by Jenny Eclair
Natasha had always had a temper. When she was a child she was apt to lash out at the smallest provocation, but as an adult she had managed to keep her tantrums under control, helped by the little white pills the doctor prescribed. But she wasn’t taking the pills any more, Hugo wouldn’t let her, not now she was a mother. She allowed the old familiar fury to wash over her. Who did this silly bitch with her plastic handbag and her dyed hair think she was? Coming up to Natasha and waving her husband’s tie in her face like some end of the pier magician playing a rubbish trick.
Later on, she would convince herself she didn’t mean it, that the push was playful rather than deadly, that she didn’t realise the woman’s legs were so short and she was so precariously balanced and anyway it happened so fast, like a speeded-up reel of film that repeated over and over again. Renee showed her the tie and Natasha pushed her – not hard, but she fell, she fell backwards off the balustrade, push, fall, push, fall, push, fall.
As Natasha stepped in from the balcony, downstairs on the ground floor Johnny Montgomery poured an entire bottle of red cochineal food dye into the fountain and the frothing water turned blood red. Everyone laughed, and then somebody screamed.
56
Falling (2)
Mayfair, London, 1963
Renee fell and took Serena with her, they fell head over heels together, the girl with the silver hair and the slightly crooked jaw and the girl who’d left Southend without saying goodbye to her mother or her nan.
As they fell, Serena sensed Renee slipping away. She was never entirely real, but it was fun to play make believe for a while, up to a point, up until that afternoon in the Grosvenor House Hotel.
Goodbye Renee and goodbye Patty and Gloria, Serena would miss them, she hoped Patty would get her shoes back and that Gloria would help herself to Renee’s knickers, she hoped that they’d stay happy and safe in the little flat in Earls Court and that they wouldn’t be too upset that she lied to them about who she was, but it was too late now to explain.
I’m Serena Tipping, she admitted to herself, falling faster now, and the only thing I regret is leaving the baby. If I had another chance, if I could come back and do things differently – that’s the only thing I’d change, I’d pick that baby up and I would take her back to Southend and I would ring the doorbell and I would say . . .
Benedict heard the commotion as he rounded the corner onto Curzon Place and immediately broke into a run. People began streaming out of the house, some seemed to be escaping, others milled about, forming a ragged circle on the pavement. They seemed to be staring at something on the ground; at first it looked like someone had kicked over a tin of silver paint, but as he got closer, he realised the splash of silver was a dress and with every step the picture became clearer, it was a girl, a girl in a silver dress was lying on the ground, a girl with platinum hair, wearing a silver dress, was lying motionless on the ground – and with a horrible certainty, he knew it was Serena.
Benedict pushed his way through the gaggle of panic, the men round-eyed with horror, the women sobbing. ‘I know her,’ he shouted. ‘Let me through, for Christ’s sake!’ Something in his tone made people stand aside and he knelt down by Serena’s lovely head and held her hand and told her that he was there, that she wasn’t alone. ‘I won’t leave you,’ he whispered into her ear and he tried not to recoil at the sight of the dark sticky red ring that seeped around her silver hair and he tried to pretend there was still hope even when he knew it was over and he tried to keep her warm even when he knew she could no longer feel the cold and with every second the wail of the siren was getting closer and closer.
Inside the house, guests were grabbing their coats and leaving as fast as they could. Something horrible had happened and it wouldn’t do them any good to be associated with it, whatever it was.
Rumours immediately began to spread. She fell, she jumped, she jumped from the roof, like an angel, a shooting silver star, a suicide.
The band stood forlornly on the mezzanine, wondering whether they would get paid if they left. Below them, people stopped dancing in the fountain and, unnoticed, a single discarded man’s sock blocked the overflow, sending frothy pink liquid flooding across the hall, eventually finding an escape route out of the open door, down the stone steps and on to the pavement where it pooled around the dead girl’s ankles.
