The Yellow Villa

by Amanda Hampson

‘You must be Susannah. I’m Roxanne.’

  Susannah feels her whole body go limp; she clutches the door jamb for support. It’s as though she has always known this day would come, without ever having consciously thought about it. As if she’s dreaded it and forgotten it at the same time. How had she found them? Why now, when it feels as though life could barely get any worse? On top of everything else, Susannah is mentally wringing her hands at the state of the house. ‘I suppose you better come in,’ she says faintly.

  They stand in the hallway. Unnervingly self-contained, Roxanne looks around curiously. She bends down and offers her hand to the dogs for their approval. ‘So sweet. What are their names?’

  ‘Lou-Lou and Chou-Chou.’ The names sound twee and juvenile to Susannah’s own ears.

  ‘Oh, gorgeous,’ says Roxanne without enthusiasm. ‘Is he here?’

  They’re standing right beside the closed door of the study; there is no way to forewarn Dominic. Susannah taps gently on the door and calls his name, her voice quavery, like an old woman. ‘There’s someone here to see you.’ She gives Roxanne a reassuring smile. There is no telling what Dominic’s response to this visitor will be.

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you not to disturb me?’ he shouts back.

  Susannah opens the door. ‘Roxanne’s here to see you, darling.’ The endearment forces its way out like something thickly putrid caught in her throat.

  Dominic looks up from his typewriter, a wreath of smoke suspended above him. He gave up smoking years ago to preserve his tastebuds but has taken it up again, insisting it helps him concentrate. He stares at Susannah and then at Roxanne over the top of his glasses, looking from one to the other for enlightenment. Susannah realises she is quite enjoying seeing him caught on the back foot. Roxanne also seems in no hurry to ease the awkwardness in the room. She stands gazing at him as though at a deity, her expression one of quiet wonder and jubilation.

  ‘It’s me. Roxy.’

  Susannah watches the slow dawning of recognition on Dominic’s face. There’s a flicker of something – fear or guilt? – immediately replaced by his usual response to anything unexpected: annoyance. ‘How did you get here?’ he asks.

  ‘She has a car,’ offers Susannah, gesturing out the window helpfully.

  ‘After an unexplained absence from his daughter’s life for over thirty years, his first words to her are: “How did you get here?”’ Roxy sounds amused more than anything.

  Dominic stands up slowly, taking care to nurse his injured ribs. Not, it seems, to greet or embrace his daughter, but to address the psychological disadvantage. ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘It wasn’t that difficult. You’d obviously changed your name, but I was able to track down Susannah’s sister quite easily, and she was more than happy to give me your address.’

  Dominic shoots Susannah a furious look as though her family are conspiring against him.

  ‘Did your mother send you?’ asks Dominic.

  ‘I’m a little too old to be sent places by my mother. No, it was my idea alone. She doesn’t know anything about it. I wanted to meet you. Found out your address and drove here. Simple as that.’

  ‘So, now what?’ he asks. ‘Is there more to the plan?’

  Roxy laughs out loud. ‘You’re exactly as I imagined you.’

  Susannah’s quietly impressed by Roxy’s apparent imperviousness to her father’s hostility. Lou and Chou seem to like her and hang around, gazing up with interest.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea,’ says Roxy with a smile.

  ‘That seems achievable.’ Dominic raises a commanding eyebrow in Susannah’s direction.

  She pulls the armchair up close to his desk for his visitor. ‘You two have a little catch-up while I make the tea.’

  Roxy sits down, head high, eyes fixed on Dominic, like a queen ascending to the throne. Nerves of steel by the looks of her.

  Twenty minutes later, Susannah opens the door to the study, balancing the tea tray against her hip, breathless from the exertion of pelting around the house throwing mess into cupboards, clearing the benches and piling all the dishes will-nilly into the dishwasher. She still wears her pyjamas under her coat, having had no time to change.

  Dominic sits typing at his desk, a fresh cigarette balanced on his lip. Without looking up, he asks: ‘What year did … oh, never mind. Your memory is even worse than mine.’

