Having resumed her worn black velvet jeans and tie-dyed T-shirt, Bianca made her way up to her parents’domain, her bare tees curling uncomfortably around the treads of the wrought-iron staircase which led upstairs. There was no time to lose. Hugh and Olivia Berrisford normally entertained on Sunday and soon her mother would be ricocheting around her kitchen in a bad temper.
She walked slowly, composing her argument, anticipating possible objections: the expense, how it would look, what people would say, whether such a move were suitable for a family in their position. The house was so quiet that the footfalls of her mother’s Abyssinian cats were clearly audible. Hushed and deserted, with many pictures facing each other across the rooms, it felt like a museum. Bianca checked the terrace, to see if perhaps her mother was outside, but found only the Portuguese maid laying the long teak table for an alfresco buffet. Her father, she discovered, had been driven to the airport to meet an important guest. Her mother was presumably in the process of dressing.
The back stairs led directly from the library to her mother’s dressing room, through a door concealed in the white-painted panelling which had charmed her from infancy. As she mounted the narrow treads she became aware of a rhythmic tap, perhaps a blind slapping against the frame of an open window in the slight breeze.
The dressing room was humid and scented from a recent bath. Indeed, the foamy water was still in the free-standing marble tub and she saw wet footprints on the carpet leading towards the bedroom. Bianca knew she should follow them at once; Olivia liked her children to be unembarrassed about nakedness, it demonstrated the family’s modernity.
At first she thought there was a new piece of sculpture in the corner of the room; the attitudes of the bodies were strikingly artificial. She walked into the centre of the room, idly wondering why an erotic piece had been put in the bedroom when such works were usually given prominence downstairs. Then she noticed the tangle of damp towels beside the figures, and registered the regular heave of the man’s buttocks; and his back knotted with the strain of supporting the woman’s long body against his own. She saw that the higher pair of feet were her mother’s, projecting above her lover’s shoulders, and realized that the noise which she had heard was the slap of their flesh together. Otherwise they were fucking in silence with their eyes shut, distant and self-involved, each intent on their own gratification.
Shocked, Bianca ran backwards to the doorway so fast that she collided with the wall. Her mother’s lovers were another celebrated feature of the ménage, another flaunted proof of the family’s bohemian heritage. All her life she had been accustomed to being introduced to the succession of uneasy, flattered men who lit her mother’s cigarettes, fetched her drinks, drove her car, loitered in her workshop and contributed a background of eroticism to the drama of her life. Often the men were of her own generation; this one, from his heavy contours and the shake of his over-mature flesh, was older. Their exact significance was something she had always avoided thinking about; to come across it by chance was ugly.
She turned and ran away immediately, then sat in the garden for almost an hour trying to still her thoughts. Anger was predominant. It seemed as if there was no corner of life that her family had not colonized; even sex, the proper playground of the young, belonged to them. She was at a loss for a place to go where she could be herself.
The beauty of the garden was soothing. Many of the trees and shrubs appeared in her grandfather’s paintings, smaller or even newly planted. Now they were sprawling old growths with thick trunks bearing the scars of many prunings, green with algae because moss would not grow in London. The rose bushes were leggy, their long stems bowed with heavy, richly scented flowers. The apple tree carried green infant fruits and its last exhausted blossoms together. An early shower, whose dampness lingered in the shady corners, had brought down a sprinkle of petals and stuck them to the flagstones.
Convivial voices drifted over the walls from the Queen’s Elm pub to the north and the Arts Club to the south, a sound which told Bianca the time. There was a brief interval on a Sunday in Chelsea when a quorum of inhabitants sleepily dragged themselves out for a slalom between the licensing restrictions of the Lord’s Day. In the course of quitting the pub in time to claim a restaurant table before the bars closed at 2 p.m., too much beer was sunk too fast and in summer, when outdoor drinking was preferred, the race was a noisy one. Bianca had grown up listening to the muted chatter with the accents of surly barmen urging their clients to drink up.
In the house the lunch guests would be arriving. Bianca recalled her intention and decided to talk to her grandmother before she was swept up in the event.
Some years earlier, Hugh Berrisford had decided to buy a dainty white house sharing a common garden wall with his home and extend the villa bearing the plaque of Walter Berrisford R.A. into an urban approximation of the dynastic country estate. The shared wall was pulled down, and a celebrated architect retained to gut the new dower house and incorporate a studio for her grandmother. When Bianca and Hermione were children the studio had been an enchanted cave where new marvels could be discovered every day. Until her eyesight deteriorated, Charlotte Berrisford had painted tiny pictures on wood, inspired by traditional Russian enamel painting. She told her granddaughters stories about the creatures she created with tiny brushes and glowing colours, dragons, mermaids or talking birds, with flowing manes and tails. Charlotte had spent seven years in St Petersburg before the Revolution, living with an aristocratic family as their governess and everything Russian held an irresistible nostalgic glamour for her.
Her son despised this attachment, but it was Charlotte’s defence against him. He deplored her collection of icons, and was rude to the shabby, gentle friends, emigrés and exiles, who were forever dropping round to drink tea in glasses, smoke stinking cigarettes and hold long passionate philosophical arguments with his mother.
