by Jilly Cooper
Lysander thought he was suffocating. On the kitchen table lay a copy of his father’s translation of Ovid. Flipping it open, he saw his father had written on the fly leaf: TO DEAREST GEORGIE, and followed by some incomprehensible Latin tag. By the recipe books he found three of his own letters unopened.
Georgie was sitting on the stairs, surrounded by pink roses, looking sulky, dead eyed, caught out, but not nearly sorry enough.
‘Tell me this is a bad dream.’
‘It’s a bad dream.’
‘How could you, Georgie?’ whispered Lysander, clutching the door for support. ‘How could you? You were so unhappy. I worked and worked to get you over Guy and I find you bonking my father — like a couple of bloody dinosaurs. He’s a geriatric, for Christ’s sake.’
‘He’s only five years older than me,’ said Georgie, flaring up.
‘He’s a bastard. Guy’s a saint by comparison. You’re revolting, Georgie. I don’t understand you.’
A combination of guilt at being caught out, or fierce protectiveness towards David, and blazing jealousy of the dead Pippa, unleashed Georgie’s legendary Irish temper.
‘Your father is the dearest man in the world, and what’s more he’s been a wonderful father to you.’
‘Bullshit,’ shouted Lysander, so loud that Maggie cringed terrified against the door, and Jack started to yap.
‘He’s incapable of love. He was diabolical to Mum.’
‘Rubbish,’ screamed Georgie. ‘Your mother was a whore. D’you know how many lovers she had when she was married to your father?’
At the top of her voice, saliva flying, face engorging and disintegrating like beetroot in the Moulinex, she proceeded to scream chapter and worse. Lysander couldn’t stop her, he’d never been quick enough for back chat. He just mouthed at her, utterly shattered, fists clenched, rigid but trembling.
‘Did you know,’ yelled Georgie finally, ‘your Uncle Alastair was her lover for years and she was having an affair with Tommy Westerham? His picture from Horse and Hound was found in her bag the day she died, galloping down the main road to plead with him not to dump her.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ whispered Lysander. ‘My father told you this to get you on his side, to poison you against me and Mum. The lying, lying bastard! I’m going to kill him when I catch up with him.’
For a second, as he grabbed Georgie’s shoulders, shaking her like a rat, his beautiful face contorted into frenzy, Georgie was terrified he was going to kill her as well.
Then he caught the reek of cod again, and recognized the smell of sex, and with his father, and threw her back against the stairs. As he stumbled out, trampling the roses underfoot and slamming the front door behind him, Georgie realized what she’d done. She tried frantically to trace David, who now would never forgive her. Nor would Lysander, who would probably kill either himself or his father.
Lysander’s only thought was to find someone who had known his parents well enough to refute Georgie’s horrific accusations. Hurtling out of Paradise with Jack and Maggie huddled together on the seat beside him, he frantically punched out numbers on his car telephone, repeatedly getting wrong people because he kept misreading his address book and misdialling. By the time he had narrowly avoided crashing into several stone walls, he had learnt that his brothers were both out of their offices, his grandmother was whooping it up at some bridge party and his mother’s sister was in the Seychelles. In despair, he decided to drive down to Brighton to see Uncle Alastair’s widow, Dinah, a tetchy old soak, who spent her life outwitting a succession of companions paid by the family to keep her off the booze. If he hurried, he might catch her while she was sober enough to make sense.
Brighton looked its least seductive. An icy wind savaged the tamarisk bushes along the front, a sullen grey sea pummelled the shingle. Aunt Dinah’s flat stank of torn cat, long-term dirt and stale booze. Lysander remembered how his mother had referred to her mockingly as an auntie-depressant. Mrs Bingham, the paid companion, tweed-suited and tight-lipped, had the same gaoler’s eyes as Mustard.
‘Mrs Hawkley’s in the lounge. Would you care for some refreshment?’
‘I’d love a drink.’
Mrs Bingham offered tea or coffee.
Lysander said he’d prefer a large whisky.
‘Oh, we don’t keep alcohol in the flat, I’m afraid.’
Looking at this wild-haired young man, totally inadequately dressed in a Foster’s Lager T-shirt and dirty white jeans, clutching a koala bear and with shakes even worse than his aunt, Mrs Bingham deduced alcohol must run in the family.
