by Liz Nugent
‘The gamey old pervert!’ she said. ‘But honestly, Delia, all the men here are asking about you. You’ll have to put a bag over your head if you want them to leave you alone. Hannah is furious. She used to be the star of Jory’s parties.’ There was always some man nearby ready to fill my glass or light my cigarette. I was certainly the focus of a lot of male attention and I could easily have cheated on Peter if I wanted. But it was not attention that I craved. It was freedom. I wanted to be free of husband and child and obligations.
Everyone who came and went over the weekend was on the same buzz, but even I was shocked at some of the behaviour of the so-called upper classes. There were food fights at the long dinner table on the first night, and I felt genuinely sorry for the servants who got caught in the crossfire. So much for etiquette. Men and women, and men and men, disappeared into broom cupboards and emerged dishevelled and half dressed. One matronly woman lifted her dress and flashed her large pale bottom during a disco on the first night. Nothing like this ever happened in Westport. The Russells had always tried so hard to be refined. But here were people who had always had money and status and therefore had nothing to prove.
On the Saturday, I stayed sober for the early part of the day despite offers of port with breakfast and marijuana after lunch. I managed to get away from everyone in the afternoon. I chose the warmest fur coat I could find in the cloakroom and someone’s greasy old deerstalker hat and made my way through back kitchens and sculleries to a back door, apologizing to the white-bloused girls as I passed them, ignoring the look of surprise on their faces. I must have appeared strange, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was in a rush to get outside.
There was almost total cloud-cover and the sun must have been low in the sky, but daylight was streaking through in parts, casting beams on the grey seas. I clambered down the man-made steps and walked out on to the rocks, as the sea surged below me. I hadn’t worn fur before, but there were sheep fleeces on our beds when we were children that we often wore as shawls, and I felt like a child again, watching the waves crashing and receding, the surf bubbling, the foam glistening on stone. It was wilder here than it was on the east coast of England, and for a little while I looked out on to the horizon as the wind whipped around my head and recalled waiting for Daddy’s boat to appear on the sea-line. The wind grew stronger, however, and the hat lifted from my head and disappeared into a rock pool, twenty feet away. I began to climb over rocks to reach it when I heard a voice.
‘I shouldn’t bother if I were you. It wasn’t terribly flattering, that hat.’
I turned. A man was standing in the shelter of the cliff behind me. I hadn’t noticed him.
‘It wasn’t my hat. I … I borrowed it …’ But the wind took my words away and he moved forward, looking at me curiously. He was older, tall and beaky, and despite his overcoat and gloves I could tell that he was a thin man. His hair was grey at the temples and thin on top. I was annoyed that I was not alone. I wondered if he had been watching me, or if he had followed me from the house.
‘Oh Christ, you weren’t going to jump, were you? Ruin the weekend for everyone?’ He saw the surprise on my face and began to laugh. ‘I was joking!’
‘No, I wanted to get the hat back.’ I watched it bobbing on the surface until it disappeared in a rough swirl of foam and descended to the deep. It was gone. I climbed back over the rocks. The man extended his arm to help me, or to touch me, I couldn’t be sure, but he looked so frail that I could have pulled him down, so I allowed him to think he was assisting me as I threw my weight forward on to the ledge at the bottom of the steps.
‘I didn’t expect consideration from such a pretty girl,’ he said.
Inwardly, I groaned at the thought of having to avoid the grabby hands of yet another man.
‘Your hair is frightful by the way. I should run a comb through it before rejoining the company if I were you.’ He was leaning back against the rock and held a long stick in his hand. I noticed a bundle of something at his feet, and when I looked closer I saw that it was the remains of a bird. ‘A baby seagull,’ he said by way of explanation, ‘probably whipped into the cliff by the wind. There are always some that are weaker than others.’ Half of its skull was missing and a few feathers clung to the blades of its wings. A purple mess of entrails oozed out of its belly. ‘A recent casualty, I imagine.’ He prodded it gently, flipping it over, staring intently at the small carcass.
