Dressing the Dearloves

by Kelly Doust

  The portrait of Rose and her daughters had presided over all the comings and goings at Bledesford for almost a century now, her luminous beauty a constant in Sylvie’s childhood. And was that a glint of mischievousness in her eyes? Sylvie could never quite tell. ‘Mother was quite selfish when she wanted to be,’ Lizzie had told her once, and Sylvie could never work out if she meant it as a compliment or not.

  As Wendy led them out of the hall, chattering on about the weather and the dogs, Sylvie couldn’t help turning her head back to look at the portrait again, the painted eyes looking at her coolly and dispassionately.

  How did you get to be so beautiful and so perfect? Sylvie thought bitterly. I bet you never got your life into a complete and utter mess . . .

  No, that wasn’t what ‘doing a Dearlove’ meant at all.

  7

  As her mother led her down one of the corridors towards the kitchen, Sylvie couldn’t help thinking about what the painting of Rose might be worth nowadays.

  It should be in a museum or with a private collector, she thought, not for the first time, although she doubted it was even insured any more. Wendy and Robin hadn’t been able to keep up the payments on the house – let alone its contents – for years. The external state of the house, and the tottering piles of bills sitting on the occasional table she’d just passed in the hall, also attested to the fact that they were as hopeless as she was at keeping up with their financial dealings. Unopened envelopes, thick A4-sized packages – Sylvie recognised them for what they were. She’d definitely inherited some things from her parents, she thought ruefully.

  It really was time to sell, if only her parents would consider it. It was pointless for them to be living in a handful of rooms while the rest of Bledesford crumbled down around their ears. But they’d argued about it so many times before, Sylvie knew it was pointless raising it with them again.

  Passing through the huge, low-ceilinged kitchen, Sylvie spotted a batch of her mother’s lemon polenta cakes cooling on the counter beside large glass jars of preserved produce from the garden. Dinner bubbled away on the ancient Aga stove, giving off a rich, heady steam. Sylvie felt a sudden pang of hunger, but Wendy didn’t pause, continuing to lead her out towards the old barn.

  The barn was attached to the main house by way of a covered workshop and various garden rooms. In Sylvie’s memory, the rabbit warren of rooms was beyond the concept of ‘romantic disrepair’ – they were just dirty, dusty and full of junk. But now Sylvie blinked in disbelief as her mother led her through a series of tidy rooms, mostly empty, some with piles of boxes neatly stacked against the walls. Sylvie felt as if she’d lost her bearings. She couldn’t quite believe how clean everything was, how ordered . . . She felt strange all of a sudden.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Wendy, beaming.

  ‘What did you do with it all?’ Sylvie asked, turning around to stare, still unable to believe her eyes.

  ‘Oh, we redistributed things, mainly. Tossed out a lot of junk, sold on a few pieces and gave the rest away. You wouldn’t believe the things we found. Polishes up well though, doesn’t it? Come on.’

  ‘I never thought you’d get around to it,’ Sylvie said truthfully, following her mother out past her father’s workshop and tools.

  Finally reaching a turn in the corridor, Sylvie followed behind Wendy as she flung open the barn door, feeling a little flutter in her chest at the thought of seeing her father again.

  He was standing alone in the centre of the barn. The floor was messy and strewn with paint-splattered dust sheets. He had his back to her and was bent over something, mixing a large stick around in circles, stirring in an old trough. Sylvie was suddenly transported back to her childhood – she couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Dad?’

  Robin froze, then wheeled around. A big smile spread across his features when he saw her.

  ‘My little Quicksilver . . . you’re home!’

  As Sylvie rushed towards him, she felt a stab of pain at the thought of how much she’d missed him. She crushed her face against his chest, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, taking in his familiar smell of Penhaligon’s cologne, woodsmoke and old cashmere jumpers. God, it killed her to be away for so long, but there was nothing for her here at Bledesford. Nothing but her parents and Lizzie, and while she loved them all, it wasn’t enough. She needed to work, and she found her passion. And somehow it had sucked up all her time and energy, leaving so little room for anything else. But now that she was back she felt terrible for all those years of virtual silence.

