He did a little puppet dance with his hands, then we looked at each other, as the significance of his words hit us simultaneously. I was doing a mental tally of the number of children who were staying that night and I was sure he was too.
Unless Chanel and Venezia were staying in separate rooms – which was very unlikely, seeing as staying up all night talking was the main point of having a friend to stay at their age – there were enough bedrooms in the kiddie corridor for at least one of us to have stayed there.
Yet Chloe had been very firm, when I’d called her that morning to say I would be getting down there early, that I was to make myself comfortable in the guest wing.
‘How’s that cocoa going then?’ said Alex suddenly, returning to his hearty City-boy persona and deftly changing the subject.
I was glad he had. I was suddenly feeling very uncomfortable with the situation and I could see exactly what Ham was up to. There were eight bedrooms in the guest wing but only two of them had been ready, with beds made up, when I’d arrived. He’d put Alex and me right next to each other – in adult rooms – completely deliberately, the old goat.
‘Yeah, I’m on to it,’ I said briskly, bustling with the saucepan and milk, very happy to have the subject changed, but then I couldn’t help myself.
‘Get the mugs out would you – Pinocchio?’ I said.
Alex looked at me and then we both cracked up. We laughed until we had tears running down our cheeks.
And with that tension cleared, and a mug of cocoa inside me, I didn’t have any problem going to sleep at all.
The next morning I was very glad Alex and I had formed a pact the night before, because when we went through to the main house for breakfast – it was always at nine sharp at Willow Barn on Saturdays, no excuses – it was like the hounds of hell had just been loosed.
At every place around the dining table was a sanitary towel, liberally decorated with what appeared to be tomato sauce. And suspended from two ceiling beams across the main living space was a banner made from several sheets of A3 paper, emblazoned in red felt tip with the words: ‘Tabitha’s got her period.’
Archie was sitting bolt upright on a sofa with a wool beanie pulled right down over his face. Toby was closely inspecting a sanitary towel and trying to get someone to tell him what it was. Daisy was wailing in Chloe’s arms – just picking up the tension. And Ham was holding Venezia and Chanel by the scruffs of their necks – well, by their T-shirts anyway – and shouting at them.
‘You foul creatures,’ he was saying. ‘You vicious little vixens. You are both going to pay for this.’
The only person missing was Tabitha.
Alex and I stood in the doorway and took it all in.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ I said to Chloe.
‘Oh, Stella,’ she said, with tears in her eyes. ‘Venezia really has gone too far this time. She found the sanitary towels in Tabitha’s bag – she’s only recently started the curse, poor lamb – and she did this.’
Alex had gone pale with fury.
‘That little bitch,’ he said, looking at Venezia, then he turned to Chloe. ‘Where’s my sister?’
‘She’s in our room,’ said Chloe, softly, touching his arm to restrain him. ‘But I think maybe Stella should go to her, Alex.’
He frowned for a moment and then nodded in understanding that this was women’s business.
‘But you could make yourself very useful taking Chanel to the station, if you wouldn’t mind, Alex,’ continued Chloe. ‘Ham has rung her mother and she’s going home on the next train.’
‘Good bloody riddance,’ I said. ‘I’m going up to Tabs.’
I could hear her before I could see her; the sobs of utter misery were audible at the bottom of the spiral staircase leading up to Ham’s turret and when I walked into the room, I could see a little hump shivering under the covers.
‘Go away!’ said Tabitha’s voice, before I could say anything.
‘It’s all right, Tabs,’ I said. ‘It’s only me, Stella.’
I sat on the bed and hugged her through the covers. She said nothing, but eventually her sobs lessened and her wretched little head emerged.
‘Oh, Tabs,’ I said. ‘Poor you. That was so horrible of them. I’m really sorry they did that to you.’
‘Now everyone will know I’ve got my period,’ she said, which brought on more wailing tears.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s awful. I still hate having them, but everyone will forget. Nobody really cares about it except you. Honestly.’
