Come and Tell Me Some Lies

by Raffaella Barker

  Chapter 4

  Eleanor had left Scotland in a tangled trail of purple silk, fishnet stockings and high-heeled shoes. She was seventeen. She went to Oxford and fell asleep in her finals. A local newspaper printed a picture of her slumbering under the headline ‘A Sleeping Beauty’. Lurking with a hangover in Blackwell’s bookshop, she picked up a volume of poetry by Patrick Lincoln; it froze her spine and she fell in love. She moved to London and took a job as a waitress in Lyons Corner House, and then another, folding scarves in Liberty’s. It was 1962 and she had never seen anyone rock and roll and had only watched television once, when her father had borrowed a set to see the Queen’s coronation. In her dreary bedsit Eleanor made tea by heating water on an iron. She did not know how to boil an egg or slice a loaf of bread; she became very thin and returned to Scotland for a while with a beehive hair-do and a lot of fanciful notions about poets.

  Chapter 5

  Two weeks after the interview, Mummy received a letter from Mary Hall’s Girls School confirming my place for the autumn term. She was thrilled and so was I until a terrible thought occurred to me.

  ‘Will I have to go on Saturdays? I can’t. What about riding?’

  Daddy was reading the paper at the kitchen table with two-year-old Poppy sitting on his knee. He looked up, raising his spectacles on to his forehead. ‘No one goes to school on Saturdays,’ he said. ‘No one works on Saturdays either.’

  Dan appeared from the playroom. ‘It’s Saturday now. It’s sweetie day. When are we going to the shop to get our sweets? I can take Poppy on my own now.’

  ‘No you can’t.’ Mummy heaved the iron door-stop back to its position against the fridge door where it squatted as a sentry against the fiendish cunning of the cats. ‘Four simply isn’t old enough to cross the road. Brodie can take you.’

  ‘I’ll have to go to school on Saturdays.’ Brodie was invisible, perched behind the sheets which hung low over the Aga to dry. ‘When I go to King Henry’s I’ll have to wear shorts and go on Saturdays.’ Brodie had also just passed his scholarship exam and, with relentless dolour, was not looking forward to his new school.

  Daddy folded the newspaper. ‘I’m going for a drive to the coast. I may have fish and chips for lunch …’ and he let his sentence trail as children engulfed him, baying to be included.

  It took hours putting on coats, and in the middle Flook returned from his dig in the garden. Flook was nine and had for a year been engrossed in a project he started at school to discover the history of Mildney. He was breathless with excitement. ‘Look what I’ve found. I think it’s prehistoric.’ He held up a skull the size of his own head.

  ‘It’s a goat,’ said Dan immediately, and Flook sighed. ‘Of course it’s a goat, but it might be a prehistoric goat, or from Roman times.’

  Daddy held the skull up to the light. ‘We shall start our museum with this,’ he said. ‘Flook, you have the bones of a great archaeologist; now let’s get the hell out of here and go to Cromer.’

  Daddy was never late and he hated dawdling. Mummy found it impossible to leave the house on time, and whenever they went out together Daddy would sit in the car for twenty minutes revving the engine and shouting, while Mummy rushed through the house muttering ‘I’m coming, you silly sod’ under her breath.

  We waited for her in the car. Brodie and I slid along the shiny leather of the front seat to make room for Flook. Mummy came out of the house without a coat. ‘I’ll stay here. All those people are coming this evening and I’ve got so much to do. Have a lovely time, darlings.’

  We bumped down the drive, Dan and Poppy kneeling up to look out of the back window. ‘Dobe’s coming too,’ said Dan, as we accelerated out of the village. Our anarchic Dobermann had a private mission to outpace the car, and he always tried to come too. He hurtled past the Mercedes as Daddy slowed down and, saliva foaming at his jaws, stood triumphant in the middle of the road.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ sighed Daddy, and opened a door. Dobe scrambled in, licking faces politely, and positioned himself with his head resting on Daddy’s shoulder to help him navigate.

