Octavia

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘When are you planning to drive down?’ Gareth asked.

  ‘Lunchtime on Friday. And you?’

  ‘I’ve got meetings all day. I won’t be able to make it much before five.’ He turned to me. ‘When do you knock off work?’

  ‘I don’t work,’ I said haughtily.

  ‘No, I should have realized that. Your private life must be a full-time activity. I’ll give you a lift down.’

  ‘No,’ I said, much too quickly. ‘I want to go down early with Jeremy and Gussie; then I can help them get the boat cleaned up.’

  Suddenly his swarthy face was a mask of malice. ‘Don’t you think the young lovers should have some time on their own? Three’s a crowd and all that.’

  ‘Yes, you go with Gareth, Tavy,’ said Gussie, pleased that her match-making was working out. ‘It’ll be nice for him to have someone to drive down with. It’s a rough old job getting the boat ready, but it’ll be all beautiful by the time you both arrive.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of hard work,’ I snapped.

  ‘No, of course you’re not,’ she said soothingly. ‘You can do the cooking on board, if it makes you any happier.’

  It didn’t. There wouldn’t be any Luigi’s restaurant to take food away from, on the backwaters of the Thames. I started to yawn.

  ‘Octavia’s tired,’ said Jeremy. ‘We must go.’

  As we were going down the stairs, the telephone rang again. Gareth took it on the first floor.

  ‘Charlotte, darling, great to hear you. Hang on love, I’m just seeing some people out.’ He put his hand over the receiver. ‘I’ll see you all on Friday.’ He turned to me. ‘What’s your address?’

  ‘Eleven Mayfair Street.’

  ‘I’ll collect you about half-past five.’

  ‘Isn’t he a scream?’ said Gussie, as we went out into the street.

  ‘Oh blast, I’ve forgotten that list of houses he gave me.’

  She charged back into the house.

  Jeremy and I looked at each other. His eyes showed as two black patches in the pallor of his face.

  ‘Do you think Gareth caught the gist of what we were saying?’ I said.

  ‘I expect so. Doesn’t matter. Did you fancy him after all that?’

  ‘He’s not my type. He looks like a lorry driver.’

  ‘What is your type?’

  ‘You are,’ I said.

  Chapter Three

  Next day the weather soared into the eighties. London wilted, but I blossomed. I felt absurdly and joyously happy, and spent most of the day lying naked on my balcony, turning brown and gazing up at a sky so blue that it reminded me of Jeremy’s eyes. I refused to go out with anyone that week, and made sure of ten hours’ sleep every night by taking too many sleeping pills. I spent a fortune on clothes for the weekend. I was only faintly disappointed Jeremy didn’t ring me. But I was ex-directory and he could hardly have got the number from Gussie.

  On Thursday morning I had my recurrent nightmare — more terrifyingly than ever before. The dream always started the same way; my father was alive still, and although I was grown-up, I was paralysed with childish fears of the dark, creeping down the stairs, hearing the sound of my parents’ quarrelling getting louder and louder, not daring to turn on the light because I knew my mother would shout at me. As I reached the bottom of the stairs, I could distinguish what my mother was saying in a voice slurred with drink.

  ‘I’ve had enough, I’m leaving you, and I’m taking Xander with me.’

  Then my father started shouting back that she’d take Xander over his dead body. Then my mother screaming, ‘Well you can keep Octavia then.’ And my father saying, ‘I don’t want Octavia. Why the bloody hell should anyone want Octavia when you’ve completely ruined her?’

  ‘Someone’s got to have her,’ yelled my mother.

  ‘Well, it’s not going to be me.’

  Then I started to scream, pushed open the door, and there was my mother, her beauty all gone, because she was drunk and red in the face. She and my father were both looking at me in guilt and horror, wondering how much of the conversation I’d heard. Then suddenly my father turned into Jeremy, shouting, ‘I don’t care how much she heard, I still don’t want her.’

