Margot's Secrets

by Don Boyd

“You are quite right. I must go home and sleep it off. I do love you so very, very much!”

  He stood up and kissed her clumsily on the mouth. She ushered him to the door.

  “I can find a cab in Las Ramblas. See you tonight. It’s Lucia. My favourite!” He spluttered his way down the steps.

  Margot walked back to her desk, sat down and fingered the book of Catalan love songs Tilly had given her. She dialled her number. Out of service. She dialled Paolo’s number. Also out of service. She decided to look through her notes about Tilly.

  Chapter Four

  When Domatilla, or ‘Tilly’ to her friends, was eight years old, she looked like a clichéd personification of Tenniel’s illustration of Alice in Wonderland. With curly, strawberry blonde hair which she neatly bunched up with a red velvet ribbon, her freckled face was almost always buried in a book, and because her mother and father ignored her at the expense of her irritatingly pretty brother, she hid her precocious intellect from almost everybody except their butler, Stephen. He realised that behind that innocent façade lay the mind of a mature adult, schooled on everything she could lay her hands on from the lewdest of Boccaccio’s stories to the most romantic of Rimbaud’s homoerotic poems. She would amuse Stephen for hours with the plots and characters from every single one of Shakespeare’s plays, and she knew the difference between a dildo and a dirk. Stephen was a tall, intense, scholarly man with a superb memory, and although his understanding of poetry was limited, he gave her the attention that wasn’t coming from her weak, hen-pecked father.

  Tilly’s family home in Oxfordshire was still anachronistically run like an Edwardian manor; butlers, cooks, maids! And in the manner of the Edwardian family, she and her brother were hidden away from the main drama of adult life and lived life in the nursery and ‘below stairs’. Or what was known as a nursery. In fact it was like a room in a Natural History Museum. Butterflies and moths were encased in glass frames on the walls. Cabinets with dead snakes. Stuffed frogs. The children hated this oppressive reminder of their family’s eccentricity. Even the blackboard displayed representations of flora, fauna and lepidoptera carefully linked to their scientific names so that when the children’s grandmother made one of her infrequent visits, Hugo and Tilly could elicit the old boot’s approval with a parrot-like recital of their Latin labels.

  Stephen was the major domo amongst the servants who were all known as ‘under the stairs staff’ or ‘serfs’. His status allowed him special access to the children, away from their parents. Tilly would escape from this hellhole of a schoolroom to the kitchen where she and Stephen would tell stories to anybody who wanted to listen. Their performances would last late into the evening and then Stephen would ask their nanny to take her to bed, hinting at the promise of a late night story from him to send her to sleep. Hugo slept in his mother’s bed, leaving Tilly a large bedroom to herself.

  Stephen would arrive, usually when she was all but asleep, and then gently read her a long poem. Her favourite was Christabel, an erotic romance about a beautiful virgin who is all but raped in the forest by a mysterious knight, who then haunts her life forever. At first, Stephen would sit on the bed reserved for Hugo. Respectably distant. But as their friendship developed beyond conventional boundaries, Tilly persuaded Stephen to sit at the end of her bed. Before long he was sleeping in the room. And on one extraordinary night, Tilly came back from the bathroom, naked, and slid in beside her own mysterious knight. The innocent glass of milk had become the excuse for a passionate and illicit love affair – an abusive relationship which began innocently enough and within time became obsessive and needy.

  At night, Tilly yearned for Stephen’s thin body and the sweet smell of his cheap after-shave lotion. He would whisper to her. Stories about his childhood, his favourite Shakespearean plots and Keats. She would make up fairy tales and bury herself in his smooth arms or stroke his hairy back, which made her giggle. These nocturnal visits lasted into puberty and Tilly finally lost her virginity to him. He was gentle. Loving. This poetic idyll came to an abrupt and hysterical end when her mother made her only visit to Tilly one cold night when Hugo had begged her to ask Tilly to tell him a late night story. The police were called. Stephen was arrested for rape (charges were later dropped) and the family ostensibly left their English stately home for a life of tax exile. Tilly cried herself to sleep every night for the next two years.

