Authors: Esther Freud
Of the three sisters that she’d met Tabitha looked the most like Kip, with dark hair falling silkily against her face, a wide mouth and those blue eyes, so clear, the whites with a shimmer of blue too. She was wearing a cotton dress, gathered below the bust to fall over the mound of her stomach, sticking out so separately from her it seemed rude not to acknowledge it was there.
‘When’s the baby due?’ Lara asked, and Tabitha took her hand and placed it on her belly. It was an odd sensation, so hard and hot, but pleasant, so that Lara had to force herself to let go.
‘At the end of the summer, six more weeks,’ and Tabitha glanced over at her husband, talking to Caroline, bending close in to her, his eyelids lowered, using all his skills to draw her in.
Lara noticed an empty chair beside her father, and before it was taken she sidled along the table and sank down.
‘Hello.’ He looked at her quizzically, unsure what it was about her that had changed, and seeing them together Caroline stood up, leaving Roland unceremoniously mid-sentence, and asked if they were ready to go home.
‘Yes,’ they said together, and not wanting to break up the entire party they murmured their goodbyes to Pamela only and walked slowly to their car. Caroline, her face white in the moonlight, stumbled a little on the step and Lambert took her arm and held her close as they climbed through the door in the wall.
‘Shall I drive?’ he offered when they reached the car, but she turned on him fiercely.
‘I’m perfectly all right.’
Back in her room, Lara looked at herself in the mirror, swathed in the soft grey cashmere of Kip’s jumper. She pulled it up to her nose and breathed. It smelt faintly of cigarettes, of chlorine and the damp dust of stone. She breathed in deeper, pressed the cuffs against her face, and still chilled from her unexpected dip she climbed under the covers with it on.
She woke in the early hours of the morning, her heart racing, the terror of an unremembered dream pulsing through her blood. It’s just because I’m too hot, she told herself, unpeeling the jumper, and she got out of bed and went to the window for air.
She didn’t notice it at first – she was too taken up with the lingering fear of her dream, but once she’d leant out of the window she heard it clearly, the sound of music coming from the hills. It was gypsy music. Lilting and dangerous. She opened her window wider. It reminded her of the first summer she’d spent with her grandparents in Dublin, and the ceilidh they’d taken her to where she’d fallen so much in love with the sound of the accordion she vowed she’d learn to play it when she grew up.
As she watched, a light flickered – fire or torchlight, she couldn’t tell. It flickered on and off several times and then went out. She waited but although she stood there for half an hour, breathing in the rich scents of the night, listening to the music drifting towards her, the hills stayed shadowy and dark.
Eventually Lara got back into bed. She closed her eyes, took a breath and let herself relive the moment when Kip had looked up and fixed her with his stare. It happened again, the shock and the exhilaration, the spinning, wheeling jolt as if she recognised him, although she knew it wasn’t possible that she’d seen him before.
Next morning everyone was subdued. Caroline was weak, too tired even for her morning swim, and Lambert, in a sudden fit of restlessness, had decided to work. He sat at the table on the terrace, his notes held down by paperweights, sighing and wincing as he scratched away. He rose every so often, as if to reach for a book, and then, remembering where he was, he shook his head and sat down.
Lara lay in the shade and read. It was too hot to swim, and her head ached anyway. Eventually Ginny called them in for lunch, serving it in the kitchen so that Lambert wouldn’t have to move his notes. She had made a sort of baby food for them, ravioli with a filling of pale cheese, soft salad and an oily mash of spinach. For pudding there was a lemon tart, so sweet and bitter that it stung the inside of your mouth, and as soon as you’d recovered made you long for more.
Afterwards Lara went back to bed, and spent all afternoon reading and dreaming, staring at the square of sky outside the window, watching for some clue that it had cooled. She must have slept, if only for a moment, because she was startled awake by the tyres of a car, the rasp of brakes and the sound of voices below. She jumped up, straightening her clothes, and ran down to see who was there.
‘I’ll tell her,’ Ginny was saying through the open door when Lara squeezed past her.
