Come and Tell Me Some Lies (15 page)

We arrived at West Runton, a straggling seaside town where the golf course dropped straight over the cliffs and into the sea. In the heart of the town the façade of a gabled house loomed over bungalows, elaborate pediments throwing wild shadows across the boarded-up windows. Sprayed graffiti sprawled drunkenly, bawling barbarous messages at passers-by. ‘Fuck the Queen' and ‘God is doing time' blazed in our headlights as Merry-Curl parked the car. Behind the Queen Anne ruin a concrete building squatted; the dance-hall in which bands played to heaving audiences of punks and skinheads every weekend.

We walked to the ticket office past two green-haired boys wearing studded dog collars who sat hunched, breathing into crumpled plastic bags. I jumped as one keeled over in our
path. He lay, back arched like an acrobat, eyes half closed, skin sticky with a sheen of sweat. Inside, the stage loomed dark across a floor empty except for a few plastic glasses. Shadowy movements in the gloom and the flare of matches illuminating pale, black-eyed faces were the only suggestions of an audience. The band plunged on to the stage. The floor swarmed. Forward they came, jostling leather-clad punks, hair in fiery crests or soaped in slimy spikes which trickled a sluggish wake down their backs. Faces smeared with kohl and pierced with safety-pins, lips wet and red, were turned up to the singer as he screamed his first song, almost swallowing the microphone.

From the other side of the room a roaring mass of bald, pasty figures stomped towards the stage. Their denim uniform flapped filthy, wounds in the fabric sewn together with raw red stitching and scarred by lumpy plastic tubes. The two waves surged towards the three of us, still and small by the stage. Brodie climbed on to a chair, unperturbed by the thrashing flesh around him. Merry-Curl left us to get a drink, and I relaxed a little and watched the band, enjoying the sensation of loud music vibrating through me. Someone pushed me, then someone else. I looked round and was terrified. I was some distance away from Brodie, and the punks were falling back in a swooping line like a drawn curtain. Brodie was beached on his chair and a steady cord of skinheads advanced towards him, led by a stout, short man. The man's brow gleamed where it was studded with metal squares; he scuttled forward, bent low like Quasimodo, mouth open in a silent roar, arms spread wide, waving half a smashed bottle in wild arcs. The band stopped playing, and the singer yelled into his microphone. ‘Stop.
What the hell is going on here?' No one took any notice. Dropping their instruments, the band tiptoed off the stage. The skinhead line fragmented and roared towards the punks. Brodie remained isolated and still on his chair, white-faced, arms stiff at his side, a martyr preparing to be burned at the stake. I expected every second that he would fall, drown in the heaving human sea, but he didn't. Somehow I was at the edge of the crowd, which slowed for a moment as people thrust their way through the door and burst out into the street. I ran back to Brodie through the empty hall. All the skinheads had gone. We were alone in the vast room, listening to muted shouts and screams and the approaching wail of police cars.

‘Do you think the band will come on again?' Brodie smiled lopsidedly.

Merry-Curl came back. ‘What's happened? Why has everyone gone?' He balanced our drinks on the edge of the stage. ‘What have I missed?'

‘I think we'd better go.' I was suddenly heavy with exhaustion and relief.

At home, Daddy and Flook were painting a fort for Dan. Flook, sleeves rolled back to his elbows, his face daubed with green and silver paint, had forgotten his anger. Daddy shook his head and looked intently at us as Brodie and I, with occasional interruptions from Merry-Curl, told of our adventure. The last wisps of fear evaporated like morning mist as we sat in the playroom drinking tea. Daddy dipped a warring knight in his tin of gold paint. ‘Well, my loves, you were lucky, very lucky. But tell me, did you enjoy the music?'

Brodie's face lit up and he leaned forward over the table,
poised to list its many virtues. Merry-Curl and I retreated to the kitchen where Mummy sat reading. The last of Honey's puppies, a handsome buck whom we had named T-Shirt Smith because his white front legs protruded from his soft black torso like arms from a T-shirt, became vivacious in the presence of Merry-Curl. ‘I'd love a dog,' said Merry-Curl, stroking T-Shirt into frenzies of delight by tickling his ears. Emboldened by his evening's experiences, Merry-Curl was expansive. ‘My parents would go mad if I told them about the fight,' he said to me. ‘Your family is really cool.'