  Living between the family ski chalet in St Moritz and an eccentric Victorian mansion outside Dublin might have seemed an attractive alternative, and of course fun for her hedonistic parents, but Tilly hated the disruption as much as she loathed the ghastly people her parents mixed with in this new existence – the rarefied equivalent of what the family called a ‘two centre holiday’ for the rich. Barely had she become used to the peculiarities of her specially imported tutors in Ireland – they were regularly fired or replaced – than she found herself having to make friends with the rather dull girls in her class at the best convent school her father could find in Dublin. There was never any consistency in her life, either in the area of her education through her teachers or in the arena of friendship with her peers.

  The tutors who replaced the disgraced Stephen in Tilly’s strange, increasingly hermetic universe were perversely recruited from the lists of those Oxbridge students who swotted or blagged their way to a good degree. They came for a few months before joining the ranks of the institutional classes for which they had been educated. Algebra and Latin lessons for Tilly were the least of their priorities, and the alcoholic advances from her mother Sabrina, which they either gratefully accepted or indignantly resisted, always led to the sack. One way or another.

  The girls in her class in Dublin fell into two categories. The boring swots who were not nearly as clever as she was and yet tried in vain to match her formidable intelligence. Or the precocious mini Lolitas who couldn’t compete with Tilly’s beauty, or for that matter with her highly developed eccentricity. When it came to dealing with the boys on offer outside school, she swatted them off with elegant disdain. The one friend she made, the brother of one of the girls in her class, a very pretty mixed race boy whose parents were tax exiles, disappeared half way through Tilly’s second term along with his sister. It turned out that their father was a Jamaican drug dealer, a Yardie on the run, whose business running a fanciful Dublin art gallery had been a cover for his dealing exploits amongst the artistic bohemia of Dublin society. She gave up trying to make any more friends after a tea party her mother gave which ended when she bloodied the nose of an annoying girl with big teeth and a hideous crew cut. The throng took against Tilly and she was ostracised, which suited her down to the ground. Friendless and handicapped with the combined attributes of a fierce intellect and startling beauty, Tilly ignored the opportunity to integrate. She did exactly the reverse: she played truant, and truant of the most sophisticated kind. When she was at home she read obsessively from her father’s considerable and eclectic library. And when she turned fifteen, she began to balance her literary passion with a highly sophisticated gift for the manipulation of her parents.

  First, the bouts of phoney headaches, migraine attacks. Six in the first month in her carefully plotted campaign designed to undermine any medical attention which would come her way.

  “She’s faking it,” was her mother Sabrina’s shrewd conclusion.

  And so the migraine moved into bouts of depression – she refused to leave her bed in the morning.

  “No! I am staying in bed!”

  “You will be late!”

  “I can’t get up!”

  “Why? Are you sick? Shall I call the doctor?”

  “I don’t know… why?!”

  Her mother didn’t normally surface until after lunch anyway and so her father’s vain attempts to take her to school were undermined. He gave up after a week’s worth of perfunctory kisses and one disastrous attempt to arrange for the doctor to see Tilly. She had locked her room and pretended to be asleep.

  Tilly then be
gan the third phase in her campaign to manacle the attention she so desperately wanted. No food. Anorexic behaviour – no more communal eating. And the Internet. She spent day and night pouring over her keyboard and computer screen, bug eyed, surfing obsessively.

  “What on earth are you spending all that time on the computer for? It’s not good for you. Bad for your eyes. And anyway, what happened to reading books, for God’s sake?”

  “Mind your own business, Dad! I don’t ask you what keeps you awake all night long.”

  Tilly knew that her father was an insomniac. Tarquin listened obsessively to spoken books. Everything from Mickey Spillane to Stephen Fry’s reading of Harry Potter. But he was also something of a whiz on the digital keyboard and had managed to hack into her Yahoo account when she was in the bathroom. And he had taken a peek at her hard drive.

  “Tilly, you don’t read Japanese, do you? Manga? What’s Manga?” he shouted. “Swahili? Comic Books?”

