Come and Tell Me Some Lies

by Raffaella Barker

  ‘Daddy, can we have biscuits for pudding and then go and buy some sweets at Mr Cardew’s?’

  ‘Anything, loves, anything,’ he agreed absently, leaning over the white, cold washbasin in the cloakroom as he shaved.

  After breakfast he kissed their sticky faces and shut himself in the study. The children knew they must not disturb him, but would creep to the door and crouch outside on the flagstones, listening as he played back poems he had read into a tape recorder. He sounded different when he talked to them, and Va Va asked why.

  Patrick looked grave, but he winked and said, ‘Now my love, you are getting serious.’ She had no idea what he meant.

  The study was exciting. It was warm and smelt of cigarettes; it was usually forbidden territory, piled high with books and papers. Va Va sat on Patrick’s knee and talked into the tape recorder while Brodie wrote wispy letters in a notebook. Patrick liked the children’s interruptions, but one day, when the milkman, the man who drove the Sunshine Bread van and the butcher had all waved cheery good-mornings to him through the window, he took his books and his green chair upstairs and made the big spare room his study.

  He hated talking to anyone during the day. He once went to the village shop, and only once. Mr Cardew, the shopkeeper, jaunty in his Camp Coffee apron, greeted him with delight. ‘Mr Lincoln, come for some gaspers, have you?’ He rubbed his hands together, beaming. ‘Can’t write those poems without something to light the fire, can we?’ and he cackled mightily.

  Patrick was horrified. He never went to the shop again, but drove five miles to Aylthorpe to buy his cigarettes.

  Chapter 21

  Sasha Warton and I were in the same stream for all classes. To my relief we became friends in the maths class, where my confusion at the problems set was as deep as my surprise at finding myself in division one. For a time my academic career flourished, and I played in the lacrosse team and swam in the swimming team. I conceived a satisfactory notion of myself as prefect material, and sustained it by always standing up when staff came into a room and by smiling winningly at anyone who addressed me.

  Sasha’s parents were divorced. She lived with her mother during the week, in a small, very clean house near the school. Sometimes I stayed the night with her, revelling in the decadence of central heating and a duvet on the bed. Best of all I avoided the long bus journey home and the punishing dawn rush to catch the bus to school from Aylthorpe. I was envious of Sasha’s ordered existence. At weekends, her father collected her from school and drove her to his house. It was near Mildney, so he dropped me off on the way. This was a big worry. Mummy told me it was polite to ask him in, so I did, every time. He always said no, but I was terrified that one day he would say yes, and see how very different our kitchen was from the shiny bright new one I had seen in his house.

  Richard Warton was the only son of Lord and Lady Warton. He lived in a moated red-brick mansion a mile from Mildney and drove a blue sports car. An admirer of the arts, he filled the medieval rooms of his house with contemporary paintings, and textiles woven from the wool of his own sheep. He invited my father to give a reading there. Mummy and Daddy took me with them, and we arrived at Felt Hall in Mummy’s mini-van, puffing black billows of smoke like a smouldering dragon. I was very pleased that my parents were visiting a school friend’s parents, but my knees shook with fear in case Daddy shouted at Richard Warton. In the Great Hall Mummy and I pressed together, embarrassed and nervous in the yawning space. We moved towards a wall, its polished panelling scarred by deep scratches. I traced my fingers down the wounds, imagining marauding knights hundreds of years ago.

  Beside us was an open fireplace surrounded by delicate blue and white tiles, and in the near distance a squad of grey plastic chairs huddled in the middle of the flagstoned floor. Daddy sat at a table facing the chairs. Whispering and scraping the floor, a tide of scrubbed women and overweight men seeped on to the chairs, corduroy-covered bottoms overflowing. Others, hesitating over where to sit, caused an eddy in the stream before plunging to a chair stranded on the perimeter of the group. Some of these people I recognized as other parents from school, and pride, mixed with resentment at their gazing at Daddy as though he were an exhibit, choked my lungs.

  Richard Warton sat next to Daddy at the little table, leaning towards him and talking while people sat down. I watched Daddy’s face anxiously, waiting for his brow to furrow and his mouth to turn down at one corner in anger. But he was laughing. He put his cigarette out in his glass. Richard leapt up to find him an ashtray.

