by Bella Pollen
‘Darling, how lovely,’ says Audrey unwrapping the fresh bread he has brought from the deli. She puts it straight into the deep freeze and removes a frozen loaf of Mother’s Pride for dinner.
* * *
Rory has renewed his monthly promise to himself. Tonight he will talk to Alistair about selling Bevan.
But after dinner, Nanny retires upstairs, Grandpa listens to the radio in his bedroom, Alistair watches the ten o’clock news and Audrey falls asleep, her feet on top of Lurch. Rory bunks out and instead sits in Alistair’s study and tackles the pile of unopened mail. He’s appalled by how bad the situation has become. Alistair has always displayed ostrich tendencies when it comes to financial obligations but these days it’s not just bills he ignores, it’s all letters from polling cards to farm notices. Correspondophobia is what he suffers from – in my opinion, a perfectly rational fear of any document that arrives in a brown envelope.
When Rory first tackled the finances of Bevan he was optimistic that careful planning and economizing would make a difference. He soon realized he might as well stand over the loo and ritually flush down wads of notes with the Queen’s head on. Bevan is a house that eats money. It’s as if the architect, as a devilish experiment, set out to see just how uncost-effective he could possibly make it. A local paper once wrote an article on Bevan simply quoting statistics. They reported a staggering 240 doors, 75 of which led directly outside. Multiplying the cumulative draught by the average winter temperature, they’d come up with one hell of a heating bill.
So this is the Herculean task Rory has inherited. And it’s not a task meant to be completed, simply carried on. Even for someone who signs up for it, this job can wear you down until you have no passion left to burn. If you don’t sign up for it you might as well chain yourself to the rock and, like Prometheus, wait for that great eagle of frustration and futility to peck your liver out day after day.
Since the accident, Rory has had a choice to make. The same choice I had to make a few years ago and one, at the time, he fought me tooth and nail on. What was the point of keeping Bevan, he argued – if our parents were cold and tired, if they couldn’t cope and their backs hurt, if they never took a holiday, didn’t want friends to stay, if they had no fun, no bloody fun at all – but what I couldn’t drive through his thick head was that if you took them away from Bevan, made them live in a cottage, dwarfed by their possessions, no trees to plant, no clearing to be done in the lake-field, no bonfires to be built, no head scratching about the latest damage to the drains in Bindey’s cottage – then they wouldn’t be our parents any more, because Bevan is in every breath they take. They cannot exist as separate entities and to force them to do so would be to expose them, to turn them into shadows of their former selves. Rather than being acceptable eccentrics, they’d just be two tragic septuagenarians clashing empty bottles at each other in drunken cheer. Besides, the point of keeping Bevan is that it deserves to remain standing. Keep the house going for future generations. You look after your inheritance. You protect the land. That’s what primogeniture is all about. And OK, I didn’t like it when it was my job, and now it’s Rory’s, he likes it even less, but decayed, putrid, atrophying though they might be, houses like Bevan are important. Tradition is important. If Rory gives up on Bevan, he’d bloody well better understand what’s at stake.
But I don’t want any favours from my brother. Saturday morning when he takes a walk with Alistair and tries to raise the subject I watch as crippling guilt and misplaced loyalty push him once again into a decision his heart is not in. Well you can stop that Rory, don’t bloody lay this thing on my head. Why is it the custom to canonize the dead in the false memory of the living? I wasn’t such a great brother half the time, so don’t make out that I was some kind of hero, I was crap the last few years. And if you want proof? Remember that beautiful girl with tiger eyes? The one you were sniffing around for ages. The one who was sacked the very first day from her big Opportunity Knocks job, who cried those plaintive little tears on your shoulder? Well know this – I was the one who slept with her.
maggie
I’d been really excited at the prospect of two days in Paris, but when it came to it there was a problem finding a decent room. There was an Internet convention and every hotel in the city was booked. Eventually the concierge from the Cadogan found a room and I took it blind. When I arrived in Paris and walked into the bedroom with its sanitine coverings and general air of beige, I remembered the conversation about the English’s warped sense of the romantic. Rory had claimed his ideal hotel in Paris was not the George V but a plain boarding house; a brass bed with an agonizing dip in its centre and an old crone stumping up the stairs with a bowl of steaming black coffee in the morning.