‘But I don’t like Daddy knowing,’ she said, and started to sob again.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I was furious with Rose – your mum – when I first got my period, because she told Dad. I took to my bed, just like you have. But he’s got lots of daughters, Tabs – and he’s had lots of wives – he’s used to it. It’s only natural, anyway.’
She looked a little bit comforted and then her face crumpled again.
‘Are Venezia and Chanel still down there?’ she said.
‘Chanel is going home straightaway,’ I said. ‘And Venezia is in serious trouble for this, Tabitha. I don’t think she’ll be coming down here again for a while. I’ve never seen Ham so cross.’
She looked comforted.
‘Can I stay in bed?’ she said.
‘Of course you can,’ I said. ‘And do you know what would be really nice? You could have a lovely bath in Chloe’s bathroom and then get back into bed. That will make you feel better.’
‘Stella,’ she said, wiping her nose on the sheet and looking desperate again. ‘She’s taken all my sanitary towels. I haven’t got any more. What am I going to do?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you some more. In fact, I’ll get you all the different types there are and you can see which you like best.’
She smiled faintly.
‘What do you use, Stella?’ she asked shyly.
‘I’ll bring what I use to show you and we can talk about it all.’
I could still remember how much it had meant to me having Claudia – Alex’s sister, who was four years older than me – to talk to about all that, when I was Tabitha’s age. Having loads of stepbrothers and sisters of various ages did have its benefits.
I put the telly on to a comfortingly babyish programme, gave her a hug and then ran down to catch Alex before they left for the station.
Sanity seemed to have resumed downstairs. The sanitary towels and banner were gone. Venezia was nowhere to be seen and Archie, Toby and Daisy were sitting having breakfast with Ham. Chloe was darting between the kitchen and the table, as usual.
Alex was just walking out of the front door, herding Chanel in front of him.
‘Alex,’ I called. ‘Wait, I’m coming with you.’
I ran to catch up with them and took a certain pleasure in directing Chanel to sit in the back seat, after she arrogantly opened the front door of the car. She started to protest.
‘Get in the back seat and shut up,’ said Alex. She did.
‘How’s Tabs?’ he asked me.
‘As you would imagine,’ I answered. Very upset.’
He shook his head. ‘Unbelievable.’
‘It is, but she’ll be all right,’ I said and patted him gently on his knee.
He glanced over at me and smiled faintly.
‘Where’s Venezia?’ I asked him.
His smile broadened.
‘Ham has locked her in her bedroom. He says he needs some time to consider her punishment.’ He started laughing. ‘But he’s already smashed her mobile phone to pieces in front of her – with a hammer.’
We put Chanel on the train to London without saying another word to her and Alex went to buy the papers, while I went to Boots and bought every kind of sanitary protection they had – including some enormous maternity pads, which I hoped would make Tabitha laugh.
I was just paying for it all when my phone rang. It was Ham.
‘Are you still in Lewes?’ he said.
/> ‘Yes, why?’
‘Excellent. You can help me construct Venezia’s punishment. I would like you to go and buy the most unfashionable and unflattering outfit you can find for a fourteen-year-old girl with a very good figure. Preferably from a charity shop and a bit smelly. Can you do that?’
‘I most certainly can,’ I said.
Alex laughed out loud when I told him what Ham had asked me to do and we had a hilarious time picking over all the charity shops on Cliffe High Street to find the most hideous things we could.
It felt so natural to be with him, fooling around, trying on old hats and arguing the case for the particularly foul garments we each found. Although we hadn’t seen each other for ages, we seemed to slip into a totally relaxed state of casual companionship, the way you do with old friends. I also realized what a deep reserve of shared history we had, of old family jokes and memories.
‘Hey, look,’ he said at one point. ‘Here’s a dress with one of those awful one-shoulder set-ups. Remember Claudia had one like that for my twenty-first? She looked so hideous.’
‘And this looks rather like what you wore…’ I said, holding up a particularly vile red polyester bow tie and cummerbund set.
