‘Ah, don’t mind him,’ Frank assured her. ‘Sure he’s only a cunt. Anyway if there was any bother you’d have Charlie and me to protect you, wouldn’t you?’
‘Ha ha,’ I said, but this was my cue to go. ‘Look, I forgot, I have to, um…’
‘See a man about a dog?’ Frank chortled, the meaning of which escaped me; Bel smirked triumphantly as I put on my topcoat and hastened outside in a cold sweat to hail a cab.
It was a long ride back, and at the door I bade farewell to a sizeable portion of my winnings. But I didn’t care, it was such a relief to be home: I closed the door and leaned back against it thankfully. The rich aroma of cooking floated up to me, and I went into the kitchen, where Mrs P was just that minute taking a tray of cinnamon buns out of the oven, piping hot with the sugar frosting still sizzling on their golden tops. My entrance took her by surprise – in fact she practically jumped out of her skin, only this time the tray acted as ballast.
‘Buns,’ I said, ignoring this. ‘I’ll just pinch one, if I may –’
‘Hmm yes,’ she recovered in time to swerve nimbly away, moving the tray just out of my reach, ‘but Master Charles, they are for your dear mother in hospital.’
‘She won’t mind,’ I said, deftly stepping around to her tray side.
She reversed. ‘Now Charles, please to think of your poor mother.’
‘Look, give me a bun,’ I said bluntly.
Pursing her lips, she proffered the tray. Tearing off a mouthful of delicious steaming sponge, I remembered my plan to save Mrs P’s failing mental health through love. ‘So,’ I said, chewing and swallowing, ‘what’s it like in that place, anyway?’
‘What?’ she said.
‘You know, where you’re from,’ I said, taking another bun. They really were very good. She hadn’t made cinnamon buns in ages.
‘Well…’ she frowned. ‘It was very nice, yes. When I was a little girl. Now, of course, there are many troubles.’
‘But it was nice when you were little, eh?’ I said.
She put the buns on the counter behind her and folded her arms meditatively. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, and her expression quite changed, making her look twenty years younger, her amber eyes taking on a happy, nostalgic glaze not unlike two frosted cinnamon buns. ‘When I was little, we lived in the country. My father was a painter and the house is filled always with the loveliest colours. Each day my sister and I bring wild flowers home for him to paint –’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said, as this line of questioning didn’t show much promise. ‘But it’s in a bad way now, is it? Lots of explosions, houses burning down, sort of thing? Like on the news?’
‘Now,’ frowning down at the ground, ‘everything is changed. Like you cannot even think. The explosion may stop, the burning, but… like this plate,’ she picked up one of Mother’s Wedgwood dinner-set from the dresser and traced her finger around the intricate design on the rim, ‘if I drop, is gone. Smash up into little pieces. You can glue it together, but the pattern, that leads into itself at every place, is still broken, disappears for ever. Houses and families, friends who talk at the market, children who sing and shout in the street, men who build, eat sandwiches in sunshine, look at pretty girls – all pattern lost and disappear like –’
‘Well don’t break the plate,’ I said hurriedly, snatching it from her upheld hand. Midnight breakfasts were one thing, but wilful plate-breaking was another matter entirely. Really the woman seemed quite disturbed. Possibly I ought to call the chap at the Cedars to come and have a look at her. ‘What about your family?’ I said, attempting to lead her on to more peaceful topics that might be less of a threat to the crockery. ‘What about them?’
She was about to reply, but halted and regarded me curiously. ‘Why do you ask me this?’
‘No reason. Just, you know, I don’t know much about you. Seems odd, doesn’t it? I mean you live here –’
‘Many, many questions,’ she said.
‘Well, global village, you know, hands across the sea, what –’
She didn’t understand. ‘Many questions,’ she mused to herself, then looking back at me said in an unfamiliar, bitter tone, ‘in Yugoslavia, men come with questions. Is not good, when they come.’
