Come and Tell Me Some Lies (3 page)

Brodie, Flook and I glared back at her. ‘You know we hate Drinking Evenings,' I muttered, but Mummy didn't hear me; she was helping Poppy down from the table where she sat marooned among the debris of tea.

Patrick wrote his first poem when he was nine. As a small boy he read precociously and widely. He spent his lunch money on poems and, inspired, wrote his own with great delight. When he was eighteen he sent a poem to David Archer, a publisher with a tiny bookshop in Parton Street. Archer invited him to tea. Nervously entering the chaotic, crammed shop, Patrick saw before him a pale young man swaying high upon a stepladder. ‘Be an angel, hand me that hammer,' said Archer and Patrick did so. Archer brought out Patrick's first volume of poetry and introduced him to T.S. Eliot. Eliot asked Patrick to send some poems to him at Faber, and a few days later a letter arrived confirming that Patrick was to be published by them. At twenty, Patrick had leapt over the straight blue line which in those days took young men from public school to Oxford and then into publishing and being published. He became famous.

Like Eleanor but twenty years earlier, Liza found Patrick's poems in a bookshop, read them and fell in love. She wrote to him, offering money and an escape from Japan, where he was teaching at a university when war broke out. He accepted and sailed across the Pacific to California where Liza met him.
They began a love affair which was to span almost two decades and produce Dominic, Helen and Theresa.

Patrick and Liza rarely lived together, and never married. During a lull in their relationship Patrick met an
ingénue
called Nancy with a fleece of blonde hair and round blue eyes like baubles on a Christmas tree. They got married and left London for a cottage in Sussex where the roses were overblown and the tap spewed sand as well as water. Nancy wanted to write, but she wanted to have babies more. Patrick forbade her to become pregnant. Nancy defied him. He drank a bottle of whisky to fortify himself, then forced her to sit in a scalding bath while he poured gin down her protesting throat. She was young and scared and she forgave him. He tortured her, a maniacal curiosity roused in him to see how much she would take.

One morning he called her into the garden. Sacrificial in her white nightdress, Nancy stood in the orchard against a bowed apple tree. Patrick picked up an apple from the grass and placed it on her head. He took a bow and arrow and, assuring her that he had been practising, shot the apple through the core. She could take no more. Days later Nancy ran away into the arms of Patrick's best friend, and they disappeared. Raging and bereft, Patrick left the house in pursuit of her. He didn't shut the front door or turn off the wireless. He went and never came back. He drove up and down England searching for Nancy but no one dared tell him where or with whom she had gone. In desperation he went to see her mother in Harlow. She tried to shut the door in his face, but he forced his way into her kitchen. Seeing his grief and his determination, Nancy's mother relented a little and made him a cup of tea.

‘Where is Nancy?'

‘I cannot tell you. I will never tell you.'

Patrick glowered and lit a cigarette. He looked up at the glinting litter of china and silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece. Propped against a small mauve shepherdess was an envelope. Patrick was sitting at the far end of the room but he could make out the familiar shape of Nancy's name. Her mother made tea and talked stiltedly of the route back to London and the weather. Patrick answered, his eyes fixed on the envelope, straining to read the address. Nancy's mother saw the direction of his gaze and continued to talk. Patrick left. He never found Nancy.

Patrick returned to Liza, but the affair dwindled and by the time he met Eleanor it had been reduced to an uneasy friendship. Liza sustained cool hostilities during Eleanor's pregnancy, but when Va Va was born, unbent a little.

In the years that followed, the tangled relationship between Liza, Eleanor and Patrick unravelled and the two women became close friends, excluding Patrick from their long late-night conversations. ‘I could never live with him, not even when the children were small. I don't know how you can remain sane,' Liza said to Eleanor time and time again. When Patrick dragged her from parties by her arm, her collar, her hair, and threw wine over men she spoke to, Eleanor vowed she would leave him for ever. But she stayed.

Every moment that I was not at school or asleep I spent with Shalimar. He had come on my ninth birthday, a black furry creature, roses latched by their thorns to his thick mane. His ears pricked up when he first saw me and his eyes gleamed with what I took to be love but which turned out to be malevolence. My own pony. For two years I was content. I rode across stubble fields and through woods. I schooled him over my home-made jumps and pampered him with hoof manicures, shampoos and hour-long grooming sessions until his barrel-shaped body gleamed. But Shalimar was too small to contain my sprawling equine obsession, and when I had performed every possible stunt on him, including swimming him across the mill pond and riding home facing backwards, I wanted more.

