by Jenny Eclair
The Robathams eventually set off at 11.45 a.m. Bel is already hungry, so before getting in the car, she swipes a couple of packets of biscuits from the cupboard and the contents of the fruit bowl. That should see them through till lunch. Unfortunately, Andrew has forgotten to fill the car with petrol as she’d asked, so about half a mile from the house they stop at the local Texaco garage and to her dismay, Ed, Jamie and Maisie all troop out of the car in search of energy drinks (despite none of them having done anything more energetic than get out of bed so far this morning), Doritos (Ed), chocolate (Jamie) and cereal bars (Maisie). Instinctively she knows that none of them will offer to pay for anything and, sure enough, Andrew gets back in the car looking slightly shell-shocked with a bag of wine-gums and a couple of bottles of water, neither of which are chilled.
Bel feels the tension creep in round the back of her neck. She had intended to do some yoga before they set off, in fact she’d intended to bring her yoga mat but there wasn’t enough room in the car, not after Maisie piled all her luggage in the boot.
Apparently she has packed one bag with clothes and the other with make-up and accessories, ‘Wigs an’ stuff,’ she explained airily. Jamie and Ed have each brought a small rucksack, Jamie’s seems to be mostly full of those Marvel magazines he buys from that peculiar place in Covent Garden.
It would be nice to chat, but the three passengers on the back seat have their headphones on and Andrew is concentrating on getting out of London and cursing their sat-nav system for being several years out of date.
Bel puts Radio Four on low and lets the words wash over her, so much information, so much opinion, she’s not sure whether people had so many opinions back in the old days, they were too busy doing stuff to sit around and talk about it, but now everyone’s an expert and everyone’s got a podcast and everyone’s meant to listen to what everyone else has to say and yet so much of it is nonsense.
They’ve been on the road for half an hour before Bel realises she’s forgotten her book and it’s book club next week, which she’s been looking forward to, because she hasn’t seen some of her friends since before the summer break and there will be a lot of catching up to do. Bel imagines herself saying, ‘Well, we haven’t been abroad as yet this year, but we did have a fabulous long weekend with all the family in Cornwall – yes, at Kittiwake, you might have seen the place, it’s often featured in magazines, yes my brother owns it, that’s right, Lance,’ and at that point she could show them all a few photos on her phone. She imagines scrolling through a lot of smiling faces holding champagne flutes aloft, a flaming fiftieth birthday cake, her and her mother with their arms wrapped around each other, Lance and Andrew clapping each other on the back.
In the photoshopped images of her imagination, her sons are beardless, Andrew is standing up straight and Maisie is nowhere to be seen.
An urgent need to pee brings her sharply back to reality, she cannot and will not have cystitis this weekend, they aren’t even on the motorway yet.
Fortunately, before she is forced to ask Andrew to stop, Maisie pipes up to say she is always travel-sick if she sits in the back of the car, which for some reason brings out the Sweeney driver in Andrew and without indicating, he swerves in front of a lorry to pull over into the forecourt of a garage on the edge of Hammersmith.
There is a huge amount of horn blaring and Bel has to virtually chew off her tongue to stop herself screeching, Jesus Christ, Andrew, you could have got us all killed! Seriously, how can anyone still be car-sick in their twenties, thinks Bel as she dutifully vacates the front seat, remembering those awful journeys back to boarding school when she was young and how the fear of being sick was worse than actually being sick.
Fortunately, as if to compensate for nearly wiping out the entire Robatham family, the garage happens to have both a lavatory and a small M & S food section.
Bel nips in to use the loo and buy some emergency sandwiches, just in case.
By the time she gets back to the car, Maisie is in the front seat, having kicked off her shoes and hoisted her bare feet onto the dashboard.
Squeezing into the seat behind her, Bel can see that she has been expertly spray-tanned and her toenails look like they have been gold-leafed.
‘Well, this is fun,’ she attempts, but no one is listening and she leans against the door and tries to sleep. If the lock failed and sent her tumbling out onto the motorway, she has a horrible feeling that no one would even notice, never mind care.