So I was the secret police now, was I? ‘Look,’ I said, ‘you can just answer the question, or not. Tell me about your wretched family or don’t. I don’t care. I’m just trying to be nice. I know all about it already. I watch the news.’
‘You want to know about my family?’ she shouted angrily. ‘Fine. Five years ago, my husband is architect, I give the legal aid, we have two sons in university and a girl who wants to be famous actress. Now there is nothing. House gone, money, we hide and we run –’ She covered her face with her apron. Little cotton ducklings danced up and down where her nose had been.
I hadn’t even known she had children. ‘Where are they?’ I asked, as gently as I could.
‘ – and now I cook you buns!’ Mrs P sobbed, and ran out of the room.
What could I do? I couldn’t follow her; she was the help, after all; her personal life wasn’t really any of my business. Possibly paying attention to Mrs P hadn’t been such a good idea after all. We truly didn’t know the first thing about her – she’d just turned up one day, responding to an advertisement that had, we discovered subsequently, mysteriously appeared in the window of the local newsagent. As it happened, though, Mother had been thinking of getting a new maid, the last one, a fetching little French au pair, having left some months before following a misunderstanding with Pongo McGurks at our Christmas party – perfectly innocent, of course, but you know au pairs. And so Mrs P had joined the household. By then Father was already very sick, and no one had ever got around to asking her about her past. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that she might have preferred it that way.
Pensively I ate another bun, then took the tray up to Father’s study. I ate tentatively; one could no longer be sure of the cooking’s soundness, that was the thing. They tasted fine, but who knew what madness might throw into the mixing bowl? And if not now, what of breakfast tomorrow? Elevenses? Lunch? Tea? Dinner? Supper? And the day after that, the deadly game of Russian roulette would continue, with each spoonful another spin of the chamber…
Deciding a glass or two of wine might steady my nerves, I went back downstairs to the cellar. Hmm. I could see what Bel meant. The stocks really had taken a beating recently. Was it possible that I could have put away this amount on my own? Or could it be that I was getting help from another quarter? I clenched my fists and swore. Frank! I could just see him, laughing soundlessly in the back of his rusty white van, rocking back and forth as he swigged from the neck of a bottle of Marsanne. Or at the dog-track, the green rim poking from the collar of his windcheater as he frittered away the proceeds from our ottoman. Or – a new thought struck me, maybe it wasn’t Frank at all! Maybe Mrs P had drunk the wine! Maybe she was a Secret Drinker, like that laundrywoman of Boyd Snooks’s he’d found asleep in the dog basket! Wouldn’t that explain why she was acting so strangely? Unless of course it was only a symptom of her collapse… Great Scott, we were living in a time bomb!
I grabbed a soothing premier cru, and returned to the study. There was only the ghost of a moon outside, but I left the light off. I sat at the desk, poured a glass and raised it to Father’s portrait – just in case there might be some vestige of his spirit still hanging around among the toxic oils and leads that could give me a sign, point the way out of my quandary. But the glass was filled and emptied until there was nothing left, and I remained in the dark.
I turned to the window and looked out at the Folly, half-hidden by night. The Folly was my idea: it had occurred to me on one of my strolls around the grounds that we hadn’t got one, and as no one else seemed to be doing anything about it, I had called in the builders. That was almost a year ago, but the tower, to be the glory of our estate, was still nowhere near finished. The builders hadn’t been in all week; possibly they were on strike, they were always on strike for one reason or another. Unlike most builders one hears of, these ones were very moral. They would go on strike at the drop of a hat, in support of the nurses or the bricklayers or some other branch of labourer, or often on more general humanitarian grounds. ‘We can’t work,’ the head builder would tell me in the kitchen of a lunchtime, ‘until the UN does something about Indonesia, it’s getting ridiculous’ (‘It is,’ I’d agree, as they went off to picket the Nike shop in town); or they’d down tools on a Tuesday morning, telling me ‘It’s the whole Kurdish thing, Mr Hythloday, it’s unconscionable, and the US is just making things worse’ (‘I know,’ I’d say with a sigh as they gathered up their placards and set off for the Turkish Embassy); and every week the Palestine question took a new turn to prompt a day off.