‘She’s not entertaining another bloody Boris, is she?’ he would demand of his daughters, ‘because I can’t stand to breathe the same air. Tell me when he’s gone, for God’s sake.’
Bianca found her grandmother fussing over the cactus garden which enjoyed the roof light, a small, quiet figure in slacks with a red cotton scarf around her short white hair.
‘I hate these things not needing water.’ She picked a dead flower from a succulent which trailed over the raised edge of the bed. ‘They’re not like plants at all. There’s nothing you can do for them. Hello, darling, you look cross.’
‘I wanted to talk to Olivia.’ It was also mandatory in the family to call parents by their Christian names.
‘That makes a change. Anything important?’ She dropped a handful of dead flowers into the wastebin and lowered herself into a seat to listen. All the old woman’s movements were slow, and her eyes characteristically focused in the middle distance, as if she were following the flight of a bird. She appeared untroubled, which Bianca found comforting.
‘Well – it isn’t that I’m not happy at home and of course I’m very lucky that the house is so big that we can have our own part of it, but – I want to have a place of my own.’
‘Does this mean that you want to stay at Chelsea after your foundation year?’ It was always a relief to talk to Grandmother who, if not truly wise, was always interested and never angry. Bianca pulled up an old bentwood chair and sat across it, leaning over the back.
‘I’ve decided I want to do sculpture. I’m really interested in moulds, Gran. And I think – something pretty big. And they have got the facilities here and they encourage that kind of work so – why not? And really, I am a bit frightened of leaving all this and going off somewhere in the provinces where I’ll get flak for the way I speak and everything. It’s bad enough as it is.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes, of course it is. At least here I’m not the only rich kid on the block.’
‘Well, that is true, I suppose. So where do you want to move to?’
‘Oh, not far. Just to be independent, you kn
ow.’
‘Have you thought about what it will cost?’
‘I can rent something, I’m sure.’
‘And what about your sister?’
‘Hermione’s going to India when she finishes school, isn’t she?’
‘Well, that’s everything considered, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
They fell silent, two women with more than half a century between them and the same fear in their hearts: of Hugh Berrisford’s temper. The central problem of the family was always the same, to manoeuvre the critical patriarch over the ditch of his own arrogance to a place of reason.
‘Help me, Gran,’ appealed Bianca suddenly.
The older woman looked at her granddaughter. Her short hair was straight and fine, standing up on top of her head like coconut fibre and flopping over her big blue-grey eyes. She was full of the fresh, clear, new-grown beauty of youth, and full also of pain, crippled by the softness of a new soul facing the hard world. However, the older woman had seen worse hardship than being young, beautiful, rich and well connected, and did not understand the malaise of the juvenile overprivileged.
‘There’s nothing I can do, you know that.’ Feeling uncomfortable, she went to the sink where she washed brushes to rinse her fingers under the cold tap.
‘Yes there is, you can talk to him, he does listen to you.’
‘He listens and then he dismisses whatever I’ve said. I’m not going to be some music-hall mother forever nagging my son, however much he deserves it. I should think he would be pleased that you want to be independent. Most parents expect it of their children nowadays, don’t they?’
‘Hugh isn’t most parents.’ The light of hope dimmed in Bianca’s eyes. She sighed and dismounted from the chair. ‘I could just leave, I suppose. There’s nothing to stop me. I’d have to live off my grant, but …’
Sensing the potential for a greater conflict, her grandmother became alarmed. ‘Don’t do anything extreme, Bianca. Remember we will all have to live here after you’ve gone.’ The girl was drifting towards the door as if she had not heard. ‘Look, dear, I am on your side, you know I am. Let me just think of the best way to go about it … Bianca? Please, dear, don’t do anything you’ll regret …’
‘Anything you’ll regret, you mean.’ It was unkind, but Bianca felt doubly hurt, and thus goaded into taking action. ‘Got to go now, I promised I’d be over there when the people came. Bye, Gran.’ She blew an insincere kiss and ran away down the path to the big house without looking back. Yesterday she would have wept at her grandmother’s feebleness. Today she fixed more resolutely on her intention.
On the terrace she saw a full complement of guests already assembled. The Sunday lunch party was a defiant social statement for Hugh and Olivia Berrisford. By choosing to entertain in London at the weekend, they challenged the convention of the establishment upper class, who had country houses for weekend parties. The Berrisfords belonged to the new elite who fancied themselves as classless. They despised people with titles and nothing else to recommend them; their most prized guests were the well-born Labour politicians who had refused their hereditary peerages; if neither of these was free, they made do with new money, new power and the artistic meritocracy. Youth was also much esteemed, and the girls were always under pressure to bring friends, the more outrageously dressed the better.
The striking figure of Olivia was already inviting the throng of guests to eat. She was dressed in a long suede waistcoat over a flowing white jersey catsuit, with her blonde hair pulled severely up and back into one of her own heavy silver clasps. Her eyes were unequivocally blue, heavily and perfectly made up below thin, arched brows; and in the sharp sunlight her false eyelashes cast shadows over her cheekbones. Hugh was at her side, of equal height and similar colouring. They made a handsome couple. Her mother had a bright-eyed, hopped-up air; Bianca wondered if her lover was still in the house.
