Come and Tell Me Some Lies (4 page)

The front door was open when they arrived at Mildney, a house Eleanor was seeing for the first time. Furious on the flagstones of the hall, spiky like an unopened chestnut, was a tiny ginger kitten. Out of the Mercedes slithered Marmalade the black cat, spitting vicious urban expletives at the kitten before slinking into the shadows of the house.

Tired and hot, with legs patched pink where they had stuck to the leather seats of the car, Va Va and Brodie got out and looked at their new home. Mildney. A seventeenth-century farmhouse, part brick, part dimpled flint, and all damp. Va Va scarcely glanced at the house but looked across at the garden stretching away in every direction through tangles of flowers and crouched bushes. Under her feet an expanse of green loomed, as big as any in a London park. Her legs took over and, racing, she carved a circle in the long grass. Brodie followed, fingers splayed like feathers as they swooped faster and faster. Va Va somersaulted and fell on the grass. ‘Listen. There's no noise, no noise at all.'

Brodie stood a moment and smiled. ‘There is noise. I can hear the trees talking.'

They laughed, sinking, rolling like beached fish.

Patrick came out of the house and took their hands. ‘Come, dear hearts, I have something to show you.' He led them round the beech hedge, which flamed high and gold above the lawn, and through a line of knobbly oaks. ‘Close your eyes now,' he said, and the ground slid as he led them down a hill, fronds of bracken tickling their legs. Patrick stopped. ‘Now look.'

They were on the bank of a slow, silent river; floating like blobs of ice-cream on the black surface were two swans.

‘Look, Daddy, look! Swans. Can we keep them? What are their names? Where's that one's head?' The children's voices tumbled out, shrill and urgent. One swan, delving deep in the weeds beneath, uncoiled her long neck, rearing from the water.
She hissed menace and warning. Patrick led the children back up the bank.

‘Those are Isabella and Isabeau,' he said. ‘They are magical birds and at bedtime I will tell you their story.'

That night they sat together in bed, shoulders stiff with anticipation. Patrick began. Isabella and Isabeau were the guardians to the gates of Halicarnassus, the pillared home of Shalimar the winged horse. Brodie and Va Va, one moment barbed excitement, the next slumped, were asleep.

One spring afternoon Sophy took me out into the park by the lake. I was riding a new horse. His name was Nimrod and his Arab nostrils flared red excitement; he capered and swished his streaming auburn tail. Nimrod rolled the whites of his eyes. He quivered, then grabbed the bit and bolted. I clung on, exhilarated, as we floated over a gate and sped off through a grove of walnut trees. I tried to stop, afraid that he might slip, but I was too late. A branch slapped me in the face, cracking between my teeth, and I was swept to the ground.

I came round in hospital, stirred into consciousness by a fracas at my feet. A cluster of nurses twittered like sparrows. They had a knife. They wanted to cut off my boots. Mummy did not want them to. Her protective instincts were sharpened by the sight of my football-sized face and her inability to help me in any other way. I had broken my jaw. I lay on the stretcher, tears tightening the parts of my face I could still feel. I couldn't speak, nor could my numbed tongue feel any teeth in my mouth. A nurse noticed my distress and, interpreting it as grief for my riding boots, called off the battle.

Two operations later someone gave me a mirror. I had black
eyes, a stitched gash beneath my lip where my teeth had gone through and wire binding my mouth. Behind the wire my teeth were still there, yellow with blood and old saliva. Where my skin was not black with bruising it was greenish white and my face was pear-shaped. I stared in horror. ‘This is not me. This is someone else. I am at home with Mummy and Daddy and the boys and Poppy.'

I pushed the mirror away and refused to look in one again until I left hospital three weeks later.

Daddy came to see me, his eyes full of tears. ‘These bloody horses. It breaks my heart to see what they've done to you.' He smiled, shaking his head. ‘My love, you are brave and foolish. I wish to God you wouldn't do it.'

Mummy kicked his ankle. He had promised not to mention his campaign to make me give up riding. Only my lips moved when I spoke. ‘It wasn't the horse's fault. It was an accident.' I fell back against the pillow, sweat breaking with the effort of utterance.

Daddy kissed my forehead. ‘You have courage. I am proud of you. I wish you could come home with us today.' He moved back to let Brodie talk to me.

