Even Imogen admired Daddy. She came to stay one weekend and Daddy gave her a book about medieval courtship. ‘Tell me, my dear, do you dream of salvation in shining armour?’ he asked her, and I sighed, exasperated by his capacity for nonsense.
Imogen was captivated. ‘Do all poets talk like your father? Will he write a poem about me?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I snapped and dragged her up to my room to try on dresses for a party.
Chapter 41
Patrick rushed in from the back yard banging the doors, pushing through with an armful of wood for the fire.
‘There is nothing, nothing, between here and the North Pole.’ His breath puffed white clouds in the cold air and he escaped into his warm study to work. Eleanor stayed, feeding the children, feeding the hens, feeding the dogs and cats and never seeing a soul. There was no money to pay a babysitter, so she could never leave the house alone unless she put Va Va, Brodie and Flook under Patrick’s vague surveillance.
The day she went to Norwich to the hairdresser they found a tin of purple paint. Patrick lay in the yard beneath the Mercedes, the bulk of three coats wedging him secure from the whistling wind. Brodie hit the paint-pot lid with a hammer and a jet of foaming violet spurted in his face. Laughing, he smeared dirty hands across his eyes, spreading purple into his hair. ‘Let’s paint the pump,’ suggested Va Va, and they set to work. The wind shrieked, but they were silent at their toil. Patrick, suspicious too late, came out from under the car to see where the children were. Flook was investigating the last of the paint and upended the tin over his boots.
‘This is a goddam mess,’ Patrick yelled. ‘Your Mummy is going to be very cross unless we can clear the whole lot up.’ He swept Flook into the house, a bright trickle of paint following them, and stood him in the kitchen sink. Va Va and Brodie scrubbed the pump, mauve water flowing at their feet. Wet through, they shivered, brushes clutched in numb hands, waiting for Patrick to tell them they had done enough.
He came out, followed by Flook wrapped in a towel. ‘Now this is good work,’ he puffed on his cigarette, ‘but Mummy will see the paint.’ Three pairs of anxious eyes implored. He laughed. ‘We’ll have to paint black over it so it looks like it did before.’
The pump looked smart with a new coat of black paint. Eleanor returned, Va Va saw her coming up the drive and shouted a warning to Patrick.
‘Quick, quick,’ he yelled, mock horror in his voice, ‘into your places.’
The children shuffled on to their chairs, shifting plates on the table so that each of them had bread and butter and a cup of milk in front of them when Eleanor came in.
Chapter 42
Much changed that year, especially Brodie’s and Flook’s hairstyles. Each week brought a new patch of bald scalp to gleam beneath peaks of rainbowed hair. Mummy walked into the bathroom during a bleaching session. Flook, bare to the waist, sat on a chair in front of the mirror, his hair half white and half invisible, tucked away in neat silver foil pouches. Poppy and Dan perched on the edge of the bath, holding strips of foil and watching, absorbed, as Brodie worked.
‘Jesus Christ! What are you doing to him?’ Mummy screamed. Brodie jumped, spilling peroxide in a glut across Flook’s naked shoulders. Flook leapt up roaring. Dan and Poppy flung down their foil and slunk out guiltily.
‘This stuff is agony. Get it off me, get it off me!’ Flook plunged his torso into the bath.
Behind him, Mummy rocked back and forth in rage, eyes narrowed, her lips tight and puckered white. ‘How can you be so stupid? Thank God it’s the summer holidays. Do you realize that in term-time you would be expelled for this, quite apart from the unutterable damage you are doing to your hair. And it looks ghastly.’ She stalked out, slamming the door so hard that one of the panels fell out.
‘I don’t see what she’s making such a fuss about.’ Brodie continued to unwrap the foil parcels. Flook sat still, tensed like an old lady at the hairdresser’s. ‘We’ve been dyeing our hair for months.’
‘I don’t think she’s ever really taken it in before,’ replied Flook.
The boys told me about this row the next day. I had been out. Suddenly I was out a lot. Imogen’s inexhaustible social energy and her desire to have someone to giggle with made her invite me to the many parties she was asked to that summer. I stayed with her for a weekend which grew into a week, enjoying the world away from my family and absorbing luxury with heady greed.
