Without much encouragement Jazzy adopted Mingus as a younger brother and forsook the boys at his private school for village lads, eagerly adopting the locals’ accent and manners to unintentionally amusing effect. Jazzy sounded nothing like them, his voice part-Dick Turpin, part-Long John Silver, several miles and centuries south of their Yorkshire vowels, though out of protective kindness they said nothing to make him feel different. In his adoption of a persona, he resembled his mother except a lower-class version seeking to mix rather than stand out, the search not so much for a voice as the rejection of one. Petula saw the advantages in Jazzy borrowing the Hardfields, even if she found his parroting of their country maxims infuriating, with ‘No one knows where the shoe pinches except the wearer’ always guaranteed to send her into apoplexy. The trick was to send him away to school at the right time; until that bright day the Hardfields could do much as they liked with him so long as he was still there for school and his other ‘hobbies’. Besides, their baby Mingus, unencumbered by his parents’ genetic inheritance, was adorable, and Petula did not object to Jenny coming up to The Heights to babysit Regan with him strapped to her back. To Jenny these visits were a source of insatiable curiosity, proof that another world existed just kilometres away from hers. Sometimes the women would share a pot of tea together, Petula pleasantly relaxed knowing that nothing she said need be doctored or acted out as the listener was of no consequence.
Instructions from Petula were nearly always conveyed to the Hardfields over the phone (that Petula installed in their kitchen at her own expense), which never stopped ringing. Otherwise there were notes, on endless points of detail scribbled in Petula’s demented hand, her sentences virtually indistinguishable from the paragraphs they belonged to. These were usually dropped off at the house as she sped by in her Volvo ferrying her children to music lessons (each was encouraged to play half a dozen instruments), theatre rehearsals, dancing classes and tennis. The usual method of delivery was for them to be tossed out of a moving window, the speeding car veering at the bend, often perilously close to the cottage to avoid a pheasant, badger or hare. Later it was only cars and tractors Petula would swerve to avoid, a few years at The Heights convincing her that the wildlife existed in large enough numbers to withstand the odd slaughter. Occasionally, when she did not have much to do, a state of affairs she avoided like illness, Petula would allow Regan to bring a note in person to their door. This is how Mingus first remembered meeting her, his earlier visits to The Heights blurry memories he confused with a children’s program depicting heaven seen at the same time.
The toddlers found each other intriguing, a feeling the mother shared. It was obvious that Mingus, not carrying the Hardfields’ genetic baggage, could be assessed as a little person in his own right. Mingus’s large eyes and delicate long lashes reminded Petula of a Pinocchio made flesh, his dreamy slow way of speaking infinitely preferable to Jazzy and Evita’s rushed diarrhoeal chatter. By the time they turned four Regan and Mingus were inseparable companions, spending silent afternoons together collecting beetles, ants and woodlice for the micro zoo they curated in Petula’s vegetable patch. Slowly the notes, if they were asking something onerous, would come with small presents of food, a stoutly unemotional way of giving those you wished to keep at arm’s length tokens of your appreciation. With a large kitchen to play in, Petula discovered cooking and, despite being entirely self-taught, found that she had a knack for it. Jenny Hardfield’s appreciation of her cuts of marmite-emblazoned ham showed her there was no outside to her system, anyone could be absorbed by it, even surly philistines like the Hardfields. Without being of a teasing nature, Petula found it satisfying for others to envy her, and food became another means for the herd to sing her praises. As a consequence Jenny Hardfield found the ‘necessary’ role she sought, that of a sounding board for Petula’s more experimental recipes, testing them before they went public. To show it was not all one-way traffic Petula began to buy clothes for Mingus, extravagant outfits of purple corduroy and big floppy Gatsby caps that were as successful at alienating his fellows as Jazzy was at ingratiating himself with them. In one of those selfless bursts of generosity that gave her an undeserved reputation for not being selfish, Petula decided she would take the two toddlers on a trip, albeit one with an ulterior motive, to London. For Regan this would be a fairly run-of-the-mill outing – she had just visited the capital for her eighth birthday – but for Mingus, she guessed, it would be groundbreaking, diminishing anything his parents could have given him. She imagined him looking back at it for the rest of his days as the happiest of his life, like the husbands who remembered their single night of passion with her as the pinnacle of theirs. Unfortunately, Petula was to get her wish, without the fulfilment she thought it entailed.