  With her father’s strong, wiry arms wrapped around her, Sylvie felt somehow safer. She breathed him in and was assailed by a hundred comforting memories: Robin reading to her in bed before sleep when she was a little girl; Robin showing her how to mix up oil paints for the first time; Robin sitting in his old leather armchair in the library, turning to look at her with a smile as she peeked around the door. Her eyes closed, she heard his heart beating with a steady thump, thump in her ears and she realised she felt safe for the first time in ages.

  Opening her eyes, she blinked in surprise.

  ‘What’s all this?’ she asked, confused, pulling away from her father.

  Huge canvases lined the walls around them – exuberant, thickly painted landscapes with bright swathes of colour adorning the taut, carefully prepared frames. And those were just the ones which had been hung up; there were many more, stacked against the massive worktable in the corner of the room, pieces of yellowing cardboard and bubble wrap separating them from each other. A makeshift rack had been created to store some others, but that was already full.

  Sylvie thought for a moment that they were someone else’s work, a collection of her father’s friends’ paintings that she’d never seen before. But how had he afforded them? Besides, her father had lost touch with most of his artist friends years ago. She realised with a jolt that they must be his. The easel set up to his side had a similar piece, a work in progress, which depicted the same bright, beautiful sky and endless rolling green.

  She looked around, turning in slow circles, drinking in the sight of them.

  Sylvie was only fifteen years old when her father gave up life as a successful artist to run Bledesford – correction, Sylvie thought, when Wendy made him give up his painting to run Bledesford. Before that, Robin had mainly painted in his London studio – long since sold to pay debts – but as far as Sylvie was aware, he hadn’t done any work since then. Hadn’t touched paints, talked about it or even mentioned it. All his paintings were sold or packed away. Robin’s bohemian artist friends had melted away, along with his high-powered London agent, and it was as if that part of his life was over. Sylvie knew never to try to talk to him about his art. The one time she had asked about it, his face had darkened and Robin had struggled to hold back tears. They never spoke about it again.

  But now Sylvie looked about herself in wonder. Back then, his work had been dark, moody, abstract. Secretly, the paintings had almost scared Sylvie, though she’d been terribly proud of him. But these works were nothing like those made in his heyday. These paintings were deceptively simple, uncomplicated landscapes, but colourful, vibrant and pulsating with an energy all of their own.

  ‘What’s new, kiddo?’ he asked, standing beside her, tousling her hair and looking her up and down. He grinned at her clothes. ‘Too much to let us know you were coming, was it? You jetset types, you’re all go, go, go.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She shrugged, returning his grin. ‘I just wanted to come home. See my aged Pa, you know how it is.’ She felt a flicker of relief. Just like that, after years apart, they’d fallen back into their private, shorthand language of shared jokes, teasing and asides – it had always been that way between them.

  Sylvie walked towards her father’s easel for a closer look. It was a familiar landscape, of the view across the valley, but she was immensely moved by the way the deep indigos and faded purples rippled across the canvas like wet silk as the day turned to dusk; someth
ing hard and tight seemed to loosen within her chest.

  ‘Wow, Dad. This is . . . amazing.’ She turned and waved her hand at the paintings. ‘These are really good.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Robin said, beaming.

  ‘Yes, they’re very nice,’ said Wendy, hands clasped in front of her, gazing around vaguely.

  ‘Nice?’ Sylvie said disbelievingly. ‘They’re a bit more than nice, Mum.’ She turned back to Robin, seeing but choosing to ignore a flash of pain across Wendy’s face. ‘Dad, these are beautiful. Truly.’

  Sylvie had always prided herself on the special connection she shared with her father. She loved Wendy too, of course, but her mother’s constant clucking and sensible attitude made them clash. The problem, Sylvie always thought, was that Wendy was too much of a pragmatist. She wasn’t creative herself, so she had never understood how important her father’s painting was to him; she didn’t understand the artistic temperament at all. It was the same with Sylvie’s interest in designing clothes.

  When Sylvie had told Wendy she was applying to Central St Martins to study fashion design, her mother had been worried. ‘I don’t know why you don’t just pursue something sensible . . . like nursing or teaching. Isn’t fashion an incredibly hard industry to succeed in?’ Wendy had said, reducing Sylvie’s passion to the silly fumblings of a starry-eyed fool, caught up in shopping and clothes and trinkets. Her mother had always made her feel foolish somehow. Frivolous. Whereas Robin always encouraged and revelled in her bravery and imagination.