Everything at Imogen’s house operated like clockwork. Her mother drifted into the walled garden carrying a trug, and beheaded limp roses while Imogen and I lay by the stinging blue pool, inhaling the scent of honeysuckle mingled with chlorine. Delicious lunches of cold salmon and crisp salad appeared like magic at one o’clock, and no one ever came and told us to feed the hens or muck out the stables. Imogen’s brother Edward was given a little blue car and he taught me to drive it, trundling through a hayfield, weaving erratically between vast cotton-reel bales.
At night I lay in a sprigged bower, stretching my limbs over stiff linen sheets and looking up at the ruby canopy of a four-poster bed. I wallowed in soft comfort and thought of my room at home: the slanted ceiling dotted with Blu-Tack where my horse pictures had fallen down; the bed, its chipped paint surrounding a gaping hole in the wickerwork, excavated, I was sure, by busy mice as I slept. I thought of the cobwebs rattling with the last throes of flies, of the bathroom where the taps in the basin had not worked since I was four, and of the fridge full of nothing more sustaining than a pool of milk spilt from an overturned bottle. I tried to think of something my home had in common with Imogen’s; some small corner of it which mirrored the smooth, structured existence at Wallby Hall. There, flowers swanned on graceful stems above gleaming polished tables, and a lady in a blue nylon coat, a yellow duster in her pocket, vaccumed and scrubbed every morning. At home there were dog hairs on the carpet and springs rearing like serpents from the sofas. Mummy picked bunches of wild flowers, thrusting cow parsley and hogweed into buckets and urns and placing them, towering and sweet-scented, on a mantelpiece where they stayed until they had become ghosts, skeletal and colourless, with the scent of old hay. No one cleaned our house. Mummy once had a vacuum cleaner, a green globe which coasted proudly along the landing for a week after Trixie had donated it. But Mummy failed to love it, and one day negligence toppled it down the stairs and on to the flagstones in the hall with a splintering crunch, followed by a high-pitched moan. After that it would only exhale air, and soon became a home for Martians in the playroom.
The only element of Imogen’s house which faintly echoed Mildney was the library. Imogen’s grandfather had collected books, and his passion was ranked neatly from floor to ceiling in a high panelled room. Imogen never went in there, dismissing the books as ‘really ancient and dull’, but I loved it. It reminded me of home, where every corridor and room was panelled with books piled one upon another.
At lunch, talking to Imogen’s father about his books as his moustache bounced above his masticating jaws, I oozed superiority when he said, ‘Of course, the library is very fine, but nothing to the one your father must have.’
‘Well, we haven’t got a room full of books like your one,’ I answered cautiously, longing but not daring to lie, ‘but there are a lot there, and I think Daddy has read every one of them, and Mummy too.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Imogen’s father, and the moustache sat inert for a second while he wiped it with his napkin, like a good dog waiting for praise. ‘I only read the Shooting Times myself, but they always say “horses for courses”, don’t they?’ The moustache shot off again in pursuit of a spoonful of summer pudding.
Chapter 43
Filing into the Drinking Room to give Patrick a good-night kiss on a Saturday, the children lined up in front of him.
‘My angel, thou art precious,’ he said. Va Va squirmed. Ben and Joe, the boys’ best friends, were staying and she was sure that their father didn’t talk like Patrick.
‘Talk properly,
Daddy,’ Brodie whispered, and Patrick let his shoulders droop.
‘Dear God. Is there no freedom from policing in a man’s own home?’ He smiled an annoying soppy smile and stroked Brodie’s hair. ‘Brave child. Thou wilt break my heart.’ Brodie and Va Va sighed. It was useless. Patrick winked at Ben. ‘Tell me, young man, exactly how old are you now?’
‘Seven,’ said Ben.
‘Seven. It is my belief that all children should remain seven for ever and ever.’
‘What about me, Daddy?’ Va Va interrupted, anxious. ‘I’m eight.’
Patrick hugged her. ‘You, heart of my heart, are a sophisticate, and sophisticates cannot be controlled.’ Va Va was pleased by this. She savoured the word, whispering it as she went up to bed. It was a good word, it sounded like lace and scent and cigarettes. It sounded so feminine that Va Va fancied the word wore lipstick and had long curling red hair.
