His mother had murmured when she first met Scarlet, ‘Isn’t she rather hormonal for you, darling?’ and a little later, ‘She’s
not very good on classical music, darling, is she?’ and then, ‘Darling, she’s a real sweetheart, but she’s not going to feel
very much at home amongst the architects, is she?’ And once, ‘If you set the dear girl down halfway between a kidney-shaped
dressing table with frills and a William Morris chest, she’d gravitate towards the dressing table.’
But once she had accepted the permanence of the relationship, Annabel was sweetness personified – she just kept away. Louis
has found Scarlet and lost a mother, and believes it is well worth it, but he wants Scarlet to acknowledge the fact. He wants
her to admit that living in Nopasaran – he is not blind to its defects – is worth it. He wants her to assure him that her
occasional disappearances – less and less occasional – are because something has indeed come up at the office. He wants her
not to name-drop in company. He
wants her to have his children. He wants her not to have asked Lola to stay, because although he is over it now, Lola went
through a stage when he could not help noticing the sexy appeal of her upper lip and the body language she used when Scarlet
was not looking. Lola would cross and uncross her legs like Sharon Stone in
Basic Instinct
, as she leant back on her chair wearing Scarlet’s flimsiest tops with no bra and thrust her small tits at him. And that was
when she was thirteen. Now she is three years older she behaves better, is almost plain, and more ruled by her brain than
her body.
Student friends took Louis to a clairvoyante when he was young. ‘A black cloud hangs over you. I can’t go there, it is too
frightening,’ said the fat lady in the black curly wig, with bright rouged cheeks and scarlet lipstick spilling over into
the lines around her mouth. ‘No, it is clearing. I see many S’s surrounding you. They protect you. One special S is destined
for you but you are kept apart. You will marry someone whose name begins with S and have three children.’
Louis thought it was nonsense but somehow he knew it would come true. There was a signed letter from Princess Di on the wall
so the fortune-teller had good credentials. The black cloud would clear, S would protect him. The three children existed in
his mind – rather as Mavis and the laundress exist in mine – two girls and a boy. Sally, Susan and Simon.
Louis told Scarlet about that in the early days when he proposed, and she said she liked the names, and he thought that meant
she wanted children, but as it turned out she didn’t. Scarlet apparently did not forget what it was like when Lola was born,
a creature spewing a strange yellow runny stuff from one end, and a milky fluid from the other. Scarlet was twelve at the
time. Cynara had made a fuss during labour, insisting that the male midwife go away, swearing at him like someone with Tourette’s,
mixed with racial insults,
so the whole staff had walked out and Scarlet was left alone with Cynara when the head showed. Scarlet had freaked and pressed
the ‘staff assault’ button, so it was a vast black guy from Security who actually tugged Lola out while Cynara screamed, ‘Get
that black man off of me.’ Scarlet had been well traumatised. And then a day later there was a midwife bending over Cynara,
whose left breast was oozing pus, saying, ‘Have you bonded yet, Mother?’ as if nothing untoward had happened at all. So no,
Scarlet was not actually into babies, though she didn’t spread it around because she realised people thought it was selfish.
Scarlet told Louis all this only when they had already been together for a couple of years, but Louis thought, well, she is
young, she will change her mind, women mostly do.
What Scarlet was into was buzzing around in her Prius with its low carbon footprint, a perk from a Japanese car manufacturer.
She had her own
Our Planet, Our Future
column in a monthly glossy, and lived amongst free gifts and samples not just from this source but from what came her way
from her job as commissioning editor for
Lookz
, a not-so-glossy weekly. She’d started out as an idealistic graduate on
Prospect
but had drifted off to where the money was, as everyone did. Being with Louis, with his indeterminate ‘private income’, and
his links with the art and fashion world, would help her get back on track. She was quite upfront with Louis about her motives,
and he found her frankness entertaining and charming.
Presently Louis realised that Scarlet had a gift for looking you in the eye and appearing to see into your soul while actually
her attention was altogether elsewhere. She’d have been thinking about something important, a deadline, perhaps, or how to
get her silk blouse back from the cleaners. He had been going on boringly about names beginning with S and she had been nodding
politely but
hadn’t heard a word. Her mother Alice, whom Louis had met so seldom, had the same gift – which, he concluded, could only make
it the more difficult for them to get on with each other. Each knew only too well how little notice the other was taking of
what was being said, no matter how impassioned.
