Prudence (20 page)

‘The producer has said don’t bother to dress up.’

Would her French jeans and Hermes belt be too casual? What time did Ace think they ought to start? Would the roads be bad? I saw Ace stifle a yawn. He looked absolutely knackered. Too much of Berenice’s superior muscle tone, I thought sourly. Having been so crochety with him last night, I found it very difficult to act normally now. We were acidly polite to each other. I still couldn’t look him straight in the eye.

The telephone rang. Maggie shot out of the room to answer it. Normally Jack wouldn’t be home at this time of day. I wondered idly if it was Pendle ringing.

Berenice turned to Ace. ‘Shall I make an egg plant lasagne for this evening, sweetest? We could heat it up when we get back.’

Ace said that he’d much rather eat out.

Maggie poked her head round the door. ‘It’s for you, Ace,’ she said. ‘It’s Penelope Blake.’

‘You look a bit uptight, sweetest,’ said Berenice, when Ace came back five minutes later. ‘Shall I massage your neck?’

‘I am
not
uptight,’ snapped Ace. ‘That was Elizabeth’s mother confirming lunch tomorrow. I’m sorry,’ he added to Jack, ‘it was arranged before I knew about Lucasta’s party. I can’t really stand them up.’

‘Course you can’t,’ said Jack, throwing a pile of envelopes into the wastepaper basket.

‘You’ll miss my party,’ wailed Lucasta.

Ace pulled her on to his knee. ‘No I won’t lovie. It’s only forty miles away. I should get back by five if the snow doesn’t get any worse.’

‘I’m so much looking forward to meeting Elizabeth’s folks tomorrow,’ said Berenice. ‘I’m sure we can be very supportive.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve got to go on my own,’ said Ace bluntly. ‘I haven’t seen them since the funeral. It wouldn’t be very tactful to barge in with someone else.’

Berenice shook back her dark hair angrily. Suddenly there was a muscle going in her cheek.

‘And what am I supposed to do while you’re away?’

‘You can help Pru organize the party.’

Lunch with Jack was a blissful relief. We both drank too much and I told Jack about Berenice’s plans for revamping the drawing-room.

‘She’ll have my mother jogging in a track suit and Mrs Braddock in an old people’s home by Christmas. We’ll all be out at the rate she’s going.’

‘She believes in clearing the decks,’ I said gloomily, ‘and she isn’t too choosy who she sweeps into the sea.’

‘She’s certainly put the kibosh on Ace. He could hardly walk this morning. Never actually came near the mill at all. Just sloped off to see an osteopath about his bad back.’

I giggled. Jack always had the ability to make things seem less awful.

‘I expect you’ll be round at the osteopath tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Berenice has been giving Maggie a few tips on sexual technique.’

Jack took my hand, ‘When you said “I love you” in that tonic bottle last night, did you mean it?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘brother-sister.’

‘We’ll always be friends, won’t we? Christ, how maudlin can one get? What the hell am I going to do about Maggie?’

‘You could boost her morale a bit more,’ I said.

Afterwards, expansive from drink, we went shopping, buying party food and three cases of Entre Deux Mers — to cheer up the mothers, said Jack. Then we spent a fortune at the toyshop, buying loads of little presents for the party and a red and silver sleigh and a three-foot fluffy white rabbit as main presents for Lucasta. I bought her a black velvet cat suit I thought she might like to wear to the party.

‘It’s so much easier shopping with you than Maggie,’ sighed Jack. ‘She always gets green eyes when I spend money on Lucasta.’

When we got back, Ace and Berenice had gone. I found Maggie eating chocolate cake in the kitchen.

‘What are you doing in here?’ I said.

‘It’s the warmest room. The central heating’s given up the ghost. Berenice and I have been having a terrifically productive dialogue. Jack and I have got to work through our conflicts and stop laying bad trips on each other, and re-structure our marriage.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Jack, coming in with a tumbler half full of whisky and heading for the fridge. ‘You can start off by putting a couple of my shirts in the washing machine.’

‘That’s broken too,’ said Maggie. ‘It went bananas this afternoon. It was like Lake Windermere in here an hour ago.’

‘Well you can wash a shirt by hand,’ said Jack. ‘Tomorrow is my daughter’s birthday. I have important customers coming over. I need a clean shirt. Christ, isn’t anyone ever going to de-frost this fridge?’

