Come and Tell Me Some Lies

by Raffaella Barker

Brodie and I were righteous, furious and jealous. Mummy was not told, and Flook went on pretending to go to school. I kept expecting him to leave home, but he was enjoying the charade and lingered on into the spring. If he had nothing better to do and the weather was bad, he did go to school, so he still had enough essays to keep Mummy’s suspicions at bay. Brodie and I had exams; Flook pretended he did.

  It was Tuesday. We were about to leave for school, very late. Our exams were not until the afternoon, and Daddy had agreed to lend me the car. Flook had apparently been dispatched on the bus earlier. He burst in through the kitchen door, twigs and leaves from his hiding-place in the hedge shivering on his coat.

  ‘God, you’re stupid,’ I sneered at him, armed by the smugness of being only weeks away from finishing school legitimately. ‘How can you be so selfish? Mummy will hit the roof.’

  Flook frowned, his breath heaving, mouth set and angry. ‘Daddy knows, so I don’t see why you should interfere.’ He moved menacingly towards me, his chin jutting defiance.

  ‘Don’t be so pathetic.’ I turned away coldly. A strained roar issued from Flook, and I swung round to see him bearing down upon me, both arms raised, a motorbike helmet held like a trophy above his head. He tried to smash at me with the helmet. I grabbed a chair, edging away from him, squeaking, ‘Calm down, don’t be silly.’ I stumbled backwards across the kitchen, dodging from side to side as Flook swung his bludgeon through the air. I thought it would never end, and wondered if I should allow him to hit me. I had a faint hope that contrition would calm him and I enjoyed the prospect of forgiving him.

  I lowered my guard and Flook charged. He never reached me. A metal dustbin descended over his head, arresting his progress. Brodie, displaying unexpected stealth, had crept towards the rubbish while Flook and I were duelling. Tipping a suppurating heap of tea-leaves, eggshells and slithering wine bottles on the floor, he ambushed Flook with the bin. Echoing rage boiled in the bin for a few moments. Then there was silence. We cautiously eased Flook out and found him laughing.

  Chapter 53

  Churches, solid Norman towers, sky-scraping spires and ancient Saxon round towers stand tall on Norfolk’s damp earth, and they haunted Patrick. Walking through dark medieval woods a mile from Mildney he found the scrambled walls of a ruined chapel, its columns and figures scattered among brambles, untouched since vandals plundered it. He took the children there, and they clutched his coat and hid when they came to a hidden lake. Patrick pointed to the tips of beech trees, bursting out at knee-height. The rest of the trees had been swallowed by the lake. The pagan spell of the woods, where a gibbet displayed a gruesome tally of weasels, rabbits and the red smear of a fox, terrified and enchanted Va Va, and the sight of a stone head rolling in dead leaves by the chapel fuelled bedtime stories for weeks afterwards.

  Driving along narrow, mud-brown lanes, Patrick used churches to guide him through the countryside. When he reached the coast he parked the car on the edge of the cliff and Va Va, Brodie and Flook rushed to buy ice lollies, their chemical red, blue and electric pink the only colours in a panorama of iron skies and steel-dark sea. Teeth turned the colour of the lollies as Patrick told the children sea stories: of Harold Hardrada and Sir Cloudesley Shovell; of a church bell ringing still in the deep North Sea, the ghostly peal commemorating the terrible day when the church of Dellingford and its congregation slipped off the crumbling cliff and perished beneath the waves.

  Va Va loved the Jewel Church best. The round flint tower had windows like arrow slits at the top, and a tomb of marble stood alone in the empty nave. The tomb was decorated with a huge polished stone; Va Va thought it was a rare jewel, bigger than any other ever mined. Eleanor had told her a story about a Blue Prince, and she imagined him buried there, sleeping for ever, wrapped in glamorous ossified youth, a fit bridegroom for Sleeping Beauty.

  Va Va was deep in a religious phase. Every Sunday she went to church, alone or with a weekend guest she had cajoled into accompanying her. She loved the orderliness and ritual of the church; the neat rows of pews with tapestry hassocks plump and square beneath them; the crimson hymn-books which never had pages missing, so that it was a joy to turn to the page announced on white cards on the wall. The vicar was boring. Each Sunday he read a different sermon in the same grey monotone. Va Va didn’t understand why he read such dull texts. At home, Patrick told her stories about the saints and made her laugh with silly voices and faces. In church everyone fidgeted and some even slept.

