‘Christ,’ says Rufus, ‘she’s turned the heating on. In November. She’s really pushing the boat out.’
We go up the corridor. I glimpse rooms full of dust and junk: piles of mismatched china, three giant perambulators, a pantry full of evil-looking Kilner jars. It’s the sort of place where spiders lurk, fat and shiny from generations of undisturbed gorging. It smells of mice.
Rufus is hurrying forward, and, in the voice of a suburban housewife, is going: ‘It’s my babies! My boys!’
Jeez. He’s been living here so long, he’s made pets out of the rats.
The door bursts open, and three solid shapes hurtle forward, grab him, just as I imagined, by the neck, with large, slobbering mouths, knock him to the floor. As I cast about for a stick to beat them off with, all I can see is a whirl of paws and tails and slobbering tongues. And I realise that Rufus is laughing, clutching them about the torsos, not, as I’d first thought, to fight them off, but with the sort of great big affectionate hugs I thought he reserved for me. And he’s going: ‘Ooozamyboooys! Wuzza wuzza idga boy-boys! Voo-voo boof! Boof!’ and other noises I can barely interpret beyond the fact that they’re obviously sounds of affection. And they’re licking him over every piece of available skin and – horrors! – he’s letting them. Not just letting them, but sticking his chin out to give them extra space. Fat, wet, dog tongues all over his face, and, with extra-special accuracy, all over his mouth as well. I make a mental note not to let him near me till he’s had a wash.
Gradually, as the squirming and panting slows down, I separate the muddle into disparate shapes. Seems like Rufus is getting love from a bulldog, a black retriever and a pug. Eyes shining like a ten-year-old, he looks up at me and treats me to a huge grin.
‘These are my babies,’ he says.
‘Uh-huh,’ I tell him back. ‘Glad to know you’ve not got any of the human type.’
He ignores me. ‘Darling, meet Fifi, Buster and Django. Sit!’
It takes me a second to work out that the final command isn’t aimed at me. It’s only when the dogs obediently line up with their backsides on the ground, tongues lolling in huge smiles, that I’m completely certain.
‘Which one’s which?’
He ruffles the head of the retriever, which responds by offering a polite paw. Despite myself, I’m drawn downwards, take it in my hand and shake it. If Pops could see me now. ‘This is Django,’ says Rufus.
‘How do you do, Django?’
Django rolls his eyes and broadens his grin. The pug, unable to contain himself, says ‘fuff’ and rubs his backside across the flags. Looks like someone needs their glands squeezing. Bags not me. Big brown pop-eyes moisten with emotion and one ear lops piteously. I take his paw and shake it in turn. ‘Fifi, right?’
‘Buster,’ says Rufus. He throws an arm round the neck of the bulldog in that homoerotic I’m-going-to-strangle-you pose that men keep for their best mates after rugby. ‘This is Fifi.’
Fifi has little pink-rimmed eyes and great big vampire teeth. They’d be threatening if they didn’t stick upwards from his lower jaw. Instead, they make him look like a goof.
‘The face that launched a thousand quips,’ I say, and can’t resist pulling his ears. We follow him into a kitchen that’s – well, medieval. Literally. The only thing that would make it more authentic would be a hunchback in the corner.
Roly peels off his Drizabone – well, shapeless waxed coat – and drops it on to the back of a wooden chair. Rufus does the same with his jacket on the one next to it. On the table, three platters and two copper baby baths stand, filled with the sort of canapés you used to see in the seventies: cheese-and-pineapple cocktail sticks, listless-looking, pale vol-au-vents filled with what looks like coronation chicken, cheese biscuits smeared with greyish-pink pâté and topped off with a little chip of green olive, potato chips that smell even from a metre away like ersatz bacon and some stick-like things that I’m not sure aren’t some sort of practical joke. I pick one up, sniff it. Smells a bit like Vegemite. Only disgusting.
‘Shall we take some of these?’ I ask their retreating backs.
Rufus turns, says: ‘Oh, yeah. Good idea. Mummy’s always forgetting them because she barely eats herself. We’ll be living on stale bacon snaps for a week if we don’t get them down people’s throats.’
He takes the stick things. Roly takes the vol-au-vents. I opt for the cheesy pineapples. I follow them through a large door covered in shreds of green baize on the far side of the room.
