Some confusion, surely. Had we swapped persona? Was there some sort of role reversal going on? A transubstantiation I hadn’t noticed, which, courtesy of her imbibing the same air as me, rubbing along on the same soil, basking in the same sunshine, had caused metamorphism to occur? Could properties seep so insidiously to blur personalities thus? Art. How could I argue with that? With what had been my answer to everything since I was fifteen years old? It’s art! You don’t understand! My room, my clothes, my boyfriends, my way of life, my whole raison d’être. I’d have yelled it, no doubt, at full volume, through my purple-painted bedroom door, before throwing myself prostrate on my tie-dyed bedspread, surrounded by Andy Warhol posters.
Sebastian still towered above me, holding the door with outstretched arm, as if daring me to duck right under it.
‘But you must admit,’ I spluttered, half to him now, ‘it’s pretty bloody surprising!’ My voice sounded weedy, though: pathetic with righteous indignation.
‘Well, now that the surprise has sunk in, perhaps you could bugger off and leave us to it?’ Sebastian said acidly. ‘Sylvia and I have work to do.’ He made to slam the door, but I stayed it quickly with my hand.
‘I thought you were going to Highgrove!’ I squeaked. ‘With Ottoline!’
‘Oh, gardens can wait,’ she said airily, waving her hand. ‘Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Sebastian’s work is far more important.’ And with that she dropped the shirt – Jesus Christ! – and rearranged herself coquettishly into position.
As I clapped my hand firmly over my eyes, the door slammed equally firmly on my face. When I opened those eyes, it was to stare at dark, woodwormed panels. I stayed still, in shock, for a moment, one foot still wearing a terracotta pot. After a moment, though, I wrenched myself free. But not without injury. I jabbed my ankle on a sharp piece of clay in the process and limped quickly inside, bleeding. Sensing drama, Maud, Doug and Buster clustered excitedly as I ran for the phone, hands fluttering, and punched out Ginnie’s number. She was obviously in her kitchen too, because she answered immediately.
‘Oh my God Ginnie you will never believe what I have just seen!’ I gabbled breathlessly, clutching the mouthpiece with both hands and glancing about furtively as if I might be overheard.
‘What?’ she demanded.
‘Mum, OK, is sitting for Sebastian.’
There was a long pause. ‘You don’t mean … sitting?’ she hissed at length.
‘Yes, I bloody do!’ I shrieked. ‘Naked!’
Another silence. ‘Good God,’ she said faintly. I sensed her swoon.
‘I know!’
‘I … can’t believe it. Mummy.’
‘I know! Neither can I!’
Another silence ensued as the scene I’d just witnessed filtered through to my sister’s brain, the full horror pictorial and penetrating.
‘I’ll come,’ she said swiftly, coming to. ‘I thought she’d gone off the rails a bit recently – wacky clothes, smoking –’
‘Smoking!’
‘Yes! I popped round the other day and she was puffing away at one of those mini cigars of Ottoline’s. Cheroots or whatever, dressed in something long and floaty and ridiculous. She looked like something out of the Bloomsbury Group, like Vita Sackville-West. But this … this is something else. It’s – well …’ She lowered her voice. ‘It’s obscene. Isn’t it, Ella?’
It wasn’t often she deferred to me.
‘Well …’ I dithered.
‘Of course it’s obscene!’ She pounced on my uncertainty. ‘Richard would certainly think it was.’ Richard. Always Ginnie’s arbiter. Her touchstone. ‘He’s her son-in-law, for God’s sake. It’s downright creepy!’
‘I know,’ I said doubtfully, thinking I’d said the very same two minutes ago. Yet from Ginnie’s mouth it sounded … prim. Reactionary. Yes, Sebastian was related by marriage, but Ottoline was his aunt. He her nephew. I’d never questioned that, had I? But Ottoline was different: she was bohemian, she was a free spirit; my mother certainly wasn’t. It couldn’t therefore be the same thing. Sylvia Jardine wiped assiduously under her pepper grinder, washed tea towels separately in a sterile solution, insisted on napkin rings. Ottoline had never done anything like that. She just didn’t think like that. But … perhaps my mother didn’t think like that either, any more? All of a sudden I regretted impetuously ringing Ginnie. It had been a knee-jerk reaction, one which would have my sister reaching for her car keys in moments, tearing round here to tell Mum her duties lay in National Trust membership, walking holidays.