  Patrick and Eleanor were relieved when Va Va’s interest in the Sunday service waned and she no longer pestered Eleanor to iron her dress, or Patrick (in the absence of someone less used to her wiles) to go with her.

  Chapter 54

  August 1991

  The summer Dad was ill, we went often to Sall Church. It has the tallest tower in Norfolk and its high vaulted ceiling and delicate columns are unexpected in a rural church. Anne Boleyn’s ghost haunts it and so do a thousand others. Up a steep stone stairway off the nave there is a whispering gallery. Gargoyles grin down from the ceiling like stars, orbiting the central sinister face of the Green Man.

  Dad found walking a great strain, and sat in the pews contemplating the altar and the great yew tree which swirled behind it through warped green diamond panes of glass.

  He and I had many outings, and they filled me with nostalgia for my childhood. Dad was very proud; he never complained about his illness, and I caught his courage and submerged my sadness and my fear. Life’s circle felt smugly, horribly complete now as I, not he, drove a large car along narrow lanes, while he, not I, sat in the back and called for lemonade. But Dad made it impossible and impertinent to be sad. His verve and his pleasure in the landscape welled over into me, and we drove slowly, admiring a line of slender poplars stalking a grey skyline, or a great beechwood canopying us in underwater light. Dad existed in a state of perpetual worship of the beauty of the countryside, combined with a sense of the ridiculous.

  ‘The Norfolk landscape sends a shiver through my soul,’ he said. ‘It really is exquisite, is it not, my love?’ Seconds later he sighed, and in a voice buoyant with mirth said, ‘I say, I really am a crashing old bore, aren’t I? Shut up, Patrick, for Christ’s sake.’

  We reached a café at tea-time to be told that it was closed. Dad, dark glasses and fisherman’s cap making him look like a spy on holiday, laughed. ‘Ha, it’s sublime! What can one expect from a hole like this!’

  The po-faced proprietor continued to sweep the floor. Dad advanced, his faded blue eyes melting with charm as he sweetened his voice to ask, ‘My dear fellow, may I have the honour of sitting outside your establishment for a moment and drinking a glass of your water?’

  The proprietor gave up, put down his broom, and two minutes later Dad was sitting, wickedly delighted, behind a pot of tea and a plate of uninspired cakes.

  We were in Balton, a godforsaken village framed by scattered caravans which looked as if they had been taken up by the wind and hurled, cars and deck chairs sprawling beside them, against the few stubby hedges. Balton was a pit-stop during the hunt for a Ford Cortina.

  Dad’s Mercedes had come back with him from an Italian trip five years earlier hot and shuddering like a racehorse. Dad had driven from Assisi without stopping and the Mercedes responded gallantly until it reached our drive. There it stopped and died. Dad fiddled with the engine to no avail and the car was heaved by all my brothers as its pallbearers to its grave in the barn. With dignity it stood there, rotting and rusting but still beautiful. No scrap men were allowed to touch Sadie Bens; Dad had plans for her. On a good day he was sure it wouldn’t take much to get her on the road again; on a bad day she was earmarked as his hearse.

  ‘I shall be buried in my Mercedes,’ he said, stroking the dust from her flank and polishing her star with his red spotted handkerchief.

  When Sadie Benz perished Dad had replaced her with a souped-up Ford with customized wheels. Other Fords followed annually, and now we were looking for this year’s m
odel. Dad was feeling rich and jubilant, having taken three hundred pounds out of the bank to buy a car. The money was burning a hole in his pocket and the quest thrilled him. We set off with Jim, who had moved on from dam-building and was constructing a river-view seat for Dad from the skeleton of an oak tree. Jim was our expert on engines. It was his lot to damp the fanciful urges Dad and I had for every Ford Cortina we saw parked in a drive or speeding along the road. By evening we had covered eighty miles and Jim’s veil of diplomacy was wearing thin.

  We arrived at a council estate and penetrated the Legoland streets to a central point which was marked by a golden car. Dad and I were adamant that we should not return home empty-handed and were sure that this Cortina was our Grail. The guardian of the golden car was a young man with no shirt; his back was tattooed with an intricate and lavish portrait of his wife Leila. As his muscles moved beneath the skin, Leila winked and smiled at Dad and me; he and I were hovering, dumb with admiration, while Jim conducted the deal.

