The study door slammed to a close. Petula had lost sense of time; how long had Regan been on the phone, that was the real question! She was never normally one for nattering away; well, at least there was no mystery why – who wouldn’t be experiencing that beautiful combination of anticipation and dread that presaged one’s first major social engagement?
Passing her on the stairs, Petula, again affecting a great hurry, gave Regan a wink that had the disconcerting effect she hoped it would, leaving Regan with the fear that there were no secrets in sisterhood and her conversation with Diamanda had been overheard.
‘Will you be needing the phone again? I’ve a number of important calls pending,’ Petula called breezily from the study door, determined to show her daughter that she liked privacy too, ‘all for your benefit, you know. The party, I mean.’
‘No thanks, I need a lift into town though, when you’re finished, if that’s okay.’
‘Why, is it urgent?’
‘No, it’s alright, I’ll ask Jazzy.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s completely mad and would probably end up driving you to Hastings.’
‘Don’t worry, it’ll be nice to catch up with him…’
It was not nice to catch up with him at all, but still preferable to having Petula drop her outside the Doctor’s, as at least Jazzy would not think of asking her what she was doing there. Regan had never experienced a silence that the instigator found so difficult to self-enforce, Jazzy straining and grimacing his way through their journey, shifting in his seat and muttering cryptically into his arm. Evidently the way was being left open for her to ask Jazzy what the problem was, or to simply offer an apology to be on the safe side. Regan felt too nervous to try, an intervention likely to provoke the avalanche he was desperate to release and she, at least for the moment, to avoid. Their parting and her decision to take the bus back was a relief, Regan resolving to not ask Jazzy for anything that might be construed as a favour until she had given him a chance to air his latest malady.
The nurse at the surgery, having established the circumstances of the seduction the night before, gave Regan what she needed with only the briefest joshing, suggesting that it might be a good idea to take a condom out on her next night run, given that one never knew who one might meet. Regan considered this well-meaning advice unnecessary. On the journey back she permitted herself to finally remember Mingus, and to establish why, despite an oceanic longing to step from the lake into the sea with him, she could have no more to do with the boy.
It was surprising, having waited to be guided by feelings in the past only to find that none came, to discover two powerful and contradictory emotions, side by side. Her desire for Mingus was wild, uncharacteristic and most likely a manifestation, if it existed, of love. Regan could not tell whether this was a predictable response to having sex for the first time or whether it predated the loss of her virginity and that she had always loved Mingus. Fun as it might have been to wrack her history and un-plunged subconscious to find out, the distinction was largely academic as nothing rested on it.
The second conviction was the one she knew she must obey the logic of. Erroneously Regan accepted the bogus divide between heart and head, the binary opposition making more sense to her than a world of supposedly nuanced shading. Whatever stood in opposition to her happiness arrested spontaneity, which was as it should be, as caution had always greater weight in her eyes than joy, and other dangerously irresponsible concepts. Of this Regan was sure, with a certainty more powerful than faith. To disobey the imperative of denial would mean she was lost as a person and to the future her mother was preparing her for. Behind it lay a prejudice against love she had accepted unquestioningly from Petula. Fear played its part too; Regan was scared of finding out that love was not true and that to sustain it required delusional levels of stupidity she might not have. The night with Mingus by the lake had been perfect, and perfection needed defending against life’s degenerative tendencies. Regan knew Mingus loved her back, and by quitting at the top she could save them both from disappointment; Mingus would never have to grow bored of the ‘real’ her, allowing Regan to remain interesting, moonlit and immaculate forever.
Blind to the romantic element inherent in her analysis, Regan drew on what she took to be her superior maturity. If she could show she was stronger than love, harder than feeling, and superior to sentiment, who knew what she could go on to achieve as an adult? Fortunately for her, she was beginning at a more evolved stage of social development than an ordinary teenager. Unlike Mingus she already understood that independence was a more advanced state than dependence and that love, for all its promise, was the handmaiden of need. It was also uncool. Regan felt that her sacrifice would set an example that a woman of greater experience would approve of, however much it hurt the girl she still was.
Regan could still not leave a decision this big entirely to emotion without some practical research to justify her conclusion. Subsequent enquiries into Mingus’s character yielded a girlfriend in Leeds, and more than one in York, an older woman in London, and a number of ‘possibles’ in the village. He also lied a lot, was pretentious and fake, would never make it as an artist, could not even paint, and put objects he found in glass cases and called them art. These blandishments coexisted with a tendency to copy his ideas off other people, drink and smoke too much, and borrow money and sponge with no thought of ever honouring his numerous debts. All this from two short conversations with her brother and mother! Admittedly none of it fitted with the other more generous accounts she heard about the place, but by taking Petula and Jazzy at their word, she at least hoped to take the sting out of any future doubts.