  I woke up screaming my head off, the sheets were drenched with sweat. For a few minutes I lay with my eyes open, gulping with relief, listening to the diminishing drumbeats of my heart, feeling the horror receding. Then I got up, took a couple of Valium and lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. I had to talk to someone, just to prove that someone wanted me. If only I could ring Jeremy, but it was too early in the relationship to show him how vulnerable I was. Nor could I talk to Charlie. It would only start the whole thing up again. I caught sight of the silver framed photograph on the dressing table and realized with relief that Xander must be back from Bangkok. At that time Xander was the only person in the world I really loved and trusted; not that I trusted him to behave himself or not do the most disgraceful things, but because I knew he loved me and that that love was intensified by guilt because he realized our parents had adored him and never loved me. Xander, four years older than me, had always fought my battles in the nursery. He had protected me from the succession of nannies that my mother never got on with, and later from the succession of potential and actual stepfathers who thundered through the house.

  I looked at my watch; it was 10.45. Even Xander — not famous for getting to the office on time — might just be in. I dialled Seaford-Brennen’s number.

  ‘Can I speak to Alexander Brennen please?’

  Xander’s secretary was a dragon, trained to keep the multitudes at bay, but she always put me through. Xander answered.

  ‘Octavia darling, I was going to ring you today,’ he said, in the light, flat drawling voice, which I always liked to think became gentler and less defensive when he talked to me.

  ‘How was Bangkok?’ I asked.

  ‘Like a fairy tale — literally — I stayed in Pat Pong Street which was nothing but gay bars and massage parlours.’

  I giggled.

  ‘Do you want something,’ said Xander, ‘or are you just lonely?’

  ‘I wanted a chat,’ I said.

  ‘A chap?’

  ‘No, silly, just to talk to you.’

  ‘Listen, I don’t want to be unfriendly darling, but I’m a bit tied up at the moment. I’ve just got in and several people are trying to hold a meeting in my office. What are you doing for lunch?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘OK, I’ll meet you at Freddy’s at one o’clock.’

  I lay back feeling better; the Valium were beginning to work. Soon I should feel strong enough to get down to the daily pastime of washing my hair.

  Because of my grandfather, Henry Brennen, I didn’t have to work for a living. After the First World War he came out of a fashionable regiment and, realizing he had no money left to support a wife and three children, the eldest of which was my father, joined forces with a fellow officer, William Seaford, to form a company, Seaford-Brennen, in the unfashionable field of electrical engineering. Both men were tough, astute and ambitious, and by dint of hard work and good luck, soon had factories turning out transformers, switchgear, generators and electric motors. Business prospered and survived the next war. After that, two rival heirs apparent joined the company — my father, who’d covered himself in glory as a Battle of Britain pilot, and William Seaford’s far less dashing son Ricky, who’d spent most of the war in a routine staff job. My father had the additional kudos of having a new and ravishingly beautiful actress wife who promptly gave up work and produced a Brennen heir, while poor Ricky Seaford married a plain, domineering Yorkshire girl who, despite her capabilities on local committees and the golf course, only provided him with daughters.

  My father, however, while appearing to hold all the cards, found it extremely difficult to settle down to a nine-to-five job after the excitement of the war. His restlessness increased as the years passed, and he discovered that my mothe
r — who found him far less glamorous out of uniform — had started drinking too much, and launched herself on a succession of very indiscreet affairs.

  By the time I was born in 1950, the marriage was well into injury time and my father even expressed grave doubts that I was his child which, I used to fantasize, explained his indifference to me. Despite such setbacks, he and my mother staggered on together for another six years, by which time old Henry Brennen had died of a heart attack and William Seaford had retired, having made his pile, leaving my father as chairman and Ricky as managing director. Ricky, meanwhile, the tortoise to my father’s hare, had put his head down and spent the postwar years building up Seaford International, a vast empire of which Seaford-Brennen soon became only a subsidiary.

  In 1956, my mother left home with my brother Xander and one of her lovers. A few months later she had a pang of guilt and sent for me and the nanny to live with her in France. My father was disconsolate for a short time, then moved in with his secretary whom he married as soon as he could divorce my mother. The marriage was extremely happy, and enabled my father to concentrate on work, and when he died, very young, of throat cancer, in 1971, he was able to leave huge blocks of Seaford-Brennen shares to Xander and me, which should have guaranteed us private incomes for life.