Well, Andrew would miss her cooking, she supposes, but once he got used to filling in an Ocado order, he’d be fine. The only one that ever cared, the only one who was truly interested in her was Benedict. If only Benedict could be at the party. She misses him badly, she’d even forgive him for leaving Kittiwake to Lance, if he could be alive to forgive.
You did get the farm, she reminds herself. Once, when she’d told a friend that her uncle had left her a farm, the friend had presumed she’d meant a proper farm, with land and barns, when the reality was a chipped and battered children’s toy, complete with a motley collection of poisonous lead animals. He’d left her some money too, though not enough to make much difference. The proceeds from the sale of the mews house had gone to his sister, which was something to be grateful for, considering the financial mess her father had left Natasha in, and for a second Bel can’t help feeling relieved that at least one of her adoptive parents is dead. Thank goodness she doesn’t have Hugo as well as Natasha to contend with this weekend.
The farm is in a box in the loft, along with some old packing cases that her mother hadn’t been able to take to France. The loft scores an eight on her worry scale, it smells funny up there and sometimes she thinks she can hear squirrels chewing through the electrics.
But there’s no point in worrying about that now, thinks Bel sleepily. At least this weekend she can give herself a break from all that stress, and as she nods off she finds herself wondering, not for the first time, about the birthday cake. Chocolate would be nice, especially if it’s covered in that ganache stuff they do on Bake Off. Hmm. Bel falls asleep with her stomach gently rumbling.
47
Maisie Arrives at Kittiwake
Maisie can’t believe how long it takes to drive to Cornwall. She’s flown to Ibiza in half the time, and that’s got sandy beaches.
‘Cornwall’s got sandy beaches,’ Bel snaps. Maisie ignores her, it’s Bel’s fault that the journey is taking so long, she keeps having to stop at every other motorway service station in order to use the ladies.
They have lunch somewhere outside of Bristol. Ed has an Egg McMuffin and seeing him with yolk in his beard makes Maisie’s stomach heave. She is going off him; his eyes are too small and she doesn’t like his belly button.
It was never meant to be a long-term thing anyway and while it’s been great living rent-free in central London, she doesn’t fancy him any more.
In fact, the sight of both brothers, pudgy and shapeless, playing some stupid driving game has totally pissed her off. It’s not like either of them can even drive. Ed is a boy, she wants a man.
Maisie takes the last of Andrew’s wine gums from the glove box. According to the back-seat driver, ‘It won’t be long now,’ and suddenly the prospect of coming face to face with Lance makes her nervous. It seemed like such a hilarious idea three hundred miles ago.
As they reach the brow of a hill, Bel lurches forward in the back seat, points over Maisie’s shoulder and screams right next to her ear, ‘Look, the sea!’ She’s right and even though it’s what Maisie’s been expecting for miles, the sight is oddly surprising, glittering and vast.
She can’t remember what lies on the other side of it. Is it a foreign country or the Isle of Man? Her geography teacher tried to touch her up once, what was her name again?
Ed and Jamie, squashed together now for seven hours on the back seat, start pretending they are four years old and talk in babyish voices about building ‘thand cathles and wanting an ithe queem’, which is quite funny b
ut at the same time annoying because they don’t stop, they keep talking in baby voices until without warning Bel erupts like a volcano next to them and starts banging on about family honour and everyone being on their best behaviour and not letting her down. Her face is tomato red and she goes on and on about how much this weekend means to her and how hard it is to come to terms with Kittiwake and nobody understanding what the place means to her and then she’s like crying and everyone else in the car is silent, until she says in a very quiet voice, ‘I’m sorry for that outburst. Andrew, don’t forget to take the next left.’ Only Andrew does forget to take the next left because obviously the man’s a moron, so then Bel starts swearing and the next thing Andrew’s driving the car backwards, which, according to Bel, is illegal. Then she wails, ‘What if we run into a tractor or someone on horseback? For the love of God, be careful, Andrew!’ which makes Ed and Jamie piss themselves laughing.
