Victoria Clayton - Moonshine

Dickie was scarlet in the face. Beads of sweat sat on his forehead and his voice was not quite under his command for he was panting.

‘Hello, Billy.’ He looked at Fleur. ‘There you are, darling. I wondered what had happened to you.’

‘You look as if you’re going to pass out.’ Fleur sounded unsympathetic. ‘Why don’t you take off your coat? For heaven’s sake, it’s high summer and you’re wearing a tie! I’m boiling!’

She pulled up her cotton jersey and hauled it over her head.

‘Well, girls, if you don’t mind, I think I will.’

Dickie leaned his stick against the steps and began to unknot his tie. I saw Billy looking at Fleur’s breasts. Her nipples were prominent beneath her thin, not altogether clean T-shirt. Her armpits had tufts of dark hair. The gypsy look is not one I normally care for but on Fleur it seemed fine, even attractive in an earthy way. Billy’s eyes narrowed and he licked his upper lip. I glanced at Dickie but he was still fighting his way out of his coat. Perspiration was damp on the back of my neck but I was disinclined to remove my jersey beneath Billy’s lascivious gaze. Mrs Harris appeared with the coffee. I saw her eyes take in everything.

She put the tray on a table that stood outside the China House. ‘I’ll take that coat, sir, then you won’t have to carry it back. You’d better put your shirt on, Billy,’ she added sharply. ‘It isn’t decent in front of ladies.’

Billy looked at Dickie.

‘Mrs Harris is always right.’ Dickie smiled. ‘We must do as we’re bid.’

Billy showed by the contemptuous drooping of his eyelids precisely what he thought of the housekeeper. He put on his T-shirt and bent and stretched languidly over his task, pausing now and then to look at Fleur and sometimes at me. Once when I caught his eye he turned his back to the others and rested his free hand casually on his groin. I stared with cold dignity at a clump of delphiniums.

‘Now, Roberta.’ Dickie sank into a deckchair. ‘Tell me honestly what you think.’ He waved his hand at the China House.

‘So far, excellent,’ I said. I noticed that Fleur was amusing herself by chucking little stones into Billy’s cement and that he was fishing them out and waving his trowel at her in mock anger.

‘I’ve consulted pre-war photographs, though it was nearly a ruin then,’ said Dickie. ‘But outside, at least, it’s as near as dammit to the original.’

‘It’s lovely. Did you know it was traditional to hang bells from the eaves, beneath the curled-up corners of the roof? So you get a tinkling sound whenever the wind blows. You could have a whingding at the apex. That’s a sort of pinnacle. Something fanciful. Perhaps a crouching dragon with a long tail spiralling upwards?’

Dickie was thrilled by these suggestions and began to make notes on the back of an envelope. Fleur lobbed a stone that bounced on a bucket and struck Billy’s thigh. He mimed a parody of spanking and she giggled. I heard him give a low growl. The little square of garden seemed to throb with dark primitive urges.

‘You could paint the roof with a scale pattern, like a goldfish,’ I continued, though my mind was not wholly on the subject. ‘Scarlet, white and green would be appropriate colours. And you ought to reach it by crossing a little scarlet Chinese bridge across a square or circular pool. Strictly speaking, though these roses are lovely, if you want to be traditional the only flowers should be water lilies. Otherwise masses of ferns and rocks.’

‘Roberta, you’re absolutely right!’ Dickie looked delighted. He turned to Fleur and just missed seeing her sticking out her tongue at Billy. ‘Isn’t it marvellous to have found someone who knows? Won’t it be fun, darling? I’m determined we shall do the thing right. Now tell me, what should the bells be made of?’

‘Anything you like. Often they were wooden but you could just as well have brass—’

I was interrupted by the sound of breaking china. ‘Oh, bugger,’ said Fleur. A pretty pink and gold Coalport tea cup lay in pieces on the gravel. ‘Mrs Harris’ll have a field day.’ Then she giggled. ‘It’s your fault, Billy. You shouldn’t make those ridiculous faces.’

Billy chuckled, an unpleasantly lubricious sound.

‘Better pick up the pieces, darling,’ said Dickie. ‘Perhaps it can be mended. But be careful not to cut yourself—’ It was too late. Fleur was sucking her thumb. The unselfconsciousness of the babyish pose was utterly charming and seductive. When she took it from her mouth drops of crimson fell on to the wet cement. ‘Here’s my hanky.’ Dickie sounded alarmed. ‘Put pressure on it and hold it above your head. We’ll go in and get a plaster—’

‘Don’t fuss.’ Fleur stood up. ‘It’s just a little cut. I was going to see Stargazer anyway. You stay and talk gardens with Bobbie.’ She fluttered a hand at me. ‘See you later.’ Then she was gone through the gap in the hedge.

Billy put down his trowel. ‘If you’re going to put a pond in, is it any good me going on with the paving?’

‘Well, no, I suppose not. You’d better leave all this for the time being and go and help Beddows with the grass.’

‘I was thinking maybe I’d go and help Mrs Sudborough with the horse. She’ll be a bit unhandy with that thumb.’

‘Good idea. Off you go then.’

Billy gave me a last lecherous look, then strode from the garden. I gazed at Dickie’s round pink face with his guileless eyes, snub nose and small mouth pursed up in an expression of whole-hearted enthusiasm and innocent pleasure and could have wept for him.

‘I don’t know though,’ Kit interrupted. ‘My sympathies are with the beauteous Fleur. Think how grim to be young and filled with the joys of spring and to be tied to a decrepit old buffer – however decent – incapable of gratifying one’s appetites. Or did the dear old fellow wink an eye when the lickerish Billy put in a spell of overtime? If so, it was probably sensible of him.’

‘A typically masculine reaction,’ I said scornfully.

‘Isn’t that reassuring? I am after all a man.’

‘For one thing, you talk as though Dickie’s in his dotage. He’s only fifty. And even if he were too old or too infirm to gratify anyone’s appetite, as you so charmingly phrase it, you seem to assume that those appetites are important enough to justify Fleur sleeping with an ignorant lout for whom she cares nothing, and who doesn’t give a fig for her. Are you telling me that men and women can’t live entirely happily together without sex?’

‘Yes.’ Seeing that I looked indignant, he added, ‘Well, you asked. With affection, yes, contentedly, possibly, but entirely happily? I doubt it. Not unless they’re both over seventy.’

‘You’re entitled to your view, of course,’ I said with a superior air.

Dickie lost no time in putting into practice my proposals for the China House. He was anxious to consult me on every detail and soon it was taken for granted that I would go over to Ladyfield for lunch or supper once or twice a week. It was wonderful to escape the dullness of Cutham for a few hours and the Sudboroughs’ hospitality was never less than munificent. When the weather was good we ate on the terrace beneath a wisteria-covered pergola. When it was wet, in the dining room. Sometimes we had lunch in the China House. For a greedy person like me it was heaven to have straight from the garden tiny broad beans, carrots like baby’s fingers, beetroot the size of olives and little purple artichokes to be eaten with a green mayonnaise and followed by tender noisettes of lamb or roast chicken with tarragon or skate with black butter. Mrs Harris’s puddings were first class, too. I remember with particular fondness her omelette Rothschild, a wonderful concoction of nectarines, strawberries and kirsch baked inside a hot vanilla-flavoured froth of eggs.