Brodie was hardly there either. Having worked for a year in the City he became dizzy with instant wealth, a commodity none of us was used to. After spending all the money on drink and drugs, he realized that banking was not for him. Uttering some crisply chosen phrases on the cynicism of exploitation, he traded his smart suits for a black-and-white guitar and a nose-ring. He formed a band by advertising for members in the New Musical Express and, soon after, they were sent to New York to record an album. Brodie came home on Christmas Eve, jet-lagged and unusually cheerful. His luggage was two bags of vanilla coffee and his guitar, his clothes were those he was wearing.
‘I forgot everything else. I suppose I’ll have to go back and get my stuff.’ Mum and Dad were surprised at his good humour. He even said he liked his Christmas presents.
‘Did you have a religious experience in New York?’ Dad teased.
Brodie was so tired he missed the joke. ‘No, I didn’t see any churches. Actually, I never got further uptown than Greenwich Village.’
I was disgusted. ‘You mean you didn’t go to the Metropolitan Museum, or Tiffany’s, or the Guggenheim?’ I squawked.
Brodie sighed. ‘I was working, you know. We never got out of the studio before two in the morning.’
Dad interrupted as I began to make a retrospective sightseeing timetable for Brodie and the band. ‘Va Va, you don’t understand,’ said Dad. ‘Rock stars disappear in daylight. They require night and a little stimulation, isn’t that so, Brodie?’ Brodie grinned. He started discussing downtown bars with Dad who, despite not having visited New York for fifteen years, could remember almost all the ones Brodie mentioned. ‘Brodie’s smiled three times in half an hour,’ said Poppy as we criss-crossed sprouts at the kitchen table. ‘He must have had fun.’
Dan’s girlfriend Tamsin came for Christmas lunch, bringing her own meat-free platter. Small, neat and blonde, she was a nurse he had met on his most recent stay in hospital. At ten o’clock in the evening, our lunch was ready. All day we had peered into the Aga, to be met with dough-coloured turkey. It sweated and hissed but would not cook. Finally Dan poured some paraffin into the Aga. It boomed from its heart and puffed into action, the hotplate turning angry red, then glittering pink with heat. Tamsin’s nut roast cowered beside the vast turkey when Poppy and I heaved it out of the oven. It was wedged with forgotten logs we had put to dry in the Aga days before. The turkey had a strong woody taste which we all decided we might as well like. ‘If we don’t we won’t eat for days,’ said Dan, his plate a small mountain leaping with an avalanche of peas.
On the day after Boxing Day, Brodie and I left for London. I went with him to the airport, and he flew back to America for six more weeks. I returned to work, noisily tapping at my typewriter to draw attention to the fact that I was in the office between Christmas and New Year. No one was very interested.
Chapter 35
Five orange kittens rolled across the kitchen floor. Patrick nudged one on to the toe of his boot. ‘Catch!’ he called to Flook, day-dreaming by the Aga.
‘No, Daddy,’ Va Va screamed, too late. The kitten was airborne, legs and tail spread wide like a star as it somersaulted towards Flook. Patrick laughed maniacally. Flook reached to catch it, but the kitten slipped through his fingers and landed on the Aga. It squealed, tinny and barbed with terror, then jumped down, scuttling sideways like a crab to hide under the dresser. The room smelt of singed fur, acrid and nauseating. Flook lay by the dresser, trawling his arms against the back wall, searching for the kitten. Va Va ran to Patrick, hitting him and screaming. Patrick was speechless. He tried to put his arms around her but she pushed him away. ‘It’s all right. My love, I am sorry, believe me.’ His voice was cowed and pleading.
Her nose ran. ‘I’ll tell the RSPCA,’ she screeched. Flook, cradling the now purring kitten, yelled too. Eleanor came in. Va Va opened her mouth to tell her what had happened but the words gagged. She could not say, ‘Daddy hurt the kitten.’ Patrick explained, halting and ashamed, like a child. Eleanor hugged Va Va and Flook. ‘Darlings, the kitten is fine. Why don’t you get him some milk? Daddy was very wrong to kick him, but it was entirely, entirely an accident that he hurt the kitten. Will you give him a kiss and let him say sorry?’
They calmed down, but the image stayed with Va Va. Every time she thought of it her stomach slipped sideways because Patrick had been cruel and she couldn’t bear him not to be perfect. He never kicked the cats again.