  We had fish and chips, then filed into Daddy’s favourite junk shop. ‘It’s Liza’s birthday today. We must find something to give her this evening. Poppy shall choose it,’ said Daddy. Liza had once been Daddy’s wife, before he knew Mummy, and their three children, Dominic, Helen and Theresa, were all grown-up. They called Daddy ‘Patrick’ and they didn’t feel like siblings to us; they were as old as Mummy and had children of our age.

  Liza came often to Mildney, driving perilously on her orange moped and clad in a coordinating cagoule. She always brought a bottle of gin, telling us, ‘This is mother’s ruin, and your mother and I are longing to be ruined.’ She was funny and kind, we liked the way she danced in the Drinking Room and teased Daddy. He called her ‘darling heart’ and said, ‘Come and tell me some lies, dear Liza.’

  Poppy chose a teapot in the shape of a Christmas pudding. Daddy was impressed. ‘My love, you have exquisite taste,’ he said to his tiny daughter, and we left the shop, pausing to purchase a rusty colander for Mummy.

  Brodie, Flook and I got out of the car on our drive. The boys vanished to go fishing and I plodded through the dusk to feed my pony Shalimar. Yanking tufts of hay from the bulging bale, I was inspired. ‘If there is Saturday school, I won’t tell Mummy.’ Pleased with this plan, I shuffled down to Shalimar’s field with a wedge of dusty hay.

  Liza arrived at tea-time, her face glowing pink from her forty-mile moped ride. She hugged Mummy. ‘Eleanor, this is a treat. I’m sure I’m too old for a tea-party, I think I’m sixty-one, but I can’t quite remember.’

  Taking off her crash helmet she dragged her fingers through her dark blonde hair and lit a cigarette. Liza looked ageless. She had deep cracks round her mouth and eyes from laughing, but they almost vanished when she was happy, and she usually seemed happy. She loved coming to Mildney because she lived alone. ‘I’m thirsty for conversation. Tell me a joke,’ she begged Dan, but he shook his head. ‘I’m eating cake,’ he mumbled. Brodie and Flook were still fishing, so she sat down with me and fumbled in her pocket for a letter. ‘It’s from Helen and the girls. Do you remember Zoe and Vinnie, my granddaughters?’

  I nodded. ‘Of course she does,’ said Daddy. ‘They are her nieces, in a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Half-nieces actually,’ I replied, and Liza laughed.

  ‘I suppose they are; Helen is your half-sister, after all. How nice to have a family to extend at will.’

  Brodie and Flook appeared. ‘Dominic’s here,’ said Brodie. ‘He’s brought a box of drink.’

  ‘Is this a family reunion?’ Liza raised her eyebrows and Mummy laughed.

  ‘No. Only Dominic, he wanted to surprise you on your birthday.’

  Liza and Daddy went through to the Drinking Room and Flook and I rolled our eyes. ‘I suppose they have to celebrate Liza’s birthday,’ said Flook, ‘but I wish they didn’t have to get drunk to do it.’

  Mummy frowned at him. ‘Don’t be mean. Liza loves parties, and she wanted to be here with all of us for her birthday. Dominic has simply come to see his mother, and a few other people will be here after you’ve gone to bed, so try and be pleasant, please.’

  Brodie, Flook and I glared back at her. ‘You know we hate Drinking Evenings,’ I muttered, but Mummy didn’t hear me; she was helping Poppy down from the table where she sat marooned among the debris of tea.

  Chapter 6

  Patrick wrote his first poem when he was nine. As a small boy he read precociously and widely. He spent his lunch money on poems and, inspired, wrote his own with great delight. When he was eighteen he sent a poem to David Archer, a publisher with a tiny bookshop in Parton Street. Archer invited him to tea. Nervously entering the chaotic, crammed shop, Patrick saw before him a pale young man swaying high upon a stepladder. ‘Be an angel, hand me that hammer,’ said Archer and Patrick did so. Archer brought out Patrick’s first volume of poetry and introduced h
im to T.S. Eliot. Eliot asked Patrick to send some poems to him at Faber, and a few days later a letter arrived confirming that Patrick was to be published by them. At twenty, Patrick had leapt over the straight blue line which in those days took young men from public school to Oxford and then into publishing and being published. He became famous.