‘I am
not
going to wash your shirt, Jack,’ said Maggie, her voice rising, ‘just because I am a female person. You are a microcosm of the whole male power base. Don’t you know the whole macho number is sick?’

‘Oh boy,’ said Jack, ‘that is profound. I think you’ve been talking to Berenice. I can’t even get the ice tray out, but I would have thought you and Ms de Courcy would have provided enough hot air to melt it.’

‘Can’t we even have a meaningful dialogue? You’ve been on a macho trip all your life, Jack.’

‘Oh, shut up.’

‘I’m entitled to my own opinions.’

‘Of course you are. I don’t want to hear them, that’s all.’

‘Oh, I hate you,’ sobbed Maggie, rushing out of the room and slamming the door behind her.

‘At least that might loosen the ice tray,’ said Jack.

Later we watched Berenice on television. She was wearing a man’s grey flannel suit, a white shirt and the inevitable Hermes belt.

‘She’s certainly easy on the eye,’ I said.

‘And absolute hell on the ears,’ said Jack.

I was safely in bed by the time they came home — but this time Ace didn’t bother to come and say good night.

The good thing about Lucasta’s birthday party was that I was so busy I didn’t have much time to brood. After a lousy night, I got up early. It was bitterly cold, the central heating was still kaput, and there were frost patterns like doilies all over the windows. I put on a thick grey sweater over two other sweaters, rust shorts, tights, leg warmers, and boots, and I was still cold. I went down to the kitchen to help Mrs Braddock make sausage rolls and fillings for the sandwiches. She was still muttering about Berenice. I was mindlessly mixing salad cream with hard-boiled eggs when Jack came in on his way to the office.

‘Knock, knock,’ he said.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Ivan.’

‘Ivan who?’

‘Ivan ’orrible ’eadache. I haven’t actually, it’s Maggie. She’s complaining of a migraine; may be diplomatic because of Lucasta’s party — but she looks pretty rough, probably suffering from an overdose of Berenice yesterday. I’m sorry to dump all this on you. There’s still the bridge rolls, the cake, some meringues and eclairs to be collected from the village, and the conjuror’ll be here by 4.45.’

He picked up his briefcase. ‘I’ll come home soon as I’m shot of these Americans. Will you be all right?’

‘I’d rather cope with thirty children than Berenice,’ I said.

‘Send them all out for a run in the snow,’ said Jack. ‘And offer £500 as a prize to the one who comes home last.’

A blackbird suddenly tapped its yellow beak on the frosted window, peering in at us with inquisitive bright eyes.

‘I’d stay outside if I were you,’ I said. ‘It’s much warmer out there.’

Ace came down looking even more heavy-eyed than yesterday, presumably from another night of passion.

‘How’s your bad back?’ I said sweetly.

He shot me a dirty look and went off and vented his rage on the gas board. ‘There are women and children freezing to death over here,’ I could hear him saying. ‘For Christ sake, can’t you put chains on your vans? I want someone over here immediately.’

Lucasta was delighted with her presents. Ace had given her Snoopy in a Snoopy kennel handbag from the States. Berenice gave her a flower press and spent a lot of time explaining that Lucasta mustn’t use it on Granny’s cyclamens but must wait until the summer.

‘Granny gave me a give-outcher from Harrods,’ Lucasta told me, ‘but I like the sledge, and Snoopy and your velvet cat suit best.’

I went upstairs to see Maggie. She was huddled in bed, a brimming ashtray beside her, looking terrible.

‘I’ll try and get up later,’ she said. ‘Did you know today was the first day of the rest of your life?’

‘Another of Berenice’s profundities,’ I said crossly.

‘I think it’s rather good.’

‘It’s been said before.’

‘Berenice doesn’t seem very keen on you,’ said Maggie.

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘What did she say about me?’

‘It was yesterday. I was saying you were pretty. She said your looks were rather
ordinaire
, and she didn’t consider you a woman of substance.’

‘Bloody bitch,’ I said crossly. ‘What else did she say?’

But Maggie was gazing out at the white landscape. ‘Today is the first day of the rest of my life,’ she said dreamily. ‘I’m going to take a lover, the question is whose.’

I’d just finished making jellies and filling the meringues with cream, and was making a hideous hedgehog by sticking cubes of pineapple and cheese on sticks into a grapefruit half, when Berenice arrived down, looking radiantly businesslike in black wool trousers, a red shirt and her hair tied back in a red bandana.

