Hens Dancing

by Raffaella Barker

  ‘Cool,’ says Felix, ‘I bet the donkey’s gone white and wrinkly from the chlorine now. Let’s go and see her, but let’s dive first and see if she left anything in the pool.’ He makes a mad face, with googly eyes and tongue out, which enchants The Beauty, and cartwheels back into the water.

  Giles races off with my camera to find the donkey, shouting back to Felix, ‘Its coat may have shrunk by being washed. Maybe it could go in the Guinness Book of Records. Come and see.’

  Sir Nicholas, who has been on gin and tonic while we were all sipping bitter lemon, is now beaming and small bubbles of perspiration are forming on his nose and upper lip. He graciously asks us to lunch in the house. I decline, but am forced, basic civility demanding, to offer him a share in our nasturtium sandwiches, knowing that the boys will be furious if he accepts and will quarrel over who gives up their Twiglets to him. He accepts, and making a few remarks about leaving a lady to sunbathe in privacy, takes himself off into the house, promising to return at twelve-thirty.

  I settle down on a rug in the shade with The Beauty and A la recherche du temps perdu, which I always seem to have in the bottom of my bag, but never take out unless there is absolutely nothing else to read, not even a crisp packet. The Beauty coos and pats my shoulders and I begin to feel as languorous as Marcel himself, when my ear is invaded by a cold wet snout. It is Jack, Sir Nicholas’s Labrador, and with him Leo, Sir Nicholas’s eighteen-year-old son. Leo, blond, brawny and very California-beach-bum, lollops towards the pool, hurdling the box hedging. The enchanting, blonde cause of this athleticism follows wearing the merest hint of a bikini. Felix and Giles return from their donkey-watch in time to see Leo execute an elaborate dive. We wait for him to surface, expressions of impressed awe at the ready, but disaster has struck. Leo rises from the pool with blood cascading down his face, his hand pressed against a wound in his forehead. He staggers out and collapses on the edge of the pool. The blonde rushes to his side, ministers for a second, then shudders and recoils, throwing something small and bloody onto the ground.

  ‘Urgh! Gross. A bit of your head’s come off,’ she says.

  Giles and Felix rush forward. ‘Let’s see, where is it? What bit?’

  Leo groans. ‘Quick, pick it up, pick it up.’ But as if in a nightmare Jack the Labrador snuffles towards the small red dollop the blonde has chucked. Leo roars, ‘That’s mine,’ and lurches, but too late – Jack’s pink tongue scoops up the itinerant piece of flesh and it is gone. Slobbering goodwill, the Labrador moves over to Leo and affectionately licks his bloodstained face. Leo and the blonde sob unrestrainedly in one another’s arms. Giles photographs the wet concrete where the bit of Leo’s head had lain.

  July 19th

  At last, Giles and Felix have stopped kicking furniture and moaning ‘I’m bored’ every three minutes, and are building a tree house. The handbag crew are coming tomorrow to set up, and David will be here later today to prepare the ground for them, I am not sure why or how. Have not seen David since bacchantine feast and am apprehensive. How much can he remember? I have toe-curling memories of a nearly naked ping-pong tournament, a show-off session dancing on the dinner table and subsequent falling off, and, finally, singing ‘Jolene’ in a much too earnest voice. Oh, God.

  David is early. The sight of him, carrying a ladder out of the barn with Felix, gives me a nasty fright as I trip across the yard in my dressing gown and duck-beak-yellow wellies. These are a vast improvement on the red ankle-length ones, and were sent by Rose with a gloomy note saying, ‘The nearest we’ll get to sunshine.’

  Consider it best to ignore Felix and David until they speak, so set to work feeding the hens and staring at the sky. Hard to believe that sludge-grey clouds ever existed, and especially last week, as we are now immersed in sunshine and even the evenings are silk-warm and glowing with rose-stained sunsets. A puff of feathers and hot air greets me when I open the hen-house door in pursuit of eggs. No eggs, just a broody hen, clamped like a tea cosy over her clutch. I stretch my hand cautiously under her and count seven eggs. David, the ladder and Felix approach, David unnecessarily jaunty for this hour.