  Susannah looks wildly around the room, almost dropping the tray. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Oh, she just left. Ben turned up, so I sent her off with him. I need to get this chapter finished. She’s booked into a hotel up the top.’

  Susannah has a sudden vision of herself as a foolish old woman in a shabby coat, standing there stupidly holding a tray of tea that no one wants.

  Dominic glances up. ‘What? It’s not as though we have room for her. She’ll come down for a drink later.’ He begins to type, tapping away with two fingers, feigning immersion in his work.

  ‘Well … how long is she staying?’

  ‘A week or so, I believe. Now, can I get on? It’s impossible to concentrate with all these interruptions.’

  ‘She’s not Ben’s responsibility …’

  ‘Look, Susannah, far be it from me to intuit your tangled logic but she has turned up here uninvited and unannounced, so as far as I’m concerned she’s no one’s responsibility. And tell that sister of yours to stop blabbing about our whereabouts or, next thing we know, we’ll have the press banging on the door.’

  Susannah grips the tray so tightly that the cups rattle in their saucers and tea slops out of the pot. Not trusting herself, she rushes for the door.

  ‘By the way, I invited her to spend Christmas with us.’

  ‘What?! Oh, Dominic, really?’

  ‘Anyway, they’re back for drinks at five. So you can discuss it with her yourself. Shut the door, will you, it’s bloody draughty. Hoy! Where are you going with that tea!’

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Meeting Roxy was a peculiar experience. Dominic felt no particular connection with her, no rush of fatherly warmth or even a sense of recognition. In fact, her name meant nothing at all to him initially. It was only the expression on Susannah’s face that jogged his memory. He wouldn’t have picked her as his daughter to look at – she doesn’t resemble Michelle, but definitely has a helping of chutzpah he could lay claim to.

  It’s uncanny that the girl should turn up right now. He’d been jumping from one era to another, writing the bits he remembers, gratified to discover tiny vistas of memory beckoning him on into the distance, revealing things he’d forgotten. He’s realised that writing about the past is like wandering into a cinema when the lights are down: it’s counterproductive to stumble around flailing for something to hold on to. One has to be patient and wait for one’s vision to adjust. He’s uncovered solid nuggets of story; some of the detail is lost, but a little extrapolation here and there is bringing it vividly to life.

  What a treat to wander through the riotous years revisiting Madame Jojo’s, Raymond’s Revue and The Marquee. Nights that went on for days with well-known names sprinkled throughout like stardust. So energising to relive those filthy alcohol-sodden nights of red-blooded fun. It all starts to gets rather tame when Michelle appears on the scene, though. She quietened him down for a year or two – he was probably in need of some rest – but he was never one to miss out on the fun for long. He’s reluctantly decided to bestow pseudonyms on all his lovers, especially during his time with Michelle – keep the punters guessing and avoid being sued. Apart from one or two, they are all respectable matrons these days. First and foremost he has a responsibility to the truth, apart from the odd detail he might need to fabricate to make it more interesting and lucid.

  The seventies and eighties; just the thought of those two decades gives him a rush of nostalgia. Back then he believed it would go on forever. When you’re having the time of your life, it’s not as though you look ahead and wonder if one day you�
�ll end up living in a brutally cold house in a foreign country with a woman desperately in need of psychiatric help. You think the good times will continue to roll. He had money back then. Not fabulous wealth, but more than enough to live the high life. These days people seem to cultivate an aversion to money, as though it is something incidental; of no importance. Back then, people quite rightly worshipped the stuff. Back then it was acknowledged as the key to everything good in life. He had driven cars that were better than sex. Sex! There was a ridiculous amount of sex. In the sixties ‘free love’ was a theory. In the seventies women started putting it into practice. Underwear went missing for at least a decade, apart from slithery little numbers called teddies. There was a smorgasbord of women to choose from. Then, for some inexplicable reason, perhaps weary of feasting, his palate desirous of something simple and nourishing for a change, he married Michelle. They were a cliché of the eighties: they smoked pot, drank Harvey Wallbangers and married impulsively.