‘Bianca, my dear. Come and meet Pierre Dumesnil.’ Her father presented a slender, colourless man with a mobile face and a fresh black cotton shirt. ‘Even you will have heard of Pierre, the hero of the Sorbonne riots. He’s our guest for a week and he’s been asking me what sort of support the Paris students are getting over here – you can answer that, can’t you?’ He leaned over her intimidatingly, making it sound as if the question was completely beyond her comprehension.
‘All the politicos are in Paris already.’ Bianca shook the Frenchman’s hand, conscious that she was on display before the company. There was a ripple of interest. ‘A whole group have been out there since the beginning of term – the International Socialists anyway. You understand that in London the university doesn’t really have a campus or anything, everyone’s spread out all over the city. I think it’s easier to organize people when they’re together.’
‘But the students don’t make demonstrations here in London?’
‘Oh yes, everywhere – riots for democracy, people tearing up their exam papers, barricading the classrooms – maybe the problem with art students is that they love their work too much to rip it up.’
‘And your work? Would you destroy it for a cause?’
‘I destroy it all the time in the cause of making it better.’ It was a pat answer; she was adept at playing the genius in bud. The company was well satisfied. Her father relaxed his inquisitorial stance, accepting their approval, and Bianca decided to seize her moment. If anything counted with her father it was the opinion of his peers. She felt her stomach heave as she drew breath to speak again.
‘I do intend a little personal protest of my own.’
‘Oh yes? And what’s that, may I ask?’ He was unable to hit the hectoring tone in which he normally uttered those words. She saw that she would succeed.
‘I’ve decided I want to move out, Hugh. I want a place of my own. I need … I feel that I’m my own person and I need to be more on a level with the other students. All this is wonderful …’ With a bold gesture she indicated the laden buffet, the smart guests settling down on the matching hide sofas in the library and the maid, her wide backside undulating in her egalitarian non-uniform blue jeans, smiling as she poured champagne. ‘Wonderful, I’m terribly happy at home, but it’s a barrier, do you see? I need to be part of a wider life now. My head needs to be blank, free, empty even – you do understand?’
The hero of the Sorbonne felt included in her appeal. ‘But of course, it’s normal, no? The little bird leaves the nest?’ She could have kissed him.
There was a pause so small that only the family registered it. ‘My dear, your mother and I thought you’d never ask, didn’t we, Olivia? We’ve been wondering where we went wrong, having these unnatural children who never rebelled. We’re so pleased to know you’re normal, Bianca. Just don’t forget to put on a clean T-shirt when you meet the landlord.’ There was general laughter, and while the guests were telling each other what magnificently liberal parents the Berrisfords were, and how lucky therefore were their children, he added in a low voice, ‘We’d better talk about this later, don’t you think?’
Later, when the guests were gone, her mother elsewhere with her lover, and Pierre taking a shower, the interrogation took place. She sat squirming on the terrace wall while he berated her. Where would she live? How much would it cost? How would she travel to college? What about the mess of her work, the damage caused by her ghastly friends, the criminal responsibility if drugs were consumed on the premises? Had she thought this through, really thought it through? Who on earth would rent a flat to an unprepossessing slut with paint in her hair? How would her sister manage on her own? And when she was thrown out, did she suppose she could come back home as if nothing had happened? He was appalled by her stupidity, amazed at her selfishness but, as she sat in pretended meekness and silence, they both knew that he could not withdraw his consent and that with the French lecturer still in the house he would not cross the border into full-blown rage.
King’s Road and Fulham Road flowed through Chelsea like the Tigris and the
Euphrates cradling the new civilization. Bianca found a room the next day, in a flat on the top floor of a mansion block that was a crucial half mile further towards the shabby West and a radical couple of blocks closer to less fashionable Fulham Road. It was reasonably large, with a sloping ceiling and a wide three-part window giving on to a decorative balcony just big enough for the flower pots donated by her grandmother. Her flatmates were a sweetly devoted couple studying fine art and another man who played French music-hall songs on the piano all morning.
She painted her largest wall in undulating bands of pink, green and yellow, this time getting closer to the intense hot-country hues she had been striving for in her parents’basement. Hermione, now in full possession of that apartment, painted a mandala all over her old wall. She liberated two red geraniums from the municipal concrete cones in Sloane Square. From home she took a mattress and red sheets, and before Pierre returned to Paris she cast his hands in plaster in half a dozen poses and set them on the window ledge to point her way forward.
Sculpture, as she anticipated, proved a highly acceptable choice of direction for the new year, and moulds also a speciality which extracted further approval. She heard the word of accolade, ‘interesting’, from all sides, except from her parents. Olivia gave her a dense look of complete non-comprehension and never referred to her work again, while Hugh uttered a disappointed ‘Ah!’ followed by ‘I suppose you didn’t consider something rather less derivative?’
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