“I don't think all our parents ever sat down at the same table again after that holiday.”
“What was their argument even about?”
She swings for a minute, reaching down to brush a streak of mud from her naked leg as she points her toes at the house, straining to make the swing go higher. “Do you not remember? Did you not work it out?”
“There wasn't anything to work out,” I answer. “They never told us anything, we were just kids.”
“Did you not do any detective work? Were you really that wrapped up in your little action figures Vincent?”
“What did you find out?” I counter, stopping the swing and watching her pass me by, before she slows and eases herself to my side. “I thought it was just some needless argument that got out of hand.”
“No, it wasn't that. My mother tried to seduce your father. At least, that's what I heard. I listened in at the parents' chalet, during one of those long drawn out arguments. A lot of the terms I heard at the time I didn't understand, but I thought about it again only the other day. I think your parents' marriage might have been going through a rough patch, and my mum of course saw an opportunity and pounced. And being my mother, she did not take rejection well. We all know your father's temper, and how quickly things escalated after that.”
“I never knew.”
“That surprises me. But then it shouldn't, knowing you as well as I do. You were so lost in your own world back then. Anything in reality that could possibly cause you pain just made you retreat. You had an imagination more fertile than any other child I knew.”
“I remember those arguments. I remember my Dad detailing, with absolute precision, some of the things your mother shouted at him that summer. It amazes me that we are still friends, given what happened next.”
“Yes, your father was pretty brutal.”
I pull the swing back, before throwing my body towards the house on it. The silhouettes on the balcony are gold shapes passing amongst each other, floating inches above the lights on the pond. The figures look angelic, as if they're from a world separate to ours. I feel as though I am watching them in a film.
“I don't think we'd still be friends were it not for this little tribe of ours. It was them that insisted we remain close.”
“They even tried to match make the two of us at one point, didn't they? Graham in particular was always saying, ‘Think what a gesture it would be to both of your parents, to all of our parents, if the two of you started to date'. I can almost picture him rubbing his hands together as he said it. It's a shame we never did learn how to be in love with one another.”
“I know,” I say, smiling. She looks at me for a second, the twist of her mouth suggesting faint amusement, before she transfers her attentions to her feet. “They couldn't bear to see us fall out, could they? Graham was always reminding me during those early days, when we found we were in the same halls at university, of how the three of us had once put on little theatre productions in your garden.”
“We were acting out your plays, little Vincent, don't you remember? You must have had some affection for your father then, because you were determined to be the little playwright of our group.”
“It wasn't affection; it was a sense of competition. It makes me cringe to think. What plays did I write – the adventures of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, episodes 1-14? With you as Marian every time, no doubt.”
“Sometimes Graham was Marian, Vincent. Those days were just wonderful, I remember them well. I loved acting out the lines you'd written, they seemed to always have a seam of magic running through them. Your mind was so agile, so alive. Even in our makeshift little theatre, made from cardboard boxes and abandoned slates of woodchip, I felt like a little star. I remember wanting to stay being the characters you'd written, wanting to embody those damsels in distress and live out every feature of their lives. My love for theatre came from those early plays of yours Vincent, there's no doubt about it.”
“I like to think that you still have a love of theatre, that is hasn't been entirely lost.”
“I'd like to say the same thing,” she says, leaning against the chain of her swing. “The moment I was old enough she put me into auditions – for amateur productions and then for competitions as well, some at the other end of the country. Trying to make me into a little starlet. Her career had ended with a definitive slam of the door, and after a period convalescence she was funnelling all of that ambition, all of that hunger, into this little girl who was still unable to ride a bike.”
“I remember. That haunted look in your eyes, with you always falling pale at the thought of not winning the next rosette for your mother.”
“And the pressure built. I'd win one rosette, and the school would applaud me in assembly, and though I'd blush as I got up to collect it, inside I would feel magnificent. I thought I'd learnt what real happiness felt like – it was seeing the colour in her cheeks when I came off the stage after a victory, when she picked me up and swung me around her.
