Jilly Cooper - Prudence

I went upstairs to see Maggie. She was huddled in bed, a brimming ashtray beside her, looking terrible.

‘I’ll try and get up later,’ she said. ‘Did you know today was the first day of the rest of your life?’

‘Another of Berenice’s profundities,’ I said crossly.

‘I think it’s rather good.’

‘It’s been said before.’

‘Berenice doesn’t seem very keen on you,’ said Maggie.

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘What did she say about me?’

‘It was yesterday. I was saying you were pretty. She said your looks were rather ordinaire, and she didn’t consider you a woman of substance.’

‘Bloody bitch,’ I said crossly. ‘What else did she say?’

But Maggie was gazing out at the white landscape. ‘Today is the first day of the rest of my life,’ she said dreamily. ‘I’m going to take a lover, the question is whose.’

I’d just finished making jellies and filling the meringues with cream, and was making a hideous hedgehog by sticking cubes of pineapple and cheese on sticks into a grapefruit half, when Berenice arrived down, looking radiantly businesslike in black wool trousers, a red shirt and her hair tied back in a red bandana.

‘Aren’t you frozen?’ I said.

‘Of course not,’ she said briskly. ‘My exercises whip up the circulation. Where’s Ivan?’ she went on, pouring out her revolting health food breakfast that looked like rat droppings in sawdust.

‘Trying out the new sledge with Lucasta.’

‘And Rose-Mary and Margaret?’

‘Still in bed,’ I said, chopping up some more pieces of cheese, and giving a bit to the dogs who were slobbering at my feet.

Berenice looked annoyed. ‘They’re not being very supportive are they? After all, Lucasta is Jack’s biological daughter.’

Brushing some non-existent hairs off her trousers, she stepped over Coleridge to get some milk from the fridge.

‘Those damn dogs are moulting everywhere, and I’m sure I found a flea in our bed this morning.’

‘It’s much too cold for fleas,’ said Ace coming in at the back door with Lucasta. There were snow flakes on his hair and his moustache. He looked cold and cross like Simpkin in The Tailor of Gloucester.

Back home after picking everything up from the village, Mrs Braddock and I were spreading chopped eggs on bridge rolls, trying not to listen to Berenice giving a blow by blow account of how she made soya bean canapés. Ace was blowing up balloons. They were playing carols on the wireless. God, I thought dismally, it’ll be Christmas in a couple of weeks. How the hell was I going to survive all the festivities? My thoughts careered wildly towards Ace, kissing me under the mistletoe, handing me a present in front of the tree, and careered away again. No doubt he’d spend Christmas enjoying Berenice in some four-star Paris hotel.

Lucasta sat on the table, eating Maltesers and swinging her legs, and telling us the plot of her nativity play.

‘Then the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and announces her, and then he goes to the shepherds and says Piece of Earth, good will to all men.’

I caught Ace’s eye and giggled.

It was midday. Everyone except Berenice had been banished from the kitchen, so she could give her all to her carrot cake. Even Ace had been thrown out. She was sulking because he refused to try one of her soya bean canapés. The dogs were behaving appallingly, because no one had had time to take them for a proper walk. Mrs Braddock was trying to clean the hall floor, putting down newspapers to dry it as she went. Wordsworth sat just behind her whining querulously. Coleridge had just eaten a whole plate of sausages, and then rushed off upstairs. I found him rolling around on Ace and Berenice’s bed, wiping his face on their counterpane. Elizabeth’s photograph had been removed from the bedside, I noticed. Fifteen love to Berenice.

I went downstairs and gathered up the balloons, climbing on to the hall table to pin them in a bunch from the ceiling. Suddenly, I was overcome by dizziness, and felt myself swaying.

The next moment two hands grabbed me firmly round the hips and steadied me.

I looked down and blushed scarlet. It was Ace. He was wearing a navy blue overcoat with the velvet collar turned up, obviously just going out. My fingers were suddenly all thumbs. I took ages to tie the string. When I finished he lifted me down, and just for a second held me, frowning down at me.

‘Let me go,’ I muttered, terrified once more that I was going to cry.

‘Stop fighting,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve got enough people bitching at me today without you joining them.’

I tried to smile. ‘I’m sorry.’

He let go of me. ‘Now for Christ’s sake remember how ill you’ve been, and don’t overdo it. Lie down for a couple of hours after lunch. The man’ll be over to do the central heating any minute.’

