It was the perfect end to a perfect weekend, really.
One particularly chilly morning a few days later, I was in the shop, happy with every passing moment that put the nightmare of Suzy’s party further behind me.
I had thrown myself into reorganizing all my stock and was working on my needlepoint cushions like a woman possessed – I’d had some wholesale enquiries about them. It still got to me in the long hours I lay awake at night, when memories of David Maier’s slobbery mouth and groping hands came back to haunt me, but during the day, if I kept busy, I could push it all down in my mind.
I was sitting behind the counter stitching while a tall red-headed woman who came in quite often was browsing happily through the old linens, when I saw a very low, very red sports car screech to a halt outside. The door slammed and Nikki Maier came storming in. She saw the other woman and immediately stopped, pretending to be looking at some cutlery.
Eventually the red-head paid for her pillowslips and left. As the door closed behind her, Nikki turned on me. She strutted over to where I was sitting and pulled my earring out of her pocket.
‘Do you recognize this?’ she asked me, swinging it backwards and forwards in front of my face.
I was so pleased to see it, I smiled with relief, before I had time to think about the implications of Nikki having it. I didn’t have her powers of instant analysis, clearly.
‘Oh!’ I said, delightedly, reaching for it. ‘My earring. What a relief …’
But before I could take it, she’d snatched it away from me.
‘Hang on a minute, you little slut,’ she said. ‘Where do you think I got this?’
The situation was beginning to dawn on me.
‘Well, I lost it at Suzy’s party …’
‘Yes, you did, didn’t you? Well, I found it in my husband’s pocket and I found your lipstick all over his collar, you whore.’
I looked at her appalled.
‘You were seen coming out of that shed where you had been rooting my husband by a friend of mine and then I found this in his pocket. We’re on to you, you pathetic English tart. Just because your husband is a fucking pouf, don’t think you can go round trying to steal our blokes.’
I could think of nothing to say. She was hardly going to believe me if I told her her husband had tried to rape me, was she?
‘Caroline told me you were coming on to her Tony earlier in the evening,’ she continued. ‘And then you took advantage of my David, when he was drunk. But don’t flatter yourself, he’d had so much coke that night he would have fucked a King’s Cross whore, so you needn’t think of coming back for a second go. He said you were a dud root anyway.’
She laughed coarsely. I opened my mouth like a fish, but nothing came out.
‘So watch out, lady muck, we’re on to you. I’ve told Suzy and all the others girls what you’ve done and you can be sure you won’t be welcome anywhere in the Eastern Suburbs now.’
She leaned across the counter and impaled me on her artificial green gaze.
‘You’re going to regret ever coming to Sydney, you stupid Pommy slut,’ she said quietly and dropped the earring into my cup of tea.
6
The weeks that followed Nikki’s visit to my shop ranked as the lowest of my life to that date and 1 September may have been the official first day of Australian spring, but it started off as just another typical miserable day in a long line of them.
That afternoon I had sorted my tax receipts, shut the shop early so I could collect Tom from school – standing alone to wait because none of the other mothers seemed to want to talk to me any more, and getting a parking ticket because I didn’t know they had re-zoned the street – and had taken him, complaining all the way, to his piano lesson.
Then I bought a week’s food from Woolworths in Double Bay, plus a packet of safety pins, to re-fasten my skirt after the button flew off in the Biscuits and Baking Goods aisle, retrieved a still-whinging Tom from his piano lesson, drove home, unloaded the car, put all the shopping away and started the dinner. Then I went to shift the big load of laundry I had put on that morning, into the dryer.
When I pressed the open button, the door of the washing machine – a front loader – flew back and flooded the kitchen with a torrent of foamy water, leaving behind a sopping mass of grey sheets and one stray black sock. My favourite lime green espadrilles were caught in the deluge.
I sat down next to the washing machine, in a pool of soapy water, and sobbed. At that very moment Tom appeared holding up a copiously bleeding cut finger. He’d been using my best Global kitchen knife to try to prise a CD-rom he shouldn’t have been playing with out of the disk drive of my laptop, which he shouldn’t have been touching. And he’d carefully bandaged it with my new white linen skirt, which he’d found in a carrier bag in the hall, as yet unworn.
