Wicked! (65 page)

There wasn’t anything on television and Patience and Ian had crap videos, so they put on a Marilyn Manson CD and, ignoring shouts of ‘Turn it down’ from all over the campus, they danced. Xav, rocking with the abandon that he drained glasses, was soon rolling another spliff.

After that they got the munchies. Paris remembered a shepherd’s pie Patience had left in the fridge, which he put in the oven, and the remains of a boeuf bourguignon, which he fed to Northcliffe. He also found a nice bottle of white and a plate of smoked salmon sandwiches under clingfilm, which they wolfed down, dropping the crusts on the carpet.

Oh help! Paris noticed a cigarette burn on one of Emerald’s poncy embroidered cushions and two more on the sofa. He’d sort it later. Drugs made him feel he could conquer anything, be the best guy Cameron Diaz had ever slept with, win the poetry prize, score five goals for Liverpool, have Little Cosmo pleading to be his best friend. Then you came down and descended into the abyss when you wanted to hurt and destroy anyone who loved you.

‘Why were you in care?’ asked Xav.

‘My mum dumped me on the doorstep of a children’s home in Alvaston and fucked off. They named me after the town. They reckoned I was about two, so they gave me a birthday on January the thirtieth. Makes me the water carrier – or wine carrier.’ He filled Xav’s glass with Pouilly-Fumé. ‘Aquarians are supposed to be aloof and charismatic. I’ve worked on it ever since. What happened to you?’

Xav drew deeply on his spliff, eyes like black threads, face impassive, a Hiawatha with puppy fat.

‘I was born with a squint and a birthmark, which, probably correctly, is the sign of the devil to the Colombian Indians. So they chucked me into the gutter to die. They shoot stray children along with dogs in Bogotá, so the place looks tidy when foreign leaders roll up. I was rescued by a nun who worked in an orphanage.’ Xav’s voice grew more bitter. ‘Bianca was brought in as a baby when I was about twenty months. She came from a good family, strict Catholics, who forced Bianca’s mother to give her up. Dad and Mum had placed an order for her and flown over from England; the nuns threw me in as a job lot. I know nothing about my parents. Bianca’s posh but I’m a yob: I can tell that when I look in the mirror.’

Emptying the entire glass of wine, Xav choked. Paris bashed him on the back and said:

‘You’ve got the poshest voice I’ve ever heard. Birthmark’s gone, so’s the squint.’

Xav glared glassily at Paris. ‘Gets worse when I’m pissed.’

‘D’you feel Indian or English?’

‘Indian mostly. I love booze, drugs and fast horses. But I’ve got no stop button. Once I start I can’t stop.’

‘Your father can’t mind that with horses.’

‘My father is the most embarrassing person I’ve ever met. He doesn’t give a shit. Wherever he goes everyone gazes at him and Mum and Bianca, and sees how like film stars they are. Then they look at me, and think: Why’s that ugly black bastard hanging round them?

‘They used to spit at Mum when I was young,’ continued Xav bitterly. ‘They thought she’d been with a black man. They used to finger my hair and ask her if she ever washed it. I wash the fucking stuff every day. Boy, Mum got angry.’ For a second, Xav’s heavy face lifted. ‘She used to yell at people. But no one ever asked Dad questions about me, because they’re too scared of him. So he’s never realized there was a problem.’

Xav was rolling a third joint, breaking cardboard off a cigarette packet for them to smoke through.

‘Least you’ve got parents,’ said Paris.

The bottle of white was empty. The only thing left seemed to be a bottle of medium-dry sherry. He filled up their glasses.

‘Let’s drink to yobbos.’

‘Yobbos,’ shouted Xav, draining his glass. ‘Put on some more music.’

Putting on Limp Bizkit, turning up the volume, Paris opened the curtains on a sky full of stars and lit-up windows all over the campus.

‘Hear that, you fuckers,’ he yelled over the din. ‘God stands up for bastards.’ Then, as the chapel clock chimed eleven o’clock: ‘I’ve got an idea how we can screw up Biffo’s steeplechase.’

On balance, Ian felt the evening had been a success. He had lied to Patience. He hadn’t been dining with a supplier, but with Poppet and Alex Bruce, whom he’d taken to
Fidelio
in Bristol – on tickets admittedly given him by a supplier.

This had been to melt the distinct
froideur
which had grown between him and Alex since Patience’s shouting match. As Alex wielded more power, Ian was increasingly edgy about losing his job. He knew Patience would disapprove of this move almost as much as Alex disapproved of her going on the march, so he had kept her in the dark.

Fidelio
had been ravishing, with a Bagley old girl, Flora Seymour, singing Leonora quite magically. But although the opera was about liberation from tyranny, he didn’t feel Poppet and Alex were fans of Beethoven – too militaristic perhaps.

‘I prefer Eastern music,’ admitted Poppet. ‘Or early music on period instruments.’

Both Bruces had worn open-toed sandals and Alex, tieless, had displayed fearful short sleeves when he removed his jacket. They had certainly tucked into the smoked chicken, roast beef, avocado and spinach salad and apricot tart Ian had ordered for the interval, and between them downed the bottle of Beaune.

Ian, who couldn’t drink because he’d agreed to drive them, couldn’t stop thinking of that bottle of Pouilly-Fumé in the fridge at the Old Coach House.