This was the moment the ambulance and the police arrived and a blanket was placed over the woman’s body before being pulled up over her head. At the sight of this a small red-haired girl in a green satin dress clutched the railings and started screaming and didn’t stop until a tall black woman wrapped her in her arms and comforted her as if she were a child, tears streaming down her own face.
Benedict was telling a policeman, ‘Her name was Serena Tipping,’ and the red-haired girl, hearing this, began to struggle in her friend’s arms, trying to contradict Benedict. ‘Renee,’ she was shouting, ‘her name is Renee!’ but the black girl silenced her. Then, without another word, the two of them melted away into the darkness.
Natasha exited the house via the kitchen, through the back garden and out of a hastily unlocked wrought-iron gate onto an alleyway to the rear of the house.
The night had turned cold now and she was grateful for the arctic fox fur stole she had around her narrow shoulders. In five minutes she’d be at Bond Street Tube and there were always taxis around the station. Natasha hummed as she walked, the moon was very bright and her heels made a satisfying click-clack, like her mother’s used to. She’d be home soon.
In Curzon Place, outside the white stucco house, a female police constable spotted two things in the gutter. One seemed to be a large dead goldfish, the other was a silver high-heeled shoe.
She decided to leave the goldfish, but picked up the shoe. There was blood on the diamanté buckle and the toes were stuffed with cotton wool.
Poor Cinderella, sometimes even fairy tales go wrong.
Natasha took a glass of whisky up to bed. Mr Phelan had picked up Mrs Phelan and thankfully Baby Annabel was out for the count in the nursery.
As she dropped the little white fox fur to her bedroom floor, Natasha was struck by the embroidered silver label stitched to the lining. How strange that it should share the same French furrier’s name tag that most of her mother’s coats sported. Peggy had worn a Mme Paquin white fur stole too. Life was full of coincidences, thought Natasha, and she was still wondering how the cheap little tart had afforded such luxury when the phone started ringing.
For a moment, she thought it might be Hugo. Perhaps his father had passed away and they could forget about their money worries for a while, but it was Benedict.
‘Were you at Charlie’s party?’ he demanded breathlessly. He sounded upset.
‘Yes,’ she answered coolly. ‘And you never showed up.’
‘I did,’ he panted, as if he’d been running. ‘Only you’d gone by the time I got there. There was an accident.’
‘I know’ she replied. ‘It was pandemonium, a girl jumped out of a window or something.’
‘It was Serena,’ he interrupted, ‘the girl from Kittiwake. It was Annabel’s mother, she’s dead.’
Once Natasha had managed to get rid of a weepy Benedict, she hid the white fur stole at the back of her wardrobe. Silly in some respects; after all, by rights it was hers. It was obvious now that the girl must have taken it from Kittiwake, but she knew she would never wear it again. It would be bad luck.
In the morning the Sunday papers reported the accident in lurid detail, the dead girl was a Serena Tipping aged twenty from Southend, also known as Renee Culpepper, a society hostess from Earls Court.
There was no mention anywhere that she was ever a mother.
57
After the Party
Kittiwake, August 2018
Freya’s mother Mari calls the doctor, but it’s ten o’clock on a bank holiday Saturday night and no one is on duty. The recorded message suggests dialling NHS Direct on 111.
The bar
n is empty. Everyone staying at Kittiwake has drifted back to the house, those sleeping in the yurts have retired to the yurt field, some have gone home early and those who live locally disappeared almost as soon as it happened. It’s embarrassing: Lance’s mother stabbed her own son.
‘She’s obviously lost her marbles,’ whispers Freya to her husband. Then the whisper turns into a hiss as she adds, ‘I’m not having that madwoman under this roof tonight.’
‘What am I supposed to do with her?’ pleads Lance, ‘I can’t put her in one of the empty yurts – she’s nearly eighty, for Christ’s sake.’
Mari reminds him not to shout at his wife and Lance tells her to ‘fuck off’.
