Victoria Clayton - Moonshine

‘I’m ashamed to admit that for some time, several weeks, I didn’t feel guilty at all. Anna seemed a hardly real figure in Burgo’s life. He rarely mentioned her name. She seemed to have nothing at all to do with me. I assumed they had some sort of understanding. That’s if I thought about her at all. At first I was so overwhelmed by feelings of … well, let’s call it infatuation, that nothing else mattered. The pain came from excessive excitement. An overdose of adrenaline. Because we couldn’t see each other often, the affair had to be carried on in my head. I must have been impossibly vague and unreachable. I drifted through the days that followed, cooking, cleaning, carrying trays in a dream, waiting for him to call, imagining what it would be like to see him again. Every minute of every hour I thought about him. When I got back to the house I found a ruined saucepan and a kitchen full of smoke. Oliver had left the bath running. He’d been so busy trying to mop up the bathroom floor with anything he could lay his hands on, including every clean towel in the linen cupboard and quite a few of the hated napkins I’d just ironed, he’d forgotten about the caramel. I didn’t feel so much as a flicker of annoyance. America and Russia could have gone to war, Africa and India have starved, Sussex might have been submerged by a tidal wave and I wouldn’t have given a damn. I only thought about Burgo. You see, I had never been in love before.’

‘And once you’d had a taste of it, it went straight to your head like wine-cup.’

‘I must be a sadly repressed sort of person.’

‘I think you’re perfectly adorable.’

I peered through the streaming window at banks of trees hanging over the road. Now the lower slopes of the mountains were clothed with green and looked more friendly, like parts of Italy. ‘We must be near Kilmuree.’

‘Four miles. I hope you brought an umbrella.’

‘It never occurred to me. I was so desperate to get out of the house without the press spotting me that I’ve probably brought all the wrong things.’

‘How did you manage it?’

‘A friend helped me. Oddly enough, she came to interview me for a newspaper.’

‘That sounds intriguing. You’ve just got time to tell me.’

Three days after Burgo’s and my love affair became carrion for the nation to peck over for the juiciest bits, I was standing in the kitchen measuring spoons of Bengers into a pan of warm milk for my mother. She had given up eating proper food, complaining that everything made her feel sick, and existed on invalidish things like Slippery Elm and eggnog with brandy. And of course sweets by the bagful. I suppose she was trying to sweeten a life that had become sour. The current craving was for coffee fondants.

‘Just a minute,’ said Kit. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt when you’ve just got going but I thought your mother had been restored to health months ago by the great Frederick Newmarch.’

‘Oh, yes. I’d forgotten I hadn’t told you about all that. The pills cured her hypothyroidism remarkably quickly. Her skin improved, her hair grew back, her voice lightened. Physically she looked better than I’d seen her for a long time. I planned to go back to London in September. Sarah said I could have my old room and my boss had agreed to have me back. And Burgo and I would be able to see more of each other, though we’d managed to meet most weeks in Sussex and occasionally I’d been able to get up to London for half a day. Of course, it was never enough. And that, I suppose, fanned the flames of passion.’ I paused, wincing inwardly at this cold analysis of our love. But I had to try to detach myself. ‘Anyway, I was telling you about my mother. Though she’d stopped grumbling about aches and pains, she refused to get dressed and wouldn’t leave her room. And she wouldn’t give up that beastly commode, though I knew she was capable of walking to the lavatory.

‘Burgo got Frederick Newmarch to call again and he said that there was nothing wrong with her as far as he could see but he thought she was seriously depressed. He advised a complete change, perhaps a holiday abroad. My father wouldn’t take her. He only likes visiting war graves or battlefields: not the thing for lifting depression. So I went to the local travel agent for brochures about cheap places to go in France, my heart absolutely in my boots because I didn’t want to be away from Burgo. Then my mother put paid to all that by deciding to get out of bed and go upstairs.

‘It was the first time for nearly five months that she’d been outside her own room. It was a crazy thing to do. I was on my way to the Fisherman’s Reel – the little pub where Burgo and I used to meet – my father was in London and Mrs Treadgold, who was supposed to be looking after her, was in the kitchen, listening to The Archers . Oliver was still in bed. Was it a coincidence that my mother chose one of the few moments when there was no one around to see or hear her? Anyway she managed, despite being as weak as water after lying so long in bed, to drag herself up to the top of the stairs and then fell down the entire flight, breaking an arm and a leg.’

‘You think she did it deliberately?’

‘I don’t know. There was no reason for her to go upstairs. I was afraid that she’d meant to kill herself. I felt I hadn’t been nearly nice enough. Of course the entire process began all over again. Two weeks in hospital, National Health this time, and heavens, did she complain! Then home, encased in plaster, to be looked after. She seemed to cheer up a bit then. If it hadn’t been for Burgo it would have been me who was suicidal.

‘I embarked on a new policy of calm endurance and tried even harder to please. I was so sorry for her. My father was cold to her, unsympathetic, whereas I was loved by this marvellous man … Anyway, the fractures mended, though it took ages. Another four months. By January she was more or less better. Just when I was thinking it might be possible to go back to London, she upset a pot of tea all over herself. She was burned from her neck to her waist. Back to hospital. Luckily, though the scalded area was large, it wasn’t deep. She was home after a week. But the burn didn’t heal. I think she picked off the new skin during the night.’

‘Oh dear, you poor girl. Was it because she didn’t want you to go away?’

‘If I’d believed that it might have been easier in many ways. I’d have felt needed. No, she’s always preferred Oliver. Though when he stopped being a gentle confiding little boy she withdrew from him too. I was always too independent and bossy. I know I am. I love making something good out of something hopeless. Once I grew old enough to be effective what affection she had for me waned almost completely. And now I was trying to make her well when she didn’t want to be. What’s more she saw all my attempts to make the house and garden more attractive as criticism. We were both to be pitied in the circumstances. I think she just enjoys lying in bed, being waited on, reading escapist novels and eating sweets, not having to go out into a world that holds no pleasure for her. I was simply a means to an end. All she needs is a more or less willing slave.’

‘So you stayed.’

‘I was afraid if I left she’d do something worse to herself. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen in the future. That she might become bored with being an invalid. Or that Burgo might force the issue by deciding to divorce his wife so he could marry me. Yes, I suppose that’s what I hoped. That he would take matters out of my hands and into his own. I was becoming increasingly dependent on him. He had become my happiness, my salvation. But, of course, that didn’t happen. The Conservative Party stormed into power under the leadership of Margot Holland; she selected him to be her youngest minister and his face was splashed all over the newspapers. Someone saw the opportunity to make some cash. It sounds awfully squalid, doesn’t it?’