Chapter 36
On New Year’s Eve, Mummy and Daddy went to a party. Helen had come to stay again, and she and Rex roared off on a motorbike, outriding Mummy and Daddy. Helen looked ill. She was very pregnant, and her face was swollen as well as her stomach. Mummy tried to stop her going on the motorbike, but she wouldn’t listen.
‘Heart of my heart, daughter of mine, you are a bloody idiot,’ said Daddy, watching Helen scoop her hair into a yellow helmet. She rolled her eyes like an exasperated teenager and winked at me as she bundled out of the door in Rex’s spare leathers. ‘They never let you grow up, you know,’ she whispered.
Zoe and Vinnie arrived in a taxi from Liza’s house. They had brought presents for us all. Zoe and I bustled about lighting the fire and enjoying having the house as our own, without parents.
Before midnight, Helen and Rex were back, their leather clothes sparkling with frost. They were drunk. Brodie had taken down the oval mirror from above the fire and we stuck candles on to it with wax drops to celebrate the New Year. Dan and Poppy were asleep in the playroom, their eyes shuttered against Benny Hill as he whooped and insinuated across the television screen. The rest of us grouped around the mirror, glasses filled with stolen wine, poised for midnight. Rex lurched head first on to the sofa, kicking one of the candles over.
‘Watch out, this is a mirror,’ said Brodie, alarmed by the large, creaking presence.
Rex leapt up, his face a snarl, long yellow teeth bared, pointed like peeled nuts. ‘All a mirror does is bring you bad luck,’ he jeered. Smiling unpleasantly, he picked the mirror up and threw it, shattering silvered splinters in the glowing fire. Then he turned on Brodie.
‘Leave him alone,’ screeched Helen, and I grabbed Rex’s arm, pulling hopelessly at his sleeve. He whipped back his shoulder to shake me off and towered over Brodie, reaching to grab him out of the shadows. From the playroom, Big Ben tolled midnight as Zoe, Helen and I heaved and rocked with Rex. He shook me off again, hitting my nose with his elbow. My eyes watered, and I squeezed past him and knelt with Brodie. ‘Go away. Leave us alone,’ I sobbed. Rex whirled round, breaking two glasses and standing on Zoe’s foot.
‘You bastard.’ Helen was at his throat, her face white fury, veins raised and pumping as she reached for his neck. Rex roared and punched her, then bounded over the sofa and out into the garden. Helen wiped her nose, smearing a trickle of blood across her cheek. She laughed shakily. ‘Happy New Year, you lot,’ she said.
After New Year, winter unfurled sharp claws and slashed deep into the earth, freezing the ground and drawing all colour and life out of trees and plants until everything was grey. Feeble snowflakes fell hesitantly from an ice-white sky, and ceased; it was too cold for the soft comfort of snow. From my bedroom I looked out at Shalimar, a soft black blur huddled beneath an oak tree.
Downstairs, Mummy was the only person who would talk to Bertrand Bougie, the French exchange student whom Brodie had visited in Paris last summer. Le Boogy, as the boys called him, was not a success. He sat at the kitchen table, his hair shiny and slicked down as if a tin of treacle had been poured over his head. As he sat he fiddled miserably with a cold piece of toast. At the beginning of his visit, Brodie and Flook had invited him to come and admire their collection of army gear. They gave him a gun to shoot rabbits with and offered their most prized unexploded shell for him to polish.
The shell, and other pieces of live ammunition, had been found when an American airforce plane hurtled into the field across the river. We came home from school one day to find khaki
-clad soldiers guarding the white bridge at the edge of the village. Brodie and Flook were overjoyed. They were always delighted when a plane crashed nearby. Scrambling out of the car, they made friends with the soldiers, wheedling and cajoling until they were taken to the wreckage of the plane. There Flook absorbed the two young Americans in conversation, while Brodie, unnoticed, picked glinting explosives out of the twisted metal and mud and stuffed them under his blazer. They hid their booty in the hayloft, and only those armed with the password ‘raphonidomai’ (a word Mummy had taught us in our infant Greek lessons, meaning ‘I stick a radish up the fundament’) might enter. The boys were wary of Mummy discovering their treasured armoury, and although I was terrified and begged them at least to defuse their weapons, I knew I could not sneak.
