Authors: Aita Ighodaro
Natalya was the eldest of her six children. Six years ago she’d been spotted by a scout from London’s Moda Nova Models while the family were in St Petersburg, on a rare trip across
the border. Ever since, Daina had spent many hours anguishing that she had been wrong to let Natalya go and live abroad at just fifteen years of age. The world of modelling seemed a weird world
indeed. Such strange people and strange practices and strange preoccupations. Would they take advantage of her child? Would she earn enough to survive? London sounded unbelievably expensive. She
hoped Natalya had finally found somewhere, in amongst all the Japanese fish and French cuisine she wrote home about, to buy good, simple Latvian rye bread. She didn’t seem to eat much bread
at all nowadays, no wonder she was still so thin! Oh how she missed making Natalya’s favourite
pîrâgi
with her, like they’d used to as a special treat when
they’d saved enough for meat. She closed her eyes and pictured them sitting together and watching the soft buns rising around the crispy bacon, filling the place with warmth and delicious
smells. She could almost taste the buns now. Their family was poor and she had had to juggle three jobs to feed her brood, but at least they’d had each other, and that must surely count for
something.
Shuddering, she let her mind flick briefly back to when she herself had been just fifteen. A sheltered fifteen-year-old who, until that horrific year, had known nothing of the deviousness of the
male psyche. Over the years, Daina had learnt not to think about what
he
had done to her. She had learnt not to let her thoughts revisit that painful period because she needed to be strong.
For her children. Especially Natalya. She needed to forget, or at least not think about her hatred any more, because she did not want to hate the father of her firstborn. She owed it to
Natalya.
And she owed it to Natalya to protect her. Yet she had let her go. Just like that. Look what good her own ‘protected’ upbringing had done anyway! But Daina
had
tried to
protect her baby daughter, all those years ago. If Natalya could have known the whole truth about the Englishman. About Stan. Well, this was the life that God intended for her. There must be a
reason for her suffering and, in Natalya, Daina knew that the purpose of all her pain was being realized.
As Daina always knew she would, Natalya had become a huge success in London and made a good living for herself. She must now be very wealthy indeed, Daina mused once more. After all, she had
been working non-stop since the very beginning, and now, at the age of twenty-one, she had a luxurious apartment in one of London’s best neighbourhoods. For three years she had been sending
her mother money and prints from fashion shoots. Although it saddened Daina that her daughter was seldom able to return home and visit her, she had been putting the extra money to good use and all
five remaining children could now be clothed, fed and sent to decent local schools.
The children’s education was the most important thing for Daina, as it had been for Janis, her late husband and the father of her five youngest offspring. Despite their poverty, the
children had led culturally rich lives from the moment they were born, and that very trip to St Petersburg, during which Natalya had been scouted, had been the result of years of saving. Seeing the
Philharmonic Orchestra perform there at the splendid Mussorgsky Opera House had been a more magical experience for them than any fairy tale. All six children were bright, and for Daina the choice
between spending Natalya’s contributions on more pleasant surroundings and living conditions or educating the children as richly as she could was an easy one to make. But, looking at yet
another captivating set of pictures of her little light
,
perhaps she would soon be able to move to a flat closer to central Riga, one with another room, so that they would not all need to
share.
What Daina did not know was that, despite being represented by one of London’s top agencies, Natalya was yet to make any real money. Natalya had indeed been enjoying a comfortable
lifestyle, but the price of this was greater than her beloved mother needed to know.
****
The Hon. Tara Wittstanley had more in common with girls like Natalya than she cared to acknowledge. Both girls had what could be described as regal looks, and though in
Tara’s case her fine patrician features clearly did reflect a noble ancestry, her family’s current situation was far from financially secure. No longer able to compete in this era of
industrial tycoons, global speculators and City high-rollers, Tara’s family were on a downwardly mobile track to refined poverty. Tara wished desperately to reverse this trend and, like
Natalya, she wanted more than she had.
The family did at least still own Willowborough Hall, a Regency pile in Gloucestershire with six hundred acres of land. Like generations of Wittstanleys before her, Tara had grown up there.
