Wise Children (29 page)

‘Delicious, darling,’ said the Lady A. ‘Clever Saskia!’ But she ate like a bird, herself.

It was a peculiar meal. The ugly food, the flies, and little stinging creatures and ants crawling up your leg – all the discomfort of eating in the garden – and the precarious peace among the Hazard clan all gave the occasion a special flavour, sweet and sour, like Chinese pork. After we’d toyed with a disgusting syllabub, came a cake, ordered from Harrods, thank God, with twenty-one candles. They blew, we clapped. Perry brushed his eyes with his hands and I saw that he was on the verge of tears.

I never thought what it might be to be a father until that moment, when I saw Perry almost cry. Yet, truly, I think he loved Nora and myself as much as he loved Saskia and Imogen, if not more. But not, you understand, in the
same way
. We were not flesh of his flesh.

But then, again, a person
isn’t
flesh of its father’s flesh, is it? One little sperm out of millions swims up the cervix and it is so very, very easy to forget how it has happened. And Melchior, whose flesh we were, or, rather, whose emission sparked off our being, felt for us only occasional pity and now and then a vague affection that seemed to puzzle him as to the cause. But he was head over heels in love with Saskia and Imogen, too, and when they blew out their birthday candles, I saw his eyes were moist, as well.

I wished we’d come by train and got a taxi from the station, as per usual. Then we could have buzzed off, pronto. As it was, we’d have to stay until Perry was good and ready to depart, which might be hours.

Then the Lady A. rapped her glass with her knife and said that Peregrine wanted to give a little speech. He got up on his feet, his face an April study of joy and sadness, as Irish might have put it, and he said:

‘My lovely girls, all four of you’ – his eyes crinkled round the edges as he raised his glass in our direction, but Saskia looked daggers – ‘I can’t tell you how much it means to this old sinner to be among you all on the day you two precious copperknobs finally reach your majorities, key of the door, licence to marry . . . but don’t rush off and marry too quickly, dearest ones, and leave us all lonely.’

They smirked.

‘It was tough, I can tell you, to think of a present fine enough for you two on this day of days. I cast around in my mind for a long time, I furrowed this old brow. Not baubles, or bangles, or beads, but something that would last, something as beautiful as you both that would go on for ever. So . . . here you are, with all my love.’

His eyes were swimming, now, as he took from each jacket pocket a wrapped box just diamond bracelet size. They smirked in pleasurable anticipation.

‘Look what’s inside, my darlings!’

He watched expectantly as they tore off the wrappings. The boxes were of metal, it turned out, with little holes drilled in the top. Curiouser and curiouser. Imogen got hers open first, peered in, then gave a little scream and dropped it. Saskia looked at hers and said: ‘Good God!’

Inside each box was a little nest of leaves and, inside the nest, a caterpillar.

‘Named after you,’ said Peregrine. ‘Saskia Hazard. Imogen Hazard. Two of the most beautiful butterflies in all the rainforest. You’ll go down in all the textbooks. As long as people love butterflies, your names will be on their lips, you’ll have a kind of beautiful eternity. They are rare species, just like you both.’

Saskia and Imogen stared blankly at their boxes. No doubt they’d hoped for a little oil well each.

‘Is that all?’ said Imogen. She poked the caterpillar with her fork. It did not stir. ‘I think mine’s dead,’ she said.

Saskia snapped her box shut and dropped it on the table.

‘Thanks a lot,’ she said, with heavy irony.

Peregrine’s face crumpled. All at once he looked his age. More. He looked a hundred. He looked a hundred and ten. And he deflated. Instantly, within his suit, as if somebody had stuck a pin in him and let the energy out. Perhaps Melchior was fond of him, after all, in his way; anyway, he hurried up to smooth things over. He got up, too, and raised his glass.

‘To your birthdays, my darling buds of May!’ We all knocked back another glass and then he said: ‘I, too, have prepared a very special present for my best beloved daughters . . . a new –’

Such timing. All eyes were upon him.

‘– stepmother!’

Then, oh! was I glad I’d come, all right! What a picture! Their jaws flew open, their eyes popped out. Imogen let out a wail. Saskia rose up and seized the cake knife. Her chignon unravelled. Red snakes of hair flew out around her head while hairpins rattled down like hail.

‘What’s this?’

Melchior stood his ground.

‘I’m going to marry my Cordelia,’ he said, tenderly. His tongue caressed the ‘I’ and rolled it round.

‘Your Cordelia,’ repeated Saskia flatly. Her rage departed her, replaced by amazement. She let the cake knife drop. ‘Your Cordelia!’

‘Your Cordelia!’ echoed Imogen, a beat behind. ‘But your Cordelia is –’

‘– is my best friend!’ wailed Saskia.