Mummy took me to meet a friend of hers who had a stable full of racehorses and hunters. Sophy Lane agreed that I should come and help muck out each weekend in exchange for rides on these peerless steeds. Sophy was the zenith of horsy glamour. She wore a headscarf knotted at the nape of her neck and she walked with a swagger. Her eyelids were sapphire-tinted, her
lips a swoop of pearly pink. I longed to look like her but lacked the courage to affect a headscarf or make-up except in the privacy of my bedroom. Sophy's husband Boots was a thin dark man, curved like a riding crop. He strutted through the stables in his yellow cowboy chaps, making sleazy jokes and smoking untipped cigarettes one after another after another.

The stables were at Sophy's parents' house, a dour greystone mansion with ranks of windows hooded by pale shutters. Sophy's mother, Lady Warton, short, stout, with white hair and a pointed voice, came riding every day decked in spotless jodhpurs and a perfectly tied cravat.

Their ordered lives, the horses' ordered lives, the regular hours and the strict routine dazzled me. At the stables I mucked out five looseboxes in a row and thought of home, wondering why we couldn't keep our rooms tidy or even make our beds each day. Mummy patiently listened as I poured out every detail of my passion, but when I tried to tell Daddy he said, ‘I have never found the conversation of horses even mildly entertaining. You are like your Mummy, you speak their language.' I was sorry not to be able to discuss my dressage test with him, but at least Mummy was interested.

Daddy shuddered and slunk out of the kitchen when we started talking about horses. He unwrapped blue tissue paper from bottles of wine and went into the Drinking Room. Mummy bit her lip and sighed.

Much later, in the middle of the night, I woke up. The landing shook as someone lurched against the banisters. ‘You fucking bitch. Get out of this house now. Do you hear me?'

A throbbing scream echoed along the corridors. I knew it
was Mummy; I wanted to help her but my limbs had turned to dough. Glass shattered in the hall, I thought of the animals' soft paws and winced. Mummy tiptoed into my room.

‘Are you all right?' She sat on my bed; touching her face I felt tears warm on her cheeks and I hated Daddy. ‘Where's he gone?'

Mummy laughed shakily. ‘To get his gun, but I've hidden it.'

I clutched at her arm, fear holding my breath. ‘Why does he do this? Why does he want to shoot you?'

‘He's mad when he's drunk.' Mummy wiped her eyes on the sheets. ‘He doesn't mean it, but a demon takes over when he drinks.'

Suddenly he was in the room. ‘Eleanor, get out of that child's bed and find me my goddam gun.'

I burst into tears. ‘Go away, Daddy, don't be horrible to Mummy.'

‘For Christ's sake go to bed, Patrick,' Mummy begged. ‘You'll wake all the children.'

He came nearer, I became frantic. ‘Go away, go away, I hate you.'

Daddy backed off, cursing. Mummy and I heard his footsteps retreating and his bedroom door slam. Mummy sighed, ‘Thank God. He's gone to bed. I'm going to take Poppy up to Louise's house tonight. I'll be back in the morning.'

Louise was calm and made strong tea. I wanted to go too, to sleep in Louise's safe house at the other end of the village. ‘Can I come?'

‘Darling, don't worry. You know he would never hurt any of
you. He loves you. He loves me too, but I'm not spending the night dodging his drunken fury.'

Mummy and Poppy were back for breakfast, but the next Sunday morning Mummy wasn't there. Poppy was.

‘Where's Mummy?' Their bedroom smelt metallic and stuffy when I opened the door, and Daddy lay groaning beneath a heap of tumbled blankets.

‘What time is it? Seven. Jesus Christ. She's in hospital.'

Nausea clawed me and I marched up to the bed and leaned over. ‘Why is she in hospital, Daddy?'

He covered his face with his hands. ‘She fell down the stairs. An ambulance came and took her to hospital. Now get off my back.'

He's guilty. Very guilty, I thought, and phoned Louise, straining to keep calm.

‘Your Mum's fine,' she said. ‘She got a black eye falling down the stairs and we sent her to hospital in case her nose was broken. She'll be back today.'

