Playing with the Grown-ups

by Sophie Dahl

  On Sundays, if it was warm, her mother took her for picnics on the hill by Hay House, a hill that looked out to for ever. When she smiled at her, Kitty felt like she was the only person in the entire world, because her mother's smile covered her from head to toe. Marina's smile reached past her eyes way up into her golden crown of hair. Everyone said she should have been a film star.

  In the summer they lay in the garden with lemon juice on their hair to bleach it blonder. She showed Kitty the exact tree in the bluebell woods where Richard McDonald the doctor's son had pressed her up into the bark and kissed her when she was twelve.

  She taught her, over miniature cups of coffee, thick with milk and sugar, how to do the twist in her studio. Her studio was at the edge of the orchard, and it was yet another facet of Hay House's magic, filled with silk butterflies and orchids, old love letters, and postcards from people who knew her so well they didn't sign their names. To be invited in was a treat, to be drenched in a world that reeked of her mystery. Kitty got the same feeling she had at church when they went at Easter or Christmas. Sometimes when her mother was up in London, Kitty stole in like a ghost, breathing in the air so still and full of her.

  Bestepapa bought Hay House from a farmer in the fifties for £500. Then it was a simple Georgian farmhouse, but over the years he and Morris, his oldest friend and gardener, had added to it with higgledy-piggledy ambition, so it resembled a doll's house that had been placed as an afterthought by a giant amongst long outbuildings and crazed half-finished pathways and mazes.

  The house was surrounded by ancient orchards whose sturdy trees were made for climbing. There was an aviary in the main garden, home to a rainbow of sherbet-coloured canaries who keened lovingly when Bestepapa came to shut them up at dusk.

  Kitty's school was a sixteen-minute walk down the lane, a walk that she loved most in the winter where, still bathed in the porridgy half-light of morning, she walked feeling that she was the first to see the world as it was just shaking awake. Stepping firmly on the frost, in her red winter boots, she was the first to hear the longing whistle of the train as it flew over the bridge, the first to hear the neighbour's car splutter alive in protest at the cold, Classic FM sending her on her crackling way.

  Kitty liked school. Her mother and her aunts were legend in the village and some of this stardust by association rubbed its coppery sheen on her, even though she had glasses, and unlike her mother she could not play netball, or, like Ingrid and Elsie, win a prize for the high jump. She did have her mother's eyes, silvery grey, and a fortune teller at the village fete once told Kitty they would get her in trouble. She hoped so. She felt a pretender to the family glamour, even when girls from the fifth form showed her a picture in Vogue, her mother gazing soulfully out of its pages, her sadness palpable perhaps only to her oldest child.

  Her illegitimacy too, was a badge of separation, though not one that she could divine. The absence of her father, given his marital status, was not something that she questioned - she had Bestepapa and Bergerac. The girls at school found it ceaselessly fascinating, so Kitty answered their questions with studied affront, because she realised early on that it was considered a social hindrance to have an unmarried mother. She manufactured hysteria when Katrina Donnelly called her a bastard after fouling her in netball as the other girls stared on in mawkish sympathy waiting for her tears.

  When her mother wasn't prone, painting, or in London, she waited for Kitty by the gate after school. She wore vintage thirties chiffon dresses, her long pale legs and knickers whispers through the fabric. Her short scarlet nails and gypsy hoops cemented her fate: she was a magnet for the pursed lips and scorching eyes of other mothers and the slavish open-mouthed worship of their daughters.

  If her mother was up in London Elsie and Ingrid would dress Kitty up and smuggle her into the pub. They had done this since she was small and they barely qualified for pub drinking themselves. Elsie was seventeen to Kitty's eleven, Ingrid eighteen. Her mother was twenty-seven.

  Walking down the lane holding her hands, they told her who they fancied. In the dark their blonde hair glinted and swirled behind them like mist. They shared a B & H, but Ingrid got angry with Elsie and said that she was disgusting because she always 'bum-sucked' cigarettes.

  'Who do you fancy, Kitten?'

  'Don't be stupid,' she said gloomily. 'I go to school with girls.'

  'What about that heavenly boy with acne in the chemist's . . . I know you love him.' Elsie dug her in the ribs.

  'Shut up,' Kitty said. Her neck was hot in the dark.

