pointed out. ‘It should be “sorrowing at his wife’s tomb”.’
‘“His long beard and side whiskers, stove-pipe hat and frock have frequently alarmed pedestrians” – I’m not surprised! So the man was a transvestite as well as insatiably libidinous!’
‘The printers missed out a word. It should be “frock coat”.’
‘This is absolutely gripping! “… alarmed pedestrians taking a short cut through graveyard as the white-bellied owls flit overhead like feathered phantasms on their way to play bingo at what was formerly the Roxy Cinema.” A sudden lowering of tone here. Was it the owls or the pedestrians who were on their way to the bingo hall?’
‘You aren’t taking it seriously!’
‘I am, I am! I promise.’ Archie put his hand on his heart. ‘Honestly, I think it’s very good. I can’t remember when I’ve enjoyed a newspaper article more.’
‘Mr Podmore put in the bit about the bingo,’ I said resentfully. ‘I wrote something rather telling about bats swooping like darts of conscience about the guilty man’s head. His wife was an heiress who died suddenly in mysterious circumstances. Only years later his younger brother, who’d gone to Australia because he was in love with the heiress himself, and who happened by chance to see an old newspaper –’
‘Stop! Archie held up his hand. ‘Don’t spoil the exquisite moment of revelation! “As the parish priest postured in the pulpit denouncing profligacy, insobriety and naked busts,”’ ‘Lusts,’ I corrected. ‘“he little knew that Nemesis was speeding towards him on the bow wave of HMS Albatross.” That’s good! Very good!’ Archie read on, with expressions of surprise and pleasure. ‘So
the rector was a skilled amateur chemist with an extensive knowledge of toxicology. And, before taking holy orders, he was a knife-thrower in a circus. I suppose he didn’t have an earlier career as a merchant seaman, with access to blowpipes and curare?’ Before I could accuse Archie of ridiculing my efforts, he said, ‘No, honestly, Harriet, I’m impressed! It’s got a distinctive voice and that’s what’s important. Not a dull sentence in it. Plenty of people can write grammatical prose but that’s not enough. It must seize the reader and run away with him like Tom the Piper’s son and the stolen pig.’
I was delighted to have some praise at last. For some reason those of my family who had seen my debut in print had found it extraordinarily funny. Bron, especially, had gone about repeating phrases like ‘his spectral tears moistened the moss’ and ‘as the setting sun steeps the Rectory in star-less dark’ and screeching with laughter.
Mr Podmore stuck in the sentence about the new roundabout and the supermarket,’ I explained. ‘He said it had to be relevant to the modern reader.’ I had already come to entertain a profound hatred for the modern reader, who seemed unable to understand anything not explained in terms of urban development.
‘Here you are, Rupert.’ Archie handed the newspaper across. ‘Let’s have the professional’s verdict.’
I waited on tenterhooks while Rupert read the piece. I knew he would be a less indulgent critic than Archie. His face was expressionless as he read it. ‘I’ve read worse,’ he said, at last. ‘I suggest you curb your fondness for alliteration.’ He placed the newspaper on the table beside him and frowned at the hole that Dirk had chewed in the carpet. ‘That dog is out of control.’ When, finally, he raised his face to mine, I had a fleeting impression that there lurked in those smoke-brown eyes something that might have been a scintilla of a smile.
I had longed for praise from Rupert. ‘Who’d like some marzipan?’ I said brightly to cover my dashed hopes. I had found a second slab in the larder and had nearly amputated a finger hacking it into small cubes for our guests. Rupert examined the plate of small greyish-yellow lumps, then shook his head.
‘Marzipan with wine?’ Archie took a piece. ‘How Middle Eastern! We should be lying on cushions, wearing tarbooshes.’ He popped it into his mouth and chewed energetically. It certainly was a little stale. I offered him some more. ‘No, thank you, Harriet. Too delicious but I mustn’t spoil myself. It might lead to an awkward craving for those embalmed objects that lurk in dusty cases in the British Museum.’
‘What are you laughing at?’ asked Portia, walking in just then. Rupert and Archie stood up. She looked disdainful. ‘You needn’t get up for my benefit. That’s one of the phoney-polite things men do, like opening doors and lighting cigarettes, to validate the concept of women as inadequate and dependent. ‘Stop giggling, Cordelia, and share the joke.’
Cordelia, who seemed to find Archie exquisitely funny, was scarlet with streaming eyes. But when she repeated, between explosions of laughter, what Archie had said, Portia did not look amused. She seemed to have acquired a new seriousness with her espousal of feminism. I suppose her mind was on higher things.
‘It’s not too bad,’ she said in answer to Rupert’s enquiry about her job. ‘Jessica Delavine is a remarkable woman. She’s dedicated her entire life to fighting men’s determination to subjugate and disempower intelligent, articulate women.’
‘I’m sure we should all be very grateful,’ said Archie solemnly.
‘What about the unintelligent, inarticulate ones?’ said Rupert. ‘Surely they’re even more in need of someone to take up the cudgels on their behalf?’
Portia gave him a cool glance. ‘Suke and I are spending Christmas with Jessica in Edinburgh. She’s going to give a lecture entitled “Where Eve went Wrong”.’
‘That does sound fun,’ said Archie.
‘Will one lecture be enough?’ asked Rupert. I was practically certain then that there was a smile lurking. ‘Who is Suke?’
Portia hesitated. Though she could hardly have had a more understanding audience than Rupert and Archie I suspected that a public declaration of her new sexuality required courage. But she was not someone who shirked difficulties. ‘She’s my lover.’
