A Surrey State of Affairs (33 page)

I have snapped. I have booked a remote cottage in Norfolk for the week, and I will be driving Sophie there shortly under the pretext that we are going to the orthodontist to get her teeth whitened, as M recommended. There will be no Internet, no phone, no “journos,” no newspapers, no connection to the outer world.

Allow me to explain what has driven me to this point. Against my better judgment—and Rupert’s warnings—I allowed the
Hot
magazine team into the house this morning. Sophie had threatened a hunger strike if I did not, and Jeffrey said, “Let her do what she wants, it’ll all blow over,” before leaving for work, imperiously ignoring the assembled journalists on his way out.

And so I let in a stylist, a makeup artist, an interviewer, and a photographer, who all, except the latter, looked about fifteen, while Sophie received last-minute instructions from M Clo on her mobile. The interview took place in the kitchen, from which I was debarred. Nevertheless, by putting a glass to the door, I was
able to catch snatches of Sophie rattling on, a newly confident inflection in her voice, about how much she admired the physics teacher because he worked with children, which reminded her of her gap year at the orphanage in Mexico, which was so, you know, tragic, yet rewarding, and so on and so forth. When she was questioned on the infamous argument, she went quiet and then said, “I’ve always had a problem with my temper. It’s something I’m going to get therapy for. I think it’s because sometimes, when I was little, my mum used to lock me in the laundry room if I misbehaved and I’ve not yet, you know, resolved my anger issues.” There was a pause, then a sniff.

I dropped my glass in disgust. How could she? This must be M Clo’s doing. I only ever used the laundry room as a last recourse, like for the time she put dead beetles in her grandmother’s shampoo. Still, aware that by bursting in I would only confirm the impression that I was some kind of unmaternal ogre, I kept quiet. Soon enough, the interview concluded, and Sophie was “styled” for her photo shoot. This took place in the garden, and it was the most horrifying sight I have witnessed there since Darcy’s escape. Sophie posed in front of my hydrangea wrapped in a Mexican flag of sadly inadequate proportions. Randolph, who was turning over the flower beds nearby, wolf-whistled. Next she was dressed up like some kind of Mardi Gras dancer, with a towering feather headdress and a minuscule sequined costume. I could hardly bear to watch.

Once the ghastly charade was finally over and the
Hot
impostors had left, I shut the door, fastened the chain, and turned to Sophie (whose face was smeared with bronzing powder to the point that she had started to resemble a chimney sweep). “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?” I asked, arms crossed.

Her mobile rang.

“Yeah? Yeah…yeah…yep…yeah…yeah…bye.”

“That was M Clo,” she said, beaming. “He wants me to write a children’s book and I’m going to launch my own perfume, called Tongue Tied. Get it?”

You will not hear from me for some days.

  
SATURDAY, JULY 26

I am back. The scratches on my left arm are healing. As soon as Sophie realized that we were not, in fact, going to the orthodontist, or anywhere else acceptable to her, she lashed out like a feral cat. Luckily I had put the child’s lock on the doors and hidden her mobile.

When we eventually got there, the cottage was perfect, just what I had hoped for: small, faintly moldy, no mobile reception, no main roads, nothing. Sophie said she wanted to die. However, her hunger strike lasted only a day and a half before she succumbed to a plate of sausages and mash, made from ingredients bought at the local farm. She stared down fixedly at her plate as she ate; I like to think she was dwelling on the superiority of fresh wholesome food versus her preferred diet of orange-flavored Kit Kats. By the end of the week she was going for long walks on the beach, picking up shells, drawing in the sand with sticks, and sometimes forgetting that she wasn’t speaking to me.

Now that we are home, however, the histrionics have begun again. M isn’t returning her calls. She got hold of last week’s
Hot
magazine, and the first paragraph began:

“After being broadcast to the nation hurling racial abuse at her cell mate, you would have thought that SoHa would be feeling a touch ashamed of herself. Not a bit of it. We caught up with her at her parents’ luxury five-bedroom mansion in Surrey, where the
tiny blonde was happy to talk about the REAL reasons for her feud with Renita, her harrowing time at an orphanage in Mexico, her old-fashioned upbringing, and what REALLY went on behind the cameras with Phil.”

I didn’t want to read any further. If they could turn my perfectly normal house into a “mansion,” Lord only knows what they did to Sophie’s stories.

6 P.M.

I heard crying coming from Sophie’s room. I knocked gently, and went in. She was curled up on the bed, back against the wall, wearing her purple minidress, with another issue of
Hot
magazine and her mobile by her side. I moved them gingerly aside and sat down. I put my arm around her. She leaned her head on my shoulder. “Tell me what’s the matter,” I said quietly. She gulped and sniffed onto my cappuccino-colored cardigan. No matter.

