Cents and Sensibility

by Maggie Alderson

  ‘Marvellous,’ said Ham. ‘The more the better, and Alex is a great chap, I’d like to see him. Haven’t seen him for ages.’

  He paused for a moment, chewing thoughtfully, then he looked at me.

  ‘Why don’t you come down too, Stella?’ he said. ‘You haven’t been for a while. And you used to be quite close to Alex, didn’t you?’

  I nodded, suddenly a little uncomfortable. Alex was the eldest son of Ham’s third wife, Rose. He’d come with her as part of the deal, along with two siblings, when she’d married Ham. I was embarrassed because I’d had the most monstrous crush on him, which had started the moment he’d arrived in our household, building to a crescendo when I was about thirteen.

  There was nothing wrong with it – we weren’t related, strictly speaking – but it was still a bit cringe-making for the whole family. Particularly as it had been obvious that he had never felt the same about me.

  Mind you, perhaps it wasn’t surprising I had been a bit overwhelmed by the situation. My mother had left before I was one, and Ham didn’t have any children with his second wife, Margot, so I’d been an only child until I was eight.

  Then, suddenly, I’d had three glamorous older siblings all of my own, the oldest of them the amazingly handsome and dashing – it had seemed to me – Alex, then aged fourteen.

  He had been a rower in his first year at Radley when he arrived in my life, with broad shoulders, a strong jaw and pink cheeks; the whole package. I was immediately smitten and he had to put up with me following him around like a little puppy every school holidays, until the years passed and he’d grown up and gone off to Cambridge and could escape me.

  I’d run into him at parties over the years, but not for a while. I was a bit nervous at the idea of seeing him, really, but at the same time, with so many of us there, it would be good fun. And, I thought simultaneously, it would stop me thinking about Jay.

  ‘I’d love to, Ham,’ I said. ‘Is that all right, Chloe?’

  She gave me a big thumbs up and added another coloured piece to her whiteboard. Yellow, that was my colour.

  4

  It was the usual mayhem that weekend at Willow Barn, but before the chaos kicked off with the arrival of Chloe in her people mover, with Venezia, Chanel, Archie and Daisy on board, I had something very unusual – a couple of quiet hours alone there with Ham.

  Due some time off in lieu, I’d left work after lunch and gone down on the train, arriving before he did. I got a taxi from the station and opened the front door with the key Ham had given me years before, another of his gestures to make me feel I was a permanent part of his life, whatever the changes in it.

  For a moment I just stood and took it all in. Willow Barn was an amazing space, which he had created out of an old farm building, with a lot of glass and steel girders.

  I had so many memories of that place – some happy, some not, all vivid – and it was good to have some time alone in it. A very rare experience in that house, which had been filled with shrieking children and equally voluble grown-ups, since Ham’s team of builders had finished it some twenty years before.

  He’d bought the barn when Rose had arrived in our lives, with the three children and several dogs, to create a space that would give us room to ‘act out whatever psychodramas will get you all through it’, as he had put it at the time.

  He’d written a treatise about the project for an esteemed international architecture journal – called ‘Creating Domestic Spaces for the Emotional Journeys of the Modern Family’ – and it was one of the things that had catapulted him to international fame.

  His ideas about how you could positively foster relationships by manipulating the spaces in which people interact, were so radical and far-reaching, they were on the syllabus of architecture schools around the world.

  Some schools had even created whole courses based around Ham’s ideas, and he was always flying off to far-flung universities to give keynote lectures. The interplay of architecture and emotion was his big thing and he had the awards to show for it.

  The same ideas applied to public housing had been shown to reduce radically the level of antisocial behaviour in some of the most desperate and deprived urban pockets in Britain.

  It had all sprung from his years of postgraduate study in Los Angeles, in the early 1970s – where he had met my mother – when the personal development movement had been in full flow. Blissfully freed from the British tendency to repress all emotion, Ham had embraced it enthusiastically – primal screaming, rebirthing, he’d done it all – and the ideas had flowed into his architectural work and become one with it.

