Gold Digger (6 page)

And they talked about the night of the storm. And the parties there used to be, and would be again.

I
t was the spring of the year after Diana Quigly returned to the house of Thomas Porteous, Collector of pictures and Inventor of games.

Gayle and Beatrice, the two daughters of Thomas, now in their late thirties, sat on the same sofa where they had sat to indulge their mother’s desire to capture them in paint some years before. Patrick was the only child this time, sitting on the floor near his mother’s feet. Gayle nudged him aside with
her foot and he scuttled across the room out of the way of her exasperation. Edward, Patrick’s father, Gayle’s husband, sat facing the women as if chairing a meeting. He was, without doubt, the head of the family.

‘He wants us to bring the children down for a party,’ Gayle said in her calm voice. ‘To leave them at the door for tea with him and a chaperone, amuse ourselves, and come back later for supper. How desperately inconvenient. Why should we?’

‘To keep him sweet,’ Edward said.

‘To mourn our mother,’ Beatrice said in her sing-song voice, which irritated Edward. ‘To remind him what he owes us. To make him feel like shit.’

‘To spy out the land,’ Edward said. ‘To see what else he’s acquired with your money.’

‘
Our
money,’ Gayle said sweetly, looking him straight in the eye.

‘I like parties,’ Patrick muttered from the floor, and then kept quiet. Edward and Gayle kept him close. He was small for his age, looking more like five than eight. Gayle was lost in thought, remembering the house by the sea she had visited as a child, and latterly only with reluctance, taking Patrick at her own mother’s insistence. There was a niggling, older memory of a party with fancy dress, something that eluded her. Patrick loving the place when he could scarcely walk, when he and his cousins, Alan and Edmund, were towed to visit Grandad.

‘We don’t have to go and see him,’ Beatrice said. ‘We can just continue to have lunch in London every now and then, let him give us presents. We don’t need to keep him sweet. His conscience should do that. He’s going to look after us once he’s dead. He made his will long since, Raymond Forrest said. We don’t need to risk the children. I can’t bear them to be near him.’

‘There’s no risk to the children,’ Edward said, angrily. ‘They’re boys, not little girls, and he’s an old man. We should go. Besides, I need to look at the house. Do a little revaluation.’

‘I wonder what he means by a chaperone,’ Gayle said. ‘I wonder what he means by a party. I wonder what he’s trying to resurrect and who he’s trying to impress.’

‘I wish he was dead,’ Beatrice said. Patrick put his hands over his ears and rocked gently. He was an insignificant presence, always engaged in small, constant movement as if his fingers itched, however still he seemed. They appeared to assume that since he was generally so silent, he could not hear, either. He wanted to go to a party by the sea: Grandpa knew they never went to parties, and the fact that his parents might refuse the invitation filled him with despair.

‘He killed our mother,’ Beatrice intoned. ‘Abandoned us and killed her.’ She was usually over-dramatic, designed for martyrdom and always, it seemed to Edward, about to burst forth in a stream of malice disguised as a hymn of moral outrage.

The portrait of them all was in Gayle’s home. For the moment, they were gathered in a small studio flat in Clerkenwell, a pied-à-terre owned by their father and frequented, in clandestine fashion, by their mother, Christina, before her disappearance. It was here that the evidence was found to unravel what was in Edward’s eyes her timely death. Receipts for prepaid tickets for a cross-channel ferry to which she was bound in pursuit of yet another lover or another kind of fortune, or maybe, cheap booze. Jumping or falling over the side was the best thing she could have done to save him from her constant rants on the subject of life’s injustices and the perfidy of his father-in-law, who had ruined
her life and her potential, blah, blah, blah. Gayle smiled at her husband, in a slight warning to hold his tongue and refrain from telling Beatrice that it was no wonder her husband had left her in her own herbal soup. She smelled of patchouli, dressed in sackcloth and her two sons were each twice the size of his only one.

‘We’ll go,’ Gayle announced, forestalling her self-righteous sister. ‘To keep the peace, we’ll go.’

‘No peace for the wicked,’ Beatrice sang. ‘I suppose he’ll invite other children, to meet ours. He wants to show us something. He wants to show us up. He’s courting us.’