  Like Eleanor but twenty years earlier, Liza found Patrick’s poems in a bookshop, read them and fell in love. She wrote to him, offering money and an escape from Japan, where he was teaching at a university when war broke out. He accepted and sailed across the Pacific to California where Liza met him. They began a love affair which was to span almost two decades and produce Dominic, Helen and Theresa.

  Patrick and Liza rarely lived together, and never married. During a lull in their relationship Patrick met an ingénue called Nancy with a fleece of blonde hair and round blue eyes like baubles on a Christmas tree. They got married and left London for a cottage in Sussex where the roses were overblown and the tap spewed sand as well as water. Nancy wanted to write, but she wanted to have babies more. Patrick forbade her to become pregnant. Nancy defied him. He drank a bottle of whisky to fortify himself, then forced her to sit in a scalding bath while he poured gin down her protesting throat. She was young and scared and she forgave him. He tortured her, a maniacal curiosity roused in him to see how much she would take.

  One morning he called her into the garden. Sacrificial in her white nightdress, Nancy stood in the orchard against a bowed apple tree. Patrick picked up an apple from the grass and placed it on her head. He took a bow and arrow and, assuring her that he had been practising, shot the apple through the core. She could take no more. Days later Nancy ran away into the arms of Patrick’s best friend, and they disappeared. Raging and bereft, Patrick left the house in pursuit of her. He didn’t shut the front door or turn off the wireless. He went and never came back. He drove up and down England searching for Nancy but no one dared tell him where or with whom she had gone. In desperation he went to see her mother in Harlow. She tried to shut the door in his face, but he forced his way into her kitchen. Seeing his grief and his determination, Nancy’s mother relented a little and made him a cup of tea.

  ‘Where is Nancy?’

  ‘I cannot tell you. I will never tell you.’

  Patrick glowered and lit a cigarette. He looked up at the glinting litter of china and silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece. Propped against a small mauve shepherdess was an envelope. Patrick was sitting at the far end of the room but he could make out the familiar shape of Nancy’s name. Her mother made tea and talked stiltedly of the route back to London and the weather. Patrick answered, his eyes fixed on the envelope, straining to read the address. Nancy’s mother saw the direction of his gaze and continued to talk. Patrick left. He never found Nancy.

  Patrick returned to Liza, but the affair dwindled and by the time he met Eleanor it had been reduced to an uneasy friendship. Liza sustained cool hostilities during Eleanor’s pregnancy, but when Va Va was born, unbent a little.

  In the years that followed, the tangled relationship between Liza, Eleanor and Patrick unravelled and the two women became close friends, excluding Patrick from their long late-night conversations. ‘I could never live with him, not even when the children were small. I don’t know how you can remain sane,’ Liza said to Eleanor time and time again. When Patrick dragged her from parties by her arm, her collar, her hair, and threw wine over men she spoke to, Eleanor vowed she would leave him for ever. But she stayed.

  Chapter 7

  Every moment that I was not at school or asleep I spent with Shalimar. He had come on my ninth birthday, a black furry creature, roses latched by their thorns to his thick mane. His ears pricked up when he first saw me and his eyes gleamed with what I took to be love but which turned out to be malevolence. My own pony. For two years I was content. I rode across stubble fields and through woods. I schooled him over my home-made jumps and pampered him with hoof manicures, shampoos and hour-long grooming sessions until his barrel-shaped body gleamed. But Shalimar was too small to contain my sprawling equine obsession, and when I had performed every possible stunt on him, including swimming him across the mill pond and riding home facing backwards, I wanted more.

  Mummy took me to meet a friend of hers who had a stable full of racehorses and hunters. Sophy Lane agreed that I should come and help muck out each weekend in exchange for rides on these peerless steeds. Sophy was the zenith of horsy glamour. She wore a headscarf knotted at the nape of her neck and she walked with a swagger. Her eyelids were sapphire-tinted, her lips a swoop of pearly pink. I longed to look like her but lacked the courage to affect a headscarf or make-up except in the privacy of my bedroom. Sophy’s husband Boots was a thin dark man, curved like a riding crop. He strutted through the stables in his yellow cowboy chaps, making sleazy jokes and smoking untipped cigarettes one after another after another.