  She liked the fuggy pub. They made steak sandwiches and crispy chips, and she was allowed Appletise in the bottle with a straw.

  'Stop,' Kitty said. 'One moment. I have a pain in my ovaries. A serious pain. I think I have to go back to the house, and get one of my sanitary towels.'

  'Not this again,' Ingrid said. 'Kitty, you do not have your period, OK? Just stop it. You probably won't get it for another two years. You're completely flat-chested. Why do you want it so badly? It's really strange. When you get it you'll be sorry: it's not fun.'

  'I think I have it, I do. I can feel things moving inside me, and I have a cramp.'

  'We're going to ignore you if you carry on. It's called the curse not the blessing. I'll bet you your pocket money it's not. Are you willing to take a bet?'

  'No,' Kitty said.

  'Would you like to go to another school? Boarding school, like we did?' Elsie asked.

  'Don't think so. Maybe, if there were boys.'

  * * *

  Boarding school was a topic of tired discussion at Hay House. Kitty had wriggled out of it for years. The others had all gone from eight to sixteen. Kitty knew secretly that one of the reasons her mother wanted her to go was so she could go up to London and not feel guilty. If she was away at school, she wouldn't be there to stare at her mother with accusing eyes when she came back the next day from a Party.

  Her mother sat huddled in the sitting room with Elsie and Ingrid, their hushed voices and squawks of laughter wafting under the door as Kitty eavesdropped.

  'God, I want to move to New York,' her mother said. 'What can I do here? There's nothing to do, I'll be stuck here for ever with you and the bloody chickens.'

  Kitty ran into the room, scandalised.

  'There's me!' she shouted. 'I'm here! Don't forget me! And there's everything to do, the walks and the woods and the canaries and the mornings . . .' She realised that she couldn't think of anything else and began to cry.

  Marina pulled her into a familiar softness that smelled of Mitsouko and Marlboro Reds.

  'Hush, hush, sweet girl, I would never leave you anywhere. Come and sit on my lap. I was just talking . . . being a silly chatty mummy . . . Whilst I realise that Hay is joy for you, my little bird, sometimes I get a bit bored here.'

  'It should be INSPIRING to you, you're a painter. No one else is bored, just you.'

  'I am,' Elsie said.

  'I want to move to Paris,' Ingrid said.

  'Well, I don't understand you - I think you're all horrible and disloyal to the lovely place where you were born!'

  They laughed and fluttered about Kitty, plastering scented kisses on her head, their soft hands pulling her this way and that, until, sated with love and ravenous, she ran to the kitchen to pester Bestepapa for one of his bacon and marmalade sandwiches, feeling that things were restored to their rightful order.

  Kitty always measured the passing of time by the calendar of her birthday, which fell, inevitably, like a spent plum, during the first week of the autumn term. The Larsens were big on birthdays, and from the moment she woke, Kitty was treated like a queen. Her mother brought her breakfast in bed, and she had been there for each and every birthday of Kitty's small life.

  It was the one day of the year Kitty was officially allowed coffee, and it arrived in a great oversized cup, so sweet it made her grimace, then smile, and her mother sat on her bed and told her, each year, the story of the day she was born. Kitty l
oved the story of her beginning; it reminded of her of Bestepapa's Viking stories:

  My waters broke at three in the morning. I had been ready for your arrival for weeks, and my suitcase sat at the end of my bed neatly packed, so nothing halted my trip to the hospital. I knocked on Bestepapa and Bestemarna's door, with a navy-blue pea coat on top of my nightie, and I said, 'The baby's coming.' Bes-tepapa leapt out of bed, and he was as agitated as I was calm. Bestemama kissed my stomach for luck (she had to stay to look after Elsie and Ingrid) and we said goodbye.

  When we walked outside, everything seemed electric. The moon lit up the garden so we could follow the path to the car. It was an Indian summer that year, and everything was still in bloom, and I remember thinking that the roses had never looked more voluptuous, or smelled quite as beautiful. The night was so thick and alive with magic it was tangible. As we were getting into the car, the canaries, in the silence of the garden, sang out, as though they were heralding the beginning of your journey, and wishing us well.