  The following morning, after a night lost amongst the pleasures of Stephen Hawkins’ astrophysical universe, Tilly’s father, Tarquin Milliken, decided to investigate his daughter’s private world with more than his usual benign fatherly curiosity. And the shock came within a couple of clicks of her mouse: Tilly had been downloading Japanese animated pornography. Smiling old Samurai with massive dicks were pleasuring nubile sixteen-year-old Geisha girls, and evil-eyed gangsters enjoying fellatio from huge-breasted Japanese transvestites. This was too much for Tarquin.

  When Tilly finally emerged from her bedroom that morning, her hair a bright orange, two of Tarquin’s employees, ‘serfs’ as they were called by Tarquin (with no irony), were there to accompany her to a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. She was quite literally frog marched by them into the surgery of Dublin’s most prestigious therapist’s office, accompanied by an ashen-faced Tarquin. And so began phase four: the failed suicide attempts.

  The psychiatrist, an old-fashioned, strict Freudian whose usual clientele fitted the Dublin demographic of the more elderly, the more conventional and the new breed of online entrepreneurs and Irish Eurocrats, was clearly at sea faced with this clever, manipulative and uncooperative teenager. Tilly knew exactly how to make her father look silly.

  “He’s over-reacting! I downloaded that stuff by mistake. I don’t take any of it seriously anyway… it’s harmless.”

  She categorically refused to have even one session on her own with the poor baffled Freudian, and Tarquin ignominiously apologised to him for his ‘over-reaction’ by writing him an unexpected huge cheque. As for Tilly, she was now in pole position to renegotiate her adolescent right to privacy. As part of the deal to keep her computer and the vital freedom of access to the Internet, she agreed to return to the local school, from which had been suspended after her last round of excessive truancy. Being a Catholic convent, the teacher nuns also had a tendency to expel anyone they thought might have a corrupting influence. Tilly fitted that bill and was now on probation.

  She was a very good artist and could write, rather poetically. And so her prowess in art classes and English lessons, combined with a massive donation to the school’s swimming pool fund from her father, had been just enough to satisfy the reluctant Mother Superior that any disruption she would probably cause in all the other classes would justify giving her ‘one last chance to redeem herself’. Even when Tilly turned up on her first day back with black lipstick, her bright orange hair now jet-black and her nose pierced, the teaching hierarchy decided to indulge her as the school’s one eccentric.

  Alas, not so her compatriots in the schoolrooms. They continued to brutally ignore her clumsy renewed attempts to socialise with them. Even the smoked salmon sandwiches proffered from her specially-crafted, sterling silver lunch box (a present from her grandmother) were scoffed at. Branded as the school weirdo, even when she turned up with cans of Coca Cola, chocolate cup cakes and bags of Walkers cheese and onion crisps to distribute, she was ignored. The reality was that Tilly had a heart of gold and most of her peers were spoilt brats who had learnt how to conform just enough to get away with their nasty brand of insidious bullying.

  All this frustration was reported back to her mother to no avail. Sabrina had long given up on Tilly, having decided that her son Hugo had inherited the family genetic genius. She left Tilly to her computers with a sigh.

  “Make sure you eat at least once a day, Domatilla!” was the sum total of any maternal anxiety. But Tilly’s phase five was about to go into operation. Without much effort and no provocation, she was able to move on to her ultimate weapon of control: she was going to pretend that she no longer wanted to live.

  Until then, Tilly had loathed cigarettes. She walked out of any room if there was even the faintest hint of stale cigarettes or a dirty ashtray. Oddly enough, cigars she tolerated and had been known to puff on her father’s post-dinner Havana without coughing. She sneered at the bike-shed puffs on offer at school and shouted at people who smoked in the streets, so her request for a lighter after dinner one night was met with horror. The family were sprawled around their drawing room like a litter of dogs. The debris of half-eaten pizzas, stale chutney bottles and abandoned bottles of wine littered the carpet and picnic table they used as a dining surface. The ghostly chiaroscuro of family ancestors stared into the void from within the ancient frames of nineteenth century paintings – some of them priceless. The huge television was glowing silently. An American golf tournament.