I knew she hadn't fallen down the stairs, and I wanted Daddy to know that I knew. So I refused to make him a cup of tea or any breakfast. He had a front tooth missing and a swollen face. It served him right. We drove to the hospital to collect Mummy.

‘Are we having another baby?' asked Dan on the way.

‘No we are not,' said Daddy.

Flook kicked Daddy's seat as we drove. ‘You shouldn't fight with Mummy. You'll be sorry, you know.'

‘I already am.'

Daddy did look very sorry, but I wanted to be sure. ‘You'll
be lucky if Mummy forgives you,' I said coldly. ‘You should give up drinking. It's gross and it makes you gross.'

I had gone too far. Daddy slammed his foot on the accelerator. ‘Oh shut up, you lot. I've got a headache.'

The shouting and fighting stopped soon afterwards, and I was convinced that we had changed Daddy's nature with our evangelical enthusiasm for making him sorry.

Brodie and Va Va spent their first summer together sitting in large saucepans of water in the cratered bomb site which was their Islington garden. Inside the flat, beneath the stone gaze of a golden seraph and an Egyptian king, Patrick wrote while Eleanor, unaware of the existence of shops beyond Harrods, tried to keep her children fed and clothed on an income which didn't come in.

Patrick gave her some money and offered to look after the children while she went and bought herself something to wear. Eleanor went shopping, the prospect of a new dress eclipsing the suspicion she should have felt at Patrick's uncharacteristic behaviour. At lunch-time she returned. She hugged the babies; they were both dressed in velvet. She turned to Patrick, astonished that he should have dressed them at all. He stood by the tiled fireplace, an expression of benign surreptitiousness on his face.

‘Thomas Bevin and Trixie will be here in half an hour,' he said. ‘We are going to baptize the children.'

Eleanor railed at his trickery, gathering Brodie and Va Va on to her knee like a New Testament mother faced with King
Herod. ‘It's not that I don't want them to be Catholic. But I don't like your methods.'

Patrick was meek. ‘How right you are, my love, how right you are.'

The doorbell rang. Thomas Bevin, a Jesuit priest with a brow furrowed like celery, arrived with Trixie, a friend of Eleanor's from Oxford. Bevin was to officiate. Trixie was to be godmother and Patrick had selected a young poet, Raj Singh, as godfather. He had failed to get hold of any other Catholics, so had decided that the children should share godparents.

Bevin sat in a crumbling armchair covered in mattress ticking. He sipped a glass of wine and ignored the half-eaten chocolate biscuit Va Va placed on his knee.

‘Raj is not a suitable person to bear responsibility for any child's soul,' he announced. ‘You will have to find another godfather, Patrick.'

Half an hour remained before the service. Patrick and Eleanor resigned themselves to picking someone off the street. They were joking about how to spot a Catholic in Islington when the doorbell rang again.

Kevin Toller, a lazy journalist with a taste for whisky, slouched in fondling a bottle of Famous Grouse. ‘Patrick,' he said, puffing whisky fumes into the little room, ‘I came to share this with you and to watch the Cup Final.'

‘Dear boy,' said Patrick, ‘you are here by divine intervention. We are baptizing my children and you shall be their godfather.'

Toller protested, to no avail. Va Va and Brodie were christened in black and green velvet and Eleanor's parents were very angry.

Patrick's first love was the Muse and she danced in the aisles of the Church of Rome. He talked about her as if she were a difficult girlfriend. ‘She's bitched me up again,' he growled after a day of crumpling paper into balls and raining them down around the rubbish bin. He abided by none of the conventions which make a good Catholic, but he believed in the saints and suffered from guilt.

His faith was handed down to him by his mother, an Irish peasant whose only education was the poetry she had learned by heart at school. She was a fervent Catholic, and worshipped with an ardour perfectly pitched between the Brompton Oratory and the Queen's Elm pub in Chelsea. Patrick's learning came not from school but from conversations with young monks at the Oratory who appeared like hungry starlings at his mother's table.

By the time Va Va was three, the basement flat in Islington could no longer contain the family. Eleanor was pregnant and Patrick was being driven insane by trying to write in a tiny room invaded by beaming, screaming children. They had no money with which to buy a house, and in desperation Patrick answered an advertisement in
The Times
for a house to rent in Norfolk. He drove up to see it and was enchanted.