And so she was. The RADA Gold Medallist, plucked from obscurity to play against Melchior’s Lear and now to marry him, in spite of the horrid shadow that a superstitious person might have seen cast over them by the union of Ranulph Hazard and Estella Ranelagh, which also kicked off with such a May/December union and ended in tears both before, after and during bedtime. At least Melchior hadn’t tucked Cordelia into the boot and brought her along to show her off at this psychologically inappropriate moment but he must have realised what a bomb-shell his news would be. Even the Lady A. looked green around the gills but Perry lightened up wonderfully and clapped his brother on the shoulder.

‘No fool like an old fool!’ he bellowed.

‘Why,’ gritted Saskia between her teeth, ‘that scheming little bitch, I’ll –’

‘Oh, Saskia, Saskia,’ said the Lady A. ‘Don’t stand in the way of your father’s last chance of happiness –’

Saskia picked up the birthday cake on its plate and pitched it against an apple tree. It shattered. Crumbs and candles scattered everywhere. Then she started to break the pots, throwing the dessert plates on the ground and stamping on them. Imogen, giggling in a febrile manner, laid about her smashing glasses with her ribboned crook, sparing nothing. When he saw his caterpillars reduced to pulp, Perry gave a piteous whimper. The Lady A., apprehending carnage among her heritage tableware, started to wring her hands and ululate while Saskia’s wails approached hysteria, whereupon Melchior smartly smacked her cheek, the way they do in the movies.

‘Stop that, young lady!’

She shut up at once, put her hand to her cheek, stared at him incredulously with her blue Lynde eyes. Then, tears. He took her in his arms, murmuring, ‘Hush, hush, darling.’ She shook him off and flounced into the house, slamming the door behind her, followed a minute or two later by Imogen, except that Imogen had to open the door her sister had just slammed before she could slam it herself. The rest of us were left staring at one another across the broken crockery and I never felt more spare in all my life and neither did Nora. We got up in unison.

‘I’m going to call a bloody taxi,’ I said. ‘I’ve had enough of this.’

‘Don’t go before you’ve had coffee,’ said the Lady A. heroically but Perry was pushing back his wicker chair so peremptorily it fell over, briefly trapping beneath it a small, yapping dog, probably a Yorkshire terrier.

‘I’m off, too,’ he announced. ‘Back to the jungle. Now. This minute. I’ll look forward to the company of crocodiles, after the bosom of my family.’

We found the bottle of Scotch we’d planned to give the Lady A. rolling around forgotten in the back of the car so we drew up on a verge and passed it round. Perry looked like the picture of Dorian Gray, I’m sorry to say, a ghastly sight. The sky closed in, the sun disappeared and all was cold and grey as we went home.

‘And yet I love them,’ he said. ‘God, I love them. That’s my punishment, isn’t it? My crime is my punishment.’

He wouldn’t come in with us. He sat in the car and watched us climb the steps with a face a mile long. We turned and blew him kisses and waved goodbye but he didn’t budge. Finally we were so chilled we went inside and closed the door. I had a premonition: ‘We won’t see him again.’ His hair was still bright, foxy red. It was twilight, the lamps just coming on. There he sat, in that grand car that was about to bear him off on his last journey.

We peered out between the curtains and watched him draw away, at last, into the dusk. He went back to his rooms in the Albany and packed a bag. He cancelled his lecture at the Royal Society; he left for Southampton that very night, he was good as his word. After the Lady A.’s accident, we tried the police. We even tried Interpol. They couldn’t find him, he was travelling incognito, he’d erased himself.

That was that.

If he babbled of green fields in Cuzco or Iquitos, we never heard.

Our footsteps echoed in the hall of 49 Bard Road with an inconsolable sound. ‘Empty,’ the echoes said. ‘Empty.’

‘They should have made a go of it,’ Nora said. ‘In spite of everything.’

‘She told me once, “One doesn’t marry a man like that!”’

‘I didn’t mean him and the Lady A. I meant him and Grandma.’

Nora had the forethought to bring the Scotch in with her and though never my favourite tipple, any port in a storm. We put on the electric fire in the front room and had a couple and got the gramophone going and after we’d rolled the rug back we dug out all the golden oldies, the old favourites, Jessie, Binnie, ‘I’ll See You Again’, even though we never thought we never would see him again, and the scratched and faded ones, songs about the harbour lights and parting, dolefully prophetic, did we but know it, and the ‘baby songs’ such as ‘Is You Is or Is You Ain’t’, and finally we found at the bottom of the stack the very first one of all, the one he brought us all those years ago when we first found out what joy it was to sing and dance, ‘I Can’t Give You Anything but Love’.