I mean there was nothing wrong with this room apart from it being identical to every other mediocre hotel room in the world. It was the coffee machine that got me – the brown plastic filter machine that stood on the dressing table next to paper packs of sugar and decaf coffee – part of the world’s nod to the convenience-seeking Americans. I have been in some real polyester palaces in my time, some swanky hotels too. Extremes are great, but middle of the road? This one just depressed the life out of me.
Several hours later, I found just what I was looking for in the sixteenth quarter. The room was huge and old fashioned with peeling wallpaper and brass fittings. The bathroom had damp in one corner and a couple of the black and white tiles were broken – but there were no pastels, no coffee machine and of course, I realized too late, no CNN for Jay.
‘Interesting choice,’ he said when he arrived.
Drugged by an afternoon nap, I watched him groggily as he looked round the room.
‘Tell me the truth,’ he sat on the bed, ‘am I too old and out of touch to appreciate that this is a hip hotel?’
‘I’m really sorry.’
He laughed and kissed me. ‘Did you know that when you’re cranky your upper lip gets shorter?’
‘Does it?’
‘Yes it does.’
‘Is it short now?’
‘It’s retracted almost entirely into your nose.’ He kissed me again. ‘Oh look here it comes, that’s better.’
I laughed but he was right, I was cranky. The room wasn’t romantic at all. It was damp and cold. Jay was sweet though. In the spirit of spontaneous bookings we chanced a family-run Italian restaurant he knew. It was only six o’clock when we sat down to eat but even so the restaurant was full. I was amazed by how attentive the service was until Jay, who couldn’t keep a straight face any longer, admitted the owners were identical twins.
‘So how is snobbery, debauchery and lunacy coming along?’ he asked.
I began giving him a suitably witty account, but he soon interrupted.
‘And who is this Rory character?’
‘Oh just a guy, you know, the agent for the houses.’ Saying it though, I felt the same guilt you get walking through the green light at customs when you have something to declare.
‘Have you slept with him yet?’
‘Give me another day or two.’ I picked up the lamb bone and sucked out the marrow.
Jealousy was a relatively uncharted territory for us. I once asked Jay about all the nights he was away.
‘Are you getting bourgeois on me, Kiddo?’ he’d replied. When he saw this wasn’t the answer I was looking for, he said. ‘You’re asking me whether I am faithful to you?’ as if this was too high-schooly an attitude for him to dignify with a reply, ‘You know what I feel about you.’
I thought the reply ambiguous, so I didn’t push it further.
‘He’s been driving us around, a guide sort of, anyway, don’t worry … he’s just a baby.’ I stopped.
Something in Jay’s face flickered, but he didn’t miss a beat.
‘How many months is this baby?’
‘A little over four-hundred and fifty would be my guess.’
I watched him as he reversed the calculation. Age was one of the few things I th
ink he was frightened of.
He asked me once what my father missed most about being young.
‘I don’t know.’ I still thought of my father as being young. At sixty-five he had become a sort of guru and consultant to stage lighting designers and could be found telling tales of the good old days when Dylan and Baez were king and queen and when tuning in and turning on was still a middle-class luxury.
I was about to answer ‘excitement’ but thought better of it. Instead I said, ‘His ponytail I guess.’
Jay nodded. ‘As good an answer as any.’
* * *
After we left the identical twins restaurant, Jay told me he might have to go back to Sierra Leone. He told me he didn’t want to but I thought I could hear something else in his voice. We walked for a while. The moon shone on the curves of the cobblestones, black and polished. I heard the sound of a piano being played. We stood still as the notes tumbled out of a window above us, beautiful and melancholy.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘It could almost be Rubinstein.’ I wanted him to kiss me then, just to have a cheesy moment in a narrow street in Paris.