  We drove to Oxford, Bestepapa and I, listening to Duke Ellington and eating boiled sweets. Just before we got there my contractions became closer and closer together, so sharp they took my breath away.

  Bestepapa had smuggled a bottle of champagne into the waiting room, and he paced there for seven hours, as I screamed and pushed, pushed and screamed and the world was nothing but you and me, and this extraordinary, other-worldly pain, but it kept reminding me how alive I was, how very much I wanted you, and I called out for Bestemama as you were pulled out by forceps that looked like medieval instruments of torture. You screamed, outraged that you were in this cold place of strip-lights and intrusion. They placed you in my arms. You had barely any hair, and because of the forceps, your little nose was squashed to one side of your face, as though you had been in a boxing match. But when I looked at you, I had never seen such perfection, or felt such an all-consuming love. I was on fire with love for you.

  The doctor went into the hall to tell Bestepapa that you were born and he shouted and hooted so much they had sternly to tell him to shut up. He came in and he held you in his huge hands like you were a baby butterfly, crying big salty tears that fell on your face. You seemed undisturbed by all of the commotion, and Bestepapa declared you, in a choking voice, 'A GOOD EGG.'

  Her mother cleared her throat.

  'Well, birthday girl.' She stroked Kitty's hair back from her eyes. 'You know the rest.'

  Having feasted on the rich tale of her existence, Kitty got ready for the spare banality of school. Ingrid and Elsie took her shopping in the afternoon, and there was a big birthday supper, whose menu she was allowed to dictate, like a miniature gourmand with an eye for excess.

  Her mother came back from one of her London trips flushed and dizzy. Kitty presumed she had met a man and took up her watchpost outside the sitting room.

  'Who is he?' asked Ingrid.

  'It's God. I've found God,' Marina said serenely.

  There was silence as her sisters waited for the punchline.

  'I always felt like something was missing. I've ached my entire life; except when I was pregnant.'

  This was news to Kitty. She wondered if a lifelong ache was like the flu. It sounded painful.

  'But I've found God and now I feel whole.'

  Elsie's giggle broke the spell.

  'That's classic! Woohoo, God! . . . You are joking?' she asked nervously.

  Kitty heard a match being struck, the measured drag of a cigarette.

  'No, Lillian Rhodes invited me to what I thought was a yoga class, this teacher they've all been banging on about, and I went in exercise clothes to this house in Victoria, and I was sort of dreading it, and I was meant to meet Lola and the Baron for dinner after at La Farniglia. When I walked in, incense was burning and there was a circle of people sitting at the feet of this, this, being. Everyone looked so happy and full of love. No one was judging anyone . . . I sat down and HE looked at me, a look of utter compassion. I felt like a boulder rolled aside and my heart opened when I sat at the Guru's feet and received his blessing. I can't really explain it, except to say I felt like I had come home.'

  'Fantastic. Far out. So you're in love with a guru, very sixties of you, Marina,' yawned Ingrid. 'How was Peter's party? Has the Baron said anything about me?'

  Kitty could tell from the silence that her mother was giving them a withering look. She bit her thumbnail.

  'Marina, can you get us tickets for the Rolling Stones?'

  They were dismissing this as one of her mother's whims.

  But now Marina had purpose, and carried herself as though she contained the secret of bliss. Kitty found it all infuriating. Her new mother didn't swear and smiled beatifically whenever Kitty misbehaved. Her new mother got up early and sat crossed-legged in the dining room deep in prayer.

  'Can you try to be quiet? I'm meditating,' she said with the smile that Kitty was certain she'd copied from the photograph of Mother Teresa that was stuck on her bathroom mirror.

  'Well, WE are trying to make breakfast,' Besternama said tolerantly.

  'Bugger off, Buddha!' was Bestepapa's response.

  Now Marina did not cry, as she'd done before, she looked at her family as though she pitied their souls, hoping for their liberation.

  'Bloody Maggie T,' Nora said, watching the news. 'Who does she think she is?'

  'I'm sure she's filled with God's love, Nora, like the rest of us,' Marina said, blissfully smoking a cheroot.

  'I'll show you God's love, woman. That smile you're wearing is giving me the heebie-jeebies,' Kitty heard Nora mutter under her breath as she flew out of the room to put the eggs on for tea.

  Marina bowed her head.