  ‘Hi, Venetia, I love your boots. Can you come and give us a hand with this ladder?’ He is not going to mention the party, his expression is preoccupied and distant. What a relief that men are so peculiar. We march in convoy with the ladder down to the wood, where Giles is perched high in an oak tree in his pyjamas. Peering down through rippling shade, he is green-skinned and ethereal in the underwater light. The wood is cool and dark, dew in exquisite droplets sparkles from the heart of curled leaves and the ends of grasses. David busies himself laying waste to a nettle wall with a scythe and I peer about me taking deep breaths of perfect air. Anxious to commune properly with nature, I raise my face and shut my eyes, still seeing bruise-blue shade in my mind’s eye. Reverie hideously interrupted by a shaken-branch shower and the splat of dewdrops down my back and front. Giles sniggers.

  ‘You look such an old hippy when you do that, Mum.’

  Felix is frowning in deepest disapproval of me, and his eyes are swamped with sudden tears.

  ‘Why can’t we be a proper family? With Daddy here and you being normal, getting dressed before you come outside and stuff?’

  If he had taken up the scythe and chopped off my legs I could hardly have been more shocked or upset. Open and close my mouth a few times while battling with inner self. ‘Poor Felix,’ says Inner Self. ‘That little swine,’ says Outer Self. Mercifully, Inner Self takes over. Hug him, stroking his wild doormat hair. He begins to recover, wipes his nose on the back on his hand and in cajoling tones makes the most of an opportunity.

  ‘Well, if you can’t be normal, or married, Mummy, could you get us a PlayStation?’

  ‘Come on, Felix, we need you up here.’

  Before we can begin negotiations, David has picked him up and thrust him into the tree.

  While he fumbles for a foothold, I scuttle back to the house and the solace of The Grand Sophy (nineteenth time of reading, I note from the tally I have marked up inside the back cover), and some cooing time with The Beauty.

  July 20th

  The silliness of the handbag crew knows no bounds. Most absurd is the photographer’s assistant, a boy called Coll with a black quiff and orange velveteen Bermuda shorts. I overhear him asking Giles and Felix about the hens.

  ‘Hi, guys, will you show me your mum’s hens?’ he says, crouching in front of them in a down-to-your-level manner which backfires as it makes his eyes level with their tummy buttons. ‘I hear they wear trousers.’

  There is an expectant pause. Felix grudgingly fills it.

  ‘They wear flares, actually.’

  Coll the Doll is not beaten yet.

  ‘That’s really great, guys, isn’t it? Does your mum knit the trousers, or is there a shop around here where she buys them?’

  The silence following this priceless comment is golden and laden with incredulity. I peer round the corner of the house, where I have been loitering to listen, in time to see Giles and Felix burst into peals of laughter. Felix’s face is beetroot with mirth, and Coll is rooted where he squats, twiddling a pair of sunglasses which look like the plastic goggles that go with the strimmer, but apparently cost as much as a small pony. The children are merciless, sniggering and repeating, ‘Does your mum knit the trousers?’ over and over. Coll has assumed an expression of puzzled daftness, and I am considering rescuing him when the back door opens and Michelle the tiny stylist pops her head out.

  ‘Coll, can you come please?’ The hens, who live with an ear to the ground waiting for doors to open and food to be hurled into the yard, scuttle round from the garden, arriving at Coll’s feet and fixing him with their beady yellow eyes. Coll stares in awe at their apricot bloomers. ‘Wow, they are so cosmic,’ he whispers, and is dragged into the house by Michelle.

  I tag along, in search of The Beauty, who has been following photographic proceedings with interest. I find her ensconced in the bathroom surround
ed by a sea of turquoise tulle, being a handbag prop. She has been given her own small reticule, apparently fashioned from a toy teddy bear, complete with pink sequin lips, matching ostrich-feather tutu and tiara. She is thrilled, loves the camera and bats her eyelashes and claps whenever it is pointed at her. The boys and I leave her at the centre of a ring of people all vying for her smile, and head off to pick strawberries. It is jam-making season, and having positively decided not to do any of this apron-string stuff now I am a single mother, was faintly appalled to find Felix in the larder this morning, matching jars to lids.

  ‘What are you doing that for?’

  ‘There isn’t any jam left, so we’ll have to make some today.’

  I try to get him to see sense. ‘But we’re about to go away to Cornwall, to have our summer holiday; we don’t need to bother with jam-making.’

  Felix gazes at the larder wall.

  ‘We should bother. We need jam,’ he says firmly. Increasingly, Felix is taking over the running of the household. Am not quite sure who his role model is, but am determined that he shall be mine.