  Sylvie often wondered how her parents had ever got together. Robin had an impish, Peter Pan quality to him, which seemed at odds with Wendy’s sensible approach to life. Together, father and daughter loved going on long, meandering walks and watching old comedy sketches, bonding over a shared love of Monty Python, the Young Ones and the twisted art of David Lynch. They had painted and dreamed together, riding their bikes around the estate in darkness, howling at the moon. Wendy would just shake her head when they came home, all flushed and silly, telling them that they’d catch their death of cold and making them wipe their shoes on the mat before they came inside. She just didn’t know what to make of them, Sylvie thought. Wendy had a hopeless tendency to miss the joke at all times, too busy issuing endless reminders to put a coat on, or clean up after yourself, or take your vitamins. Her parents were like the proverbial chalk and cheese.

  ‘How many paintings have you finished now?’ Sylvie asked, her eyes wandering the room. ‘There’s so many.’

  ‘I don’t know, I just sort of lost track . . . Thirty? Maybe forty, even. Lydia would think that’s enough. For an exhibition,’ her father said, collecting up his brushes and taking them to the sink in the corner.

  Her mother gave a sharp little intake of breath. No, Wendy wouldn’t like that, Sylvie thought. Not at all. The relationship with Lydia had soured, and it was all her mother’s fault, for making Robin give it all up and move back to Bledesford to take up his inheritance.

  Once her father’s agent, Lydia Porter, had been the biggest champion of his work, and the one who’d first made Robin Dearlove a household name. ‘Robin Dearlove, my terribly posh one,’ she’d been fond of calling Robin in her husky, pack-a-day smoker’s voice. For years she’d represented all the young British artists and top names in the art world, hosting regular exhibitions in her West London gallery which were attended by a slew of glamorous celebrities. But Lydia had died under strange circumstances. Suicide or the side-effect of drugs, the coroner’s report had been inconclusive. Lydia had been found in her Hammersmith home, her heart stopped and without a note, but there were whisperings of foul play.

  While Lydia had been around, and when her dad had been painting, loads of her father’s friends – artists, writers and creatives whom her dad collected while studying fine art in London – had come down to Bledesford for weekends. Sylvie was always kicking about underfoot, drinking it all in, with wide eyes and tangled hair. Memories of those wild weekends were what inspired her fashion work: the willowy models in their androgynous clothes, smoking and swaying about on whatever drugs they happened to be on; the rock-star slam poet Dad had shared a house with in Camden, and the musicians, before they’d got super-famous and stopped visiting him at all. Where were they all now? Still famous, mostly, whereas Dad was . . . what, exactly? Forgotten. Overlooked. Left behind.

  Bledesford had seemed such a fun and bohemian place back then. It used to have something special about it – magical, even. But then Lydia had left, along with her coterie of bright young things, and Dad’s friends had stopped calling. No doubt discouraged by Wendy, who always disapproved of the drug taking, the drinking and the general antics. And Robin had seemingly morphed overnight into one of the fusty old ancestors depicted in the portraits hung from the decaying manor’s peeling walls: stooped, tired and worn down by the burdens of managing the estate.

  ‘It’s the legacy,’ Lizzie had said to Sylvie once. They’d been talking over the phone, Sylvie in New York, and Lizzie in Bledesford, on one of their regular phone calls. Sylvie had made the mistake of confiding in her about her continuing sadness about her father walking away from his art when he’d been at the height of his powers. But dearest Lizzie, as dear to her as her father, always so supportive of Sylvie’s successes, had on this subject been implacable.

  ‘But, darling, he’s a Dearlove,’ she’d said, and Sylvie could hear the steel in her voice. ‘What choice did he have? Bledesford is in his blood. It’s his destiny, after all. I mean,’ she snorted, ‘Gigi being useless, of course he had to step up to manage the estate. One has to live up to one’s responsibilities, after all.’

  ‘But don’t you think he should have followed his dreams?’ Sylvie asked forlornly. But Lizzie was having none of it.