We had a really good laugh and once we felt we had sourced Venezia’s nightmare outfit, Alex suggested we went down to Bill’s for a coffee break.
The Saturday morning rush was in full flow and while we waited for a table to become free, we checked out the fruit and vegetable display, selecting some exotic Italian salad greens to take back to Chloe.
After we’d paid for them, I nipped off to the loo, and when I came back after a long wait in a queue, I couldn’t immediately spot Alex in the throng. The girl who had served us at the veggie counter saw me looking lost and smiled at me.
‘Your husband’s sitting at a table outside,’ she said, smiling kindly, and turned back to her customer.
For a moment I just stood there stunned, as it dawned on me that was exactly how we must look together. Similar ages, clearly from the same kind of social tribe, and so comfortable and relaxed in each other’s company, of course anyone would assume we were a happy couple.
I made my way to the outside tables and found Alex sitting with two coffees already in front of him, clearly looking out for me.
His handsome face broke into such a warm smile when he saw me, I felt like some kind of impostor. I wanted to go back and tell the girl on the till that we weren’t married, he was just my stepbrother. My ex-stepbrother actually, who I didn’t really know and hardly ever saw any more. And who I found a bit dull, quite frankly.
I felt painfully self-conscious, as I squeezed into my seat, to be sitting there with him, surrounded by our bags of shopping, the Saturday papers on the spare chair next to us.
We were such a living cliché, in our smart-casual clothes and our designer sunglasses, we could have been in an advert for a building society.
The next frame would have shown us smilingly opening the door of our dream home, then cutting to five years hence where we’d be settled in with a toddler in tow and a babe in arms.
But even through my discomfort, I couldn’t help thinking how I was momentarily living exactly the future the thirteen-year-old me had planned. If I had been shown back then a glimpse of my future self, sitting there with Alex like that, I would have been sure all my dreams had come true. How misleading visual impressions can be, I thought.
Alex was clearly blissfully unaware of it, though.
‘I ordered you a cappuccino,’ he said, smiling his most winning creasy-eyed smile, and pushing it closer to me. ‘I hope that’s OK. Would you like the Journal mag to look at?’
I nodded distractedly, even though I hated cappuccino. I was stricrly an espresso girl. Or tea. And no, I didn’t want the magazine, I wanted the news pages– the foreign news pages, with the really gory stories and the long words and the difficult concepts and the unpronounceable names.
But I wasn’t going to make a thing of it. I just wanted us to drink our coffee and leave, before he also realized how embarrassing it was for us to be sitting there playing Mr and Mrs Young Professional Couple, when we were really just fucked-up human fallout from a particularly dysfunctional family.
That family was looking even more bonkers than normal when we eventually got back to Willow Barn. Ham had a big bonfire going in the orchard and Venezia was screaming out of her bedroom window, as he tossed her clothes, shoes, accessories and make-up on to it.
‘You can’t do that,’ Venezia was screaming. ‘My mother bought me those clothes. I’m going to call the police.’
‘What on, darling?’ Ham shouted back, clearly enjoying himself enormously. ‘I don’t think your mobile’s working very well just at the moment. Shall I send them a smoke signal for you?’
‘You bastard! I’m going to make Mum SUE YOU!’ Venezia was screaming. And as Ham waved her favourite Diesel jeans in the air, before tossing them on to the pyre, she burst into hysterical tears and slammed the window.
‘I don’t think she’ll forget this in a hurry, do you?’ he said to me and Alex. ‘Did you get the outfit? Let’s see.’
I pulled it out of the carrier bags. There was a really nasty pair of black platform-soled school shoes; some white towelling sports socks; a foul pair of red polyester elastic-waist trousers; a jade and purple anorak; and the pièce de résistance – which Alex had found in a record shop – a McFly T-shirt. Size: XXX Large.
Ham clapped his hands with delight.
‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘Until her cow of a mother collects her from my house tomorrow night, this will be all she wears.’