  The strawberry field is empty of pickers but full of flamboyant scarecrows. The farmer is a big fan of B-movies, and every strawberry season he adorns his field with mannequins in nylon bikinis and skimpy dresses from charity shops. Giles runs ahead, but stops short at the entrance.

  ‘Look, Mum,’ he yells, ‘they’ve hung one.’ The gate is guarded by a mannequin dangling on a rope from a vast oak tree, this one clad more in the style of a Brueghel peasant than Raquel Welch.

  ‘I like the wedding one, she must have kept the birds away. I’m going to pick near her.’ Giles grabs a punnet and makes his way towards the centre of the field where a fabulous blonde is positioned, with a vast confection of transparent polythene on her head and trailing down her back. Despite her green bikini, there is no question that she is a bride, and I make a mental note to tell the handbag gang to come down and photograph their wedding collection here instead of in my bathroom. Ten pounds of strawberries later we are home, and to my relief the recipe book says, ‘Leave to steep in sugar for twenty-four hours.’

  Miles the photographer is on a ladder outside the bathroom window, looking in at The Beauty in the bath with a handful of chicks he has scooped out of their run. There is no handbag visible in this shot, and when I mention this oversight, Miles rolls his eyes and says kindly, ‘The product has a voice, you know, it kind of speaks through this sort of set-up.’

  What a nonce, as Giles would say.

  July 22nd

  Jam-making commences at dawn. Utterly forgot the steeping strawberries yesterday, so have committed cardinal sin of leaving them lying around for two days. Kitchen quickly begins to resemble Willie Wonka’s factory, with bubbling pink mess on the Aga and ruby droplets on small saucers and indeed the floor. Felix is not helping. He is lying in bed reading the Beano and is no longer my role model. Am scraping old labels off jars with my fingernails and listening to a practical pig-keeping report on Farming Today, when there is an ominous gushing sound followed by billowing black smoke. The Aga hotplate vanishes beneath a black mass, like sticky volcano lava, as more and more syrupy jam froths out of the pan.

  ‘Bastard, bloody, sodding jam. God, I hate the Aga. Why is this happening? What do I do?’ Wailing and weeping self-pitying tears, I wage war on my strawberry jam.

  July 23rd

  Ten jars, and it has set, and is delicious. Aga still thick with incinerated jam. David arrives for house-sitting instructions and is clearly impressed. Felix is not: ‘Last year’s was better,’ he insists at teatime. No time to argue though, I must pack for the longed-for holiday.

  July 25th

  Have arrived in Cornwall after gruelling two-day journey in the car, including sleepless night at Welcome Break hotel on the M4. My mother, who refuses to sit in the front, has kept her eyes shut almost all the way and has been no help at all, so Giles has assumed role of navigator. Hurtle down the final winding roads, shoving the car into the bank as vast Jeeps and Mercedes cruise towards us full of families returning sandy and sun-kissed from the beach. Every village and indeed every house is called Tre-something, which confounds Giles, and we sweep up a rough track and arrive at Trefogey, a low white cottage in which a family of total strangers are having tea.

  ‘No, Mummy, ours is called Trepanning, and the village is Tredition,’ hisses Giles, ducking his face low as the family, all wearing pink polo shirts, converge by our car and stare at us with mild contempt.

  ‘Sorry, you’re the wrong people,’ I shout out of my window, in what I hope is a hearty and jolly fashion, and we spin back down the track, a cloud of dust billowing in our wake.

  Tredition is enchanting. A clutch of cottages clings to three criss-crossing lanes which plunge down to the cliffs between meadows and tiny golden cornfields. Where the lanes meet there is a village green with a mini shop on the corner, and a squat church whose delicate spire pierces the sky. Trepanning is at the end of a terrace with roses straggling up the walls and evening primrose nodding yellow beneath blue window frames. Lila has already arrived, and is standing on a chair in the garden fiddling with her mobile telephone.

  ‘It doesn’t work here, and Angelo was meant to ring to tell me his train times.’ Heart sinks: Angelo is Lila’s seventeen-year-old nephew by marriage, spoilt and disagreeable no doubt, like her children. My mother manages to extract The Beauty from her car seat where she has been embedded in biscuit crumbs, segments of orange and smeared raisins. We stand around for a few minutes while Lila teeters on the chair, waving her telephone above her head.

  Felix and Giles rush round from the other side of the house.

  ‘Can we go surfing after tea? Is the tide right? Can we buy some T-shirts at the beach and an ice cream afterwards?’

