Come and Tell Me Some Lies (6 page)

Patrick mended bikes with copper wire and masking tape and endless optimism. He and his brother had built cars together as young men. They raced one across Texas once with the Earl of Dunlane.

Va Va wobbled off on her bicycle. ‘That's dandy,' said Patrick, but she tumbled a moment later when the injured wheel
buckled again. His spanner set was prized beyond anything he owned. Wrath gathered in an instant cloud if any went missing. ‘One of you has stolen it.' He glared round the yard. ‘You can damn well find it or else …' Flook ran up to him and pulled the spanner from the pocket of Patrick's jeans. Fury vanished. ‘Cleverest bambino, you deserve a prize.' And reaching for his cigarette packet, Patrick pulled out the silver foil and made a tiny goblet for Flook. ‘This is the cup that the Knights of the Round Table drank from,' he said.

‘No it's not. You just made it.'

Patrick looked down his long nose. ‘It is magic, young man.' Flook howled with laughter, bent double over his crumpled goblet.

Daddy was very upset by Flook's illness. He usually only went into the Drinking Room on Saturdays, but while Mummy was at the hospital he drifted in every evening and stood, shoulders hunched, staring into the cold fireplace. Louise left her children with her mother and came to look after us, but I thought Daddy needed more care. I peered through the crack in the door at dusk, worried that he might be lonely. He was looking out towards the river, one arm raised to the top of the window frame. Through the small panes of glass clouds bowled across a sky dark with approaching storms. Daddy turned round and saw me. ‘Come in, my love, come in.' The Drinking Room seemed forlorn with just Daddy and no fire lit, and although I hated drinking evenings, I wished Daddy had someone there to cheer him up.

‘Daddy, are you all right?'

He smiled and pulled me over to him. ‘I'm keeping company with Bacchus and some old ghosts,' he said. ‘I miss your Mummy.'

I sat down in a deep armchair. ‘She'll be back soon.' I curled up and leaned my cheek against the soft density of velvet. ‘Flook really is getting better now, isn't he?'

Daddy poured a splash of Martini and some water into his glass and raised it. ‘Yes, thank Christ. He is better. But he has paid with the loss of innocence.'

Louise came in. ‘Now Patrick, what stories are you telling this poor child?' She sounded a little flirtatious, deliberately light-hearted, like all Mummy's friends when they talked to Daddy.

Daddy looked at her and didn't speak. He drank some Martini and still he didn't speak. He winked at me. ‘A tiny discussion about Life and Love and the great Hereafter,' he said in his most professorial tones.

Louise laughed. ‘Well, it's supper-time, so come and have some spaghetti.'

‘Dear God, these women are frightening,' Daddy whispered to me as we followed Louise. ‘But what can I do? Your Mummy has left her orders, and we must obey her.'

June 1986

Brodie and Flook became taller than Dad without anyone noticing them grow. They were stringy and clumsy, and nearly twenty. Their huge feet tripped people over in the kitchen where they sat at the table whistling and fidgeting, waiting like cuckoos for Mum to give them breakfast. I watched them from my distant pinnacle of London glamour, home for a weekend and frothing my conversation with stories of champagne and film stars I had encountered at parties. I was twenty-one and liberated; a friend of a friend had got me a job with a small television production company and suddenly, by accident, I was a real person. The boys, jeans ripped, housed in West London squats, regarded me curiously, their smiles indulgent and conspiratorial as I rattled on. ‘Get her,' Brodie grinned when I advanced into the kitchen, prancing in a swish of lemon-sorbet silk. ‘This dress is borrowed from a fashion designer,' I boasted. ‘We used it for a programme on couture last week. Do you like it?'

‘It's all right.' Brodie lit a cigarette and rolled back on his chair. ‘You do look a bit of a prat, though.'

I scowled and spun out of the kitchen. Dad was in the
playroom, small in the arms of a big chair. A book lay open, rising and falling gently on his stomach, resting with him while he slept. He looked up as I opened the door. ‘Enchanting, dear heart, and utterly frivolous.'

As the boys grew, Dad seemed to shrink. Brown pill-bottles and little inhalers like periscopes appeared in the house and followed him wherever he went. He coughed a lot, and when I asked him what he wanted me to bring from London he looked solemn and said, ‘A pair of wings for when I go to join the angels.'