Leaving Ham and Alex to stoke the flames, I went up to see Tabitha and we had great fun with all the ‘sanpro’, which I explained to her was the generic name for all those kinds of products. She found that very amusing, declaring that she was going to call Venezia ‘sanpro’ from now on, and the huge maternity pads induced a very healthy state of hilarity in her, just as I had hoped they would.
Chloe and Daisy came up to join in.
‘Don’t laugh,’ said Chloe, squealing when she saw the maternity pads. ‘I had to wear those after Daisy was born. It was like having a futon down my pants.’
But while we fell about laughing, Daisy thought they were lovely and was very happy putting her dolly to bed on one of them.
After that bit of girly bonding, Tabitha felt ready to come downstairs for lunch and a relative sense of normality returned to the weekend.
When we’d finished eating the chicken à la king, with a rice salad featuring garish cubes of red and yellow peppers – Chloe was still testing recipes for her book – Ham disappeared off somewhere, so I told Chloe that I would look after Daisy while she had a well-earned rest.
Daisy was delighted.
‘Ooh, Stella,’ she said, swinging on my hands. ‘Can we make biscuits? Can we make little cakes? Can I put the pretty bits on? Can I do licking?’
So we did. Even though Chloe was always baking with Daisy, she never tired of it, and although I was no cook, Daisy had an excellent children’s cookery book with recipes even I could master.
As soon as they heard us getting the mixer and the cake tins out, the others all came to join in. Even Archie liked baking and when Alex heard the commotion in the kitchen, he put down the paper – he was reading the motoring pages, I noticed – and came over.
Soon we had the radio blaring and we were singing and dancing around like idiots, while weighing the ingredients, sieving flour and greasing tins. It was the best fun – and we knew we could make as much noise as we wanted and we wouldn’t disturb Chloe, up in her turret bedroom.
We were just getting the first batch of fairy cakes out of the oven when a very droopy figure appeared – wearing a foul anorak. It was Venezia, looking properly shamefaced. We all stopped what we were doing and stared at her. She was holding a piece of white paper.
‘I’m sorry, Tabitha,’ she said, in the smallest voice I had ever heard out of
that arrogant mouth. ‘Will you please accept my apology? I was really out of line and I’m sorry. I was jealous about your modelling, that’s why I did it. I’m sorry.’
It was a pretty good apology, I thought, and doing it in front of all of us earned extra points too. She handed over the piece of paper. Tabitha took it, read it and nodded.
‘OΚ,’ she said. ‘But do you really promise you won’t be horrid to me any more?’
‘I promise,’ said Venezia and finally raised her eyes to take in what we were doing. ‘Can I decorate some cakes?’ she said immediately, and I had to smile. Underneath it all, the bitch-queen teen was still a little girl.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course you can, but only if you take that anorak off.’
She did and the full horror of the McFly T-shirt was revealed. Everyone roared with laughter and the drama was over.
A little later, while Venezia was helping me wash up – she really was on her best behaviour – I asked her how she had got out of her room.
‘Dad let me out,’ she said. ‘He said I could come out as long as I apologized to Tabitha – and I’ve got to wear these horrendous clothes for the rest of the weekend. But it’s better than being stuck in there, I suppose, and at least they were only my second-favourite pair of Diesel jeans.’
I had to admire her spirit.
By dinner time, everything was very much back to normal, including Venezia’s appearance. She had customized the McFly T-shirt, by cutting off the bottom three quarters to reveal her abdomen, as per normal. Then she’d hacked off the sleeves and cut the faces out from the band photo, to create a peekaboo effect just above her breasts.
With the polyester pants chopped off into crop pants and rolled right down to her hips, she had managed to make it look just as provocative as her usual outfits and almost stylish.
She’d even jazzed up the terrible shoes, cutting out the toes to reveal fluorescent pink, yellow and green painted toenails and decorating the remaining uppers with sparkly little gems from the craft cupboard in the kiddie corridor.
Cents and Sensibility Page 8