“But then I made some mistakes. I came second and third a few times, and initially though her encouragement remained, her optimism began to dim. And then one day, after months of feeling drawn and weak, I messed up the opening lines of a piece in a regional competition. She'd brought my grandma along to watch me, wheeled her out of her home for the first time in centuries, and I blew it spectacularly.
“I'll never forget the feeling – looking out into the audience as the judges condescendingly gazed down on this over-made up girl in a frilly dress. I felt utterly naked for a second, and then I sought my mum's eyes in the audience, to see that there was someone in the crowd for whom this failure didn't matter. And she looked so – utterly – humiliated. She didn't speak to me on the way home. Despite the vague qualifications of my grandma – who was too generous to care and too old to have any critical understanding. I remember her pulling me out of the car and practically throwing me towards the house. ‘I'm so ashamed of you,' she said. ‘That wasn't what we practiced at all.' And I cried and cried, and she didn't relent. And when the crying finally ceased, I came to my senses and for the first time I saw beyond her. And I've never seen acting in the same way since.”
We swing for a minute, in utter silence. Only the sound of the chains rubbing against each other fill the air, and we look back at those melting statues. In the distance, the lilting sound of Barbara's laughter carries itself over to us. “We've never had an easy relationship with each other since.”
“Is that why you wanted her to come here?” I ask. “Are you trying to resolve the issues between the two of you tonight?”
“There are bigger issues between us than that Vincent,” she says. “Six weeks ago, I was going through some folders in her garage and I found an exercise book that she'd kept from school. The first few pages were full of old history assignments, but she'd used the rest of it, years later, as a diary in which to record her innermost thoughts. I know I shouldn't have read it, but I did – each page fell open in my hands. They flowed past my eyes, one after the other. And I learnt some things about her in that book that – I don't even know how to begin to deal with. How to even start.
“It was written around the time that I was born. I got the impression that at that point she had something she had to get out of herself that she couldn't share with anyone, that she felt no-one would understand. There was none of the usual concerns that you'd expect a young mother to be having. Of how to deal with this new sense of responsibility, of being overwhelmed by the bond that she felt for her two babies perhaps. She wrote about us as if we had just been left on her doorstep one day, as if we weren't her problem. She wrote that she felt nothing for us, not during the birth nor in the weeks that followed – and yet she expressed no guilt about that. She kept describing us as ‘the two creatures sucking the life out of me'. That diary helped me understand something about my mother that had always seemed inexplicable to me. I realised that she was unable to consider any situation from a perspective other tha
n her own. We were only a week old when she decided that she needed space from us. That she needed ‘the room to find success again'. I just couldn't really believe what I was reading.
“When I was a girl she never talked about the period of time when I was born, and it was only years later that I learnt anything about that time from her boyfriend. He told me that for the first few weeks we'd been looked after by a young Belgian nurse. As I grew up I began to suspect that perhaps she'd been somehow responsible for my brother's death. But this diary gave me a whole new take on that. Just before we were born she wrote about how much she wanted someone to look after us full-time, and she mentioned this Belgian girl, Annick, which a friend of hers at the local theatre had recommended. But the diary mentioned that she wasn't a nurse at all, but an au pair who had once, for a short while, performed the duties of a babysitter to give her friend the opportunity to go on tour. In the diary she wondered if Annick might offer a cheap solution to her predicament. She managed to contact her, and despite the fact that Annick was about to return to Belgium to find work, she convinced her to act as our carer until she ‘got back on her feet'. But one afternoon a few weeks later, my left brother was left unattended in the bath, and he drowned. For years I wondered if Annick had simply been too inexperienced to handle two newborn babies. This diary finally answered that question for me.
“But I can't even think about that issue tonight. This party, for me, has one purpose. I want her to spend some time with The Intimates, to see how much our lives were affected by the little arrangement made by our parents that summer.”
