The Litten Path

by James Clarke

  Which was apparently Clem’s cue to send over the joint, sniggering as Evie took another drag and exhaled a long plume of grass smoke, barely managing not to cough.

  A brass tin lay on the floor between the girls, packed with exotic-scented sativa skunk. Evie picked at one of the dense little buds, her toes kneading the luxurious rug. “God, your room’s huge,” she said at last. “Is that your horse, Clem?” She pointed to a watercolour painting of a child astride a mare. A mustard rosette was pinned on a blurred lapel.

  “I think so,” said Clem. “Although I don’t ride anymore. It makes my groin look like a pair of cooked steaks.”

  “God,” said Evie. “Your own horse. A room like this . . .”

  “It isn’t as big as Felix’s.”

  “. . . Marble dresser, walk-in-wardrobe.” Evie gestured at the array of tapes and records arranged in columns about the room. “You’re so lucky.”

  Clem blew her own twist of smoke into the compact London air.

  “What?” said Evie.

  “Nothing.”

  “What, Clem?”

  “Nothing.”

  Clem rose to the desk and fetched a copy of The Face magazine. She began to leaf through it, showing very little emotion as she digested a piece on Marvin Gaye’s funeral, all the while rotating with one foot a pleated ring she wore on the big toe of her other foot.

  Accepting the dismissal as once she never would have, Evie returned to the window and its vista of Mary Poppins rooftops. Here, as far as the eye could see, were the jagged barbicans protecting London from the rest of the country. She might well have shown too much esteem then; she was hardly dropping her aitches. Perhaps the grass was making her more conscious, more observant, or perhaps nothing fit any more and she was only just beginning to realise it. She knew Litten had changed her, but even listening to her Walkman and running a hand along the psoriasis of flaking wallpaper at Threndle House hadn’t made her feel this poor. Clem’s lovely profile. This fecund city. How easy it was to lose yourself. How the bottom could fall so totally out of everything.

  Although even Evie could see that Clemmie wasn’t the fairest of comparisons to make with herself. Clemmie was the eldest daughter of Tony Dallas, the hedge fund manager for AGP, an asset management firm with offices in London, Hong Kong, New York, Jersey and Sydney. Tony Dallas was a prominent member of the Premier Group, the Conservative party supporters’ club responsible for tonight’s fundraiser. For an annual fee and subsequent donations, Premier Group members were invited to dinners with senior party officials, post-PMQ lunches, drinks receptions, events and important campaign launches. It was said Tony Dallas was a shoo-in for a knighthood.

  And her father? The patsy, the dupe, the stooge? Evie had to laugh, and so she did.

  “What’s so funny?” Clem said, finally shutting her magazine.

  “Oh, nothing. Nothing’s funny.”

  “Actually, everything is.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  The girls giggled, the ice between them seeming to liquefy at last.

  “I can’t believe your timing. Are you sure your mother didn’t tell you about tonight?” Clem said, rolling another joint.

  “Honestly, no.” Evie shook her head, the grass she’d already smoked causing her to stray closer to the shuttered trapdoors in her head. She didn’t believe she had ever met anybody like Bram, and was currently picturing his tanned knees, wrinkled at head height as she awaited him on the bed. How she loved to hate what she loved. Feared she’d never be happy. Wouldn’t let herself.

  “Any survival tips?” she asked.

  “Haven’t a clue. I don’t keep up with things like that.” Clem was supine on her side. “I only turn up for the cocktails.”

  Now it was Evie’s turn to deliver the condescending look.

  “All right,” Clem shot back. “I do like to dress up, and laughing at those walruses and turkeys is a hoot . . . But as for the gossip, I’m nearly as out of it as you are. I’m only just home from college.”

  Even more since she’d moved away, Evie had gleaned that when you live in any world it begins to permeate you: it’s a kind of seepage. For example, she had a soft spot for the sincerity of the country now that she had never had when living in the city. And similarly, as a child of a politician, she had spent her whole life steeped in the illusive rites of omission, ambition and indirection, so this thinking was embedded in her, too. Which was why she could spot falsehoods from a mile away, and why she was certain now that Clemmie was lying.

  The speed with which Clem changed the subject confirmed Evie’s suspicions. “The party’s at Archie Wethered’s,” she said. “Do you know the Wethereds?”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “God, you have been out of it.” Clem raised the joint. “To the bucolic life. A purer way.”

  “I’d like to see how you’d do up there.”

  Clem arched an eyebrow. “Fuck that. Arch is in retail. He’s just branched into pharmacies. You should see his house.”

  “Influential, then.”

  “They say half the cabinet’s been round. Even the prime minister.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “I could tell you a thing or two about Arch.”

  But Evie wasn’t bothered. She felt snugly high, so much so that she wasn’t particularly interested when the next joint came her way. She set it on the corner of the coffee table, balanced diagonally so each tip hung above the carpet.

  “He’s stepped up to the crease,” she said.

  “He’s paid to join the Premier Group and annual membership doesn’t come cheap. Plus he’s hosting the garden party, so I’d say Arch hasn’t so much stepped up as is captaining the team entirely. Is it that dead where you’ve been that you wouldn’t have heard of the Wethereds? Have you been trussed up in a dungeon all this time or something?”