  My father drove his new Cortina home, skidding round the hairpin bends to Mildney. The car gave him freedom and became his salon. For the rest of the summer he conducted all conversations from its brown nylon seats and invited his children on perilous journeys which we dreaded but dared not spurn in case he broke down and was left stranded, alone.

  Chapter 55

  Merry-Curl was living in London. He had left university and was looking for a job. I went to stay with him one weekend, and found him resplendent in a long-corridored flat above the King’s Road. The drawing-room swaggered beneath mighty red silk curtains and every surface was scattered with cigarette ash. Dazzled, I fell in love with him. Merry-Curl was taken aback. After an hour or two of red-faced fumbling, we went out and walked in the rain across Hyde Park and he held my hand.

  In the evening, we climbed into a taxi and ticked across London to Soho for a party. Sandwiched between two strip-joints was a huge green metal door. We went in, and up and up. On the roof, spotlights draped in yellow and pink gauze cast hazy beams towards the night sky. The party was being given by one of Merry-Curl’s friends from Oxford, and everyone there knew him and wanted to know who I was. Intoxicated by pink champagne and attention, I danced on the slate rooftop and promised myself that as soon as my last exam was done I would move to London.

  A tall girl, with a slender cylinder body and a silver mini-dress, asked where I lived. ‘Norfolk,’ I replied, wishing I could have said ‘Chelsea’ or ‘Bohemia’ or anywhere exotic. ‘Mansions or Square?’ Her fishbowl eyes swivelled frantically and focused on me again. ‘County, actually,’ I admitted regretfully. She shrieked, arching her back, rippling laughter down her long white throat.

  ‘Why don’t you come and live with me? Norfolk’s so far away. I’ve got a spare room in my flat.’

  Nodding, beaming, I agreed. Merry-Curl came over and led me away. In the taxi on the way back to his flat, I realized I hadn’t asked the girl her name.

  Returning to Norfolk on the coach did not match my new vision of myself and my life. I reached Mildney hot and nauseated by petrol fumes. I felt frustrated, frumpy, hung-over and fed up. Daddy observed my glazed, tired eyes and my scowl. ‘Burning the candle at all four corners,’ he mocked, raising his eyebrows at Brodie when I flounced out of the room.

  Home. Place of revision. Crowded ants’ nest infested with the lowest form of life. Squalid and not at all aesthetic. I lay in my bed and thought dark thoughts until I fell asleep.

  A month later, my exams were over. I didn’t care whether or not I had passed them because a friend of Merry-Curl’s had offered me a job running errands for a film crew working on a documentary. I was moving to London. Merry-Curl had identified the blonde cylinder girl as Palladia MacAdam, a name of unqualified sophistication in my eyes, and of gross pretension in the view of my family. Even Dan managed a Latin pun: Et in Palladia ego, he proffered during the ‘humiliate Va Va’ session the boys had the morning before I left. Daddy answered her telephone call when she rang up to confirm her offer of a room. ‘Your father is divine,’ she warbled, enraging me. ‘And his poetry … heaven, absolute heaven. We shall read it together over breakfast.’

  ‘Mmm …’ I was unenthusiastic, but perked up when Palladia told me I would have a telephone next to my bed.

  Mummy became sentimental and kept following me around the house as I packed, offering broken china animals. ‘This was yours when you were five; I think you should take it with you.’ When I rejected the limbless pony, she folded her hands and started to recall the labour pains she suffered to bring me into the world all those eighteen years ago.

  Snapping and snarling at everyone, I heaped the brown Ford Cortina with all my belongings. Daddy had given me this car as a leaving-home present. I wished it was a sports car and hardly managed to say thank you. Poppy stumbled out of the house wearing a pair of gold-painted stilettos I had thrown at her while clearing my bedroom. ‘You said I could have them, I know you did,’ she pleaded, rocking forward as she struggled to keep them on her feet. I couldn’t be bothered to argue. Looking at her, I suddenly wanted to change my mind; to unpack the car again and stay at home. I sat down on the grass, pulling Poppy down next to me, and hugged her awkwardly. She was ten, too big to cuddle on my knee, but I remembered her baby embraces, and I wanted them again now.

