Playing with the Grown-ups (6 page)
Read Playing with the Grown-ups Online
Authors: Sophie Dahl
Kitty wondered who 'we' was.
Nora was shy and formal on the phone, but she always was, so it was comforting.
'Hello, Kitty,' she said. 'How are you?'
'I'm fine, how are you?'
'I'm very well, thank you. How's school?'
'Good. How are Violet and Sam?'
'They're well, thank you. Naughty. I had to put hot sauce on Violet's tongue as she bit Sam. I don't think she'll be biting
in a hurry.'
'My minutes are up.'
'It's worse than a prison. Well, I love you.'
'I love you too. Quickly, do they have Angel Delight in New York?'
'Actually, they do,' Nora said, a smile in her voice.
The train to London took four hours, the coach to the train station thirty-five minutes. By the time she reached Hay, it was
dark and she couldn't make out anything familiar in the black.
Bestepapa stood at the train station, smoking his pipe.
He wore a grey raincoat and green wellingtons.
'There's my girl,' he said. 'I thought we'd walk so you could get a feel for home. You don't get that in the car. Sweet?'
He handed Kitty a lemon barley, and took her small case from her, the one with her initials on it.
The smell was the thing that made it all feel real, a smoky woodsy smell, and Bestepapa next to her, with his smell of tobacco
and India lime. They trudged up the lane, treacherous with frost, the only light a flickering ember from the bowl of Bestepapa's
pipe. They spoke in hushed voices, as though they might disturb sleeping giants in the woods.
'It smells of home now,' Kitty said.
'What are you reading?'
'The
Great Gaaby.
I imagine that Daisy looks like Mummy.'
'Ha! No red dot though.' He laughed.
'Bestepapa, why do you think there has to be change?'
'I used to think there had to be but now I'm not sure. I think change is unnecessary. The old ways are the best ways.'
'Well, I liked it before, just so you know. I like the old ways too,' Kitty said.
'I think, my Kitty, that you and I were born in the wrong time then.'
The table was covered in candles, and it looked long without everyone at it. Bestepapa sat at the head, carving the lamb.
'Thought we'd go to the farm in the morning, get some eggs. Would you like that?'
'She probably wants to go to town, and buy records from Our Price.' Besternama handed Kitty the spinach.
'No, I don't need to go to town,' she said.
'After supper,' Bestepapa said in a jovial voice that didn't sound like his real one, 'we'll have to take Ibsen up to the
woods for his walk. He didn't have a long enough one today, so he's itching to go.'
Ibsen lay prostrate on the floor, sleeping.
Kitty wanted to stay awake, savouring every minute of being at Hay, lying in Ingrid's bed, surrounded by Ingrid's things,
a poster of Adam Ant grinning down at her. This is what it feels like to go to sleep being Ingrid, she thought. An old copy
of Madame Bovay was on her bedside table. Kitty rubbed the cocoa butter from the Body Shop on her elbows and knees like Ingrid
did, and fell asleep.
It was raining, and the sky was moody. Kitty revelled in waking up on her own, of her own volition. She went downstairs in
her nightdress. Bestemama was making lunch. She kissed her.
'You must have been tired, darling,' she said. 'I've never known you sleep so late. I thought you must need it, so I decided
not to bother you.'
'What time is it?' Kitty felt a trickle of panic.
'It's twelve. We'll have lunch in half an hour, quick walk, and Bestepapa says he'll drive you back, so you don't have to
do that miserable train journey again.'
'I've missed the morning!' Kitty said. 'Why didn't you wake me up? I've missed the morning, and the same one will never happen
again.'
'That's all right; there'll be many mornings for you. Your body wanted to sleep.'
'It wanted the morning! It wanted to do normal things. Now I don't have time, now I'll be rushed. I've ruined the whole weekend!
Now it's not the same. I had a list of everything I wanted to do, and now I can't do any of it!' Kitty started to cry.
'Darling, we'll do everything on your list in double the time, that's all. Please don't cry. Everything here will still be
here the next time you come. Take a deep breath. Would you like a nice cup of tea? nice cup of tea?
* * *
She was in a cave, and it was empty. The whole world had ended and she was the only person left. She could hear the voices
of Sam and Violet calling her urgently, but she could not find them. There was another voice too, one she did not recognise,
smooth and male.