Unlike most of her ancestors, though, Tara didn’t have a trust fund to see her through adulthood. An artistic and whimsical family, the Wittstanleys had not made the most of their
considerable acres and over the years had squandered substantial wealth through ill-fated investments and unwise marriages. By the time Tara’s father, Hugo, had been born, all that was left
was the family home and the right to the title Lord Bridges, of Bridges in Gloucestershire.
When the time came for Hugo and his two younger brothers to make their final career choices – a day job outside the running of the estate now being, irritatingly for them, a necessity
– his brothers swallowed their pride and jumped head first into the world of commerce and City banking. Hugo, however, stubbornly decided to pursue his artistic leanings and attempt to make a
living by dealing antiques and doing equestrian paintings for friends. He travelled the world in search of sights and horses to paint, visiting some of the former colonies in Africa and Asia and,
with some help from high-powered friends in the government, even venturing into hostile territories such as the closed USSR. Life had been exciting but not lucrative, and he had failed to make good
money from his art and antiques.
Tara often found herself musing over how her family had evolved over the years. If only they hadn’t been such suckers for aesthetics. Maybe then her father would have made a more sensible
career choice. Perhaps there would have been some sensible marriages. A strategic coupling with a rich heiress would have restored the wealth her grandfather had gambled away. Instead, both her
grandfather and her father had married ambitious young beauties with no wealth or name to speak of.
Her own dear mother, Tina, was in fact often a source of embarrassment to Tara. Twenty years younger than Hugo, Tina had met and seduced him on a flight to India on which she’d been
working as an air-hostess.
In those days hostesses were employed above all for their alluring looks. For Tina, who was eighteen at the time and had never left Liverpool, the job was a dream come true. She enjoyed the
travelling and loved meeting the smartly dressed, upscale passengers even more. She was awed by the women in their elegant twin-sets, with their well-behaved children who didn’t trouble her.
And the men were all so dapper, never without blazers. She liked to study the passenger list before they arrived and was excited to see that there was a lord on her first ever flight to India.
‘Can I offer you a drink, my Lord?’ she asked him when he embarked looking bored, tired and unremarkable. She wondered whether she ought to curtsey. She poured him a Martini at his seat
and then turned to offer a drink to the gentleman on the other side of the aisle. She leaned over so that her round little bottom pushed against the taut material of her navy-blue pencil skirt.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw his lordship lean forward as if to get up.
‘Oh, toilets at the rear,’ giggled Tina.
‘The only rear I’m interested in is this one,’ his lordship murmured, letting his signet-ringed hand slide across her buttock as he glided ever so slowly past her.
‘Splendid little filly aren’t you,’ he whispered in her ear. His breath was hot on the side of her face, the faint aroma of alcohol filling her nose with its intoxicating promise
of champagne, ponies and high tea with the Queen. Men were expected to be chauvinists and molesters in those days, but women were certainly not allowed to show it when they enjoyed it.
‘Oh, my Lord!’ she tittered, feigning shocked offence.
But she still took her time demonstrating the safety procedures in front of him, lingering over the one about the overhead luggage compartments as she knew that with her arms up above her head
her breasts were at their most uplifted and must look fantastic straining against her tight shirt.
She was sad when the flight landed in Bombay. ‘Can I do anything else for you my Lord, you know, to ease your trip?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Come with me.’ So she followed him to his hotel in India and cleverly remained chaste during their stay, although she relented a little when he asked
her to put her uniform back on and point out the emergency exits for him while he pleasured himself. Then, at the moment of climax he liked her to assume the brace position.
Afterwards they returned to Willowborough Hall, where he painted her on horseback. That painting remains, to this day, Lord Bridges’ most well-received piece. Critics hail the
extraordinary look on the rider’s face as an artistic coup: she appears unsure yet deliriously happy, beautiful but wretched; with an impenetrable smile like that of the Mona Lisa.
