‘Don’t be silly. It’s modern art. It was sculpted in an atelier in Bolivia,’ Laura said testily.
‘What’s an atelier?’ asked Daisy.
‘A workshop,’ Dad told her.
‘Look, Dad, I’m just trying to bring this place up to date a bit, OK? Trying to bring it kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, make it less like – like a mausoleum!’
‘Of course you are,’ said Mum, making her don’t-say-another-word face at my father.
Dad held up his hands in defeat. ‘OK, OK. I’m just trying to stop you being taken for a ride, that’s all. Seems to me this house is pretty neat as it is. A bit tired, granted, but nothing a few coats of paint and some new couches wouldn’t solve. But, hey, who am I to say? I’m just an old dinosaur who’d be happy living in a hut with a pile of newspapers and pizza delivered regularly.’
‘Precisely,’ said Mum.
‘But if it was a case of paint and new sofas,’ said Hugh bravely, ‘then, Hattie, you and Maggie could, you know, see to that, couldn’t you?’
‘Oh, marvellous,’ spat Laura, before Maggie and I could murmur some sort of awkward assent. ‘Make me feel bad about not giving the whole commission to Hattie. Make me feel guilty in front of my entire family about spending too much on a fancy interior designer!’ And with that she pushed back her chair and swept out.
Daisy looked distressed and made to go after her, but Hugh laid a hand on her arm. ‘I’ll go. She’ll be OK in a minute.’ He got up and followed Laura out.
‘But why’s she so upset?’ said Daisy, blinking. ‘It’s only decorating.’
‘I think,’ said my mother, widening her eyes expressively at my father and employing her best pas devant les enfants voice, ‘there are other affairs going on here. Pass the cheese, would you, Seffy, please?’
‘You mean like Luca inheriting instead of Charlie?’ asked Biba.
‘Biba!’ My mother couldn’t get over how young people just spoke right up these days.
‘I don’t see why it would go to Charlie anyway,’ objected Daisy. ‘You’re the eldest. It should be you.’
‘Or why just one person?’ said Biba. ‘He’s so old-fashioned.’
‘Yeah, you should split it between all of you,’ said Seffy. ‘Like the French do.’
‘That would be cool,’ agreed Biba. ‘Then we could sell it and each buy our own house in Chelsea.’
‘Biba!’ said Mum again. ‘How can you even think of such a thing when your mother is working tirelessly to turn this into a beautiful home for you?’
‘Sorry, Granny.’ Biba blushed.
‘Maybe she’s got issues?’ suggested Charlie helpfully with his mouth full. ‘Maybe she’s run out of eggs?’
‘No, Charlie, there’s a box of twelve in the fridge,’ Mum told him.
‘I meant in her ovaries.’
‘Don’t be silly. She’s not old enough for that,’ snapped Biba. ‘And what d’you know about that, anyway?’
‘They teach us at school in PSHE. Apparently, when the lady’s young she gets really stressy just before she drops her egg – that’s called PMT – and then later on, when she’s really old, about forty, she runs out of eggs, and gets all wrinkly and depressed again, suicidal, sometimes. That’s called the men-or-paws.’
‘Thank you, Charlie,’ I said quickly. Mum looked as if she were about to pass out.
‘What kind of school does this kid go to?’ asked Dad in horror. ‘I hope you’re taught a little football too?’
‘Only when we’re truly in touch with our feminine side,’ Charlie told him, both hands clasped to his heart. He fluttered his eyelids expressively.
Dad snorted. ‘Is that so? That could take a little while then. So what time do you guys have to get back to these visionary, emancipated educational establishments?’ He looked at his watch.
‘Soon.’ Biba, beside him, turned his wrist so she could see the face.
‘Twenty after two. And how are you getting there?’
‘We’ll get the train,’ she told him.
‘Anybody want a lift?’
‘Oh, yes, please!’ said the girls.
‘Seffy?’
‘Sure. If you don’t mind?’
‘Not at all. I’d like to see your new pad. Haven’t clapped eyes on it yet.’
I blinked. Opened my mouth to protest. As a general clearing of the table ensued and everyone got to their feet, Seffy shrugged at me.
‘Why not?’ he murmured. ‘He hasn’t seen it yet.’
On the way home in the car, Maggie tried to placate me.
‘Boys of that age don’t always want their mums fussing around. He wants some independence. I can understand that.’