He went towards the door.

‘I hope it isn’t too agonizing going to see them,’ I stammered. ‘I’m sure it’ll mean a lot to them. You will drive carefully, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’ He opened the door, letting in a blast of icy air.

‘By the way, I like your leg warmers,’ he said.

‘They’re my supportive hose,’ I said.

Just for a second a smile flickered across his face.

Back in the kitchen Berenice was pounding lentils with unnecessary violence, her mouth set in a hard line.

‘I am trying to remain supportive at the moment, but Ivan is being very difficult,’ she said. ‘Instead of being on the same wavelength, he’s giving off a lot of static. He was so different in the States. It’s the effect of his family of course. They’re absolutely hopeless.’

‘But he adores them.’

‘They wear him down. And why does he have this morbid obsession with the past? It’s so hypocritical. Elizabeth’s parents have got to face up to the fact that he’s bound to make another commitment sooner or later.’

‘But they’re old,’ I said, removing Antonia Fraser who was thoughtfully licking crab paste off the bridge rolls, ‘and they all loved Elizabeth.’

Crash came the pestle down on the poor lentils.

‘That marriage’d have come unstuck anyway.’

‘Rubbish,’ I said furiously. ‘He adored her. Everyone says so.’

‘He’d never have achieved his full potential married to her. He’d have got bored.’

‘Because she wasn’t a woman of substance,’ I said sourly. ‘I suppose you would have found her a little ordinaire.’

Berenice’s face suddenly took on the unarresting personality of a stopped clock. ‘God rest you merry gentlemen,’ sang the wireless.

I escaped from the kitchen before I wrung her deeply tanned neck.

Lucasta met me in the hall. ‘Very bad news,’ she said. ‘Coleridge has been sick three times on the stairs, and there’s bits of leather in it.’

‘Oh God!’

From a cursory examination of the stairs it was quite obvious that Coleridge had regurgitated a good deal of chewed-up Hermes belt.

‘Shall I tell Berenice?’ asked Lucasta happily.

‘God no,’ I said. ‘Do you want Coleridge put in an Old Setters’ Home?’

‘Don’t look so sad,’ said Lucasta to me as I mopped away with a Jay cloth and disinfectant. She put her arm round my shoulders.

‘You may not be very clever,’ she said, ‘but you’re very good at wiping up sick.’

At that moment Rose came down the stairs, carrying a suitcase. She looked very crestfallen. In fact her crest was positively round her ankles.

‘Beastly, beastly weather,’ she said.

‘You’re not going away, Granny?’ said Lucasta.

‘No darling, I’m going to have lunch and a nice hot bath at Professor Copeland’s and change into something pretty for your party. Where is she?’ she whispered, looking round nervously.

‘Making health food canapés in the kitchen.’

Rose shuddered. ‘She keeps trying to interest me in yoga.’

‘She thinks her navel is the centre of the universe.’

‘I used to think naval officers were the centre of mine,’ said Rose sadly.

There still seemed to be an awful lot to do. Hiding the going-away presents in a special drawer, putting cream in the meringues, hanging doughnuts on pieces of string, on a clothes line across the drawing-room. The child that finished its doughnut first, eating with its hands behind its back, would be awarded a prize. It was an excellent ice-breaker, said Berenice. I drew a donkey for people to pin a tail on. Berenice did an incredibly neat parcel for Pass-the-Parcel, using string instead of Sellotape. The snow was getting thicker, blanketing everything. I hoped Ace was getting on all right. Finally the man came to mend the central heating.

Maggie came down an hour before the party was due to start, poured herself a large drink, and balefully surveyed the platefuls of food in the kitchen.

‘It looks like the planet of the Canapés,’ she said.

Berenice’s lips tightened at such ‘unsupportive’ behaviour, but she merely extracted the Vim from the cupboard under the sink and went towards the door.

‘Where are you going?’ said Lucasta.

‘To have a bath,’ said Berenice grimly.

‘Gosh, you must be dirty!’

‘This is to clean the bath before I get into it.’

I had hoped to have a bath too and change, but Berenice pinched all the hot water, and at the end there was a terrible rush, what with trying to find some candle holders for Lucasta’s cake and getting her dressed and doing her hair. Sting was pounding away in an empty drawing-room. I had only one eye made up when the doorbell rang. It was a mother, twenty minutes early.