  Alas, no income would have been enough for my brother Xander. Sacked from school for smoking grass and seducing too many new boys, he was also sent down from Cambridge after two terms for riotous living. Being artistically inclined, he would have been happier editing an art magazine or working in a gallery, but as the only existing Seaford-Brennen heir, he automatically went into the family firm. Here he survived — after my father was no longer alive to protect him — by the skin of his beautifully capped teeth, and by his immense personal charm. Three years ago, when Ricky Seaford was on the brink of sacking him, Xander redeemed himself by selling an Arab a power station worth millions of pounds in a deal carried out across the roulette table. Eighteen months later when things had again looked really dicey, Xander had played his trump card by running off with Ricky’s elder daughter, Pamela, to the horror of both her parents. Even Ricky, however, didn’t want to have the reputation in the city as the man who’d booted out his son-in-law. Xander was made export sales manager, which gave him access to vast expenses.

  In his new, exalted position Xander had managed to fiddle the renting and re-decorating of my flat on the firm. After all, he said, one must have somewhere nice to take overseas clients. The firm also paid my rates, telephone, electricity and gas, and provided me with a car which I’d just smashed up. On the whole Xander and I did pretty well out of Seaford-Brennen.

  While I was waiting for the conditioner to soak into my hair, I flipped through my wardrobe deciding what to take on the weekend. I’d bought so many new clothes this week, my cheque book had run out, but after the nasty letter I’d got from my bank manager, I didn’t dare order another one. American Express and Access had also cut off their supplies. I still had to get another bikini and a glamorous dress to float around on deck. I’d have to borrow from Xander.

  The doorbell rang. I peered through the spy hole looking out for creditors or unwelcome suitors, but all I could see were flowers. They turned out to be a huge bunch of pink roses in a plastic vase, filled with green spongy stuff, into which was stuck a mauve bow on a hatpin. I hoped for a blissful moment they were from Jeremy and felt a ridiculous thud of disappointment when the note in loopy florist’s handwriting said: ‘Don’t cut me out of your life altogether, all love, Charlie.’

  Charlie, I reflected as I rinsed and re-rinsed, was going to be as hard to get out of my hair as conditioner. I wondered how the hell I was going to survive the next 30-odd hours until I saw Jeremy again. I felt a restlessness like milk coming up to the boil, an excitement sometimes pleasurable, but far more often, painful.

  Chapter Four

  The heat wave had set in relentlessly. The traffic glittered and flashed in the sunshine as it crawled up Piccadilly. The park was full of typists in bikinis, sliding off the deckchairs as the park attendant approached with his ticket machine. I could feel the tarmac burning through the soles of my shoes as I crossed the road to Freddy’s. I nipped into the Ladies first to tidy my hair and take the shine off my nose. I was wearing new pale pink dungarees with nothing underneath. I toyed with the idea of wearing them when I travelled down with Gareth tomorrow.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said in a loud voice to the cloakroom attendant as I left, just to draw her attention to the fact I’d put 50p in the saucer. Since I’d met Jeremy, sheer happiness made me overtip everyone.

  Freddy’s was packed as usual and giving off the same my-dear-punctuated roar as a smart wedding. Along the bar sat advertising executives with brushed forward hair and romantic looking young men wearing open-necked shirts. Chatting them up were beautiful girls, their streaked hair swinging, their blusher in exactly the right place, their upper lips painted a perfect crimson double circumflex. As they sat, fingers tapping on their slim thighs, eyes flickering over each other’s shoulders to see who had just come in, they constantly checked their appearance in the mirror above the bar. Freddy’s was the current favourite haunt of trendies and show business people, anyone in fact who was important enough to get in, and rich enough to get out.

  Freddy, a mountain of a man with a face as red as a Dutch cheese, was serving behind the bar.

  ‘Hullo, ugly mug,’ he bawled at me. ‘How the hell did you get past the doorman?’ Nearby drinkers looked at me in admiration. Only favourites and the famous got insulted. Freddy leaned over and pumped my hand vigorously.