‘But he was perfectly happy for Dad to take him back!’
‘Because he was taking the girls anyway. Come on, Hatts, how much time does Seffy spend with his grandfather? Not a lot, I’m sure.’
‘I suppose. And Dad did want to see the school…’
My father always made a huge effort to be even-handed with his grandchildren. If he went to a concert at one school, he liked to go to one at the other. He’d always been like that with us as kids. Comparatively recently he’d given Kit, who earned diddly-squat, an old car he’d been about to trade in, and then tried to hand Laura and me the corresponding amount of money. We’d handed it back, touched, but as Laura had said, ‘I’m hardly on the breadline, Dad. You don’t have to give me money!’
Never penalize success, though, had always been his mantra. And Laura had certainly made a success of her life. Would he say the same about me? I was never sure. I knew it quietly saddened him that neither Kit nor I was married with children of our own – although he loved Seffy as if he were my own – and I was aware that he, almost more than Mum, worried I’d left it too late. Which of course I had.
‘Exactly,’ Maggie was saying.
It took me a moment to remember what we’d been talking about. Oh, Seffy. My chest tightened in its familiar fashion, but not as much as it would have done a year ago. Things were definitely better between us, but I still had the feeling he was deliberately distancing himself. Perhaps I’d been too overprotective, when he was younger? Too smothering? But then he was my only child, and I his only family too. He’d seemed to need that extra strong bond; we both did. But I knew some of his friends treated their mothers much more casually; kept them at arm’s length. Perhaps Seffy was embarrassed by our closeness. Didn’t want to be a mummy’s boy. Perhaps he was just doing the same.
I’d wanted to ask his housemaster how he was getting on, but I suspected Seffy knew that and didn’t want me to. Didn’t want to be discussed; examined minutely from every angle – who would? And the awful thing was, whenever I talked about Seffy, I got horribly emotional. Often in the most inappropriate places. The last thing I wanted was to have a box of tissues passed silently to me by an embarrassed housemaster. There’d been enough of that at the last school. Perhaps it was as well he’d gone back with Dad.
I dropped Maggie off at her house just off Fulham Palace Road and drove the few blocks round to mine. The moment I was alone all vestige of pretence left me, and I felt the skies descend. My spirits dived in a way that couldn’t just be attributed to general Sunday night gloom. Shoulders up, I hunched over the wheel. Not a great day. Not great at all. The encounter with Hal and Letty had shaken me more than I could say, and now Seffy – withdrawn, defensive. As I purred round the backstreets, I experienced a sense of foreboding that rushed at me in a nightmarish, ghostly fashion. It was one I knew of old and associated with inescapable loss.
As I turned into my road, though, remarkably, my spirits lifted, just perceptibly. They always did as I crawled down this tree-lined street to home. Home. My house. Small and terraced in a row of identical cottages, but how I loved it. Loved the pretty Victorian façade I’d painted clotted cream, the tiny front garden where I grew roses and sweet william, a lupin if there was room, the Peter Pan statue I’d found in Lyons an
d set amongst the fauna. I loved the fact that I could impose my taste on a small area and make it look so different from the neighbours’. And I’d done just the same inside. It was a real two-up two-down, but I’d knocked the two-down into one long sitting room: tacked a conservatory onto the kitchen too, which gave onto the garden. Now that really was a backyard. I smiled when I thought of Laura’s. I’d personally cleared it of rubble with the help of Kit and my father when I’d bought the place, chucking out broken bricks, an old bath, masses of green and brown bottles, turning it from a rubbish heap into a tiny walled enclosure, with a patch of grass. It was here that Seffy had splashed in his paddling pool, then later tricycled around in circles – just – and now lay on his back in the sun, feet up the wall. It was small, but enough for us. Or so I’d always thought. As I switched off the engine I glanced at it anxiously, willing it to do its magic. Willing it to relax my fraught nerves. It did, a bit.
In these enlightened days of residents’ parking – no more dragging of smelly dustbins into the road to reserve a space – I was able to park right outside. I walked the few steps up the front path, deliberately taking time to savour the musky scent of the tobacco plants I’d placed strategically in pots by the front door. Always gloriously heady in warm evening air, they were really earning their keep tonight. I inhaled their fragrance deeply; smiled. Then I reached in my bag for the key, but as I put it in the latch, I realized the light was already on in the hallway, shining through the stained-glass door panel. I froze. Music was drifting out from within. Shit. Seffy? No, obviously not Seffy. He was en route to Lightbrook with Dad.
