Cents and Sensibility

by Maggie Alderson

  ‘She might not be good enough for you…’ I suggested.

  ‘I’d like the chance to find out,’ said Archie and for the first time, his face split into the grin I had loved so much when he had arrived in my life as a cheeky little boy.

  As conversations went with Archie these days, this was a good one. A victim of his own hormones, he’d turned from such a perky little chap, so enthusiastic about his Power Rangers and model cars, into a block of uncommunicative lard, with attitude.

  It had happened almost overnight on his sixteenth birthday, as far as I could tell, and I reckoned all I could do was be there for him until he emerged from the other end of whatever tunnel he was in.

  ‘Fucking Gerald’s a total wanker,’ he spat out, suddenly.

  ‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘Any particular kind of wankerness?’

  ‘Well, he won’t let me have a drum kit, even though I’m already in a band, and I’m the drummer – duh? – and he won’t let me go and see Cradle of Filth and he’s confiscated my Marilyn Manson posters and he’s just a total fuckwit. He won’t let me have Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, either. He’s not even my dad and he thinks he can, like, totally control me. And Mum’s useless. She just does anything he wants, as long as he buys her stuff.’

  He paused for a bit and picked some black varnish off his little fingernail. The one that was really long and ugly.

  ‘I can hear them having sex,’ he said, quietly. ‘They do it all the time and it is so gross. I can hear what they’re saying, it’s disgusting. Venezia just puts her iPod on and turns up the volume, but he’s confiscated mine as well as everything else, just because I wouldn’t take it off at dinner one night.’

  I felt really sorry for him. The sex thing was gross. Really gross. Suddenly he looked up grinning.

  ‘The other night they were doing it and I just got up and put on Dismember’s new CD really loud.’ He was nodding his head enthusiastically and laughing his awkward, choking, mirthless laugh. ‘That stopped them. He’s confiscated that now as well, the tosser.’

  He was quiet for a moment and then he looked up at me. There were tears in his eyes. He punched the wall.

  ‘Ow, ow, ow,’ he said, nursing his fist under his arm.

  ‘Oh, Arch,’ I said, touching his arm. I knew that was as much physical contact as he would allow.

  ‘It’s shit,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Archie, it is. It’s total shit.’

  By the time we got back to the house, dinner was on the table – and Alex had arrived with Toby and Tabitha. My stomach turned over when I saw him. He still had that effect on me, although I didn’t know whether it was a genuine involuntary reaction to the man standing up to greet me, some kind of throwback sense memory to my thirteen-year-old self, or simple embarrassment.

  I just had time to register that he was still rather good-looking, in a superannuated public schoolboy kind of way, and to say a rather gabbled, ‘Hi, Alex,’ when I was rugby tackled by my twelve-year-old half-brother, Toby, and in a more ladylike fashion by his twin sister, Tabitha, who wanted to show me her newly French-manicured nails.

  Although they were the same age, Toby still seemed a boy, affectionate and innocent, while Tabitha was still sweet, but moving into the awkward years, made more so by the presence of Venezia, who would now extend her unpleasant, snubbing behaviour to her, as well as to Archie. Another half-sibling to torture was her idea of good sport.

  ‘Hey, you two,’ I said, hugging them back. ‘Great to see you.’

  But before I could say any more, Ham was loudly clapping his hands.

  ‘Come on, you lot. You can do that later,’ he was saying. ‘It’s dinner time.’

  And like the children we all still were, in his eyes, we sat down obediently at the round table.

  Ham always had round dining tables, with various tops to cater for different numbers. It was all part of his orchestrated manipulation of space and relationships; he didn’t like the idea of a hierarchy at a family table, although it was quite clear to all of us that wherever he sat was the head. He just wanted the rest of us to feel equal, as his subordinates.

  Apart from a few opening snarky remarks between Archie and Venezia, and some snickering between her and Chanel with regard to Tabitha, dinner looked set to be pleasant enough.

  Chloe’s food was superb as always – it was steak Diane, she was writing a book called Kitsch Cuisine – Ham was in very good spirits, surrounded by the fruits of his loins, as he called us, under his own award-winning roof, and good wine was flowing.