  Barely an hour into the visit and already the asides were coming thick. Still, Evie couldn’t deny that the hidden arbours like this, the world of the Dallas’s and the Wethereds, were where things happened, where things felt safe. And who wouldn’t want a slice of these generous comforts?

  “I suppose all the Who-do-you-know stuff does feel slightly immaterial these days,” she admitted.

  “Immaterial?”

  “You know, petty. It’s old-fashioned, isn’t it?”

  “Jesus,” said Clem. “I’ll call the doctor.”

  Speaking of old-fashioned, Evie had once asked Bram about his background. He’d told her that his father Gerry was a farmer, which her own father had found hugely amusing, because Sir Greville Guiseley was actually the eighth holder of a baronetcy that could be traced back to the seventeenth century. His stock was worth upwards of ten million pounds and included two thousand acres of arable land, Threndle House itself – inherited from his deceased wife, Margot – a stately home outside of Harrogate, his house in London and a hall near Whitby; all of which went to Bram upon his father’s death. The hereditary peerage must have come as something of a bonus, Clive joked.

  “So is there any cock up there or what?” asked Clem, when they were a little drunker.

  “God, no.”

  “You hesitated.”

  “Didn’t.”

  “You’ve found some sport, Evie. I can tell.”

  “Really I haven’t.”

  “Balls,” said Clem. “I can still read you even if you have been off getting a farmer’s tan. Which suits you, by the way. Manure-brown.”

  “You do realise we don’t have to look like Victorian dolls any more, Clem.”

  Clem finished and docked out the second joint. Her room was hazy, smoke filtering from the skylight rather than into the house. She removed her t-shirt and shorts and faced Evie in her bra and knickers.

  “Give me a hand with this, would you.”

  Clem sl
ipped her lingerie off and went to select a dress, now naked. She was so decisive. While she stepped into a coconut-white halter-neck, Evie stole a handful of grass from the tin and shoved it in her pocket.

  “Breathe in, so I can do it up.”

  “Breathe in,” said Clem, playfully slapping Evie’s wrist as her zip was fastened. Her figure was sickening in its way. So it was with pretty people.

  “What do you think?” she said, popping another bottle, red.

  “There is someone, actually,” Evie said.

  “Go on.” Clem began her make-up.

  “Someone local.”

  “Horse and cart? Build walls?”

  “No—”

  “A brooding landowner then. Ha ha.”

  “Oh shut up. He’s a year younger than me. Just left school. He does brood though.”

  The fact Lawrence was a schoolboy seemed to surprise Clem. “That dress suits you,” said Evie.

  “What’re you wearing?”

  “I didn’t bring anything. Everything’s been a bit slap-dash.”

  “That’s the best way to approach it. Take your pick from any of these if you like,” Clem said, entering her wardrobe and flicking through the hangers like a rolodex, removing dresses and laying them on the beanbag. Evie recalled Duncan remarking on Lawrence dressing from the penny rail at the market.

  “Do you like him?” said Clem.

  “Who?”

  “What did I say about being coy? Your rustic. Tell me about him or you’re going to the party as you are.”

  “He’s a miner’s son.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Really.”

  “Evie, that’s bloody brilliant.”

  “I can’t decide if I like him or if I’m just bored. Probably a bit of both. Maybe neither.”

  “Maybe all of the above. What does he look like?”

  “Well, he’s not really my type, but he has a quality. I think he’d do anything I asked.”

  “Oh, why didn’t you bring him?”

  “I’d have had a hard time. I don’t have his number and I don’t know where he lives – we’ve just been meeting in the woods. I think he’s embarrassed. Besides, I haven’t seen him for ages. We were supposed to meet up the other week . . . I didn’t show.”

  “Cow.”

  “He hasn’t been back. I’m not sure why I didn’t go.”

  “Washing your hair, I expect.”

  “Washing Duncan’s, more like.”

  “You always did make me laugh.”

  “Pass the wine. Thanks.”

  “Certainly sounds interesting,” said Clem, brushing her hair. “Tell me something else.”

  Lawrence. There wasn’t much Evie knew about the only person in Litten she had allowed herself to meet, which made it all the more strange that she found herself telling Clem about him now. She said, “He lies all the time, and he has this spot in his head, a cubbyhole he goes to. It’s absorbing, really. He just goes silent. He’s desperate, really.”

  “He sounds almost as much hard work as you.”

  Evie threw a pillow, giggling as it ricocheted comically off Clem’s head. Clem collapsed dramatically onto the carpet, laughing too. It was refreshing to be a teenager again. As the taper of Clem’s dress reached the stairs, her dark wine left tidelines up the inner slopes of her glass.

  The Swarsbys and the Dallas’s shared a car west across London. Evie wondered how her mother had been promoted to this social stratum. In all the time her parents were together, they seemed only to mix with other low-level party members and civil servants. Bram was as high as they ever got. He and Clive were at Brasenose together, although the way Bram treated her father – Evie grew to realise – made the friendship seem like more of an act, an avuncular benevolence on Bram’s part. Yet here was Evie’s mother, living in luxury and flirting with millionaires.