“It’s M Clo,” she said, and sniffed again. “He finally answered.” Another sniff, and a stifled sob.

“He called me Sophie, not SoHa. That’s when I knew something was wrong. Then he told me I was last week’s news. And I am! Look at this!”

And she held up her new copy of
Hot
in a limp hand as she turned her face away and buried it in my cardigan. I looked. On the cover was a picture of Renita, who wore a tiny black bikini and a huge pout, with the headline M
Y ORPHANAGE HELL!
“‘Only Phil could take my mind off my tragic past,’ says
Dungeon
’s new star.”

As she sobbed, I stroked her hair, and told her that she was my wonderful daughter, that she could be anything she wanted to be in the world, that she was a million times more precious than this
tacky world of five-minute fame and fickle headlines and silly abbreviations.

“Whatever, MoHa,” she said, and sniffed.

  
SUNDAY, JULY 27

When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions. No sooner have I patched up my distraught, misguided daughter than Jeffrey drops another bombshell on me. Over breakfast this morning, he cracked the head off his boiled egg with one bold, surgical swipe of the teaspoon, uttered a self-congratulatory “Ha!” then calmly told me that Ivan the Terrible would be coming to stay. Today. For an indefinite period. He has split up with Ivanka. He is, apparently, devastated; I imagine in the same way that a hawk feels sad after losing its grip on a water vole midair. It is just as well that Natalia is off for a couple of days visiting a cousin in London. Heaven only knows how she will take the news. I called Rupert to tell him just how thoughtless his father was, but he sounded distracted and asked me who I was talking about when I was halfway through. He has been a bit off for the past few weeks; I might pop a few back issues of
Crossword Weekly
in the mail for him to improve his powers of concentration.

  
MONDAY, JULY 28

Ivan is here, smoking in the conservatory; his odious presence pervades the house more thoroughly than the foul stench of his Russian cigars. And it is all my fault. To my dismay, I learned last night that I had a role to play in his unwanted presence in my house. It made me want to sit down with Reginald and discuss the concept of Divine Retribution.

Ivan arrived around seven o’clock, roaring up the drive in his
show-off Alfa Romeo sports car and only just missing my terra-cotta pots of geraniums. I had prepared a casserole for dinner. Jeffrey poured the wine. Ivan poured the wine directly down his gullet, stared at me through his hooded eyes, and began telling the tale of how he has come to be divorced from his fourth wife, Ivanka.

I did not think it a suitable conversation in the company of Sophie, who is still in a fragile emotional state, but he persisted despite my attempts at changing the subject to the disgraceful and neglected state of this country’s bell towers. It transpires that, although Ivan and Ivanka presented a smiling, united front when our paths crossed on holiday in the Bahamas, in reality a rift had already opened up between them.

Ivan suspected her of caring more about beauty parlors and designer dress shops than attending to his needs, leaving a horrible silence as to the question of what precisely those needs might be. Ivanka, meanwhile, suspected that he had sent her to a second-rate surgeon for her boob job, which had started to go askew.

With a small catch in his cigarette-ravaged voice, he explained that the final straw came when her failure to ensure that he was properly coated in sunscreen led to a severe bout of sunstroke. He said he still bore the scars from the blisters. He took another gulp of wine. Sophie’s blue eyes were darkened with tears.

God may just as well have peeled back our roof tiles and smited me with a thunderbolt.

  
TUESDAY, JULY 29

Natalia got back last night, and she couldn’t have returned at a worse moment. She must have heard our voices, because she wandered into the dining room to say hello, with her duffel bag still in her hand, just as Ivan was banging his fist on the table
and telling Jeffrey that Russia had every right to bomb Georgia to smithereens.

Natalia dropped her bag and called Ivan a Russian pig. I had no idea that her vocabulary extended to porcine insults. It appears that, along with politics and religion, the borders of South Ossetia should not be discussed at the dinner table. Ivan looked part bemused, part amused, while Jeffrey just looked like he wanted to slip between the cracks in the floorboards and disappear.

Natalia put her hands on her hips. “I cannot live with this Russian prison-keeper of nations,” she said, decidedly. She turned to Jeffrey. “You must choose. He go, or I go.”

I don’t know why she asked Jeffrey when I normally handle all matters relating to her employment; it must have been her sense of deference to the man of the house. In any case, there she stood, defiant, her head held high, her streaky chestnut ponytail tickling her bare shoulders. Jeffrey’s eyes swiveled from her to Ivan and back again. Ivan raised one eyebrow, looked at Jeffrey, and said sardonically, “Vell, my friend?”