They lead me up some stairs. Dark, unventilated, lined with more black wood. As we near the top, I catch a low rumble from the far side of another green baize door at the top. The rumble of a distant tidal wave. The hairs prickle on the back of my neck. Rufus barges through the door, which swings back on Roly and, in turn, swings back on me. We’re in a hallway – shiny wooden floors and wooden panelling, a white, arched ceiling covered in diamond-patterned plasterwork, a collection of high-backed oak chairs lining the walls. At the end, no more baize, but a panelled oak door in a frame carved with vine leaves. And from behind it, the sound, louder, now, and more ferocious, like the roar of baying bloodhounds.
‘Hell,’ says Rufus, ‘how many people did you say?’
‘Sounds like a few,’ understates Roly.
Sounds like more than a few. It sounds like my mother-in-law has lined up the entire cast of Braveheart to jeer my arrival. I can envisage them, faces painted blue, banging on their shields in anticipation. The roar gets louder and louder as the door gets closer. Now it’s the roar of the New York subway, the sound of labour riots.
Rufus puts his hand on the handle and pushes the door open. I glimpse, behind a mêlée of olive green and navy blue, a cavernous hall lined, like the passageway, with wooden panelling, a huge expanse of hanging hammer-beam overhead, flashes of tapestry and metal against stark white paint.
The noise level suddenly drops.
‘Hello, everybody,’ says Rufus.
And a hundred voices bellow his name.
Chapter Fourteen
Neighbours
Rufus is immediately consumed by a rugby scrum of people who all seem to want to hit him at once. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this trial-by-combat form of greeting after the pummelling he got at Moreton-in-Marsh, but the sight of all these hands rising into the air and slamming down on his back, his shoulders, his head – whatever spare bit of body is available – is a bit alarming. Maybe it’s just the crazy-mad surroundings, the collection of armour and weaponry hanging on the walls, the head-high wooden panelling that lines the cricket-pitch-sized space, the fireplace the size of a Soweto shanty, but I feel that these people aren’t just touching him through affection, but because they believe that the physical contact will miraculously cure them of leprosy.
I’ve barely made it through the door, and the flailing elbows haven’t let me get much further. Eventually, my canapés and I fetch up against the wall, hemmed in between a suit of armour and a high-backed wooden chair whose low, embroidered seat has caved in so far that it almost rests on the floor. Roly has pushed his own tray into the hands of a sabre-toothed blonde and battered his way to the other side of the room, standing under what looks remarkably, even to my untrained eye, like a Caravaggio, and is already replacing an empty champagne glass on a tray with his left hand while lifting another off with his right. I peer around to see if I can identify any of the rest of the family. A woman who must be Tilly – she has Rufus’s slightly almond, slightly oriental-looking eyes – sits on one of those couches with the boxy frames you can open up by undoing the ropes at the top, in a huge bay window. Apart from the eyes, there’s not a whole lot of obvious family resemblance – Tilly is short and ginger, her hair curly where his is straight and floppy – but she’s the only woman in the room who’s stuffed a cantaloupe up her dress so I guess this must be her. She is drinking fizzy water and shoving the contents of another bowl of the stick things into her mouth like she thinks someone will take them
away if she doesn’t get on with it. Beside her is a tiny little old woman, maybe the size of my thumb, who wears a hat and seems to have something wrong with her neck: her head tilts to the left, pointy chin jutting from powdered dewlaps beneath a smile of practised sweetness. She must be about a hundred. I guess this must be Granny Wattestone. I’ve never spoken to someone that old before. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone that old before in the flesh.
At the far end of the room, on wide steps that lead through a partially curtained arch into what looks like another sitting room beyond, I catch sight of Mary. Elegant as ever, in black-and-white houndstooth check, she twiddles her champagne flute by the stem and cranes to catch sight of Rufus. She’s talking with a thin man who’s a good head taller than she is, dimpling up at him like a fine-vintage Doris Day as he dips his head to share a pleasantry. There are no women around them, surprise surprise.
Our eyes lock, and the dimples drop, momentarily, from the sides of her mouth. Mary’s eyes turn dark, like a shark’s: they shine at me, beam something not altogether pleasant in my direction. Then she slaps the smile back on, touches his sleeve with a light and intimate hand and points me out. Raises her glass at me, says something that makes him laugh. He imitates her gesture.