Brodie had been hysterical since my accident. He refused to believe I was alive until he saw me himself. His eyes flickered over my warped face. He burst into tears and whispered to Mummy. She took him out and came back moments later, alone. ‘Brodie's been sick,' she said calmly. ‘He's very shocked, I must take him home.'

It was lonely and tedious in hospital. I could not eat, so even the small diversion of mealtimes was denied me. For protein
I was given mugs of yeasty Complan which I sipped gingerly, revolted by the potent iron taste and thick blood-warmth of the drink. Mummy's and Daddy's visits were my daily high-point, but through the long dull afternoons I was vulnerable, supine. Friends of my parents, people I hardly knew and people I didn't like at all visited me. I lay in my bed, gloom mounting, as these well-meaning folk ambled down the ward looking for me. My face was too sore to bury in the pillows or duck beneath the blankets. I had no choice but to sit there waiting, lips stretched back over my steel-filled mouth in a permanent, unwanted grin.

Reverend Thompson, who had come to our primary school to tell us the facts of life, brought a box of Turkish Delight. I hated Turkish Delight. Two of the old ladies from the village made a special trip on the OAPs' bus. They had sacrificed their bingo for me and I was not pleased. They were part of the coven of busybodies at the bottom of our drive. They loathed Dobe because he once went down to the village wearing some red lacy camiknickers we had dressed him in. I knew they were only visiting me out of nosiness. I frowned throughout their stay as they tittered and gibed about the village fete and the vicar winning a bottle of gin. All the visitors sat at the end of my bed and gazed at me with eager pity. I glared back, mute and frustrated in my mouth harness, furiously embarrassed by the long silences which persisted through all visits save those of my family.

Sophy came, bringing her two-year-old son, Adam. Adam thought he was a dog. He had spent his whole small life in the stables with dogs or in the car with dogs and he didn't speak,
he barked. He sat on my feet whimpering and then uttered a soft yap and smiled. Mummy arrived, absently patting him as she reached to kiss me. ‘Good boy, Adam, good boy.' She got out a paper bag and handed it to me.

‘Darling, I brought you these. I chose lots of different kinds for you from Mr Cardew's. He sends his love.' She beamed encouragement. In the bag a dense mass of wrapped toffees rustled in their pretty floral papers. There were red ones and green ones, purple ones with pink flowers and yellow and blue ones. Dozens of them. All flaunting their chewiness. All mocking my affliction. I looked at Mummy, eyes stark at her stupidity; grunts of horror gurgled in my throat. She looked back at me and recognition of her wrong dawned. She started to laugh. Her eyes creased up and disappeared; tears eased down her cheeks as she continued to laugh. Embarrassed, Sophy left. I chucked a few toffees to Adam. He picked them up in his mouth and trotted after his mother. Mummy still laughed. Finally I did too, wincing as mirth tore through the wires in my gums. Mummy stayed a long time and when she left, I noticed that she had eaten all the toffees.

When I returned home from hospital Dobe wasn't there. ‘Where is he?' I still spoke through clenched teeth like a Dalek; the wires were not being removed for six weeks. Mummy sat down and pulled me towards her.

‘Darling, I have something very sad to tell you.' My stomach churned and I began to cry, knowing already that Dobe was dead. ‘Dobe had a heart attack just there, over by the sink, last Tuesday. He jumped up to steal some food, then crashed to
the floor. He didn't suffer. He was so well and happy and then he was dead – no pain or fear.'

I shook as I cried, wanting to bawl like a baby, prevented by my caged jaws.

‘Why didn't you tell me?' I sobbed, but I knew Mummy was right when she said, ‘It would have been awful for you to have known and not to have been here.'

She took me out to the Wilderness where Daddy and the boys had buried Dobe. I lay in the grass and wept until I was empty. I felt robbed and cheated. I hadn't been there. I hadn't dug his grave or said goodbye. I hadn't known and he would never be back.

Eleanor's stomach was huge and hot like an oven when Va Va hugged her. She was going to have a baby. She needed to rest, Patrick said, but she never seemed to lie down. She was always in some room Va Va had not noticed before, hanging up curtains, sneezing as she dusted the mantelpiece.

Too young for school, Brodie and Va Va stayed outside exploring their domain. They lay flat on the lawn gazing up at the limitless sky. It throbbed high above and they watched, trying never to blink as tiny birds flew up and up, faint dots on pale paper vanishing into a cloud.

