Victoria Clayton - Clouds among the Stars

‘I’m going to Manton’s first to borrow some jewellery.’ Manton’s was a theatrical costumier. ‘This man is a bloated capitalist,’ Portia continued. ‘I don’t want him to think I’m hard up.’ She slipped her foot from her high-heeled patent leather shoe and bent to rub her heel. ‘Ow! These shoes are hell! Why should Ophelia be blessed with small aristocratic feet and not me? It’s so unfair.’ She looked up from behind a fall of pale yellow hair, her expression half laughing and half cross.

‘You’ve nothing to complain about, I should say. Even dressed like that you look gorgeous.’

My three sisters and Bron had all inherited my mother’s looks, the same shining fair hair, huge deep blue eyes and marvellous mouth. Ophelia was generally thought to be the beauty of the family, having, in addition, my mother’s perfect nose, but I thought there might be some who would prefer Portia’s more animated features and friendlier disposition. Cordelia was already shaping up to rival the other two. I had dark hair and dark eyes like my father and the same bony frame. While my sisters were voluptuous, I was completely bosomless, to my great sorrow.

‘Thanks for the compliment, I don’t think.’ Portia took a mauve scarf from her coat pocket and tied it round her head, Red Indian fashion. On anyone else it would have looked ridiculous but it gave Portia a seductive air I really envied. ‘There’s nothing the matter with the way I’m dressed. You’re a fine one to talk, anyway. I never see you in anything but black these days. I suppose it’s all because of that frightful Dodge. That reminds me what came up to tell you. He’s on the phone.’

Dodge had been my boyfriend for the last year. Everyone disapproved of him, which was one of the things I liked about him. It is difficult to assert oneself in a large family of beautiful people overflowing with self-confidence.

‘You might have said! He has to ring from a call box.’

‘I’m surprised he condescends to use such a bourgeois means of communication,’ she called after me as I ran down the stairs. ‘I’d have thought a note written in blood and wrapped round a bullet would’ve been more in his line.’

I had brought Dodge home to have supper with us some weeks after meeting him in a bus queue. It had not been a success. Usually people adore the zany glamour so liberally dispensed by my family. My father is a marvellous storyteller and my mother likes all young men to fall in love with her.

Claremont Lodge – this was the name of our house – was Regency and very large and handsome for the suburbs. It looked out over the park and was furnished in a manner both theatrical and dégagé , on the lines of Sleeping Beauty’s castle after a decade or two of slumber. There was a great deal of peeling paint, crumpled velvet, cracked marble, tarnished silver and chipped porcelain. As much of it had been rescued from stage sets, things constantly fell to pieces and were repaired rather badly by Loveday. My mother was a keen decorator with a taste for dramatic tableaux. When Dodge came to dinner she had arranged a corner of the hall with a harp, entwined with ivy where the strings should have been, and a stool made from a Corinthian capital on which stood a clock without hands, a crown – possibly Henry IV’s – and a stuffed partridge hanging from one claw. A guttering candle lit the scene, which my mother called Caducity . I looked it up later. It means transitoriness or frailty, a tendency to fall apart. It seemed appropriate, considering the state of the furniture.

Dodge had taken all this in with cold eyes, and when my mother had invited him to sit beside her on the sofa before dinner he had said he preferred to stand. Champagne was offered but he asked for beer so I had to raid Loveday’s supplies. During dinner my father entertained us with stories of touring Borneo with The Winter’s Tale . He described a feast of woodworms, considered a delicacy but tasting like the sawdust of which they were composed, and told of an embassy dinner where guests in white tie and long dresses were politely offered a pair of pillowcases to tie on to their feet as protection against the bites of mosquitoes. He drew a vivid picture of natives launching little rafts bearing rice, eggs and flowers into the sea, a custom intended to propitiate the gods of fishing.

My mother had said she was sure Dodge was frighteningly clever and she longed to hear all about his fascinating political views. He had scowled at his plate and answered her in monosyllables. After he had gone home my mother gave an elaborate yawn, flapping her hand at her mouth in a parody of boredom.

My father, with one of the darting, caustic looks he had perfected playing Iago years ago, said, ‘What an extraordinary choice, Harriet. I think he may have given Mark Antony fleas.’

Dodge had black hair that stood up in spikes. His eyes were grey and generally filled with scorn. Just occasionally I saw this level stare of defiance waver and a look of doubt creep in, and then I felt sure that I loved him. At least I wanted to put my arms round him, which was probably the same thing.

Dodge was an anarchist. He wanted to rebuild the world and he was making a start with me. It was hardly possible to remark on the weather without provoking a diatribe on my hopelessly class-bound attitudes. He lectured me about my feeble capitulation to society’s attempts to abort the creative expansion of my spirit. In protest I had shown him some of my poetry and he had verbally torn it to shreds. Milton, Spenser and Shakespeare were merely propagandists for corrupt regimes. He threw my gods to the ground and trampled on them. I was not to despair altogether, though. He could teach me to free myself from the bondage of erroneous constructs. By going to bed with him I would take the first steps towards enlightenment. I was only too ready to believe that I was hopelessly in error and I was grateful for his interest.

Dodge lived on a piece of waste ground by the river in Deptford, in a disused lighterman’s hut. In one corner was a pile of ropes and tackle, and in another was Dodge’s bed, the frame made from flotsam picked up on the shore. Instead of a mattress there were heaps of sacks. Beside his bed he had a homemade bookcase filled with anarchic texts. It was all rough, damp and pretty uncomfortable. Yet it had, for me, a strange attraction. When we sat together on the steps of the hut, frying sausages over a driftwood fire and throwing pieces of bread to the seagulls while Dodge outlined his plans for the world, I was happy. He was a seeker after truth and there are not too many of these.

When we made love Dodge changed altogether from his austere public persona. Without the regulation black jersey, donkey jacket and jeans his body was soft and white and his hands were gentle. He would growl like a dog as he got excited and yelp at key moments. I have always liked dogs. I loved it when he lay with his head in the crook of my arm afterwards, sleeping like a child, his expression unguarded and a smile on his lips. I knew it could not last, that Dodge was not the man with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life but there was something about the rank smell of the river, the scream of the gulls, the hooting of the river craft and the scratchiness of the sacks that made me feel alive, a real person living in the real world.

I picked up the receiver.

‘Hello, Ekaterina.’ Dodge objected to Harriet on the grounds that it was too upper class. He was a great admirer of Prince Kropotkin, the famous anarchist, and almost anything Russian, apart from Communism, met with his approval. Of the social connotations of Ekaterina we were both in happy ignorance. ‘I suppose you were asleep. Dissipation will kill you in the end, you know.’ Dodge thought lying in past six o’clock was immoral. One ought to be in the streets, destroying the fabric of society. No doubt it is easier to rise early from damp hessian. ‘We’re having a meeting. At Nikolskoye. Twelve o’clock. Be there.’