  ‘Where the hell you been anyway, Octavia? Sneaking over to Arabella’s, I suppose. Can’t say I blame you, I eat there too. The prices here are too high for me.’ He bellowed with laughter, then added, ‘Your no-good brother’s already at the table upstairs drinking himself stupid.’

  I followed the smell of garlic, wine and herbs up to the dining-room, waited in the doorway until I had everyone’s undivided attention, then sauntered across the room. The pink dungarees definitely had the desired effect; the front flap only just covered my nipples.

  Xander was sitting at a window table, flipping through a Sotheby’s catalogue. He looked up, smiled, and kissed me on both cheeks. ‘Hullo, angel, you look positively radiant. Have I forgotten your birthday or something?’

  Waiters immediately rushed up, spreading a napkin across my knees, pushing in my chair, getting a waiting bottle of Poully Fuissé out of an ice bucket, and filling up my glass. Xander ordered another large whisky.

  Perhaps it’s because he is my brother that I always think Xander is the best looking man in the world. He is slim and immensely elegant, with very pale patrician features, brilliant grey eyes, fringed by long dark lashes, and light brown hair, the colour mine was before I started bleaching it. Even on the hottest day of the year he gives the impression of a saluki shivering with overbreeding. As usual he was exquisitely dressed in a pale grey suit, grey and white striped shirt, and a pink tie.

  Impossibly spoilt, with all the restlessness that comes with inherited wealth, he moved through life like a prince, expecting everyone to do exactly what he wanted, and capable of making himself extremely disagreeable if they did not. Few people realized how insecure he was underneath, or that he employed a technique of relentless bitching to cover up his increasing black glooms. He was always sweet to me, but I was very glad he was my brother and not a boyfriend. Part of his charm was that he always gave one his undivided attention. He didn’t need to look over your shoulder, because he was always the one person people were looking over other people’s shoulders to see.

  On closer examination that day, he looked rather ill, his eyes laced with red, his hands shaking. He had placed himself with his back to the window, but still looked much younger than his thirty years.

  ‘How are you?’ I said.

  ‘A bit poorly. I ran into a bottle of whisky last night. Later I landed up at Jamie
Bennett’s. We smoked a lot of grass. I’m sure it had gone off. There was a case of stuffed birds in the corner and Jamie started cackling with laughter, saying they were flying all over the room, then suddenly he was sick in a wastepaper basket.’

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I started feeling frightful too, and decided I must get home, so I drove very slowly to Paddington, but it wasn’t there, so I came back again.’

  I giggled. ‘So you never got home?’

  He shot me a sideways glance. ‘Can I tell Pamela I spent last night at your place?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said lightly. ‘It’s only another point she’ll notch up against me.’

  Pamela had never forgiven me for slashing my wrists the day she and Xander got married, taking all the attention from her.

  ‘How’s our dear mother?’ I said.

  ‘Absolutely awful! You’ve no idea how lucky you are not being the apple of her eye. She rings up every day. Gerald is evidently threatening to walk out if she doesn’t stop drinking, so she has to resort to having quick swigs in the lavatory.’

  ‘Does she ever say anything about me?’ I asked. Even now I can’t mention my mother’s name without my throat going dry.

  ‘Never,’ said Xander. ‘Do you want to order?’

  I wasn’t hungry, but I hadn’t eaten since yesterday lunch-time, and the wine was beginning to make me feel dizzy.

  ‘I’ll have a Cobb salad and a grilled sole,’ I said.

  ‘You really do look marvellous,’ said Xander. ‘What’s up? Someone must be. Who’s he married to?’

  ‘No one,’ I said, grooving four lines on the table cloth with my fork.

  ‘There must be some complication.’

  ‘He’s engaged,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t know anyone did that any more. Who to?’

  ‘An eager overgrown schoolgirl; she’s so fat, wherever you stand in the room she’s beside you.’

  ‘Unforgiveable,’ said Xander with a shudder. ‘What’s he like?’