Rory Francis was born before Va Va and Brodie had conquered the whole garden. They hardly noticed his advent. They had discovered a series of tiny streams in murky scrubland and had hunted out a moss-green crocodile, his jaws wide and gnarled. They planned to tame him and put him in the barns.

The new baby, sweetly scented and interestingly soft when poked, was nice enough, but not as exciting as the crocodile. Also he was not a girl. Va Va pretended he was. ‘She's a little girl actually,' she crisply informed visitors.

Eleanor left Va Va and Brodie to their own devices; she made
a holster out of an Indian scarf, tied the baby over her shoulder and continued to put the house straight. To swaddle Rory from black November skies she sang to him, a song about sailing down the Nile in a felucca. He became Flook and was never called Rory again.

In February Eleanor sent Patrick to meet a train. Out of the guard's van emerged his birthday present. A puppy. A Dobermann puppy who had travelled from Cornwall curled up in a washing-basket. Eleanor had found him in
Exchange & Mart
and saved up her family allowance, increased by the advent of Flook, to purchase him. Patrick's imagination failed him. ‘He must be called Dobe,' he said. ‘There is no other name for this remarkable hound.' He was enormously proud of Dobe's pedigree, and hung the certificate on the wall in the garage so that he could admire it while mending his car.

Patrick did not believe in discipline for dogs or children, and Dobe agreed. A sleek lunatic in black and tan, he lolled his tongue insolently when chastised. He never learned to sit or stay, or to walk at heel. He roamed the fields and lanes for miles around Mildney, returning home to slump, groaning, into Patrick's favourite armchair. Patrick exercised him by driving the Mercedes round a three-mile block while Dobe ran beside the front wheel.

Eleanor climbed the stairs, Flook under one arm, a pile of clean washing cradled in the other. A thunderbolt of puppy hit her half-way up. It was Dobe in pursuit of a cat. She groped for the banister, and let go one of the soft white bundles to prevent herself from toppling. Va Va watched as the mound
bounced slowly down the stairs. Outraged wails from the stone floor revealed that Flook was alive.

‘Oh Christ. I thought it was the clothes.' Eleanor's voice was sharp with anguish. Flook, red and wriggling on the flagstones, was fine; his tightly bound shawl had given him a safe landing. Va Va stroked his head and looked at Eleanor, tears starting in her eyes when she saw them in her mother's.

Brodie's eleventh birthday hardly dawned at all. Iron-grey clouds yawned upwards for an hour, then slumped low over the fields. Brodie opened his presents, silent and withdrawn as he always was at times of expectation. Mummy was nervous about the things she had given him.

‘He said he wanted uniforms so I've got two, one from the Second World War, one from the Crimea. Do you think he'll like them? He never likes anything I give him.'

‘They sound fine,' I whispered because Brodie was in the kitchen, reading in the rocking-chair beneath a pile of purring cats. ‘I've got him a fur hunter's hat from one of Daddy's junk shops. Daddy has got him a watch.'

Brodie unwrapped his parcels slowly. He said nothing. The rest of us chorused interest, trying to drown his silence. Mummy bit her lip, Daddy rolled his eyes, Brodie jumped up and left the room, presents cascading from his chair. Mummy found him crying in the playroom.

‘What is it, darling? Don't you like your things? You can change them.'

Brodie sniffed. ‘I do like some of them. I'm sorry.'

Mummy laughed, relieved that nothing more sinister lay in his tears. ‘I'm used to none of you liking things. We'll go together and change them for the right ones.'

Brodie cheered up. Moments later he was laughing as he cut the cake Mummy had made. It was black, in the shape of an army helmet.

‘Thank God he likes something,' Mummy whispered to Daddy.

Brodie grew tall in spurts. Some bits of him were small and childlike; others, his arms and legs, his mouth, his hands, strained large and adult in a schoolboy frame.

Flook was even bonier, translucent skin stretched over long legs which he whirled about on, dizzying himself, spinning, excited; quick to burst out laughing or roar in rage. Flook loved all his birthday presents and kept his things carefully in his tidy bedroom where his possessions were ranked in labelled drawers. Brodie's room was a cave where he huddled in bed reading, not noticing mould growing out of a forgotten cup of cocoa.