Spring has come so suddenly this year. I’ve been getting up really early to work, it being the best time for writing, and
this morning when I opened the wooden shutters – they’re the original ones; once Mavis would have had the task – a burst of
sunlight struck across the lawn. I saw it was vivid green, and the Japanese cherries were in bud. I am really cheered. I can
turn the central heating down to three instead of five, and take off the plain mittens a Norwegian fan knitted for me – less
distracting than the ones with the bobbles – and unswaddle my knees from the pale mauve throw Vi our cleaner gave me for Christmas.
She used to work in this house for Rex’s mother and now she’s gone and so we’ve taken over as Vi’s employers. She comes in
on Mondays.
It’s just a coincidence that since we use the boiler room next door to this one for the washing machine and the dryer – and
it’s where Vi does the ironing – she passes through here on laundry day. At least once I thought it was coincidence; now I
begin to realise it’s the habit of the house asserting itself. The house drives me down here where the actual work is done,
it’s the house gets me up early, because work in this house is meant to start early. It can’t stand its shutters being closed
in daylight. I belong more down here than up there.
Vi says yes, it’s a bit haunted down here but she doesn’t mind, not
as much as she minded seeing the rat run past the window in the snow, or the grass snake in the rhubarb down the end of the
garden when she was pegging out the washing on the line. Forget the dryer – everything’s so much fresher, she says, and smells
so good, when it’s been hung out. She goes upstairs with a basket of folded, beautifully ironed clothes, proud as the laundress
of yesteryear.
Other than Vi pattering through the room it’s quieter down here on Mondays than it is on other mornings. The others are used
to me by now and take no notice: when Vi comes I get the feeling they welcome her. I listen out for the sounds that have become
familiar, subdued noises from the kitchen, which I think can only be Cook panting and puffing away. She doesn’t sound well.
Cooks were an unhealthy lot, eating and drinking too much, leaning over hot stoves in a state of tension, famous for falling
dead in the middle of dinner parties. Or had I just read that somewhere and now projected it on to the sounds of water in
the pipes? Just as I might very well have interpreted the clanking of the old water system where it hadn’t been renewed as
Mavis clearing the grate, the sweep of ashes into the pan? I can think this easily on Mondays when the real living Vi is around,
if only because I can hear her properly, not fuzzily. I hear the actual hiss of the water when she picks up the electric steam
iron, and the other more shadowy sounds are still. The house is soothed by Vi.
Who’s the snake? The one Vi saw last summer under the rhubarb? We know who the rat is – the one I saw in the winter, dragging
its belly across the snow – it’s Jackson. Probably the snake is Lola. I am not sure myself, but I have to get to know before
she does. There is a kind of race going on between me and these characters. They are mine and they dance to my tune and I
need to keep it like that.
They like to think they have control over their destinies and have
free will but they can only dance so far on the end of my chain. If this is how I say it went, this is how it went. Those
writers who claim their characters take off on their own are irresponsible. Their personages may escape, but they become lawless
and inconsequential. Let them stick to their paths for their own good; rats and snakes though they may be, they need to be
true to their natures.
Lola Olsson, at sixteen, has as we know been fast-tracked through school under the gifted children scheme and before she dropped
out of education had gained a provisional place studying law at Bristol University. Her mother Cynara is a barrister in the
high-profile Human Rights’ chambers of WVB (Wright, Varnes, Bovis). Her father is Jesper Olsson, a big wheel in the museum
world and a specialist in Bronze Age artefacts. Lola complains he has Asperger’s and lacks any capacity for human affection.
Not that it matters much, she will add, since he has deserted her and gone to live in Dubai, leaving the matrimonial bed available
for filling by D’Dora.
It was shortly after Jesper’s departure that Lola failed to turn up to her A-level exams, and so lost her university place.