‘Aren’t you frozen?’ I said.

‘Of course not,’ she said briskly. ‘My exercises whip up the circulation. Where’s Ivan?’ she went on, pouring out her revolting health food breakfast that looked like rat droppings in sawdust.

‘Trying out the new sledge with Lucasta.’

‘And Rose-Mary and Margaret?’

‘Still in bed,’ I said, chopping up some more pieces of cheese, and giving a bit to the dogs who were slobbering at my feet.

Berenice looked annoyed. ‘They’re not being very supportive are they? After all, Lucasta
is
Jack’s biological daughter.’

Brushing some non-existent hairs off her trousers, she stepped over Coleridge to get some milk from the fridge.

‘Those damn dogs are moulting everywhere, and I’m sure I found a flea in our bed this morning.’

‘It’s much too cold for fleas,’ said Ace coming in at the back door with Lucasta. There were snow flakes on his hair and his moustache. He looked cold and cross like Simpkin in
The Tailor of Gloucester.

Back home after picking everything up from the village, Mrs Braddock and I were spreading chopped eggs on bridge rolls, trying not to listen to Berenice giving a blow by blow account of how she made soya bean canapés. Ace was blowing up balloons. They were playing carols on the wireless. God, I thought dismally, it’ll be Christmas in a couple of weeks. How the hell was I going to survive all the festivities? My thoughts careered wildly towards Ace, kissing me under the mistletoe, handing me a present in front of the tree, and careered away again. No doubt he’d spend Christmas enjoying Berenice in some four-star Paris hotel.

Lucasta sat on the table, eating Maltesers and swinging her legs, and telling us the plot of her nativity play.

‘Then the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and announces her, and then he goes to the shepherds and says Piece of Earth, good will to all men.’

I caught Ace’s eye and giggled.

It was midday. Everyone except Berenice had been banished from the kitchen, so she could give her all to her carrot cake. Even Ace had been thrown out. She was sulking because he refused to try one of her soya bean canapés. The dogs were behaving appallingly, because no one had had time to take them for a proper walk. Mrs Braddock was trying to clean the hall floor, putting down newspapers to dry it as she went. Wordsworth sat just behind her whining querulously. Coleridge had just eaten a whole plate of sausages, and then rushed off upstairs. I found him rolling around on Ace and Berenice’s bed, wiping his face on their counterpane. Elizabeth’s photograph had been removed from the bedside, I noticed. Fifteen love to Berenice.

I went downstairs and gathered up the balloons, climbing on to the hall table to pin them in a bunch from the ceiling. Suddenly, I was overcome by dizziness, and felt myself swaying.

The next moment two hands grabbed me firmly round the hips and steadied me.

I looked down and blushed scarlet. It was Ace. He was wearing a navy blue overcoat with the velvet collar turned up, obviously just going out. My fingers were suddenly all thumbs. I took ages to tie the string. When I finished he lifted me down, and just for a second held me, frowning down at me.

‘Let me go,’ I muttered, terrified once more that I was going to cry.

‘Stop fighting,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve got enough people bitching at me today without you joining them.’

I tried to smile. ‘I’m sorry.’

He let go of me. ‘Now for Christ’s sake remember how ill you’ve been, and don’t overdo it. Lie down for a couple of hours after lunch. The man’ll be over to do the central heating any minute.’

He went towards the door.

‘I hope it isn’t too agonizing going to see them,’ I stammered. ‘I’m sure it’ll mean a lot to them. You will drive carefully, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’ He opened the door, letting in a blast of icy air.

‘By the way, I like your leg warmers,’ he said.

‘They’re my supportive hose,’ I said.

Just for a second a smile flickered across his face.

Back in the kitchen Berenice was pounding lentils with unnecessary violence, her mouth set in a hard line.

‘I am trying to remain supportive at the moment, but Ivan is being very difficult,’ she said. ‘Instead of being on the same wavelength, he’s giving off a lot of static. He was so different in the States. It’s the effect of his family of course. They’re absolutely hopeless.’

‘But he adores them.’

‘They wear him down. And why does he have this morbid obsession with the past? It’s so hypocritical. Elizabeth’s parents have got to face up to the fact that he’s bound to make another commitment sooner or later.’