Patrick looked at Eleanor as she ushered the children out. ‘Dear heart, do not allow these bambini in here when I am in my cups.’
Chapter 44
Imogen and I were to go to a party that evening. Sitting in her room preparing ourselves, we discussed who might be there. I still nurtured a secret desire to meet and spellbind Tom the racehorse rider. I had seen him several times, but had never dared speak to him, terrified that my infatuation might be visible and mocked.
‘Amelia will be there, won’t she?’ I strained with the effort to sound casual. ‘She seems to spend a lot of time with her cousin Tom, doesn’t she?’
Imogen was painting her tiny mouth pale pink with a delicate brush and a pot of gluey lip gloss. ‘She’s very keen on him,’ she mumbled. ‘And she knows it makes her more popular to be with him, because all the girls have crushes on Tom.’ Absorbed, she didn’t see the prickly flush spread across my face. We went downstairs to find Edward, who was driving us.
The party was in a small flint barn sunk deep into a fold of curving pasture, two miles from the nearest road. A paint-spattered sheet draped over the door was the only attempt at decoration; the rest of the barn was bare. A friend of Edward’s sat on the floor, a screwdriver and a tape recorder in his hands. ‘The music has packed up,’ he said gloomily as we entered.
Imogen and I stood by the door and looked across the hazy summer fields. An occasional car lumbered towards us, depositing brightly clad partygoers who tripped giggling into the barn, and then stood like a disconsolate herd of cows in the corner by the barrel of beer. Intermittent squawks and groans issued from the tape machine; the only other sounds were nocturnal twitterings from sleepy birds and the neurotic, ceaseless whisper of wind in the trees. Tom and Amelia arrived in a tiny, grunting mini-moke. This confirmed my high opinion of Tom. Very few others found the barn. At midnight, bored and sober, Edward decided to leave. Tom and Amelia followed us. We skidded over shorn hayfields back on to the road. I sat in the front with Edward, my feet up on the glove compartment of the car, and leaned back looking out of the sun-roof at pale stars in the deep purple sky.
‘Tom is really messing around,’ said Edward, as the mini-moke zoomed past us on a bend. I sat up as we rounded the corner. There, squat and stationary, music blaring and lights flashing, was the mini-moke.
‘We’re going to crash,’ said Edward, trying to swerve, but we were going too fast and I watched with curious detachment as we smashed into the mini-moke. My head hit the windscreen and cold glass splintered in my hair and on my face. My shins were thrust into the dashboard as the car spiralled into the roadside.
‘Get out! For Christ’s sake get out!’ yelled Edward. ‘There’s another car coming.’ Imogen scrambled out from the back and I tried to open my door. It was buckled and stuck. I did not dare to move, or even look round. Blood oozed warm on my face; if I moved, I knew the slow sticky bleeding would burst into a torrent. Motionless in heaped dead metal, I watched through the hole my head had made in the windscreen as the others ran and stopped in shocked, uncertain circles.
Edward and Tom pushed the cars off the road and pressed themselves back on the bank. A sweep of headlights came towards us. Imogen was still trying to let me out. ‘Are you all right? Oh, God, she’s got blood on her face. Edward, come here quick!’ Edward came just as the door yielded. He sank back on the verge. ‘Oh God, what have I done?’ he whispered. And finally I cried, terror at his expression pumping tears until I heaved with breathless, hysterical sobs.
Daddy came to collect me from Imogen’s house the next morning. He looked very angry until we got into the car. Then he said, ‘Darling heart, thank God you’re not hurt. That tiny cut on your face will be gone in a week.’ I wept, and he took my hand. ‘Look at me.’ I did. He was smiling. ‘My love, it will not spoil your beauty, so don’t cry.’
Two weeks later my face was healed, and after a series of lengthy, tiring telephone calls and visits, I finally persuaded Edward that it was not his fault. Secretly I enjoyed my role as most damaged victim of a car crash. I stayed at home, craving comfort and receiving it in cups of hot chocolate and rolls of loo paper to cry into. Mummy was furious, feeding my sense of martyrdom by shouting in bouts lasting a few minutes every day. ‘How can you be so idiotic as to let yourself be driven by drunken louts?’