‘Ginnie – actually – I’ll handle it,’ I said, even though I knew it was useless.
‘I’m coming!’ she barked. And the phone went dead. So that was that.
I hovered nervously at the kitchen window, tending to my bleeding ankle with kitchen towel – no plasters, of course, and I couldn’t raid the holiday lets and risk running into Mrs Braithwaite and the equally bleeding Jason – so I stuck a piece of paper on with Sellotape to staunch the flow. My eyes were on the yard, however, ears pricked for a vehicle. I did risk making a cup of coffee, but without taking my eyes off the window, running – limping – to put the kettle on. The moment I heard an expensive purr, I was outside.
‘Actually, Ginnie,’ I breathed, as she got out of her Range Rover, her eyes already far beyond me and fixed firmly on the Granary door, ‘I’ve decided it’s fine.’
I hadn’t, really, if I’m honest. Still couldn’t quite get my head round the disturbing scene, but had decided, in some weird way, that us stopping her was much worse. Public opinion would be very much on the arty side – I was very cowed by public opinion – and however nauseous Ginnie and I found it, we’d be branded spoilsports. Mostly, though, I feared Sebastian’s scorn, as I’d always feared it. I wanted to show I could rise above this wide, bourgeois streak in my family, which I think he’d always suspected had percolated down to me.
‘Oh, you have, have you? Well, I’ve decided it’s very far from fine!’ Ginnie declared, slamming her car door and striding – nay, marching – to the studio. I practically had to rugby-tackle her.
‘No, Ginnie!’
‘Get off, Ella!’ she cried as I gripped her round the waist, my head in her huge chest. Was this how prop forwards did it? Lower, perhaps: her hips. I had to stop her. A short and unseemly struggle ensued.
‘Oh my God – yuk – you’re bleeding all over me!’
I was. My makeshift bandage had come off and my leg, as I tried to wrap it round hers and trip her, was gushing on her jeans, although, to be fair, her jeans were pretty agricultural already. This was a woman who wrestled sheep.
‘Just come inside a moment!’ I pleaded in a harsh whisper – we were perilously close to the Granary door. ‘At least let’s talk about it.’
She went limp in acquiescence, allowing herself to be led; succumbing to my strength of feeling, if not my muscle. Once she was safely inside my kitchen I shut the back door firmly, wishing I knew where the key was to lock it.
‘This is all I bloody need, frankly,’ Ginnie was saying as she swept a hand through precipitously erect hair and strode to my Aga to bang my kettle on the hob. Ginnie always took over in my house and I always let her. ‘I’ve got Araminta wanting to change schools at the eleventh hour, Richard up to his eyes in work leaving me to run the entire estate single-handed, Hugo –’ She broke off, unable, it seemed, to tell me the trouble with Hugo. She recovered herself. ‘And now Mum,’ she seethed, ‘thinking she’s some bloody Saga holidays centrefold!’
‘Yes, well, it wasn’t quite like that,’ I muttered, making to get some mugs down from the cupboard, but Ginnie had already barged past; got them herself. ‘I mean, it was an arty pose. Not a … you know.’
‘Well, thank Christ for that!’
I turned. Cross. ‘Well, obviously it was an arty pose, Ginnie.’ Who was I cross on behalf of, I wondered? Mum? No. Sebastian? That he would in some way make a fool of our mother? Of course he wouldn’t. How I wis
hed I’d never rung her. ‘And I think that maybe,’ I cast about wildly, ‘maybe she wasn’t entirely naked.’
‘Really?’ She turned sharply, about to pour the kettle.
‘Yes, I think there was – a thong.’
Her eyes bulged. ‘A thong?’ This snapshot of our mother was almost worse than the one of her naked.
‘No, not a thong,’ I said quickly, shaking my head and banishing the image. ‘Some sort of … thing, though.’
‘A thing thong?’ suggested Ginnie drily and quite wittily for her. I knew I wasn’t out of the woods yet, though.
‘Yes, a wispy bit of gauze.’ Now I was deep in an ancient Pete and Dud routine, two tramps in an art gallery. ‘Covering her – you know.’ I demonstrated low, with my hand.
‘Oh.’ She nodded. This helped. My lie helped. As lies often can, I find. Ease the way. Oil the wheels. Make life more comfortable. We both breathed a bit, for different reasons.