'Kitty! Kitty! Where are you? We can't find you. We're with someone who wants to meet you!'
They were ducking and weaving in the silence, like ghost children.
The male voice called through the rocks, 'Kitty, I can only stay for a bit. I have to go, I have an appointment. I want to
see your face before I go.'
'I'm here!' she called back. 'Mr Fitzgerald, I'm here! Please don't go!'
She ran among the rocks pounding at them with her fists and arms, but they were immobile. The male voice left, and Sam and
Violet's voices died with his, whispers that turned into thick black nothingness.
When she woke up, her arms looked like she had torn through a bramble patch.
'Vampire get you in the night?' said Evie, and she laughed.
'No, it was my master communicating with me.' Kitty glowered at her darkly.
'You are such a spas, Kitty,' Evie said.
On the phone her mother said she thought it would be fun to fly to California for the Christmas holidays.
'The sun always shines there,' she said. 'Can you imagine a place where it never rains?'
Palm trees swayed, and neon Father Christmases skied with snowmen on lush green lawns, untouched by frost. It was warm enough
to swim, even though her mother didn't.
On Christmas Day, Kitty played mermaids in the pool with Sam and Violet, in a new Adrienne Vittadini swimsuit she had bought
from the gift shop in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was white, and in it her bosoms pointed high and men looked
at her, which Kitty sort of liked.
Her mother said that Christmas in California was out of the ordinary, and that's why she chose it. They watched movies on
the movie channel, and ate enormous strawberries and grapes that were so cold they made Kitty's mouth ache.
It was the opposite of Christmas at Hay. Kitty ate shrimps for lunch with lots of happy strangers.
'I like it traditional,' Nora said. 'What is Christmas without a turkey?'
Marina told Nora she was a creature of habit. They opened their stockings in her room which was pale pink with a huge marble
fireplace that roared so they could make believe it was cold outside.
Her mother seemed to have friends wherever she went: tanned women with gold jewellery and houses that had belonged to Rudolph
Valentino or Gloria Swanson. Kitty stole up to their bathrooms and tried on dusky scents with names like Giorgio and Poison.
Nora took them to Disneyland, and Kitty wanted to go on the Peter Pan ride again and again. She convinced Sam that it was
his favourite ride, so they could keep going back. Flying up, out of the Darlings' window over London, swooping down on the
island of Never Never Land, which was sunny with a soundtrack.
California orange juice was the best orange juice she'd ever tasted. Kitty thought maybe America was a decent place after
all. At night the dry Santa Ana wind blew hotly over her as she slept, carrying away with it any thought of what they were
doing at Hay on the first Christmas they were not a complete family.
Dear Kitty,
Your mother tells me that you are progressing well with your studies and that is good. I have just returned from Paris, which
was unseasonably warm. If you need supplies ETC, please do not hesitate to call my secretary, Anna. She will assist you.
You seem to be proficient at sport; keep up with the netball. Sports are good for keeping the mind straight.
With all my best,
R. Fitzgerald.
' "Proficient at sport", that's a good one,' Rosaria said.
Mr Fitzgerald wrote her short informative letters every week, in neat, measured writing. Anna, the secretary, wrote cheery
postscripts on his letters that made Kitty laugh. She noticed he never mentioned meeting her. When she wrote back she tried
to impress him with her words, to create a technicolour version of herself that leapt off the page to meet him, but her letters
felt pallid and bland like school rice pudding, and after writing them she felt like an imposter.
Kitty owned one photograph of Mr Fitzgerald in which he looked happy, rich and slightly baffled, with a beard. The beard was
distracting because she couldn't find her face underneath it. She studied the picture obsessively looking for a clue. There
was the merest suggestion of a dimple on his left cheek, and that was it as far as she could see. Rosaria told her she had
his smile, but as it was obscured by the beard in the photograph, Kitty told her to shut up if she didn't have anything constructive
to say.
Mr Fitzgerald lived with Mrs Fitzgerald in a huge white house in Eaton Square. Kitty knew this because she copied its address
down from his letters, and one Saturday half-term afternoon on their way to Miss Selfridge she and Rosaria peered through
its windows.