It could only mean one thing. He’d got back early. Had said he might, from Toulouse, but I knew that trip: hadn’t really imagined he would. And yes, I had said come round, in the unlikely event. And he’d have found the spare key, the one I always kept for Seffy under the geranium pot, and which I moved periodically, leaving a note in Latin, hoping the burglars weren’t versed in the classics. I didn’t have a bit of food in the house, not even an egg. But more to the point – more pressingly – I didn’t have any make-up on. Not a scrap. No eyeliner, no mascara, no hideously expensive Touche Éclat, which I needed to erase the dark circles from under my eyes, the lines from my mouth, the tiny spider veins from my cheeks. No transfiguration unguents, which, when applied, went some way to ensuring I resembled not a dewy twenty-six – that would be downright impossible – but at least a sophisticated creature the right side of forty. Right now, all I had on was my Sunday night, greasy-haired, barefaced cheek. The one I reserved for my family or old friends like Maggie, who’d seen me open-mouthed and snoring as we slumbered in the back of a lorry, waiting for the sun to rise over some distant brocante; who knew about the ravages of time and had seen the whole difficult, intricate process of living etched on my face.
But not this individual. He certainly hadn’t. In that moment, all morbid thoughts of Hal, Letty – Seffy, even – were dispelled in a trice. With something approaching panic I leaped behind the dustbins, riffling furiously in my handbag like an old lady fumbling for her keys, except this one was after lippy. Lippy lippy lippy. Oh God, lippy! Hands trembling, I’d just managed to pull it out, twist it erect, and was poised to slather it on furiously – when my front door swung wide.
There, in the doorway, tousled and blond, in a crumpled white T-shirt and trailing jeans, feet bare and tanned, looking very much the dewy twenty-six I couldn’t hope to achieve, was Ivan. He blinked in surprise as I hunched, paralysed over a dustbin in the moonlight, my compact mirror in one hand, a stick of Chanel’s appropriately named Sunset Rose in the other.
‘Oh, it is you. I heard the key in the door and couldn’t work out why it didn’t open.’ He peered at me in the gloom. ‘Have you been swimming?’
14
‘Um, yes.’ Swimming. God, I did look rough. I put my head down and made to slide past him. ‘Desperate for the loo, though. Won’t be a tick.’
‘Hey, not so fast,’ he laughed, stopping me with a huge arm and giving me a bear hug. ‘Haven’t you got a kiss for your old man?’
Old he certainly wasn’t, but I liked the possessive article, and even though it was under the glare of my ghastly overhead light, I succumbed to his embrace. I made a mental note, eyes shut, mid-kiss, to remove the bulb. I’d removed all the other overhead bulbs in the house when I’d met Ivan, replaced them with extremely low-voltage table lamps, but hadn’t got round to the hall. In the first place there wasn’t room for a table – no matter, it could sit on the floor – but neither had I envisaged being ravaged here. I can’t imagine why, I’d been ravaged most other places in the house, and this thought clearly occurred to Ivan as he began to peel off my jacket, eyeing the twelve square feet of carpet speculatively. But I wasn’t having that.
‘Won’t be a mo!’ I gasped, as I finally came up for air. I wrenched myself free from his arms and stumbled into the downstairs loo, locking it firmly behind me.
Happily, a full set of beauty paraphernalia was to hand – I kept make-up in most rooms, these days – and I frantically got to work. Not the full rig, I thought, scrubbing off too much blusher – that might be a bit obvious – but I outlined my eyes, glossed my lips, then threw my head down and tossed my hair back to add bounce. I sucked in my cheeks and eyed my reflection critically. Better. Nothing would improve the nose Dad had given me, Roman and distinguished on a man, less so on a girl, nor the fullness of my face, but the fullness also extended to my lips, and together with my brown eyes and dark lashes, contrived to create a luscious, if slightly bovine look. If only I was taller, I thought, standing on tiptoe, but since most of the time I was horizontal with Ivan, it didn’t really matter. I came out, licking my teeth in case Sunset Rose had strayed, and remembering to pull the chain behind me.
He was watching television in the sitting room, softly lit, but still too bright. I snapped off a lamp as I came in and groped towards him in the gloom.
