Come and Tell Me Some Lies (2 page)

Mummy had prepared me for this question, and we had mapped out a charming, enthusiastic answer full of pony clubs, wild flowers and brass-rubbing. I was astonished to hear my voice, crystal clear and confident: ‘I am interested in the dead. I go to all the churches near home on my bicycle and I look at every grave and try to imagine the lives of the people who are buried there. My favourites, although they are the saddest, are the young men who were killed in the First World War, and the whole families of tiny children who must have perished through scarlet fever.'

Miss Floyd's smile faded, her thin eyebrows rose into her thin hair and she fiddled with a pencil. Her confusion buoyed up my confidence; I told her everything Daddy had ever told me about history, and wildly ascribed these tales to people whose graves I said I had seen. By the time I reached the Gunpowder Plot (inventing a trip to London to see the Houses of Parliament) she had heard enough.

‘You have a lively imagination.' Her voice dipped into a sour squawk and she disappeared behind her desk as she bobbed forwards to push her chair out. I craned my neck to see if she had to jump to reach the floor. ‘And history is indeed fascinating. Come. Let us join your mother.'

Beaming victory, I followed her out of the office to Mummy. We said goodbye and left.

With every step away from the school my confidence ebbed. I thought of the sour squawk and the chilly comment about my imagination, and shrank. I told Mummy what I had said and she was horrified.

‘What on earth possessed you? It isn't even remotely true, is it?'

I shook my head. ‘It just seemed to be the right thing to say. I couldn't help it, it just all came out.'

‘Never mind.' Mummy stopped to hug me. Daddy was waiting outside in the Mercedes. Mummy had rung him and asked him to collect us. He saw our tight faces as we walked to the car.

‘I think we all deserve a treat now,' he said. Mortified, I sat like a statue as Mummy told him about the car's disgraceful behaviour.

I knew that Daddy and Mummy desperately wanted me to win a scholarship and that they couldn't afford to send me to a good school if I didn't get one. Longed-for virtue and my recent unexpected rebellion warred within me. I wanted another chance.

‘Shall I write her a letter saying I made it all up?'

I hoped Mummy would say no. She did.

‘What happened, my love?' Daddy asked, but I didn't answer because at that moment we were driving up a concrete ramp into a cavernous multi-storey car park. ‘There is a delicious Chinese restaurant in here,' said Daddy.

‘How on earth do you know?' Mummy was incredulous.

Daddy winked. ‘The world is full of unsolved mysteries, my dear Eleanor.'

‘I suppose you come here for indulgent little lunches when I take the children to the dentist.'

Daddy laughed. ‘The mystery is solved.'

The restaurant walls were lined with glass tanks full of drifting tropical fish. Between the tanks, thick glass panes gave a misty view into the car park. Daddy chose a table where we could look out at the Mercedes. Mummy yelped. ‘God. No wonder you like it here. Do we have to look at the car?'

‘You may look the other way,' said Daddy, ‘but I want to look at the car.'

I had never been to a restaurant with just Mummy and Daddy. I felt sophisticated. The boys will be jealous, I thought.

Daddy lit a cigarette. ‘Was the school decent? Did you like it, my love? You shall not go there if you didn't.'

‘I won't get the chance.' And I told him about my lies.

Daddy laughed. ‘I see you have a brain underneath all that hair.'

‘Are you angry?' I blurted out.

Mummy and Daddy answered together. ‘No, of course we aren't.'

‘You are a very clever girl,' said Daddy, ‘and I can see no reason why you should have to go to school at all.'

Mummy glared at him, but he pretended not to see and ordered me a frozen orange with sorbet in the place of flesh.

On Burns Night when Gabriella was one, a fat cherub with eyes like china saucers and dimpled knees, her brother Archibald Robert was born. Patrick and Eleanor had returned from Italy to their damp Islington basement. They were broke. Whenever it rained, thick white slugs slouched their way up the glass of the french windows. Gabriella was sent to stay with Eleanor's parents in Scotland; she learned to walk, tottering gnomish in a red hooded suit, and she forgot her mother.

Eleanor went to Harrods and bought a bearskin hat for Patrick to take to the icy plains of Buffalo. He had been offered a post as writer in residence at the university, and the fee was too large to refuse. Eleanor waved him off at the airport and went into hospital to give birth to her son. She knew no one in London; her only visitor was the ghost of Graham Kingsley who had died a week or two before. She and Graham's spirit spent a merry afternoon recalling evenings wet with whisky and tears in the pubs of Soho, and then Eleanor and her baby caught the train to Scotland.