‘Look, Mummy, I’ve turn-the-keyed it,’ he said proudly. ‘Do you think I need to go to Casualty?’ He unfolded the $300 dressing, to reveal a flapping flesh wound.
I actually screamed, like a banshee. A blood-curdling primeval howl. Then the doorbell rang, prompting me to start banging my head against the wall. I couldn’t take one more bit of pressure.
‘I’ll go,’ said Tom, running for the door before I could tell him we were not in. I just prayed it wasn’t Nikki Maier popping round with a baseball bat, to make me a bit more miserable.
It definitely wasn’t Nikki.
‘Oh, how marvellous,’ said a very fruity voice from the hall. ‘A wounded soldier. Was it shrapnel? Shall we rush you to the field hospital? It could be fatal. Where’s matron?’
There was the sound of Tom squealing and jumping up and down with excitement and a throaty laugh from the recipient of one of his legendary hugs. Then Hugo’s Uncle Percy walked through the kitchen door.
‘Mummy, Mummy,’ said Tom, holding on to his arm and leaping about like a flea. ‘It’s Uncle Perky.’
‘Has the dyke burst, darling?’ said Percy in his unmistakable voice, like a cross between Ralph Richardson and Dame Edith Evans, so ridiculously plummy and 1930s English in style that crowds would gather round him in public places, like the sausage counter in Harrods Food Hall, the number 12 bus stop, or wherever he happened to be making his unique comments on life.
Ten minutes later I was reclining on the sofa, a stiff vodka martini in my hand, the smell of frying onions wafting in from the kitchen and Billie Holiday’s velvet tones floating from the CD player, with Percy providing back-up vocals from the kitchen, as he mopped the floor with Tom’s help.
‘What a strrrrange frrrrooooot … That’s right, Tom, swish, swish, swish, squeeeeeeeze. Marvellous stuff. That sticking plaster holding out, is it? Good man.’
Percy’s very particular head, with its extravagantly arched plucked eyebrows and mauve-rinsed and bouffant hair, a tribute to his late friend Quentin Crisp, popped through the hatch to observe me.
‘All right, sweet pea? Feeling better? The deck’s all swabbed and Master Heaveringham and I are well on the way with a mushroom risotto. Need a top-up?’
I shook my head and a tear of sheer relief rolled down my cheek.
Percy cooked the dinner, laid the table, including a small centrepiece of garden foliage, cleared up, put the sheets on to wash again, put Tom to bed, read him a story and then sat me down at the dining table with a bottle of single malt and a carton of Sobranie cocktail cigarettes, straight from his duty free carrier bag.
‘Smoke, darling,’ he said, waving a bright turquoise ciggie under my nose. ‘Sinning will make you feel better. Then tell me everything about that naughty poofter nephew of mine.’ He screwed a lilac cigarette into an ivory holder and clamped it between his teeth. ‘I hear he’s shacked up with a hairdresser.’
‘How on earth did you know, Percy?’
‘Gaydar, darling,’ he said, patting my hand and topping up my glass. ‘Drink up.’
He lit his cigarette and blew a plume of smoke through his nostrils that swirled around his purple
head like an old film still of Marlene Dietrich.
‘I was coming over to Sydney anyway,’ he continued. ‘For Sleaze Ball, which is supposed to be wonderful, much better than that common Mardi Gras, which is full of parking attendants dressed as Adolf Hitler, which is not amusing or arousing, I may tell you, and it just sort of wafted over the ether that Hugo had decided to be a homosexualist. Nothing wrong with that, of course, lifelong member of the League of Dorothy myself, but a bit rough on you and little Tomety, I thought, so here I am. Plus we’ve had a perfectly frightful summer in the Med this year. Capri was like Aberystwyth, couldn’t see the point of it at all.’
A sudden ghastly thought roused me from the Valium calm Percy’s extraordinary presence had instilled in me.
‘His parents don’t know, do they?’ I asked suddenly.
‘Good GOD, no. That ghastly Margot would split her panty girdle, if she thought one of her precious little sons was a poof. Freddie wouldn’t give a damn, of course, we all took it up the jacksie at school, no big deal, but Margot would be horrrrrrified. It’s her deeply suburban soul, you see. Father made ball bearings or some such.’