  His theories certainly seemed to work at Willow Barn. The open spaces of the house – and equally importantly the gardens, orchards and woods surrounding it, and all the little gazebos, grottos and tree houses he had scattered through them – absorbed friction, with enough room to allow festering tensions to dissolve.

  There was always somewhere private to go to plot, giggle or sulk, while the huge communal main living area – the kitchen, dining area, sitting room and library flowed into each other in one masterfully articulated space – would gently bring us all together again, like a mother hen gathering in her chicks.

  So despite our disparate parentage and allegiances, our different personalities and hang-ups – and the problems they created – we were always a tight little unit again, before we went back to our London lives on Sunday nights. Willow Barn actively absorbed stress and promoted harmony. No wonder we all loved that house so much.

  I unpacked my bag in one of the rooms in the guest wing – Chloe had told me that the kids’ rooms where I usually slept would all be needed – put a large bunch of parrot tulips into a vase on the table in the sitting area, and a bottle of Jo Malone bath oil on Chloe’s bedside table.

  By the time Ham arrived, I had Joni Mitchell – another hangover from his LA days, when he had actually lived near her in Topanga Canyon – playing on the whole-house stereo system, the kettle steaming happily on the Aga, ready for his afternoon cup of tea, and some of Chloe’s legendary cheese scones out of the freezer and warming in the oven.

  I knew so well how my dad liked things to run and the beam on his face when he heard the music, smelled the scones and took in the other details, made my efforts worthwhile.

  He made the tea – he was so finicky about it, it was easier just to let him make it and pour it himself – while I sat at the kitchen table happily doing nothing.

  ‘So, number one duckling,’ he said, pouring a stream of his favourite Yorkshire tea – Resolution blend from Botham’s in Whitby, and no other – into white Wedgwood cups. He wouldn’t drink tea out of anything except white china, because he said it affected the taste. And the milk had to be organic semi-skimmed. Just some of his many micro-obsessions.

  ‘How are things at the paper?’ he asked me. ‘Broken any major stories about corruption in the Hermès workrooms, eh? Black hearts at Boucheron? Boardroom coups at Gucci Gucci goo.’

  I smiled weakly. Ham’s constant teasing about the frivolity of my work sometimes went just over the edge with me.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, tersely. ‘I went to the South of France last week. Stayed at the Grand-Hotel du Cap Mimosa. Fluff has its benefits.’

  ‘Jolly nice too – rather a pretty building, good gardens, marvellous pool. Had a memorable weekend there once myself, with a rather beautiful woman. One of the few I didn’t marry.’ He smiled sweetly at me and took a big, satisfied slurp of tea. ‘How’s your love life these days? Met anyone you might want to introduce to me, yet?’

  I shook my head. It was another sticky point between us. I had never really brought a boyfriend home. I just hadn’t ever met anyone with a strong enough personality to stand up to Ham, and it really wasn’t worth putting someone through it just for the sake of it. And the real truth of the matter was, I didn’t really do ‘boyfriends’, as such. The cosy couple thing just didn’t appeal to me.

  All my girlfriends seemed to
want nothing more than a man they could stay in with, as far as I could tell, but I liked men I could go out with. I liked to live it up with someone – people, movement, bright lights, fast cars, champagne, dancing. All the stuff I’d done with Jay really.

  Nights at home together, watching videos and eating pasta, just didn’t appeal to me. Those were the things I liked doing on my own, so why would I want someone else there, getting in the way, wanting to change the channel, or go to sleep early?

  And whenever I did feel like a dose of domestic bliss, I could just nip through the garden gate into Ham’s world and, while that was usually fun, I was always glad to get back into my own little solitary space again.

  Really, after a life of watching the women on rotation in Ham’s life, I didn’t think it was very surprising I felt that way, but Ham was such a fan of married life himself – as he liked to joke, he loved being married so much he’d done it six times – he just couldn’t quite understand why I didn’t want it as well.