With my spare hand, I raise an imaginary glass in return. They make no effort to come over. Just stand there, the two of them, and talk about me.
A thickset man in a kilt walks past, reaches out and takes half a dozen pineapple sticks from the tray, says something about being starving, moves on without once looking at my face. Hastily, I stoop and lay my tray down on the chair. I figure that being mistaken for staff isn’t the best way to enter the fold. Clever old Mary. She’s set it up so that the first impression everyone gets of me will be of a travel-raddled, grimy oik, a fish out of water. I’d expected a couple of days’ grace, a chance to settle in. I guess she knew that. I can feel stirrings of respect deep in my breast. Clever old Mary.
I could murder a drink. There’s no-one within hailing distance, though: just a hundred chinless, big-nosed, straight-haired, bellowing humanoids with vowels like drill-bits. No-one seems to have noticed me. They’re all too intent on congratulating my husband. I guess it wouldn’t be the thing to shove my way past them and grab a glass. Rufus’s new wife, the dipsomaniac.
He calls me. Well, I assume it’s me, though everyone here seems to be calling everyone else ‘darling’ without discrimination. I look over to check, and he’s got a grin on his face and holds out a hand. ‘Come on, darling,’ he calls. ‘Come and meet everyone! Don’t be shy!’
There was a turkey farm down the road from where we lived when we were kids – a farm that made a smashing once-a-year profit from all the lunatics who insist on turning out a full ‘traditional’ roast dinner complete with spuds and stuffing in fifty degrees of heat because that’s what their grandparents used to do. My friend Tina and I whiled away a lot of spring afternoons, before we discovered boys, by whistling at them. The thing is with turkeys, they tend to make no noise at all, or they all gobble at once. Not an individual thought between them. And the sound of someone whistling drives them into a frenzy of indignation. Tina and I used to sneak up on the barn and, when they caught sight of us, there’d be a moment’s deathly hush as four hundred pea-sized brains tried to work out what the hell we were doing there. And then one of us – usually me; I’ve got the most raucous wolf whistle in the southern hemisphere – would let fly with a builder’s special, and the whole lot would let fly with a shriek of obbleobbleobbleobbleobble, every one of them goggling at us in astonishment like we’d farted in church.
It’s a bit like that now, only I’m not laughing. When Rufus began calling me, the entire room fell, bit by bit, silent. As a body, they turned in the direction of his reaching hand, stared, lips slightly ajar, at me. And now, as I unpeel myself from the wall and step into the aisle that has opened up before me, the crowd bursts into comment.
‘Obbleobbleobbleobbleobble,’ they go. ‘Obbleobbleobbleobbleobble.’
And once again, the room goes quiet.
Feeling the blush rise in my cheeks, I cross the space to reach him, feel scrutiny of my gait, my crumpled travelling clothes, my shiny nose, my grubby trainers. And then I’m in the middle of it, hand pumped, clothes tweaked, air kisses flying about my ears. I don’t stand a chance. There are a hundred-odd strangers in the room, and I’m the only one they have to take in. This is Rupert, says Rufus, this is Miranda. I nod, smile, fail to memorise the faces, grin inanely as the names fly past: this is Charlie, this is Jimbo, this is Ginny. This is LuluNessaTrinnyCaro and EddyReggieBertieSam. Mel, meet EmmaTobyLaviniaAndrew PoppyJamieSophieHugo. PippaDaddySusieTom …
Backtrack. I swing round to see the daddy.
He’s fairly obvious: an older version of the son. A little shorter, and run to thinness in that way that some older men have, and the hair’s gone salt-and-pepper and is cut with the sort of forced side parting that always makes you wonder about wigs, but it’s all pretty good, considering.
He sticks a hand out. ‘Edmund Wattestone,’ he says. ‘Shocked father-in-law. How do you do?’
I take the hand, return the greeting. ‘Melody Katsouris,’ I say. ‘Horrified daughter-in-law. Good to make your acquaintance.’
And then, thank God, we both burst out laughing. ‘How was your trip?’ he asks. ‘You haven’t got a drink.’
