Nature and Necessity

by Tariq Goddard

  ‘I love it when things go wrong.’

  ‘I bet you do.’

  ‘Why not? Misfortune increases my possibilities, my greatest enemy is also my greatest enabler. That’s why I love it when things go wrong… there’s nothing like a disaster to bring out the best in me. It’s the daily support that people need, my having to be nice to them and say “good morning”, that bores me.’ Petula hiccupped. She was on the verge of being completely pissed and did not know whether this was the moment to ask Wrath when he would be moving back to England, should she make plans to leave her husband and would he be prepared to move into The Heights. In seconds she would forgo her tactical brain for the evening; she must obtain a concrete advantage before it was too late.

  ‘Excuse me a moment, this beer can make you piss like a horse, don’t go anywhere.’

  Petula watched Wrath untangle himself from the table and stride purposefully to the lavatory, feeling a simultaneous desire to relieve herself. Best get it out of the way and not waste a moment, she thought, as the jealous eyes of the room followed her to make sure it was not the Gents she was heading to. What happened next Petula could not remember. Perhaps she splashed her face with cold water, took a little too long washing her hands or struggled with the paper towels, for it was a different world she eventually returned to only six minutes later – one in which Ned Wrath had most suddenly ceased to feature.

  ‘Why?’ she blurted, for she knew he had gone and only wanted to know the reason.

  Astley, who to his immense credit looked genuinely sorry for her, motioned to Donald Eager, who had lit a smelly cigar. Trying to disguise his satisfaction at delivering bad news that he considered just, Eager drawled, ‘Well, he was just on his way back to you, back to us I should say, when that waiter,’ he pointed at a guilty-looking Chinaman, ‘that waiter called him over to the counter, there was a phone call for him you see.’

  ‘Yep’, Astley took over, ‘his wife…’

  ‘His second wife,’ Eager interrupted.

  ‘Please Donald. I’m sorry Petula, she arrived out of nowhere. The woman must have just got into the country…’

  ‘This country?’ Petula felt stripped of her skin, a shock equal to being born had overcome her. If she was not careful she would lose her balance.

  ‘Nonsense Max,’ said Eager, ‘she’s been here for a couple of days at least, holed up in a hotel in Richmond, refusing to leave her room because she thinks our cooking is so awful. She’s been ringing round all day and finally caught up with our boy. The bitch told him that if he isn’t back before bedtime she’ll be on the next plane to JFK without him. And out for a big cut of his goody money after that, if I know the type. Still, all is not lost, he left this for you Lady P.’ Eager passed Petula a crumpled napkin and pressed it into her limp hand. Scratched onto it in faint biro was Ned Wrath’s New York address, and under it the words, ‘I enjoyed bringing down fire on our own positions.’

  Petula was to never see Ned Wrath again. As with any famous person, she hoped she would at least bump into him in odd places, before he disappeared completely. At other times she went further and admitted she had spent the most rewarding night of her life with him; in this version she saw them together, the golden couple making the grand entrance, but something stopped her from pursuing this picture in reality. Her correspondence with Wrath, postcards and the odd letter, continued for the next eleven years, one of those false signposts and deliberately misleading clues that kept her going but ultimately led to a dead-end. What it was for him, a fancy not followed or an unconsummated and riveting passion, she never dared ask. Instead she would seek lesser Wraths to spice and season the void left by the first, and with Regan’s help hang on to most, the talismanic night at Chinkies marking the last time she would let her guard down with a man. All this was there for her to see on the napkin Wrath left her, the jade cloth his leg rested against, the smell of oyster sauce in her hair and taste of monosodium glutamate under her tongue. Without waiting for her night to end as her day had begun, Petula fled from Astley’s sympathetic embrace out onto the pier, her future resigned to a destiny she had not the faith in love to fight.

  PART TWO:

  Cocytus, Lamentation.