But Le Boogy, an uncomprehending alien ill-clad for the Norfolk winter in neat shirts and sharply creased shorts, did not appreciate the honour of entering the hayloft. He sidled out, smiling and nodding, and went back to the warmth of the kitchen. He read comics and munched chocolate from a secret supply he stashed behind Mummy’s French dictionary. He was afraid of animals and horrified by dirt. He clung to Mummy’s kindness as if it were the last drop of human affection he would ever receive, and he went everywhere with her. Mummy urged me to be nice to him. ‘Please, couldn’t you talk to him? Tell him what you learned in French or something. He’s so lonely,’ she begged in a desperate whisper, using a moment when Le Boogy was rootling for another bar of chocolate on the musty bookshelf. But I refused, retreating to the telephone for an hour-long string of inanities with Sasha. Brodie and Flook, exasperated at the failure of their overtures, and unable to offer Le Boogy anything more thrilling than ammunition, simply ignored him and went on with their ever more sophisticated and bloody war games.
So Le Boogy went to Mr Cardew’s with Mummy, he went to the Norwich hairdresser with her, and he went shopping in Aylthorpe with her. This he enjoyed, bustling ahead of the supermarket trolley, his rounded rump swinging as he made for the cheese counter and the chocolate biscuits. Mummy allowed him to choose his favourite things, and his responsibility made him forget his homesickness a little. Le Boogy brought home piles of smoked cheese, tins of sardines, packets of garlic sausage and plastic tubs bursting with coiled salted herrings. We were all appalled. ‘What’s this gross stuff?’ asked Brodie, holding up a thin, viscous anchovy. ‘It looks like a worm. I’m not eating it. Why can’t we have fish fingers?’ Le Boogy looked at him astonished and went on tucking into his own plate of anchovies, pâté and olives.
Mummy still wore the blonde wig when driving. Daddy thought that driving lessons, like buying the cats and dogs tinned food instead of giving them scraps, were a waste of money, and flew into a spitting frenzy if he discovered Mummy was taking them. She somehow kept up a secret weekly tryst with her driving instructor. Although Mr Ball bowed to her insistence occasionally and let her take a driving test, each time fear paralysed her and she failed. Le Boogy became accustomed to the last-minute search for the wig, and solemnly hunted it out. He offered it to her, watching with unblinking concentration as she wedged it on to her head. She found his gaze unnerving, and once forgot to take off her beret before applying the wig. Le Boogy silently rose from the rocking-chair beside the Aga. Climbing up on to another chair next to Mummy, he gently removed the wig and then the beret. He replaced the wig with great care, tweaking it a little like a couturier addressing the final fitting of a gown. He spoke not a word as he completed the adjustments and climbed down.
He had never referred to the wig at all. Mummy had been attempting unsuccessfully to construct an answer to the inevitable question and was relieved when Le Boogy’s last day came and he had still not commented on her disguise. But preparing for the final shopping trip, Le Boogy, wig in hand, having retrieved it from the dog chair in the playroom, shook his head sorrowfully and looked up at Mummy with his great bovine eyes. ‘Why you do this thing, Madame, why?’ he pleaded, and Mummy was astonished to find herself answering firmly, ‘It is a British custom.’ Le Boogy smiled happily and nodded, a weight lifted from his mind, and they drove to Aylthorpe to purchase some offal, Le Boogy’s special request for his last supper.
Chapter 37
Patrick gave Eleanor a barrel full of crooning white doves and she hung it in a tree in the Wilderness. The doves swooped and hovered over the children as they played on fallen trees and dug holes among the naked twists of roots. When the doves were settled happily in their new home, Patrick and Eleanor and baby Dan flew to Wisconsin, leaving the three older children on the drive, clutching their cats, trying not to cry. They had to go, said Eleanor, making tea automatically as she did at every crisis, every triumph, and to pass the days and hours when nothing else was happening.
‘Daddy and I have to go to America because Daddy has to earn some money so we can go on living here. Dan is a baby so he has to come with us, but we need you all to stay here and take care of the house and the animals and to keep it all safe for when we come home.’
Va Va saw an opportunity to reign supreme. ‘I’ll look after everything. I’m seven and a half, that’s old enough. I can buy food from Mr Cardew’s.’
‘Yes. But to help you and to drive you to school, Tarquin and Mary Lou are coming to stay here with you. And Louise is just up the road if you need her.’
Brodie flopped over Eleanor’s knee, pinning her down. ‘Why can’t they look after the animals so we can all go with you?’
Eleanor looked sad. ‘We haven’t got enough money to buy all those aeroplane tickets.’