  The stables were at Sophy’s parents’ house, a dour greystone mansion with ranks of windows hooded by pale shutters. Sophy’s mother, Lady Warton, short, stout, with white hair and a pointed voice, came riding every day decked in spotless jodhpurs and a perfectly tied cravat.

  Their ordered lives, the horses’ ordered lives, the regular hours and the strict routine dazzled me. At the stables I mucked out five looseboxes in a row and thought of home, wondering why we couldn’t keep our rooms tidy or even make our beds each day. Mummy patiently listened as I poured out every detail of my passion, but when I tried to tell Daddy he said, ‘I have never found the conversation of horses even mildly entertaining. You are like your Mummy, you speak their language.’ I was sorry not to be able to discuss my dressage test with him, but at least Mummy was interested.

  Daddy shuddered and slunk out of the kitchen when we started talking about horses. He unwrapped blue tissue paper from bottles of wine and went into the Drinking Room. Mummy bit her lip and sighed.

  Much later, in the middle of the night, I woke up. The landing shook as someone lurched against the banisters. ‘You fucking bitch. Get out of this house now. Do you hear me?’

  A throbbing scream echoed along the corridors. I knew it was Mummy; I wanted to help her but my limbs had turned to dough. Glass shattered in the hall, I thought of the animals’ soft paws and winced. Mummy tiptoed into my room.

  ‘Are you all right?’ She sat on my bed; touching her face I felt tears warm on her cheeks and I hated Daddy. ‘Where’s he gone?’

  Mummy laughed shakily. ‘To get his gun, but I’ve hidden it.’

  I clutched at her arm, fear holding my breath. ‘Why does he do this? Why does he want to shoot you?’

  ‘He’s mad when he’s drunk.’ Mummy wiped her eyes on the sheets. ‘He doesn’t mean it, but a demon takes over when he drinks.’

  Suddenly he was in the room. ‘Eleanor, get out of that child’s bed and find me my goddam gun.’

  I burst into tears. ‘Go away, Daddy, don’t be horrible to Mummy.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake go to bed, Patrick,’ Mummy begged. ‘You’ll wake all the children.’

  He came nearer, I became frantic. ‘Go away, go away, I hate you.’

  Daddy backed off, cursing. Mummy and I heard his footsteps retreating and his bedroom door slam. Mummy sighed, ‘Thank God. He’s gone to bed. I’m going to take Poppy up to Louise’s house tonight. I’ll be back in the morning.’

  Louise was calm and made strong tea. I wanted to go too, to sleep in Louise’s safe house at the other end of the village. ‘Can I come?’

  ‘Darling, don’t worry. You know he would never hurt any of you. He loves you. He loves me too, but I’m not spending the night dodging his drunken fury.’

  Mummy and Poppy were back for breakfast, but the next Sunday morning Mummy wasn’t there. Poppy was.

  ‘Where’s Mummy?’ Their bedroom smelt metallic and stuffy when I opened the door, and Daddy lay groaning beneath a heap of tumbled blankets.

  ‘What time is it? Seven. Jesus Christ. She’s in hospital.’
<
br />   Nausea clawed me and I marched up to the bed and leaned over. ‘Why is she in hospital, Daddy?’

  He covered his face with his hands. ‘She fell down the stairs. An ambulance came and took her to hospital. Now get off my back.’

  He’s guilty. Very guilty, I thought, and phoned Louise, straining to keep calm.

  ‘Your Mum’s fine,’ she said. ‘She got a black eye falling down the stairs and we sent her to hospital in case her nose was broken. She’ll be back today.’

  I knew she hadn’t fallen down the stairs, and I wanted Daddy to know that I knew. So I refused to make him a cup of tea or any breakfast. He had a front tooth missing and a swollen face. It served him right. We drove to the hospital to collect Mummy.

  ‘Are we having another baby?’ asked Dan on the way.

  ‘No we are not,’ said Daddy.

  Flook kicked Daddy’s seat as we drove. ‘You shouldn’t fight with Mummy. You’ll be sorry, you know.’