*
Petula liked to kill several birds with a single stone and the trip to London was no different. Ostensibly it was to buy clothes in preparation for Regan’s seventh birthday, lunch somewhere special and catch a children’s show at a well-known theatre, but if it had only involved these things Petula would not have left Yorkshire. The trip would serve a more vital matter. By 1979 the problem of how to progress to the next level of societal success had become an obsession for Petula. The Montagues’ local standing was second to none, they were welcome in the houses of the aristocracy, highly regarded by the artistic community, such as it was, and an indispensable cog in the county’s social machine. Most flatteringly of all, her dinner parties enjoyed unrivalled regional dominance, invitations highly coveted and widely sought after. And that was part of her funk; her renown was all very neighbourly and nearby. Petula’s expanding horizons were beginning to keep her awake at night. Getting ahead, once so remote she doubted its existence, was, in practice, one of the most frighteningly easy things she had put her mind to. So why shouldn’t she aim higher than bloody Yorkshire?
As a self-avowed enemy of provincialism she had attempted to bring more of the world to The Heights; invitations to Noah’s innumerable bohemian friends dotted round the country had pumped fresh blood into the weekends, his money led her to artistic contacts over the Pennines and she was already a patron of any cultural activity within a fifty-mile radius of the farm. It was not enough. The kind of success she desired was ‘modest’ only because she said so, and local on the condition that she could bring the mountain, wherever she found it, back to Muhammed.
Events or fate, she oscillated over which to thank, rewarded her with a golden egg that surpassed her most extreme fantasies. The hen was the poet Ned Wrath, widely acknowledged as Britain’s finest, the wild man of the moors whose work idolised the very place Petula lived. He was to turn forty that year and the regional arts-and-crafts brigade planned to celebrate the event by all means necessary, turning the county into a shrine to Wrath. Although Wrath had actually been born in Croydon, lived in New York for the past ten years, gone to university in Cambridge and married and divorced two black American ladies, his poetry had never moved beyond his native Yorkshire. Volume after volume celebrated hawks, virility, milk-bottle tops and bad weather, the Yorkshire of his memory or mind finding its way from libraries to school texts and from there to the front of mugs and T-shirts. Shatby, an ugly seaside town with several large caravan parks, was the scene of several of his holidays and the place chosen as the centrepiece of that year’s celebrations. A selection of the country’s leading actors were to gather there and read from Wrath’s most famous work, Raven Did Crow, a plaque was to be unveiled, and there were rumours that Wrath, who had long planned to ‘come home’, would do so at last. When his personal appearance was finally confirmed Petula consulted her map: Shatby was only twenty-six miles from Mockery Gap. The game was afoot.
Petula could never be accused of being unrealistic. She knew that she lacked a head start or even a specialist interest in this particular area. Though Petula loved actors, for she was one herself, and theatre, particularly music hall and pantomime, she had little feel for poetry and next to no knowledge of it
. Though she readily agreed that Wrath was a rugged hunk, if not an outright dish, she was a spring shower next to the storm of enthusiasts who could recite his interviews backwards. Which left her free to act, coolly, dispassionately and effectively. What she needed to do was work an advantage; The Heights would not be enough in itself and she could be sure that her reputation for preparing a spicy beef stroganoff would mean nothing to Wrath. With the aid of cunning she would ‘stumble’ upon her opportunity and announce herself by ‘mistake’. The answer was the actors, they would be her way in. Four of the Shatby seven were doing a special one-off performance of Dick Whittington in London for Great Ormond Street, tickets were exorbitant but attainable. By the end of the day these four would be her lifelong friends by hook or by crook. And through them she would have Wrath to show off to all the world. Several birds, a single stone. It had a wonderful symmetry to it.