'Looks cold and miserable,' Rosaria said.
'Poor him. Shall we send him an anonymous dressing gown? Or break in, like in The Little Princess . . . His life should be
less bare than this. Do you think she's foul to him?' Kitty sought out signs of a colourful internal life, a record, a bunch
of flowers, an ashtray, but she saw nothing that revealed him, just the plush antiseptic of a show home.
'Pussy-whipped, most likely. Let's go.' Rosaria spun round on her small heel.
Her mother was fearful of the cold. She loved squashy overstuffed sofas and paintings, and the rooms to be filled to bursting
with flowers, molten with fires roaring. She said she liked comfort. She understood better than anyone that school was cold,
and she sent Kitty beautiful thermal pyjamas from New York, and a cashmere-covered hot water bottle with her initials on it.
Mr Fitzgerald never minded that men were after her mother, she said it herself. The part she didn't say out loud was that
it was because he understood that she was beautiful and impetuous and men would always love her. Kitty didn't mind either
because it meant she got bountiful presents from people she'd never met, who were just trying to get into her mother's good
graces. One Christmas, she got £500-worth of vouchers from HMV. Inexplicably, the one after, lingerie from Janet Reger, which
her mother deemed inappropriate and hid until Kitty was 'old enough'.
June proved triumphant, the Federal Express man was kind. Kitty received the ultimate benediction: a letter, Smyth son writing
paper covered in her mother's childish curly hand. With that same familiar hand her mother released her from purdah. Marina
explained that Swami-ji had appeared to her in a vision and informed her that all of her children should be in the same country,
and she had written him a letter to check it wasn't a spiritual crossed wire, and he had written back confirming that yes,
it was a good thing, he had meditated upon it. Kitty should come to New York.
Swami-ji was temporarily Kitty's hero, and during prep she ran up to the empty dormitory and cradled his photograph, whispering,
'Thank you, thank you.' She took to sleeping with it under her pillow, like a charm.
Maybe her letters had made her mother miss her. Maybe her mother had noticed how brightly Kitty's shoes and hair shone when
she saw her at half term. Evie had laughed when, on the rare Friday nights her mother was in England, Kitty wore face masks
and rag curlers to bed like a spinster aunt with no one to take her out on a Saturday.
'Are you getting ready for your boyfriend?' she hooted as Kitty lay carefully on her pillow, head upright.
'No, my mother,' she wanted to say. But who could understand why she wanted to have curly hair and flawless skin for her own
mother? Why she cared what knickers she wore to go home in and how she begged Imogen Holliday to lend her a pale-pink bra
made by Sloggi? She knew it was strange, but she thought maybe a bit of Imogen Holliday would rub off on her, permeate through
her white skin, all the way down to her bones, until they were shiny and new like a Christmas ten-pound note.
She smiled at everyone. Nothing could touch her. At suppertime when Veronica poured salt in her tea she didn't care.
'Why are you looking so pleased, you little whore? Did you get ten per cent in your maths instead of five?'
'I'm moving to New York. I'm going to live with my mother,' she answered dreamily.
'No you are not. You're a liar.' Veronica's face became an angry ham, red and pulsing with arterial veins.
'She is, actually,' said Rosaria, pouring sugar on her white bread and butter.
Veronica paused.
'I don't believe you. Everyone knows your mother doesn't want you. Why should she suddenly want you now? If she wanted you
why did she take your brother and sister to New York and not you? I heard Ma'am Rachel say two illegits are enough to travel
round the world with like suitcases. She says you'll be here for the duration, because you're difficult and your mother can't
cope with you.'
Ma'am Rachel was their matron. She was a real bitch.
'My mother didn't want to disrupt my education,' Kitty said, parroting what she knew. 'And Sam and Violet are not illegitimate.'
'Perfectly sensible,' said Rosaria in a grown-up way. 'If I was your mother, Veronica, I would have sent you away at birth.
To live with a Hottentot tribe. Perhaps they would have liked you. But probably not. They certainly would have wanted to eat
you, you're so juicy and fat.' She took a measured bite of her bread and sugared butter.
Veronica was rendered speechless, and purple-faced she lurched off to torture the African toads in the science block.