  Which way I flie is Hell: my self am Hell;

  The mind is its own place, and in it self

  Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heaven

  – JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

  CHAPTER FOUR,

  education and endurance.

  The storm was aligning. In the ten years that followed her mother’s discreet breakdown on Shatby Pier, which Petula blamed on Chinese food, Regan grew up. To her surprise she was sent away to school soon after the Shatby jolly, and having successfully accepted abandonment as her due, recovered quickly from the shock. The first term away felt longer than life, her boarding-school self the hardened rind of the polite eight year-old she hurriedly distanced herself from. Weeks and months had no meaning, terms and holidays were her new reality and within those she discovered that barbarism allowed no one to rise above it.

  Nohallows Hill was an exclusive girls’ school for parents who did not wish to share the permissiveness of the 1960s with their children, the former asylum housing over three-hundred daughters of the rich and otherwise preoccupied. Its emphasis on discipline was its selling point though in truth a veneer for a degenerate state of nature, exacerbated by the unnatural absence of boys and young men. It was, in the words of Regan’s best friend Diamanda, ‘Just like ’Nam!,’ an adventure for those girls prepared to ignore their swift dehumanisation, usually a confident majority, and a disaster for the rest. Regan thrived, and developed a detestation for those in her yearly intake who did not. Her unwillingness to occupy subjectivities unlike her own, for however short a time, came from this basic intolerance of outward frailty and with it the habit of holding reflection responsible for every kind of defect of character. Girls who spent too much time analysing the comforts of home, remembering a favourite swing or pony, earned her sullen scorn. ‘Get over it!’ was all she had to offer flakes, sapping house morale with their finicky digressions and nostalgia for humanity.

  Activity was the thing, on the playing fields, in the expensively built sports hall and over the vast school grounds where vicious games of British Bulldogs were enacted until fractured bones or chipped teeth gave the players a chance to hobble away. Admirable as being able to ‘take it’ and ‘take part’ was, Regan’s indifference to pain robbed her experiences of content, the parlour game of wondering whether she had been happy or not at Nohallows haunting her for years to come. What, after all, was she doing there?

  The possibility that her mother no longer desired a constant witness to her life, a little pair of eyes taking everything in, did admittedly occur to Regan when Diamanda, sharing a crushed Battenberg cake sent to celebrate her ninth birthday, told her ‘We’re here because our parents are assholes, right? But so what? Who cares? Everyone’s an asshole, right?’ Well, Regan decided, that might be true of Diamanda’s kith and kin, Columbian socialist-socialites who furnished second and third homes for the Jaggers, but hers weren’t like that at all. She was at Nohallows because her parents, or at least Petula, cared for her, Noah having already begun his slow-fade into amiable irrelevance. Making the most of her residency was the least she could do to show her gratitude for the opportunity and, toning it down a little so as to not sound too goody-goody, Regan wasted no time in setting Diamanda straight.

  ‘If only all of you girls could think like that,’ her housemistress said after overhearing their conversation and giving Diamanda two weeks’ detention. ‘I heartily wish there were more like you Regan Montague. You express yourself so beautifully too. Regan Montague, even your name sounds like it should.’

  For all her appreciation of her parents’ motives, home was not an easy world to return to, however much she missed it at night, when the time came for lights out and she found she could not sleep. To her shame she secretly pined after t
he gentle inactivity she left behind, naive and basic as it was, next to lacrosse, chemistry and debates on euthanasia. But all that had to be cast to one side, and her new world embraced in all its stimulating cruelty. Staring from her window at galloping cloud formations, fastening animal shapes to her corkboard and dreaming of the day she would accept Mingus’s offer of marriage, all now embarrassed Regan deeply, and in a fit of self-disgust she swapped bedrooms on her first exeat home from school.

  ‘Why?’ asked Petula, who liked a bit of sentimentality so long as she did not have to have her nose rubbed in it. ‘That was the room you grew up in, we chose it for you deliberately, it has a lovely view of the garden, south-facing, and large cupboards we had made at great cost to keep the moths out. Jazzy and Evita would have killed you for it.’