‘Basically, it would be wrong of us to work while this sort of thing is going on,’ they would argue, and they had a good point; however, the world didn’t seem to be improving and consequently the Folly was going very slowly. I still wasn’t allowed to enter it, and they weren’t sure exactly when it would be safe enough to do so. Yet in a way, I almost preferred that they did it like this; as I looked out at its skeletal form, I could perceive already its proud upsurge, its noble future. ‘Liberty!’ it seemed to cry. And tonight, just as I was about to look away, I saw something: an angelic face peeping out from one of the narrow windows. It was a very beautiful face, painted in the choicest greys and silvers of the clouded moonlight; it saw me, smiled and waved. I waved back, whereupon it disappeared.
I should explain at this point that this sort of thing wasn’t entirely new to me. In recent months I had had quite a few supernatural experiences. My theory was that without Mother here to distract me with her nagging, I was more receptive to communications from the spirit world. I’ve mentioned the eerie feelings I had had watching late-night films – i.e., the unshakeable sense that the films were watching me. Often the Visions were of a more hostile variety. Leaning from the window after a long night, attempting to assuage my spinning brain, I had on more than one occasion seen huge, goblin-like figures, not dissimilar to Frank, lurching about in the shadow of the Folly, or lumbering with silent menace across the lawn. Whether these manifestations had always been resident in Amaurot, or whether they had only arrived recently in some sort of premonitory capacity, I didn’t know. But whichever line you took, this particular Vision seemed propitious. I mean an angel was a definite step up from a goblin, for one thing; symbolically speaking, it surely meant that the Folly (representing me, Charles, and also the family line in general) would continue to rise and transcend the intrusions of the brutish world (symbolized by Frank, if you want).
I tipped an imaginary hat to Father, by way of thank you for the good omen, and returned to my room in a much more optimistic frame of mind, and it wasn’t until I tried to sit down on it that I realized the chair to my writing-desk wasn’t there. ‘What now?’ I said to the ceiling, which had risen to prominence in my new horizontal position.
Picking myself up, I scoured the room for it, and then the landing, but it was nowhere to be seen. This was exasperating. It wasn’t a costly chair, it wasn’t even an attractive chair; it had come down from the attic after its predecessor succumbed to woodworm. Its theft revealed a hitherto unsuspected degree of stupidity in the malefactor. There were lots of nicer things in the house to steal, and it was most bothersome that he should settle on this worthless item just as I intended to sit on it. At that very minute I heard them come in and, sniggering to each other, climb the stairs to Bel’s room. I had half a mind to go and confront him there and then: indeed I had put on my slippers and was halfway to the door when the horrible image of interrupting him and Bel in the middle of
something
appeared in my mind, and my legs quite failed me. The room began to list, like a ship in a storm; knees buckling, I staggered into the armoire, then back the way I had come as the room tilted to the other side. I lay down on the bed and covered my eyes. This had to end. We couldn’t go on like this; my stomach, for one, couldn’t bear it. Action had to be taken: definitive action.
3
The next couple of days were peaceful enough. Bel was out most of the time and she took her Project with her; when at home they tended to stay in her bedroom at their reading lesson. The day after was when all the trouble with the bank materialized, and things really started to cave in: though the morning began so sweetly, with Mrs P waking me just before noon with the telephone on a tray.
‘Hello?’ I said, after establishing that this was not a murderous ruse on Mrs P’s part.
‘Hello,’ an unfamiliar voice said. ‘Charles?’
Heart pounding, I scrambled out of bed to my feet. It was a sultry voice, throaty, at once refined and scandalously suggestive; it could have come from a thousand black-and-white movies – the fallen dame in the bar-room asking for a light, the heiress with the detective parked on a shadowy driveway, the trembling young widow pleading for help from the embittered ex-marine. A monochrome voice that could belong to only one person.