  When all the chairs were full, and some people were standing at the back, Richard stood up. His grey wavy hair curled down to his shoulders, and he wore brown plus-fours and thick patterned socks. He looked like Lord Emsworth showing off the Empress of Blandings. Mummy and I, sitting together at the front, giggled nervously.

  ‘We are delighted to have with us this evening Patrick Lincoln, one of the greatest poets of this century. Many of you may know him already as a neighbour, for Patrick lives a mile from here at Mildney with his family,’ and Richard beamed a big-toothed white smile and sat down.

  Daddy stood up. He came round to the front of the table, leaned against it and crossed his feet. ‘This is a beautiful house,’ he said. ‘Now let’s get this reading lark over and done with. I shall read to you from a new poem.’ Daddy reached into the top pocket of his jacket and took out a notebook. The audience tittered uneasily, stopping abruptly when Daddy raised his cupped hand to shoulder height. He began to read.

  Daddy’s voice thundered, echoing across the room. He glared at the page he was reading, and his words rolled slowly out. He read for a long time, perhaps twenty minutes, from one poem, and no one moved or sneezed or scratched. When he stopped, I found my nose and eyes smarting with tears. Daddy stared across the room. There was silence, then clapping began, and although there were no more than fifty people, the clapping was a crescendoed roar. Daddy and Richard left the table and walked through into the next room.

  ‘I can’t believe he read that poem here,’ Mummy whispered to me. ‘He said he was going to read some children’s poems and one or two about Norfolk.’

  ‘Perhaps he thought it was a good place to practise it,’ I whispered back. ‘Do you think they understood it? I didn’t.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if they did or not,’ said Mummy, crouching beside me and reaching beneath the chair for her bag. ‘Your father wants people to listen to and enjoy his poems; he never cares if they understand them or not.’

  I listened to the comments around us. ‘Quite remarkable, I need a drink after that’; ‘Never heard anything like it, what did Richard say his name was?’

  A woman I had never seen before, with a strident, horsy voice, was proudly announcing, ‘Patrick and his wife Eleanor are great friends of ours. Of course, the man’s a genius.’ I craned, hoping the woman might add, ‘Charming children, inherited his genius apparently,’ but she was gurgling with echoing laughter at something her consort had said.

  ‘Well, everyone here enjoyed it,’ I whispered back to Mummy. ‘They didn’t move for twenty minutes.’ I stood up, my pride in Daddy making me feel tall, sophisticated and confident.

  A cream carpet as thick as a lawn lay across the drawing-room floor and the walls were spattered with paintings of black blobs. Daddy leaned against the mantelpiece, talking to a woman with thin red hair. She was smoking a pipe.

  ‘Are you, in fact, a man? Could you be the reincarnation of my great hero Sherlock Holmes?’ I heard him ask her, and my ballooning pride deflated.

  The woman laughed. ‘No. This is a pipe, not a way of life. I’m married to Richard, actually.’

  ‘Ah, well, Holmes would never have done that, would he?’ A martial light sparked in Daddy’s eye. Mummy, tilting a glass of wine precariously towards the carpet, struggled through the tightly knit mob to his side.

  ‘Let’s get the hell out of here, Ellie. I will not talk to these people,’ he whispered to her. But Mummy was talking to Ric
hard’s wife, asking about their recent wedding, encouraging her to make light of Daddy’s remarks. Mummy leaned on a small wooden table and sipped her wine. A man with grey hair came up to Daddy and asked him to sign a book. Mummy and Sonia, the wife, were talking about roses, their voices melting in the cloud of conversation and smoke. A splintering crash broke like ice across the room. The tiny table Mummy had been leaning on collapsed, and she and her glass of red wine spilt on to the creamy carpet. Her black-clad legs splayed against pale fluff; next to her a wine-dark pool seeped. Mummy didn’t know what to apologize for or what to try and salvage. The table was a heap of jagged wood. I felt her embarrassment as Sonia poured salt over the carpet, and it reached me over my own hot-faced humiliation.

  Daddy laughed, one huge ‘Ha ha’, and knocked back his own wine, saying gently, ‘Eleanor, Eleanor, when will you learn to behave?’ He took Mummy’s hand, smiling as he turned to Richard. ‘I must apologize for my wife, and to cover her shame with a veil of diplomacy I shall take her home.’ He was laughing, and Mummy, wet with wine and speechless with mortification, mumbled ‘Of course we will pay for the table’ as we left. I hung my head, blushing, too humiliated to catch anyone’s eye.