*
The train ride down to London was heavenly. The three of them looked majestic, Mingus in turquoise knickerbockers, Regan with a geriatric Bo-Peep bonnet and Petula resplendent in what the tailor had designed for the day, a close-fitting lilac business suit with yellow flared bellbottoms and matching handkerchief, worn as a headband. British Rail had rarely seen their like. The children played a long and quiet game of I-spy with typical and well-behaved understatement as Petula amused herself drawing attention to her painted toenails, laid out on the seat opposite. A clergyman, who clearly wanted to sit there, instead chose to stand blocking the corridor, his gaze held by Petula’s wriggling toes, until he was moved on by an impatient ticket inspector who took his place. Idly, Petula closed her eyes and imagined a train full of Tarzans, their modesty protected by loin cloths, all ready to do her bidding in the first-class carriage, Regan spoiling her fantasy with an ill-timed enquiry.
‘Does Seagull begun with a “c” Mummy?’
‘No, they come from the sea, not the letter.’
‘I love the sea, I’d like to go there every day,’ said Mingus. ‘But it would make my parents unhappy as they can’t take me and I’m not old enough to go by myself.’ Petula smiled warily; the boy’s interjections were sudden, unpredictable and often tinged with vaguely adult melancholia. ‘And if I did go I might drown.’
She looked into the corridor; a bleached-haired cosmopolitpunk, not unhandsome, shamelessly held her stare, then crossed into the compartment opposite. Attention, especially from unknown and anonymous sources, was glorious. Noah’s frequent absences suited Petula, much as it surprised her to admit it. Rory Anycock had been jealously possessive and she reflexively assumed the same stance toward him, the two spending little time apart and forcing one another to account in detail for whenever they did. It wasn’t that Petula particularly cared what Rory got up to, or thought he got up to anything at all, beyond the occasional flirtation with his brother’s wife. Only that if he was going to grill her (‘Who was that you were talking to, you like the dark ones don’t you?’) then she considered it her duty to be equally quarrelsome in return. What fun she permitted herself was slipped into a shopping errand or long walk, interrogation and suspicion attaching themselves to an ambitious hour of slap and tickle. She lived just two good questions away from getting caught, her lovers men who resented their marriages as much as she did hers, civil enough to get out of her way once she had taken what she wanted. These affairs were Petula’s only way of extending herself, her only time on her ‘own’. It was in this context that she approached her second cohabitation, her romantic self and practical one by now two separate beings. When Noah had first gone to London for a week she did not know whether she should throw a plate at him and accuse him of a mistress, or insist on going too. Choosing to do neither had been the making of her, for freedom was a two-way street she learnt to make the most of. To think she once feared that love would restrict sexual activity! If anything, Petula felt more comely than she had ten years before when she was still scared of the workings of the heart. What men had lost, she had gained. There were even occasions when she desired herself, closing her eyes during lovemaking and imagining a woman, her reflection, having love made to her.
They hailed a black cab to Biagi’s for lunch, so that Regan and Mingus were the first children from North Yorkshire to know the difference between pasta al dente and overcooked spaghetti. The shopping trip passed in a blaze of looks and sideways glances from distracted men and jealous mothers, an irrelevant collection of objects being the only lasting proof it occurred at all. The play itself was terrible, the actors uncomfortable with their dumbed-down roles, the leads trying too hard for the children (who wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference if the parts were played by the presenters of Blue Peter, Petula later reflected). Getting backstage was easier than she thought, all she had to do was present the children as her outliers; no door remained closed to sweet little autograph hunters and where they went, she followed, her fingers twitching with nervous egotism.
The atmosphere in the changing area was just as she hoped; garish, sincerely insincere and extremely friendly. The space was not so impressive, there was something of the pisspot gloom of the pantry, a line of chairs turned to face a small table of plastic cups and crisp packets, the only concession to show business. Her four main targets were sitting in their makeup, wigs and glad rags, happily rubbishing a well-known contemporary whose profile had recently risen to prominence thanks to an appearance in a Bond film as a charming British villain of questionable sexuality.
‘Impotent you say? Well he managed to keep that one quiet for a while.’