The road they have turned down is very narrow with tall hedges forming high leafy green barriers on either side, so you can’t see anything and every time they round a bend, Bel shrieks ‘Slow down, Andrew, anything could be coming round that corner, someone walking a dog, or a child on a bike.’
Maisie wonders how anyone can live in a place where there are no shops. Once in a while there’s a break in the hedge, and all she can see for miles are fields and trees and occasionally another glimpse of the sea, but no shops, only cows.
Maisie has read that more people are killed by cows in the UK than by terrorist attacks. She’d rather take her chances on a bomb in the West End than run the risk of an encounter with a cow down here, they’re fucking massive.
She squints at the sky: the weather is crap. What’s the point in paying for a spray tan if you can’t show it off? Maisie has had to compromise by wearing skinny jeans with lots of deliberate rips and tears in the denim. Andrew had been aghast, ‘Are you telling me you actually paid money for jeans with holes in the knees?’
The man is a freakin’ dinosaur.
‘Do they have a pool?’ she asks. Preferably an indoor one, she thinks, looking at the thickening cloud.
‘No,’ Bel replies, and launches into a long-winded story about someone Maisie’s never heard of who drowned there decades before she was born.
‘If you want to swim, there’s always the sea,’ Andrew reminds her. Maisie doesn’t bother to tell him that she’s not interested in swimming, she simply wants to wear her new bikini. Anyway, she can’t swim – no one taught her, not properly – so she won’t be going near any cows and she’s not going in the sea either. All she wants is to doss around in a posh house while giving the bloke that owns it either a heart attack or the horn, or both. Because that’s another thing she’s read in one of her ‘real life and celebrity’ magazines, that loads of middle-aged men peg out due to sexual arousal; something about not having enough blood supply to feed both the penis and the brain at the same time, which is pretty gross when you think about it.
She is intrigued to see Lance’s wife and their kids in the flesh, Freya, Luna and Ludo, and there is a dog too and chickens in the garden. ‘All the eggs will be Kittiwake’s own,’ Bel informed her self-importantly.
Then there’s the Natasha woman, Bel’s mum, who sounds like a right piece of work. According to Bel, she is very well turned out – ‘Like a pineapple upside-down cake,’ ventures Andrew, sniggering at his own joke, but everyone ignores him.
‘My mother is what they used to call a fashion plate,’ Bel sighs.
I’ll be the judge of that, thinks Maisie, wondering if the little white fur stole she found in the Clapham attic ever belonged to this Natasha woman. It smells old enough to belong to someone from the past.
Sod it, she’s wearing it anyway. The old bat’s nearly eighty, so neither her eyesight or her memory will be up to much.
Maisie plans to look amazing for the party. Tomorrow night she’s going to be ‘Amazing Maisie’, like she was that night in the hotel, only this time she’s doing it properly. She has a silver beaded dress that fits her like a condom and a blond wig, because sometimes they have more fun – she laughs out loud at this but nobody notices because Bel is suddenly screaming and pointing ‘Look! Kittiwake, I can see Kittiwake.’
Maisie follows the line of Bel’s finger but all she can see is the top of some chimneys and it’s only when Andrew rounds the next corner that the house comes into view and Maisie can physically feel her jaw drop. It’s big. Fuck me, she thinks, it’s big and it’s posh and it’s yellow but like a good yellow with a hint of mustard in it. I should buy a handbag in that colour, or shoes . . . yeah, yellow shoes.
48
Back Where She Was Born
Cornwall, Saturday afternoon
Bel has no idea why she cannot fully relax. Apart from the weather, everything at Kittiwake is completely fine, a couple of eggy moments during the gift-opening ceremony earlier, perhaps, and Bel is once again convinced that she’d seen Lance and Freya swapping smirks at the present she’d bought him.
She’d been so proud of it. It had seemed like such a brainwave, commissioning a woman in Dulwich Village who had exhibited at the RA’s summer exhibition no less, to paint a small oil landscape for her brother’s big birthday. But as the wrapping paper fell away, she’d been engulfed by doubt. Was it her imagination or was the painting rather horrid? An amateurish daub that rather than grace one of Kittiwake’s finely rendered walls, would be consigned to the bin as soon as this long bank holiday weekend is over.