Freya leaves the room in tears and her sister follows her.
Natasha is sitting quietly by the Aga drinking sweet hot tea. She’s had a nasty shock – Serena came back from the grave and she had to fight her off, only it wasn’t Serena because even if Serena wasn’t dead, she’d be old enough to be Lance’s mother, and a mother shouldn’t dance with her son like that, it’s disgusting, no wonder she had to be stopped.
Natasha is very tired indeed and everyone in the kitchen is upset and talking far too loudly. Her son is sitting on the kitchen table having his wound attended to by that troll creature – poor man, constantly being mauled at by strange women.
For a moment Natasha wonders if she’s in a pantomime, the one with the pumpkin and the mice, the man sitting on the table who looks like her son is dressed up like a footman, so he must be Buttons and the pig woman fussing over him must be one of the ugly sisters. In which case Natasha must be Cinderella.
Only that’s what they called Serena in the newspapers: ‘Death of Party Girl Cinderella’ said the headlines. Because she lost a shoe, a shoe with a diamanté buckle, one two buckle my shoe, three, four knock on the door . . .
It’s the police, Freya has called them because Elise told her she had to, she didn’t have any choice. ‘That woman might decide to stab one of the children next.’ No one can sleep safely in this house while Natasha is free to roam about, ‘Think about all the Sabatier knives in the kitchen, Freya, think about Baby Aksel.’
Even if they did find somewhere, they couldn’t keep her locked away – she could end up harming herself.
‘If you don’t phone them, I will,’ threatened Elise in Norwegian.
Freya opens the door to the police and they follow her into the kitchen, two of them, a man and a woman in police uniform, but they have brought a plain-clothes liaison officer with them, someone who can professionally assess Natasha and, if necessary, find her somewhere safe to stay for the night.
She looks very frail, sitting on a stool laughing at the policemen, muttering about Punch and Judy and then shouting, ‘Who’s got the sausages?’
The liaison officer raises an eyebrow at his colleagues and goes away ‘for a minute’ to make some phone calls.
A few of the remaining party guests drift in and out of the kitchen to say their goodbyes, a priest says, ‘Thank you very much for a wonderful party’ and Natasha laughs even harder.
Upstairs, next to the dormitory of sleeping children, Ed and Jamie are still playing video games. Maisie joins them, she has changed into her pyjamas and lies down on the bed Ed slept in last night. She’s not sleeping on her own tonight, no way.
She thinks about telling the brothers about what has happened but can’t be bothered. They won’t interested, not when everything they need is on the screen in front of them: cars smashing into walls and buildings bursting into flames, men machine-gunning other men in the face and brains splattering as they scream in agony.
Some old woman going crazy with a carving knife isn’t likely to grab their attention, even if it was their grandmother. Though maybe Bel should be told? Considering it’s her mother who has gone berserk.
Maisie would go and tell her but she’s too tired to move and anyway she doesn’t want to answer any questions about why and how she was dancing with Lance. She allows herself a tiny smirk, the erection she’d felt straining from his breeches was huge, ha!
She imagines they will all drive home tomorrow. No one will want to stay here after what happened tonight. Then on Tuesday, after the bank holiday, she’ll start asking around at work, see if anyone’s got a room going spare. She’s going to have to brace herself for a bit of a come-down in the comfort stakes, she can’t imagine she’s going to find anywhere with such a big showerhead and under-floor heating in the bathroom. She will miss Bel’s home-cooked dinners and Andrew’s shit jokes, too. She’s going to have to manage her own laundry from now on and get used to cheap hummus and avocados from the market, rather than Marks, dammit.
Andrew has been sitting quietly in the barn for a long time. He had seen the way Maisie danced with Lance and it embarrassed him, what the hell were they both doing? Lance is old enough to know better and Maisie is supposed to be so keen on his eldest son that she has moved into their home. No doubt Bel will be delighted when he tells her, she’s never liked the girl, but what if no one else saw what he and Natasha had seen, what if Maisie denies it? Then he’ll have stirred up trouble for no reason. And in any case it could have been entirely innocent, although somehow he doubts it.
