Never Mind Miss Fox (6 page)

C
live had not intended to go to Eliot's birthday party but when the day came he found himself at his parents' home—on a laundry run—and with nothing to do that night. Tom was there, excited and jumpy about the evening to come, and Clive was jealous.

Tom had not given up on Eliot and still loved her, not quite hopeless and not quite encouraged. “That naughty Eliot,” sighed Val. “She leads him on, poor Tom.”

Clive had not told his brother about the day at the races. It would have been uncomfortable to tell and hard for Tom to hear, so he kept it to himself—quite tight against his chest.

Watching Tom bob about in the kitchen, bothering his mother and making her laugh, Clive could read his brother's mind—they all could:
Perhaps tonight.

“I might come too,” Clive offered. When he saw Tom's surprised face turn towards him he knew that he did want to go. “Yes, I think I'll come with you, to the party. She asked me, did you know that?”

Tom pulled no punches: it was his big night and he did not want his brother there. “She asked you because she thinks you're a sad act with no friends. She's not expecting you to actually come. Anyway, what about exams? Aren't you supposed to be working?”

“I'll take the night off.”

Tom sat down at the kitchen table to lace his sneaker and did not say anything for a moment. Val looked from one son to the other but kept quiet. When Tom straightened up he said, “But—” He stopped and started again. “But everyone will be my age—apart from her parents. You won't know anyone. It'll be weird.”

Clive stared at his reflection in the kitchen mirror. “Eliot said there were all sorts of different people going,” he said.

Other grown-ups,
was what she had laughed down the telephone.
There might even be some as old as you. Hey—and listen: have you got a number for Danny?
The words had struck and winded him.

“You'll probably chat up her mum or something,” continued Tom. “You're all right when you're with Martha, but on your own you can be a bit…” The sentence did not seem to have an end.

Martha had gone to visit her father. “He sounded awful on the phone,” she had confessed to Clive that morning. “He sounded wasted.” She had filled Viv's car with provisions—“I bet he hasn't eaten proper food in weeks”—and pressed away through the Saturday traffic.

She would have been baffled by Clive's change of plan. “Eliot's birthday party? But why?”

I don't have to tell her everything,
Clive reasoned with his conscience.

The two brothers shouted “'Bye, Mum,” over their shoulders as they went out of the front door and Clive heard, “Send her our love—” before the door slammed.

They cycled to the station, tied up their bikes and caught the Tube.

“It's nice up here,” said Tom as they walked towards Primrose Hill. “I'm going to live in Camden when I'm older.”

Tom was in love with everything about Eliot, thought Clive, and that included her family home and her postcode.

Martha had been right when she had said that Kilburn and Primrose Hill were separated by more than geography. Eliot's was a sturdy, square white cake of a house that stood, quite certain of itself and its position, in a proper garden of its own. From a glossy front door, stone steps led to a gate at the pavement.

Inside, Clive was given champagne and Tom a glass of punch. “Punch for the young,” trilled Sabrina, Eliot's mother. “Darling Tom,” she added, kissing him. “How's my rotten daughter treating you? I wish you were in love with
me.
” She sighed and shimmered away in her silk drapery.

“Nightmare woman,” said Tom, shaking his head. “She showed me her bush, once. It was unbelievably massive.” Then he sidled off to have his drink topped up by a friend.

When Eliot saw Clive she said, “Clive!” as if he were the only person she had wanted to come to the party. She was glassy-eyed and dazed; starstruck with herself.

A couple of hard-faced girlfriends had taken charge of her, holding her by the elbows and steering her round the house. The two friends stared and giggled at Clive, flirted with Eliot's father and gazed with unblinking insolence at Sabrina before spotting Tom and separating him from the crowd, like mute, efficient sheepdogs. They herded him up the stairs in front of them and away to Eliot's room.

Tom did not try to win people over but with an unconscious, careless, laughing kindness he attracted them. His mother had called it his “magnet.”

“It's because he's free,” Martha had said, watching Tom on the beach. “You can tell a mile off.”