‘Hello.’ There was May with a white-paper carrier bag and behind her the jeep from Ceccomoro, its canvas top rolled back, Piers sitting in the front alone while Roland and Kip lounged, smoking, against the garden wall.
‘We brought your clothes back,’ May said, and Kip kicked a stone across the forecourt.
Lara took the package and looked inside and there, neatly folded, were her washed and ironed clothes. ‘Thanks so much.’
She glanced up at the closed shutters of Caroline’s room. She didn’t know if she had the right to ask them in. She looked at Ginny, but she was simply nodding and smiling, and not able to think of anything else to say Lara watched as they climbed back into the car.
‘Oh,’ she remembered then, ‘I’ve still . . .’ but the jeep was turning round and her voice was drowned out by the screech of tyres as it picked up speed. ‘Bye,’ she called, waving in a sudden burst of friendliness, and Kip smiled at her out of the open back and flicked out his half-smoked cigarette.
‘I didn’t give them
their
clothes back,’ she told Ginny, and feeling at a sudden loss she followed her into the kitchen.
Ginny poured her a glass of pear juice, which she drank slowly, feeling the ice-cold thickness of it sinking to the bottom of her stomach.
‘Don’t worry,’ Ginny smiled gently, ‘you’ll get another chance,’ and then a moment later, colouring, her voice rising, her face creasing into an uncontrollable smile. ‘So that’s Lord Willoughby’s son, is it? Lucky lad must take after his mother.’
‘Yes.’ Lara gulped down the last of her juice, and then Ginny, laughing, leant over to ruffle her hair. ‘I hope you know he’s just about the most eligible bachelor in town, even if he wasn’t gorgeous.’
No, she wanted to say, irritable, and she realised she’d hoped no one had noticed. That it was just possible Kip’s beauty might only be visible to her.
Ginny turned away to grate some cheese, her fingers firm and capable as she turned the Parmesan into a cloud of froth. ‘Lady Lara Willoughby.’ Her throat was full of laughter. ‘Doesn’t that sound lovely?’ and blushing furiously Lara told her to be quiet.
The first time Lara fell in love it was on the Budget Bus. His name was Sam and he was blond and lanky with a wide, white-toothed smile. Lara saw him before they’d even started, while they were still in Tottenham waiting for the journey to begin. People were milling around, stowing their bags into the boot, checking their names with the driver, choosing the seats that would be theirs for the next six weeks. There were fifty-two seats, one for each week of the year, and within a few days they would become as familiar as home.
‘Hello,’ Sam smiled at Lara and Cathy as they climbed on, only an hour after the appointed time for departure, and when they chose two seats on the left-hand side, about a third of the way back, he slipped into an empty one behind.
‘Hello,’ Cathy smiled back at him and he leant forward and told them he had a sister about the same age as Lara who was under orders not to grow up until he got home.
How long will that be? Lara wondered, but she felt self-conscious suddenly, and shy.
An hour later, as they made their slow way through London, he asked if she wanted to play cards. ‘All right,’ she agreed, and she watched him shuffle, admiring the way he flipped the cards, bent them, let them scatter together in a spray. They played gin rummy, endlessly, altering and elaborating the rules. They moved on to cheat and then to racing demons where the cards had to be spread out like patience in the gangway of the bus where Sam and Lara would crouch, slapping them down, screaming in a frenzy to anyone who might want to pass.
The Budget Bus was famous. The magic bus it was sometimes called, but mostly by people who hadn’t caught it. Lara and Cathy had referred to it as magic while they’d waited in Scotland for that last primary-school year to be finished, and Lara realised after ten days or so of travelling that she really had imagined it would fly – spread its wings and rise over the tops of mountains, dip down to rest on the edges of lakes. But in reality the Budget Bus trundled slowly across Europe, through Turkey and into Iran. It broke down in Afghanistan and then again in the Khyber Pass where the gears failed on a stretch of flat. Soon after a small boy hurled a stone through its back window, spraying shards of glass over the bare shoulders of the miners, leaving little pin-pricks in their already tender skin.