There was a brief pause.
‘And what a very lucky girl she is,’ said Archie, with commendable grace.
‘Crikey!’ Cordelia giggled. ‘You don’t mean – not really – you’re joking.’
‘There’s nothing funny about homosexuality,’ said Portia freezingly.
‘But you’ve always laughed about Pa’s queer friends. When I asked what they did together you said it was revolting – Ow!’ Cordelia glared at me. ‘That hurt!’
‘Sorry. My foot slipped.’
‘How can your foot slip when you’re sitting down?’
Ophelia came in then, luckily. She waved a careless hand at Rupert and Archie who, despite Portia’s snubbing, had stood up again. ‘You’ll be pleased to hear I’ve just taken on my first clients. They’ve made a vast fortune making plastic bottles for shampoos and things and they’ve just had an enormous house built in Sussex. Fay will help me with quantities and suppliers but I’m to be allowed to do as I like. Fay’s mad about Empire but somehow I don’t see it. I’m thinking of Louis Quinze. Bert and Marilee Drosselmeyer – they’re the clients – have asked me to spend Christmas with them so I can get the feel of the place. ‘Imagine! Proper central heating!’ She hugged herself at the thought. ‘It’ll be wonderful to have something decent to eat. They probably have champagne every day.’ She looked more beautiful than I had ever seen her. Her eyes were sparkling and her mouth no longer drooped at the corners. She was wearing a new dress, black-and-white silk and very smart. I wondered how much it had cost. ‘My God, where did those hideous things come from?’ She grabbed the chrysanthemums and rammed them headfirst into the wastepaper basket, from where the stems dripped water on to the carpet. ‘I’d love a drink.’ She threw herself into a chair and lit a cigarette.
Archie, who was nearest the tray, poured some and took it to her. ‘Like a glass of wine, Portia?’
‘Thanks. But if I want a drink I can get it myself.’ She looked at Ophelia. ‘I thought you were spending Christmas with Peregrine.’
‘I was. But I’m delighted to have somewhere else to go. Peregrine’s family think of nothing but hunting. Their chairs are like rocks because they have large, fleshy bottoms to sit on, they never shut a door because their circulations are in tiptop form and they don’t feel draughts, at dinner they talk about snaffles and worms, and they go to bed at ten o’clock so they can get up at dawn. Lady Wolmscott’s face is like pickled red cabbage and she smells of horse pee. And, when they aren’t galloping about ripping up foxes, they’re slaughtering chickens and ducks and drowning kittens in the yard.’
‘No more.’ Archie shook his head. ‘I see it all. Better to spend Christmas in a commune in Wales, worshipping Vishnu and eating soya beans. Or at a railway hotel in Northampton with all one’s aunts. Or even,’ Archie’s eyes brightened, ‘rounding the Horn on a man-o’-war under the lash of a brutal admiral.’
‘You could have spent Christmas at home with us,’ I said to Ophelia, trying not to sound reproachful. ‘There’ll only be Bron and Cordelia and me now.’
‘Terrific!’ said Cordelia sarcastically, while sticking her toe into the hole in the carpet. ‘Harriet will be mooning about stupid, dead poets and Bron’ll be drunk.’
‘Don’t do that,’ I said. ‘You’re making it bigger. ‘It’ll be horribly expensive to repair. And I don’t moon.’
‘You do. All the time. You’ve mooned all week about Max Frensham.’
‘I have not!’
We looked at each other angrily. The vehemence in my voice woke Dirk from his doze beneath the piano and he began to bark.
‘Girls, girls!’ said Archie. ‘Think of the embarrassment of your guests as you tear into one another. I shall be obliged to create a diversion.’
‘Harriet is twenty-two,’
said Portia. ‘By calling her a girl you’re reinforcing the stereotype of women being like children – weak and incapable.’
‘Thank you, dear Portia,’ said Archie. ‘You’ve saved me the trouble.’
I noticed that Rupert was looking at me thoughtfully. When he caught my eye he looked away.
‘Hello, hello, hello!’ Bron came in then and I could see at once that he had been drinking. ‘A nice thing, everyone sitting about getting pissed while I’m out in the sordid world, going several rounds with Mammon.’
‘How’s Letizia?’ asked Rupert while Bron poured himself a drink and threw several logs on to the fire.
‘One touch on the throttle and she’s off. Hroom! She’s almost impossible to park without ramming bumpers. And she drinks petrol intravenously.’
‘Letizia?’
‘Oh, she’s not a bad old thing either. Frighteningly clever and has her minions darting about like those little fish that clean sharks’ teeth. She’s got a violent temper and an autocratic manner but I don’t mind that. You know where you are.’ Bron gazed at himself in the mirror over the fireplace and combed his hair with his fingers while elaborating on his theme. ‘What I can’t stand is a women who falls into the sullens at the drop of a hat but when you ask what’s eating her, she refuses to tell you. So you hazard a guess that she’s discovered she’s got cancer – or her mother’s been run over by a train – but she just gets more moody and silent, until your fevered imagination has run out of possibilities. Then it turns out she’s had half an inch cut off her fringe and is furious because you haven’t noticed. Now Letizia is a woman who tells you exactly what she means. It’s extremely restful. She’s asked me to spend Christmas with her in Milan. Five-star hotel, a suite of rooms with a private roof terrace, dinner at the best restaurants, tickets for La Scala, all expenses paid. Unless a better offer comes up, I think I’ll go. What’s this noxious substance?’ He bent to examine the plate. I snatched it from him.
Clouds among the Stars Page 26