‘What do you mean?' My voice, intended to be bantering and no-nonsense, quavered on a sob.

Dad leaned forward and winked in conspiracy. ‘Get me a cigarette, kid, and don't tell your mother. The doctor thinks I've given up, and Ellie's been policing me.'

A sheet of ice slid between my skin and the swathed warmth of silk. He was really ill. He was about to die, I was never going to see him again. I knew that, in years, he was old enough to be our grandfather, but in spirit he was younger than all my friends' parents. His mortality hit me coldly in the face. My nose prickled and began to run as tears swelled in my eyes. Miserable, guilty, I gave Dad a cigarette from my packet. How could I refuse his final request? Mum came in, bringing a cup of tea and a piece of dark, wet cake for Dad.

‘Where did you get that cigarette?' she demanded, and my face crumpled in a weeping slide.

‘Dad said he wanted one last one,' I gulped, wiping streaming eyes on the hem of my dress, and followed her out of the room. ‘Why didn't you tell me?'

Mum looked blank. ‘Tell you what?'

‘How ill Dad is.' I was off. Trembling, exploding with sobs, smearing black drips of mascara down my peerless, priceless, borrowed yellow dress.

I heard Mum laughing, soothing, close to my ear as she stroked my hair. ‘Pay no attention to him at all,' she insisted. ‘He's been ill, and Dr Jones wants him to stop smoking, but he's as strong as an ox, and as stubborn. He particularly enjoys getting cigarettes by blackmail, and even had a bet with Flook about how many he would achieve today.'

Relief turned to outrage. I marched back into the playroom. ‘How could you, Dad. Look what's happened to my dress, all because you had some stupid bet with Flook.' I flashed the damp skirt towards him and he bowed his head and looked sheepish. ‘Why can't that goddam woman mind her own business,' he said out of the corner of his mouth.

But later, he stood up very slowly and paused to catch his breath before leaving the room. I glanced at Brodie stretched full length on the sofa, black boots lolling on the rocking-horse beyond. He was watching Dad, and his expression was lopsided and dismayed.

Neither of the cars was working on my first day at Mary Hall's School. Louise offered to drive me to school and Mummy, with Poppy in tow, came too. We sat in a row on the front seat of Louise's pea-green camper van. Mummy and Louise chattered and laughed, Poppy slept, and I clenched my teeth and gazed out of the window, trying to plot an escape from the camper van at an invisible distance from the school.

I had never had a school uniform before, nor indeed a whole outfit of new clothes. Daddy took me to Norwich armed with a pale-green list of school requirements and we bought them all. On the school outfitting floor of Blond's department store we hailed a matronly woman. She had frizzy grey hair and a badge with ‘Madge Wilkins' written on it. Madge had never met anyone like my father.

‘My dear lady.' He leaned on the counter and pushed his dark glasses on to his forehead. ‘Would you be kind enough to render us assistance in dressing my daughter as befits a pupil of Mary Hall's School?' He lowered his glasses again and lit a cigarette. Madge patted her hair and overlooked the cigarette. She led us to a rail of drab green clothes. Daddy removed his glasses
for a closer look. ‘Remarkable,' he drawled. ‘Do you think they deliberately dress these poor children like lesbian aunts, or is it done through ignorance?'

Madge bridled. ‘Mary Hall's is the most expensive uniform on our racks,' she reproved.

‘Dear God,' said Daddy, ‘let's get this damn thing over, then.'

Madge reached into shelves and boxes and brought out cream shirts, fawn jerseys, socks, and bile-green heaps of skirt and blazer. Daddy became bored before we got to ties and gym knickers and left me, speechless and bewildered, by the pile of my acquisitions.

‘I don't really like that,' I said. Madge was holding up a jersey the colour and texture of thick porridge. ‘Do I have to have it?'

Madge clucked like a broody hen as she consulted the list. She pulled out a thin, tawny cardigan. It reminded me of Ginger, Brodie's cat, and I nodded. ‘That one is fine. I can wear it under my jacket when I go riding.'

But there was no alternative to the foul skirt, a triangle of crackling synthetic fabric. Madge insisted on one several sizes too big. Its folds reached half-way down my calves and hung there, inelegant and stiff, like mildewed cardboard. ‘It's a polyester mix,' enthused Madge, ‘so Mum can just pop it in the washing machine and run a cool iron over it.'

