‘Audrey’s my mother,’ said Adam. ‘Vivian’s married to dad. She married him when I was twelve.’
‘Do you like her?’
‘Of course.’ He affected surprise.
‘Don’t you resent her?’
‘Not really.’
‘How come all of you live with your father and not your mother?’
‘This is our home. It’s the place that matters, not the people in it,’ said Adam, which I thought was a strange thing to say.
‘What about your mother?’
‘She has a house in Doniford. She lives with Uncle David. I don’t think they’re lovers or anything. I think he just lives there. He hasn’t got any money. He’s pretty hopeless. Mum’s here a lot. She comes up nearly every day.’
‘I can’t believe they all sit around the table together.’
‘Why not?’ said Adam, with the patrician air he occasionally assumed and which I found quite irritating.
‘People’s feelings usually prevent it,’ I said.
‘Do they? How boring.’
He produced a packet of cigarettes and we each lit one. The smoke was quickly scooped up off the green hill by the wind.
‘This is a fantastic place,’ I said.
Two girls with yellow hair came out of the house and walked towards us across the lawn. They looked slightly discomfited as the wind blew their clothes against their bodies. One of them was about my age. The other one was younger and had a red rash on her face.
‘You’re back!’ cried the older one. ‘When did you get back?’
‘This is Michael,’ said Adam. ‘This is Laura, and that’s Jilly. My stepsisters.’
‘Don’t call us that!’ shrieked the older one. ‘I think it sounds so awful!’
She was solidly built, with thick, white arms and skin that was so even-toned it seemed not to be skin at all but a sort of casing, like that of a doll. She looked as though she could never be troubled by anything. Her sister was the opposite: she was thin and jointed and awkward-looking, and her rash, which I now saw spread over her neck and down her arms as well as her face, gave her a look of public suffering, almost of election. Their yellow hair had a synthetic appearance. If these were Vivian’s daughters they were nothing like her. They were like things that had accrued to her by accident.
‘Mummy’s in a complete state,’ said the older one.
‘She didn’t want the party,’ said the younger one.
‘It’s just that Caris has been so demanding,’ said the older one, rolling her eyes cheerfully.
‘She likes to be the centre of attention,’ said the younger one.
‘What’s it like, getting away from this place?’ said the older one. ‘Is it really great?’
‘I can’t wait to get away,’ said the younger one. ‘I can’t wait to have a house of my own. I’m going to have horses. I’m not going to have sheep. I hate sheep. At our old house we didn’t have sheep.’
‘It’s not too bad,’ said Adam.
The older one turned to me. ‘Is it really great?’ she asked.
‘At our old house we had a swing made out of a car tyre,’ said the younger one, also to me. Her red, distressed face was pinched. ‘It used to swing you out over the pond and if you fell off you went into the water. Daddy used to make us go really high.’
‘Have you made lots of friends and gone to lots of parties and things?’ said the older one.
At that moment Caris emerged from the house. She came out of a door at the back and stood alone. She looked more extraordinary than any person I had seen before, although it is hard to say exactly why she gave this impression. She was wearing a simple white dress that left her arms and shoulders bare and she had her brown hair loose. A wreath of ivy sat on the top of her head. She wore no shoes or jewellery. Her pale face was very beautiful. She looked like a goddess. Everyone turned and when they saw her they applauded riotously. I happened to catch Audrey’s eye and she gave me an inscrutable, imploring look. A stocky, dishevelled man in a pale suit approached Caris over the lawn and when he reached her he took her in his arms and kissed her in front of everybody. I was surprised by this because he was much older than her. Her face when he let her go was like the open face of a flower.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked Adam.
‘That’s Jasper. He’s an artist. He lives in the lodge down by the gates. He rents it from dad. He’s staying for a year because he’s got some grant from Doniford council. He’s pretty good, actually. Caris is his muse.’
‘Does he paint her?’
‘Absolutely. Even in the buff.’
‘Doesn’t your father mind?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Adam shrugged. ‘Jasper’s sort of an abstract expressionist anyway. It doesn’t look that much like her. There’s one hanging in the window of the gallery on the high street and you’d never know.’
I laughed. The evening softened and lengthened out towards the sea, which lay pacific and opaque far below. The lawn was crowded with people in the dusk, shouting and laughing noisily. Their noise in this empty, elevated place flew wildly up into the air like a river of sparks from a beacon; the party was like a big fire laid out on the hill, generating heat and light in the falling darkness, growing molten and indistinct at its core. Someone lit Caris’s candles. Someone else put on some music. I saw Paul Hanbury roaming the lawn with his shirt unbuttoned and a bottle of wine dangling from his fingers. I saw Caris standing near me in her luminous dress and I said:
‘Happy birthday.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling brilliantly, as though I had paid her a compliment.
‘It’s a good party. It was nice of you to invite me. Especially since you’d never even met me.’
‘I feel as though I had met you,’ said she earnestly. ‘Adam talks about you a lot. I feel you were meant to be here.’
I was surprised to hear that Adam talked about me. I couldn’t imagine what he would say. It caused me to feel an inextricable mixture of pleasure and affront, though I liked the feeling of being possessed. I liked to be compelled through my own resistance. I liked too the fact that the Hanburys’ privileged circumstances left me with the illusion that I was indifferent to them.
‘Are these your friends?’ I asked, because I had noticed that most of the guests on the lawn were far older than Caris.
‘Of course they are,’ she said, smiling incredulously at me in a way that nonetheless managed to suggest that they might not have been.
‘Even him?’ I asked.
There was a corpulent old man with a walking stick standing entrenched in the middle of the dancing. He wore knee-length breeches and a tweed jacket.
‘That’s Barnsie,’ protested Caris, laughing. I was gratified to see her face turn red. ‘He always comes to our parties. Mum and dad used to have the most amazing parties,’ she added. ‘I seem to remember even Barnsie getting pretty wild. They could last for days. I remember when I was little going to bed and then getting up in the morning and finding them still at it. They’d carry all the furniture out on to the lawn. I used to come out here and find dad sitting on the sofa on the grass at breakfast time, smoking a cigar.’
It irritated me that she kept talking about the past, as though the superiority of that era were a matter of agreement between us; as though we were two diminutive people whose stature had relegated them to a life on the sidelines.
‘Your family are very unusual,’ I said.