by Jenny Eclair
Even worse than the prospect of facing Hugo and Natasha was the idea of having let down Mrs Phelan. Mercifully, her carriage was empty, and as Annabel sat snivelling forlornly, she realised that even if she attempted to put into words what had made her do it, no one would ever fully understand.
How could she explain that all she wanted was to know how it felt to have a mother who loved you more than anything else in the world?
That’s why she had taken the letters. She hadn’t intended to keep them, she only wanted to read them. She was going to put them back but Penny had returned to school earlier than anyone had expected and by the time Annabel had finished her last lesson of the day, the letters had been discovered in her locker and all hell had broken loose.
An hour later, as the train pulled into Waterloo, Annabel’s face was swollen and blotchy and she was utterly confused as to what her next step should be. She didn’t have any money for a taxi and was clueless about how to navigate her way from Waterloo to Barnes on foot. Anyway, what if no one was in when she got home? She didn’t have a key; she pictured herself sitting on the step and waiting in abject misery, what if she needed to go to the loo?
With the prospect of facing the music getting closer, Annabel’s mind flitted to other alternatives. She didn’t have to go home, she could always sleep rough or give hand jobs to old men and get enough money for a hotel. Sonia Baines had demonstrated how to wank someone off only a couple of weeks before – she said the main thing was to swap hands now and again because it was very tiring.
In a state of despair, Annabel stepped down from the train only to find to her utter amazement that a familiar face was waving to her from beyond the ticket barrier. It was Benedict – Benedict had come to meet her. Annabel was thrilled and slightly embarrassed; she hadn’t seen him since she found out he wasn’t her father.
Her shyness soon melted away. He looked exactly the same as he always did and he was smiling, like he always did, which was odd because surely everyone in the whole wide world hated her guts at the moment.
She felt the sting of tears again and by the time he had wrapped her in his arms, she was blubbing like a baby. He said nothing, gave her his handkerchief that smelled of limes, took her case and propelled her towards the taxi rank.
‘I thought we’d have some lunch at mine so you can tell me all about it.’
Back at the mews house, Benedict tied a red gingham-frilled pinny around his waist and put a pan of water on the hob. He had cooked a chicken – ‘One of my exes showed me how,’ he explained. ‘To be honest, it’s not that difficult; the most important thing is to remember to remove that disgusting plastic bag of giblets. Now, I’m afraid gravy is beyond me, so we’re having it cold with new potatoes, a nice green salad and Harrods’ very own home-made mayonnaise.’
He had even chopped some parsley to scatter on the new potatoes. Annabel felt tears coming again; she hadn’t expected anyone to be kind to her.
Benedict reached into the fridge. ‘I know you’re not old enough to drink, but I’m going to have a nice glass of chilled Chablis, and even though you are in utter disgrace, young lady, you may have half a glass, to take the edge off, and then we’ll decide on a course of action.’
He handed her a glass and they looked each other in the eye for the first time since she got off the train, and instantly both of them felt a great flood of relief. Benedict because he didn’t feel any different about her, even though he knew categorically that she wasn’t his, and Annabel because she knew that, whatever she said, he would listen, and that knowledge caused a huge weight to lift from her chest.
‘OK, why don’t you go upstairs, get out of that uniform, splash your face with some cold water and by the time you get down, lunch will be ready,’ her uncle said.
Annabel did as she was told and once she was back in civvies with her face washed and her hair brushed, she realised that although she was still upset, she was also starving and actually looking forward to her lunch.
Benedict waggled a serving spoon at her as she came back down. ‘Now, as you can imagine, Hugo and Natasha are very upset about the suspension.’
She was glad he referred to them by their Christian names and not as her parents. It was time everyone stopped pretending.
‘But,’ Benedict reached into a cupboard for some plates, ‘as I pay the school fees, it’s me who should feel pissed off.’