‘He’s courting our children,’ Gayle said.

I
t was almost summer when they delivered the children for the party with the chaperone. Patrick would remember it forever, but then Patrick was the eldest and knew his grandfather in a way no one else did. Patrick had been here before, like his superior cousins who scarcely remembered and never noticed anything anyway.

It was wicked, that party. There was a tent of shiny turquoise material in the centre of the big room, reaching from floor to ceiling, flickering lights on the walls and inside the tent, a tea party laid out on a low table covered with a white cloth. There were pink and yellow cakes and crisps and sweets and other things. The table was surrounded by cushions and resplendent on the biggest of these, facing the draped entrance to the tent, sat a large green frog, eating a sandwich. He had friendly eyes, this frog, and a nice voice.

‘Delicious!’ the Frog said. ‘Will you come and join me for tea once you’re dressed? Only in Fairyland, we like to dress specially for tea.’

He took off his soft frog helmet and put on a red fez, and
there was Grandpa in a green coat with long white hair sticking out of his hat and over his collar and he was accompanied by a small witch with wild hair, who encouraged them towards a mountain of soft, rich clothes, including rings, beads, crowns, tiaras for the three girls, crowns and helmets for the boys. They put them on over what they wore, emerging from the spangled heap as princesses with rings on fingers and princes with hats on heads.
That one’s better
, said the pretty little witch,
try that
, and he did. Then they sat with the King Frog, who still wore his fez and his green cloak, who told them stories and sang them songs until they were singing, too. They ate and sang and sang and ate, and did races round the room where everyone managed to win and saw themselves reflected in their finery in a mirror on the wall, and yelled and laughed and laughed. Then Grandad did his magic tricks, which made them quiet for a while, and then they played another game where they had to turn away and draw each others’ faces on paper the witch gave them, fold up the paper and put it in a pot, and each of them pull one out and guess whose face it was. And then the witch got them playing again. Then the Auntie of the three girls who was called Monica came to collect them, and she laughed, too, and took them home still in their adorning garments which they were told by the witch they must keep, and yet the Auntie lingered, watching the King Frog waving goodbye from his seat and telling them,
don’t ever be sad
and they said,
no, never
.

Then it crashed: the whole thing crashed.

Beatrice came back early to collect her sons, just as the little girls stumbled downstairs in assorted garments and pushed across her path on the stairs. She saw three
common
little girls pulling coats over petticoats, blowing bubbles and
waving feathers, drunk with fatigue, being led away by a woman who smelled of heavy perfume with a fierce face and overdone hair who was lighting a cigarette as she went. The woman nodded and smiled through crimson lips. Beatrice had an abhorrence of smoke and lipstick. When Beatrice entered the room, she saw a scene of depravity and reacted with horror. Not only were there scruffy little girls who had clearly undressed, there were her boys, flopped on the floor, wearing silly clothes, filthy and exhausted. They were playing dead. She pulled at them, hissed at them, come away, come away now and shouted for Gayle, who followed her. Gayle came in behind and saw an almighty mess, a scene of carnage, loud colours, fabric trampled into the floor, and a pretty girl dressed in a tattered cloak, who was breathless from running round and who bowed towards her. There was rouge on the girl’s cheeks and black lines round her mischievous eyes. She looked like a precocious and knowing child. Mess was anathema to Gayle: she hated mess: it was tantamount to losing control and Gayle never lost control.

‘’Allo,’ Di said. ‘You aren’t taking him away yet, are you? The others are playing at being dead.’

Patrick was clutching at her tattered cloak and looking at her adoringly. He had a pencil stuck behind his ear; his spectacles looked as if someone had knocked them sideways and his mouth was smeared with chocolate.

‘I did drawing, Mummy. I did … ’ He stopped.

‘We got supper a bit later,’ the pretty Witch said. ‘Once we’ve cleaned up a bit, eh, Patrick?’

She wiped his chocolatey face with the hem of the cloak. Gayle touched her own white linen jacket and shuddered.

‘I think not,’ she said in her calm, deep voice, looking her up and down and down and up, until Patrick detached his
hand from the material of the cloak and let it fall. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing? They’re filthy. My child is filthy.’
And as happy as I have ever seen him.

