Moonshine. Victoria Clayton

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the heroine’s pride and spirit until she loves him so much she’s prepared to let him do unutterably filthy things to her despite her natural disinclination. That’s always going to be the ending. She’s never going to go off with the good-natured wall-eyed coachman or decide she’d rather run a dress shop.’

      But my mother affected not to be listening. ‘You can ask Treadgold to bring my tea now. And tell her not to slop it in the saucer. That woman’s so clumsy, she could get a job at the nursing home easily. You’d better go and see what Brough is doing. Now I’m lying here helpless I suppose the place is falling to rack and ruin.’

      ‘It looks fine,’ I lied. ‘You mustn’t worry about it. Just concentrate on getting better.’

      My mother threw me a sidelong glance of annoyance. It occurred to me then that she much preferred lying in bed and being waited on to the unremitting slog of trying to run a large decaying house with severely limited funds. I could sympathize with this. I went to see Brough as instructed.

      The forty acres my great-grandfather had begun with had shrunk to four as parcels of land had been sold piecemeal during the last hundred years to prop up a pretentious style lived on an insufficient income. Most of the remaining acreage had been given over to shrubbery which required little attention. Brough had a comfortable arrangement in the greenhouse with a chair, a radio and a kettle by the stove where he sat for hours on end, no doubt brooding over his thralldom. On this occasion I found him actually out of doors, spraying something evil-smelling over hybrid tea roses of a hideous flaunting red.

      ‘Wouldn’t they look rather better if they had something growing between them?’ I suggested, hoping to strike a note of fellowship with this remote, furious being. ‘Perhaps some hardy geraniums or violas—’

      ‘This is a rose-bed.’ Brough’s angry little eyes were contemptuous.

      ‘Yes, but it needn’t be just roses …’

      ‘The Major wouldn’t like it.’

      The Major was my father.

      ‘How do you know he wouldn’t?’

      ‘Because he told me. He said, “Brough, whatever you do, don’t go planting anything between them roses. Over my dead body.”’

      One cannot call someone a liar without disagreeable consequences. I walked angrily away and set myself the task of weeding the stone urns on the terrace. A harvest of bittercress shot seeds into the cracks between the stones as I worked, there to take ineradicable root and, just as I finished, the handle of one of the urns dropped off and smashed, leaving two large holes through which the sandy earth trickled on to my shoes in a steady stream. I went indoors.

      My brother Oliver, the fourth inmate of this unhappy house, threatened daily to shake the plentiful dust of home from his feet. He was twenty, nearly six years younger than me, and could certainly have done so without anyone objecting. I think my father might even have been willing to drive him to the station himself, had he been convinced that Oliver would board the train. Oliver was currently an aspiring novelist. He was working on something satirical about a Swiftian character who, like the fortunate Dean, was adored by two equally desirable women. Despite having completed a mere ten pages Oliver was convinced that this was to be his passport to success and a new life. I loved my brother dearly and to see him struggling to maintain a fragile self-confidence was painful. I already knew the plot of Sunbeams from Cucumbers backwards and it seemed promising.

      ‘It’s all in the writing, you see,’ he explained, lying full-length on the sofa after a lonely afternoon of creation, while I peeled potatoes for supper.

      It was three weeks after my return and my mother had not yet managed to totter further than to the commode set up for her in the corner of the morning room. I was sinking into a lethargic despondency at the prospective length of my term of servitude.

      ‘You know the saying “kill your darlings”?’ Oliver went on. ‘I think it was Hemingway who said it. Well, as soon as I write anything that seems any good, I have to destroy it immediately. So, naturally, it takes a while to get a page done.’

      ‘You’re sure you aren’t taking it too literally?’ I put the saucepan on to boil. ‘I mean, if you only keep the bits that aren’t any good, isn’t that defeating the object?’

      ‘It means you must cut out the showy, self-conscious passages.’ Oliver licked out the bowl in which I had made a batter for apple fritters. School and the army had bred in my father a taste for nursery food which meant that solid English puddings, of the kind that require custard, were obligatory at lunch and supper. ‘My problem is that to lose self-consciousness I have to be drunk. But not so drunk that I can’t hold the pen. It’s a delicate balance. You’ve no idea what a serious writer has to suffer.’ As he said this at least twice a day I felt I was beginning to get a pretty good idea.

      It was unfortunate that alcohol did not agree with Oliver. He had tried beer, whisky, wine, sherry, even crème de menthe, but they all made him wretchedly ill. He was a handsome boy with dark, almost black hair, a large, slightly bulging forehead, which gave him the appearance of a solemn child, a sensitive, girlish mouth and my mother’s green eyes which, because of the drinking, were matched by his complexion. On bad days his skin was the colour of a leaf.

      ‘I think this place is part of the trouble,’ he went on to say as I cut corned beef into cubes for a hash. ‘How can one be inspired when living in an atmosphere of intellectual aridity and Pecksniffian hypocrisy? That tosh Mother reads is atrophying her brain. She’s so miserable with Father that she can’t bear to live in the real world. I sometimes wonder where Father’s getting his spiritual nourishment. I can’t believe being beastly to his children and kicking Brough around is quite enough even for a man with the mental acuity of a wood louse.’

      ‘I can answer that as it happens. I drove into Worping this morning to see if Bowser’s had any new romances and afterwards I stopped at the Kardomah for a cup of coffee. While I was there Father came in. That was strange enough but what made it even odder was that he was with a woman.’

      ‘No!’ Oliver swung his legs round to sit up, his green face lit by excitement. ‘What was she like? And what did he say when he saw you?’

      ‘I was sitting in the corner behind a sort of trellis screen covered with plastic ivy. I could see them quite clearly by peering between the leaves but he never knew I was there. I heard every word they said.’

      ‘Go on!’

      ‘She was asking him about Mother. Father said she’d do a lot better if she put some damned effort into it, instead of lolling about, filling her head with rubbish. He never let illness get him down, he said. If he had anything wrong with him he always went out for a brisk walk over the Downs and blew it away. I don’t suppose a brisk walk would do Mother’s broken hip any good at all.’ I paused in the act of chopping onions to wipe my stinging eyes.

      ‘Don’t stop now!’

      ‘She said something about being sure he was a brave man. He couldn’t have done what he did in the war unless he’d been really courageous.’

      ‘So he didn’t tell her about being sent home with a bad case of Tobruk tummy to a desk job in Devizes. What was the woman like?’

      ‘In her fifties, plump, hennaed hair, a lot of make-up and jewellery. Her name’s Ruby. Not his usual type. Apparently they’re having dinner on Friday at the Majestic in Brighton. She was quite excited and giggly about СКАЧАТЬ