Dead Babies (12 page)

gagged in unison when boiled eggs were produced ("No," said

Celia, putting them away, "perhaps that wasn't a good idea"). Twenty minutes with a bottle of wine apiece, however, and loquacity returned, mainly in the form of piecemeal self-
congratulation about the recent escape. Quentin then began a speech on the writings of the late Alain Robbe-Grillet; its length, periodicity, and range of reference held in thrall everyone but Keith (anyway groggy enough with heat, the memory of Roxeanne's body, and his triannual deliverance from the costive state) and Andy. The restless Adorno rolled over in front of Diana and started to stroke her hair and whisper sexy things to her neck. Diana turned away toward the curved field, where without comment she saw the injured heifer climb uncertainly to its knees, its feet, then zigzag away. When she looked back at Andy she noticed that some blood from his cheek had dripped onto the downy white scants of her pantie suit. "Keep away from me," she said quietly. "Just keep, the fuck, away from me," said Diana.

xx: Diana

Diana spends a lot of time wondering what the hell she's doing in Appleseed Rectory. Occasionally—when the attentive Villiers pours her a Tio Pepe at 11:30, or while she drives to the shopping center in Celia's I-type Jaguar, or as Giles's unsteady hand appears round his bedroom door with a wad of £20 notes to settle the quarterly accounts, or during the moments after Andy has made love to her—Diana feels, well, a sort of fleeting satisfaction with the stage her life has reached. But most days she sits there hating everything, the place she's in, the people she's living with, the light around her, the time of day it is.

For this there are excellent reasons. Diana's background may not in itself be illustrious, but it has an unquestionable luster. Always she has mingled with the great. At the age of six Diana spent the first of many summers at Moreley Court, where her ermine waterbed was maintained at body temperature and where every night she found her toothbrush pre-pasted in the ormolu bathroom. Two years later she wintered with the Beresford-Parkinsons in the famous Ariadne Palace on Lake Geneva, down whose hanging-garden avenues unsmiling dwarfs ferried her breakfast to the aviary swimming pool. As a teenager she was the perennial houseguest of the Rudolphes, the Perths, of the screen personalities Murray and Elspeth Krane, of the Balfours, the Grizes, of Sir Henry and
Lady Doorlock, of the motion picture producer "Tubby" de Large and his lovely young wife, Lurleen. And, a little later, she is marriageably to be seen on the west patio of the Castello Pinero near Padua, basking naked on the glossy decks of Logo Lesbos' schooner among the Seychelle reefs, quaffing champagne in Giovanni Raffini's dune litter at the topless beaches of Acapulco. Youngish, well-connected, cosmopolitian readers can expect to see her about the place in six or seven years' time. At cockail parties, soirees, premieres, and so on, she will usually be accompanied by one or other of her parents, but after a few months she will begin to arrive alone, still a rather hesitant figure, slightly ill at ease about the aggressive sexiness of her catsuits and leotards, continually on edge about her appearance, until, during her second year of social immersion, she will be widely celebrated for her aplomb, verbal asperity, and daring and expertise in bed.

Diana's half-vicarious celebrity can be explained, on the one hand, by her mother's editrixship of "Nell's Notebook" in the pages of the distinguished glossy
Euroscene,
and, on the other, by her father's position as Assistant Chief Casting Director of Magnum Cinematic Promotions, Ltd., Paris and New York. Examples of that matrimonial tendency whereby unlike poles attract, Eleanor is practical, intelligent and cunning, a sharp-faced woman and angular, while Bruce is foolish, guileless, and benign, a shaggy middle-aged boy with a demeanor of nonspecific, goofy good will. Their Parisian idyll spanned Diana's conception and gestation, and survived her birth by two months, at which point Eleanor decided that she didn't much like Bruce and got on an airplane to London, where she embarked on a continuing series of compact, knowing little affairs with persons flourishing in the media; the hopeless Bruce meanwhile staggered around Paris getting drunk for six months, then took up with a Breton ingenue of such ingenuousness that she has since forgotten French and failed to learn English. Between these hearths the young Diana was patted like a listless shuttlecock for the first fifteen years of her life.