‘And now that I’m over the shock,’ I told her, forging on, ‘I think it’s fine. And you’ll think so too, um, tomorrow,’ I added, thinking the twenty-minute head start I’d had wouldn’t be nearly enough for Ginnie.
‘Don’t bank on it,’ she said darkly, although I could see she was simmering down a bit.
‘Think of Lucian Freud,’ I said encouragingly. ‘God, he painted his entire family naked. And pregnant. You wouldn’t mind if it was him, would you?’
She sat down heavily at my kitchen table, a black coffee before her. ‘Would I mind if Lucian Freud came back from the dead and painted our mother naked and pregnant? Is that what you’re asking me?’ Despite the sarcasm she had clearly calmed down slightly. She looked all in, suddenly. Defeated. ‘I don’t know, Ella. Don’t know anything any more.’
I frowned. Really? This wasn’t Ginnie. Ginnie knew everything.
‘What’s wrong?’ I sat down opposite her with my mug. ‘I mean, apart from Mum?’
She looked at me, some inward battle going on behind her eyes. She seemed about to tell me, then changed her mind. ‘Well, Daddy doesn’t help,’ she said caustically. ‘I went to see him the other day, popped in unannounced. You know he’s doing B&B?’
‘What?’
‘Yes, some government minister has said there are too many old people rattling round in enormous great houses. Says it’s preposterous when there are so many homeless people. Daddy’s taken it to heart. Taken in lodgers.’
‘But – bed and breakfast?’
‘Oh, he doesn’t do the breakfast. They have to fend for themselves. And the whole place is in chaos. Dirty plates in the sink, cereal packets still on the table at midday …’ We tried not to look at the array on mine.
‘But – doesn’t he need a licence, or something?’
‘One would assume so, but I’m not even sure they pay, Ella. He airily said something about it all being above board and in return for favours, or something.’
‘Favours!’
‘Well, you know, gardening, getting the logs in … I don’t know.’ She really did look tired.
‘Good God,’ I said faintly, blinking into space. I tried to imagine the house. ‘Does Mum know?’
‘Of course not.’
‘How many has he got?’
‘Oh, two or three. All youngish, so the place looks like a youth hostel. Some South African’s got his enormous great rucksack in the hall, then in the drawing room there’s this Indian bloke with a laptop at Mummy’s lovely walnut desk. And when I asked him – imperiously, I hoped – what he was doing, he said: “Working from home.” “My home!” I roared, but it didn’t seem to cut much ice. He just carried on tapping away. Then, in the midst of all this mayhem – there was a trainee hairdresser, incidentally, from Luton, in the kitchen, trying out new hairstyles on some bizarre life-size model with fake red hair – Daddy breezes in from the study where he’s been working out to some keep-fit DVD.’
‘Zumba,’ I said abstractedly. ‘It’s a dance craze he’s been doing at the village hall. Peggy got him into it.’
‘Yes, but he was in jogging shorts, Ella. With a sweat band round his head. It was gross!’
I boggled, trying to imagine that. My dad mostly wore corduroy. Moleskin, occasionally.
‘Was Maureen there?’
‘Happily not, and when I mentioned her he said something about her dog-training and Zumba DVDs not really mixing. They howl, apparently, at the music. Her canine clients.’
‘Well, that’s a relief.’
‘Oh, don’t get excited. I think she’s still very much on the scene. There were antimacassars on the backs of all the chairs and air fresheners everywhere.’ She shuddered.
‘But not actually living there?’
‘Daddy says no.’
‘Well, then it’s a no. He wouldn’t lie, Ginnie. Dad’s not like that. And, anyway, in his present mood he’d be quite happy to tell us. Wouldn’t spare us the gory details.’ Rather like Mum, I thought. Not that he’d do it deliberately, of course. Was Mum? Doing it deliberately, to shock? No, I thought, not her, either.
Ginnie sighed. It was a heartfelt sigh, right up from the soles of her shoes. ‘Maybe not.’ She rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand. ‘As I say, I don’t think I know anything any more.’ She blinked hard, her eyes lowered to the table.
I bravely reached out and covered her hand. My sister and I don’t cover hands. She flinched and I withdrew mine quickly.
‘What is it, Ginnie?’ I asked.
She didn’t answer.
‘Is it Hugo?’