  “I thought that you loathed cigarettes, Tilly.”

  “I did! I like them now.”

  She blew the smoke into the air above her, helped herself to a large brandy and flounced out of the room.

  Within ten minutes the house was echoing with the screams and moans of a madwoman. Tilly now had this phase firmly and successfully in operation. Her first suicide attempt was in full swing and working gloriously. Even her mother now appeared anxious and exasperated: the fire brigade was called! Tilly had climbed onto the slate roof of their rambling Victorian mansion and was shouting across the neighbouring red rooftops towards the sea and the twilight of Dublin Bay. A mixture of Turner’s light and the crazy desperation of a Munch painting had been her plan. And then the terrible dialogue: her deliberate attempt to appeal to her father’s intellectual sensibilities.

  “I want to die. I hate it all. There is no point. It’s all so absurd. I am an existentialist manqué. I hate my mother. I hate my father. I hate you, Hugo. I hate life. Hugo! Hugo! Hugo!”

  The shrieks and wailing never really approached operatic heights. They came over as what they were – pathetic melodrama. If anybody had really paid any attention, the use of Hugo’s name should have given the game away. Secretly Tilly absolutely adored her brother, and he had loyally repaid her genuine love with regular sneaked visits into her bed late into the night. These moments of sibling passion were the bedrocks for a solitary expression of a robust familial connection. But her parents had been fooled. Hugo wasn’t brought into play during their ridiculous attempts to persuade her that life was worth living after all. Coerced into the arms of a ruddy-faced fireman, wrapped in a blanket and carted off to the local hospital in an ambulance, they all sobbed into the palms of their hands.

  Her family were now exasperated, and genuinely anxious about Tilly’s desire to die. They indulged her every whim during her recuperation. Like a hermit, she began to spend almost all her life in her room with her eyes glued to the computer screen. She emerged occasionally to take possession of new electronic and computer equipment she had ordered online with her father’s credit card. Something was stirring in her complicated mind. She was moving on. Her hysteria and desperation had been turning into a powerful self-motivational force. She seemed to have found a solution, a remedy, salvation. She hatched such a bold and credible plan that Tarquin and Sabrina, cowed into acquiescence, clutching at every straw available, allowed her to present her new found condition without much explanation, with mind-boggling simplicity.

  “I am in love with Paolo!” s
he announced to them suddenly, and proceeded with a startlingly simple manifesto. “He wants me to come to live with him in Barcelona! I am going next week. I want to fuck him all night. I want to make love to him for forty-eight hours without stopping. We are going to watch each other all night between now and then on our web cams. I am so in love. I want to die.”

  Her mother fainted, quite literally. When that particular drama, including a visit to the hospital, had been obliterated and Sabrina had recovered, somewhat miraculously, Tarquin asked Tilly for Paulo’s telephone number and his e-mail address – if he couldn’t reach him on the phone he would find him online.

  “You can Skype him!”

  “Skype? What on earth is Skype?”

  “I can’t believe that you haven’t heard of Skype, Dad. It’s an online ‘phone. Cheap. Come up to my room and I will show you…”

  Tilly ushered her father into her room and proudly showed him how to log on and communicate with her beloved Paulo with her computer’s equivalent of a telephone system and file-swapping device. She repositioned her tiny web cam in front of her father and a small square window popped up on the computer screen showing both her and her father sitting there looking a little nervous.

  “That is what he can see of us on his big screen! I am Skyping him now. You must know about Skype, don’t you, Dad?” And before Dad could answer, they were both face to face on screen with the new love in his daughter’s life. Paulo’s beautiful face stared at them with the clarity of a Richard Avedon portrait – stark features against a white background.

  “No colour?” Tilly’s father asked, a little sheepishly.

  “We prefer making love to each other in black and white. I can switch it if you would prefer.”

  “No, no. That’s fine… Hello, Paulo. My name is Tarquin. I am Domatilla’s father.”

  “I know who you are. Tilly has sent me a few movie files of you on her website. I wanted to ask you why you were given such a peculiar name?”