‘I was wearing them out, I thought,’ Di said, cheerfully. ‘You can’t go yet. Come on in. We’ve had a lot of fun and your dad’s dying to see you.’

‘Dying? How sad.’ Beatrice murmured, not quite inaud -ibly, glancing across the room to the tent. ‘Look at what you’ve done, Father. You’ve got them drunk. Poisoned them. They’re behaving like drunks.’

‘Not
drunk
,’ Di said, stung. ‘But we did get a bit excited. I thought that was the whole idea.’

Alan, the youngest cousin, took his cue from his mother, stood up and began to sniffle. Edmund began to whine.

‘Who are you?’ Beatrice hissed at Di.

‘I’m the housekeeper.’

‘Really?’

Beatrice pulled her two towards the exit and Gayle followed. The room emptied. Patrick saw his grandfather sitting with his head in his hands; remembered trying to go back and kiss him and waving at him instead, with a brief wave back. He remembered Di calling out to them all,
Oh please come back, there’s food
. He was aware of his own father’s presence in the house somewhere; wanted to shout some sort of protest, but did not. He simply waved goodbye and the witch blew him a kiss.

The room fell into a terrible silence for a whole minute. The early evening sunlight shone through the window. There was a whole adult meal prepared downstairs for later. Salmon with capers, supper for a family; potatoes waiting to be cooked, wine to be drunk.

Into the stunned silence, Edward, Gayle’s husband, came
into the gallery room through the second door, looking as if he had lost his way, which indeed he had. Despite the warmth of the day, he was wearing a bulky coat, with something held beneath it. He began to back out, and couldn’t quite do it, grinned foolishly, trapped.

‘Good evening, Edward,’ Thomas said. ‘How nice to see you.’

‘Nice to see you, too. I was just … er, looking around. Sorry about the fuss. I was just staying out of the fray, keeping in the background, that’s me. Don’t worry, they’ll calm down. It’s Beatrice, you see. Always a bit hysterical. I’ll see if I can fetch them back, shall I? Can’t promise, though. Women. Always getting the wrong end of the stick.’

Thomas smiled at him.

‘No, of course you can’t promise. I quite understand. It would be nice if you could try, though, bring them back, or come back yourself.’

‘Right, will do. See you later.’

Edward sidled out of the room, pulling his coat around him. Di watched him, her mouth opening and closing. He seemed to be able to feel her staring at him, and at the door he surreptitiously slid his hand inside the coat, extracted a silver box he had purloined from a room upstairs and placed it on the side table.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Seemed to have picked that up by mistake. Bye.’

Di looked towards Thomas, her mouth forming words.

‘Don’t,’ he said to her, softly. ‘Don’t say anything.’

After Edward’s hurried footsteps had echoed away, Di followed. There was a trail of sweets left by Alan and Edmund who had stuffed their pockets to overflowing. Beatrice had knocked over a figurine in the hall, leaving it broken in her
headlong rush to leave. A small piece of crystal next to it was gone, along with the cash in the red jug, kept for emergencies and anyone who came collecting at the door. Oddly, someone had taken the flowers. Di came back, slowly. Thomas seemed to have guessed what she had found. He took off his hat, threw it in the air, let it fall, looked at her and shrugged.

‘They can’t help it,’ he said. ‘They always take or break. Like their mother.’

Di wanted to cry.

‘They’ll come back, won’t they? They’ll come back for supper?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘They’ll come back.’

The drawings of faces were scattered all over the floor. Di began to pick them up slowly. She handed them to him. He looked at them slowly, as if drawing comfort from them, and yet she knew he was inconsolable. So much had been invested in this day.

‘We made them play,’ Thomas murmured. ‘At least we made them play. I can’t bear it when children aren’t allowed to play. Christina wouldn’t let them play.’

‘They’ll come back,’ Di said.

She thought of the food she had lovingly prepared for later, the wine in the cooler, how she planned to leave daughters and father together, take the children for a walk and show them the sea perhaps, come back and find them talking, like the families of her imagination did. What stupid imaginings she had, as if she ever had any power to make things better. Why would anyone ever trust her?