A Surrey State of Affairs (30 page)

  
TUESDAY, JULY 8

It is exactly one month until my fifty-fourth birthday. I wonder whether I should start dropping mild hints as to what sorts of presents would be appropriate, or whether such things are beneath me.

The problem is that, left to his own devices, Jeffrey once lurched from forgetting one year to giving me a necklace made from pink diamonds and jet the next. I can only hope it was his secretary’s choice. I stored it away in my underwear drawer, where it keeps snagging my 30 Derniers. After that it was an oven glove; then a miniature foot spa. Sophie can be equally misguided. Last year she bought me a disgusting book called
Belle du Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl.
Rupert, at least, can be relied upon to buy my favorite perfume or a smart neck scarf. He always seems
to find just the thing to compliment my complexion. If only the rest of the family would follow his lead.

  
WEDNESDAY, JULY 9

No sign of Gerald at bell ringing last night. I hope the combined forces of Jeffrey and Mad Marvin have not frightened him off indefinitely. There are only six weeks left before the championships and we can’t afford to lose any of our ringers, no matter how rhythmically challenged. Miss Hughes seemed to blame me, and trod on my toe twice while executing a Plain Bob Major. She must weigh at least 14 stone. I have a livid bruise showing through my cream espadrilles. I suppose one must suffer for one’s art.

10:30 P.M.

I am shaking. What have I done to deserve this? What? I taught Sophie right from wrong, I read her Ladybird Classics from the age of three, I gave her an apple a day, I taught her that she could achieve whatever she wanted if she worked hard. How can this have happened?

At nine
P.M.
this evening, just as I was watching David Attenborough’s
The Life of Mammals
and Jeffrey was snoozing in his armchair, the telephone rang. It was Tanya. “Turn on your TV,” she said in an odd voice.

“I have,” I replied. “I’m watching a baby bat learn to fly.”

“Wrong channel,” she said urgently. “Put it on channel four.”

By this point Jeffrey had woken up and was looking at me with a bemused expression. I needed his help to locate channel 4. Then we found it. We both stared. I thought for a moment that it was some kind of practical joke. We looked again. “Connie? Are you there?” echoed Tanya’s voice, small and remote, from where the receiver lay. Jeffrey hung it up. We stared at the screen again.
The last piece of a monstrous jigsaw clicked into place. Sophie was not working on a documentary. Sophie was in an experimental new reality television program—mentioned only yesterday in a disapproving editorial in the newspaper—called
Dungeon.
Thanks to this said editorial, I am aware that the program involves twelve people being held in a ghoulish medieval-style dungeon who will be given challenges to win the right to daylight or food other than gruel. The “dunce of the day” will be put in replica plastic stocks. I am aware that it is only the latest in a long line of such programs, which are essentially cruel cynical freak shows allowing nonentities to build careers out of playing strip poker and weeping copiously at the mistreatment that they enthusiastically signed up for.

And there was my daughter, sitting on her prison bunk in her strapless purple Topshop minidress, giving a dwarf a foot massage.

  
THURSDAY, JULY 10

For a few soft, swirly moments when I woke up this morning, I forgot that anything was amiss. I wondered if it would be warm enough to go to Church Flowers without a cardigan and whether Jeffrey would have made himself coffee yet or waited for me to do it, as usual. Then I remembered.

A good night’s sleep is meant to make most things better, but not, alas, all. Sophie was on
Dungeon.
As I lay there underneath my white cotton summer duvet set, Sophie was lying in a strange, crepuscular cell filled with stranger people, under the blinkless gaze of the television cameras. I got up and ran downstairs. Jeffrey had already left. He took things more calmly than I did last night, sitting ramrod straight on the sofa with a double whiskey while I paced and pulled out my hair; but he must be ruffled to have skimped on breakfast.

Natalia was emptying the dishwasher as I walked into the
kitchen. I am sure she was humming the theme song of the accursed program, as if to mock me. I left the house without talking to her, and hurried straight to the newsagent in the village, counting my paces and breathing in through my nose then out through my mouth in an effort to calm myself down. Rupert had called before the dreaded program had even finished last night, and had told me that I had to brace myself for a lot of publicity in the newspapers, but that it would all blow over in the end. And so, for the first time since the death of Princess Diana, I bought a tabloid. Not just one, but three: the new series had made the front page of the
Sun,
the
Mirror,
and the
Mail.
I couldn’t look Niral, the soft-spoken newsagent whose son is the same age as Sophie, in the eye as I handed over my change.