  There was a remote possibility that a loosely woven marriage might have worked but the wedding vows activated a primal switch in Michelle’s brain and she jumped tracks. Turned out that the whole bohemian business was a front for a woman deeply entrenched in suburban sensibilities. She wanted them to move out of his Notting Hill flat and buy a house near her parents in Walthamstow. Walthamstow! On the edge of the known universe. Here be dragons. He dug his heels in. She campaigned. He stayed out late. She waited up. It was relentless. After months of bickering, he agreed to try Camden Town, which was just the right side of the suburban wastelands. He stonewalled on the actualities of the relocation. She got pregnant. He met Susannah.

  Susannah’s husband, Maxwell Dixon, was the darling of the West End. Every show he directed was a smash. He was wooed by actors and producers alike. He neglected his wife, which was a mistake because she was beautiful. Gorgeous. Irresistible. Hard to believe it now, but Susannah was the most uninhibited woman he’d ever encountered. They were either drunk or getting drunk; either screwing or thinking about screwing. They were indiscreet and utterly obsessed with each other. But when the cuckolded twigged to the situation, they joined forces and came at the lovers from every direction. The director turned the whole episode into a tragic drama with himself in the starring role. Michelle competed as the untamed shrew.

  By that time Dominic didn’t have the stomach for conflict he’d once had. Ironically he and Susannah ended up renting a place together in Camden and, once their divorces came through, married, almost as if to prove it was all worthwhile. After all Susannah had suffered, Reggie felt the urge to come to the rescue and bought the house for her. Dominic was soon poached by an opposition paper and their life of abundance resumed. Maxwell and Susannah had made peace but Michelle never forgave him, which makes Roxy’s appearance all the more surprising.

  She had been presenting him with a problem even before she manifested. It was almost as though she sensed his dilemma and turned up to force her own inclusion in his story. Leaving Michelle when she was pregnant would take some careful explanation, apart from stressing the obvious: that it was commonplace back then. It was the 1980s. Everyone did it. Back then liaisons dissolved and reassembled with different players quite effortlessly.

  Michelle obviously had her own part to play in his defection. It wasn’t as though she was screwing around, she was too busy titivating the flat and reading him passages from The Female Eunuch, which she embraced a full decade after everyone else had forgotten it. That book alone was enough to send him screaming out into the night. But then she got herself pregnant. And that was the end for him. Those bad-boy chefs got away with this sort of behaviour all the time. The problem remains that it makes him seem untrustworthy, which makes it harder to defend his innocent intentions over the Farash affair. Unless he can shake that one off, any hopes of this book springboarding him into a television career could be severely compromised.

  He leaves his study and makes his way to the kitchen to forage for something edible. Pleasingly, Roxy’s visit has spurred Susannah into action, because here she is scrubbing the worktops like someone possessed. Something is actually cooking in the oven, and the kitchen is warm and relatively inviting as a result. There’s nothing much to snack on but he finds a loaf of thin sliced white bread in the freezer and puts two slices into the toaster.

  ‘What are you going to do about her?’ asks Susannah, jerking around to face him. ‘You can’t just fob her off onto Ben.’

  ‘What do you suggest? She’s met me, basked in my radiance, probably all she wanted. I did invite her for Christmas, but got the impression that you object to that.’

  ‘If she’s here for a week, you have to do something. Make her welcome. Do you want her going back and telling Michelle we’re living in squalor and poverty?’

  ‘Or that this was recently the scene of a serious domestic violence incident?’ asks Dominic, mildly. ‘There’s no shame in a little genteel poverty, but that was something else again.’

  ‘Dominic, please don’t provoke me. You must see that I am at the very end of what I can deal with. I can’t bear to hear you dismissing what happened to Mr Farash so lightly … you don’t seem to understand that a man is dead because of you —’

  ‘Susannah, for Christ’s sake, everything doesn’t have to be part of your ongoing melodrama. Farash is gone and nothing can bring him back. A little untidiness is hardly squalor. Our minor financial hiccup, most likely due to your poor management, will be resolved in due course. Let’s revisit my original question: What do you suggest?’