A bell rings from the house, and I sense a commotion taking place within it. A few moments later the shape of Francoise's butler appears at the top of the garden, stopping for a moment before making his way over to us. “Francoise must be about to read from her book,” Georgina says.
In our absence the house has become a riot of music and laughter. Elise looks intrigued by my return, and as I feel her arm snake around my waist I notice a new wooziness in her movements. The guests are draped around various corners of the drawing room. Graham, caustic and mock-indignant, is holding court over Carina and Barbara, who are rapidly becoming hysterical. Franz is lying on his back on a couch at Francoise's side, as she rather nervously leafs through her slim volume. He strums a few chords for her, and she turns her face towards him. “I don't need musical backing on this one Franz,” she says, and catches a butler's attention with her hand. “Walter, if Franz starts trying to distract me with flamenco chords during this reading, will you confiscate his guitar?”
Graham joins me at my side, offering me a glass. “I'm not alone in being terrified by all this, am I?”
“This must be so strange for you both,” Elise says. “How old were you when this book was started?”
“You're about to see your boyfriend as he was during his flea-bitten student years,” Graham says. “I hope Francoise will be gentle with us.”
“I'm sure nothing that she says about you can surprise me too much,” Elise says.
“Is this what being an author is going to be like?” Francoise asks her audience, quietening the clamour around her. “This is actually quite nerve-wracking.”
She looks around for her glass of wine. For once her pristine demeanour is slightly ruffled – I'm seeing a side to her that I'm not used to.
“You should try getting a real job,” Graham calls. Everyone laughs.
“Don't interrupt me when I'm working Graham,” Francoise says, with an incisive smile.
“It's not surgery though, is it?” Graham replies, without missing a beat.
“We'll see,” she answers, to a rising laugh. She turns to the front of her book, leaning against the piano at her side as she prepares to read. “Here we go.”
‘For some reason I feel quite vulnerable this evening. Though quite why I do is utterly beyond me. I have become accustomed to feeling invigorated by my new talented and youthful friends, and in return I believe that I offer them a little steadiness. This steadiness can only be earned, let alone passed on, after a few years amongst the shameless indifference of the world. Perhaps my nerves are borne out of nothing more than trepidation – as tonight is Franz's first performance. For so long he has played the role of mentor – particularly to Vincent and Graham. But tonight his talents for the first time will yield a critical response.
‘Over the course of the term he has put together a band of like-minded musicians, each of whom have been as seduced by his work as we are. I feel hopeful that these carefully nurtured songs will meet with a receptive audience tonight. But above all the prospect excites me – as carved within these songs are the personalities of each of The Intimates. They've encouraged and inspired their development, they feature copiously in their lyrics, and their insights form the backdrop to his current state of mind. The songs are marvellous, and out of all of us it is Franz, I feel, whose talents will find an international stage.
‘A few years older than most of them, he is clearly the man Vincent hopes to emulate. Where Vincent is uncertain and mercurial, Franz is quietly assured and consistently creative. While Franz has developed his own unique style of Eastern Bloc chic, Vincent follows the fashions of the day however badly they match his own idiosyncrasies. Although I have never seen Franz perform, something tells me that tonight I will witness him fully expressing his own individuality, as he often does towards the end of parties, when he's at his most drunken and laconic. Vincent, no doubt, will be taking notes.
‘Before we leave for the venue the seven of us agree to congregate at my flat, in the traditional way that every Friday night now begins. Rock ‘n' roll chic is not a part of my fashion repertoire, and I struggle to make it so for one night. I leave my jewellery on the dresser, and seriously consider wearing some distressed jeans. But then Georgina arrives, wearing overly bright red lipstick and coiffed hair, and she tells me that I look like I am about to do some gardening. I relent, and wear an evening dress, and resolve that I will sit at the back. I have heard the music of her generation – it involves empty platitudes, nausea, and sonorous keyboards. It involves flat vocals and pale, wan faces. I know that the physicality of this concert will be nothing to be afraid of.