‘Laura,’ I said with a strange, thankful calmness, a sense that one thing had ended and a new one was beginning.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Your sister called me last night, she said you had something you needed to discuss with me…?’
Damn that Bel, she would make nothing easy for me. ‘That’s right,’ I said. A moment of blissful tension elapsed.
‘So what is it?’ Laura said.
What was it? I could hardly tell her she’d caught my eye as a twelve-year-old while I was paging through my sister’s yearbook, it might give her the wrong idea, and I didn’t want to jump the gun with any talk of destiny. ‘Um…’ I said.
‘Christabel told me,’ she interjected delicately, ‘you were interested in insurance?’
‘Yes,’ I said, seizing on the words. ‘Yes I am. Very interested. Insurance, in all its, ah, forms, and, um, wonders… it, it enthrals me…’
‘She said you were interested in insuring a vase,’ Laura said slowly, as if guiding someone of limited mental ability.
‘Vases, yes, that’s it, I have a vase and I’d like to insure it. I was wondering if you’d care to come over some night and discuss it? Over dinner perhaps? Say this Saturday?’
She was doubtful at first. ‘Couldn’t you just come by the office?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘because there’s actually more than one vase, you see, in fact there’s several vases, much too many to carry to the office – and anyway I prefer to do business over dinner. That way, ah, no one gets hungry.’
‘Oh,’ she said. There was a long pause. I waited, quietly grinding my teeth and berating myself.
That way no one gets hungry
– what on earth was I thinking? Was I still crippled by the fallout from the Olé incident? Would I never be able to speak to a woman again?
‘All right,’ Laura broke in. ‘It’s not normally how we do things, but you are Christabel’s brother, after all.’
‘Yes,’ I said fatuously, resisting the urge to jump up and down weeping tears of gratitude. ‘So I’ll see you Saturday? Eightish?’
‘I suppose,’ the voice crackled. ‘Oh, but I’m lactose intolerant, okay? So like, I can’t eat anything with lactose.’
‘Certainly, certainly… don’t give it another thought,’ I said, and replaced the receiver. For a few seconds I remained there in the moment’s afterglow, not yet ready to yield up its immediacy; then, with a whoop, I raised my fist to the air. Victory! True, I hadn’t presented myself in the most flattering light; I may have come across as a tad eccentric, or deranged. But what mattered was that she had accepted. Once she was inside the house, where I controlled all, everything would fall into place: for she would see that here was a world waiting to be remade as she desired – mountains moved, seas emptied, lactose banished to the ends of the earth – it would all be for her, and she would understand straight away that we were meant to be.
I went into the breakfast room to deliver the good news, but found myself confronted by Frank in a state of partial undress on the far side of the table, which rather spoiled the moment. ‘All right bud,’ he greeted me, stretching back in an uninhibited, vaguely post-coital yawn that exposed his flaccid white belly. I shuddered: How could Bel endure to look at
that
, indeed to feel it slapping greasily against – but no. She had honoured the pact and I had got what I wanted – now the détente must be respected. Swallowing my disgust, I gave him as unhostile a nod as I could manage, and pulled out a chair at the table.
Bel was sitting slumped in front of a pile of opened letters. She looked rather agitated: her cheeks had a high colour and her hair was frazzled as though she’d been tugging at it, and when I asked her pointedly who had eaten all the marmalade she didn’t reply. I changed tack and told her about Laura. ‘Funny that she’s in insurance, though. I hardly thought she’d be the type, did you?’
‘Mmm,’ Bel said, continuing to glower into her pile.
‘Is there any more marmalade?’ Frank said.
‘I mean, bit funny, isn’t it?’
‘Not to anyone who knows her,’ she snapped. ‘Why, what did you think she did?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully, although in my imagination I’d sort of pictured her walking around a big empty house, gazing melancholically out at the rain with a cup of black coffee in her hands and slow jazz in the background, more or less on a fulltime basis.