Having known Percy Heaveringham – or Stephen Heaveringham-Taylor, as he was really called – for nearly ten years, his ridiculous appearance (he had been wearing a voluminous white voile poet shirt, fastened with some kind of gypsy sash over dark pink linen trousers, a short tweed cape and mustard-yellow embroidered Moroccan shoes when he had arrived), his over-the-top voice and outrageous statements no longer surprised me.
I had understood right from the start, when I first met Percy, that his entire persona was an overcompensation for his strange upbringing as Hugo’s father’s illegitimate half-brother.
Percy was brought up with Freddie, Hugo’s dad, as part of the family, but his adapted surname was a constant reminder that he wasn’t fully of it.
He was the result of a ‘forgetful’ moment Hugo’s grandfather, the fifteenth Earl, had had with an exotic dancer (‘Esmé la Rose’) during the Blitz. After she was killed in an air raid – wearing nothing but a feather fan and a professional smile, according to Percy – the Earl had felt he should do the right thing by the boy.
So at the age of two Percy was moved from a small flat in Maida Vale to a stately home in Lincolnshire and when the time came he had been sent off to Eton, where he was known as the Heaveringham Half Bastard.
Lesser characters might have been broken by such a childhood, but Percy was a survivor. His charismatic personality was his lifebelt and the more he exaggerated it, the more attention he got. It was hardly surprising he was a little odd.
From the moment we met, we recognized each other as fellow displaced persons. My father was a quite dotty and completely unworldly country vicar (deepest Somerset) who officiated at a very smart girls’ boarding school, as well as carrying out his general parish duties. In return for his services my sisters and I had been educated at the school for nothing and, as a result, I had also grown up not quite sure where I belonged.
We were the classic hand-me-down vicar’s daughters, yet the village girls would taunt us as ‘posh snobs’. At school, the other girls – who all seemed to be jet-set rich rather than the Heaveringham style of impoverished aristos – were perfectly nice to us, but as soon as the holidays came around they would disappear to St Tropez, Mustique, or wherever, and we’d be left mooching around the school grounds and helping Mum make sandwiches for pensioner coffee mornings.
Very early in my relationship with Hugo, I’d met Percy at a terrifying Heaveringham family gathering and he had immediately taken me on as a special project, making me feel much less frightened of them all by telling me his own history.
Never feeling quite accepted among his peers, but a raging success in college revues, he’d told me, Percy had left Oxford before graduating to pursue a career on the stage in provincial repertory, which was when he’d changed his name.
‘Didn’t mind Stephen so much,’ he’d explained to me. ‘But couldn’t bear ghastly “Steve”. So ordinary. I did try Stefan for a while in New York in the 70s, but gave it up. Too balletic.’
He’d taken the stage name of ‘Percy Circus’ after the elegant London crescent where he had once lived.
‘Thought it was frightfully amusing,’ he’d said. ‘Percy Circus Esq., 17 Percy Circus, London WCi. Don’t you think?’
The acting career didn’t last long (‘Couldn’t bear all those ghastly 60s plays about kitchen sinks – one minute I was coming delightfully through the French window with a tennis racket, the next I had to be a moody miner’s son in a bedsit, couldn’t be doing with it …’) but ‘Percy’ and the theatricality never left him – well, I suppose it was in his blood.
After that it was hard to say what Percy did, he just sort of floated around, staying with wealthy people who enjoyed his company. He kept some things in a forgotten boxroom at Willington, the Heaveringham seat, but he didn’t have a home of his own, he was a permanent guest somewhere, with a PO box in Belgravia.
‘I’m a life enhancer,’ I’d once heard him tell someone at a cocktail party, who’d made the mistake of asking him what he ‘did’, which he considered the most vulgar of questions. He was certainly enhancing my life. In the few hours he had been with us, I felt transformed from a half-mad single mother back into a member of the human race. And he made Tom so happy.
‘Can you stay a while, Percy?’ I asked him tentatively, when we were halfway down the whisky bottle and I had told him the entire story of Hugo’s announcement, gruesome Greg and the sudden mass refrigeration of the female half of Sydney’s social set towards me.
