‘Oh, yes,’ I said, eventually, aware that Archie was standing with potato-peeler poised, looking at me. ‘Of course. I made a fool of myself over Max. I expect everyone does it.’
‘Mm.’ Archie continued to look at me. ‘I can see it has shocked you to discover that Rupert is like any other man – impulsive and liable to blunder in the bedroom department. You have probably confused a horror of melodramatics with a lack of carnal desire. Rupert has spent most of his life with theatre people, who indulge every emotional caprice, each tug on the heartstrings until they have wrung from it every nuance of sensibility. Not being a performer himself he finds it wearing. He makes an exception in my case because he knows I don’t expect a full-bore response to my dramatics. Also I cook and drive and organise the day-to-day running of his life, which he doesn’t want to have to do for himself. Also,’ Archie tried to look modest, ‘I think I may say with truth that he is fond of me.’
‘I’m sure of that,’ I said warmly.
A sudden shout – of fright or was it anger? – came from outside. Archie shot me an excited glance.
‘A little hot in here, don’t you think?’
He sashayed to the window and opened it. In a second I had joined him and we were both listening for all we were worth. The kitchen was in the basement and the window was screened by a box hedge on the other side of the area. We could hear every word without being seen.
‘… dare treat me like this!’
‘Like what?’ Rupert managed to sound both bored and annoyed.
‘You think you can pick me up and drop me like a soiled glove!’
‘I seem to remember you picked me up.’
‘You pig! I didn’t exactly have to drag you to bed, did I?’
‘I agree I came willingly.’
‘You were like a dog after a rabbit! You took what you wanted and then left without a backward glance.’
‘It lasted several weekends, didn’t it? I wasn’t aware I had signed up for anything more.’
‘You’re like all men. Only interested in one thing – a fuck and then it’s goodbye.’
‘If you wanted something else you should have told me at the beginning.’
‘And I suppose you’d have promised love and then dropped me the minute you’d got what you wanted.’ Leah sounded livid.
‘If you’d told me you wanted love, then I hope I’d have declined the rest, tempting though the offer undoubtedly was. I can’t swear to altruism but I think a sense of self-preservation would have made me draw back.’
‘So you think I’m good enough to screw but not to love!’ Leah was shouting now.
I imagined the members of the Horn-on-the-Green Preservation Society sitting in their several gardens, clucking with disapproval at this breach of the peace.
‘No doubt my views are entirely unrepresentative,’ said Rupert with deceptive mildness.
A sound like a smack rang out.
‘If you hit me again I shall hit you – hard.’ I could tell he was really angry now.
‘Oh, Rupert, I’m sorry.’ Leah was suddenly tearful. ‘If you only understood how much it hurts. I’m in love with you. Please. Take pity on me.’ Then in a lower tone, throbbing with emotion, ‘Kiss me.’
Archie and I exchanged glances.
‘If I believed that you really meant that,’ said Rupert in a softer tone, ‘I should be desperately sorry to have made you unhappy.’ Archie and I clutched each other and held our breaths. ‘Luckily I don’t. Love isn’t something that springs up over a few weekends. We hardly know each other.’
‘Oh, how cruel you are!’ She was sobbing. ‘You’re breaking my heart! I’m busting up inside. My life isn’t worth living. What did I ever do to make it impossible for you to love me?’
‘Well,’ Rupert spoke with deadly effect, ‘I think moral blackmail is pretty unappealing. And I dislike clichés, both in speech and behaviour.’
‘You absolute bastard! I must have been crazy to think I was in love with you. Goodbye, Rupert Wolvespurges, and I hope you rot in hell!’
The sound of footsteps running through the house was followed by a slamming of the front door that made the house shake.
‘Bravo!’ shouted Archie.
Rupert’s face appeared over the box hedge. I saw a pink mark on his cheek. ‘How dishonourable of you both to listen to what was a painful and private exchange. Harriet, I had thought better of you.’
‘Sorry. But you were very good. Though – poor girl – I feel awfully sorry for her.’
‘Don’t be.’ He patted his face gently. ‘She nearly broke my jaw. I wonder where she learned to hit like that.’