  He remembers a time when Susannah’s face was guileless, untroubled by any hint of serious thought. Now he watches her features twist into a parody of anger and frustration; a snarling fishwife. Her crazy behaviour is no aberration, it’s just the way some women turn out.

  Not bothering to answer him, she turns back to the sink, shaking her head in disgust; and begins to scrub her hands furiously under the water. What a sight she is, hunched over the sink, the saggy pants of her pink flannelette pyjamas hanging below her coat and ugly old-woman slippers broken at the back because she’s too slovenly to put them on properly. She insisted on separate rooms from the day they moved into this house and when he looks at her now he’s almost grateful for his enforced state of celibacy. It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when she was irresistible to him. He’d always been a buttock man. The sight of a hip-hugging dress taut across her long haunches, the tantalising knowledge of the smooth alabaster beneath … He wonders, would she even have the power to arouse him now? Attacking him with that broom was the most interesting thing she’d done in years. And almost as he thinks it, he finds himself behind her at the sink. With one hand he grips the back of her neck, roughly shoving her head under the running water. With the other, he pulls her coat up over her shoulders and wrenches the pyjama pants down, exposing her naked buttocks. As he suspected, they are not as he remembers. The once firm white orbs are now shapeless and dimpled as cold porridge.

  Disoriented under the stream of water, Susannah screams furiously, her arms flailing helplessly for the tap – or him – and finding neither. He has her firmly pinned against the bench and the pyjamas gathered around her knees hamper her attempts to kick him.

  He’s in no rush to release her despite the pain of his ribs, or perhaps because of the pain. He rubs himself against her naked buttocks experimentally. Nothing. He’s had more thrills from a mouthful of decent foie gras on a nice thin slice of white toast. At that moment, his toast pops up and, feeling creative, he wedges one slice between her quivering buttocks. ‘There you are,’ he says cheerfully, munching on the other piece of toast. ‘I’ve finally found a use for you.’

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Ben had been unaware that Dominic had a daughter, but was not all that surprised. He’s often the last person to find things out and assumes he was distracted when everyone else was listening. In any case, he didn’t need to know about Roxy and now he just needs to carry out his duty as Dom
inic’s deputised host.

  He had walked across the fields to the Harringtons’, so goes with Roxy in her car to the village where they stop for petit déjeuner at the Salon de Thé. It’s quiet this morning, just a few people out doing errands. Half-a-dozen men sit outside the bar opposite drinking un express from tiny white cups, their faces raised towards the winter sun. Ben explains the layout of the town, this lower part being the business centre with a dozen or so useful shops and Saturday market, whereas the old town up the hill is the touristy part with nothing useful to buy unless you’re after handmade chocolates or foie gras.

  Roxy was chirpy and confident at the Harringtons’; now she seems subdued. Ben tries to think about things from her point of view, a practice he has worked hard to perfect over the years, under the tutelage of both Mia and Olivia. ‘It must have been nerve-racking coming to meet Dominic and Susannah,’ he says as an opener.

  ‘You have no idea. I haven’t slept properly for days, just worrying about it. I haven’t even been to my hotel yet – wanted to get the first meeting done with.’

  ‘Oh well, the worst is over,’ he assures her. ‘If they were going to throw you out the door it would have happened by now.’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it. Could still happen, I suppose. I’ll just need to watch my step.’

  ‘Dominic’s bark is worse than his bite. He likes to overstate everything. He’s really a decent guy.’

  Roxy glances at him dubiously and looks away, as though she thinks it’s an odd thing to say. If she doesn’t think her father is a decent guy, then why is she even here?

  ‘You’ve haven’t known them long then?’ she asks. ‘Sorry, I haven’t even asked you a thing about yourself. How rude of me!’

  ‘That’s okay, you’re not here to see me. I’m just the tour guide.’

  ‘It’s not like you volunteered for the job.’ She smiles.

  ‘That’s okay, I’m happy to show you round a bit. I was working until one this morning. It’s nice to be outside. I go and have coffee with Dominic sometimes to get out of the house and talk to someone.’