At Aberdeen her daughter, arms stretched out behind for
balance, taxied down the platform towards her. Tearful, Eleanor ran to Gabriella and knelt to embrace her. Gabriella screamed as this tall woman bore down on her, terrifying and unidentifiable in a cavernous cloak. Her grandmother, a tiny smile playing on her lips, stepped forward and picked Gabriella up. ‘It's all right, darling. This is Mummy. You remember Mummy, don't you? She's brought you a baby brother.'

Gabriella squatted in front of the moses basket and patted the baby's soft head. ‘Brodie,' she said, beaming round at her mother and grandmother standing behind her, tensed for her reaction.

Archibald Robert lay festooned in Cameron lace on the spindly sofa in his grandparents' drawing-room. Gabriella had stumbled through her first two words (Va Va, her name for herself, and Boys, the other people she was interested in) when she met her brother. Eleanor tried to call her Gabriella, but she shook her head and would not answer. She was Va Va now, and her baby was Brodie. He was small and pink and crumpled; Va Va was delighted by his inability to do any of the things at which she excelled, like walking and talking, and she adored him because he was hers, everyone told her so. She looked upon him as something to care for, keenly embracing the role of Big Sister. He incurred her displeasure, though, when he learned to walk. As he forged his first moon-man steps towards the doorway of a room where Eleanor sat, fury welled in Va Va at her mother's words of encouragement. Indignation pricked her skin like sunburn and, gathering all her crosspatch feelings, she rushed to slam the door, separating Brodie and his success from Eleanor's proud smiling eyes.

Eleanor had left Scotland in a tangled trail of purple silk, fishnet stockings and high-heeled shoes. She was seventeen. She went to Oxford and fell asleep in her finals. A local newspaper printed a picture of her slumbering under the headline ‘A Sleeping Beauty'. Lurking with a hangover in Blackwell's bookshop, she picked up a volume of poetry by Patrick Lincoln; it froze her spine and she fell in love. She moved to London and took a job as a waitress in Lyons Corner House, and then another, folding scarves in Liberty's. It was 1962 and she had never seen anyone rock and roll and had only watched television once, when her father had borrowed a set to see the Queen's coronation. In her dreary bedsit Eleanor made tea by heating water on an iron. She did not know how to boil an egg or slice a loaf of bread; she became very thin and returned to Scotland for a while with a beehive hair-do and a lot of fanciful notions about poets.

Two weeks after the interview, Mummy received a letter from Mary Hall's Girls School confirming my place for the autumn term. She was thrilled and so was I until a terrible thought occurred to me.

‘Will I have to go on Saturdays? I can't. What about riding?'

Daddy was reading the paper at the kitchen table with two-year-old Poppy sitting on his knee. He looked up, raising his spectacles on to his forehead. ‘No one goes to school on Saturdays,' he said. ‘No one works on Saturdays either.'

Dan appeared from the playroom. ‘It's Saturday now. It's sweetie day. When are we going to the shop to get our sweets? I can take Poppy on my own now.'

‘No you can't.' Mummy heaved the iron door-stop back to its position against the fridge door where it squatted as a sentry against the fiendish cunning of the cats. ‘Four simply isn't old enough to cross the road. Brodie can take you.'

‘I'll have to go to school on Saturdays.' Brodie was invisible, perched behind the sheets which hung low over the Aga to dry. ‘When I go to King Henry's I'll have to wear shorts and go on Saturdays.' Brodie had also just passed his scholarship
exam and, with relentless dolour, was not looking forward to his new school.

Daddy folded the newspaper. ‘I'm going for a drive to the coast. I may have fish and chips for lunch …' and he let his sentence trail as children engulfed him, baying to be included.

It took hours putting on coats, and in the middle Flook returned from his dig in the garden. Flook was nine and had for a year been engrossed in a project he started at school to discover the history of Mildney. He was breathless with excitement. ‘Look what I've found. I think it's prehistoric.' He held up a skull the size of his own head.

‘It's a goat,' said Dan immediately, and Flook sighed. ‘Of course it's a goat, but it might be a prehistoric goat, or from Roman times.'