‘I think it’s incredibly sexy,’ breathed Archie. ‘I’m racked with jealousy.’
After that things bowled along smoothly for a while. Rupert said several times that he repented having another telephone line connected for both rang with tiresome consistency and we got into the habit of unplugging them after eight o’clock to be able to enjoy the evening in peace. Cordelia finished the red-and-white garment and began to knit a rainbow-striped cot blanket. After the first few rows it started to develop a strange trapezoid shape. Archie said we had better waste no time looking for a lozenge-shaped cot to match it. Luckily Cordelia’s tranquillity was undisturbed by Archie’s teasing. In fact she seemed to take it as a tribute.
She and Rupert, however, had another falling-out. To my surprise, when Zak presented himself at the house with the intention of escorting Cordelia to the cinema, Rupert asked him to come into his work-room. Archie and I tried to listen at the door but they made them to fit in the eighteenth century and we heard only a low rumble.
‘I merely asked him if he knew how old Cordelia was,’ said Rupert when we questioned him later. ‘Apparently Cordelia told him she was sixteen. She explained her presence in the lower second form by claiming to have spent several years in a Swiss sanatorium with TB, which had put her behind with her school-work. I suggested to Zak that a romantic encounter with a twelve-year-old might be detrimental to his public image and reminded him that the law took a dim view of sex with children. He seemed anxious to leave after that.’
The scene that followed when Cordelia came downstairs dressed to slay, only to find her cavaliere servente gone, was bloody but brief. It is difficult to continue to shriek at someone who waits politely for you to finish, then goes back to reading his book without comment.
The following day, when Cordelia was pale and exhausted from alternately sulking and sobbing, Rupert had a talk with her. From what she told me afterwards, I was much impressed by his ingenuity. Apparently he had told her that love affairs rushed into without forethought and with persons lacking experience and finesse would destroy the exquisite bloom of romance for ever. There were subtleties and refinements that one needed maturity to master and it would be a pity for a great beauty to throw herself away on the first grubby schoolboy who offered himself. It would not make inspiring reading in later biographies. It was a good thing Cordelia had not heard the exchange between Rupert and Leah or she might have been less inclined to take his word for it.
Anyway, the end result was that Zak circulated Cordelia’s real age among his contemporaries and the bigger boys stopped calling. Cordelia had no intention of squandering her loveliness on fourth-formers, now she had set herself to learn the arts of coquetry. Archie gave her a book about geishas, which absorbed her for several weeks. As she was to be Viola in the school production of Twelfth Night, she had enough for the moment to occupy her thoughts.
We all worked hard at our various callings and when we came home, inspiration spent, energies depleted, Archie had wine cooling in the fridge and delicious things cooking on the stove. Because Rupert was in a crucial period of rehearsal we entertained no one but Pa and Pussyfoot occasionally and, more often, Ophelia and Charles. Rupert said he felt like a voyeur whenever they came to dinner. It was obvious that they had got out of a rank, enseamèd bed to come to Horn-on-the-Green and that the moment they left
us, they dashed back into it.
It was, looking back, a time of real happiness spoiled only by occasional reverses, such as when Mr Podmore opened his office door long enough to shout, ‘Deb Dismissed for Overwriting,’ before slamming it so hard that our eardrums practically bled. I quite believed my career was over and started to pack up the tools of my trade – a Biro, two pencils and an India-rubber – which I could hardly see through a blur of tears. Muriel told me to take no notice. He had at one time or another sacked everyone on the staff but nothing ever came of it. Anyway, the union would have something to say if it did. Eileen made us all a cup of tea and opened a new packet of caramel wafers, which we worked our way through as a cosy threesome with a sense of solidarity that was actually rather enjoyable. An hour later Mr Podmore sent me out to report on the Brixton Rodent Show as though nothing had happened.
The letters from Max came less frequently now. The last one was postmarked Rio de Janeiro. I threw it away unopened.
