Victoria Clayton - Moonshine

Ten days passed in which I performed my duties with a lightened heart. Being reminded that there was fun to be had and that there were people who did not find me provoking (my mother), self-willed (my father), or bossy (Oliver) was good for my morale.

None the less it was a difficult time. Every day Oliver got up at tea-time and wrote feverishly during the night, covering pages of foolscap which the next morning I collected from the floor of his room where they lay in crumpled heaps round an empty waste-paper basket. I lent him money from my precious and dwindling fund to buy more paper. Also some biros to replace the fountain pen that leaked and was gradually staining his hands and face until he resembled an Ancient Briton decorated with woad.

My mother had been grumbling about the lumpiness of her mattress. I had a new one sent from Worping. Her complaints trebled, this time about its hardness. She sulked for a whole day when I gave her a piece of toast with her lunchtime consommé in an attempt to persuade her to eat something more nourishing than walnut whips and the violet creams that she devoured daily by the half-pound. The woman who owned the sweet shop had had to place an extra order with the wholesalers to keep up with demand. When the physiotherapist came my mother drew her sheet over her head and refused to speak to her.

‘Poor old thing,’ said the physiotherapist, whose name was Daphne, as I accompanied her to the front door. ‘They get awkward, you know. We’ll be the same, I dare say, when we’re her age.’

‘She’s only fifty-one,’ I said.

‘Never!’ Daphne riffled through a sheaf of notes. ‘Well, goodness gracious, you’re right! Dear, dear! And I’d thought she must be seventy-odd. She’s such a bad colour! And her hair’s that thin you can see her scalp.’ This was true. The quantity of hair I brushed daily from her pillow could have stuffed the offending mattress. ‘You’d better get the doctor to her.’

‘She refuses to see one.’

Daphne tut-tutted as she manoeuvred her hips behind the wheel of her tiny car. ‘Well, I don’t know. Anyway, there’s no point in my coming any more. Ta ta, love. I’d get someone in for definite.’

As I watched her chug down the drive, I wondered what I ought to do. I managed to catch my father by the front door, just as he was going out.

‘There’s nothing wrong with your mother that a bit of effort on her part wouldn’t cure,’ he said. ‘It’s all in the mind.’

‘I’m not so sure. She still can’t walk without help. Her hip ought to be healing faster than this.’

‘What you know about the healing of fractures could be inscribed on a piece of lead shot. If you don’t mind, I’d like to get off.’ He tried to close the door but I hung on to it. ‘Damn it, Roberta, let go! You’d like to warm the South Downs at my expense, I know.’

‘The heating isn’t on.’

He ran down the steps to prevent the rain from spoiling his shining brogues and spotting the nap of his suit. I wondered if he was going to meet Ruby. It was a favourite trick of Brough’s to let out the clutch just as my father was stepping into the car, which caused it to jerk forward and him to fall on to the back seat with a yelp of protest. I could see from the grim satisfaction on Brough’s face as he drove away that, though frequently played, this little joke was by no means stale.

‘I’m really worried about Mother,’ I said that evening.

My father, Oliver and I were sitting in the dining room, eating tapioca pudding. My father had removed three of the four bulbs belonging to the brass chandelier. The remaining bulb, high above our heads, only deepened the shadows cast by the giant sideboard and the enormous pseudo-Tudor court cupboard. More useful was a measure of dusty light which sneaked past the rhododendrons that crowded, like inquisitive passers-by, round the dining-room windows.

‘Jam, please.’ My father snapped his fingers in Oliver’s direction.

‘It’s a magnificent colour.’ Oliver stirred the jam and allowed a spoonful to plop back into the pot from a considerable height. Not surprisingly, he missed. ‘Exactly the colour of a ruby, isn’t it? Ruby .’ He repeated the action with the same result.

‘ When you’ve finished smearing food over the table, perhaps you’ll be good enough to let me have it,’ barked my father. I felt like barking too. I had spent nearly an hour that morning polishing the beastly thing which seemed to expand as I laboured to the size of a tennis court.

‘OK. No need to get waxy.’ Oliver sent the jam-pot sliding across the couple of yards that separated them, leaving a long scratch.

‘I am not waxy, as you call it.’

‘I read a delicious book this afternoon.’ Oliver rolled his eyes and pursed his lips, assuming the camp mannerisms he knew annoyed my father. ‘Such lovely poetry. It’s called The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám . Such an interesting word, isn’t it? Arabic, I suppose. The Ruby -at.’

My father paused in the act of shovelling down his tapioca to regard Oliver suspiciously. ‘If I didn’t know you’d been after every scrubby little tart in the neighbourhood I’d be worried that you were queer.’ He flung down his spoon, tossed his napkin to one side and stood up. ‘I’ll have my coffee in the library.’ He walked off without bothering to shut the door, as though he were a rich milord with an extensive retinue.

‘He’s so stupid he never sees the point of anything.’ Oliver was cross that his barbs had failed to lodge in our father’s conscience.

‘What do you think about Mother? She ought to be getting better by now. She looks at me sometimes in a way that’s quite disconcerting. Huge, staring eyes. And she seems rather muddled.’

‘Muddled?’

‘This morning she complained that the toast smelt of electricity.’

‘Women are never any good at science,’ said Oliver with a complacency I felt was misplaced considering he had failed Physics O level twice. ‘I refuse to believe Father and I have genes in common. I’m really the descendant of an itinerant minstrel and a gypsy princess who carelessly laid their baby beneath a blackberry bush. While they were canoodling among crow-flowers and long-purples an officious person discovered me and carried me off to Worping Cottage Hospital.’

I gave up trying to interest him in my own preoccupations. ‘Help me with the supper things, will you?’

Oliver groaned. ‘You’re a slave-driver, you know, Bobbie. Men don’t like to be bullied. You’ll never get a husband if you go on like this.’

‘I don’t want one if it means I’ve got to wash up every night for two.’

‘I’ve just had the most brilliant idea for my novel,’ he pleaded. ‘If I don’t write it down at once I might forget it.’

‘Make a quick note.’

‘That won’t do. Its brilliance is in the expression, not the naked fact. It’s a question of atmosphere and mood. It’s already beginning to fade as we speak. I must hurry or it will be gone for ever.’

I hesitated. Had Dorothy Wordsworth insisted that William put down his pen to help her sow the peas? I doubted it.

‘Go on, then.’ I gathered up the napkins to be washed.

‘You’re a dear darling, Bobbie. Will you get me some more paper tomorrow?’

‘All right. But couldn’t you write a bit smaller and on every line? It’s getting rather expensive—’ I was speaking to an empty room.

‘Do you think my mother’s getting a little … confused?’ I asked Mrs Treadgold the next morning as we washed up the breakfast things together.

‘How do you mean, dear?’

‘Not making sense. It might be delayed shock from the fall, perhaps. Have you noticed her saying things that don’t quite add up?’