Sharing the full awfulness of it with such a dear old pal – but leaving out the details of the sexual assault, which made me feel somehow ashamed – I realized quite how unhappy I’d been. I was terrified he would disappear as suddenly as he had arrived.
‘I’ll stay as long as it takes, my darling child,’ he said, lighting a bright pink cigarette and blowing the smoke over my head. ‘As long as it takes.’
It took barely a week for life with Percy to settle into a glorious routine. He took over the household management completely and was so much better at it than me. Silver was polished, the air smelled of beeswax and spring flowers, there was food in the fridge and ice in the freezer. He even reorganized my linen cupboard, filing it all into sets, tied up with lilac ribbons and sprigs of lavender, and lining the shelves with stripy wallpaper.
Tom loved having him around and insisted on Uncle Perky taking him to school and collecting him as often as possible, which was a wonderful help for me. I think some six-year-olds would have baulked at being associated with a sixty-year-old man with purple hair, who frequently sported a kaftan as daywear, but Tom was tremendously proud of Percy and conveyed his enthusiasm to the other children, who all wanted to join in the fun.
Not that Percy wasn’t having fun of his own, in return for all his good works. After he’d taken Tom to school in the morning he would drop into the shop to chat and tell me what he’d got up to the night before.
‘There’s this marvellous place called Lady Jane beach,’ he told me one late spring day, when the sun was pouring through the shop window. ‘Everyone’s totally in the nuddy and if you like the look of a fellow, you just tip the wink and off you go. Simple as that. It’s even better after dark. Had a daisy chain down there last night. Marvellously well built these Aussie chaps. Large, you know.’
‘No, I don’t know, Percy, and I’m not sure I want to,’ I said primly, although the memory of David Maier’s dishonourable member for Double Bay was all too fresh. I shuddered and sought distraction.
‘What’s a daisy chain, Percy?’ I asked in innocent curiosity.
‘Oh, it’s such fun,’ he said, taking a large bite of the bacon sandwich he had just rustled up in the shop kitchen and pushing the plate towards me. ‘Remember the daisy chains you made as a child? It’s just like that. Lots of beautiful flowers, happily joined together.’
The meaning suddenly dawned on me. All too clearly.
‘Sort of a fairy ring, really,’ continued Percy, licking a large dollop of tomato ketchup off his chin with an unusually long tongue. Seeing my shocked expression he waggled it at me.
‘In a public place?’ I squeaked, every bit the parson’s daughter.
‘Where better?’ said Percy, clearly delighted at my reaction. ‘Except maybe a public loo …’
‘Oh God, your sex life is too weird, Percy. Don’t tell me any more.’
‘Thinking about your husband?’ he asked gently.
‘I suppose I am, Perce. It’s all a bit much to take in.’
I picked up a bacon sandwich and drenched it in mayo, before taking a big bite.
‘If it’s any comfort, I don’t imagine Hugo is patrolling the public lavvies of the Eastern Suburbs,’ said Percy, between bites. ‘I haven’t bumped into him there, anyway. No, I believe he’s very much a one-hole man. I’m sure he had never been unfaithful to you until ghastly Greg and his dancing pecs brought all that suppressed homoerotic desire out of him.’
I sighed.
‘I think you’re right,’ I said, still chewing. ‘And at least I know he wasn’t knobbing my girlfriends behind my back. Because I did sometimes wonder, when we would go so long without having sex, whether he was getting it somewhere else.’
‘How long is it now since he told you?’
I counted on my fingers. ‘Nine months.’
‘And you haven’t had so much as a flirtation in that time, Antonia?’
I grimaced.
‘I’ve been groped by other people’s husbands, but that was somehow my fault, and invitations have not exactly been pouring in recently. Anyway, I don’t feel like going out.’
‘That’s because you’re too fat,’ said Percy.
I nearly spat out my mouthful of sandwich. I couldn’t believe my ears.
‘You’ve packed on the pounds, Antonia. You must be over ten stone. You used to have such a pretty figure. I’ve never seen a more lovely bride. Such fine features. But you won’t feel like going out ever again unless you do something about those spare tyres. Positively Michelin.’
Mad About the Boy Page 7