Benedict hacked at the chicken with a bread knife. Annabel could tell it was a bit overcooked, but she carried the salad bowl and the potatoes over to where he had arranged some cork placemats and they sat down at a small round walnut dining table squeezed between the sofa and the staircase.
During lunch, he regaled her with stories of his work and latest girlfriend, the twin vases he was convinced were Ottoman that turned out to be Woollies fakes, his latest squeeze’s peculiar habit of licking his ears which made him feel both sticky and uncomfortable, and the sudden appearance of punks on the King’s Road. ‘Rather sweet, if you ask me – every generation needs to rebel, and I was lucky, I had the sixties, Summer of Love and all that.’
But after they washed up the dishes together in his tiny galley kitchen, he finally got serious. Once the last plate had been dried, he removed the pinny from his waist and said, ‘OK, Annabel, let’s thrash this out.’
He brewed a pot of tea and nodded to the sofa, but Annabel refused to sit down; she paced the small sitting room and looked at anything other than Benedict’s face before she finally began to speak.
‘I overheard them, Natasha and Hugo. I’ve always been good at sitting on the stairs and listening, I’ve done it ever since I was very small, and I heard them talking about you, me and my birth mother.’
Benedict’s hand trembled at this and milk slopped onto the tray holding their tea. Annabel didn’t stop, she continued talking in a strange emotionless monotone.
‘Basically, in the space of ten minutes flat, I found out that everything I ever thought I knew was a lie. My mother didn’t die in childbirth, she walked out on me, and Natasha didn’t choose me because I was special, she adopted me because she didn’t think she could have a child and she thought you were my father. Because if you were my father, then it meant we shared some family blood, so it wasn’t like she was adopting a complete stranger – only she was, and I think she suspected as much as soon as Lance was born, I think she knew then that I didn’t belong.’ Annabel took a breath and carried on. ‘And I know taking those letters was weird and wrong, but the thing that’s completely weird is that even though Penny had lost her mum, I was still madly jealous of her, because I knew how much her mother loved her and I needed to read those letters to see how that might feel.’
Benedict was chain-smoking now, ash and stubs piling up in the bright yellow ashtray with the word ricard printed on the side. Annabel continued to pace, picking up the odd ornament and putting it down in slightly the wrong place, rearranging the animals around the toy farm on the windowsill.
‘But the thing that confused me most is you. Why you had never told me that you might have been my dad and that you knew my mum, that you knew her well enough to sleep with her, and that you could have described her to me and told me what she sounded like – if she was taller or shorter than me and what kind of shoes she wore.’ She was holding a glass paperweight now and Benedict wondered for a moment if she was going to throw it at his head. He wouldn’t have blamed her – it was high time she was told the truth.
He got up and opened the cupboard under the stairs. Annabel was still tossing the paperweight from hand to hand.
‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he said, and he drew the curtains.
40
Benedict Tells What He Knows
Annabel stopped pacing and watched as Benedict switched on a table light and disappeared into the cupboard under the stairs. Seconds later, he emerged with a large attaché case in one hand and a dusty cardboard box under his arm.
As he dropped the box onto the dining table
, Annabel could see that it contained reels of ciné film, stacked up on top of each other, each neatly labelled.
Frowning with concentration, Benedict rooted around and eventually dug out one of the circular tins. Across the lid in grey and white Dymo tape was a word and a date: KITTIWAKE 1962. Breathing heavily and swearing occasionally, he then lifted a projector from the attaché case and assembled it on top of the nest of tables by the sofa, positioning it so that the projector was pointing at the wall directly opposite.
Finally, with everything set, he lit yet another cigarette, patted the empty seat on the sofa next to him and told Annabel to sit down.
Reluctantly, she did as she was told and perched next to him, sitting bolt upright with her knees clamped together, staring at the blank wall.