They were to meet again once that holiday, along the track on the morning of Regan’s party. Mingus looked ill when their eyes met, the weight of all he wished to ask leaving him grossly over-qualified for the confident and easy greeting the encounter required. He felt touched by the unreality of things, the confusion and sheer embarrassment at having been cut by the love of his life rendering him no more capable of speech than a terrified mute. He had, to assuage his own incomprehension, decided that Regan’s gross indifference to him was his own fault, and in this way, had given her a motive he could at least understand. She was a rare and precious thing who had been humiliated by his desire to physically possess her. His raging itch must have destroyed her impression of him as a celestial being, reducing their intimacy to the level of debased lust. No wonder she wanted nothing more to do with him; he was no better than an animal in her eyes. It was better to take possession of the tragedy in this way, and blame himself so as to get over it sooner, if ever he could. The alternative, that Regan did things like this all the time, and so for her, it constituted no big deal, was unacceptable.
Stuck for what to say, Mingus foolishly, for it could be no other way, asked Regan for the only thing it was in his power to offer at that moment. Would she like to go for a walk with him? Regan replied, airily, that she needed to ‘chill’ as she was busy later, which was the type of balanced answer Mingus dreaded. Shaken by this humiliation, and left with no reply, Mingus carried on his walk alone.
Regan felt like a bitch immediately afterward, before experiencing an exalted sense of power. Had she not shown she was an adult at last, wiser and more accomplished than Mingus and his pointless walks? It was an impure high and could not last. The space still to come, the future, a concept she was in thrall to without the least idea of how its subclauses, time and regret, worked, had other plans. Those few weeks of holiday had represented radical freedom; rare avenues of choice where her causal chain had come loose, leaving Regan undetermined by the patterns of the past. Her tragedy was she could see, even then, how simple it was to act freely, and pick a juncture where she might emerge recast as herself. Instead, like a wistful flirt tied to old codes of courtship, Regan substituted volition for a parasitic notion of what she thought Petula would do
in the same situation, and missed her chance.
The cost was enormous. By turning her back on freedom Regan had to accept the moral responsibility for what followed as surely as if she cast the winning vote for a madman who brought the world to wrack and ruin. To her horror she discovered that her decision to reject Mingus trapped her in a new cycle of predestination, without choices or options, binding her to an irreversible logic that would take years to play out. However hard she struggled there was no way out, only a single course to follow determined by the act before it, narrowing her life to a predictable series of mistakes she was helpless to prevent. Free will grew to be so much a stranger to her that when, hidden in a tiny corner of her future, the opportunity to choose rose again, Regan remembered her last taste of freedom and put her hand through a window in disgust. Time and regret had had the last word.
But before that she had a party to attend. Regan walked back to the house cautiously, sensing something come and then go; the sky a royal blue, a trickle of condescending pity coming over her as she imagined Mingus’s lonely life on the farm in years to come. She had guessed that if she saw him again it would be awkward and it had been, though at least it was out of the way, and there had not been any embarrassing scenes. Things were often not as bad as one thought they might be, and, sensing the worst was over before the worst had even begun, Regan congratulated herself on a situation well handled. It was just a shame that she could not tell her mother about it.
PART THREE:
Styx, hate.
But from inward motion to deliver
sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the ages tooth:
Which, though I will not practise to deceive,
Yet, to avoid deceit, I mean to learn.
– WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King John
CHAPTER EIGHT,
a party and a punishment.
It was only meant to be a bit of fun. The day of the party was overcast and treacly, crystals of salt sticking to Petula’s body like handfuls of sand, putting her in mind of a Tennessee Williams play, the absence of a breeze most unlike Yorkshire and the opposite of what was forecast. With slow imprecision the rain clouds finally assembled, releasing only a few soggy flecks, the weather neither breaking nor clearing but congealing colourlessly with god-like indifference. Petula found that she had very little appetite for breakfast and none at all for lunch. With Noah away as usual and Regan shaking like an intoxicated foal, she felt an unwelcome ring of isolation form round her as the hours slid away and the desire to retch grew. It was unpleasant to observe that she did not have her usual grasp of what was stippling across her mind, mad and wild thoughts that seemed to come from the very heart of the house itself. With great determination she acted her way through the labyrinth of preparations and duties, harnessing her fears to commands that somehow managed to overlay them, the surfaces holding out against her simmering depths until it was time for the first guests to arrive, and all hell to break loose.
*
The party was out of control from the very start. Petula had made it clear to Tim Tinwood that she did not want B-listers telling anecdotes about people they did not know, only the crème de la crème of his client list, with a contemporary twist if possible. She had got her wish – with a twist. The crème de la crème had arrived drunk and drugged out of their contemporary minds. It had been typical of Petula’s life that no sooner had a fear manifested itself than reality would do its best to outflank it on a platter. And so it proved. Petula turned to Tinwood, first out of the minibus, and said,
‘My God! What have you done to me? They’re all absolutely wrecked! I was expecting something to go wrong, but this…’
‘Oh come on Petula! Live a little, it’s a party! Party time! Eh?’
‘It bloody will be but shouldn’t be yet. This lot look like they’ve been on it since breakfast. They’re bloody sozzled Tim!’
‘Come come!’