‘It was fine. Interesting to get a fix on your so-called public transport. I think Rufus is trying to keep me sober. Doesn’t want me hoisting up my skirts and dancing on the tables on my first day.’
‘Well, he may not,’ says Edmund, ‘but this is something I’ve got to see. Champagne do you?’
‘No way. Makes me chunder.’
‘Good girl,’ he says, pats me amicably on the shoulder. ‘Roly!’ he bellows across the room. ‘Stop filling your own boots and get the girl a glass of plonk.’
Roly, face buried in his third flute of the fizzy stuff, looks up, calls ‘Right-oh!’ and heads in the direction of a woman with a tray.
‘Sorry,’ says Edmund, ‘no-one came and picked you up. We weren’t sure what flight you were getting in on, and then Mary wanted to put on this ghastly shindig. I wanted to give you a chance to get settled before you had to face this lot, but once she gets the bit between her teeth …’
‘It’s OK,’ I lie, ‘might as well jump in at the deep end.’
‘Hmm,’ muses Edmund, ‘I’m not sure if deep is exactly the word you’re grasping for. Still. Nice to have an excuse to turn on the heating, I suppose. Have you met the neighbours?’
‘Sort of,’ I say. ‘Haven’t seen this many pearl necklaces since my last trip to Pat Pong.’ And then I think perhaps this isn’t the most appropriate first impression to make on your father-in-law.
He laughs nervously. Hell. My only hope was that it might have gone over his head. Now I’ll never know. ‘So,’ he says, the subject change as clunky as a learner driver’s first move up to third, ‘what do you think of Bourton Allhallows, then?’
It’s probably a bit early in the day to tell him the truth. ‘Amazing,’ I say. ‘I couldn’t have imagined it in a million years.’
It works. A huge simpleton’s grin covers his face. ‘Well, you’ll find there are one or two drawbacks,’ he says.
‘So have you lived here all your life?’ A stupid question, I know.
‘Well, yes,’ he replies. ‘Apart from school and Oxford, of course.’
What on earth have you done with yourself in all that time? is the next question that runs through my head. ‘Wow,’ I say. ‘I guess it’s pretty much a full-time job.’
‘Not so bad now Rufus is on board,’ he says complaisantly. ‘And anyway, one has one’s duty.’
We’re standing side-by-side now, facing the room like old buddies. I squint at him out of the corner of my eye. Edmund doesn’t look like a man who’s spent his life burdened by duty. The lines on his face look like they’ve been earned by exposur
e to the elements, rather than to care. Like his son, he has the look of a man whose price has been put above pearls all his life. He’s got the mild, open face of someone who has never, ever questioned his own position in the world, because he’s never, ever had it challenged. I see it, sometimes, in Rufus. It’s an attractive quality, especially to someone like me, eaten up as I am with social insecurity. Unquestioning confidence: it’s what we all long for, isn’t it?
Roly pants up, new glass of champagne in one hand, jaded-looking glass of red in the other. ‘How you getting on, Mrs W?’ he asks. ‘See you’ve met the pa-in-law, then.’
I accept the glass, take a slug to steady my nerves. Old socks, car parts, tinfoil. Someone to our left is eyeing someone on the other side of the room. ‘Fryful social climber,’ she says. ‘Family made its money in breweries.’
‘Great,’ I say. ‘Though I wish I’d had some chance to look halfway respectable.’
‘You look marvellous, m’dear,’ says Edmund, and I think he means it. ‘Such a relief to see something that’s not navy blue for a change.’
Looking around the room, I see that he’s right. Well over half the women here are wearing navy blue. Boxy jackets, businesslike skirts, Alice bands, silk blouses, all the same light-sucking shade.
‘You’ll find,’ confides Edmund, ‘that a large number of British women base their style on their school uniform.’
‘Seriously? Why would you do that?’ We didn’t have uniforms at Redcliffe State High, but the thought of trying to recreate the look in adult life makes my spine turn cold. I mean, there’s daggy, and there’s really daggy.
‘Saves them having to think about what they’re going to wear, I think. If everything goes together.’
‘And the small retailers,’ adds Roly, ‘you know, in towns like Stow and Moreton. It’s a lot more convenient if they know what they need to stock, and as most of them belong to people’s ex-wives …’
‘… Empty nesters …’
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