From the beginning Eleanor Parry policed her daughter's social life with astuteness and dedication. She enrolled Diana at the sort of schools where the children of the fashionable were likely to gather—Eldahurst Kindergarten, Laura and June Bateson House, The Hendlebury Association for the
Furtherance of Girls' Education, Hampstead Comprehensive— then withdrew her once the requisite circle of acquaintances had been made. Selflessly Mrs. Parry attended all parents' meetings, liaison projects and school bazaars. A brief perusal of the register furnished her with remarks like, "Oh, of course, you're little Sarah's parents! My Diana absolutely adores Sarah," or, "Then Bettina's
your
child. Oh, dear, I'm afraid poor Diana must pester her dreadfully." Parental invitations soon followed and were as readily accepted by the young columnist. Host and hostess would then receive, consecutively, a flattering profile in "Nell's Notebook" and a long letter from Eleanor about what difficulty Diana had in making friends. And Diana was such a ferociously immaculate guest (an excellent gauger of mood, correct forms of address, prompt thank-you missives, tips for the maids) that it seemed churlish not to ask her again.

For his part, big Bruce Parry saw to it that Diana's thrice-yearly holidays with him in Paris and New York were varied and eventful. As was the case with his ex-wife, everyone was to some extent in Bruce's debt and his social standing was thus providentially enhanced. Unflappable and always eager to please, old Bruce had given many one-line parts to talentless mistresses of superannuated company-owners, had often found employment for loafing sons of neurotic lighting-cameramen, had regularly steered hysterectomized vamps through mid-career crises, was prepared to put in unpaid overtime to cover up for menopausal assistant directors and alcoholic production managers, had been known to work around the clock to appease coronary-prone producers, depressive financiers, and apoplectic entrepreneurs. And—heck—the guy just likes kids. Confidentially known in Magnum House as "The Nursery," the apartment of Bruce Parry and his alingual consort is an indulgent, eventempered Disneyland of sweets, crackers, and party games. Accordingly, little dark-haired Diana is a feted personage whenever she visits her father, the receptacle of much guilty hospitality.

Unfair. There
is
genuine warmth and feeling in the childish

Diana. Although she is deeply unresponsive to her parents,

there is much that remains—for she's the girl who writes thirty letters a week, who gives you her old handbags and makeup, who spends three hours a day vocally marshaling her
: dolls' house, who steals stockings from the boutique, who'll tell you about sex, who likes the tanned boy in ragged socks and sandals and chucks the yobs' caps under buses, who kicks the matron and shows her pants to the gardener, who'll offer you up to 20p. to shout
FUCK OFF
outside Miss Granger's study, who'd rather come with you than go home, and who bursts into tears without knowing why. Diana is as baffled as anyone by her cold envy for her mother, her cold contempt for her father, and by her fear of being alone.

A word about Diana's sex life.

Nine days after the first menstrual bloodstain had been sighted on her sheets Diana was successfully, and very painfully, seduced by a thirty-five-year-old stuntman at a Bruce Parry shindig. High time too, she thought, dispatching letters to her friends the next morning. When she got back to London she told her mother about it. Mrs. Parry, who would never stand any nonsense from Diana, marched her straight down to the gynecologist's and put her on the pill. Diana could be said never to have looked back: an intelligible procedure— at what, anyway? If someone neither sordid nor unattractive seemed to want to go to bed with her, Diana went to bed with him. Along they came—tramp tramp tramp—slowly and sporadically at first, then in steady Indian file. Unlike many of her friends, Diana never felt that she had "let herself down" in these
affaires,
no matter how brief and pleasureless they might have been. She had never slept with anyone who wasn't rich, well-groomed, and halfway civilized; the ubiquitous venereal maladies which she could not but occasionally complain weren't, in her case, of the chronic variety and her tolerance to antibiotics was happily low; on no account would she entertain gentlemen friends at home and her bedroom remained a silent, pink retreat of dolls and paper tissues; up until the age of nineteen, up until Andy, Diana hadn't once spent an entire night with a man, would leave unfussily when the act was completed, had never woken up to new skin and breath.