Now, as Tom was carried off upstairs by the sheepdogs, Clive felt conflicting thoughts strike him within like bits of flint:
Those girls look mean—I wish they liked me—But they like Tom—I don't care anyway.
In the days before Martha that sensation—rummaging; cutting—had come often.

As Tom had suspected, Clive did not know anyone here. He became aware that he was caught in a hopeless position: he did not wish to be dismissed by the teenagers as a boring grown-up but nor did he wish to be seen by the adults as an ignorant schoolboy. He wanted his own category:
Oxford finalist.

He discovered that if he walked into a room where adults stood in discussion he was regarded with cool disinterest. In the basement, teenagers looked up at him with incurious distrust from their draped positions over beanbags and cushions on the floor.

He located Eliot's bedroom: a shut door, a stink of fags, a noisy hubbub within. Clive knocked and pushed the door open a crack.

“Who is it?” said an unfamiliar voice. Clive could see through the chink three girls lying pressed together like sardines across the bed. One of them held a bottle of vodka.

“Clive. Can I come in?”

A whispered consultation and then, “No!” shouted in unison. The door was kicked shut in his face and he heard their shrieks of laughter.

Clive was feverish with discomfort and a needling terror. If Martha had been there she would have told him to go home. “Why stay?” she would have said. “You're hating it; you're miserable.”
Give up,
he told himself.
Go home. No one will care—no one will even notice.
Never mind his dignity; he wanted his bed.

The decision made, Clive felt a great relief. He opened the front door and took a breath of the clean, bright night—

“Clive?”

He peered into the garden. “Danny?”

A tall figure, lit cigarette glowing between his teeth, was stepping up to the door with a click of his soles. “Leaving already?”

“No,” lied Clive. “Just going to get some fags for Eliot.”

“I've got loads,” came the reply, and somehow Clive was inside the house again with the door shut behind him and a brand-new drink in his hand.

Danny moved with presidential confidence from room to room and Clive trod in his shadow like the lowly ambassador. Sabrina was greeted with a warm kiss on each cheek and the gentle clasp of a hand at her elbow. “Stunning,” murmured Danny to her and then, “How are you? Are they behaving themselves? Has anyone broken the law?”

“Probably.” Sabrina giggled. “Have you seen Eliot? She'll be so glad you're here.”

“I came back to see you,” said Danny, gazing down at her. “Eliot can wait.” His voice was glycerin-coated and his hand drifted to her waist.

If she had had a tail, Sabrina would have whisked it. Clive, listening to their exchange and staring into the fireplace, thought he might be sick. He pictured a torrent of vomit quenching the blue gas flames. He allowed himself a fantasy: a jet of flame; her dress alight; Danny torched and squealing and he, Clive, laughing and laughing, all the way home on the Tube. He took a speculative suck at his drink.

When Sabrina had departed, tipsy with compliments, to check on the caterers, Clive asked Danny, “How come you two are such pals?”

Danny took a gold lighter off the mantelpiece and examined it. “I met her earlier. I dropped a present round for Eliot, and Sabrina gave me some cake. Where's Martha?”

Clive did not answer but asked, “What present?”

Eliot interrupted them, coiling around Danny like a vapor. “Danny Danny Danny! You came back!”

“I said I would,” he said. “Happy sixteenth birthday—again.”

Eliot took his hand. “Sweet sixteen,” she said, blinking up at him, “but not for long.”

Danny laughed. “Oh yes? Which of these poor sods have you set your sights on?”

But Eliot just twisted his fingers in hers and gazed at him. Then she said, “Come on,” and took his drink from his hand. She passed the glass to Clive and led Danny away, downstairs towards the dance floor.

Clive bobbed in the swirled air left behind them, trying to stay afloat. Eliot wanted Danny—it was plain—but wanted what? Putting the drinks down on a side table he turned to see Tom, standing at the bottom of the stairs.

“Where did Eliot go?” Tom asked Clive with a helpless look.

