Clouds among the Stars. Victoria Clayton

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СКАЧАТЬ father absently. ‘I’ve always said so.’ This was true. My parents had been consistent in their ridiculing of the school and its preceptors. Their attitude might go some way to explain why – except for English at which we excelled – we were all so undistinguished academically and athletically. ‘You’d better ring up a few schools,’ was my father’s reply, when I asked him what I should do about Cordelia.

      ‘What about the bank?’

      ‘Tell them to do their worst. The worst is not, so long as we can say, “This is the worst.”’

      ‘Othello,’ I said, to please him, though it seemed a singularly discouraging remark. ‘But, really, Pa, we must do something. We don’t want them to take away the furniture.’

      ‘King Lear. We’ll have to borrow a couple of thousand from someone, just to tide us over. Let me see. Edgar’s a decent, generous chap.’

      ‘He’s just married again,’ I reminded him. ‘He’ll be paying Celia vast amounts of alimony. We can’t possibly ask him.’

      ‘Roddy and Tallulah.’

      ‘They’ve gone to Tibet for six months, don’t you remember? They’re getting spiritually aligned.’

      ‘All right. Cosmo and Alfred, then.’

      ‘They’ve moved to Bath to write a verse play about Beau Nash. They won’t make any money for months. If ever. They’ll need all their capital.’

      ‘Very well. Mortimer Dunn.’ A tetchy note had come into my father’s voice and I didn’t blame him. It was unpleasant work, raking through one’s acquaintances to see to whom one could go cap in hand.

      ‘His obituary was in yesterday’s paper.’

      ‘Oh bugger!’ Pa put his shorn head in his hands, whether with regret at Mortimer’s demise or his disqualification as a possible milch cow, I did not know. I racked my brains, unsuccessfully, for something comforting to say. When he looked up, my father’s expression was fierce. ‘You must ask Rupert Wolvespurges.’

      I stared at him in astonishment, wondering if imprisonment had turned his brain.

      

      Rupert Wolvespurges was the illegitimate son of my father’s best friend at Cambridge – the product of an undergraduate discretion with a pretty young Armenian waitress. The waitress had gone back to Armenia after Rupert’s birth, leaving the baby and no forwarding address. After Rupert’s father had been shot in mistake for a grouse less than a year later, the responsibility for Rupert fell to his paternal grandmother. Her nature, said Pa, was severe and exacting, a good match for the bleak, uncomfortable castle on a windy mountain in Scotland in which she lived. Lady Wolvespurges was delighted to accept my father’s proposal that Rupert, as soon as he reached preparatory school age, should spend his holidays with us. A household composed of two struggling but glamorous young actors and their hopeful offspring must have been a lot more fun than that of a high-nosed widow who thoroughly disapproved of her dead son’s liaison.

      Rupert was ten years older than me. When I search for memories of him I remember a tall, thin boy with dark eyes and black hair, whose features denoted his Indo-European rather than his English ancestry. He was different from us in every way. Compared with our extrovert rowdiness, Rupert seemed introspective, uncommunicative and something of an outsider, which I think was his choice.

      He was kind to us children. My mother maintained that he was a difficult boy, always shutting himself up with books, brooding and writing bad poetry, but to me he was a godlike being. When he condescended to play with us, I can say without exaggeration that those were the happiest times of my childhood. Of course he was much older even than Bron, so it was not surprising that we all admired him without reservation.

      There was a corner of the park made gloomy by a circle of trees. It was a long way from any path and here we set up our kingdom, named Ravenswood by Rupert. At that time he was devoted to the novels of Sir Walter Scott. It was made entirely from what we thought of as valuable finds and what others would have called junk – old boards, broken deck chairs, tea chests, sheets of corrugated iron, even the prow of an old boat we had dug from the mud by the river. Rupert nailed and glued these riches together to create an eccentric structure that seemed to my infant eyes a palace.

      The entrance was by way of a home-made ladder up to the lowest branches. When you had climbed up, collecting a new set of splinters each time, you found yourself in a baronial hall. Rupert had brought back several pairs of antlers from his grandmother’s estate. He hung these on the walls that we painstakingly constructed from mud and sticks mixed with animal hair. Rupert said that was how houses had been made for centuries until they thought of bricks. Sometimes the walls dried out too much and broke down. Rupert said this was because there was not enough hair binding the mud. We carefully trimmed the fur from Mark Antony’s predecessor and took surreptitious snips from the coats of dogs we befriended in the street. My parents were mystified and annoyed when we insisted on returning from a holiday in Devon with three large bags of sheeps’ wool collected from barbed wire fences.

      Rupert was furious with Bron for cutting off a horse’s tail. He gave us all a lecture on cruelty, and reduced Portia and me to tears with a harrowing picture of a poor animal tormented by flies and unable to chase them away. He received my donation of two plaits that I had cut from my own head with proper expressions of gratitude and they were immured in mud with suitable ceremony. Predictably, my mother was angry about my sadly altered appearance and blamed Rupert. Bron made me unhappy by refusing to be seen with me in public until my hair had grown to a more becoming length but Rupert said I had the Dunkirk spirit. It was some years before I knew what that was but I was comforted. Naturally my parents knew nothing of Ravenswood. We had all cut our fingers and sworn in blood not to divulge the whereabouts of our hideaway. I remember Rupert losing his temper with Bron over a bottle of red ink.

      Many blissful hours were spent excavating for shards of broken china to decorate the walls of the refectory, which was built higher up and could be reached only by a perilous scramble along a rickety walkway between two trees. On one occasion Portia fell and broke her arm. There was an almighty row, with Rupert once again getting the blame. He said Portia was a great gun for not telling and gave her his brass inkwell that was shaped like a frog as a reward for bravery. After that I tried to pluck up the courage to hurl myself to the ground but I always funked it.

      Almost the best bit of Ravenswood was the dungeon. One of the trees was hollow and you could slide right down inside it. We covered the floor with an old rug and lit our secret chamber with candle ends, and Rupert read us bits from The Bride of Lammermoor, his eyes glittering in the lambent light. I barely understood one sentence in ten. But my imagination was fired by that far-off place, hemmed about with dark forests and peopled with quarrelsome characters of compelling beauty.

      Rupert was very fond of my father. His relationship with my mother was always complicated. My mother really only liked people who were in love with her and Rupert, even at that age, was not fond of women. I don’t know how I knew that.

      When Rupert left school and went up to Oxford it was the end of things. I suppose he spent his holidays abroad. I remember him coming to the house for dinner several times, occasions from which we children were excluded. Once when he was standing in the hall saying goodbye, I crept to the head of the stairs in my dressing gown and whispered his name. He looked up and caught sight of my face pressed against the banisters. He had waved, a gesture no one else saw. I treasured that secret communication for a long time.

      Bron and Ophelia grew too old for the pleasures of Ravenswood and so it came to belong to Portia and me. СКАЧАТЬ