Moonshine. Victoria Clayton

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СКАЧАТЬ tap to get rid of the sugar because she feared for our tooth enamel. Ever since then, when things have looked on the bleak side, I’ve found there are few things more comforting than a dry, plump, sugary doughnut. Other men may hanker for foie gras but I thank God my tastes are more easily satisfied.’

      Warm within my nest of blankets, with a strong breeze in my face, looking up at the stars while I ate the sandwiches and sipped the cooling coffee, I began to feel the truth of the saying that stuffing holds out a storm. It would be too much to say that I felt cheerful but while Kit was talking nonsense and when I was not thinking about Burgo I began to feel a little less miserable.

      

      Ironically, it was entirely due to my father’s passion for interfering with other people’s lives that I had met Burgo.

      By my own reckoning I had removed myself from my father’s sphere of influence years before. As soon as I was capable of living independently (that is, the summer after I left school), I had spent three months living in a bed-sitter in Earls Court and working in an antique shop. That autumn I had enrolled at London University to read History of Art and after graduating I took a poorly paid but interesting job at Boswell’s, one of the smaller auction houses. I shared a tiny house with two friends, Sarah and Jasmine, in an enchanting cul-de-sac near the river in Chelsea. To help pay the rent I spent some of my spare time writing articles for periodicals about things like embroidered textiles, fans, silhouettes and custard pots. For relaxation I was entertained by my share of the large, fluctuating collection of men friends about whom Sarah, Jasmine and I speculated endlessly over bottles of cheap wine in the intimacy of the shabby but pretty sitting room of 22 Paradise Row.

      Jasmine was in love with a married man called Teddy Bayliss. Though Sarah and I had told her (until we were in danger of sounding like evangelists for the Divine Light through Abstinence and Purity) that this was asking for trouble and bound to make her miserable, it was impossible to be anything other than sympathetic when one saw her lovely face ravaged by grief. Naturally, after the first wild rapture of romance with Teddy had passed, all our predictions came true. There were long lonely evenings in thrall to the telephone, broken dates because of wifely comings and goings or the demands of his children, the misery of imagining him sitting by a Christmas tree unwrapping presents with his family while Jasmine sat in a suite at the Savoy, watching her mother drift into a gin haze. Though the trials of her situation were commonplace, even hackneyed, this did nothing to alleviate the unhappiness they created.

      I could not understand the attraction. Jasmine was sweet-natured, gentle, generous and half-Chinese. Her waist-length hair was black and lustrous, her skin golden, her features childlike and enchanting. Teddy was middle-aged, had mean little eyes, scant hair, an undersized chin, an oversized stomach and a self-conceit that seemed entirely unfounded. To see him treating Jasmine with a careless assurance that seemed to take her devotion for granted made us furious. We did everything we could think of to release her from the spell that made her blind to his ass’s head – lecturing her as mentioned above, telling her that Teddy was a boring and pompous bastard, introducing her to nicer, more attractive men – but she remained enamoured.

      Sarah, who owned the house in Paradise Row, and to whom Jasmine and I paid rent, had her own theory about this.

      ‘Jazzy sees her father twice a year. He kisses her politely, gives her an inscrutable smile and a cheque and asks her to call him a cab. Ergo, she’s looking for a father substitute.’

      On the sole occasion Jasmine’s father and I had met, he had shaken my hand and told me that Communism had been the end of civilization as far as China was concerned. Then he had whipped a book from his pocket and removed himself to the far end of the room to read. He held some diplomatic post at the embassy in Paris. It did not seem to me a position for which he was particularly well suited.

      ‘But would you say that Teddy was exactly an ideal father figure? Having an affair with a girl half his age would seem to me to disqualify him from the start.’

      ‘Don’t be so literal, you fathead!’ Sarah was a forthright girl, a barrister-in-training. She enjoyed polemic. ‘Jazzy doesn’t want a bloke smelling of pipe tobacco with slippers and a woolly waistcoat. She’s looking for an authority figure to lead her through the maze of life and instruct her in every instance, including sex. Surely you know that all little girls have powerful sexual feelings about their fathers?’

      I looked at Sarah’s round brown eyes in her round face, framed by straight brown hair.

      ‘I can say with absolute certainty that I never did.’

      ‘You’re afraid to admit it to yourself, that’s all.’

      ‘Afraid would be the word, all right.’

      ‘Anyway,’ Sarah continued with energy, ‘Jazzy’s still in many ways a child. She doesn’t understand cause and effect. She refuses to take responsibility for her actions. Like a baby, she simply responds to the most pressing physical need.’

      ‘I still don’t see why that makes the repulsive, chinless, paunchy Teddy—’

      ‘What a dunce you are! There’s nothing special about Teddy except his age and his unavailability. She has to struggle to engage his attention. That feels familiar, therefore comforting. Those of us who’ve had reasonable relationships with our fathers can move on from there to seek men who satisfy our grown-up emotional and intellectual needs as equals.’

      ‘So far we don’t seem to have had much success.’

      It was true that there were men of all kinds turning up on the front doorstep of Number 22 to take us severally out to lunch, dinner, the theatre, the cinema, exhibitions, home to meet their mothers, and sometimes to bed. But neither of us had so far met anyone who met all our requirements for more than a few months. Sarah had had a string of lawyer boyfriends who were unsatisfactory because they much preferred sex to arguing. My boyfriends tended to be artistic and unsatisfactory because they were self-absorbed, neurotic, unreliable, and always borrowing money. Once I had got as far as announcing an engagement in The Times before I came to my senses and called it off. The unpleasantness this engendered and my own deep regret for causing pain had put me off such conventional behaviour for good. After the tremors had ebbed I decided that if I met someone I wanted to marry I would do it at once and without more ceremony than the register office provided. No one had so far tempted me to put this plan into action.

      None the less, it would be true to say that my life was continuing satisfactorily until one morning not long after the above conversation – 22 April 1978, to be precise – a telephone call from my father had come as a rude blast shattering the idyll.

       TWO

      ‘It’s your mother. Broken her hip. You’d better come at once.’

      ‘Poor thing! Is she in pain? How did it happen?’

      ‘Fell down the library steps. Her own fault for frittering her life away with those damned stupid fairy tales.’

      There was triumph in my father’s voice. His reading matter was confined to the Trout and Salmon Monthly and the Shooting Times. He considered a taste for fiction evidence of bohemian depravity.

      ‘I suppose it could have happened anywhere.’

      ‘Stop arguing, Roberta! Your mother needs you. I’ll tell Brough to meet the twelve-fifteen.’

      Brough СКАЧАТЬ