‘Whatever. Listen, Charles, there’s something I want to talk to you about.’ She turned in her seat to look directly at me. From the far side of the table I heard Frank chuckling as he ate his toast.
‘Yes?’ I said, suddenly feeling uneasy.
‘How long, exactly, have you been leaving letters in the String Drawer?’
‘Why… I don’t know.’ I was usually at home when the postman came, so it was generally me who separated the post; taking personal correspondence up to our respective bedrooms and leaving family business in the String Drawer for Bel to look at at her convenience. I didn’t see what she was driving at, nor why her face was taking on that disconcerting brick-red hue. ‘A few months, I suppose.’
‘And were you thinking of
telling
me at any stage?’
‘Telling you what?’ I said, confused. ‘I mean, it’s your, well it’s sort of your cubbyhole, isn’t it?’
‘What gave you the impression,’ she said, ‘that the String Drawer was my cubbyhole?’
I didn’t like her tone and was about to retort, when I realized that I had no idea what had given me that impression. We must have had
some
prior arrangement, I thought, racking my brains; although it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that I had stuck the afternoon post in there one day after some lunchtime drinks and latterly
assumed
that there had been a prior arrangement. Whatever had happened, the String Drawer was where family-related correspondence had been going more or less since Mother left for the Cedars. Now that I came to think of it, I had wondered recently why Bel was letting it build up so.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘Well what?’ I said. ‘You’ve found them now, so let’s just be happy with that, and not start blaming each other –’
‘Charles, have you
seen
these? Do you know what they are?’ She waved a sheaf of the envelopes with the funny red stamp on them. ‘Do you?’
‘Special delivery?’ I hazarded. Frank stifled a laugh. ‘Well how should I know? All that’s your department, that’s always been the way.’
‘One of my many departments,’ Bel said in a scornful aside to Frank. ‘Charles handles Food and Wine, and the rest is left for me.’
‘As long as you keep handlin me,’ Frank leered. She lapsed into a shy smile and I glimpsed her stockinged toe nudging his white sock under the table; I experienced a sensation of utter displacement, as though the earth had shifted on its axis and everything had toppled over. This must have been how Louis XVI felt, I reflected, when he was taken from his prison cell and led to the scaffold, and understood for the first time that this noisy, shouty bunch of nobodies were actually serious about their Revolution business.
‘Well, what are they so?’ I half-shouted, in case she had forgotten I was there.
‘They’re from the
bank
, Charles!’ Bel shouted back, banging the palms of her hands on the table. ‘From the bank, from the building society, from our solicitors, from other people’s solicitors. But mainly from the bank.’
A cold shiver went down my spine. ‘I wonder what they want?’ I said.
‘What do they ever want,’ Frank mused dolorously. ‘You won’t catch them wastin stamps askin you how you are.’
‘Money. They want money. There’s bills in here going back for months, from the phone company, the electricity, the television people.’ She flung the pages about desperately. ‘But they’re the least of our worries. The big one is the bank. Our mortgage repayments are in arrears, serious arrears. They’re talking about foreclosing.’
This took a moment to register with me.
Mortgage, foreclose
– these were words with which I was not wholly familiar, rarely being encountered in polite society, except in murmured stories told in the midnight hours, in the same tone one might use for cancer or abortion; horrible things that, outside the confines of one’s demesne, were happening to luckless strangers. ‘I didn’t know we
had
a mortgage,’ I said.
‘Charles,’ Bel pulled at her hair frustratedly, ‘this
Hythloday empire
you’re always going on about didn’t come from nowhere. It’s built on
credit
. None of it’s
ours
, not really. It looks like Father borrowed an absolute fortune, the sums they’re talking about here are just, just
astronomical
–’ She sat back in her chair, making slits of her eyes. ‘I
knew
something like this would happen, Mother’s just let everything go to hell since he died, I don’t think she’s even
seen
the accountant since the funeral…’
‘But…’ we had company, so one didn’t want to be vulgar, ‘but, I mean – we’re still
rich
, aren’t we? Can’t we just pay them what they want and they’ll leave us alone?’