Maria-Alba continued to write, more and more sensibly. At last she wrote to say that she had decided to become a noviciate, having been promised sole reign in the convent kitchens, Sister Mary-Joseph’s arthritis having become troublesome. My first reaction was dismay. Initially I thought my uneasiness was for Maria-Alba’s sake but, when I had a chance to think about it, I realised my distress was entirely selfish. After all, if there were enough faith to sustain it, life in a closed order must be a haven for sufferers of severe agoraphobia. The family she loved was scattered, her home disbanded. I quickly came to see that it was the best possible solution.
In her letter Maria-Alba said she had made her peace with God since he had been kind enough to put her in charge of an enormous kitchen. Her only regret, she was kind enough to say, was parting from our family and me in particular. She would be allowed a few visitors to say goodbye. Would I come?
Of course I did go, the next week. The convent was a grim Victorian building but in the courtyard, surrounding the life-size statue of the Virgin in painted azure robes, were glowing orange nasturtiums and scarlet zinnias. It was cheerful and reassuring, just the sort of thing Maria-Alba liked. The nuns greeted me like an old friend, their smiling faces unlined by doubt or sorrow. I was shown into the visitors’ room. Maria-Alba, from now on to be known as Sister Veronica John, was waiting on the other side of a grille. The bars reminded me, most unpleasantly, of visiting my father in prison.
We wept on seeing each other. Maria-Alba had loved me unconditionally all my life and I owed her more than I could possibly tell. But she assured me she was happy. She looked beautiful in the plain grey habit. She had stopped taking sedatives and anti-depressants and her skin had lost its yellowness. It was odd but delightful to see her cheeks faintly flushed with pink. She already knew all the family news from my letters, and in this context our worldly concerns seemed irrelevant. On every wall were images of the crucifixion and pictures of the Christ and the Virgin. It was natural that we should talk about God and the eternal verities and things that really mattered. I came away feeling that though Maria-Alba and I would never see each other again, we thoroughly loved and understood each other and that this union of hearts and minds was as much as anyone could possibly ask.
I cried all the way home on the bus, not from sadness but because I was deeply moved. Also another part of my childhood was gone for ever. Fortunately I was able to creep into the house and remove all sign of tears by supper-time so as not to annoy Rupert.
FORTY
It was the opening night of Othello. I felt sick all day with sympathetic butterflies. My father suffered agonies from stage fright on first nights. Before the first performance of every play he would announce at breakfast that someone must ring the understudy as he, Pa, was incapable of putting even a toe on the stage that evening. He was not an actor, he was a talentless sham, whom the audience would boo and the critics rip to shreds. He would dry, he would faint, he would freeze with a petit mal. Pa had never been epileptic but one of his many phobias was that he was about to become one. He could not eat, could barely sip a glass of water. As a child I used to stand outside the bathroom door weeping tears of fellow-feeling while he retched fruitlessly into the lavatory.
Years ago, when he was due to go on as Romeo, he had suddenly decided that he was too old for the part – he was thirty-five then but actually could pass for twenty in makeup – and that the critics were certain to ridicule his interpretation. He had locked himself in my bedroom and threatened to throw himself out of the window. The fire brigade had come round with a canvas sheet in which to catch him and Loveday had become violent with one of them for trampling on his yew cuttings. After a couple of hours of coaxing and threatening, my mother had hit on the clever scheme of getting Bron to puff cigarette smoke under the bedroom door while shouting that the house was on fire. My father, who also had a phobia about being burned alive, came out at once and was bodily carried downstairs by the firemen.
On every first night our long-suffering GP was summoned to prescribe beta-blockers and my father would deliberate for hours about whether to take them. He always ended by flushing them down the lav rather than risk taking the edge off his performance. By the time the director shoved him on stage we were all nearly demented with the strain.
Pa had not yet recovered from his prison horrors. He could not use lifts, or even trains in case they went into tunnels. Being in small rooms with lots of people made him panicky. He could not lock the lavatory door or even close it. He had perfected whistling the triumphal march from Aida as a warning that he was enthroned.