Even Imogen admired Daddy. She came to stay one weekend and Daddy gave her a book about medieval courtship. ‘Tell me, my dear, do you dream of salvation in shining armour?' he asked her, and I sighed, exasperated by his capacity for nonsense.

Imogen was captivated. ‘Do all poets talk like your father? Will he write a poem about me?'

‘Don't be ridiculous,' I snapped and dragged her up to my room to try on dresses for a party.

Patrick rushed in from the back yard banging the doors, pushing through with an armful of wood for the fire.

‘There is nothing, nothing, between here and the North Pole.' His breath puffed white clouds in the cold air and he escaped into his warm study to work. Eleanor stayed, feeding the children, feeding the hens, feeding the dogs and cats and never seeing a soul. There was no money to pay a babysitter, so she could never leave the house alone unless she put Va Va, Brodie and Flook under Patrick's vague surveillance.

The day she went to Norwich to the hairdresser they found a tin of purple paint. Patrick lay in the yard beneath the Mercedes, the bulk of three coats wedging him secure from the whistling wind. Brodie hit the paint-pot lid with a hammer and a jet of foaming violet spurted in his face. Laughing, he smeared dirty hands across his eyes, spreading purple into his hair. ‘Let's paint the pump,' suggested Va Va, and they set to work. The wind shrieked, but they were silent at their toil. Patrick, suspicious too late, came out from under the car to see where the children were. Flook was investigating the last of the paint and upended the tin over his boots.

‘This is a goddam mess,' Patrick yelled. ‘Your Mummy is going to be very cross unless we can clear the whole lot up.' He swept Flook into the house, a bright trickle of paint following them, and stood him in the kitchen sink. Va Va and Brodie scrubbed the pump, mauve water flowing at their feet. Wet through, they shivered, brushes clutched in numb hands, waiting for Patrick to tell them they had done enough.

He came out, followed by Flook wrapped in a towel. ‘Now this is good work,' he puffed on his cigarette, ‘but Mummy will see the paint.' Three pairs of anxious eyes implored. He laughed. ‘We'll have to paint black over it so it looks like it did before.'

The pump looked smart with a new coat of black paint. Eleanor returned, Va Va saw her coming up the drive and shouted a warning to Patrick.

‘Quick, quick,' he yelled, mock horror in his voice, ‘into your places.'

The children shuffled on to their chairs, shifting plates on the table so that each of them had bread and butter and a cup of milk in front of them when Eleanor came in.

Much changed that year, especially Brodie's and Flook's hairstyles. Each week brought a new patch of bald scalp to gleam beneath peaks of rainbowed hair. Mummy walked into the bathroom during a bleaching session. Flook, bare to the waist, sat on a chair in front of the mirror, his hair half white and half invisible, tucked away in neat silver foil pouches. Poppy and Dan perched on the edge of the bath, holding strips of foil and watching, absorbed, as Brodie worked.

‘Jesus Christ! What are you doing to him?' Mummy screamed. Brodie jumped, spilling peroxide in a glut across Flook's naked shoulders. Flook leapt up roaring. Dan and Poppy flung down their foil and slunk out guiltily.

‘This stuff is agony. Get it off me, get it off me!' Flook plunged his torso into the bath.

Behind him, Mummy rocked back and forth in rage, eyes narrowed, her lips tight and puckered white. ‘How can you be so stupid? Thank God it's the summer holidays. Do you realize that in term-time you would be expelled for this, quite apart from the unutterable damage you are doing to your hair. And
it looks ghastly.' She stalked out, slamming the door so hard that one of the panels fell out.

‘I don't see what she's making such a fuss about.' Brodie continued to unwrap the foil parcels. Flook sat still, tensed like an old lady at the hairdresser's. ‘We've been dyeing our hair for months.'

‘I don't think she's ever really taken it in before,' replied Flook.

The boys told me about this row the next day. I had been out. Suddenly I was out a lot. Imogen's inexhaustible social energy and her desire to have someone to giggle with made her invite me to the many parties she was asked to that summer. I stayed with her for a weekend which grew into a week, enjoying the world away from my family and absorbing luxury with heady greed.

