Come and Tell Me Some Lies Read online

  ‘Look Daddy, isn’t it lovely?’ I gasped, quivering with pre-party nerves.

  Daddy kissed me. ‘Have a wonderful time, my love. And make sure someone has a decent pumpkin to bring you home in.’

  We laughed, and he drove off as I stepped into the hall. Imogen was there. She looked very like the fairy twinkling at the top of the two-storey Christmas tree. ‘I say, Gabriella, what a gorgeous dress,’ she said, when I removed my sheepskin coat. ‘Put that thing upstairs and then come through.’

  I glided up the wide shallow steps, looking forward to coming down them again like Scarlett O’Hara, and breathed the heavy, oily scent of pine mingling with candle wax. I hadn’t seen anyone I knew yet, but my head was so filled with dreams that I would have found it hard to cope with a real human being. In a tall bedroom I found a throng of giggling girls from school putting on lipstick in front of the mirror. They were all wearing pretty dresses with bows at their necks and sashes at their waists. They fell silent and smirked when they saw me. ‘Gosh. Look at your dress,’ said a blancmange-pink one, ‘it’s very grown-up, isn’t it?’ I looked through the group of bell skirts and tight bodices to my own reflection in the long mirror, and my hazy dreams shrivelled to dust. In my high heels, carefully gilded with a spray can of car paint, I towered above them. My dress had tiny straps of lace, and my flesh looked sinful and naked beside their puffed organdie sleeves and velvet bows. I saw my hands, huge and blue with cold. They looked like hams. I did not know what to do with them, so I crossed my arms. I wanted to go home.

  Downstairs went the rustling twitter of schoolgirls. I followed them slowly, hoping I wouldn’t overbalance but determined not to uncross my arms and reveal my hands. I forgot about being Scarlett O’Hara. Imogen’s parents were with her in the hall, her mother tiny, with the fragile face of a doe and a thin smile, her father bluff and genial. ‘Do go through and have some punch, dear,’ said Imogen’s mother. ‘Are you cold?’ I shook my head miserably, taking her remark as criticism of my flimsy dress, and stumbled through into a darker room. Music boomed from a black box in the corner, masterminded by a boy in dirty jeans and a paint-spattered shirt.

  Sasha Warton was there, and I joined her, grateful to be disguised a little by her height. She too was wearing puffed sleeves and bows, but she looked at my dress with real envy, and I felt better. Before us squatted a vast stone fireplace, its heart blazing with tree trunks. On the walls, gilt-framed paintings of men in wigs and women with powdered ringlets peeped from a hedge of holly.

  Someone gave me a glass of punch; it tasted of lemonade, and I drank it in one nervous gulp. Sasha passed me a purple cigarette with a gold tip, and I coughed as she lit it for me. ‘Don’t swallow the smoke,’ she said, watching me gulp and then choke, ‘Try to breathe it in.’ I tried, and swooning dizziness followed a rush of nausea.

  I peered around the room; there were boys everywhere. Most of them were smaller than I was. Sasha was talking to a medium-sized boy called James. I wondered what she could be saying to him, and was listening, my eyes half shut in concentration, when someone touched my arm. I jumped and turned round. It was a very short boy, with an astonishingly deep voice. ‘Hello, I’m Imogen’s cousin Tim,’ he said. ‘Will you come and dance?’ Amazed, I nodded. He led me on to the dance floor and whisked me around very fast. I had been to one or two discos with my brothers. We usually stood around the edge and watched other people dancing. I had never danced with a boy before, and did not feel ready for the experience. Tim had great determination, and after a minute of elephantine galumphing into people and tripping over, I began to enjoy myself.

  Tim had evidently been made master of ceremonies by his aunt. What Tim did, everyone did. After our dance, two other boys, one large, one medium, asked me to dance, and then another large one. I had escaped into fantasy, and the last one looked to me like Rhett Butler. I felt popular and beautiful, and fancied myself as the belle of the ball. Forgotten was my wickedly exposed flesh.

  ‘My name is James Merry-Curl,’ he said.

  I snorted with laughter. ‘Sorry, sorry. It’s just that it’s a funny name,’ I said, noticing his hurt expression.

  ‘Your name is pretty funny too,’ he pointed out. ‘Everyone says your parents are really weird. Are they hippies?’