For a while he helps the hog-roast men pack everything up, apart from the knife, which has been taken away for safekeeping. The men are chatty and tell Andrew that they’ve been doing festivals around the country for the past five years and they’ve never seen anything as mad as tonight. In the end they all start laughing about it, which is awful but a sort of relief. Andrew laughs so much that he winds himself and he’s a tiny bit sick behind one of the hay bales. He may have drunk more than he thought he had.
Outside the barn the wind has got up and the rain is visibly rolling in from the sea. Without the multi strings of old-fashioned light bulbs which had illuminated the dancing, the inside of the barn is gloomy and getting colder by the minute. Andrew finds a discarded plastic knife and decides to hack a piece of the Kittiwake cake off for Bel. He studies the crumbling edifice and realises he can take her the bedroom where she is sleeping right now – she’ll love that, she’ll say, ‘Oh, Andrew, it’s far too good to eat’ and he’ll show her the photos of how it looked when the candles were blazing. Then, while she’s eating the cake, he will gently tell her about her mother.
Crossing the back lawn over to the house, Andrew is caught in a sudden downpour, his linen shirt is instantly drenched and he notices a police car in the drive.
Poor Natasha. He can’t help feeling sorry for her, she is obviously terribly confused. This weekend has been too much for her, this house is too much. He never wants to come here again, he’d like to go home tonight but knows he’ll have to wait until the morning. Anyway, he can’t drive, not when he’s pissed.
Avoiding the kitchen, Andrew creeps into the house through a side entrance and makes his way round to the necessary staircase by cutting through the empty sitting room. He takes his shoes off – Freya doesn’t need to deal with mud on top of blood – and he climbs the stairs in his stockinged feet carrying the rain-sodden cake carefully on a soggy paper plate.
He might have a bath before bed. Bel will come and sit on the toilet seat like she does at home, and she’ll fire lots of questions at him, she will want to know everything, every little detail, she will interrogate him about the food, music, costumes, dancing and what about the boys? He doesn’t want to tell her that he hasn’t seen them all night. He’ll simply say they kept a pretty low profile, but that Maisie seemed to enjoy herself.
He has to put the cake down on the floor to twist the handle on the bedroom door. It’s much stiffer than he remembers and he has to push hard to get in. There must be some kind of draught creating an airlock, maybe Bel has opened a window?
Andrew shoves at the door with his shoulder and stumbles over the threshold.
The room is like an ice-box and behind the dressing table the curtains flap wildly. Andrew switches the light on and rushes over to
shut the window before turning round to find that Bel is nowhere to be seen, the bed is rumpled but empty. He checks the en suite, feeling a childish sense of panic when he finds that empty too. Leaving the bathroom in a hurry, he bangs his ankle on the open drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. Damn and blast it, he feels like crying as he hobbles down the corridor to find his wife. ‘Bel!’ he shouts. ‘Bel, it’s me, where are you?’
Natasha is sitting in the back of the police car next to the nice man who held her hand as they made their way out of the house. He has a kind face and she finds herself confiding in him about what actually happened at the party, the silly mistake she had made. ‘It’s a secret,’ she tells him and then she whispers in his ear, ‘I knew it couldn’t be Serena, because I saw her die. She fell, I pushed her and she fell backwards, I think she landed on her head. My brother fell too and he died, he fell forward into water and drowned.’
Natasha is laughing now, laughing and crying, and she tries to hit herself across the face like her husband used to when she got ‘silly’ in the past. Slap slap, harder and harder, until the nice man decides to give her a pill, a little white pill exactly like the ones that Hugo used to give her all those years ago, and very soon Natasha is asleep with her head on the nice man’s shoulder.