  Regan had no answer she was ready to share; things that were important had ceased to be.

  ‘Suit yourself, though I warn you, independence for independence sake is as much of a bore as hanging round your mother’s apron strings.’

  Regan’s new choice of abode was an austere guest berth Petula tended to put people she did not like in, and as removed from her lilac den of old as school was from home. Showing a taste for absolutism worthy of her mother, the once-treasured contents of her old life were boxed away and stored in the attic, her other knick-knacks and mementoes trashed or taken to charity. The transition between the two worlds was thus narrowed, reaching its apogee when her mother forced her to change out of school uniform a week into the holidays.

  ‘I will simply not have you going round like that, a dead-end kid, you remind me of an evacuee from the war. They couldn’t afford normal clothes so had to walk round in school uniforms until they fell apart. It was very sad.’

  ‘Can’t I wear what I want to wear?’

  ‘Not if it makes you look like an underprivileged dredge.’

  ‘What’s so wrong with being one of those?’

  ‘Nothing if you really are one. Now go and put something sensible on.’

  ‘She’s become a cool customer,’ commented her father on her second exeat home.

  ‘You mean an even cooler customer,’ corrected Royce. Regan’s outlook had indeed chilled; like a metaphor that was always changing without revealing its object, adults could not locate a heart behind the glass. Her mother did not need to, she knew she could rely on Regan and required no more than that to enjoy a perfect relationship with her protégée. The further off the others stayed the better; Regan’s self-imposed solitude suited her wider purpose. This arrangement was tested only once, and then by mistake.

  Unlike school, with its orderly procession of dates and events, The Heights had lost its sense of sequence for Regan; time there did not lead to the future. Perfection had already been attained and it resided in her mother; she could not see past Petula, sitting atop of it all, rendering change a meaningless impossibility. History here did not evolve, there was no such thing as moving up a year, only a stillness that required occasional shoring-up to make it ever more immobile. What hope was there for advancement in this sort of environment? Regan did not put it like this when she asked a very tipsy Royce one December whether she thought her mother would let her pick the jacket she wanted for Christmas, or choose for her, but she came close.

  ‘Read between the lines my dear,’ whispered Royce as if danger lurked beneath the very roof they were sat under, ‘you’ll see what I mean as you get older, as you already can I shouldn’t doubt. There’s not enough vitality to share round a small place like this. One woman’s got a monopoly on the stuff. First she sucked it from your father, his friends and social set, then got to work on the rich and famous. Once she was finished with them she started on you kids; she’ll be taking it from the trees and the earth itself next. Why do you think we all feel so tired all the time my dear? She’ll disinherit you before she approves of a decision you’ve come to on your own. Pixie Boots or your choice of husband, you’re her little doll, always have been and it’s little wonder you should be sick of it.’ Royce often said things like this about ‘situations’, as she liked to call them, speaking obliquely in fits and snatches, assuming her audience understood every word. Tonight she had taken the bull by the horns and Regan marked the moment by trying to deny it.

  ‘You are talking about Mummy now, aren’t you Royce?’

  ‘Who else?’ snorted Royce, quite forgetting she was stirring blood against blood. ‘Who else could I mean, the monkey who steals your nuts? A chicken?’

  Regan could see that she had annoyed the old woman. ‘Are you saying Mummy will never let me buy the clothes I like? Not even when I’m older?’

  ‘Oh come on, you’re an intelligent girl, you can’t put on that Simple-Simon act with me. Since when has Petula, I’m sorry, your Mummy, since when has she liked people making their minds up for themselves? Look at your Father. Ask him if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘But he doesn’t mind or care about anything.’

  ‘More like he hasn’t had the chance to.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It just becomes easier not to argue after a while.’