  I just felt so hopelessly self-conscious around Alex.

  I always seemed to be looking at him by mistake when he looked over at me, and whenever he addressed a remark to me, I had just filled my mouth with food. It was like my body was still programmed to react to him the same way it had when I was thirteen.

  It was so unfair, it was really beginning to annoy me. I didn’t even fancy him any more. OK, so he was quite good-looking, my friends were always telling me that, although I thought his features had coarsened a little, and in all honesty, I found him pretty boring.

  He was a solicitor, working for some big bank in the City, and he’d developed that falsely jovial and extremely patronizing way of interacting that those City boys have, especially with women.

  He got my back up early on in the proceedings by asking me lame questions about the paper.

  ‘So, Stella,’ he said, with forced Rotarian warmth. ‘You’re still working for the rag, I see. All the girls in the office love your articles.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, barely able to hide my irritation. I hated it when people didn’t show due respect for the Journal. ‘I am still working for the bestselling, most respected broadsheet paper in the country, thank you. Are you still slaving for Mammon?’

  He laughed in a rather empty, corporate good-guy kind of way and I was relieved when he didn’t address any more remarks to me.

  Instead, he was having long conversations with Ham about cars and rugby, just about the only two dull subjects my father was interested in – and he was really interested in them. So with them tied up with man talk, the teenagers acting out their own little Pinter play, and Chloe constantly up and down to the kitchen, I spent most of the dinner talking to Toby.

  ‘Stella,’ he said, earnestly, after he had finished separating all the food on his plate into careful sections so that none of it touched. ‘Do you like McFly?’

  ‘I’m not really sure, darling,’ I replied. ‘I know Venezia used to like them, but now she very much doesn’t like them and Archie hates them with a passion, but I haven’t really got a stand on them. How about you?’

  ‘I think they’re pretty lame actually,’ said Toby. ‘I like Gorillaz, but Tabitha loves McFly. It’s weird. She’s got pictures of them all over her bedroom walls. She’s even got them on the ceiling.’

  ‘Hey, Chanel,’ said Venezia, overhearing. ‘Tabitha likes McFly. Ooh, Tabitha, do you love Dougie? Do you dream of him? Are you going to marry him?’

  Then she and Chanel went into a fit of unpleasant snickering, singing what even I recognized as a McFly song, in stupid voices. Tabitha looked outraged and upset in equal measure. She clearly didn’t know whether to defend Dougie and her other McFly heart-throbs, or to pretend she didn’t like them, so she could fit in with the older girls. She was trying not to cry.

  I looked at Alex, who had a pained expression on his face. He caught my glance and for the first time, I felt a connection with him. I raised my eyebrows, and he nodded in acknowledgement. Tabitha was his little sister too.

  ‘Hey, Tabs,’ he said softly. ‘Have you told Venezia about your modelling yet?’

  Tabitha’s exquisitely pretty little face lit up and Venezia’s darkened with suspicion. She wanted to be a model even more than she wanted to star in The OC, or be a Pussycat Doll.

  ‘What modelling?’ she said, her cunning eyes darting between Alex and Tabitha, in case it was a set-up.

  ‘I’m going to be
in the Boden catalogue,’ said Tabitha proudly.

  ‘Are you, darling?’ said Ham, suddenly taking notice. ‘That’s marvellous. You’ll be a beautiful model. You’ve got the best head in the family.’

  I saw an expression of pure jealousy cross Venezia’s face. Chanel looked pretty pissed off too.

  ‘Boden?’ said Venezia, in her most contemptuous tones. ‘I wouldn’t wear Boden if they were the last clothes on earth. They are the most lame clothes in the whole world. I’d rather wear cling film than wear Boden. They so suck. They’re just for stupid children or old women.’

  Tabitha looked a bit crestfallen, but even she knew Venezia was just jealous.

  ‘Only total lame-arses wear Boden,’ Venezia was still going on. ‘Boden makes me want to puke.’