She could have pleaded illness or stress, but chose not to. She had, she said, discovered that her mother was only waiting
for her to go off to university before her lesbian lover moved in. So she would not go. She was as open about her motives
to her family, teachers, counsellors, interested journalists, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as Scarlet was in discussing with
Louis her motives for marrying him.
‘I see no reason to keep your affair with D’Dora secret,’ she told her mother, when the latter pleaded for privacy. ‘Why,
are you ashamed of being a lesbian? Surely not.’ To which of course there could be no answer. Other than: ‘Why do you suddenly
hate me?’
To which Lola, being Lola, replied, ‘Because you are hateful to me.’
A year previously D’Dora Jones, founder of the Lesbian and Gay Sorority, or LGS, a person then unknown to Cynara, had sued
her employers, Pinfold & Daughters, for unfair dismissal, alleging sexual harassment. WVB had taken on the case. P&D manufactured
mountaineering equipment. Its CEO, Allegra Pinfold, alleged incompetence and deliberate absenteeism. D’Dora became headline
news when she said she’d been fired, not for these two failings, which she freely admitted, but claimed they were the result
of Allegra’s sexual advances. Allegra Pinfold counter-claimed that she had been the seduced, not the seducer. D’Dora, thanks
to Cynara’s skilful defence, won, and was awarded half a million pounds in damages.
When the litigants left the Royal Courts of Justice after the verdict, Allegra physically attacked Cynara on the steps, shrieking
that it was a dyke-ist set-up, and that Cynara and D’Dora were in a relationship, which was not initially the case, though
during the four weeks of the court case it had become one. The attack had ended up on YouTube. The media furore had sent the
hits on Cynara’s blog off the scale, greatly increased the number of her WVB clients, firmed up Jesper’s decision to take
an offered Dubai job, and attracted journalists to Lola’s school the week she was due to take her A-levels.
‘Yes, and the dog ate her homework,’ said D’Dora, cuddling Cynara to comfort her, when she brought home the news of her daughter’s
rebellion. ‘More excuses. She spent too much time on computer games and not enough on revision; the reason she didn’t sit
her exams was because she knew she’d fail. Nothing to do with you and me.’
Lola spent a week with friends and came back with large black pupils and hollow eyes and the announcement that she had been
taking hard drugs but what did her mother care?
‘So what are you going to do with your life, Lola?’ asked Cynara, distraught. ‘What about your exams, law school, your future?’
‘You should have thought of that,’ said Lola, ‘before getting rid of my father. I’m getting out of here and you can’t stop
me. I can use my own money.’
And it seemed that she had just handed it all over – some £2,000 accumulated in dribs and drabs since birth – to a charity
called Help the Harmed, which dispatched young people to crisis points worldwide, where they could make a difference. The
charity had booked her up for a three-month stint in Haiti at a Christian camp well away from any voodoo centres, and now
she was waiting for the ticket to arrive. Cynara needn’t worry to look out for it in the post, said Lola, she had given Nopasaran
as a forwarding address. Aunt Scarlet, who might not be very bright but at least had style, not to mention contacts, and with
whom she was going to stay, was less likely to lose letters out of malice than was D’Dora.
The latter had taken matters into her own hands and moved in to the home to comfort Cynara, who, what with press persecution
and Lola’s disappearance – once she had been gone three days the police had been alerted – had been beside herself with anxiety.
‘Does Scarlet know of this plan?’ asked Cynara, thin-lipped because she thinks perhaps Scarlet has been egging Lola on. Scarlet
behaves towards Lola more like a flighty sister than a responsible aunt.
‘No she doesn’t,’ said Lola. ‘But she soon will.’
So that’s how Lola comes to be staying with Scarlet and Louis. And, given even more strength by Lola’s arrival, why the kehua
are so madly and effectively fluttering their wings.
Run, run!
they are noisily beseeching Scarlet, descendant of Beverley, child of Kitchie McLean and her murderous husband, as once they
urged little
Beverley. It seems to be working. When a child finds a mother murdered by the father it does not bode well for that child,
or for the descendants of that child through the generations, especially if the purification rituals are not properly done.
The kehua of the Maori, like the Furies of the Greek myths, will follow the straggler and his or her kin across the world
if they have to. They are family, hapu, and that’s enough for them.