“Downstairs.” They both went down to watch Eliot dance round Danny. She held her hands above her head and twisted round him, glittering and luminous. Danny did not respond but only danced. He made no move to touch her and Eliot, trying to tease, floated towards him and away again.

If Danny could not—would not—see what Eliot wanted, Tom could. After a few minutes he lifted his shoulders from the wall he had been leaning on and, defeated, leaned towards his brother. “I'm going to go,” he shouted into Clive's ear.

Clive followed him up the stairs. “You can't,” he bleated. “What about me?”

“I'm not going home,” said Tom. “I just took half an E. I'll go round the corner to a mate's. He's gone already, taken some people.”

“Is Eliot on drugs?” Clive asked. “Should I be worried?”

“No, just pissed. She doesn't do drugs.” He picked up his jacket from the couch in the hall. “See you at home,” he said, “tomorrow.” And then he was gone.

Clive stood in the hall and wondered what to do. The grown-ups had left, the caterers' van had disappeared from the driveway and Eliot's parents had retired to what Sabrina referred to as “The Orangery”—an annex in their garden which was “about ten times nicer than our actual house,” according to Tom. There seemed to be no one to take things in hand. Was he the only one who could see what might happen? If Eliot got into real trouble, who would care?

Fretting, Clive trailed back downstairs but both Eliot and Danny had vanished. The music played to a near-empty room and he stood and stared at the place where they had danced. In this slow moment he pictured them locked together on a sofa, perhaps in the drawing room, surrounded by framed photographs of Eliot as a younger child. With a burst of frenzied energy—breath coming in gasps—he flung himself around the house, opening and shutting doors.

In a small study he found Danny sitting in an armchair while two girls—the sheepdogs—lay on the rug, sharing a spliff and giggling at MTV.

“Hello, Clive,” said Danny. “Look at these two—they're wasted.”

“Where's Eliot?”

“I don't know.” Danny looked at him, puzzled. “Are you all right?”

Clive could not contain himself. “It depends,” he spat at Danny, “on what's happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh come on, Danny—you know what I mean. I saw the way you were dancing with Eliot.”

There was a brief pause while Danny looked Clive full in the face, his expression of astonishment curdling to contempt. Clive held his ground but he could feel a hot flush creep up his throat. The girls, oblivious, continued to giggle, yawn and grapple like tired puppies.

“You're pathetic,” said Danny. “You're a joke.” He turned back to the girls and the television screen.

Clive tried again. “If you so much as—”

Danny did not respond—he did not react at all—and Clive withdrew, closing the door behind him.

Treading slowly upstairs through the house he watched each foot lift from one step to the next. He had got it all wrong. He should never have come.
On your own you can be a bit
…Tom was right.

“You've got to go home,” he said to his reflection in the window on the landing, but another voice spoke in his head:
I'll say goodbye to Eliot, and then I'll go.
He turned to climb the next flight of stairs.

In answer to his knock at the bedroom door came a muffled sound that might have been, “Who is it?” Clive, with a responsible adult's sense of concern, pushed open the door of the room and stepped inside. He found Eliot collapsed on the bed with clothes and hair twisted in a bundle around her like a bird's nest that had tumbled from a hedge into the road.

The room was silent and still—the close-knit air of a London attic. Clive closed the door behind him and exhaled. The pounding in his ears subsided.

“Eliot?” he said. “It's me, Clive. Are you all right?”

“Clive—” A hand stuck out towards him from the middle of the nest. There was a stifled sob and then Eliot said, “I've been such an idiot.”

“What's happened?”

“I wanted…it was so embarrassing. I love him so much. I can't believe…and now we'll never be friends. He wouldn't…he didn't want to…” She faltered on the words.

So: Danny had turned her down. Clive waited for the softening sensation of relief but to his surprise he felt again that strike of flint within.

She was devastated. He wanted to console her—he told himself to—but he struggled to muster sympathy, even to his voice. “I'm sorry,” he managed to say. “Poor you.”

“I told everyone.” Eliot was crying now, in a series of sniffs and hiccups. “Everyone knew I wanted him to be the one…everyone's going to think I'm such an idiot…”