I thought of Mummy's iron, its once shiny surface blackened and ploughed where Daddy had used it to press masking tape on to his torn jeans. ‘We haven't got a washing machine.'

Madge gasped. Her face registered the tragic pity she would have displayed if I had told her I had no mother.

Daddy returned. ‘Dear lady' – he leaned on the pile of uniform in front of Madge – ‘could she not have one of those black dresses that the divine Goldie wears on
Top of the Pops?
Are you with me? The dress is, I think, made from a black plastic bag.'

‘She's not called Goldie,' I hissed at him. ‘She's called Blondie.'

Madge knew who he meant. ‘My sons love her,' she beamed, showing white, even dentures between her frosted lips. ‘You might find those frocks on the fashion floor, but I'm not sure that we stock them.'

Daddy nodded sagely. ‘Ah so,' he said.

We took the clothes to the cash desk and they were priced. I was mortified when the total was rung up. ‘Daddy, we can't afford sixty pounds,' I whispered, ‘we'll be bankrupt.'

‘My love, I will be the judge of that. But it does seem a shame that your uniform should be so uniform. Let us go and buy a pen.'

We bought a beautiful silver pen and an atlas. We didn't buy the regulation green Bible because Daddy leafed through it. ‘This is rubbish. You will read the King James Bible, if – which I doubt – you read the Bible at all.'

I was worried. ‘But Daddy, what will I do in scripture lessons?'

‘You will not attend them,' he said firmly. ‘You are a Catholic and you have no need of scripture lessons.'

Daddy never went to church, and when I asked him if I was going to be confirmed, he said, ‘There is no reason for you to confirm your faith, just as there is no reason for you to confess to it.'

October 1986

London was fun for me but not for my cats. Angelica and Witton sat on the high windowsills of my flat, looking out at treetops in the communal gardens behind. Guilt followed me out of the door when I went to work each day leaving a floor deep in clothes. The cats padded through the chaos, flexing luxuriating claws, then curling up plump in the folds of a dressing-gown until I returned. However stealthily I made my late-night entrance, they woke, purring machine-gun joy, twisting and cloying round my legs while I poured them milk. My dependants. The guilt turned to panic when one of Witton's ears began to droop forward, like a shattered traffic bollard. I rang Mum and found a cardboard box. In went Witton, one ear twitching, the other at half-mast; in went Angelica, a ball of struggling orange fury. I drove them to the station and waved them off on the train like a mother abandoning her children to a new term at boarding-school.

Mum rang me that evening. ‘Darling, those poor cats, they look utterly miserable. Something's happened to Witton's ear. They miss you. I don't know if it will work having them here. When are you coming down to visit them? And us?'

But there never seemed to be time. Every day I went to work, proudly arranging myself at my desk and making a hundred vital phone calls. Every evening I went to a party, or two, or three, chattering and bustling through unnoticed changing seasons as I plunged into London.

Brodie and Flook were in London too, but they didn't have telephones. Sometimes they turned up in Covent Garden at the office, and I brought them up to my department for a cup of coffee, half embarrassed by their torn, faded clothes but ablaze with pride at the lingering looks from the other girls.

One day Brodie arrived at lunch-time. He was wearing a suit, and his hair was smooth, slicked black, a yellow strand from his peroxide days bleached stiff behind his ear. ‘I've got a job in the City,' he said. ‘I'm selling bonds. I'll take you out to lunch if you like.'

He wasn't my little brother any more, striding now in grey pinstripes, his hat low on his brow like Bugsy Malone. We went to a Greek restaurant. ‘When did you last go home?' he asked, reaching for a cigarette.

‘I haven't been for ages.' I didn't look at him as I spoke. I knew he wasn't smiling.

‘You should go. Dad isn't well, you know, winter is coming, and he hates it, especially when the clocks go back. It would really cheer him up to see you.'

I was defensive. ‘I saw him the other day when he came to get that prize. You were there, you know I did.'

‘That's different. One drunken evening with thousands of people isn't like going home, is it?'

I twisted my fork in the crumbly mound of feta cheese on my
plate; an olive dropped out and rolled on to the floor. I felt sick and scared. Brodie was irritating me with his superior manner. ‘What about you, then? You only go when you need money, and you won't need money now, so I suppose you want me to go instead of you.'