  He’d get all misty-eyed and sentimental sometimes about walking me up the aisle. He had it all planned: we were using the Norman church near Willow Barn, which we would walk to along a winding path mown the night before (by him) through the wildflower meadow, then back for the reception in a Rajasthani tent on the lawn.

  We’d also have a maypole, he insisted, with people dancing round it, for some crackpot reason of his, probably something heinous to do with fertility.

  He’d practically chosen my dress for me, he was so excited about it. All his weddings had been big productions of various kinds and he just loved the whole package. So did everyone, it seemed, except me.

  All my girlfriends were fixated on getting married. Intelligent women secretly longed to be Disney princesses for a day, in meringue dresses and the whole number. Even the ones silly enough to be having affairs with already-married men.

  It was an obsession I really could not understand. Couldn’t they see that marriage offered no security to a woman whatsoever? That was why I wanted to build my own sense of security, one that only I controlled.

  And I didn’t want children either, so that was no reason to seek out a more permanent male fixture. I had enough children in my life already through Ham and much as I loved them, especially Daisy, I’d also had plenty of opportunity to observe just how much they restricted and controlled women’s lives.

  Even successful, independent women like Nicola, the mother of Marcus and Freddie, could be felled by a couple of little toddlers. She’d had a virtual nervous breakdown from the strain. She’d got over it and gone on to have two little girls, Beatrice and Hattie, with her second husband, but I knew it was not for me.

  I had tried to explain all this to Ham over the years, but he just couldn’t understand it and kept telling me I would grow out of it as soon as I met the right man.

  I didn’t want to have an argument with him that afternoon, though. Time alone together like that was too rare and precious for us, but I could see he was looking at me with a particularly Hammy expression, as I called it.

  I put my head in my hands and waited for the bomb to drop. And it did. It was a beauty.

  ‘You know, Stella,’ he said, finally. ‘It’s really all right with me if you’re gay, you know. Just tell me. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if my behaviour had put you off men entirely. I’m a shocking example of the male species for any daughter and if you’ve decided that you feel more comfortable romantically with other women – and you did lose your mother at a critical age, as well, of course – that’s fine with me. But do tell me.’

  I just looked at him, completely astonished, and then I burst out laughing.

  ‘Ham!’ I cried. ‘You don’t really think I’m a lesbian, do you?’

  He looked sheepish.

  ‘Well, it’s just you’re a very beautiful girl and you never seem to have a chap… And I’ve got some very attractive young lezzos working in the practice these days, it seems to be the way of the world, so I thought I’d better ask you, in case you were suffering, wondering how to tell your dear old dad you were secretly dwelling in The Well of Loneliness.’

  ‘Oh, Ham,’ I said, squeezing his hand. ‘You really are so sweet, but I’m not gay, really I’m not. I do have chaps, as you call them, but nobody special enough to bore you with.’

  Jay’s face flashed into my mind. Could I imagine introducing him to Ham? Actually, I could. It was the first time I had ever thought that about anybody, but I pushed the thought right out again. If I told Ham about him, even in a casual way, he’d be off ordering the maypole.

  ‘Just accept it, Ham,’ I said. ‘You won’t ever be walking me up to the altar, it’s not my thing. But you’ll have Venezia to do – she’s already planning her wedding, although the scenario changes depending which celebrity has just got married – and then you’ll have Tabitha and Daisy to give away, so it’s not like you’re going to be missing out.’

  He looked maudlin for a moment.

  ‘Hope I’m around long enough to see little Daisy-day, in her wedding gown,’ he said sadly. ‘I won’t be here forever, you know, Stella, and I just want to see you settled with a decent bloke before I go.’

  I squeezed his hand. For a monstrous tyrant he could be so unbelievably soppy.

  ‘But, Daddy dearest,’ I said, determined to tease him out of his tristesse, ‘haven’t you always told me there’s no such thing?’

  It became very clear from the moment that Chloe arrived with Daisy and the teenagers, that Venezia’s friend Chanel was arguably even more vain and self-centred than she was. Between the two of them, they were doing a very good job of torturing Venezia’s older half-brother, Archie.