If Ginnie had a soft spot in her seemingly reinforced-concrete underbelly, it was her son: her firstborn, Hugo. Bright, blond, beautiful, a sporting hero all his life, trophies and cups galore, captain of the first eleven, hitting a victorious century in the match against Eton in his final term – another mother I knew who was watching said she’d had to restrain Ginnie from running onto the pitch to do a lap of honour: had a nasty feeling she’d take her top off and wave it in the air. Normally Ginnie couldn’t stop talking about Hugo. Araminta, too, of course, but Araminta wasn’t quite so high achieving, so usually it was Hugo we heard about. But not recently.
‘Is he still with … the girl?’
‘Yes, he’s still with Frankie.’
It was the first time I’d heard her say her name. I’d deliberately avoided it myself. Avoided pressing her buttons. I was surprised.
‘And, actually, she’s been brilliant,’ she said quietly.
‘Oh! Good. Because I thought you thought she was …’ I hesitated.
‘Not smart enough for us?’ She raised her eyes from the table to look at me for the first time. Sad eyes. ‘Perhaps I did. Not now. I’m very grateful to her.’ She struggled with something. Herself, perhaps. ‘Hugo hasn’t been well, Ella. He had a bit of a breakdown.’
‘Oh!’
‘Nothing major, but, well … We had to take him to a doctor. In London. A …’
‘Psychiatrist?’
‘Yes. He said it was stress. Overdoing it.’ She gave a hollow laugh. ‘At twenty-one.’
I felt so sad. Rallied for her. ‘It happens, Ginnie. These things happen.’
I knew she was blaming herself. For pushing. And, boy, could Ginnie push. Ringing him at boarding school – have you done this, have you joined that society, are you playing enough instruments, why aren’t you doing fencing? Grandpa was so good at fencing. Well, surely you can fit cricket practice around the fencing? Surely you can do both? Why aren’t you doing Greek any more? Josh told me.
‘We were warned, at the end of his time at school, by his housemaster, but I ignored it. Richard didn’t. Got him that job in the pub, near Mummy and Daddy. Away from us. Me, probably. Instead of going to the South Pole on that Quest expedition I wanted him to do. A good decision, in retrospect. And where he met Frankie.’
‘Good.’ The South Pole, for God’s sake. Good for Richard.
‘But it was all a bit late. A nice relaxed time, staying at Granny and Grandpa�
��s, pulling pints, going out with a local girl. He was found crying in a bus shelter at five in the morning. Couldn’t stop.’
I swallowed. Felt so sad. I was very fond of Hugo. I remembered thinking he’d looked rather thin when I’d seen him.
‘And Frankie’s been brilliant. I thought she might head for the hills when she heard, but she stuck right by him. Went to all his doctor’s appointments with him. Her mother’s been a brick, too. He stays there quite a lot. Feels happy there.’ She gulped. ‘There are younger brothers and sisters, which is lovely, of course. To mess about with. Tiny little house, but still. And he’s never really had that. Well, Araminta,’ she said, realizing. ‘But away, at boarding school.’
She fell silent.
‘This isn’t your fault, Ginnie,’ I said quietly.
‘No. Maybe not. But … I don’t know.’ She heaved up another great sigh. ‘So the upshot is, he’s going to retake his first year at Cambridge.’
‘Oh, OK.’
‘Give himself a bit more time. To regroup. Start again.’
‘Yes, good idea.’
It was. But this was all so hard for his mother. She gave me a level look. ‘And I’m fine about it, Ella, really. Couldn’t care less that he’s behind his contemporaries. I want him to be well. Healthy. Happy. The doctor had a little word with me, too.’
‘Right.’ Because having got to the bottom of Hugo, he no doubt felt the need to speak to the mother. ‘But he didn’t …’
‘Blame me? No. No, this guy was the real deal. Cause and effect cod psychology didn’t feature.’
‘Good.’
She straightened up a bit. Nervously rubbed the handle of her mug with her fingertip. ‘And, um, anyway, I’m starting a course of counselling myself. Next week, in fact.’
‘Counselling?’
‘Yes, it’s what I want to do.’
‘Oh!’ I thought she’d meant she was getting the counselling. ‘You mean … you’re going to be a counsellor?’
‘Well, eventually. It takes five years to train. But I’m definitely going back to work.’
‘Right.’ This in itself was an admission. That she didn’t currently work.
My Husband Next Door Page 26