‘Oh,’ I said, surprised that anyone could be absorbed with such a thing.
‘I think it is exquisite,’ he said, ‘but everyone thinks I’m an oddball, even my wife.’
I grew less wary. If he had intended to seduce me, he would not have mentioned his wife. I smiled at him. ‘I think your wife might be right.’ I looked down at the bird. I tried to see the beauty in it, but all I saw was decay.
‘Did you come down here to get away from the insufferableness of one of Jory’s interminable parties? I’m trying to decide if I am totally bored or totally boring. What do you think, young lady?’
‘I think you are probably a bit of both.’
‘You cheeky pup! Run along then, back to the beautiful people.’ There was a note of amusement in his voice.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘For what?’
‘Helping me up on to the ledge.’
‘Oh God,’ he said, ‘just what the world needs, another pretty liar.’
I climbed the steps, and it wasn’t until I got to the top that I looked back, expecting him to be following me. He was not there.
As I entered the cloakroom to replace the fur coat, I caught Daniel and another man in a compromising position, but not one of a sexual nature. Daniel was counting out a large wad of cash, and a flamboyantly dressed man was dabbing some white powder from a small clear plastic bag on to his gums. Daniel was dealing in a bigger way than I’d previously thought.
‘Fuck off,’ said the man, glaring.
‘Don’t worry, it’s only Delia,’ said Daniel, throwing his arm around me. ‘Would you like a toot?’ And I took the tiny silver spoon offered and whooshed myself back up into a kind of euphoria.
Hannah soon joined us in the cloakroom. She eyed Daniel’s arm around my shoulder. ‘Well, isn’t this cosy?’ she said. I left them to go look for some champagne, promising to return with a bottle, but I don’t recall if I did.
The party ended early on the Sunday morning when the house’s ancient plumbing could no longer cope with the sewage expelled by thirty guests. Everyone and everything was beginning to smell. Uncle Jory wasn’t in the least apologetic. ‘Oh, do stay, we’ll get the local boys in to dig a latrine!’ He was still drunk and hadn’t been to bed since the night before. Neither had Hannah or Daniel.
Isabelle told me that some of the local staff had already deserted their posts, outraged by the guests’ behaviour and their treatment of them. ‘I don’t think he’ll find anyone to dig a latrine,’ she muttered.
Hannah declared in a loud voice, ‘I’m sure Delia wouldn’t mind rolling up her sleeves. She’s Irish, you know!’
I was tired and irritable and had had enough of Hannah’s barbs. I turned on her. ‘What are you talking about, Hannah? For God’s sake, spit it out!’
There was quite a gathering in the breakfast room at this time, with maybe ten or fifteen others hovering around in various stages of hangover. They sat up straighter now, alert to what might be unfolding drama.
‘Well, Delia, none of us know where you come from, do we? You told us you went to school in Kylemore Abbey in Connemara, but Belinda Sheridan went there and she has never heard of you. You never talk about your family. One would almost think you had something to hide. And that accent, darling, it really slips when you’re drunk. You sound like a peasant. Perhaps you’d be more at home in the kitchens, or scrubbing out the toilets.’
A short silence descended upon the room before Isabelle interrupted it. ‘Shut up, Hannah. Don’t be such a bitch.’
I could feel all
the blood rush to my face as Isabelle took me by the arm and pulled me out of the room. As I left, I noticed the tall man who had been down by the cliffs, lounging by the door. He put out his hand to me. I don’t know what he meant by the gesture, but I kept my head down and ignored it.
‘Much too pretty,’ he said, dismissively.
Isabelle drove me back to London. ‘Daniel and Hannah can make their own way back. Sod them.’ She waited until my tears subsided. ‘Look, Hannah is jealous. Most of us don’t give a damn where you’re from or who you are. You are a mystery to me, but I like it that way. Your past and your background is nobody else’s business. Please don’t judge all English people on the basis of bloody Hannah.’
I smiled at her. ‘She’s Scottish.’
‘With that accent?’ Isabelle said. And then we started to laugh.