‘It ain’t though.’ Jay turned his coat collar up. I knew he wanted to go back to the hotel so meanly I made him walk on.
I think I needed something in Paris to inspire us. I tried to imagine us living there, just another pair of lovers, shopping for bread in the market, bargaining with crotchety dealers for the tin toys that, for some obscure reason, Jay loved to collect. But it wasn’t to be.
On the next street corner Jay stopped and hunched his shoulders around a cough. I thought it looked deliberate, like he was trying to keep it quiet. The cost of a cough could be a bullet, I thought melodramatically. I waved down a cab.
Back in our brass bed with its dip in the centre, Jay reached for his paper and I felt my upper lip shortening. I knew I wanted more out of the evening but I couldn’t isolate exactly what.
‘What is this revisionist trash they’re endlessly spouting?’ Jay was shaking his head. It wasn’t a question that required an answer and though he went on to explain what had enraged him – something in local government – all I heard was nationalism, fascism, interventionism on an eternal loop.
‘Can we not talk politics for once?’ I horrified myself by saying.
He turned to look at me. ‘OK,’ he said evenly, ‘what shall we talk about?’
‘I don’t know.’ His tone had made me feel five years old. ‘Something light. Something fluffy.’
‘I’m sorry, Maggie, I don’t do Martha Stewart.’
I should have laughed but I couldn’t. I curled up, away from him. I heard the rustle of newspapers being opened, but I don’t think he was reading because I didn’t hear the pages turning. After a while he put his fingers through my hair and rubbed my scalp gently.
‘Please turn round,’ he said. And I did. Blotting the dampness on my cheeks on the pillow first.
‘Do you have any idea how lucky we are? Our relationship is made up of perfect free-standing moments … we get to travel light, no baggage, duty-free.’ He put his arms around me and kissed the top of my head. Then he read me excerpts from the Washington Post in his Truman Capote voice which he did so brilliantly I laughed till my stomach ached.
* * *
‘So Duchess of Roxmere, or the barmaid?’ Wolf asked.
‘Neither,’ Dwight said.
‘You can’t have neither.’
‘Suicide then.’
‘You can’t have suicide, you have to choose.’
‘I’m telling you, neither.’
‘My rules.’
‘Sorry,’ Dwight was outraged, ‘my dick.’
We were having a pub lunch in a small village in Somerset. We’d unloaded our equipment and settled into Stamford, whose owner, the deeply conservative Duke of Normouth, more or less owned the county. His son Miles was due to arrive that night with a weekend party of younger guests. As this was the last house on the Stately Locations itinerary and as we seemed to have filmed nothing but middle-aged couples we’d decided to stay on.
Rory returned from the bar clutching bottles of coke and beer. ‘What about you, Rory?’ Wolf said. ‘Who’d you’d sleep with – the barmaid, or the Duchess of Roxmere?’
‘The Duchess is a client, so it would have to be the barmaid, who oddly enough,’ he craned his head to give her a closer look, ‘is rather sexy – in a terrifying sort of way.’
‘OK,’ Wolf said, ‘now the barmaid or…’ he looked around, but apart from the odd gnarled local the pub was deserted. His eye settled on me, ‘Maggie!’
‘Hey leave me out of this.’
‘Hmmm.’ Rory made a big show of chewing it over. I was about to protest again but Wolf put his hand over mine.
‘American girls don’t really find English men attractive.’ Rory said.
‘Oh and you know this because?’
‘Ruined by their mothers, emotionally castrated, and ultimately gay.’ These were my own words he was quoting back to me and to my disgust I felt my face redden up. ‘I’m not saying Maggie’s not passable looking but who wants to be put under the microscope and dissected?’
‘Like I said,’ I played for indifference. ‘No passion.’