  I glared at him. ‘They are not weird, and they’re not hippies. Who says they are, anyway?’

  Merry-Curl reddened, his film-star glamour disappearing for ever. ‘Oh, you know. Imogen and the other girls. They say that your parents are really poor and that you’ve got twenty-five brothers and sisters and you live in some weird place like a gypsy’s house.’

  He was now so embarrassed that he couldn’t stop, and I listened in silence, my whole body tensed in humiliation and anger. ‘How old are you?’ I asked him.

  ‘Eighteen,’ he said, miserably shifting, dying to get away.

  ‘Can you drive?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘Well, you can take me away from this hateful party and drive me home. Then you can see for yourself what my family is like, as you seem so interested.’

  Merry-Curl’s pink cheeks blenched, and his eyes bulged with horror. ‘Oh, God. Umm, I’m awfully sorry, but I don’t think I can. I have to take my sister back home, you see.’

  Angry and trapped, exposed by two-faced schoolgirls and their feeble-minded consorts, I wanted to go home. I had longed to be like them and liked by them, and they had conspired against me. Merry-Curl mumbled something about getting a drink, and attempted a smile before moving away from me backwards. I watched with a flicker of satisfaction as he bumped into Imogen’s mother, spilling her drink over her wrist. I looked around for Sasha, but she was dancing, her arms and legs swaying like branches. Her sister Annie came over to me, her boyfriend clamped to her side as he had been all evening. Annie was older and more worldly than the other girls at the party, and Chris, her boyfriend, looked like a pop star in his glittering yellow and green striped jacket. Annie wore a black rubber dress and her legs were enmeshed in fishnet tights. Black kohl rimmed her eyes, and her face was unnaturally pale. No one else there had a boyfriend.

  ‘This is so dire,’ she sighed, leaning against the wall next to me and taking a sip of my drink. ‘Let’s go. Do you want to come with us, Gabriella?’ Annie had never spoken to me before, and now she was inviting me to escape with her. I nodded eagerly, she fastened me to the boyfriend-free side of her wiggling rubber body, and we moved out into the hall.

  Merry-Curl was sitting on a radiator with Alice Grey, a girl in the year above me at school, perched on his knee. They both looked very uncomfortable. Alice’s legs were braced against the floor so Merry-Curl would think she was less heavy than she was. His face was obscured by her hair, and his hands drooped uselessly by his side. Alice gazed at the wall above Merry-Curl’s head. She looked awkward and too big, not like Poppy snuggled on Mummy’s lap, more a gormless cuckoo trying to be a tiny lark. I smirked and ran upstairs for my coat.

  Chris’s car had only two seats. It was a mini pick-up truck, and I had to hover in the gap above the handbrake as we drove. Annie had decided to take me home, and as Chris never spoke, he could not disagree.

  ‘Will your parents be up? Will your father be reading poetry? Will any of your brothers be there? Will there be a fight?’

  Annie was annoying me. I was not being taken home because she liked me, but because she wanted to meet my father. ‘They’re not like that,’ I said impatiently. ‘They’re perfectly normal.’

  We drew up outside Mildney, and I noticed with a sinking heart that there were several cars parked behind the house. It was a Drinking Evening.

  Chapter 32

  There were always people at Mildney, and many of them were Fans, Poetry Fans. First they wrote, then they telephoned, then they came, eager to pay homage to The Poet. Patrick would only tolerate them on Saturdays. Brodie, Flook and Va Va founded a kingdom beyond the river with three islands named Fuck, Shit and Hell. The names were part of t
heir sinful secrecy. Springing out from the reeds around their domain, the children greeted cars crawling up the drive, a phalanx of mud-coated outriders brandishing sticks and home-made guns.

  Newcomers were nervous and indulgent, poised to greet the children. The American ones brought presents, the German ones came on motorbikes. Va Va fiddled with her hair, legs twisted coyly, when Eleanor said, ‘And this is Gabriella, but we call her Va Va.’ It was the handbags, not the guests, which were interesting. Va Va had two of her own, identical, shiny, one pink, one blue, given on the same birthday by Eleanor and Granny. She spied a bulging green one near a chair and sidled over. ‘Can I play with your handbag?’ The woman laughed. ‘Of course, why not?’ Va Va knelt down and lost herself in the musty leather folds of someone else’s life.