‘Who’s there?’ came Aunt Dinah’s gin-soaked yell.
Lysander found her in the sitting room, reading Dick Francis with a huge magnifying glass with the television roaring. She was wearing a grey wool dress so tight it had ridden up to reveal stocking tops and thighs like unbaked suet. Although her black wig was worn at a rakish angle, her once-fine features had collapsed with the booze. Beneath eyelids swollen like shiny white maggots, however, her bloodshot eyes had the craftiness of an old hippo.
A large tabby cat covered most of her lap. Fear of her dashing husband leaving her had kept her sober and reasonably attractive for thirty-five years, but when he did go, albeit to another world, she had given up. Even in his state of shock, Lysander felt huge pity, and wished he had brought her a box of chocolates.
‘It’s Lysander, Aunt Dinah.’
As he leant forward to kiss a cheek on which red veins tangled like candy floss, he caught a waft of stale sweat and Gordon’s. The paid companion wasn’t being as efficient as she thought.
‘Just been watching a flick called The Bengal Lancers.’ Aunt Dinah spoke in a very precise voice to conceal the slurring. ‘Everything wrong as usual. They never had pig-sticking on the Frontier, but Gary Cooper was certainly a dish. Sorry, I can’t get up — cat on lap.’
‘I’m sorry to barge in. I need to talk to you.’
‘She offered you a drink?’ said Aunt Dinah as the paid companion sidled in, plonked her tweed bottom on the sofa and got out her knitting.
‘I’m OK.’ Collapsing into the armchair nearest the electric fire, Lysander noticed a cat’s earth box beside his aunt’s chair. From the smell, it hadn’t been cleaned out recently. He suppressed a wave of nausea.
‘You get more and more like your mother.’
Glancing up, he was disconcerted to see both Dinah’s crossed eyes concentrating on him.
‘It’s Mum I came to talk about.’
A long sigh ruffled the tabby cat’s fur.
‘I wondered how long it would be.’
Lysander turned to Mrs Bingham. ‘Look, d’you mind awfully if we talk alone?’
‘My job is to stay with Mrs Hawkley.’
‘Oh, bugger off,’ snarled Dinah. ‘I’m not likely to get up to anything with my nephew. No doubt you frisked him before he came in.’
As Mrs Bingham flounced out, the cat started to purr.
‘Common, isn’t she? Doesn’t like Thatcher,’ yelled Dinah over the television. ‘The one coming next week, according to the hand-out, has wide experience with handicapped children.’ She gave a cackle of laughter.
‘D’you mind if we turn the television down a bit?’
Jane Asher was in her kitchen talking about Christmas cake. She looked so fresh, pretty and alien to his current squalid surroundings that Lysander wished he could climb into the set with her. After turning her face bright orange and changing channels twice, Dinah found the mute button.
Ramming his hands between his knees to stop them trembling Lysander took a deep breath. ‘About Mum. I honestly don’t want to upset you, but basically Dad’s got a new woman.’
‘Mrs Colman. I’ve met her. That voice would drive me cuckoo.’
‘No, a newer one. Basically she’s been slagging Mum off, I don’t believe her, but I just wanted proof that she was lying.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘That, that — I’m really sorr
y — that she was having an affaire with Alastair.’
‘Ah.’ Dinah’s dirty-nailed fingers stopped stroking the cat.
‘And loads of other people.’
Outside he could see two gulls and a boat with a red sail battling desperately with the gale. The pause seemed to go on for ever.
‘She was rather unfaithful,’ said Dinah.
‘She was?’ Lysander was aghast. ‘Then Dad drove her to it. He’s such a shit.’
‘Your father put up with a lot. They were never suited. He brought her to stay when they were first engaged. He was dotty about her. The first afternoon he went to his room to write a review for The Spectator and Alastair offered to show her the garden. Looking down from my bedroom, I saw them kissing in the orchard. All the blossom was out. It was like a Barbara Cartland book jacket.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ hissed Lysander.
‘It’s true.’ Dinah’s words were slurring now. ‘I caught them out so many times. Christmas, birthdays, your grandfather’s funeral — even your christening. Some people even thought — no, forget that. Alastair and Pippa would be the life and soul of every party, but suddenly they’d vanish like gypsies’ lurchers.’