Lara and Cathy made another friend, a pale, red-headed woman called Jennifer, and at night the four of them would venture out into the towns they stopped in. They bought fruit in the markets, packets of biscuits and flat bread, and the further east they went, the more attention they attracted. Men in turbans and long cotton dresses, men from
The Arabian Nights
, followed them and stared, at Cathy in her jeans and headscarf, at Jennifer with her blue-white skin, but mostly at Lara who had plaited her dark hair into pigtails and tied the ends with pink and orange bands.
‘You’re the right age for marriage,’ Sam told her, ‘in this culture,’ and on more than one occasion money and even camels were offered in exchange.
‘Keep close,’ Cathy warned her, and so she’d slipped her hand into Sam’s.
It was after midday, and Lambert stood, a pile of papers in his arms, and watched disapprovingly as the table he’d been working at was shifted by two workmen to the far end of the terrace.
‘No, this way, over here!’ Ginny was directing them, high-pitched, swathed in a professional apron, her hands dripping from the sink.
‘I suppose I’ll go upstairs and work,’ Lambert said.
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Caroline snapped. ‘Couldn’t you just forget about your work this once? After all, when did you last take a holiday?’
‘The thing is,’ Lambert explained, ‘I’m not getting any younger. And the century, you may have noticed, is rather long.’
‘Yes,’ Caroline said, subdued. ‘I see.’ And softening, she went over and kissed him on the forehead.
Lara watched him as he went upstairs. What, she wondered, would happen if he didn’t make it to the end? How would the book work if he died before it was over? It was 1981 and he was already nearly sixty. There were still nineteen years to go. More than the span of her life again, and by then – it made her shudder – he would be seventy-seven.
‘Work well,’ Caroline called after him. ‘And don’t forget, they’re all coming at one.’
Lara didn’t dare ask who was coming for fear of disappointment. There were three tables on the terrace now and Ginny was covering them with thick white linen cloths.
‘Can I help?’ she asked her, and Ginny said she could count out sixteen knives and forks, small and large. And sixteen spoons.
Lara began to count. Besides them, that meant they were expecting thirteen guests. If it was the Willoughbys, that meant three daughters, Antonia, Tabitha and May. Then there was Kip, Roland and Piers. Pamela and Lulu, and of course Andrew, but that still left four. Maybe they’d bring their own guests, or maybe it was thirteen other people entirely.
Having laid the table she spent the rest of the morning in the pool, swimming swift lengths until she felt lean and strong and hungry and her mind was soothed. She changed, keeping her bikini on under her clothes in case Roland repeated his idea of a joke, and finding it was still early she went back to the kitchen.
‘I suppose you’ll want to know who you’re sitting next to?’ Ginny nudged her, handing her a bowl of flowers to set on the crease of the white cloth. ‘Caroline has already done the placement so let’s keep fingers crossed and see where she’s put you.’
Even as they spoke Caroline was there with a tiny basket of white labels arranging them at the top of each plate. ‘And how are you today?’ she asked, as Lara followed her along the table, staring, gratified, at each hoped-for name.
‘Oh I’m fine, thank you.’ She hesitated. Could you ask after the health of someone who was ill? Was it polite, when they were trying so hard to pretend that they were fine? ‘Who’s Isabelle?’ she asked instead.
‘Isabelle?’ Caroline looked flustered as if she had only just realised that she’d put her beside Lambert. ‘Hmmm.’ She looked as if she were about to swap him, and then, with a shrug of her shoulders, she walked back into the house.
Restless, Lara hovered around Ginny, watching her stir dressing, artfully scoop avocado pears out of their skins, slice and arrange them against white rounds of mozzarella, hoops of tomato, green sprigs of basil.
‘Scoot,’ Ginny said when the doorbell rang. ‘Wash your hands first!’ and she ushered her towards the bathroom as Caroline appeared to answer the door.
‘Was it a frightful journey?’ Caroline was saying. ‘You poor dears. It’s so good of you to make the effort,’ and she heard the clatter and race of feet across the room.