‘Yes.’ She smiled self-consciously, like an adolescent girl. ‘I thought it’d be fun.’
‘Be careful with him.’
‘I’m not daft, Bart.’ She finished her tea and got out from the table, gesturing with an aggressive wave of her hand not to get up. Another girlish smile. ‘Nothing wrong with a little flirt though.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Mother.’
‘I’m teasing, of course.’ She kissed his head on the way out, her jewellery jingle-jangling. ‘Eat your eggy-weggies!’
Chapter 7
The sun was a lemon sherbet, bright yellow and hard, and beneath it bloated clouds lounged on their endless blue bed like bored courtesans.
Having recently read T. S. Eliot’s line in ‘Prufrock’ about the evening sky resembling a patient etherized upon a table, Bettina had sworn to better it, or at least come up with something equally inventive. She must, she thought, remember to make a note of ‘bored courtesans’. But the lemon sherbet sun could be improved upon.
She was sitting with her mother under the giant oak tree in the garden, a frail white canopy over their heads to catch the falling golden leaves. Of course, they weren’t really golden – they were brown. But Mother was in one of her whimsical moods; she was reading Tennyson, sometimes interrupting Bettina’s thoughts to recite a particularly ‘marvellous passage’. Bettina didn’t care for Tennyson, or any of the other Romantics. She liked Edna St. Vincent Millay and Hilda Doolittle and, of course, Eliot. Anything from the previous century was tedious.
A sun like a fierce, pale lord? In keeping with the bordello theme?
She was knitting in a pair of white fingerless gloves to keep out the cold, which was creeping into her bones despite the mildness of the autumn day. She loathed knitting – it was a kind of penance, this awful clattering of needles and the inane jolliness of these poetic utterings.
They were served tea and scones for elevenses, Venetia whingeing under her breath about the ‘measly dollop’ of clotted cream. Henry pretended not to hear. He often pretended not to hear. As a matter of fact, he heard everything – without a doubt he’d heard about a certain incident in a certain boiler room and he’d made sure Bettina knew that he knew in the most subtle ways possible – little lingering looks, a stiffening of his shoulders as he passed by her in the house.
Heinous Henry had been working for the family for close to twenty years. He had a squashed-looking head as if he’d come into this world through a particularly tight birth canal and never recovered. He ran the house and managed the wine cellar, and he did it with perfect diligence, never putting a foot out of line. Bettina hated his guts. He was always agreeable, nodding and smarming around with his flubbery lips pursed into a dog’s anus of a smile, but the poison leached out of him like sap from a diseased tree, only no one else could see it. Wanted to see it.
The maid came out to inform Henry and milady that they were needed in the drawing room. Henry gave Bettina a look before he left – a malicious flash of the eyes, too brief to rebuke, like a gnat at the corner of your vision, here then gone, zip zap – and Venetia sulked off after him with many hushed exclamations, leaving Bettina alone. She tossed her knitting on the table and leaned surreptitiously to the side to let out some gas she’d been holding in all morning.
‘Bettina!’
A voice from above. She cried out in surprise, the cry blessedly covering up the crackerjack emission. Leaving the shelter of the canopy, she looked up into the tree. One of the larger branches shook, causing a rustling avalanche of loose brown – not golden – leaves to fall. It was Bart, arms and legs wrapped around the branch, dangling slothlike. He wriggled along to the trunk, brought his legs down, and, finding footholds within its gnarled dips, jumped, catlike, to the grass. He picked his hat off the ground and smoothed his waistcoat down. It was marked with bits of tree muck.
‘Oh, bugger,’ he murmured, trying to scrape away a sticky streak with his fingernail. ‘Mother’s going to knock my block off.’
‘What in the name of God were you doing in my tree, Bartholomew?’
Bart looked up as if just noticing his friend’s existence. He strode up to her and hugged her tight.
‘How long were you there?’ she said.
‘Long enough to wish Tennyson had never been born.’
‘How did you get up there?’
‘I was spirited up there by the very capable hands of the Archangel Gabriel.’
‘Bart. Don’t irritate me.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it, darling.’ He took her arm and pulled her to the other side of the tree so that they were shielded from the house and its many windows. ‘I saw Heinous Henry bringing out the tables and chairs earlier, while taking my morning constitutional. So I crept up the tree and waited. Awfully uncomfortable, and at one point I lit a ciggie and almost set fire to the leaves.’
‘That would have been brilliant,’ she said, laughing. ‘You, setting the tree on fire and then dropping to my mother’s feet like a charcoaled goat. When are you returning to school?’
‘Tomorrow. I got the all-clear yesterday. Goat? I’m nothing like a goat.’
‘It’s awful that they won’t let me see you.’ She kicked the head off a dandelion. ‘I don’t understand what this isolation is supposed to achieve.’
‘It’s punishment. That’s all. You’re just not used to it because you’re spoiled.’
‘So are you!’
‘Of course.’
‘Reverend Pigface was giving a sermon about deviance and immorality last Sunday, the usual tosh, but it felt like it was aimed at me. Mother made me sit in the front row, she is such a hypocrite, really. I felt like I should be wearing the scarlet letter. I feel sick to the stomach about it all if you must know.’
‘Meet me on the beach tonight. We can talk about it.’
‘God no. I’m on such a tight leash. Mother keeps checking on me in my room. Did I mention she’s a hypocrite? Awful woman.’
Bart sucked on his bottom lip and peered around the tree, checking for snoopers. ‘It’s just I wanted to talk to you about something.’
‘Can’t you say it now?’
‘No. It’s not the right time. It can wait. It’s stupid, anyway. Will I see you at Christmas?’
‘I should think so. They can’t keep me locked away forever.’
‘No. They can’t.’ He put his hands in his waistcoat pockets. Smiled at her. ‘Well. Be a good girl, won’t you?’
‘I’ve no choice in the matter.’
‘And you’ll write to me?’
‘I always do.’
‘Your dress is beautiful, by the way. Sets off your eyes.’
‘I know. Thank you.’
He took his hands out of his pockets, grabbed her hand, accidentally skimming her skin with the corner of his fingernail and apologising with a shrill laugh, kissed it just above the knuckle, and jogged off with his shirt tail poking out from his trousers, like a bridegroom who has just woken up, still drunk, to find himself late for his wedding.
She read by lamplight, knees drawn up under the covers, a bowl of powder-pink bonbons on her bedside table. The Sheik by E. M. Hull – not as salacious as promised, but then she was only thirty pages in. She’d swapped the book jacket with an Edith Wharton one. Her mother approved of Edith Wharton, of course.
She reached for her bonbons. Her arm froze mid-stretch as a floorboard groaned outside her door.
‘This is getting ridiculous,’ she hissed, snatching the covers away and getting off the bed. She yanked the door open. It wasn’t her mother. It was Henry. Just standing there in the dark, his legs slightly parted. She couldn’t clearly see his face.