  Eleanor did not have much make-up, and what she did have was hers and not for playing with, Va Va had been told a thousand times. But a stranger, wanting to make friends, was more forthcoming. Out came scent, exotic in a round bottle with a gold stopper, breathing a hint of the delectable promise inside. Out came lipstick, heavy in a bullet-shaped tube and tasting of violets and Vaseline. Out came a purse, jangling with coins. One would be given to Va Va. She paraded it in front of Brodie. ‘ ’S’ not fair,’ he whined to Patrick, who leaned forward to hear him, then reached into his pocket for a sixpence.

  Children’s supper was haphazard. People milled in the kitchen – ‘Eleanor, do let me help’ – and then stood smoking, talking, talking, talking, while Eleanor spooned baked beans and yoghurt into anyone within reach. No toothbrushing or face-washing on Drinking Evenings. Straight upstairs. Brodie built a castle on his bed. Sheets thrust over the spikes where he had unscrewed his bed knobs made a canopy beneath which he sat cross-legged, smirking. Flook and Va Va copied him. Three castles, three pairs of ripped sheets, toys catapulting across the wasteland of the room and bombing against the castle walls.

  Va Va went on a mission for provisions at half-time. The kitchen was empty, plates strewn across the table, festooned spaghetti, half-eaten, hanging from them. All the grown-ups were in the Drinking Room, forbidden territory on Saturday nights. Through a crack in the door Va Va could see a bright sliver of flame reflected in the glass of the french windows and Patrick leaning one arm upon the mantelpiece.

  He didn’t see her when she sidled in to whisper something to Eleanor. He stood close to a man, talking. Abruptly he moved back, smashing his glass into the fire. ‘I beseech you in the bowels of Christ to remove this interloper.’ The man edged towards the door, someone else filled the space at Patrick’s side. Patrick frowned. ‘Eleanor. Read me something beautiful,’ he growled, and her low voice fell into the silent room:

  ‘The sigh that heaves the grasses

  Whence thou wilt never rise

  Is of the air that passes

  And knows not if it sighs.

  ‘The diamond tears adorning

  Thy low mound on the lea,

  Those are the tears of morning,

  That weeps, but not for thee.’

  Va Va hung around at the top of the stairs, peering through the banisters. A fat man lurched into the hall. He opened the front door and peed noisily and long into the garden. Va Va clenched her fists around the banisters and scowled. ‘How dare he? We don’t even know him.’

  Liza’s son Dominic, Va Va’s half-brother, shuffled ponderous and sideways out of the Drinking Room; his face was puffy and sentimental with drink. ‘You should be in bed, Gabriella, this is grown-ups’ time.’ He raised his glass to his lips and crashed headlong to the floor. Va Va held her breath, waiting for someone to come. The Drinking Room was loud with laughter. No one came. She tiptoed down the stairs. Dominic smelt stale and boozy, his nose was pleated red against the tiles. He was breathing. ‘Not dead,’ she thought. ‘It serves him right.’

  Now Patrick was singing, his empty glass a microphone held under his chin. Va Va’s eyes pinched with tiredness; she longed for them all to go to bed, to go away and make the house safe again. She sat on the stairs and listened.

  ‘The train don’t stay love

  It goes straight through

  And now it’s gone love

  And so are you

  ‘Build me a castle

  Forty feet high

  So I can see her

  As she goes by

  ‘Bird in a cage love

  Bird in a cage

  Dying for freedom

  Ever a slave.’

  Chapter 33

  Annie unwound herself from the pick-up truck, shivering in her thin dress, and followed me into the house.

  ‘I say, it’s Cinderella back from the ball.’ Daddy’s elbows were on either side of a plate of food. Twisted cigarette butts protruded from mashed potato like crippled seedlings. ‘How nice of you to come home.’ He turned to the man sitting next to him. ‘My daughter moves in the most exalted circles these days,’ he drawled. ‘She is becoming a member of the upper classes and wishes to forget her poverty-stricken family.’

  ‘You’re drunk, Daddy. Don’t be foul.’ My voice wobbled. ‘What’s wrong with my friends anyway? You sent me to that school, and that’s where I met them.’

  Mummy intervened. ‘Pay no attention. He’s been perfectly ghastly all evening. He’s bored and he’s secretly dying to hear about your party.’

  ‘Darling heart, come and tell me some lies.’ Daddy was smiling now, reaching his hand out to me.

