Opening the file, she emptied it out on to a nearby table, knocking over a dying cyclamen and a Staffordshire dog. Photographs, bills, letters fluttered everywhere all over the carpet.

With a stab of anguish, Lysander recognized his mother’s scrawl on a piece of blue writing paper.

‘Darling Alastair,’ he read laboriously. ‘That was the best fuck I’ve ever had.’

‘As your father got crosser and grimmer, your mother got wilder,’ mumbled Dinah picking up the Radio Times. ‘Nice lunch party I went to yesterday, with even numbers for a change. All the men were queer of course, but at my age, you have to expect queers.’

This isn’t happening to me, I can’t read any more, thought Lysander.

‘Here, give that back,’ said Dinah as he chucked the letter on the electric bars of the fire.

‘Time for your medication, young lady.’ Mrs Bingham, dying to know what was going on, marched in with a glass of water and two yellow pills on a plate.

Trying to shield his mother, Lysander hunched himself over the letters and photographs, as he frantically gathered them back into their file. For a second they were all distracted by the giant tabby cat lumbering into its earth box scattering cat litter as it rose like a Deux Chevaux, and noisily evacuated.

Then, as Lysander shoved the file viciously back into the drawer, he caught sight of a photograph that had fallen on to the floor and nearly blacked out. It showed Uncle Alastair with a great grin on his face, lounging in an armchair with a cigar in one hand, and his mother kneeling at his feet and laughing as she held his rampant cock towards her mouth between two fingers as though she were about to smoke it. They were both naked.

Lysander gave a sob. For a second his distress jolted Dinah out of her stupor. ‘Damn, I thought I’d burnt that one.’

Mrs Bingham gave a crow of triumph.

‘Why, you naughty, naughty girl,’ she gloated.

For scraping away in his earth box, the cat had revealed a green bottle of Gordon’s gin, three-quarters empty.

‘Turn up the telly,’ said Dinah airily. ‘There’s William Morris on The Animal Road Show.’

Lysander only just reached the lavatory in time, before he threw up and up and up.

Stumbling down three flights of stairs and rushing out into the street, narrowly avoiding being mown down by cars trying to get home before the rush hour, he took Maggie and Jack for a run on the beach at dusk. He was acutely conscious of the indifference of the sea, as it reared up in a long white wall of foam, then collapsed at his feet. The pier was already lit up against a darkening sky. Ahead the little fairground where Pippa had often taken him had closed down for the winter. The red train rested on its buffers. No children whizzed, shrieking with delight, down the blue-and-yellow helter-skelter. The merry-go-round horses had been zipped away in their leather covers. Even the ghouls on the ghost train had fled.

‘Oh no,’ pleaded Lysander, as he frantically wiped away the tears. ‘Oh please, Mum, oh no, no, no.’

But he knew that his childhood had gone for ever.


45



Wearily Kitty made lists for a Christmas she dreaded. All Rannaldini’s Christmas cards had to be sent off and presents bought for his numerous children and each member of the London Met. Rannaldini had to compensate for his chronic bloody-mindedness somehow. Even more lavish presents had to be bought for his multitude of mistresses, but the London secretary, who had better taste, dealt with that. Kitty wondered if Flora or Rachel had been added to the list. He’d been away so long, she wasn’t au fait with the latest developments. But the deep freezes still had to be filled. Rannaldini liked to have Cecilia and all his children for Christmas, and Hermione, Bob and little Cosmo came over for Christmas dinner. Kitty was also desperately trying to cover her screen with photographs of Rannaldini and the famous, and had just cut out one of him gazing admiringly up at Princess Michael.

It was nearly midnight on the wildest of nights. Everything rattled and creaked. Creepers clawed at the windows, the wind moaned down the chimneys like women desperate to get at Rannaldini. Kitty had already had three dropped telephone calls, and didn’t know if she’d rather it were burglars checking anyone was at home or mistresses checking Rannaldini’s whereabouts. She’d also had increasingly distraught calls from Georgie trying to trace Lysander.

‘We had a stupid lovers’ tiff and he stormed off. You know how impulsive he is. Make him ring me at once if he rings or turns up.’

Kitty had been jumpy all evening. The wind was really wailing now. Suddenly she heard a jangling of bells and a distant pounding on the front door. Terrified, she seized a saucepan and crept along the dark, panelled passages, guided by the rough slither of a tapestry, or the sharp blade of a hanging sword, edging round cannon-balls and suits of armour, not daring to betray her identity by turning on a light. The pounding grew louder, and was now accompanied by terrible spine-chilling sobbing. Kitty gasped with terror as she saw an anguished shadowy face at the hall window.