‘Graham has interpreted the evening's dress code with a flamboyant determination. He has stolen a pair of Carina's fishnet tights, which are barely wide enough to accommodate a child's leg, and he is wearing one on each arm. His torso is covered with what appears to be a pillow case slashed with three long cuts, but which is in fact, a New Romantic vest. He's wearing leggings and has large swathes of rouge on each cheek. When he arrives he greets me as though this attire is entirely usual, and not at all a departure from his customary preppy aesthetic. I try to go along with this, and resist the urge to laugh at him. He looks like a boy who's fallen asleep with his head in his mothers' makeup bag (Graham laughs at this) and he doesn't quite have the physique to pull off his slim-fitting attire (his laughter subsides). I am meticulous in greeting him warmly. Carina laughs hysterically at him, and for some time. She has sculpted her hair into a quiff, and her cheeks for once hold some hint of colour. I suspect we are seeing her at her most unbridled.
‘As James makes his way to the drinks cabinet I notice that his minor concession to contemporary style is to unbutton the very top of his shirt and not polish his shoes this evening. While the other guests arrive, as usual, he makes his way to the glass chess set that I keep in the living room. He consoles himself, like an errant child returning to his favourite corner, by playing out some historic end game on his own. James last year narrowly missed out upon becoming a young national chess champion, though his prodigious talents do not end there. He has recently begun to paint, and already local collectors have shown an interest in exhibiting his vivid, confrontational works. He has an intensity that I increasingly find promising, however uncomfortable it sometimes can be. I find his unyielding sincerity to be often misplaced, and at times a little dangerous. After a few drinks he can be for
midable and witty, but he soon withdraws again into a twitchy state of introversion. I fear his analytical way of thinking makes him interpret the world as a series of contracts. He is yet to understand the insincerity of a world which fuels itself on empty platitudes and meaningless statements. He denotes semantic reason behind every statement, and I fear one day he will feel maligned by someone's empty promises unless he learns to abandon this tendency.
‘Carina creates excellent Bloody Marys for each of us. Her cocktails are marvellous, though not even I can quite handle them. As we wait for the others to arrive she dances with me, and I again feel maternal towards her. She has such understated beauty, such untapped potential. If she learns to become conscious of her attractiveness she will realise how it can labour on her behalf. At present she is shy; some may even find her reticence rather flat. She reproduces every mannerism I make, and I feel quite flattered by her attention. She is increasingly nourished by the assurance that our little group offers her. She mentioned that she's considering dropping her studies and focusing purely on her ballet for the remainder of her university years. Although hugely encouraged when I urged her to do so, I sensed she is still frightened of her father's disapproval should she sway from his chosen path. She has not yet found that sacred middle ground which I sought too cautiously – of living the life you want while gently placating your elders. I must dedicate some time towards encouraging her to grasp this necessary opportunity.
‘Georgina bustles in from practice still wearing the clothes from her dress rehearsal, with her cheeks rouged like an eighteenth century moll. In moments she is throwing back Bloody Marys, dancing with us to the gramophone and announcing her relief that the weekend has begun. She has just been offered the lead part in the university's summer revue, a remarkable achievement considering it was her first acting audition since childhood. I'm told that the directors were quite startled by her raw ability. She has thrown herself into this role with the fervour of the recently converted. I am so pleased – she seemed lost and conflicted when we first met, and now she seems inspired. When Carina asks her how the rehearsal was she is positively queenly in her response, which is just adorable. I can sense already her mother's acute sense of self-worth now she has started to act. I can only hope this does not develop with too great a sense of entitlement, though I suspect we are seeing some understandable feelings of vindication expressed now. When she talks of how nervous the other actresses are, there's a sympathy in her voice that suggests she is wary of being swept up in the glamour of it all. I'm sure she's very aware of how the movie industry burnt her mother, and mindful that she must preserve her love of acting without allowing any attendant flames to scorch her.
The Intimates Page 4