‘We have passion. We just don’t talk about it. You’re not going to find an Englishman who’ll declare himself on the first date.’
‘Well why not?’
‘Because an Englishman is obliged to play the game. He must follow the rules. To ask you out is to declare a romantic interest. To declare a romantic interest is to expose himself. In order to avoid that horror he is forced to insult you.’
‘Insult you?’
‘Yes, it’s how an Englishman courts.’
‘Oh,’ I said faintly.
‘First he must embarrass himself horribly, then it’s advisable to highlight his own worst faults, finally it’s important to be as rude as possible to the girl he longs to marry.’
‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘no wonder you weirdos sleep with your dogs and take your wives for walks in the countryside.’
* * *
En route back to Stamford I asked him whether he followed his own rules.
‘Of course.’
‘So you insult all the girls you like.’
‘I have a Ph.D. in verbal abuse.’
‘And have you found this successful?’
‘Actually I got as far as the proposal stage.’
‘You’re married?’ It hadn’t even occurred to me.
‘Actually. No.’
I felt stupidly glad. ‘Uh, divorced?’
‘She left before the wedding.’
‘Before the wedding?’
‘She didn’t take to the weather.’
‘Jeez, where’d she been living all her life,’ I matched his flippant tone, ‘down a rabbit hole?’
‘Rome.’
I tried conjuring up a picture of Rory sauntering through the Colosseum with a dark-eyed Italian girl but for some reason I kept superimposing my own image in her place.
‘So … uh … what was she like?’
Rory’s look said, Enough of these tiresome questions.
‘Come on,’ I wheedled, ‘I’m just making conversation.’
‘Why don’t you just shine a bright light in my eyes?’
‘Oh I see, you’re a little uptight about this.’
‘Not a little uptight. I am very uptight.’
‘OK I’m sorry,’ I relented. ‘End of interview, I swear.’
The Rover hummed in neutral, stationary in front of a level crossing. The arm of the barrier was down. We waited … and we waited some more.
‘So was she pretty?’
He ignored me.
‘C’mon, tell me if she was pretty at least.’
‘There’s the train now.’ Over to Rory’s right, white smoke was rising through the trees.
‘Are not Italian girls usually pretty?’ I mused.
A muscle was working in his cheek.
‘Was she smart? Funny? Did she have enormous breasts?’
The train drew into the station.
‘I mean you never know, she could have regretted dumping you. She could be pining for you, obsessing over you. She could even be stalking you, waiting for just that right moment to strike.’ I peered through the window. ‘If your ex-girlfriend’s a psycho, I really need to know what she looks like … for my own self-protection if nothing else.’
I stole a look at him. He was laughing.
‘Wait. Over there,’ I pointed, ‘is that her?’ A woman had clambered off the train. Fifty years old or so, she strutted along the platform wearing the tightest of red suits. She had peroxide hair, orange make-up and impossible white stilettos.
Rory peered through the windscreen. ‘Are you quite mad?’ he said regretfully. ‘You think I’d let someone like that go?’ He gripped the steering wheel forcefully, ‘I’d be a fool.’
I was laughing. He turned to me and his grin was huge and so was mine. Then like someone else entirely was pulling our strings we leant into each other and I knew that in a nanosecond we would be kissing. My whole body fizzed with how good that would be.
I pulled back abruptly. What the hell was I thinking?
* * *
Stella arrived with the rest of the house party. She was an artist of some kind. That she and Rory knew each other was obvious. When she walked into the drawing room she draped her arms around his neck and pressed her body against his. She kissed him on the mouth then watched his face as he talked.
She must have asked him what he was doing because they both glanced in my direction and she nodded, swinging a small sheepskin handbag fastened with a horn button. Her eyes said, Watch it toots, this one’s mine. She had long dark hair which waved in the right places and despite her height, tiny elfin ears. Everything about the way she moved said waif, coltish, gamine. You could almost see her pheromones flying through the air, and even they were designer.