‘So how was it?’ I asked, sinking down beside him on the sofa. David Attenborough was lying prone in the undergrowth before us, whispering excitedly about a female gorilla behind a tree. Poor girl. I have many problems, but wearing my sexual organs on the outside is not one of them.
‘Oh, averagely ghastly,’ Ivan groaned. He put his arm around me and I snuggled up, tucking my knees beneath me in a youthful manner. One of them clicked. ‘The usual merry-go-round of rip-off merchants and tat, with the occasional lucky find. Our friend Monsieur Renard had the best, as usual, but he wasn’t prepared to part with it for peanuts. I ended up paying well over the odds for a pair of château shutters, but they’re excellent. You’d have fought me for them.’
I smiled. The first time I’d met Ivan we’d both been after the same piece in Boulogne. I’d seen it first: a plaster bust of the goddess Daphne, slightly wounded, it has to be said, but nevertheless, she’d sit beautifully in the landing window of a house Maggie and I were doing in Putney. But the fellow was asking a lot. I’d haggled and got him down a bit, but he wouldn’t budge any more. Also he wanted cash.
‘Save it for me,’ I told him as I went grudgingly off to the bank to accommodate him. When I got back, Ivan had just bought it.
‘That’s my Daphne!’ I said, as the Frenchman handed it over.
Monsieur Renard raised shoulders and dismissive eyebrows. ‘He pay more. What can I do?’
I turned, furious, to my competitor: a tall blond chap in a leather jacket.
‘I’d reserved that bust. You could at least have waited to see if I was prepared to outbid you!’
He’d widened cool grey eyes. ‘Oh, is that how it works? A sort of gentlemanly entente cordiale. And there was I thinking antique dealing was every man for himself. Had no idea there were conduct rules.’
Monsieur Renard sniggered as he pocketed his euros.
‘Well, you’re obviously new to the game,’ I snapped. Maggie and I knew most dealers’ faces, particularly the English ones in the markets, and this was a new one on me. ‘As
a rule we don’t tread on each other’s toes and we do try to maintain some sort of decorum.’ This was quite untrue. We’d snatch an object from each other’s jaws if necessary.
‘Is that so? So the little episode last week in Montauroux, when two girls were seen physically assaulting an elderly gentleman before whisking a campaign bed away in the back of a lorry, was totally uncharacteristic?’
This, a reference to an unseemly little tussle with Billy the Bastard, as he was known in trading circles, who’d tried to buy a bed Maggie had in fact already secured, and was just waiting for me to bring the van around to collect. Naturally we’d dealt with him in a robust manner, since any other manner would be lost on Billy, but I wasn’t prepared to go into that with my blond rival right now. I just wanted my Daphne back. But he was already making off with it.
‘Where d’you think you’re going?’ I squealed.
‘I was going to pop it in the back of your lorry for you – it’s quite heavy. You can line up the café au laits in the bar.’
‘Oh.’ I stared after him.
Over coffee, I’d tried to pay him for the bust, but he wouldn’t accept it.
‘It’s a present.’
‘For me?’
‘Why not?’
‘Don’t be silly, you can’t buy it for me.’ I was embarrassed now. ‘I’ll only sell it on at a profit.’
He’d shrugged. ‘OK.’ His eyes held mine over the rim of his coffee cup. Smouldered, might even be the word. ‘Your choice.’
I hadn’t, of course, sold Daphne. She was still with me today, on a console table in my bathroom, her beautiful face – lips pursed, eyes half shut – a comfort to me in times of stress, although Seffy said she looked like she was straining a turd. And that day in Boulogne, I hadn’t hurried back to the brocante either. After all, there was another fair in Legele the following morning, and it was a long time since I’d been chatted up by a man at least ten years younger than me in the back room of a smoky bar, the low winter sun glancing off the tobacco-stained walls, our knees almost touching as coffee turned into a jug of wine, which turned into lunch, smiled on indulgently the while by knowing waiters, in a seduction scene that seemed to me, as I toyed winsomely with my tarte tatin and glanced at him under my lashes, to be straight out of a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, but may have had more to do with yet another sozzled, middle-aged woman being easy prey for a young, slightly down-at-heel Lothario. Certainly as I weaved to the ladies for a monumental and long overdue wee – had my waters broken? Surely one didn’t get pregnant toying with tarte tatin? – I clocked a few sly grins from the locals, as well as one or two dealers I knew.
One Day in May Page 16