  Brodie and Flook came out, each carrying a slumped cat. ‘We’ve given them their sleeping-pills. The vet says they’ll work for four hours, so you should get there.’ Brodie passed me the soft heap of Angelica, my ginger cat. Flook lifted Witton, the stripy one, into the car, placing him carefully inside a hat where he fitted like coiled rope.

  It was time to go. I hugged everyone in turn and, shaking, crawled into the tiny space left by my luggage. Mummy and Daddy, Brodie, Flook, Dan and Poppy stood by the porch waving as I grated the gears and drove away down the drive. I cried all the way to Norwich, but when I jerked into the slow lane of the London road, I became a new person. Super-efficient and grandly independent, I chugged to London, my top speed downhill a stately forty. The cats woke up at Hyde Park Corner and were very alarmed. Climbing on to my shoulders and scrambling along the dashboard, they looked out at the whirling, grinding traffic and miaowed pitifully. I felt ashamed for having brought them.

  Chapter 56

  October 1991

  The longer I lived away from Mildney, the more often I returned. Each time I came home, I was reassured by Dad’s enthusiastic discussions of fourteenth-century Chinese physics, and his determined battle against Mum’s use of the categorical imperative. ‘You are your mother’s daughter,’ he told me over and over again as I marshalled him on excursions, bossily insisting on his wearing a hat. He complained, astonished, when I refused to let him drive for thirty miles when he was recuperating from pneumonia.

  In London during the week, I developed a paranoid dread of the telephone. If it rang very early or very late, I raced to answer it, rehearsing my reaction when I was told Dad had died. I knew my lines inside out. I knew how I would watch over my brothers and my sister and help them. I knew how I would speak to my mother. I knew I could cope. In London, with none of my family about me, I was ready for Dad to die.

  In Norfolk, I was guilty and appalled, shocked that I could overreact so when away. There was Dad, joking and teasing, waking Mum up at dawn for a verbal sword fight over Kipling’s syntax or whether Hitler invented the VW Beetle.

  One weekend he was in hospital. I went to visit him with Mum. I was tired out and feeling ugly. I had impetigo. ‘Impetigo is the twentieth-century descendant of the plague,’ Dad announced when I arrived. ‘I have asked Nurse Amalasontha, and she tells me this is so.’ I glared at him and whispered to Mum, ‘Is the nurse really called Amalasontha?’

  ‘Of course not, she’s called Joan, but your father is trying to change all their names here. He’s persuaded the doctor to call her Amalasontha.’

  Nurse Amalasontha bustled in with a cup of tea in her chubby hands. She frisked and flirted wi
th Dad. Her gait changed from the stately glide of a ministering angel and she skittered about like an awkward heifer.

  ‘They’ll let me out of here tomorrow,’ whispered Dad when Amalasontha had swerved out again. ‘If they don’t, I’ll hitch-hike.’

  At Mildney, Dan shivered in the playroom. It wasn’t cold and he was wearing a jersey. He whispered to me to follow him and he limped into the hall. ‘Jim’s in trouble,’ he said. ‘The police are after him.’

  ‘Why? What’s he done?’ I whispered back. ‘Is it serious?’

  ‘Very. I can’t tell you why, but you should say goodbye to him. He’s going to vanish any day now, before they find him, and he won’t say where.’

  I begged and cajoled, bullied and wheedled, but Dan wouldn’t tell me what Jim had done. I tried for clues: ‘Does Dad know what it is?’

  ‘Yes, but he won’t tell you. Honestly, Va Va, it’s no joke. It’s life and death.’

  ‘Well, it can’t be that bad, or Dad wouldn’t be friends with him.’

  ‘Depends what you think is bad,’ said Dan provokingly. I wondered if I should pull his hair and torture it out of him, but he was too big now.

  Suddenly, he capitulated. Dan had never been good at hiding things; he always confessed when he broke a window with a cricket ball, or pinched half of Dad’s engine for his car.

  ‘Have you never guessed or wondered where Jim’s money comes from?’ Excitement broke over his face. I held my breath. Dan pulled me nearer and whispered in my ear, ‘He’s a bank robber.’

  Danger, danger, glamorous, wonderful, shocking danger bolted through me. ‘He didn’t hurt anyone, did he?’ I was anxious that the image should be untarnished. Jim, dispenser of good to the poor and needy, must have no blots on his copybook.

  ‘No. But he did have guns,’ said Dan, ‘and he says the police are on to him.’