  Outside, stars swooped low in the black autumn sky and the air was heavy with the dank reptilian scent of the moat. ‘Your Mummy is wonderful,’ Daddy said to me as we got into the car. ‘She got us out of there in less than five minutes, and what’s more, we won’t be asked back.’ He was gleeful, driving very fast along the tiny lanes, the headlamps cleaving a path between dark, heaped hedges.

  At home, the boys were watching television and Marmalade had knocked over a bottle of milk in the kitchen, purring with deep satisfaction as her pink tongue lapped up the puddle on the table. Mummy relaxed and laughed too when Daddy told the story to the boys, and I was left lonely, washed up on a dirty shore of embarrassment from which I longed to be rescued.

  Chapter 22

  August 1987

  On a hot summer morning, Dad arrived at my front door in London wearing dark glasses and carrying a small black suitcase. He looked suntanned and healthy, and it was hard to believe that he had ever been ill.

  ‘Have you got a passport?’ he asked.

  I made tea and took it on to the balcony with its view of cars inching along the A40. ‘Yes, why?’

  He looked at his watch. ‘We have precisely two hours before the plane leaves for Rome. I should like to take you with me.’

  Scattering clothes and toothbrushes, books and shoes, I spiralled around the flat, packing nonsense in my excitement. Dad had been invited to read at the Rome Poetry Festival, and Mum was too afraid of flying to go with him. I was on my way to Rome for the first time since infancy.

  We arrived at the Hotel George Washington in time for a silvered sorbet in the walled garden. We sat in the shade of a faded pink umbrella, and Dad lifted his sunglasses from his nose and beamed his delight. ‘This is the nearest you or I will ever get to heaven,’ he said. I squirmed with pleasure, happy to be in Rome with my father, doing the sort of thing that other people did. We took a taxi and walked through the still, hot gardens of the Villa Giulia where twisted pines and plush cypress trees canopied us, suffocating the blaring horns and screeching brakes of Rome.

  In the evening we went to watch athletics. It was dark when we reached Mussolini’s stadium. Neo-classical statues surrounded the arena, lit blue and holy by tungsten arc lights. We ate hot dogs and drank beer, squashed together on a bench in the midst of pooping hooters and wildly excited Italians. Looking down at the cinder-red track where athletes pranced and jogged, I shivered with the presence of long ago, when gladiators fought to the death. I was choosing a random athlete to throw to the lions when Dad gripped my arm. ‘Look, there he is. It’s Moses.’ A towering, gleaming man, his skin polished mink-dark, skipped and hopped past. The crowd surged, rolling to its feet to honour the American hurdler, and Dad sat rapt, silent.

  A starting-pistol cracked, and Moses floated over a chain of white hurdles, tilting his long body forward. Over the line, he flashed a wide white smile and three girls behind me screamed a fanfare of bliss. Dad was as carried away as they were, tears coursing down his face as he clapped and clapped.

  The poetry reading took place at sunset on the following evening. In a glade in a garden a great platform had been erected. A row of poets sat drinking to one side, swaying on their seats like a throng of sea-lions. At a spotlit lectern a blonde with heaving décolletage introduced them in breathless Italian. Dad stood up; the other sea-lions bayed approval. He moved to the lectern and read his poems in English. When he stopped, red roses rained on him from the applauding audience. Dad picked one up and gave it to the blonde, who pressed it down into her cleavage. Everyone liked that. The poets clapped and the crowd cheered. I crumpled in my seat, and realized how nervous I had been.

  Dad was having dinner with an old friend, a tall blind poet with the hooked nose and white face of a snowy owl. They took me with them to a tiny restaurant and I became very drunk. They did not notice until we left, when I stumbled helplessly. Dad and his friend grasped an elbow each and pulled me home, their walking-sticks tapping an accompaniment to our weaving progress.

  In the morning, Dad was unsympathetic about my throbbing head. ‘Poor love,’ he said. ‘But you know, it happens to everyone the first time they come to Rome. It’s the air as much as the wine.’ He scarcely looked up from his paper and his foaming coffee. ‘To cleanse your soul we shall visit some churches today.’ I ate a brioche, a taste of almond air, and suppressed my self-pity.