  ‘That’s unfair. Whatever it is that makes Mummy so bossy is also what makes her care so much, you once told me. You must remember? She does too much for everyone, you said that. I thought you and her were, well, that you liked each other. You’re friends. Aren’t you?’

  ‘I’ve seen a few things that have made me wonder, my dear.’

  ‘What things?’

  Royce thrust another lump of cold ham into her mouth and, looking knowingly from side to side, said with the whimsical pomposity that is often the substitute for wisdom or achievement in a person of advanced years, ‘Little girls have heard enough for one night, quite enough, and it’s time for this one to kiss her Auntie goodnight. Don’t you worry my dear,’ she tapped her nose, ‘remember Royce knows, Roycey knows! And now you know what Roycey knows! I’ll take care of you my darling.’

  Regan, who seconds earlier had been addressed as an equal, held back from scratching the rouge off the patronising old lady’s cheek. Concluding that she would be only a couple of sentences away from wanting to do so again, she avoided Royce for the rest of that holiday.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye to your Auntie?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’m about to have a bath, Mummy.’

  ‘Yes. I know what you mean. I’ll tell Royce you need to wash your hair.’

  Regan lay on her uncomfortably hard bed and brooded over the security offered by eternal stasis, against the risks posed by uninvited change. Though she did not grasp it yet, she was not without her mother’s ambition. By the following Easter she had come to the view that it was best to take advantage of her unique relationship with Petula and talk to her directly. It was not beyond the realms of plausibility that her mother already knew how she felt, sympathised with her confusion, and would welcome the opportunity to assist her with inimitable clarity.

  Regan was used to manipulating adults in a way that did not count as such if handled with the right amount of roundabout innocence. On her last day at home she took the unusual step of engaging Petula in a rather general conversation on human nature. Not sure whether her daughter wanted something, or was just trying out new hats, Petula tried to humour her as best she could, with one eye on the time. She had an important fitting in Richmond, and did not want to break the speed limit to get there.

  ‘So Mummy, people, greedy people…’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘There’s always been greed hasn’t there, people have always been greedy, ever since the dinosaurs…’

  ‘Yes, greedy people, living in caves in animal skins, what of them?’

  ‘That’s never changed, they were always greedy, but the way they’ve acted greedy has changed, hasn’t it, it’s sort of progressed?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Greed.’

  ‘I know that. What are you really talking about?’

  ‘Pe
ople.’

  ‘Hurry up Regan, I haven’t bought you up to dilly-dally, it’s bad enough having to listen to Royce telling me how she’s discovered a new A-road between Spamshingle and Codstock, without having to hear you take the longest distance between two points.’

  ‘What I mean is the way they, they… the way people express their greed, that’s changed, I think.’

  ‘Could have fooled me.’

  ‘But it has, if you look at history I think it has. Instead of girls and boys being sent into a factory to make money we’re sent to school to learn how to make it instead. That’s quite a contradiction isn’t it, I think. The same quality changes its character over time. Changes for the better too. I mean, it’s less bad to learn how to take money from someone legally than to just steal it off a weaker person, I think, like they used to do in the olden days.’

  ‘Jesus Regan, you sound like Plato. Have you some Greek homework to get out of the way? Can’t you ask your father about whatever it is you are asking me about, he has to be good for something.’

  ‘No, it’s not schoolwork Mummy. I’ve just been thinking about stuff.’

  ‘I suppose that’s what we send you there for – that school you never tell us anything about. Out with it then, whatever it is you’re getting at.’

  ‘Do you ever think I might be as important as you?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Do you think I might count as much as you, matter as much? You might go and live somewhere else and I live here on my own one day, then would I feel as important as you? Live here and be in charge.’ Regan went bright red, she did not know what she was saying, only that if she were to express the sentiment she was most afraid of hearing, it would not sound worse than this.

  Petula, who had already moved into planning that evening’s seating arrangement for Tom Conti’s fortieth, brought her full attention to bear on this sudden lapse in her daughter’s sanity.