‘Absolutely, as potent as an empty tube of Colgate. Would have trouble making a budgie come. Always has been that way apparently, even when he was handsome.’
‘I’m not old enough to remember that far back.’
‘Consider yourself lucky, you’d also have had to remember the war and rationing. Anyway, since time immemorial.’
‘Wasn’t he meant to be some kind of sex symbol back when?’
‘Before he married the bull dyke for her money.’
‘I thought she married him for his money? Didn’t he come from it?’
‘Come off it! No, she married him because he was impotent. Allowed her a free rein with the young ladies.’
‘I thought she married him because he was in a Bond film.’
‘No, that’s the new one, a floozy half his age with her sights set on the pool boy and a generous alimony package I shouldn’t guess. She certainly can’t be with him because of his conversation, he’s the most boorish drunk I know.’
‘I hate that man starrily, his career arc is as pointless as a rat fucking a grapefruit, must we even mention him again?’
Petula cleared her throat and took a necessary chance. ‘I do beg your pardon, but would you mind awfully signing my daughter and her little friend’s programmes? You see, you’ve already made their days and this would just absolutely top it off for them.’ She could tell that her hold on their attention was as thin as the skin covering her wrist, and she pushed Mingus forward as firmly as she could.
The actors stopped talking and took notice of their guest. Mingus looked up at them thoughtfully. His sense of what he was doing there was only a little better developed than Regan’s, who unlike him had slept through most of the play, but with a bold flourish, he removed his cap and got onto one knee. ‘I am Dick and this,’ he pointed to Regan, ‘is Tom my cat!’
‘My god he’s a natural! Where did you find the little dear, Alain Delon’s purse?’
‘Why, on the streets of London of course, with his Tom!’ cried Petula curtseying in a way she hoped would make the actors laugh, and did.
She could see an opportunity to show her best side, or at least, the negative better side of her character, and quickly added, ‘They both want to be actors when they grow up. So I thought, where would be the best place to take them?’
‘Where indeed my good lady, welcome to the Hydra’s Head!’
Of the ‘Shatby Four’, two of the actors were
women and two men. The women were the Middleton twins, Esther and Margy, classically trained actresses and proselytising Marxists forever switching sects, specialising in austere heroines and bold spinsters with no need of men. Despite suspecting the sisters of lesbianism, if not actual incest, and balking at their beauty close up, Petula would have found Esther and Margy of great interest if it had not been for the presence of Donald Eager and Max Astley. These slight and delicate thespians were the King and Dauphin in waiting of the Royal Shakespeare Company and British film industry. Eager had been the Clark Gable of his day, albeit a rather small one, clean-cut, bold and officerly with just a hint of the night about him. Despite a good war in the RAF, a pair of very successful Broadway musicals and a second lease of life in kitchen-sink dramas, his flagrant homosexuality had held him back as much as his young rival and lover, Astley, had been abetted by his. They were the meeting point between generations, Astley’s rise was swift, brusque and opportunistic as such rises have to be, aided by his shoulder-length blond hair and sensitive frown. Jewish sex comedies, counter-culture love stories and anti-war satire were his chosen stomping grounds, his appeal split between the sexes. A TV remake of a period drama provided the occasion for the two actors to meet and declare their mutual love, followed by frustrated attempts by Eager to leave his wife, which is where they were when Petula said: ‘The two of you are just the most remarkable actors I’ve ever watched,’ a compliment that was as honest as it was calculated.
‘You can’t be referring to Dick Whittington my good lady, or else I’d suspect you of insincerity or worse,’ drawled Eager, his offhand manner betraying how much he still loved praise of any kind.
‘Well you made quite a good Lord Mayor, but I’ve seen better. No, I mean that otherwise totally awful re-make of Wuthering Heights they showed on telly over Christmas, the other actors should have been shot en masse, especially the wet twit they got for Linton, but the way you both played the two different stages of Heathcliff’s life, amazing, no one would have thought you weren’t one and the same person, yet looking at you now, I don’t know how you did it, I don’t. It was more than acting, something inside you was the same. Brilliant. Just brilliant.’
Nature and Necessity Page 5