  ‘Shut up, Venezia,’ said Ham suddenly. ‘You really are being very unpleasant. In fact, I’ve got a good idea, why don’t you and Chanel leave the table now. I really don’t want to see you until the morning.’

  ‘Good,’ said Venezia. ‘We were going anyway. Come on, Chanel.’

  And she stomped off towards the metal staircase that led up to the kids’ bedrooms, her shiny blonde hair swinging, Chanel following behind.

  Chloe broke the silence at the table, by standing up to fetch the pudding and getting the younger ones to come and choose what flavour of ice cream they wanted to have with theirs. Alex came over and took Toby’s place next to me.

  ‘Is she always so unpleasant?’ he asked me.

  ‘Venezia?’ I said. ‘She’s a monster. A foul creature. And having a crony with her just makes her worse.’

  ‘Well, she’ll have to reckon with me, if she has another go at Tabitha,’ he said.

  I smiled at his fraternal loyalty. It was quite endearing, but I knew it was useless. Teenage mind games were way beyond the control of even the most well-meaning grownups. They ran their own course impervious to outside interference, which usually only made matters worse.

  Indeed, mentioning the modelling the way he had would only have wrecked all hope of Tabitha being included by Venezia and Chanel for the rest of the weekend, which they would now devote to revenge. I knew all that from the battlegrounds of our own shared adolescence and I was surprised he had forgotten.

  He was looking thoughtful.

  ‘Is she like her mother?’ he asked.

  I laughed bitterly.

  ‘Oh, boy,’ I said. ‘She’s delightful compared to her mother. Her mother is an utter monster. Why do you think Archie’s here? He’s not even Ham’s son – well, I know you’re not either, but anyway – Kristy’s gone off to Paris for the weekend and she’s just dumped Archie here for convenience.’

  ‘Poor you,’ said Alex, quietly.

  I just looked at him. I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  ‘Poor you having her as a stepmother,’ he continued.

  I was really surprised.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘It was a rude shock after your lovely mum, but I survived. How is Rose by the way?’

  ‘She’s great,’ said Alex. ‘It suits her being single. She’s still got the two young ones to look after and with her garden and the house and the dogs, that’s enough for her. She doesn’t need a husband to worry about as well.’

  He smiled, wryly, at me.

  ‘We’ve got a lot in common really, haven’t we, Stella?’ he said, looking me right in the eye. ‘With the state of our families it’s hardly surprising we’re both still single.’

  I was lost for words at his presumption. How dare he comment on my marital status? And imply I gave a flying fuck about his? I was instantly furious, but before I could pursue it with him, Chloe arrived back at the table with a baked Alaska and the moment was gone.

  5

  I just couldn’t get to sleep that night. Mainly because I wasn’t really happy being shoved over in the guest wing, which had to be entered across a courtyard at ground level, even though it was built right on to the side of the main house.

  Keeping it separate was all part of Ham’s intention to contrive the feeling of a tight family unit in the main house; he didn’t want the guest wing to become just another space for us to spill over into.

  He also believed guests were happier if they had their own zone to retreat into, and it had its own separate kitchen, sitting room and a terrace, where visitors could sit outside, without being in view of the main house.

  He held mini architecture conferences at Willow Barn from time to time, as well as having a constant stream of eminent international colleagues and clients to stay, so it was all part of his professional world.

  One architecture student – presumably with aspirations to work only on domestic projects for the very rich – had done her whole dissertation on Ham’s theories of guest accommodation.

  I remembered how he had laughed when a copy of it had arrived in the post from Los Angeles one morning. ‘Beyond the Cabana – the Power and Politics of Guest Spaces in the Work of Henry Montecourt’ it had been called.

  But famous though Ham’s opinions on guest wings were, I was so used to being in one of the row of six cell-like children’s rooms which ran along one wide corridor on a mezzanine floor in the main house – all identical and completely separate from the master bedroom suite, which was in a small turret one floor up – I did feel a little cast out of Eden.

  Although one architectural critic had likened Ham’s ‘kiddie corridor’ to a battery henhouse for children, it had achieved its purpose of throwing us all together every night on an equal footing. He’d made the corridor extra wide so it could act as an informal meeting area, but with no seating, to keep things moving and ‘loose’, as he called it. Nothing was accidental at Willow Barn.