For Diana, sex was not a fleshy concern; it was a dial in

the machinery of her self-regard, a salute to her clothes sense,

applause for her exercises, a hat tipped to her dieting, the required compliment to her hairdresser, the means socially to measure herself against others. She quite enjoyed it, too, now
that most people were good enough at pressing the right buttons to give her clitorial orgasms of admittedly varying quality. If anyone happened to be particularly rich, handsome, or accomplished in bed, Diana would perhaps see them more than once, and, if they were moreover kind and/or amusing, she might even get quite to like them. But sexual lassitude and disgust seemed to be everywhere among the young, and two-night stands were becoming a rarity. The party, the man, the dinner, the flat, the fuck, the taxi, the scalding bath. Besides being good exercise in itself Diana found that it helped her to eat less. She would get out of bed the next morning and complete her callisthenics program with fresh verve.

Diana and Eleanor Parry were sunbathing by the Reina Victoria swimming pool one August afternoon when Andy Adorno boomed down the Seville Road into Ronda on his 1,225 cc. Harley Davidson Hurricane, stripped to the waist, his gout of black hair driven back from his face, his heavy body dusted and sweatstained in the mountain sunshine. He pulled up at the traffic lights adjacent to the hotel driveway, and, revving hugely in the empty road, glanced round about him, enjoying the heat, the noise, the new town. Twenty yards away, Diana and Eleanor looked up from their magazines. "Why aren't there any Spick laws about scooters," said Mrs. Parry. "I don't think he's Spanish," said Diana. "Mm, too tall." Adorno turned and met their eyes; he smiled, apparently pleased that he was the theme of their irritation. "You English too?" he shouted. Removing her sunglasses, Diana nodded. "Catch you around," he said as he hurled the bike forward with needless violence into the town, causing the tan-suited
patrones
of the hotel to watch the thinning sprays of grit with cardiac disgust.

They saw him every day—punching the pintables that lined the cafe terraces, shooting pool with the soldiers in the main square casino, lurching out of side roads by the bus station on his bike, bellowing past the hotel to El Hondon swimming pool with some bikini-ed Swede or American clutching his waist. Diana and Eleanor would mention Andy from time to time. "Saw that hooligan with the motorbike this morning in Bar Oliva drinking Anises . . . the yob on the motorbike was in the Telefonica with some dagos today . . .

:
the bike oik almost ran someone down in the market square ... I wish the bike oik wouldn't go around half naked all the time. . . ."

Parry
fille
and Parry
mere
were alike convalescing after a long run of abbreviated affairs. In particular, Diana had recently tired of a set of spendthrift stockbrokers which she had found herself going to bed with; Eleanor had recently been spurned by the young director of a new radio company, who had waived her frank entreaties at a crowded after-dinner party. For Mrs. P. the cure was relatively straightforward— she needed a rest. The younger Diana, on the other hand, was suffering from the inevitable attack of night fatigue; night fatigue, with its languor and apathy, an indefinite series of one-directional days over which the dusk hung like the promise of extinction. So they gave themselves up to silence, dark glasses, and sun, to a period during which they would re-invigorate their bodies and conserve their sexual energies, going to bed early, sober and alone.

With two weeks of the holiday still to run Mrs. Parry decided that she didn't much like Ronda and got on an airplane to London. The evening before, over dinner in the starched chill of the Reina dining room, Eleanor complained of a slight restlessness, and when Diana went to her mother's room the next morning she found her gone.

Diana had, she supposed, intended to stay out the month, but as she ate lunch that day and reread her mother's note a familiar tremor came over her. The night fatigue was passing; she felt active, envious, neglected again. At two she walked down to the Iberia office and booked a flight for the next day. She spent the rest of the afternoon drinking up the remaining sun, every now and then anxiously examining her bikini marks. She returned to her room, did her exercises until her thighs were as stiff as steel rods and her breasts felt like little fists of muscle, and then, as a sort of token, put on her short white Pucci dress, checking in the mirror that her black pubic triangle was just discernible beneath it as she left for the hotel bar. She was there bought champagne until 8:30 by a perspiring American called Dexter, with whom she dined. "Let's look in at Coca's afterwards," Dexter then said.