Damn Lance. There is something about his face that she has never been able to read. Even as a child he’d had the slight supercilious curl to his lip that still hovers today. She knows it’s not his fault but it has always lent him an air of mocking superiority. Ever since he was born, he’s made me feel like some kind of poor relation, she thinks, swigging her Pimm’s. Dammit, she hadn’t meant to drink till this evening. Oh God, this evening – she already feels exhausted by the prospect of more socialising. It’s hard enough dealing with her extended family, including Freya’s numerous Norwegian relatives, never mind all these glamorous total strangers.
Bel scans the party-goers playing croquet on the back lawn. So many gorgeous women, so many handsome, tanned, stubble-faced men, so much bohemian jewellery and so many straw hats, despite it not being straw-hat weather.
She herself is wearing her nice new skirt but with a casual red T-shirt as Maisie had suggested, rather than the white blouse, which she will change into for tonight. Freya had looked slightly crestfallen when she and Andrew admitted during the post-fish pie cheese board that they’d bottled out of the fancy-dress option. ‘Quite right, too,’ her mother had chimed in from the other end of the table, ‘such a silly waste of time,’ and Bel had watched Freya’s face fall even further. Thinking back to this exchange now, Bel is grateful for the realisation that Natasha is capable of pricking someone else’s bubble rather than just her own. ‘She’s a difficult woman,’ she mutters under her breath, simultaneously recalling how taken aback she’d been by her mother’s arrival last night. The first thing that had struck her when Natasha walked into the dining room was how old she looked and how small, as if she’d shrunk in the wash like good cashmere.
Bel had immediately gone over to greet her, feeling mountainous beside her. Natasha flinched slightly as she approached, possibly nervous that Bel might tread on her, before offering up a papery cheek to be kissed.
They were halfway through supper when she’d arrived, which was a tad embarrassing but Freya had decided not to delay proceedings because the pie was threatening to dry out and Natasha had swiftly been seated at the table some distance from Bel, which was a relief. Her mother was clearly put out at the fact no one had waited for her and had typically refused to eat anything except a small bunch of black grapes.
Her loss, thinks Bel, that fish pie was amazing. Even Maisie had wolfed it down and she is normally very squeamish about fish, squealing with horror when Bel buys trout for supper and she accidentally touch
es the blood-smeared plastic bag in the fridge.
Still, she had to admit Madam was toeing the line here at Kittiwake. Bel has never seen Maisie so demure as last night, sitting there in some kind of pretty vintage seventies peasant-style dress, holding her knife and fork correctly for once. Maisie had barely said a word but when she did Bel could tell she was doing her best to sound a little less Croydon than usual. Again, she feels a wave of warmth towards her. Must be the Pimm’s, she shouldn’t drink any more, she’ll only get a headache.
Bel feels increasingly self-conscious, Andrew and the boys are nowhere to be seen and no one is making any real effort to include her in their conversations. New guests keep arriving all the time and the idea of mingling and introducing herself to strangers holds very little appeal. She’s already been met with blank incomprehension after telling some woman in an orange straw trilby that she is Lance’s sister. ‘Older, obviously,’ she’d added helpfully in the ensuing silence, only for the woman to blurt, ‘Oh, gosh, I didn’t even know he had a sister.’
Though they’ve never met him, all Bel’s friends know about Lance, but then Lance appears in glossy magazines, Lance is a player, Lance is a successful businessman, Lance is someone to be proud of, while she is a dumpy middle-aged housewife and mother who lives in a house with too many coats.
Bel shivers in the stiff breeze. Talking of coats, she might go in soon and put on a cardigan. She glances up at Kittiwake. Even when the sun goes in, the house continues to glow. They really have done a remarkable job; there was a time when Kittiwake had looked quite sorry for itself, and it certainly hadn’t been at its best in the sixties when Bel was born here.