Daddy held the skull up to the light. ‘We shall start our museum with this,' he said. ‘Flook, you have the bones of a great archaeologist; now let's get the hell out of here and go to Cromer.'

Daddy was never late and he hated dawdling. Mummy found it impossible to leave the house on time, and whenever they went out together Daddy would sit in the car for twenty minutes revving the engine and shouting, while Mummy rushed through the house muttering ‘I'm coming, you silly sod' under her breath.

We waited for her in the car. Brodie and I slid along the shiny leather of the front seat to make room for Flook. Mummy came out of the house without a coat. ‘I'll stay here. All those people are coming this evening and I've got so much to do. Have a lovely time, darlings.'

We bumped down the drive, Dan and Poppy kneeling up to look out of the back window. ‘Dobe's coming too,' said Dan, as we accelerated out of the village. Our anarchic Dobermann had a private mission to outpace the car, and he always tried to come too. He hurtled past the Mercedes as Daddy slowed down and, saliva foaming at his jaws, stood triumphant in the middle of the road.

‘For Christ's sake,' sighed Daddy, and opened a door. Dobe scrambled in, licking faces politely, and positioned himself with his head resting on Daddy's shoulder to help him navigate.

We had fish and chips, then filed into Daddy's favourite junk shop. ‘It's Liza's birthday today. We must find something to give her this evening. Poppy shall choose it,' said Daddy. Liza had once been Daddy's wife, before he knew Mummy, and their three children, Dominic, Helen and Theresa, were all grown-up. They called Daddy ‘Patrick' and they didn't feel like siblings to us; they were as old as Mummy and had children of our age.

Liza came often to Mildney, driving perilously on her orange moped and clad in a coordinating cagoule. She always brought a bottle of gin, telling us, ‘This is mother's ruin, and your mother and I are longing to be ruined.' She was funny and kind, we liked the way she danced in the Drinking Room and teased Daddy. He called her ‘darling heart' and said, ‘Come and tell me some lies, dear Liza.'

Poppy chose a teapot in the shape of a Christmas pudding. Daddy was impressed. ‘My love, you have exquisite taste,' he said to his tiny daughter, and we left the shop, pausing to purchase a rusty colander for Mummy.

Brodie, Flook and I got out of the car on our drive. The boys
vanished to go fishing and I plodded through the dusk to feed my pony Shalimar. Yanking tufts of hay from the bulging bale, I was inspired. ‘If there is Saturday school, I won't tell Mummy.' Pleased with this plan, I shuffled down to Shalimar's field with a wedge of dusty hay.

Liza arrived at tea-time, her face glowing pink from her forty-mile moped ride. She hugged Mummy. ‘Eleanor, this is a treat. I'm sure I'm too old for a tea-party, I think I'm sixty-one, but I can't quite remember.'

Taking off her crash helmet she dragged her fingers through her dark blonde hair and lit a cigarette. Liza looked ageless. She had deep cracks round her mouth and eyes from laughing, but they almost vanished when she was happy, and she usually seemed happy. She loved coming to Mildney because she lived alone. ‘I'm thirsty for conversation. Tell me a joke,' she begged Dan, but he shook his head. ‘I'm eating cake,' he mumbled. Brodie and Flook were still fishing, so she sat down with me and fumbled in her pocket for a letter. ‘It's from Helen and the girls. Do you remember Zoe and Vinnie, my granddaughters?'

I nodded. ‘Of course she does,' said Daddy. ‘They are her nieces, in a manner of speaking.'

‘Half-nieces actually,' I replied, and Liza laughed.

‘I suppose they are; Helen is your half-sister, after all. How nice to have a family to extend at will.'

Brodie and Flook appeared. ‘Dominic's here,' said Brodie. ‘He's brought a box of drink.'

‘Is this a family reunion?' Liza raised her eyebrows and Mummy laughed.

‘No. Only Dominic, he wanted to surprise you on your birthday.'

Liza and Daddy went through to the Drinking Room and Flook and I rolled our eyes. ‘I suppose they have to celebrate Liza's birthday,' said Flook, ‘but I wish they didn't have to get drunk to do it.'

Mummy frowned at him. ‘Don't be mean. Liza loves parties, and she wanted to be here with all of us for her birthday. Dominic has simply come to see his mother, and a few other people will be here after you've gone to bed, so try and be pleasant, please.'