Clouds among the Stars. Victoria Clayton

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       THREE

      We laid Cordelia on the ebony and gilt day bed, which had come from the set of Antony and Cleopatra. Its frame was made of writhing snakes with leopards’ heads supporting the scrolled arms. The coats, lacrosse sticks, cricket bats and school satchels that had been carelessly chucked on to it over the years had chipped off most of the gesso, and Bron, when a small boy, had indelibly inked spectacles round the leopards’ eyes, but it made a striking effect as you walked in through the front door. Next to it, a life-sized statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god with the head of a jackal, acted as a hat stand.

      Maria-Alba snatched several feathers from an ostrich boa that was draped round Anubis’s neck, set a lighted match to them and held them under Cordelia’s nose. Cordelia came to immediately, complaining volubly about the disgusting smell. She gazed up at me with tragic eyes.

      ‘Don’t kiss me goodbye, my dearest sister, lest you take the poison from my lips. I love all my family but you’re my favourite. Portia was a pig yesterday when I asked if I could borrow her mohair jersey.’

      ‘Stop acting at once, this minute, and tell me truthfully. Did you swallow any nightshade and laburnum mixture?’ I spoke sharply because Cordelia frequently told lies. Also I wanted to bring myself back from the immense distance to which Maria-Alba’s broken sentences had sent me. I saw myself bending over my sister in one of those out-of-the-body experiences people have when they nearly die. My sight was dim and I seemed to be intermittently deaf.

      ‘I – I – don’t remember.’ Cordelia pressed her hand to her head and fluttered her lashes.

      ‘C’è bisogno di emetico. Salt and water,’ said Maria-Alba grimly. ‘I go make it.’

      ‘You’ll be wasting your time because I won’t drink it.’ Cordelia sat up, looking cross. ‘I hate this family. Isn’t it bad enough that my own darling father is a prisoner and a captive and perhaps even going to be hung without you trying to make me sick?’

      ‘Hanged,’ I corrected automatically while muffled shock waves boomed in my head like the tolling of a submerged bell.

      Cordelia glared at me. ‘I expect if someone strapped you to a table and swung an axe over your naked quivering flesh like in The Pit and the Pendulum, you’d be correcting his grammar.’

      ‘Probably. Anyway, they don’t hang people any more in this country.’

      ‘Don’t they? Really not? Because I saw this film and the man was going to be hung – oh, all right, hanged – and the priest asked him to pretend to be afraid so that all the people who looked up to him as a hero would despise him and turn from their villainy and it was so awful when he started to cry and tried to get away – I wanted to be sick, it was so horrible. You see, you don’t know whether he’s pretending or he really is frightened –’

      ‘It was only film.’ My voice echoed as though my ears were stuffed with cotton wool. ‘Hanging is against the law.’

      ‘The law! Fie!’ said a voice from above. We looked up. My mother stood at the head of the staircase, dressed all in black. ‘The bloody book of law you shall yourselves read in the bitter letter.’

      ‘King Lear,’ said Cordelia.

      ‘Othello,’ I said at the same moment.

      It was our parents’ habit to quote extensively from Shakespeare’s plays because, naturally, they knew reams of it by heart. As if this was not bad enough we were supposed to respond with the source of the quotation. In a spirit of rebellion against this pernicious cruelty we had agreed years ago to attribute any quotation to the particular play from which our Christian names had been taken (I had taken to using my second name to avoid embarrassment) and, naturally, sooner or later, we were bound to be spot on. Our parents never tumbled to this stratagem as they lived on a more exalted plane from our juvenile utterances and never really listened to us. Bron scored the fewest hits and Ophelia was most often right, which says something about Hamlet.

      ‘The quality of mercy is not strained –’ my mother began.

      She delivered the speech very slowly with plenty of pomp and circumstance for the bit about the thronèd monarch and the sceptred sway. I hoped she would stop when she got to ‘Therefore, Jew’, as it was hardly relevant, but she carried on.

      ‘Somebody’s got to tell me what’s happening,’ I said as soon as she had finished. ‘It can’t be true that Pa’s been arrested!’

      My mother looked pained by my lack of sensibility. ‘They say the owl was a baker’s daughter.’

      Ophelia’s mad scene – Shakespeare’s Ophelia, I mean – was a favourite of Ma’s. She descended slowly, singing the mildly lewd songs that had put Sister Paulina, our English mistress, so painfully to the blush. I felt I would go mad myself if I had to listen to much more of it. As soon as Ma turned into the drawing room, still reciting, I ran up to my eldest sister’s bedroom and knocked on her door.

      ‘Ophelia!’

      There was no answer. I turned the handle but the door was locked. I looked through the keyhole. Ophelia lay on her bed, hair trailing across the pillow, eyes closed. She looked very beautiful, framed by the primrose brocade curtains that hung from the gilded corona high on the wall. Her eiderdown was ivory silk and the carpet was a needlepoint extravaganza of flowers. A vase of pale yellow florists’ roses, probably from Crispin, stood on the table beside the bed. Ophelia had gone to much trouble to make her room pretty and comfortable, and she spent a lot of time there. The moment anything vaguely demanding or tiresome occurred she would go to bed, whatever the time of day and regardless of the inconvenience to others.

      I rattled the handle. ‘Ophelia! Do talk to me! I must know what’s happening. I can’t get any sense out of Ma.’

      I put my eye to the keyhole again. She stirred, but only to pull the sheets over her head.

      I was standing irresolute, wondering if there was anything to be gained by going down to The Green Dragon to find Bron, when the doorbell rang. I went down to answer it. Two men stood on the doorstep, one of them in police uniform. I remembered the policeman’s helmet and my heart gave a leap of fright. The one who was dressed in a fawn mackintosh pulled a badge from his pocket and showed it to me. I could make nothing of it. My eyes read but my mind refused to take it in.

      ‘Miss Byng? I’m Chief Inspector Foy and this is Sergeant Tweeter. May we come in for a moment? I’d like to talk СКАЧАТЬ