Bel got up and started throwing her hands around. ‘What goes
on
in that fucking head of yours? When you’re not drunk, what’s happening in there?’
‘Well don’t swear,’ I pleaded, not feeling very well.
‘Father was a
chemist
, Charles, a
scientist
, not an
emperor
, not fucking Charlemagne. Even very good scientists don’t get paid enough to afford a place like this, haven’t you ever thought of that?’
‘He had his investments,’ for some reason I felt the need to defend Father here, ‘his assets, that sort of thing –’
‘Well, where are they? Where are they, Charles? I mean I just don’t know what he was thinking. Even if he hadn’t
died
I don’t know how he was intending to repay it all. And since then we’ve had no income proper and this colossal inheritance tax and all these new demands on the finances, Mother’s clinic and your alcoholism and that ridiculous Folly and we seem to be spending a
ton
on groceries at the moment for some reason –’
I bit my lip. ‘What are you saying, exactly?’
‘There isn’t enough, Charles. There simply isn’t enough to pay them back.’ She rested her head on the back of her chair, as if overcome by fatigue; sunlight streamed through the Chantilly curtains and picked out golden strands in her hair. At that moment my conversation with Laura seemed to be terribly far away. ‘Right now the only thing I can think of to do is sell off some of our shares. I mean that’ll get us some time, at least.’
‘Ah, yes, the shares,’ I said neutrally.
‘Mine’re still all bound up in trust, so we’ll have to use yours,’ she blinked at me with red eyes. ‘We can split the difference later.’
‘Right. Good.’ I decided that now was not the best time to tell her about my run of bad luck at the baccarat table a few months ago. Instead I put on a false smile and told her not to worry. ‘They’re reasonable people, bankers,’ I said. ‘And we’ve given them loads of money over the years. They must have forgotten it’s us, that’s all. I mean I’m sure no one ever lost a house because they’d put the letters in the wrong cubbyhole; that’s absurd. I can go and talk to them today. It’s a storm in a teacup, you’ll see.’
‘Ha,’ remarked Frank, who had been occupying himself with an extensive excavation of his aural cavities.
‘What, “Ha”? What do you mean, “Ha”?’ I rounded on him; the whole thing was his fault, sort of.
‘Me ma was plagued by them fucken banks her whole life,’ he said into his teacup. ‘Never had a penny to her name but they’d be sniffin after it – she used to have this joke, what’s the difference between banks and the Devil?’
Bel and I looked at him.
‘In Hell they won’t cut off your heatin,’ he said.
‘Is that a joke?’ I screeched at last.
He shrugged. ‘It’s about as funny as banks get,’ he said.
‘Well I’ll go and talk to them,’ I said, and left them to their sock-rubbing, which might calm Bel down at least. I didn’t like her to get upset. She might not have looked it, but she was a ferocious worrier: she could tie herself into knots over the most inconsequential matters. She had always been like this, even as a small girl. When other children were busy believing in Santa Claus and Tooth Fairies, she became obsessed with the idea that every time Father and Mother left the house they would never come back. She never said anything to them; but as soon as she saw the car pull out of the driveway, she’d go to her room, sit very still and think Positive Thoughts about them until they had safely returned. That was just one instance of what was even then a broad spectrum of worrying. She also worried about losing things. She worried about things breaking or running out. She worried about robbers and dangerous drivers. She worried about what would happen to her dolls when she died. She had a whole host of worries on behalf of the animal kingdom – what would they eat in the winter, where would they sleep if people kept putting buildings everywhere, whether they would be all right crossing roads by themselves. All these were as nothing, however, compared to the Herculean bout of worrying provoked by the arrival of our one and only household pet, not counting the peacocks, which I didn’t: a springer spaniel, a loving if excitable fellow who in the end wasn’t around long enough even to be given a name.