Tarquin and Mary Lou cowered in the kitchen behind curtains of long hippy hair. They brought with them their pale baby, Lupin, thin like a parsnip with a snail trail of snot on his upper lip.
Young Canadian intellectuals, soft and fresh out of university, Tarquin and Mary Lou prepared to embark upon a rural idyll at Mildney. Mary Lou cooked brown rice, boiling it for hours on the sullen Aga, droning away about where rice came from and what a fabulous famine food it was. It didn’t make the rice any nicer. Mary Lou’s large eyes wobbled with tears as she dished out the fabulous famine food. Brodie spat out a mouthful, rubbing his fist in it so it slimed over the table. ‘Why don’t you send it to the starving babies then?’ Mary Lou pursed her lips and cleared it up. Brodie and Va Va glanced at one another, scorn in their eyes. Why hadn’t she made him wipe the table, or at least told him off?
Eleanor had left pages of instructions on the dresser about feeding the animals, paying the milkman, washing clothes. When Mary Lou went upstairs to change Lupin’s nappy, Va Va pushed a chair across to the dresser and wrote: THE CHILDREN LOVE ICECREAM AND STEAK AND KIDNEY PIE. THEY HATE BROWN RICE AND ALL HIPPY FOOD.
Tarquin looked like Jesus. He had long shiny hair and a wispy beard, he wore white flared trousers and a white shirt. Every morning he strode out to the Wilderness and stood in front of the doves, arms outstretched, eyes closed, in a state of near-beatification. He said he was feeding them, but the doves never flew down, as they did with the children, to take the grain from his hands. After a few weeks they departed in a gleaming cloud to join the wood-pigeons at Mosseymere.
Mary Lou’s hair was not as long or as lustrous as Tarquin’s and she stuttered and blinked when she spoke to the children. ‘Come on, honeys, brush your teeth for your Mom.’
Her orders and suggestions were met with scorn. ‘Mummy doesn’t mind if we don’t brush our hair or our teeth. Anyway, she’s not here.’ Flook buried his head in a towel after his bath. His fringe was long and tangled, it swung into his eyes so he crashed into walls and fell over. Mary Lou wanted to cut it. ‘My Mummy cuts my hair, not you.’ He flailed and fought and Mary Lou almost gave up, but not entirely. Each morning she brushed Flook’s hair, then scraped back his fringe and secured it with a kirby-grip. He looked like Shirley Temple, but it was better than allowing Mary Lou to cut his hair. Although he was only four, Flook started school while Patrick and Eleanor were away. Mary Lou begged the teachers to take
him because she couldn’t cope. Flook was delighted; he was big now, like Va Va and Brodie.
Eleanor sent frequent letters to each of the children, with presents in them. Balloons, as big as faces before they were blown up, had unreadable squashed writing on them. The children lined up in front of poor thin Tarquin, begging him to inflate them. It took him all day, but finally at tea-time Tarquin lay limp on the lawn as the children charged over him, their balloons as big as Space Hoppers, chanting, ‘Madison Wisconsin, Madison Wisconsin,’ delighted to be able to read the words stamped across the balloons’ curves.
Patrick and Eleanor and Dan went to New Orleans one weekend, and the sweltering skies turned Dan’s wisps of hair into corkscrew curls. They returned to England where Va Va, Brodie and Flook waited, misting tiny patches of the vast glass windows at Heathrow as they watched the plane land.
Chapter 38
Grudgingly, the weather improved and winter slouched away before an invasion of buds dripping pale green from still trees. Snowdrops marched across the lawn and the animals started their usual irritating ritual of fornication and non-stop howling. Honey conceived her third litter of puppies by Hector, the rapist collie dog who belonged to the local farmer, and I received a letter from James Merry-Curl.
Dear Gabriella,
I wonder if you would like to come and watch my end of term match. Imogen is coming with a few other people, and it would be great fun to see you again. I am in the team, so I’ll be able to see you after the game.
Love James (Merry-Curl)
I had never been sent a letter by a boy before. It caused hours of glee for my brothers, not least because Merry-Curl had enclosed a photograph of himself looking mean and moody in a cravat and blazer.
‘Va Va’s got a boyfriend!’ yelled Brodie, waving the photograph above his head and passing it to Flook, who at once drew a caricature and stuck both likenesses up on the dresser. Pink with embarrassment and delight, I tried to ignore the boys and tell Mummy about Merry-Curl.
Come and Tell Me Some Lies Page 10