Once home, I shut myself in the conservatory, put on my pink rubber gloves, and turned the pages. You can imagine my feelings when I saw that Sophie’s official picture showed her angling her head with a coy look in her eye and sticking her pierced tongue out. With a hammering heart, I learned that her fellow contestants included the dwarf, a transvestite yoga teacher, a lap dancer from Brazil, an eighteen-year-old public school boy with a
Brideshead
obsession and a teddy bear named Aloysius (or “posh weirdo with Latin cuddly,” as the
Sun
put it), a lesbian council worker whose job was to fill potholes, a Peter Andre impersonator named Phil, and a physics teacher with a Mussolini mustache.

It was all too much. The knowledge that my daughter’s picture was being ogled by millions, that she was right now being broadcast via the Internet to perverts from Japan to Gibraltar. It was bad enough that time she wore a miniskirt past the Epsom Common Working Man’s Club. The names and faces swam in front of my eyes. I called Jeffrey. His mobile was turned off. I called
his office line; his secretary told me he was in a meeting with Andrew and the CEO of Hubris Consulting. I ordered her to interrupt the meeting and tell him to read the
Sun.
In desperation, I called the number that Sophie had left me. It rang twice, and a harried voice said, “Golden Noodle Restaurant. How can I help?” I hung up, tears of frustration building in my eyes. I ran up to Jeffrey’s study, logged on to the Internet, and searched for a channel 4 contact number. After an hour of listening to recorded messages and grating music and being passed from pillar to post, I finally got hold of a producer. She sounded about twelve, and told me—in a voice that skipped between Received Pronunciation and Estuary English—that as Sophie was over eighteen there was nothing I could do, and that I should be proud that she’d made the final cut.

I hung up and spent ten dark minutes with my head in my hands, crying. And then I did what I always do when adversity overwhelms me: I recited Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” ten times, then formed a mental list of people less fortunate than me, beginning with the workers who have to remove roadkill from the side of the motorway, and ending with Miss Hughes.

10 P.M.

Jeffrey and I have just watched the latest episode of
Dungeon.
How could we not? The imagination is a terrible thing; it is worse to guess at what images of one’s daughter are being beamed around the world than it is to confront the mortifying reality head-on. Not that this was an easy task.

The “cell mates,” as I am apparently meant to think of them, were set a challenge. They were given an enormous hamper of fruit, a white sheet, and a print of Botticelli’s
Venus,
and told to re-create the painting as best as they could by arranging the fruit
on the sheet. An art historian would decide whether they had passed or failed. Jeffrey and I looked at each other. Why had our daughter subjected herself to this circus?

At least it turned out that her art A-level had not been wasted. Under the flickering light of replica candles, she had the sensible idea of positioning herself on the sheet in the Venus pose while Phil, the Peter Andre impersonator, drew around her in crayon, to give them an outline to work from. I wish he hadn’t stuck to her outline quite so closely. After that, everyone set to work with the fruit, and it all went fairly smoothly until a fierce argument erupted between the council worker, who felt that Venus’s bosom would best be represented by a pair of grapefruits, and the lap dancer, who wanted to use melons. Peter Andre intervened in favor of melons. I was annoyed to see that Jeffrey was silently nodding along with him. The end result, I have to admit, was rather impressive, and I felt certain that they would carry the challenge until, at the very last moment, the transvestite added a most unfortunately positioned banana as a protest against “monolithic Western gender clichés” and the judge shook his head in disgust. There was to be no daylight; and they would eat gruel for dinner. At least Sophie has some practice for this from her grandmother’s porridge.

  
FRIDAY, JULY 11

Dear Lord. The tabloids today are full of photos of Phil, the Peter Andre impersonator, with his crayon next to Sophie’s thigh and headlines like B
OTTY-CELLI’S
V
EN-ARSE
. Even the
Daily Mail
had the same picture, though its caption was the slightly less objectionable “The art of love?”

Once again, I handed my change over to Niral from a clammy palm, hardly daring to raise my eyes to his. He must know. Everyone must know.

As if to confirm this impression, as soon as I’d left the newsagent my mobile rang. It was Bridget.

“God, Constance, are you okay? That is your Sophie, isn’t it?” she said. For a moment I was tempted to lie, to delude her, and myself, that the pierced adolescent in that narcissists’ madhouse bore no relation whatsoever to my cherished daughter.

“Yes, it’s my Sophie,” I said in a defeated voice instead. It was futile. I listened to Bridget try to cheer me up for a few minutes, then ended the conversation and put my mobile back in my pocket. It rang again, almost immediately. Tanya.