‘Honestly, just because she’s a nun she thinks she can get away with any amount of rudeness,’ I said, feeling aggrieved all over again.
Though none but the bare facts of the case had been made public, it was obvious that nearly everyone believed that my father must be guilty of the murder of Sir Basil Wintergreen or he would not be in prison. The old adage that there is no smoke without fire was persuasive. What had been admired in Pa before as the eccentricity of artistic genius had been transformed at a stroke to the vicious traits of psychopathy.
Sister Imelda did not doubt that we were the children of a cold-blooded assassin and therefore she despised us. I had been so hurt by her disparagement of my family that I was prompted to strike a blow in return. I asked her if she was aware that her relationship with Sister Justinia had been the subject of malicious gossip throughout the school. If so, she would know how painful it was to be condemned without a hearing.
Sister Imelda had given a satisfying scream of affliction at the other end of the telephone and the line had gone dead. For several hours I had felt quite buoyed up by the success of my revenge. I had said nothing that was not true. According to Cordelia, Sister Imelda’s passion for the novice teacher had been common knowledge for weeks and the more censorious parents were beginning to mutter. But when my indignation had cooled I repented. Sister Imelda was an unhappy woman and her spiteful behaviour was proof of this.
I wrote to Sister Imelda, saying she was probably right about Cordelia needing more discipline. I would see that she returned to school within a few days. I apologised unreservedly for losing my temper and asked her to put it down to the strain of my father’s arrest and imprisonment, which, naturally, had made us all very unhappy. I received a letter by return of post, which said that the Byng family would be personae non gratae at any future school occasion and would I send a cheque immediately for a term’s fees, in lieu of notice? It concluded with a request for an additional forty-five pence to replace the light bulb that Cordelia had broken a few weeks before.
‘She’s an extremely silly woman,’ said my 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