  Evie wasn’t sure if the venue they arrived at was Archie Wethered’s house, or if the property had been hired for the occasion. Either way it looked fit for a ducal residency, a stately home garlanded by magnificent wisteria, an enormous glass cupola protruding above the lobby and significant acreage for grounds.

  Duncan led the way towards the main doors. He looked very grown-up in his dinner suit, striding along the rouge carpet fastened down by brass runners, up the stairs to be greeted by the staff.

  They were served champagne and directed towards a marquee around the back of the property. Orbs of light were strung gaily from the pine trees, crystal balls that told no future. The band played swing-time even though it far was too early for dancing. All the women were layered, lithe and shoulder-draped. They held large purses and let their necks show, their men tucked and pressed, crisply defined in black and white.

  Far less shapely than Clem, Evie had snacked before departing but was terribly aware of her conspicuous bones, her exposed clavicle. The chicken fillets felt strange against her breasts, fleshy beneath the turquoise dress. She ate a ruthless number of canapés, partly to compensate, and partly because she was so bloody stoned. It was also, in part, for the anonymity of purpose, to give herself something to do, because being high made her feel like everyone was looking at her. It made her think that they knew the things only she knew about herself: the things she had done that made her dislike herself the most.

  She touched her hair. It was crunchy. She had another drink. Thankfully Duncan was coming this way, because there, down the other end of the shingle path, was Bramwell Guiseley.

  Evie ducked behind a bush that had been clipped into a double spiral. Bram wore a cummerbund similar to the one in that bloody photo that was still cracked after the break-in back in March. Evie swallowed her wine; it was sharp. She turned to face her brother.

  “What are you doing behind the topiary?” said Duncan.

  “There’s Bram.”

  “So he is.”

  “Do you think he knows we’re here?”

  “Mummy told him we were coming.”

  “You’ve spoken to him?”

  “Course I haven’t.”

  Evie would never cry over Bram, but something nearly happened as she monitored him now. Pallid as winter, even in summer, she had never been paid attention to before, never truly considered, not until Bram. He had given her books and blended compliments into their conversations. He had listened to her, written expansive letters in response to her own juvenile salvos, offered her his opinion on intimate matters, his advice, crediting her with the sort of intelligence she had not known she possessed, making her think of herself and regard herself, become aware. And then there were those times at his clandestine flat, Bram’s hot tongue upon her neck mere moments after she first put her hand on his knee. She had been more grown-up than ever, a woman who knew her own mind. The skrike of gulls on the Thames. That single white hair sprouting amid the otherwise dark thatch on Bram’s chest.

  Evie realised Duncan was staring at her, and knew that she had revealed a part of herself, a visible wound, and that her brother had no respect for people who gave away everything.

  “You’re on something,” he said.

  “I’m not.”

  “When are you going to stop letting this family down, Evie?”

  She didn’t know.

  It was a short walk to the toilet to cover her mouth and scream. The swing doors fanned her face and then she was entering the end cubicle under the frosted window. Feeling this way about Bram, it was as if she’d been mugged and couldn’t go past the spot where it had happened. A consensual fling should not result in such self-loathing. Sex Evie had occasionally instigated, even if she never finished it, was still under her control. She rested her head on the cistern and breathed. Developing feelings was crude and childish, becoming entrammelled with the first person that ever made her feel understood even more so. How obvious she had been. Clemmie and
the other girls took lovers. They were never taken themselves.

  She returned to the garden. Everyone was clapping as Archie Wethered finished his welcome speech and stepped aside so the auction could be set up. Glossy programmes had been arranged on a nearby lectern. The auction lots included vintage posters from victorious Conservative elections gone by, a luxury chalet holiday in Austria, a grouse hunting trip to Scotland, a night’s exclusive use of a private members’ club in West London, a bronze statue of Winston Churchill and numerous items of jewellery. Evie was interested to see that activities with various powerful government officials were also on offer – afternoon tea, dinner dates and shopping trips – all of them available to the highest vested bidder.

  After that would come dinner, speeches and dancing. The menu had been displayed on a side table: grapefruit stuffed with crab and avocado, consommé, roast sirloin of beef, Norfolk turkey, breaded lamb cutlets, cider-glazed gammon and vol-au-vents. Green salad, tomato salad, Waldorf salad, French bean salad, sweetcorn salad, something called pilaff, new potatoes, the whole lot followed by a dessert of orange sorbet, strawberry gateaux and black cherry flan. After that came cheese and biscuits, tea and coffee and wine, wine, wine, wine, wine.

  Another drink, another, why not? Evie watched the auction proceed and thought of the world she had left behind, a place where the cloud canopy never seemed to part for very long. Every day in Yorkshire there were processions of police vehicles on the pit road near Threndle House, battalions of urgent white and blue heading towards the locals who stood together outside of their place of work and other pits like it. These picketers staged protests and held their banners aloft. They claimed to fight for their jobs when, for the most part, it wasn’t even their pits that were being threatened. It seemed absurd that these people would put themselves through that for one another. Although that was the immensity of it, Evie supposed, the power of collective action. No wonder the government wanted to stamp it out.