The machine began to noisily whir, projecting a beam of light which immediately illuminated a bright white square on the wall. Grey spots flickered, followed by a random succession of upside-down numbers. Then, in faded Technicolor, the wall seethed with an indistinct blur of bodies. The picture quality was poor – Benedict fiddled with the lens on the front of the projector and the focus became a little sharper. The blur became people dancing, hair swinging, elbows jerking, and then the camera wheeled abruptly away from the dancers and over to a table crowded with bottles: wine, gin, vodka, Martini, and a large tin bath which looked like it might be full of punch, before swivelling back to the dancers again.
Apart from the mechanical whir of the projector, there was no recorded sound. Fingers silently clicked in the air and Annabel wished she knew what was playing on the invisible gramophone.
Some danced as if they were being subjected to electric shocks, others moved more slowly, eyes closed in ecstasy, while a few mooched self-consciously, staring fixedly at their own feet. Suddenly a small blonde with a lopsided bouffant and a low-cut top jiggled right in front of the camera, raised her arms in the air, threw her head back for a moment and then shimmied her beautiful face right into the camera lens.
In that single moment Annabel could see the thickness of her eyeliner, the glue of her false eyelashes, the slightly crooked teeth that flashed inside that delighted fleeting grin and then she was gone, the blondness and the smile simply vanishing, and in the space left behind there was Benedict, young and thin and hungrily following the girl with his eyes.
The older, fatter Benedict sitting next to her on the sofa coughed and stopped the tape as it tickered to a halt. He pointed at the screen and said, ‘That was your mother. That was Serena.’
She made him play it at least ten times over, sitting forward now on the sofa, craning to take in every last detail of the woman, each time trying to glimpse something new.
Her earrings? Gold hoops.
The colour of her eyes? Green.
Eventually she allowed herself to laugh at young Benedict’s slightly gormless expression as the object of his obvious desire dropped out of shot for the umpteenth time.
‘I think I might have slept with her that night,’ he admits. ‘I thought you might have been mine, and I wish you were.’
She could have cried again then, but she didn’t – she’d already cried enough and her face was still sore.
Benedict fetched another bottle of wine from the kitchen and offered her another small glass and then told her everything that he could remember about her mother.
‘Her name was Serena – she came from Southend and she sounded like a fishwife. I had never met anyone like her; she was naughty and funny and preposterous and a bit reckless. We were never what you might call an item, but we did sleep together.’
Annabel interrupted: ‘Did you know she was pregnant?’
‘No,’ answered Benedict. ‘I went abroad for the summer, came back to London in the autumn to do spot of work – I seem to remember a letter she wrote saying she wanted to talk to me, but nothing about expecting a baby, so I forgot all about it. Then I went skiing over Christmas and the New Year, stayed out in Courchevel a bit longer than I intended, got mixed up with some nutty girl, went back to Kittiwake to hide for a while – and there you were.’
‘And my mother?’
‘Nowhere to be seen.’
Without realising it, Benedict had reached for her hand, and she let him.
‘Brenda, the housekeeper, she looked after you. There’s a farmhouse down the track, you lived there for a while, but . . . ’ He shrugged. ‘Natasha was so miserable and kept losing all these babies and you were a baby who needed a home and it seemed the ideal solution. Hugo had all the right contacts, your real mother was nowhere to be found, all I had to do was sign some papers.’
Annabel had so many questions she didn’t know where to begin, so she started with the end.
‘So how did she die?’
‘Ah, well . . . ’ And now it was Benedict’s turn to get up and pace.
‘We found out later that she was actually living in London, Earls Court. She’d changed her name, which made things a little tricky – called herself Renee Culpepper. Then one night she went to a party, this rather smart house, Mayfair, there was a balcony and she fell. And I was there – not when it happened, she was already lying on the pavement when I arrived, but I was able to be with her, I held her hand until the ambulance arrived, but by then she had gone.’
‘And my parents were there too?’