With her family’s approval Hugo asked for Tina’s hand in marriage. Despite their backgrounds being worlds apart, Tina was so impressed by his title, confidence and family home that
she ignored his paunch, his condescension and his drinking habits and jumped at the chance. Likewise he, hopelessly excited by her young and nubile body and her naive devotion to him, did his best
to forget that she’d had a strong Liverpudlian accent when they met, had not been educated at a ‘decent’ school, and could not tell the difference between a Mondrian and a
Modigliani. In this way the couple had limped along for twenty-three years. But for some time now, the cracks had been beginning to show.
Luckily, given the Wittstanleys’ financial situation, Tara had managed to secure scholarships to her expensive boarding schools, where she excelled effortlessly. Her haughty looks and her
witty, if also bitchy, tongue ensured that the other girls admired her; a few also feared her. In her adolescence she grew prone to extremes of feeling and behaviour. Or, as her detractors put it,
she could be a complete drama queen. By the age of twenty-two she had already checked herself in and out of different rehabilitation centres and a psychiatric hospital for a range of modern
conditions from exhaustion to body dysmorphic disorder. At heart, though, she was a kind person whose prickliness masked a deep-rooted feeling of unlovableness and inadequacy, brought about by her
overbearing yet needy, neglectful and self-absorbed parents. To the few people Tara deemed interesting and glamorous enough, she was a loyal friend. One of those was her dear friend Abena, whom
she’d met at Oxford.
Initially Tara had had no interest in getting to know other girls and concentrated on stalking the Bullingdon boys in search of a privileged sponsor for her rampant partying. The Bullingdon was
the university’s most exclusive gentlemen’s drinking society, whose members rollicked around Oxfordshire starting food fights and smashing up smart establishments so that they would
have something to spend their inheritances on when the repair bill arrived. It seemed this was excellent training for going on to run the country. But, having slept her way through almost the
entire society, Tara came to the sorry conclusion that the Bullingdon boys were pitifully overrated in virtually every way imaginable. Disillusioned with anything the students had to offer, she
turned to the celebrity speakers who regularly descend on Oxford to address the Union, the university’s historic debating society.
One evening, determined to leave with the handsome deputy prime minister of a small Balkan state, Tara had dressed up in her best ‘political wife’ outfit of a plain and decent-length
fitted black dress, a cashmere cardigan and a string of fake pearls. Sitting primly in the front row of the Union’s grand main hall, she gazed up at her target just as Abena’s dark,
feline eyes bore down on the speaker from the balcony above. At the end of the discourse, the room emptied until the only participants left were Abena, Tara, the dashing speaker himself, and Giles,
the gangling Oxford Union president who slept with a postcard of William Hague under his pillow to inspire him to greater heights. Tara could see it was going to be tough to shake off the other
two. Giles grandly led the way into the Union bar and the speaker turned to insist that she and Abena join them to further discuss the ‘exciting’ political issues he’d been
talking about. Abena, with her sexily slanting eyes, unnaturally long, wavy black hair, perfectly smooth dark skin and full seductive mouth was starting to irritate Tara. As was her toned and tiny
five-foot-three frame, which, from the look on the speaker and the Union president’s faces, rendered her irresistibly cutesy and adorable to boys – something that Tara, in all her
elegant cool, had never managed.
Abena winked at Tara and ordered a magnum of Moët from the bar. She then made a point of continuously filling the glass of the Union president, who didn’t notice how fast he was
drinking, being so engrossed in his own rants about cash for peerages in the Labour party, and ‘sexing-up’ various political dossiers that were not sexy and never would be. Because
drinking was fairly new to him, his stringy body was unable to take the quantities Abena smilingly pressed upon him and he was soon face down on the bar muttering something incoherent about poll
tax.
With Giles out of the picture, it was a stand-off between the two girls. Tara peeled off her demure cardigan to expose the exceptionally low front of her dress, while Abena leaned forward and,
pressing the deputy prime minister’s leg, gently asked how it felt to be one of the most powerful men in the world. The politician, growing increasingly excitable with the abundance of
champagne and gorgeous young flesh beside him, seemed at a genuine loss as to whether he was more turned on by the Western threat, baring its breast in front of him, or by the dark and mysterious
excitement of Africa to his left.