Everything at Imogen's house operated like clockwork. Her mother drifted into the walled garden carrying a trug, and beheaded limp roses while Imogen and I lay by the stinging blue pool, inhaling the scent of honeysuckle mingled with chlorine. Delicious lunches of cold salmon and crisp salad appeared like magic at one o'clock, and no one ever came and told us to feed the hens or muck out the stables. Imogen's brother Edward was given a little blue car and he taught me to drive it, trundling through a hayfield, weaving erratically between vast cotton-reel bales.

At night I lay in a sprigged bower, stretching my limbs over stiff linen sheets and looking up at the ruby canopy of a four-poster bed. I wallowed in soft comfort and thought of my
room at home: the slanted ceiling dotted with Blu-Tack where my horse pictures had fallen down; the bed, its chipped paint surrounding a gaping hole in the wickerwork, excavated, I was sure, by busy mice as I slept. I thought of the cobwebs rattling with the last throes of flies, of the bathroom where the taps in the basin had not worked since I was four, and of the fridge full of nothing more sustaining than a pool of milk spilt from an overturned bottle. I tried to think of something my home had in common with Imogen's; some small corner of it which mirrored the smooth, structured existence at Wallby Hall. There, flowers swanned on graceful stems above gleaming polished tables, and a lady in a blue nylon coat, a yellow duster in her pocket, vaccumed and scrubbed every morning. At home there were dog hairs on the carpet and springs rearing like serpents from the sofas. Mummy picked bunches of wild flowers, thrusting cow parsley and hogweed into buckets and urns and placing them, towering and sweet-scented, on a mantelpiece where they stayed until they had become ghosts, skeletal and colourless, with the scent of old hay. No one cleaned our house. Mummy once had a vacuum cleaner, a green globe which coasted proudly along the landing for a week after Trixie had donated it. But Mummy failed to love it, and one day negligence toppled it down the stairs and on to the flagstones in the hall with a splintering crunch, followed by a high-pitched moan. After that it would only exhale air, and soon became a home for Martians in the playroom.

The only element of Imogen's house which faintly echoed Mildney was the library. Imogen's grandfather had collected books, and his passion was ranked neatly from floor to ceiling in
a high panelled room. Imogen never went in there, dismissing the books as ‘really ancient and dull', but I loved it. It reminded me of home, where every corridor and room was panelled with books piled one upon another.

At lunch, talking to Imogen's father about his books as his moustache bounced above his masticating jaws, I oozed superiority when he said, ‘Of course, the library is very fine, but nothing to the one your father must have.'

‘Well, we haven't got a room full of books like your one,' I answered cautiously, longing but not daring to lie, ‘but there are a lot there, and I think Daddy has read every one of them, and Mummy too.'

‘Extraordinary,' said Imogen's father, and the moustache sat inert for a second while he wiped it with his napkin, like a good dog waiting for praise. ‘I only read the
Shooting Times
myself, but they always say “horses for courses”, don't they?' The moustache shot off again in pursuit of a spoonful of summer pudding.

Filing into the Drinking Room to give Patrick a good-night kiss on a Saturday, the children lined up in front of him.

‘My angel, thou art precious,' he said. Va Va squirmed. Ben and Joe, the boys' best friends, were staying and she was sure that their father didn't talk like Patrick.

‘Talk properly, Daddy,' Brodie whispered, and Patrick let his shoulders droop.

‘Dear God. Is there no freedom from policing in a man's own home?' He smiled an annoying soppy smile and stroked Brodie's hair. ‘Brave child. Thou wilt break my heart.' Brodie and Va Va sighed. It was useless. Patrick winked at Ben. ‘Tell me, young man, exactly how old are you now?'

‘Seven,' said Ben.

‘Seven. It is my belief that all children should remain seven for ever and ever.'

‘What about me, Daddy?' Va Va interrupted, anxious. ‘I'm eight.'

Patrick hugged her. ‘You, heart of my heart, are a sophisticate, and sophisticates cannot be controlled.' Va Va was pleased by this. She savoured the word, whispering it as she went up to
bed. It was a good word, it sounded like lace and scent and cigarettes. It sounded so feminine that Va Va fancied the word wore lipstick and had long curling red hair.

Patrick looked at Eleanor as she ushered the children out. ‘Dear heart, do not allow these bambini in here when I am in my cups.'

Imogen and I were to go to a party that evening. Sitting in her room preparing ourselves, we discussed who might be there. I still nurtured a secret desire to meet and spellbind Tom the racehorse rider. I had seen him several times, but had never dared speak to him, terrified that my infatuation might be visible and mocked.