‘Jesus, you can barely stand yourself! And what about him still in the taxi? He’s fast asleep!’
‘Don’t worry… I’ll get the driver to give him a poke. Got stuck in a bit, earlier on. He’s Bobby.’
‘What?’
‘Bobby, a good lad, normally.’
‘I am frightened, I am. What the hell were you thinking?’
‘Relax, okay, relax, it’s not as bad as it looks. “Forget your fears babe,” we’re all just here to have a good time!’
In fact Tinwood was not so immune to fear as his phoney protestation was intended to suggest. Getting the actors Petula wanted had been quite a sell, harder than the same proposition would have been a couple of years earlier. His efforts had forced him to cast a wary eye over his association with Petula and reappraise her market worth. Doubtless, she had delivered good times in the past. But to a spunky young actor asked to attend a dinner party, not even a rave, for a teenager they had never met held by a pushy mum they had also never met, in Yorkshire, verged on the otiose. The days of stating that there was this incredible force of nature they just had to meet seemed innocently passé when fed to a generation gorged on cable, air travel and Sunday shopping. Tinwood was left with no choice but to sell the evening as an outrageous orgy in the making, which of course he had no objection to should that promise come true, presenting Petula as a high-class brothel madam, happy to line up a troupe of schoolgirls for their delectation. Though exaggeration and unthinking misrepresentation were his stock and trade, Tinwood couldn’t now nullify the fear that he might have gone too far on this occasion, allowing his loyalty to Petula to run amok. But how else could he have got them there? The five young actors, single, pandered and gullible, appeared to have taken him at his word, referring to the party as a ‘jailbait fuck fest’ in a conference call the day before. Fearing his own hyperbole, Tinwood had made a belated attempt to play matters down to no good effect, and had no choice but to encourage the actors, travelling up together on the train, to loosen up with a few sharpeners in the hope that the booze might take the edge off their predatory instincts, a ruse that was over-successful in its application.
Which was only the first reason for his odyssey of anxiety. Tinwood had, when confronted with the reality of another trip to The Heights, reacted with delayed dread to returning to the scene of his earlier crime. Every time he put the debate to bed, another aspect, usually the one he hoped to have resolved, returned in a marginally altered guise to take him, once again, through the gauntlet of doubt. True, his principle of acting as though nothing had happened had served him well on the myriad of occasions he had gone back before, neither of the two molested children anywhere to be seen, nor even so much as mentioned by their mother. But was he pushing his luck in persisting and hanging on, when the world was not exactly short of parties and hostesses he could defect to? The unease would not go away and so, like his clients, Tinwood had started on the booze and pills, the result being that as his party approached York there was not one of them who was not stage drunk or speaking amphetamine logic. By the time the train finally pulled into Darlington, Tinwood had started to imagine he was a General in the Spanish Civil War every time he went to the lavatory – his tried-and-tested way of knowing it was time to switch to something less toxic. Out came the brandy miniatures and, with the counterproductive inconsistency of a novice, the new ‘sedative’ he had scored the night before: ‘E’.
Petula watched the mob enter The Heights, so elegiac in the dusk now the sun was finally visible as it set, with intense dismay. It would have to fall to her loyal nucleus of Eager, Astley, Marg and Esther to save the evening, that or the few local celebrities she could count on to stem the Dionysian outbreak. Unfortunately, she knew in the instant it took to consider it that this strategy would fall short of solving the problem. The small number of invites and gaggle of inexperienced girls were a regrettable combination; there was simply not enough fondant in her cake to disguise the taste of the inebriated thespians, who would stand out in a Viking raid let alone a sit-down dinner. She would have to scrap it out h
ead on, ask them to pull themselves together and compel the fools to behave like the professionals they professedly were. Actors were like most pansies; they liked a good scolding.
‘Fuck a duck!’
To her horror she had spotted one, an actor, the cover star of the current Radio Times, urinating over the side of the house as the Bentley bearing Landon Trafalgar pulled up, the gap between the roses allowing the deed to be perfectly visible from the drive.
Trafalgar, the septuagenarian owner of Trafalgars, the north’s largest department store, looked on with astonishment as the new Doctor Who, Crispin Fogle, wiry and impudently handsome, attempted to tuck himself in, the most important part of the operation remaining stubbornly beyond the reach of his flies.
‘You’re hanging out lad,’ Trafalgar shouted gruffly, showing remarkable powers of adaption, Petula felt, in the circumstances.
Ignoring him and tittering like a small child, Fogle skipped up to Petula and offering up his moist hand, which she did not take, said, ‘I’m so happy I could shit in a Tardis! Tee heeee! Sorry! I’m still in character, it’s the sort of thing The Doctor says you know.’
‘Not in any of the episodes I’ve watched.’
Laughing feverishly Tinwood pretended to slap Fogle, before not pretending to grasp him in a headlock and bundle him through the front door; a manoeuvre he accomplished without resistance as Fogle had decided to pretend to be a dog, and was woofing happily at the new arrivals.
Nature and Necessity Page 25