Benedict looked shifty. ‘I didn’t see them, but a lot of people were there, it was one of those big society bashes. There were a lot of parties like that in the old days. By the time the police came, a lot of people had disappeared – they had reputations to worry about, wives who didn’t know where they were, that sort of thing. But that doesn’t alter the facts: it was a warm night, she’d been drinking, sitting out on the balcony and she lost her balance. No one actually saw what happened. It was an accident, Annabel.’
‘Have you got any photographs of my mother?’ Annabel demanded.
‘No.’
But he had. He’d kept a newspaper cutting reporting her death, it was on the front page of the Evening Standard: ‘Nightclub Hostess Falls to Death at Society Party’. The grainy photograph accompanying the story made her look harder and older than she was.
‘What about Kittiwake? I went when I was little once, but I can’t remember anything.’
‘Yes.’ He reached into a drawer and showed her a small battered black-and-white photograph of a large turreted house covered in some kind of foliage. On the gravel drive in front of the house was an old-fashioned car and standing next to it were five people, two adults and three children. Benedict studied the photograph as intently as Annabel before muttering, ‘Everyone in that photograph is dead, except Natasha and me.’
Outside the mews house, the light faded and Benedict and Annabel sat in the dark holding hands as he told her how he and Natasha had witnessed their brother’s death down at Kittiwake and how his mother didn’t have enough love left over for her other children once he had gone and how his father gambled everything away and decided to end it all on the eve of Benedict’s twenty-first birthday.
And then when both of them had wept some more, Benedict, who was quite drunk, phoned Natasha and – pronouncing his words very carefully – informed his sister that he had Annabel safe at Cadogan Mews and that she would be staying in Belgravia for a couple of nights until everyone calmed down. There was a short pause before Benedict raised his voice and informed Natasha, ‘I couldn’t give a shit what Hugo thinks – we’ll speak tomorrow,’ and put the phone down.
For a moment they looked at each other in appalled silence before collapsing into giggling hysterics. The next thing Annabel knew they were making toast in the kitchen before settling down in front of the television to watch Celebrity Squares.
Later, when Annabel said goodnight to her uncle, Benedict asked her if she’d like to visit one day.
For a moment, she looked at him, confused.
‘Kittiwake – would you like to go back there one day?’
‘One day,’ she said
. ‘Yes.’
41
One Week to Go
Kittiwake, August 2018
Freya slides her egg-whites-only omelette out of the pan and onto a hand-thrown ceramic plate. She made a series of these last summer, each irregularly dipped into indigo slip before being fired and glazed. Sadly, they don’t seem to be dishwasher proof but the cleaner will insist on putting them in at seventy degrees, leaving Freya to pick out the jagged fragments once the wretched thing finishes its cycle.
‘Ridiculous,’ she tuts to herself, everyone is so hopeless, but she can’t manage the place by herself. Since she took on the role of chatelaine of Kittiwake, it has become a full-time job, and with the party looming ever closer she occasionally finds herself hating the place.
The house is voracious, it gobbles up her time and sucks huge amounts of money from the joint account. There was a moment, a glorious moment, when the refurbishment was complete and the place was perfect, but all she can see now is its gradual decline, the smudges of her children’s fingerprints on the copper-clad kitchen island, a wonderful burnished metal rectangle that in certain lights sets the entire room ablaze.
What she needs is another, secret kitchen where she can prepare meals without destroying the pristine beauty of the show kitchen. An Ikea job with cheap Formica work surfaces would do.
Kittiwake requires constant attention, one daily cleaner isn’t enough. There are too many staircases for a single Hoover to defluff, too many brass door handles for one pair of hands to polish.
As for the windows, several local cleaning companies won’t touch them, their ladders aren’t long enough, the turrets are too treacherous, a sudden gust of wind and a man could lose his life. Then there are the gardens; they may have been designed by a crack squad of internationally renowned landscape architects, but they need more care than a sick child. Aphids and mildew attack the roses, black-headed caterpillars have been found amongst the rapidly browning box hedges, and now she can only hope that they can get the party out of the way before the infestation turns the entire ornamental hedging into a hideous brown crisp.