Lysander had put his head in his hands. Now he looked up, his eyes cavernous in horror and bewilderment.
‘It was a pity Alastair died so suddenly. Didn’t leave his affairs in very good order.’ Staggering to her feet, tipping the cat on to the carpet, Dinah lurched towards the desk and after pulling out several drawers, took out a salmon-pink file on which the words: TWO YEAR OLDS, 1983 had been crossed out.
‘It’s all here. When I want a masochistic charge of adrenalin late at night I go through it.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘And wish they were both alive, so I could kill them.
‘Alastair was crazy about her,’ she went on. ‘In the beginning he blamed the male menopause. Twenty years later Pippa was an old man’s folly. But there were always others. She loved collecting scalps, then telling him about them.’
Opening the file, she emptied it out on to a nearby table, knocking over a dying cyclamen and a Staffordshire dog. Photographs, bills, letters fluttered everywhere all over the carpet.
With a stab of anguish, Lysander recognized his mother’s scrawl on a piece of blue writing paper.
‘Darling Alastair,’ he read laboriously. ‘That was the best fuck I’ve ever had.’
‘As your father got crosser and grimmer, your mother got wilder,’ mumbled Dinah picking up the Radio Times. ‘Nice lunch party I went to yesterday, with even numbers for a change. All the men were queer of course, but at my age, you have to expect queers.’
This isn’t happening to me, I can’t read any more, thought Lysander.
‘Here, give that back,’ said Dinah as he chucked the letter on the electric bars of the fire.
‘Time for your medication, young lady.’ Mrs Bingham, dying to know what was going on, marched in with a glass of water and two yellow pills on a plate.
Trying to shield his mother, Lysander hunched himself over the letters and photographs, as he frantically gathered them back into their file. For a second they were all distracted by the giant tabby cat lumbering into its earth box scattering cat litter as it rose like a Deux Chevaux, and noisily evacuated.
Then, as Lysander shoved the file viciously back into the drawer, he caught sight of a photograph that had fallen on to the floor and nearly blacked out. It showed Uncle Alastair with a great grin on his face, lounging in an armchair with a cigar in one hand, and his mother kneeling at his feet and laughing as she held his rampant cock towards her mouth between two fingers as though she were about to smoke it. They were both naked.
Lysander gave a sob. For a second his distress jolted Dinah out of her stupor. ‘Damn, I thought I’d burnt that one.’
Mrs Bingham gave a crow of triumph.
‘Why, you naughty, naughty girl,’ she gloated.
For scraping away in his earth box, the cat had revealed a green bottle of Gordon’s gin, three-quarters empty.
‘Turn up the telly,’ said Dinah airily. ‘There’s William Morris on The Animal Road Show.’
Lysander only just reached the lavatory in time, before he threw up and up and up.
Stumbling down three flights of stairs and rushing out into the street, narrowly avoiding being mown down by cars trying to get home before the rush hour, he took Maggie and Jack for a run on the beach at dusk. He was acutely conscious of the indifference of the sea, as it reared up in a long white wall of foam, then collapsed at his feet. The pier was already lit up against a darkening sky. Ahead the little fairground where Pippa had often taken him had closed down for the winter. The red train rested on its buffers. No children whizzed, shrieking with delight, down the blue-and-yellow helter-skelter. The merry-go-round horses had been zipped away in their leather covers. Even the ghouls on the ghost train had fled.
‘Oh no,’ pleaded Lysander, as he frantically wiped away the tears. ‘Oh please, Mum, oh no, no, no.’
But he knew that his childhood had gone for ever.
45
Wearily Kitty made lists for a Christmas she dreaded. All Rannaldini’s Christmas cards had to be sent off and presents bought for his numerous children and each member of the London Met. Rannaldini had to compensate for his chronic bloody-mindedness somehow. Even more lavish presents had to be bought for his multitude of mistresses, but the London secretary, who had better taste, dealt with that. Kitty wondered if Flora or Rachel had been added to the list. He’d been away so long, she wasn’t au fait with the latest developments. But the deep freezes still had to be filled. Rannaldini liked to have Cecilia and all his children for Christmas, and Hermione, Bob and little Cosmo came over for Christmas dinner. Kitty was also desperately trying to cover her screen with photographs of Rannaldini and the famous, and had just cut out one of him gazing admiringly up at Princess Michael.