‘Thank you, Isabelle,’ I said.
‘I do have to kiss up to her though, you know – she gets me all my clients. I must continue to be her friend, and so must you, for the sake of Russell Wilkes.’
‘What? How can I even talk to her again? She deliberately humiliated me!’
‘That was mild. I’ve seen much worse from Hannah in my time. If she decides to really turn on you, she could persuade Daniel to ditch Peter. Everyone knows that Peter is the brains of the company, but Daniel opens doors that Peter would not otherwise have access to.’
I am a peasant. By their standards, that’s what I am. And by any standards, I suppose. I grew up on an impoverished island in a stone-wall cottage with a thatched roof and no running water. How could I have come from that to this? And how could I ever belong?
18
I grew fond of Peter. He was endearingly earnest about everything, and although I still would not have called it love, I enjoyed his company. I might have loved him if the child wasn’t in the way. James loved Chiara and reached for her when he wanted attention. I guess he knew he wouldn’t get it from me. But he got it from his father. Peter noticed the distance between James and me and tried his best to forge a bond between us. I made an effort and took over the bedtime routine from Peter, but James cried and screamed for his daddy, so the experiment was short-lived. My husband bought me many books on parenting. I would crack the spines and put the books beside the bath so it looked like I was reading them, but I pointed out that James simply didn’t like me. And the evidence of James’s attachment to Chiara and aversion to me was obvious, though Peter never knew how much time Chiara actually spent with him.
As James grew and moved on to solids, cut teeth, began to crawl, to stand, to toddle, Peter celebrated each of these milestones as if they were acts of genius. Since all babies grow up, I couldn’t see any reason to make a fuss. Peter showed concern for my ongoing headaches. I went to crackpots and healers and neurologists and acupuncturists, but nobody could find the cause. ‘It’s James!’ I wailed to Peter one day.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, darling. Look at him,’ Peter said, ‘he’s beautiful!’
I looked at my child, and while I could see that he was a handsome little boy, I felt only resentment and hostility. I was supremely bored and drank a lot of wine and ate a lot of breath mints. Chiara did the domestic chores that I couldn’t summon any interest in. She even brought me tea in bed after I’d had a late night at Annabel’s. She was quite pathetic.
Chiara did, however, get me interested in cooking. In the beginning, she would prepare the food and I would present it to Peter as my own work when he came home, but I was interested enough to watch and to learn from her. Peter didn’t notice much about food, only whether it was there or not, but I learned from going to London dinner parties that you couldn’t serve up scrambled eggs on cream crackers, which used to be a Friday night treat at Alan and Moira’s in Westport. At one dinner party, I heard Hannah and Daniel sniggering at pineapple and cheese on cocktail sticks. I tasted mushroom vol-au-vents, quiches, avocado, devilled kidneys and pâté de foie gras and I liked them all. I used to watch Keith Floyd on the television, cooking fish. I liked his style. Isabelle watched her weight all the time and Hannah only ate salads in public. I could eat whatever I wanted and retain my slim figure. I bought cookery books and learned gourmet recipes from Robert Carrier. Chiara was relieved, I think, that she no longer had to cook and mind the child at the same time. I banned James from the kitchen. It was impossible to do anything while he was there.
Peter encouraged me to read books about history and science. He suggested that I could take A levels at a senior college and study medicine, and for a while it seemed like a good idea. I started doing night classes in A level physics, chemistry and biology, but even though some of the coursework was familiar to me, I was paralysed by fear of failing again. The students often went for a drink together after class. The men, including one of the tutors, flocked around me, offered me help with my studies, walked me to the Tube station, ignored my wedding ring, tried to kiss me. I knew that if I told Peter, that would be my way out. It was. He was outraged. He suggested that I try to study the books on my own, but physics in particular was a different language to me. I had not studied it in school. He was exasperated when I gave up.
‘I’ll get a job,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you thinking I’m useless.’
He kissed me. ‘That would really help.’