  Dad and I flew back to London after a day spent between the Etruscan Museum in the Villa Giulia and La Rinascente, a jewel of a department store. As a souvenir I had a black bikini; Dad had a tiny Etruscan statue with a vast penis.

  Chapter 23

  It was Saturday. Brodie and Flook, who had now joined him at King Henry’s School, met us at the bus-stop in Norwich after lessons and Dad drove us all to Liza’s house in Suffolk.

  The Glade stood beyond a quarry. We drove off the road, through gates topped with barbed wire, and followed a sandy track past great cranes, arrested, swinging silent in the wind until work would begin again on Monday. Yellow diggers perched dusty at the edge of deep pits, long rootling necks drooping like tulips. Brodie and Flook twisted their heads in fascination until the last scrap of rusted metal was lost from sight and we came to a green thicket, a tiny island marooned in the sandy desert. In the middle of the thicket was the Glade, a little house made big by the way Liza lived in it. We walked in through the Book Room. Even the ashtrays stood on stacks of books. More books spilled across the floor, covering the carpet, sliding, jostling, flapping their leaves in the draught, vying to be read.

  Liza had a big round table in a room where you couldn’t see out of the window because of the roses thrusting their way in. We children had supper and then wound through meandering paths in the garden to the Summer Palace, a concrete air-raid shelter transformed by Liza’s green fingers into a tumbling scented bower of honeysuckle and wisteria. Inside the Summer Palace a television flickered on to a green leather sofa.

  All Liza’s children were there that weekend. Dominic had shed his suit and donned a pair of mud-encrusted boots, and was building a trellis outside the back door. ‘Brodie, come and give me a hand,’ he yelled when he saw us, and Brodie scrambled through a hedge to help him. Helen and Theresa sat with Mummy in the garden, glasses of green-white wine in their hands, shaded from the evening sun by decaying straw hats they had found heaped in the kitchen. They looked like three sisters, all pale-skinned, dark-haired and slender. Theresa’s eyes were the same blue as Mummy’s and she sat forward on her chair, gesturing with her hands to explain something just as Mummy always did. Helen leaned back and turned her face up to the sun. ‘I’m so glad to be here again,’ she said. ‘I want to move back.’

  Helen lived in Ireland and I had not seen her or her children for several years; Zoe and Vinnie were hard to r
ecognize at first. Zoe was fifteen, her curling dark hair fell down her back and she looked like a gypsy princess with her gold hooped earrings and mass of clattering bracelets. I laughed when she said, ‘Do you realize that even though I’m six months older than you, you are my aunt and so is Poppy?’

  Vinnie, tongue-tied and confused by her ever-increasing family, stuck her thumb in her mouth and crouched on the grass at Helen’s feet. ‘Vinnie shouldn’t suck her thumb,’ whispered Dan. ‘She’s twelve, and when I was seven Mummy said mine would drop off if I went on sucking it.’

  We closed the curtains in the Summer Palace so the grownups couldn’t see Zoe and me smoking cigarettes. I pretended to inhale, the acrid smoke prickling my mouth.

  Vinnie came in, a goldfish writhing and slipping on a wooden spoon in her hand. ‘Fish soup tonight,’ she giggled, and we ran out aghast. Around Liza’s mossy pond little orange chips fluttered and flipped. Vinnie had scooped all the baby fish out of the water. We rescued them, our hands stroking the earth, trying to find every one in the gathering dusk.

  In the house, Daddy and Liza stood talking at the fireplace. Music swooned from a pink tape recorder. Mummy was upstairs putting Dan and Poppy to bed. ‘Is Liza your mother?’ Dan asked her.

  ‘No. She’s Helen’s mother.’ Mummy tucked Poppy up and took Dan to brush his teeth. ‘Liza’s my friend and Daddy’s friend.’

  ‘How was Daddy old enough to have Helen and Dominic and Theresa?’ Dan was determined to understand his family tree. I had been defeated trying to explain to him earlier. ‘Ask Mummy. She told me,’ I had suggested finally, exasperated by my lack of vocabulary for such complexities.

  Zoe and I, Brodie, Vinnie and Flook were allowed to stay up later at Liza’s than at home, and we played Scrabble in the kitchen, interrupted by shuffling adults.