I said nothing, bowing my head, bearing my undeserved haranguing. Maimed and misjudged, I thought to myself.
Daddy intervened. ‘Eleanor, I think she’s learned her lesson. Let’s hear no more of it.’ Mummy fumed and humphed for a while longer, but eventually gave up, distracted by Poppy, who, aged eight, had decided to become a vegetarian.
Chapter 45
Va Va woke early and looked up at the ceiling, focusing her eyes to make faces emerge from the wavering pattern of cracks. She raised her arms, fingers reaching out, twisting in the little puffs of smoke which sailed above her bed. The smoke thickened dull grey, and she got out of bed to turn the light on. ‘It looks like a lighthouse,’ she thought, climbing back into the warm hollow and lying flat, concentrating until the ceiling cracks metamorphosed into boats and waves on the ocean.
Brodie sat up, coughing. ‘There’s a fire. Quick, we must tell Mummy.’ He scuttled out of the nursery holding his sagging pyjamas up with one hand. Va Va followed, speechless at her own stupidity and her missed opportunity to be the heroine of the hour.
Patrick came running down the landing, a jersey tied like an apron around his waist. The study door was shut and from beneath it woolly strands of smoke unravelled.
‘Open the door!’ yelled Patrick, and Va Va remembered that a man with a crinkled yellowing beard had come to stay. He had said he was her godfather. ‘Let us in, Kevin. Let us in!’ Va Va was anxious to see the fire before it was put out. When Kevin opened the door, his face was black and he had a blanket wrapped around him. A cheery blaze crackled in the waste-paper basket.
‘You fool, you’re supposed to put the blanket over the fire.’ Patrick tugged a flapping corner of Kevin’s shroud and sent him spinning across the room. Wielding the huge folds of blanket, Patrick threw himself on to the burning basket, groping and wrestling until he had a clumsy parcel. He stood up, bellowing, ‘Watch out, children!’ and charged out of the room and down the stairs. Va Va and Brodie ran after him, but he was already outside, his naked limbs catching the sunlight on the river where he splashed, trying to drown the flames.
Chapter 46
It was nearly the end of the summer holidays, and I had to make a skirt for the sixth form. I sat, as I had done every day since the accident, composed but forlorn on the sofa in the playroom, cushioned by Honey’s plump sleeping form. Louise tacked my skirt together for me, and I began to hem it, struggling with unyielding tweed. Staring mindlessly at the television I moved my tongue around the inside of my mouth, feeling for the hundredth time the rough bump of the inside of my cut. Music blared out as the local news programme began.
‘The headlines tonight. Dereham protests against bypass plans. Norfolk beaches are under threat from litter-lout tourists, and Tom Letson, elder son
of Robin Letson the racehorse trainer, has been killed. The tragedy occurred when his horse fell while he was competing at the Byborough County Show this afternoon. The horse, Dancing Rainbow, was also injured, and had to be shot.’
Excitement at hearing Tom’s name on television turned to cold horror as the reporter completed his announcement. Dead. Killed. Tragedy. Shot. The words swarmed in my head. I stood up, limbs heavy and stomach contracted, and turned off the television before stumbling through to the kitchen. I tried to tell Mummy, but no words would come out. Instead I was sick, coughing and sweating over the sink. Mummy bathed my face with an old floorcloth which smelt of cat pee. I spluttered, she led me to a chair.
‘Darling, what is it? Are you hurt? What has happened?’ She leaned over me, stroking my hair. ‘It’s delayed shock from your accident. I must ring the doctor. Sit there and sip this water.’
I grabbed her arm and shook my head, another wave of nausea rising. ‘No, not me. I’m fine. It’s Tom, Amelia’s cousin. He’s been killed. I saw it on television. I can’t believe it. It’s not fair.’
I bent forward and rocked in the chair, trying to focus the thoughts swarming in my head. Mummy wrapped her arms around me, murmuring.
Daddy appeared. ‘What’s the matter in here?’ Mummy told him. He went out, and came in a moment later with a glass half full of brown liquid. It smelt bitter and pungent. ‘Drink this, love, it will steady you.’
Come and Tell Me Some Lies Page 12