  The thin end of the wedge was at six o'clock, Bestepapa's sacred gin and tonic hour, where nightly he hummed tunelessly to Beethoven's Seventh, and imbibed like a bootlegger. Kitty sat next to him and did her homework and he let her have one sip of his drink, a big one.

  They were just settling into their ritual when across the Beethoven came the mystical throb of a sitar followed by a mournful wail from her mother. Kitty thought that maybe she was crying, and became heartened.

  'Come with me.' Bestepapa gave Kitty a look that promised trouble. A recklessness came over her and itched like a rash. They crept up the stairs along the hall which reeked of incense, stopping in Ingrid and Elsie's bathroom and applying orange lipstick to the spot between their eyes. Bestepapa looked deranged, and Kitty gasped with pleasure at his theatrical touch.

  'You're brilliant!' she said.

  'Shush.' He winked, holding his finger to his lips.

  Opening the study door, Bestepapa sprang in whirling like a dervish as she tried to keep up, doing an impromptu belly dance, rolling her white tummy in and out with the music. They clapped their palms together in a spontaneous Hindu high five.

  Her mother opened one eye and glared at them.

  'It's fine,' she said. 'Laugh at me. It's your dharma. Though frankly, Kitty, I expect more of you. I thought you were interested in other cultures, but it would seem that's not the case.'

  'It was just a joke.'

  Kitty began to feel unsure, but Bestepapa gave another giant hip roll, and she laughed out loud at his defiance, leaving her mother to sweep out, without deigning to acknowledge them, the religious philistines.

  Bestemama was up within minutes.

  'Honestly, Harald,' she said. 'You of all people should be pleased Marina's found something that makes her happy, and encouraging Kitty to join you in mocking her is unforgivable. It demoralises her.'

  Bestepapa tried his hardest to look contrite.

  Bestemama stumped downstairs, each footfall a stamp of disgrace, and once he was sure she was gone, Bestepapa held his hands to his heart coyly and whispered, 'OMmmmm,' releasing a giant fart that sounded like a duck quacking.

  'That showed her what we think of mumbo jumbo gumbo.'

  Kitty promptly fell on the floor, convulsed with laughter, blue spectacles steamed
up from her exertions.

  Unlike her mother's other phases - astrology, the fit-for-life diet, runes and knitting - which waned and flickered like the rain in May, this one had staying power. Every evening her mother drove to London for 'Satsang with Swami-ji'. She said that the Guru normally lived in Pennsylvania but was on a 'tour of compassion' in London. Kitty conjured up the Guru healing the sick, on a tour bus wearing a conductor's hat and a navy-blue dress.

  She wondered what exactly her mother did with Swami-ji, and her head spun with the limited tabloid knowledge she had of Rajneesh and his Rolls-Royces, the jolly round Maharishi with the Beatles. She lay awake long into the night, and she felt jealous of her mother's newfound happiness. Nothing was certain any more. Her mother ate greying macrobiotic food that she bought at Holland &Barrett up in London, and spurned Bestemama's meatballs.

  'Her favourite since childhood!' said Bestepapa, his voice rising with indignation.

  Sam and Violet rejected Marina's efforts to teach them Hindi chants in the bath.

  'Humpty Dumpty!' they shouted, drenching her with soapy water.

  Elsie and Ingrid were equally glum about the whole thing, and they lay with Kitty in the sitting room, waiting for Marina to come home, like the long-suffering wives of a prophet. They chain-smoked menthols, because they thought they were sophisticated and, if feeling particularly laconic, let Kitty have a hasty baby puff. They watched Doc& Who, which gave Kitty nightmares; she dreamed of her mother riding a Dalek in a crimson sari, evil grinning monkeys perched beside her.

  Although she was calm like the desert, Marina, who Kitty felt was only half hers to begin with, seemed to be slipping quietly away. Since she was small, Kitty had suspected that her mother was really a changeling who had been left in the garden one night by a bearded witch who stole her from the fairies and hid her for safekeeping at Hay House. She knew the crone would return one bad day to claim her. That day seemed to have arrived. But instead of the twisted thorny figure of Kitty's nightmares, her mother's spiriter was a man, a reedy Indian man in his fifties, with kind eyes and feet like wrinkled walnut shells.