I thought I might be able to work as Isabelle’s assistant and was a little taken aback when she balked at my suggestion. ‘Oh, Delia, this isn’t a hobby for me. I’m not Hannah. It’s my living and if I were ever in a position to take somebody on, it would have to be a person who was as enthusiastic and committed as I am, not someone who is simply bored.’ She softened the blow. ‘Look, a friend of mine has the franchise for a cosmetics company. They’re always looking for pretty faces to flog make-up at department stores. I’ll put in a word for you.’
At the interview, I thought it was going badly at first. ‘A perfect face,’ said Joyce, the interviewer, ‘but you don’t even need make-up. I don’t think you’re the right person to sell it.’
I was about to thank her for her time when she said, ‘You’re a perfume girl. Natural beauty sells perfume. And you can sell to men.’
I got a part-time job selling Ocean aftershave at a counter on the ground floor of Debenhams. It smelled nothing like the ocean. There was no training involved, apart from smiling and spraying, and telling the gormless fools how this particular scent suited them. I did well at that counter, and Peter was happy that we had another income, small as it was.
James was four years old when we went on our first holiday. Everyone else in our circle went on foreign holidays all the time. Back in Westport, two girls in my class had gone to Spain for a week and we were all insanely jealous. They’d come back looking like Americans, with teeth shining whiter out of tanned faces.
We went without James. I thought I could try hard with Peter on a week away, that maybe I could try to fall in love with him without the pressures of work or the needs of our son getting in the way. Peter thought it was a crazy idea because James had just started prep school. But Isabelle’s friend’s villa was only available for the second week in September and she had offered it to me at a knock-down rate. Peter thought our sudden absence would disturb James. I had arranged for Elizabeth to fly over to take care of the boy for the week, which I thought meant that we would be saving money on Chiara, but Chiara didn’t want to take a holiday and Peter said we couldn’t not pay her just because we were going away. I was able to counter Peter’s argument by pointing out that James would have Chiara and his doting granny. Then Peter balked at the cost of the flights. Peter was always making a fuss about money. We were only going to Nice. Daniel and Hannah took off to the Seychelles and Mauritius regularly, but Peter insisted they weren’t going on company money. Hannah’s mother was minted, apparently. I suspected that Daniel might be making a tidy profit from his drug dealing, but I wasn’t about to tell Peter that. I pleaded with him, impressing upon him the fact that he needed a holiday. He did. He was always
working and even Daniel helped me to persuade him to take a break. At the time, I thought Peter’s reluctance was because he couldn’t trust Daniel to run Russell Wilkes in his absence. He made every excuse under the sun to stay, but it was Elizabeth who finally convinced him. ‘You are going to work yourself to death, and then you’ll be no good to wife or child,’ she said.
Peter agreed but insisted on giving the phone number of the villa to all of his clients and taking a stack of files with him.
I had seen it on television and in magazines and other people’s photographs, but the reality of the blue Mediterranean was breathtaking. The azure in Côte d’Azur is richer and softer than any blue I have seen. The one-bed villa was on a hill above Villefranche, and several flights of vertiginous steps led down to the beach. Even Peter was taken by the beauty. The cloudless skies and bobbing yachts and sun-kissed people and the simplicity of bread, olives and cheese and cheap wine all worked their charms.
On our first day at the beach, Peter dived into the sea and swam out, beckoning me to join him. He was shocked to discover that I couldn’t swim. ‘How is that possible, when you grew up on an island, and you, of all people, are so infatuated by the sea?’
I was the daughter of a fisherman, and on the islands fishermen deliberately never learned to swim. ‘Drowning is a horrible death if you fight it,’ Daddy always said. ‘’Tis always better to let go.’ I tried to explain it to Peter, but he insisted that swimming was an enjoyable leisure activity and not just about survival, and set about teaching me how to do it. The water was almost lukewarm at this time of year and, despite my fears, I learned quickly in a matter of hours. When we emerged from the gentle waves, a small gathering of locals cheered and whistled, and I felt prouder than if I’d graduated as a doctor or an astronaut, and heart-achingly grateful to Peter for releasing this ability of mine.