  ‘Oh, please. Dreams,’ Lizzie said, in her acerbic cut-glass accent. ‘Spare me.’

  What with Lizzie and her mother – two strong-willed women – pulling the strings behind the scenes, what chance did Robin, with his somewhat fey tendencies, have?

  ‘Darling, we’ve got something to tell you,’ said Wendy now, disturbing Sylvie’s thoughts.

  Robin put an arm around Wendy’s waist. ‘Yes,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘Some news.’

  ‘What?’ Sylvie asked, suddenly worried by her parents’ grim expressions. Whatever it was, it didn’t look good.

  8

  ‘We’re selling Bledesford. We’re going to put it on the market.’

  ‘But— What? Why now?’ Sylvie wasn’t surprised, but she was angry, she realised. She’d been on at them for years to sell – and now they had to go and make this decision? When it could have made more of a difference ten bloody years ago? Every time her mother had complained over the phone to her about another thing going wrong on the estate, which was bound to cost a small fortune to fix, Sylvie had suggested it. But now, just when she needed a place to hide, a space to gather her thoughts and get some strength back and herself together, they were selling! Great. The timing was so bad, it was almost comical.

  A look of silent communication passed between her parents as they chose the right words to use.

  ‘We just can’t hold on any longer, Quicksilver,’ Robin said. ‘We’ve borrowed so much against Bledesford over the years that if we don’t sell now we’ll have precious little left. And we have our retirement to think about. Lizzie will need full-time care soon. She’s been having . . . episodes.’

  Sylvie was shocked. ‘What? What sort of episodes?’

  ‘Confusion, slipping back into the past . . . and, well, she’s frail. She’ll need a twenty-four-hour nurse soon.’

  Sylvie couldn’t believe it. ‘But she seemed okay the last time I spoke with her.’

  It had only been a couple of Sundays ago, when she’d Skyped Lizzie from New York. They’d spoken for over an hour, Sylvie keeping up the pretence that everything was fine at her end. Apart from the obvious aches and pains associated with ageing, which her great-grandmother had mentioned briefly, she’d
seemed altogether fine. Lizzie had regaled her with choice tidbits from the local paper, the way she often did, and Sylvie had laughed and told her about a neighbour who’d got a new tattoo but managed to have it inked the wrong way around.

  ‘It’s meant to symbolise Peace, but I wonder if this means he’ll experience the opposite.’

  Lizzie had laughed quietly.

  ‘Does Lizzie know?’ Sylvie asked now, brows knitted as she wondered how they’d managed to convince her – her great-grandmother loved Bledesford, heart and soul. She was also notoriously feisty.

  Robin looked down at his shoes uncomfortably. ‘We’ve – well, I’ve tried talking to her about handing Bledesford over to people who can take better care of it, but she won’t have a bar of it.’

  ‘But we can’t stay here just because she wants to,’ broke in Wendy. ‘We have no choice, Sylvie. We really do have to sell.’ She darted a nervous glance at Robin, who nodded slowly. Robin was devoted to Lizzie, because she’d raised him alone after Gigi had disappeared out of his life when he was a baby. But both Wendy and Sylvie knew that he’d never been able to stand up to her.

  ‘So, darling,’ Wendy looked at Sylvie pleadingly, ‘we’re not going to mention anything to her just yet – not until everything’s sorted. We’re doing everything we need to, on the quiet, okay?’

  ‘Okay, I get it,’ said Sylvie. ‘But why didn’t you tell me earlier? You must have been working away for months, getting those box rooms cleaned up . . .’

  ‘We didn’t want to bother you,’ said Wendy, biting her lip. ‘We’re always aware of how frantic you are with your business. Speaking of which, how are things going, darling? Are you working on a new collection?’

  Sylvie’s mouth went dry. So they hadn’t heard. She was surprised. Lizzie, she understood – apart from Skyping occasionally, wasn’t much interested in news from the world. ‘Can’t stomach it – everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket. What with all those reality TV shows, I wouldn’t be surprised if those Kardashi-wotsits ended up in the White House.’ Sylvie had been certain the news would reach her parents, though. It had certainly spread across the papers quickly enough.