We were singing and dancing and loud music playing and both of us a touch tiddly when the phone rang and it was the Lady A.’s Old Nanny and so it came to pass, in the fullness of time, that the Lady A. moved into the front basement minus the use of her legs, because what Nanny had to tell us was, the Lady A. had taken a tumble down those very shiny and uncarpeted stairs we’d warned her about so often, come cracking on her bum to land on the stone flags in the hall and so jarred, snagged or dislocated her spine that she’d never walk again, but we didn’t know that, then, only that the Lady A. had gone arse over tip and Old Nanny didn’t know which way to turn.

‘Have you called the ambulance?’

She’d had the presence of mind to do that, at least.

‘What about Saskia and Imogen?’

She burst into such a harangue I couldn’t make out one word and had to hold the receiver some distance from my ear, the noise was causing me such distress. But when I finally got the gist, I scarcely could believe it, because it turned out they’d buggered off.

It seemed that Melchior had left them shortly after we did, under a cloud, and the Lady A. had taken to her bed, emotionally prostrate. Old Nanny, doing the washing-up, crouched over a sinkful of dishes, heard raised voices in the room above and then a godalmighty crash, bang, wallop! and she went flying out of the kitchen with the drying-up cloth in her hand to find the Lady A. moaning in her Viyella nightie all of a heap at the stairfoot.

Then the girls came flying down the stairs, both of them clutching kit-bags, carriers, pillowslips, bulging with this and that, and pushed Old Nanny brusquely aside, off into the night they went. They hiked down to the village in their little flatties and knocked up the baker who, out of a brute feudal loyalty to the Lynde clan and their kin, drove them to the station in the bread van, unaware of the terrible accident that had just occurred back at Lynde Court Home Farm.

Did she fall or was she pushed? That was the question. But not a word, not a whisper upon the subject ever wormed its way through the Lady A.’s stiff upper lip. If ever we raised it, even if everso tactfully, she would look teddibly, teddibly British and, quietly but firmly, change the subject. But I
do
know those dreadful girls had just made her sign the Home Farm over to them both, plus all that remained of her last bit of capital, before she took her tumble. We couldn’t help but be aware of that because now she hadn’t got a penny to bless herself, and nowhere to go, either.

Peregrine was gone. I called my father but it turned out he was overnighting at his fiancée’s basement flat in Gunter Grove, so no joy there, either. The Lady A. lay flat on her back in Lewes General Hospital with one tear trickling out of the corner of her left eye, enough to break your heart.

And that was how we came to inherit the Lady A., though she’s no trouble, really, even if she used to thump on the ceiling with the head of her silver-knobbed cane: ‘Stop that racket immediately!’ during the one, two, three, hop! days of the Brixton Academy of Dance.

She used to babysit our little Tiff, too, when she was a toddler. She used to sing her a lullaby, about horses, all the pretty little horses. ‘Sing,’ I say; more of a tuneless hum, but Tiff went to sleep, anyway. She taught her how to cross-stitch, though I can’t say it’s a talent Tiff’s ever used.

And the unrighteous prospered.

I always thought Saskia’s fame was to do, mostly, with the back of her neck. She had a lovely nape, on which that knot of scarlet hair sat like a Rhode Island red on a clutch and her nape was on display in all she did, intimate, exposed and sexy as she bent over the stove to poke around with a spoon suggestively in a pot or stick a prong into a drumstick with quite sadistic glee. I never saw anything so rude as her TV shows, not even Gorgeous George at the Royal Variety Performance.

We watched her jug a hare, once, on television, years ago, when she was just getting into her stride. She cut the thing up with slow, voluptuous strokes. ‘Make sure your blade is up to it!’ she husked, running her finger up and down the edge, although the spectacle of Saskia with a cleaver couldn’t help but remind me and Nora of how she’d run amok with the cake knife on her twenty-first. Next, she lovingly prepared a bath for the hare, she minced up shallots, garlic, onions, added a bouquet garni and a pint of claret and sat the poor dismembered beast in that for a day and a half. Then she condescended to sauté the parts briskly in a hot pan over a high flame until they singed. Then it all went into the oven for the best part of another day. She sealed the lid of the pot with a flour-and-water paste. ‘Don’t be a naughty thing and peek!’ she warned with a teasing wink. Time to decant at last! The hare had been half-rotted, then cremated, then consumed. If there is a god and she is of the rabbit family, then Saskia will be in deep doodoo on Judgment Day. ‘Delicious,’ she moaned, dipping her finger in the juice and sucking. She licked her lips, letting her pink tongue-tip linger. ‘Mmmm . . .’