It was nearly midnight on the wildest of nights. Everything rattled and creaked. Creepers clawed at the windows, the wind moaned down the chimneys like women desperate to get at Rannaldini. Kitty had already had three dropped telephone calls, and didn’t know if she’d rather it were burglars checking anyone was at home or mistresses checking Rannaldini’s whereabouts. She’d also had increasingly distraught calls from Georgie trying to trace Lysander.
‘We had a stupid lovers’ tiff and he stormed off. You know how impulsive he is. Make him ring me at once if he rings or turns up.’
Kitty had been jumpy all evening. The wind was really wailing now. Suddenly she heard a jangling of bells and a distant pounding on the front door. Terrified, she seized a saucepan and crept along the dark, panelled passages, guided by the rough slither of a tapestry, or the sharp blade of a hanging sword, edging round cannon-balls and suits of armour, not daring to betray her identity by turning on a light. The pounding grew louder, and was now accompanied by terrible spine-chilling sobbing. Kitty gasped with terror as she saw an anguished shadowy face at the hall window.
‘Oh, God!’ Frantically she crossed herself — it was the Paradise Lad.
‘Go away,’ she screamed.
‘Kitty, Kitty, let me in.’
‘Oh, fank goodness.’
As she unbolted the door, Lysander fell inside, clutching a koala bear, followed by a very subdued Maggie and Jack. He was absolutely plastered and blue with cold beneath his suntan, his teeth chattering convulsively, his eyes crazy, his face drenched with sweat. Kitty had never seen anyone shake so much.
‘Help me, Kitty. Georgie, it’s her fault, not Mum’s. She’s a bitch, and Dad’s a bastard, and Uncle Alastair, oh Christ.’
Putting her arms round him, propping him up, Kitty steered him two steps forward, one step sideways or back until, knocking over several suits of armour and the screen, they finally reached the kitchen, where she steered him into an armchair by the Aga.
‘Why did she do it? Jack, Maggie, I haven’t fed them. Oh, Kitty,’ he started to cry.
�
��There, there, my lambkin, I’ll see to them. Let me run and get one of Rannaldini’s jumpers, then I’ll make you somefink hot. Wherever ’ave you been?’
‘Don’t go.’
‘I won’t be a sec.’
But when she came back with jerseys, including Guy’s lost Free Forester’s cricket sweater, and blankets, he had passed out.
Tucking them round him, she fed the dogs, who appreciated the steak and kidney she was about to freeze for Boxing Day far more than Rannaldini’s faddy family ever would.
She then curled up on the window-seat. She didn’t want Lysander falling into the Aga, or waking terrified and not knowing where he was. He and Georgie had plainly had far more than a lovers’ tiff.
It was a good thing she stayed. Two hours later he was awake and screaming the house down, and she only got him to the 100 in time, where she had to hold his head for the next quarter of an hour until she thought he’d heave his entrails out. Somehow she managed to get him upstairs to bed, but he continued to rave and gabble incoherently, begging her to stay with him. Only when she gave him one of Rannaldini’s Mogadons did he finally fall asleep.
Next day Kitty abandoned the hundred and one things she had to do, including making a dozen sets of angels’ wings for the annual Valhalla nativity play, and nursed Lysander, feeding him dry toast and clear chicken soup, and letting him talk. She didn’t fill in the silences as he frantically tried to get his image of his mother into some kind of shape.
‘She was so kind, Kitty,’ said Lysander. ‘We had a really awful groom, who bullshitted her way into the job. She couldn’t even ride and she was vaguer than me. Mum finally screwed up courage to sack her, but four hours later Mum had said so many nice things to her to soften the blow that the groom thought she’d been promoted.’
‘Kind people find it ever so hard to say no,’ said Kitty who was cutting out a picture of Rannaldini shaking hands with Donald Duck. ‘Your mum was so beautiful, and so many men must ’ave wanted her, she must ’ave felt unkind refusing them.