‘Oh, damn! How awful, I’d forgotten about her.’
I ran downstairs to see if she was all right. She was lying on her bed beneath an eiderdown, reading a cookery book.
‘Così, così,’ she replied in answer to my enquiry. She shut the book and slowly swung her huge legs over the side of the bed. Her lids were swollen and dark, like two black eyes. ‘You need to eat, tesora mia. No, no,’ she went on as I protested that she should rest. ‘Mi farà bene.’
I peeled potatoes and made a salad while Maria-Alba put on partridges to roast. Cordelia came out from the coal-hole and sat at the table doing her French knitting. This is done by winding wool round a cotton reel with four little nails in the top. You hook the wool over the nails and from the hole at the other end of the reel emerges a knitted tail. So far all my efforts to think of something she could make from this had been fruitless. The tail was now four feet long and distinctly grubby from falling into Mark Antony’s bowl and being trodden on, but Cordelia kept doggedly on. She was unusually silent. Maria-Alba made a sauce for the partridges and heaved long, sad sighs. I knew I must pull myself together. I tried to find things to talk about that had nothing to do with murder or prisons but ideas slipped like bars of wet soap from my deliberative grasp before I could put them into words.
‘I’m starving.’ Bron came into the kitchen just as we were loading hot dishes into the dumb waiter. He peered into the lift shaft. ‘It’s a very good sauce.’ He withdrew his head, licking his fingers.
‘Oh, Bron, you pig!’ protested Cordelia.
Bron patted her cheek with his just-licked finger.
‘A lady there was in Antigua
Who said to her spouse, “What a pig you are!”
He answered “My queen!
Is it my manner you mean,
Or do you refer to my figua?”’
Cordelia giggled. Sometimes I got the impression that other people found Bron’s ebullience a little trying, but often, as on this occasion, I was glad of it.
‘Lascia solo.’ Maria-Alba looked up from unmoulding the blackberry bavarois she had made that morning, when the serene skies over Blackheath were untroubled by so much as a single cloud. ‘It is well for you to make joke. When the things go wrong you abandon the boat. When Harriet want you to visit il povero Waldo you are rotten drunk! She have to look only to me for help!’ Bron’s full soft mouth drooped and he looked perfectly angelic. ‘Senta, io sono debole. She need a strong man. You do not think of other than yourself.’ With hands that trembled, Maria-Alba arranged a few whole blackberries round the pale-violet, speckled pudding. ‘You are egoista – selfish like a peeg –’
‘That will do, Maria-Alba!’ My mother had broken her general rule of pretending the kitchen did not exist and that food in our house was provided by unseen spirit Shapes, as on Prospero’s island. She descended the last few steps into the basement, her progress impeded by her long black evening dress and a tiara of jet and feathers like the crest of a giant bird, which collided with the plastic shade of the overhead light. Her High Renaissance features manifested pain. ‘I hardly think abusing poor Bron will help in this predicament. You know how loud, discordant voices upset me. Use your chest tones. Fingers here –’ she tapped her own impressively small waist – ‘and breathe from the stomach.’ She bent her plumed head to examine the bavarois as though she was going to peck it. ‘Darling,’ she patted Bron’s cheek, ‘don’t look so woebegone. Let’s have a cosy supper together on trays in the drawing room and leave these nasty, cross people to get on by themselves. Afterwards you shall turn the pages for me while I play.’
Bron considered the proposed plan. Staying at home rated low in his estimation of an amusing evening. Various expressions flitted across his face before it assumed something like compliance. ‘That would be fun. I may have to pop out later on, though.’ As they went upstairs I heard him say, ‘Mama dearest, could you possibly let me have a bob or two? I find I’ve run rather short –’
Maria-Alba slammed two trays on to the dumb waiter. I took up a tray to Ophelia.
‘You can come in,’ she said in answer to my knock. She lay on her back across the bed, her head hanging over the side as though she had been strangled, her long hair running over the carpet like liquid gold. ‘Oh, food,’ she went on in tones of disgust. ‘I shan’t be able to eat a thing. Has Crispin telephoned?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You realise what a disaster Pa’s going to prison is for me?’ She blinked rapidly several times. People’s faces, and their eyes particularly, look strange and rather unpleasant, upside down. I felt a return of the disturbing, hallucinatory sensations that had affected me on and off throughout the day. ‘Crispin’s mother is a complete bitch. She’s crazily jealous and she’ll use this to turn Crispin against me.’
‘But if he loves you …?’ The Honourable Crispin Mallilieu had never struck me as the passionate type. He was small and rather weedy, with pale crinkly hair and rabbit teeth. To be fair I did not think Ophelia was much in love with him. She had told me that his elder brother’s liver was marinating in alcohol, his skin was perforated with needle marks and that he resorted to public lavatories for passages of love, so Crispin stood an odds-on chance of inheriting the title and the estate.
‘That cow –’ I understood her to be referring to Lady Mallilieu – ‘wants him to marry Henrietta Slotts. Her father wallows in filthy lucre like a hog in muck.’
‘Does Crispin like her?’
‘He says she reminds him of a dog he was very fond of as a boy. Certainly she has a long snout-like nose and a great deal of facial hair.’
‘Poor girl. In that case she doesn’t stands a chance against you.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure. Crispin’s mental development received a severe check at prep school. If la Slotts looked like a one-eared teddy bear with a darn on its stomach I wouldn’t have a prayer.’
‘I expect he hasn’t rung because he hasn’t heard yet. Why don’t you have something to eat and then telephone him?’
‘My dear, sweet sister, you know nothing about men. I’ve never rung one up in my life. It’s quite fatal to show the least interest. I never accept two invitations in a row and I make a point of being frosty and difficult at least once a week. On Saturday Crispin threatened to throw himself off the battlements of Mallilieu Towers because I said his pathetic attempts to kiss me made me think of a monitor lizard. It’s true. He’s got a very reptilian tongue, long and thin and flickering.’
I thought of Dodge’s face after we’d made love. Happy, peaceful and momentarily reconciled to an unjust world. ‘I don’t think I’d be very good at that kind of thing.’
‘No, I dare say not. That’s why I have hundreds of eligible men after me and you’ve got one spotty crackpot beatnik.’
This wounded, though I tried not to show it. ‘It’s because you’re beautiful, Ophelia. If other girls behaved like you they wouldn’t get asked out again.’
‘Oh Harriet!’ Ophelia’s voice sharpened with annoyance. ‘Don’t fish. It’s so boring. You’re as good-looking as any of us. Different maybe, but there are plenty of men who’d prefer your style of beauty. I do hate it when you get humble and saintly.’
‘Sorry. Well, anyway, eat before it gets cold.’ I put the tray on her bedside table. ‘I’m worried about Portia. Do read this.’
I handed her the letter. Ophelia ran her eyes quickly over it and then threw it down. ‘Oxshott’s in Surrey. Rather parvenu.’
‘I don’t like the sound of Dimitri.’
‘Obviously