  He was so clearly in love with Chanel, it hurt. Slumped like a piece of lank liquorice in his oversized hoodie, his baggy jeans hanging down below his skinny butt, his cheeks a bas relief of pimples, his mouth crammed with miniature Forth Bridges designed to control his wayward teeth; he was a festering mound of hormones.

  It reminded me so much of my own unrequited passion for Alex, acted out in the same setting, it was quite painful to watch.

  He’d try to impress her with witty ripostes to her vapid remarks, only to have her turn to Venezia and giggle, before one or other of them would turn back and say, ‘Whatever…’ in indescribably dismissive tones. Then they’d strut off to apply more mascara and lipgloss, all exposed flat midriffs, high breasts and endless legs.

  I loved Archie. He was far too good for Chanel. I was well aware that my big-sister credentials had little appeal compared to her golden-brown abdomen, but nevertheless he seemed quite pleased to see me.

  ‘Hey, Archie boy,’ I said, sparring with him a bit and trying, in vain, to be allowed to plant a kiss on him.

  ‘Yeah, hi, Stella,’ he grunted, not looking at me. ‘Howya doing?’

  ‘I’m fine, Archie.’ I leaned my face right into his, to force him to make eye contact with me. ‘But how are you?’

  He finally looked at me. He had dark red kohl pencil inside his lower eyelids. It did nothing for his pimples.

  ‘Shit, actually, since you ask.’

  ‘Want to come and see if the tree house is still there?’

  The clip-clop of Venezia and Chanel coming back down the metal staircase in their high heels distracted him.

  ‘Chanel will still be here at dinner, Arch,’ I said. ‘Try playing hard to get for a while. Make her miss you.’

  He looked at me for a moment, sucking on his braces, then nodded.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Tree house in five.’

  It was one of our little Willow Barn rituals, that none of us kids ever walked to any of Ham’s follies together. There were so many different ways to get anywhere in the garden, the lark of it was making sure you got to the agreed place without bumping into whoever you were supposed to be meeting there. It was just something we did.

  I set off via a sliding glass door in the entirely glazed front of the house, while Archie headed off towards the kitch
en.

  I stood on the lawn, now fully green as spring had properly taken hold, breathing in the clear country evening air, watching the hawks wheeling over the hillsides of that ancient-looking landscape and pondering which way to approach the tree house.

  It was beyond the old hay barn, spanning a stream on the far side of the orchard. I reckoned Archie would be taking the route via the kitchen garden and decided I would go down the drive, climb over the stile into the paddock, cross that and then enter the tree house from the other side of the stream.

  With a bit of jogging, I arrived almost simultaneously with Archie.

  ‘Nice work,’ he said, as we smacked palms. ‘Did you go drive–stile–paddock?’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah. A predictable classic, but I like it. How about you? Kitchen door–courtyard–herb garden–vegetable garden–orchard–hay barn–tree house?’

  ‘Nah, much better than that. Kitchen door–courtyard–guest wing…’

  I made an appropriate ‘ooh’ noise, to mark the originality of his route.

  ‘… guest-wing sitting-room French window–pool house–orchard-hay barn–tree house.’

  I nodded appreciatively. ‘Good work,’ I said. ‘Quite tangential.’

  We grinned at each other, in joint satisfaction at a family tradition perfectly upheld. Then we just sat in silence for a while, soaking in the tree house’s familiar atmosphere.

  Ham had built it himself, over a week one summer, in one of his fits of excess creativity between big architectural projects, and it was rough-hewn, to put it mildly. It was splinter hell, if you weren’t careful.

  ‘Ow,’ said Archie, alternately inspecting and sucking one of his thumbs. There was flaking black varnish on the nail.

  ‘So why’s everything shit?’ I asked.

  He shrugged.

  ‘Mum?’ I pressed him. He just pulled a face. ‘School?’ I continued. He crossed his eyes. ‘Stepdad?’ He pretended to hang himself. ‘Venezia?’ He gagged. ‘Chanel?’ He hung his tongue out and panted.