Jilly Cooper - Octavia

He backed away from Andreas until he reached the wall.

‘Now then big boy,’ murmured Andreas, his voice almost a caress. ‘I’ll teach you to get tough with me.’ He brandished the jagged edge of the bottle in Gareth’s face. ‘Give me back that film.’

Gareth stared at him, not a muscle moving in his face.

‘You lousy cheap punk,’ he said.

Then I froze with horror as I saw that Mannie had extracted himself from the potted plants and, armed with a flick knife, was moving relentlessly in from the right. Without thinking, I picked up the Christopher Wray lamp and hurled it at him, slap on target. Just for a second Andreas’ concentration flickered, giving Gareth the chance to leap on him, knocking him to the floor. Over and over they rolled like Tommy Brook and Mr Tod, yelling abuse at each other. Then finally Gareth was on top smashing his fists into Andreas’ head. For a minute I thought he was going to kill him; then he got up, picked Andreas up and threw him through the Habitat wallpaper like a clown through a hoop.

There was another long pause. Gareth looked slowly round the room. Everyone flattened themselves against the wall or the floor. Then suddenly there was the sound of clapping, and Angelica emerged from under the bed, her Nun’s headdress askew.

‘I’ve been waiting three years for someone to do that,’ she said.

Blood was pouring from Gareth’s arm. He must have jagged it on Andreas’ bottle.

‘You’ll bleed to death,’ I moaned, gathering up a peach silk petticoat that was lying on the floor.

‘Well, bags I give him the kiss of life,’ said a little voice from under the bed. Gareth grabbed my wrist. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

I hoped Gareth had worked off his rage breaking up Cy’s studio, but as we stormed up Parkside towards London, with Wimbledon Common on our right, the full storm of his fury broke over me.

‘I tried to help you,’ he yelled. ‘We all did. Jakey’s nursed you like a baby through the last eight weeks, and then you have to pick this afternoon to blow the whole thing — just when Jakey needed you. I don’t understand you, Octavia. Have you got some sort of death wish? Don’t you care about anyone?’

He overtook another car; you could have got fag paper between them. Thank God we were going against the traffic. Home-going commuters crawling in the other direction stared at us in amazement. Some of them were stopping to put their hoods up. The stifling heat hadn’t let up, but an ominous, bilberry dark sky had replaced the serene unclouded blue of the morning.

‘Why did you do it?’ said Gareth, overtaking yet again. ‘Go on, I want to know.’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Sure you can’t. Well I’ll tell you; you’re so bloody idle you can’t resist making a quick buck from Andreas. But my God, you’d have paid for it. He’d have broken you in a couple of months.’

We were passing Wimbledon Windmill now. I gazed stonily at the dried-up pond and the great sweeps of platinum-bleached grass, blackened everywhere by fires.

Gareth warmed to his subject:

‘I guess you’re turned on at the thought of all those men on news-stands slobbering over your photograph, misting up windows in Soho to get a second glance at your tits, not to mention the ones in bedsitters wearing raincoats. .’

‘They’d hardly keep their macs on in the bedroom,’ I protested.

‘Don’t be flippant,’ he howled.

We had reached the roundabout at Tibbet’s Corner now, but he was so incensed he kept missing the turning off to Putney and had to go round three times, which didn’t improve his temper.

‘Don’t you give a fuck about your reputation?’

‘I don’t care,’ I snapped. ‘I needed the bread in a hurry, that was all. But you’re so well-heeled you wouldn’t understand things like that.’

Gareth turned on me, enraged.

‘Haven’t you any idea how poor we were when I was a child?’

‘I don’t want to hear,’ I said, putting my hands over my ears. ‘I’ve read D. H. Lawrence, I know quite enough already about poverty at the pithead. I’m just fed up with you going round censoring my behaviour. Who the hell do you think you are, Mary Whitehouse, you great Welsh prude?’

‘You’ve called me that already,’ he said.

‘What!’ I shouted, my hands still over my ears.

‘Don’t bug me,’ he shouted back and, seizing my arm, yanked my hand away from my ear.

I sat very still, watching the white marks left by his fingers slowly turning red. Then out of the corner of my eye I noticed the peach silk petticoat I’d tied round his arm completely drenched in blood, and a red stain creeping down his blue check shirt. He’d gone very white. Suddenly the fight went out of me.

‘For God’s sake let’s call a truce and go to Roehampton Hospital. You need stitches in that arm,’ I said.

‘I don’t want any stitches,’ he said, screeching to a halt at the top of my road. Leaning across, he opened the door.

‘Now get out, or I’ll throw you out, and don’t come grovelling back to Jakey either. You’re on your own from now on.’

And, swinging the car round, he drove off in a cloud of dust.

As soon as he’d gone I began to shake again. How the hell was I going to tell Xander I hadn’t got the money? I hadn’t got the rent either. Mrs Lonsdale-Taylor was sure to sling me out. The trauma of the afternoon had left me in a state of total shock. Numbly I walked towards the river, kicking my shoes off, when I came to the Common, not even noticing the sharp dry grass cutting into my feet.

A large drop of rain fell on the path in front of me. Perhaps at last the drought was at an end. The poplar trees by the bowling green clattered their leaves in a sudden gust of wind. The light was curious, as though one was swimming under water. Picnickers and dog-walkers hurried home, looking anxiously up at the sky; even the rooks were silent. The river bank was covered with coke tins, bottles and old ice-cream cartons. Two dogs were splashing about in the water, cooling off. I wished I had Monkey for company.

A large drop of warm rain splashed on my face, then on my hand; the discoloured sky was suddenly veined by lightning, followed three seconds later by an earth-shattering clap of thunder. The whole valley seemed to be boiling, the rain was coming down faster now, pattering on the leaves above me, pitting the river with rings, bouncing off the iron-hard ground. Another flash of lightning unzipped the sky, followed by another, far more brilliant, which seemed to snake down the centre of a huge elm tree only fifty yards away, and rip it apart. Then the whole sky exploded with rain.

I didn’t care. I wanted to be struck down. I put back my head, feeling the drops dripping down my neck, cascading on my face, washing away all the horrible stage make-up. In two minutes I was drenched. The lightning was coming at the same time as the thunder-claps now; it sounded like Gareth up in heaven breaking up another studio.

I don’t know how many hours I wandered round, half crazy with grief. I felt like Lear: ‘poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm.’

Then suddenly it was getting dark, and the storm was moving away, grumbling like a drunk turned out of the pub. The rain was letting up, night was falling. In the distance I could see the orange lights on the roads around the common. It must be nearly ten o’clock.

Xander, Mrs Lonsdale-Taylor and the music had to be faced. Listlessly I started to walk home. I was frozen and drenched. The temperature had probably dropped to the seventies, but after weeks up in the nineties, it felt like midwinter. My pink smock, worn on Andreas’ instructions, had instructions of its own on the label about being only dry-cleaned. Wet-cleaned, it had shrunk drastically, risen to miniskirt level, and was now clinging to every inch of my body. My hair was hanging in dripping tendrils. People giving their dogs last runs before bedtime looked at me strangely as I wandered barefoot past them. The whole common was steaming now like a crocodile swamp.