Would Pussyfoot manage to calm him, I wondered. Should I go round to her flat and offer assistance? Selfishly I shrank from the idea. I had been there only once and had not enjoyed it. From the moment the door opened to envelope me in fumes of Nuages, which was the scent Pussyfoot wore in bucketfuls, I had felt profoundly depressed and had to stick a stupid grin on my face all the time so they wouldn’t see how I hated it. It was partly because in this domestic setting they seemed very much a couple. Also Pussyfoot was very house-proud. She asked me to take off my shoes in the hall, though I noticed she and Pa were wearing theirs and that his were not particularly clean. One is somehow at a disadvantage being the only one in stockinged feet. Also before I sat down she whisked away the silk cushion from my chair and threw it on an unoccupied sofa, as though my clothes were dirty or I might be sick on it. She put a coaster under my glass in case I marked the table and moved a sort of air-freshener thing in a plastic cone right next to me.
Pa never noticed these things, of course. He was too busy pretending they were delighted to see me. I honestly think she was hardly aware of doing them herself. Her subconscious was protesting against the invasion of the enemy. While Pa and I talked, Pussyfoot had looked at her fingernails, hummed, stared out of the window and started every time either of us spoke to her as though her thoughts were miles away. Then she began to yawn until her eyes ran. I made an excuse and left.
No, I would not go to Pussyfoot’s flat. Luckily I had to go to work anyway so I was able to survive until five o’clock with an assumption of composure though I had a stomachache on and off all day. When I pushed open the door of 10 Horn-on-the-Green, my nostrils were greeted by a mixture of a sharp cologne and the familiar scent of Cabochard.
‘Here she is!’ Ronnie got up from his chair and came to greet me with open arms. A sprucer Ronnie whose elegant clothes displayed a trimmer paunch. ‘How are you, my dear? You’re looking quite marvellous! Isn’t she, Clarissa?’
‘She certainly is.’ Ma ran her eyes over me from crown to toe before offering me her cheek. ‘My word, darling, what an improvement! Turn round so I can see you.’
I pirouetted, enjoying the unaccustomed warmth of maternal approval. ‘How lovely to see you both! What a wonderful surprise!’
‘Darling, old habits die hard. I couldn’t let Waldo have a first night without being there to support him. I had a dreadful nightmare last night that he’d dried, and t
his morning Ronnie said, “If it worries you so much let’s go up to town and cheer the old boy on.” Wasn’t that sweet of him?’
‘Very.’ I looked affectionately at Ronnie, who beamed at these words of praise. Probably they were in short supply. I felt like hugging them both for coming but I knew that Ma wearied quite quickly of demonstrations of affection.
‘So,’ my mother continued, ‘I telephoned Rupert to see if he could get us tickets and he asked us to come and stay here. I must say it’s pretty stylish.’ She looked about her with an appreciative eye, admiring the pale-green painted panelling, the rose-coloured sofas, the group portrait by Zoffany above the chimneypiece, the collection of Chelsea botanical plates in the alcoves on either side. ‘Of course, queers have no one to spend their money on but themselves. They can be deliciously selfish.’
‘Actually Rupert’s already spent a fortune on us,’ I said. ‘He’s been incredibly unselfish, paying our bills while Pa was – away and giving me these lovely clothes and having Cordelia and me living here. And there was her school uniform – the blazer was twenty pounds and goodness knows what it added up to with a new hockey stick and a tennis racquet. And four hundred pairs of navy knickers.’
‘It was only a casual remark, darling.’ My mother raised her eyebrows. ‘No need to get het up. I’m sure he’s been perfectly angelic. I can assure you that I’m very ready to overlook any disagreements we may have had in the past –’
‘Hello, Clarissa. Hello, Ronnie.’ Rupert had come in through the French windows. I wondered if he had overheard. ‘Sorry I’m later than I meant to be. The meeting went on longer than I expected.’ He shook Ronnie’s hand and looked uncertainly at my mother. She rose and placed an affectionate hand on his shoulder while kissing both cheeks.
‘So divine of you to have us at short notice, Rupert. Archie’s made us feel utterly at home. I’m completely in love with this house. You’re a very clever boy.’ She gave him the benefit of her most seductive smile and the moment his back was turned gave me a conspiratorial wink.
Clouds among the Stars Page 61