  The tide is right, and I am amazed that they can remember the routine, as our last Cornish holiday was three years ago, with Charles at his most sergeant major-ish due to having invited his business partner, Henry Loden, and family to come with us.

  My mother is worn to a shred by back-seat driving and elects to Beauty-sit. Leaving her in charge of a bumper bottle of gin and a few miniature tonics, we all squeeze into Lila’s red convertible VW Beetle and roar up the road to Treboden and the beach.

  Lose my head utterly in the surfing shop and find that I have purchased wetsuits for both the boys and am unable to resist a miniature one for The Beauty. ‘It’s all right, they’re second-hand,’ I whisper over and over to myself. Usual nasty moment behind the curtain in the hire hut, when I am convinced that I no longer fit into the size M wetsuit. Struggle to pull wet, sandy neoprene over thighs, while out of the corner of eye observe Lila sliding into a red short-legged version, which is dry and therefore much easier to get on. Final test is to thrust arms in and heave ever-tightening suit over shoulders. This is like peeling a banana in reverse. It is on, and, as always, have sudden conviction that I am a Baywatch star and have perfect figure and posture.

  Felix and Giles are hopping excitedly on the steps to the beach, and I follow them down. We break into a perfect beach-bum canter as we hit the sand, dodging between every size and shape of wet-suited surfer to head for the surf. Can never get over how well neoprene suits everyone. Portly gentlemen in their sixties, liquorice-stick-limbed children and pear-shaped mummies are all glorious, fit and healthy: perfect cereal-packet people. In the sea, seal-like bodies are everywhere, rising gleaming wet and black on waves and tumbling from bright boards into the spray.

  Immediately lose sight of children who hurl themselves onto waves and come riding in effortlessly every time, black shiny exclamation marks, perfectly upright on their boards. Flat on my own boogie board, in the beginners’ area, I dither, hoping to catch the elusive big wave, but unsure how to. My face is full of sea; inhale it, trying not to think about number of people who have entered the water and found that they needed a pee. Perfect crested sea horse approaches; leap onto it and forget sanitation worries in a flash.


  July 27th

  The cottage has become little more than dormitory and wardrobe. Cushions pieced together like a jigsaw form Felix’s bed in the sitting room, and Giles occupies the sofa. Diptych has been relegated to a small cot mattress and a few pillows under the window. Upstairs, Angelo sleeps in the top bunk of a room no bigger than a paper hanky, and Calypso and seven Barbies are in the bottom one. My mother and Lila have a twin-bed room, and The Beauty and I have the dubious pleasure of sleeping in a double bed together. Every inch of space not occupied by bedding is covered with clothes, and these garments are all sprinkled with sand and are mainly damp. There is nowhere to dry anything, as it has rained almost ceaselessly. The wetsuits have not been dry since we obtained them, and the path from the cars to the back door is strewn with every size of suit, thrown on the ground and left like deflated rubber dolls in a heap next to ice-lolly pink, blue and green slabs of surfboard.

  Angelo has increased our street cred in Tredition no end, and a stream of long-limbed youths and exquisite girls with silver trainers and braids in their hair make their way to Trepanning each day to sit in the garden and smoke with him. His arrival, twenty-four hours later than expected, was greeted with shrill relief from Lila. ‘Oh, Angelo, thank God you’re here, I was dreading telephoning your mother to find you.’ Angelo, king of cool in big-pocketed flapping trousers, shades and a camouflage Michelin-man jacket, was aghast.

  ‘Never telephone my mother, she is the last person to know where I am. I have been down at the campsite with some friends.’

  It transpires that Angelo has spent several holidays in this part of Cornwall, can surf standing up and has a large retinue of followers. He is indeed the King of Cool, and Giles and Felix are delighted to have him in the house. He treats me and Lila with the usual amused contempt that teenagers save for adults, but is so respectful to my mother that I begin to think he has confused her with a Mafia leader or a member of the royal family. My mother loves him. They even share nail polish. Angelo is very taken by my mother’s poison-green, and in exchange offers her Party Time dark purple for her toes. My mother is blessed with an invitation to the Ploughman pub for local groovers. Am jealous and at the same time relieved not to be asked; too demoralising to be crushed by throng of lithe and lovely young, when all my clothes are crumpled and have something wrong with them, nose has somehow become sunburnt despite weather, and one shoe is missing after today’s surfing.