‘Jane, actually,’ I said.
He peered at me and shook his head.
‘I am forced to reject the imposture on external evidence,’ he said. ‘There’s a girl in Dorothy’s room in a gold dress like yours calling herself Margaret Millett and expounding the nuances of the dialect of your tribe. Journalists are taking notes of what she tells them. I have heard her declare that the word ‘potato’ has no plural. One speaks of a brace of potato. The scribblers are taking it for gospel. That’s not in your book, that I remember.’
(Tom had been an angel and copy-read Uncle Tosh for me. He’d made masses of useful little suggestions, but the thing that had really fascinated him, like a scab he couldn’t stop picking, was Uncle Tosh’s list of words. I’d only put this in to fill up the end of a chapter, dividing the words into ‘Us’ and ‘Ponsy’[1]—mostly quite obvious ones like saying ‘luncheon’ and not saying ‘toilet’. Things Mummy had always insisted on, though she’d made up her own rules—some of our friends, for instance, thought it was a bit ponsy to say ‘Mummy’ but she said that was nonsense.)
I felt a gush of fury that absolutely astonished me. By Tom’s eyes I could see I’d shown it. I snapped something at the Camus-man and began to shove my way out of the room. The crush slowed me down enough for me to feel I’d got some sort of control back by the time I’d pushed along the corridor to Mrs Clarke’s room. Jane was a few feet from the door, facing it. There were two men talking to her. One of them did have a notebook. She’d been watching for me, and smiled like a pig-faced cherub.
‘Hello, Jane darling,’ she said. ‘I hope you’re enjoying my party.’
I stared at her. I remembered she’d rung me to ask long or short, and I’d told her what I’d be wearing. She’d got hold of a gold frock from somewhere. I’d never seen it before and it looked a bit tight under the arms. It wasn’t the same as mine but near enough for a man not to notice. I have to explain that there was nothing unusual about this. We often played that kind of trick, on each other, on our friends. Jane had once come home to Charles Street and told me I was now engaged to a young man she knew I was utterly bored with. She’d shown me a ring to prove it. I’d got almost hysterical with panic, though I knew it couldn’t be true. (In the end it had turned out that she’d spent the evening trapping him into telling her how much he preferred me to Jane and how anyone who really cared for me could tell us apart at once, and then as he was paying the bill she’d told him who he’d been talking to.) Now I was perfectly well aware that Jane just thought she’d have fun doing something like that again—she couldn’t have understood how it mattered to me, in fact I hadn’t understood myself till that moment. Or perhaps I hadn’t realised how quickly my private self, the self that had nothing to do with family and Jane, had grown, and grown apart, since I’d left Charles Street.
Jane saw what had happened. Her eyes stretched. Her nostrils widened into piggy pits. Sharp red blotches appeared on her cheeks. I knew that I must be wearing exactly the same hideous mask, but I couldn’t do anything about it. The men stared.
‘What the hell do you think you’re up to?’ I snapped.
Jane produced a grimace that was meant to be a smile.
‘I’m afraid Jane can be pretty stupid,’ she said to the man with the notebook.
The man looked embarrassed, but eager and inquisitive too. His ratty little eyes flicked from face to face. I started to screech. I don’t know what I said.
When something like that happens in the middle of a noisy crush there’s a funny effect of silence spreading away from the centre where the rumpus is, as more and more people realise that something’s up. This had just begun to happen. I was fighting to get back into sanity, but all I could see was Jane’s face, working like a spell, turning me against my will into a screeching pig. I was just about to ruin my own party. Jane’s face was framed against the back of a man with a large, pink, bald dome and yellow-grey hair trailing down over sticky-out red ears—one of Jack Todd’s mangy lions. He became aware of the pool of silence spreading over him and turned to see what the fuss was, but somebody shoved him aside and barged through. It was Mummy.
The screech stuck. She came forward wearing the smile she uses when there are guests and everyone has just heard a pile of plates go down outside the pantry.
‘There you are, darling,’ she said. ‘What an interesting lot of people. Please introduce me to your friends.’
‘You’ll have to ask Jane,’ I said.
Jane looked in the other direction. The pig-mask was melting away.
‘Your daughters are fantastically alike, Lady Er,’ said the man with the notebook. ‘Can anyone tell them apart?’
‘So people say,’ she said. ‘I think they’re quite different. This is darling clever Mabs, and this is darling clever Janey.’
She put her arms round us and drew us close, uniting us in love on the maternal b.
‘I wonder if you could tell me, Lady Er, if your family always talk about, what was it, traddling?’
‘Traddling?’
‘And a brace of potato?’
Mummy laughed.
‘Oh, dear no. That was only old Major Ackers. He was a bit . . .’
The man twitched his notebook up.
‘A bit what?’ he said.
Mummy stared at him.
‘Aposiopesis,’ I said.
‘Oh, Ar, Eff,’ said Jane at the same moment.
‘You mustn’t tease the poor man,’ said Mummy.
I thought journalists were supposed to have thick skins. With real satisfaction I watched the sweatbeads glisten on his cheek. The unity of Family is extraordinary. My fury with Jane was still grinding away inside me and I was tense with Mummy’s touch, but for the moment the three of us were like some tribe who have caught an intruder on their sacred ground and are now dancing round him while he roasts alive. This was my ground, my party, my triumphant celebration of freedom from the thraldom of Cheadle; but suddenly here we were, the three of us, as if we’d been putting on our hats for church outside the Morning Room and agreeing without saying so that we were going to have to keep at arm’s length that pushy new family who’d just moved into the Old Rectory.
The man put his notebook away. He was going to vote Labour for life, I could see, and what’s more he was going to write the cattiest story about me that he could get past his Features Editor. (I was wrong. It turned out an absolutely grovelling piece, as if he’d really loved what we’d done to him.)
Mummy let go of Jane but not me and by swinging a few inches round managed to split us off completely from the others.
‘I hope you’ll introduce me to your friend, darling,’ she said.
‘Tom? He’s in the other room.’
‘The one who settles your account at Harrods.’
She smiled at me, the-witch-who-will-find-you-in-the-end. Ever since I could remember she’d been able to do this. The trick had two parts. The first was finding your secret, and the second was choosing the moment to tell you. There was a tone and look for it, a sad little voice, a sad little smile, eyes bright as glass beads. No anger, only contemptuous pity that you should think you could hide from her, ever, anywhere. Of course she never told you how she found out.[2] The punishment was usually fair and came with a great swoop of relief.
I was nine again, reading Mumfie under the bed in King William’s Room when I was supposed to be helping Samson weed the Bowling Green path. Sick-mess in my throat and all my skin a layer of chilly rubber. I discovered that beneath my recent happiness and exultation—part of it, adding to its excitement—had been the certainty that this was going to happen. Of course I’d sometimes wondered what I’d do or say if she found out, but that’s not what I mean. The rhythms of my life decreed that she had got to find out. In dreams of escape you glance back along your secret path and see that at the entrance you have left your pullover, caught on a blackthorn, a huge and obvious clue for the lion-faced people to find. You left it there on purpose, though you didn’t know, because that is the logic of the dream.