  ‘Are you going to be nice?’ I squeezed past a red-nosed woman on his right. The man opposite stood up, a pipe swinging on his lip, and shook hands with me. ‘Victor Schmidt,’ he said, and gestured to the red-nosed woman, ‘and this is my wife, Evelyn.’ Evelyn sniffed.

  Daddy sneered, narrowing his eyes, ‘Evelyn is a practising lesbian. Her conversation is superfluous until she admits this.’

  Evelyn shrank away from him and burst into tears, dabbing at her nose with a frilly handkerchief.

  ‘Patrick, for heaven’s sake leave her alone.’

  Evelyn wailed and rushed from the room. Daddy slammed the table with his glass. ‘I will not tolerate hypocritical little bitches in my house,’ he yelled. Victor took a swig from a bottle of red wine and looked up at the ceiling. Mummy disappeared to find Evelyn, and Annie, eyes starting from her head in glee, wriggled past Evelyn’s upturned chair and sat down next to Daddy.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Daddy, this is Annie, Sasha’s sister. She brought me home from the party.’

  Daddy raised his glass to Chris. ‘You must be the pumpkin then, dear boy,’ he said. Chris cowered by the Aga, a protective shield of cat curved in his arms. He blushed and nodded. Annie lit a cigarette and swivelled herself nearer to Daddy. He looked at her, a smile glimmering. ‘You look like a hooker,’ he said. Annie simpered and said primly, ‘Thank you.’

  Daddy laughed and passed her a yellow mug. ‘Here, have a drink.’ He poured wine into the bottom of the mug, then topped it up with water. ‘This is how we get drunk in Italy, dear heart. Intoxication should be gradual.’

  Weak with relief, I leaned next to Chris, keeping a good distance from the table. I found a box of chocolates melting in the top oven and in silence Chris and I consumed them.

  Annie bombarded Daddy with questions. His mood had changed. ‘You are impertinent,’ he said gently, when she asked, ‘How did you get to be a poet?’ But he liked her, and even Victor unbent a little from his umbrage when Daddy took his glass like a microphone and sang ‘My Snowy-Breasted Pearl’. Evelyn did not return; Victor was so drunk that he failed to notice her absence when he went to bed. The phone rang very late. Daddy had gone to bed; Annie and Chris, she wreathed in smiles, he in yawns, had departed, promising to come back soon. It was Evelyn. In the village telephone-box.

  ‘I am taking a taxi to Norwich where I shall spend the night in a hotel. The taxi is collecting me from the churchyard. Please could you tell Victor to meet me at the Maid’s Head tomorrow morning.’

  Mummy p
leaded with Evelyn to return but she would have none of it. ‘I shall never set foot in that house again, Eleanor.’

  Mummy came back into the kitchen. ‘I’d better go and wake Victor,’ she said, ‘Evelyn is in a terrible state.’

  Victor refused to do anything, so Mummy gave up and kissed me goodnight. ‘Darling, I haven’t heard a word about your party yet. You must tell me it all tomorrow.’

  Chapter 34

  Christmas 1988

  For the first time, we did not all come home for Christmas. Flook was away, hitch-hiking across America. He sent frequent postcards offering glimpses of his adventures.

  ‘New York. Robbed on the subway – lost everything except my money and my life.’

  ‘Salt Lake City. Met a pretty girl and followed her in through a big door. She slammed it, it was a Mormon Church – narrow escape.’

  ‘Big Sur. Stood on a cliff drinking orange juice at dawn and saw a school of whales heading south. May follow them.’

  Mum was neurotic for three days after each of these postcards arrived. She imagined her baby son being sold by white slavers, run over by lorries and seduced by mad women. Dad laughed. ‘Eleanor, for Christ’s sake. He’s having a wonderful time. He is twenty-one, precisely the right age to go to America, and at least he’s sending postcards.’ He looked at Mum’s wretched face and took her hand. ‘Come on. He’s fine. You are too full of sensibility and somewhat lacking in sense.’ Mum laughed and agreed not to worry, but continued to ask casual questions about mortality in the San Andreas fault.

  Flook rang from San Francisco on Christmas Day. ‘It’s sunny, and I’m on my own,’ he said, ‘but it doesn’t matter, because I can’t imagine Christmas without being at home. This is just another day. I’ll have Christmas next year.’