‘Oh, God!’ Frantically she crossed herself — it was the Paradise Lad.

‘Go away,’ she screamed.

‘Kitty, Kitty, let me in.’

‘Oh, fank goodness.’

As she unbolted the door, Lysander fell inside, clutching a koala bear, followed by a very subdued Maggie and Jack. He was absolutely plastered and blue with cold beneath his suntan, his teeth chattering convulsively, his eyes crazy, his face drenched with sweat. Kitty had never seen anyone shake so much.

‘Help me, Kitty. Georgie, it’s her fault, not Mum’s. She’s a bitch, and Dad’s a bastard, and Uncle Alastair, oh Christ.’

Putting her arms round him, propping him up, Kitty steered him two steps forward, one step sideways or back until, knocking over several suits of armour and the screen, they finally reached the kitchen, where she steered him into an armchair by the Aga.

‘Why did she do it? Jack, Maggie, I haven’t fed them. Oh, Kitty,’ he started to cry.

‘There, there, my lambkin, I’ll see to them. Let me run and get one of Rannaldini’s jumpers, then I’ll make you somefink hot. Wherever ’ave you been?’

‘Don’t go.’

‘I won’t be a sec.’

But when she came back with jerseys, including Guy’s lost Free Forester’s cricket sweater, and blankets, he had passed out.

Tucking them round him, she fed the dogs, who appreciated the steak and kidney she was about to freeze for Boxing Day far more than Rannaldini’s faddy family ever would.

She then curled up on the window-seat. She didn’t want Lysander falling into the Aga, or waking terrified and not knowing where he was. He and Georgie had plainly had far more than a lovers’ tiff.

It was a good thing she stayed. Two hours later he was awake and screaming the house down, and she only got him to the 100 in time, where she had to hold his head for the next quarter of an hour until she thought he’d heave his entrails out. Somehow she managed to get him upstairs to bed, but he continued to rave and gabble incoherently, begging her to stay with him. Only when she gave him one of Rannaldini’s Mogadons did he finally fall asleep.

Next day Kitty abandoned the hundred and one things she had to do, including making a dozen sets of angels’ wings for the annual Valhalla nativity play, and nursed Lysander, feeding him dry toast and clear chicken soup, and letting him talk. She didn’t fill in the silences as he frantically tried to get his image of his mother into some kind of shape.

‘She was so kind, Kitty,’ said Lysander. ‘We had a really awful groom, who bullshitted her way into the job. She couldn’t even ride and she was vaguer than me. Mum finally screwed up courage to sack her, but four hours later Mum had said so many nice things to her to soften the blow that the groom thought she’d been promoted.’

‘Kind people find it ever so hard to say no,’ said Kitty who was cutting out a picture of Rannaldini shaking hands with Donald Duck. ‘Your mum was so beautiful, and so many men must ’ave wanted her, she must ’ave felt unkind refusing them.

‘I expect Georgie’s infatuated with your dad,’ she went on. ‘As he’s almost as ’andsome as you, I don’t blame ’er, and that makes her ever so jealous of your mum. I mean you know how huptight she was about Rachel and Julia. She’s worse than ’im.’ Kitty pointed to Jack who was sitting on the kitchen table glaring at Maggie who was now lying like a baby in Lysander’s arms.

‘I don’t ’spect she meant half the fings she told you. Some people just need extra frills in marriage,’ Kitty added sadly, as she dipped her brush in glue and pasted Donald Duck and Rannaldini under Princess Michael.

‘Christ, it’s a horrible world!’ Lysander, who was still wearing Guy’s cricket sweater, dipped a ginger biscuit in his tea and handed it to Jack. ‘I don’t understand why everyone plays games. I loved Georgie so much, we were having terrific sex, twice a day at least, but it wasn’t enough for her. She had to have Dad as well.’

As Kitty was reflecting that if Georgie were working really hard she might have preferred the perhaps lesser sexual demands of David Hawkley, Lysander noticed Donald Duck.

‘God, I’m jealous of Rannaldini meeting him. Did he get Donald’s autograph? This screen is lovely. You’re brilliant at cutting out. Can I have a go?’

‘What d’you really want from life?’ asked Kitty, passing him the scissors and a picture of Rannaldini laughing with Pavarotti.