  And now, while I was in the much more lavish and adult accommodation of the guest wing, I just didn’t feel so comfortable there. I was also painfully aware of Alex sleeping in the next room.

  It reminded me of one particularly hormonal summer when I had contrived to have the room next to his in the kiddie corridor. None of us had our own dedicated room there, we had a different one every time we came to stay, another aspect of Ham’s overall scheme – and I had been determined to get the one next to Alex that school holidays.

  Then I’d lain awake night after night, knowing he was lying in his bed, right next to me, just on the other side of the wall. I had spent hours with my ear pressed to a wine glass, trying to hear him breathe through the frustrating bricks and mortar.

  I couldn’t, of course, but I’d convinced myself I could and that he was sighing in his sleep because he was dreaming about me. I really had been potty about him.

  What was it, I wondered now, that had made me so in love with him then? OK, so he had been dashing-looking, sporty and fit, but was that really enough to inspire such devotion?

  It probably had more to do with his apparently abundant self-confidence, I decided. To a rather lonely and bewildered girl, already on her third mother, he had seemed so sure of where he stood in the world, something I had been very confused about – and still was.

  After an hour or so lying there in the guest wing, with all those memories flooding back, and trying unsuccessfully to go to sleep, I became gripped by a mad idea.

  I got up and opened my bedroom door as quietly as I could, then tiptoed through the sitting room to the kitchen. I was going to get a wine glass to see if I could hear him breathing through the wall.

  I knew it was crazy, but after all the teenage angst at the dinner table and being thrown back together with Alex, I felt so in touch with the thirteen-year-old me, I just had to do it out of solidarity with her.

  I got the glass out and then decided that as I was up anyway, I might as well make some hot chocolate to try and help myself get off to sleep. I’d just bent down to get the milk out of the fridge – I was wearing a very short Agent Provocateur baby-doll nightie – when I heard a noise behind me.

  I stood up very quickly and turned round to see Alex standing there, his hands over his face, i
n mock horror.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Stella,’ he said. ‘I heard a noise and I just came to see what it was.’

  He was wearing pyjama bottoms and nothing else, and I couldn’t help noticing he still had a really good body, although he had grown some hair on the once perfectly smooth chest and stomach that used to render me so speechless with admiration round the swimming pool.

  He slowly brought his hands down from his face and I could see he was laughing. I started laughing too. Nervous tension, really.

  ‘Are you having a midnight feast?’ he asked, looking determinedly at my face. My nightie was pretty much see-through, as well as ridiculously short. I couldn’t imagine what had possessed me to bring it for a family weekend, it was just the first one that I grabbed out of the drawer. I folded my arms and crossed my legs, which wasn’t easy standing up.

  ‘Um, yeah, I can’t sleep,’ I said. ‘I’m making some hot chocolate. Would you like some?’

  ‘I would, actually,’ he said. ‘I can’t sleep either. It’s a bit weird being back here…’

  ‘… and sleeping in the guest wing?’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s really weird.’

  I smiled at him. I put the milk down on the kitchen worktop and reached up to get the hot chocolate out of the cupboard, when I suddenly realized what I was doing and folded my arms again quickly. Alex put his hands back over his face.

  ‘I’ll go and see if I can find us some bathrobes,’ he said.

  He came back a few minutes later – averting his gaze over one shoulder – and threw me a huge sweatshirt.

  ‘I couldn’t find any dressing gowns, but I found these.’

  I put it on quickly – it came practically to my knees – and looked down to read the slogan on the front. ‘The Architecture of Emotion – Willow Barn Revisited’ it said.

  I burst out laughing. I knew the sweatshirts were left over from a big domestic architecture forum Ham had held here a couple of years before, but they could have been specially printed for my reunion with Alex.

  ‘Your father isn’t kidding, is he?’ he said, smiling down at his own sweatshirt. ‘I remember now, how I used to feel like his puppet down here sometimes, the way he could manipulate us all so brilliantly, just by moving us round in this house and garden.’