On the way home, Poppet and Alex talked insufferably smugly about their daughter Charisma, who went to Searston Abbey.

‘Of course she’s G and T,’ boasted Poppet, which turned out to be ‘gifted and talented’, rather than ‘gin and tonic’, and which made Ian long for a drink even more.

As they crossed the border into Larkshire, it was still mild enough to have the windows open. Conversation moved on to the challenging behaviour of Paris.

‘He’s very troubled,’ said Poppet firmly, ‘and I’m afraid Janna Curtis gave him an inflated sense of his own ability.’

Ian didn’t rise, saying they were finding Paris much easier and he seemed to be getting on well with Xavier.

‘I’m not liking that,’ mused Poppet. ‘Xav is very troubled too. I blame Rupert. Xav gets a detention for challenging behaviour and instead of dropping everything to sort out his son, Rupert swans off on the Countryside March.’

‘I asked Rupert to discuss Xav’s special educational needs recently,’ added Alex petulantly, ‘and he said: “All Xav needs is a kick up the arse. He’s a lazy little sod, like I was at school.”’

In the dark, Ian suppressed a smile.

‘Rupert of course is troubled,’ sighed Poppet, ‘and a very private person.’

Only because he runs like hell the moment you appear on the horizon, thought Ian.

Swinging the car in between the stone lions at the bottom of the school drive, Ian was surprised at the number of lights still on. Must be pupils revising for tomorrow’s retakes. Someone was playing loud music. Through the trees he could see lights in the Old Coach House; perhaps Patience was home.

‘I’ve got a nice bottle of Pouilly-Fumé and some sandwiches in the fridge,’ he told the Bruces. ‘It’s a long time since supper.’

Paris, if up, could open the bottle for them and hand things round.

‘Well, if you insist,’ said Poppet.

‘Christ,’ whispered Paris, who’d been looking out of the window, ‘Ian’s home and he’s brought Mr and Mrs Fussy.’ Turning off Limp Bizkit, he chucked the remains of the spliff into the waste-paper basket.

Then he noticed more burns: in the ‘Mother’s Place is in the Wrong’ cushion and on Ian’s bridge table and on another of Emerald’s cushions, shit, shit, shit. Paris turned the cushions over and shoved a pile of
Horse & Hounds
on the bridge table.

‘Gather up the empties at once, man,’ he begged, but, cross-eyed and giggling on the sofa, Xav was too far gone.

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Paris scooped up at least four bottles and shoved them in Patience’s little sewing cupboard, producing a chink and crash of glass, which indicated Ian was already secreting bottles there.

Paris was just trying to identify a smell of burning and shoving a swaying Xav out by the back door when they went slap into Ian, Alex and Poppet coming in through the garage.

‘Mr and Mrs Fussy,’ said a beaming Xav. ‘Have you had a good evening?’

Seeing him momentarily handsome, showing excellent teeth and softened features, Alex thought for a moment Xav had turned into the egregious Feral Jackson. Then he caught sight of the shadow of a birthmark in the overhead light.

‘Xavier Campbell-Black,’ he thundered, ‘why aren’t you in bed?’

‘Chill, man, I’ve been counselling Paris. I didn’t realize it was so late.’

‘You were ordered not to leave your house.’

‘I got permission.’

‘Something’s burning,’ said Poppet, fascinated to witness such chaos.

Wrenching open the oven, Ian found a blackened shepherd’s pie. Opening the fridge, he discovered the bottle of Pouilly-Fumé and the sandwiches missing and, striding into the drawing room, found an utterly depleted drinks cupboard and took in the mess.

‘Paris, come in here at once,’ he bellowed.

Everyone unfortunately followed him, whereupon the wastepaper basket containing Paris’s discarded spliff, not wanting to be left out, burst into flames.

‘Fire, fire,’ giggled Xav, emptying the last of the sherry over it, which turned the flame blue. ‘Just like the Christmas pudding at home,’ he added wistfully.

‘We’ll be forgetting that drink and sandwiches,’ said Alex grimly, ‘and take you straight home.’ He seized Xav by the arm and turned to Paris. ‘And I want you in my office before chapel tomorrow to explain yourself.’

Thank God, the burnt shepherd’s pie had blotted out the smell of dope.

Giggling hysterically, Xav tripped over a side table, sending flying a ‘World’s Best Dad’ mug and a Staffordshire dog, and fell flat on his face.

‘For God’s sake,’ exploded Ian.

Xav was as unyielding as a bag of concrete as Paris lugged him to his feet. ‘Getta grip,’ he hissed. ‘I’ll help him out, sir.’ Anything to escape from Ian’s fury.

Outside, the peace of the soft September starlight was disturbed by a tantivy of horns and joyful off-key singing.

‘The dusky night rides down the sky,

And ushers in the morn;

The hounds all join in glorious cry,

The huntsman winds his horn.’

‘“And a-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go,”’ joined in Xav. Lunging forward he yelled, ‘Taxi, taxi, take me to paradise,’ as a lorry, driven by Patience, with Dora, Jack, Lando and Junior, and several beagles falling out of the windows, came roaring up the drive.

‘“The dusky night rides down the sky, the huntsman . . .”’ began Patience. Screeching to a halt outside the Old Coach House and seeing Xav and Paris, she cried, ‘Hello, boys, we’ve all had such a wonderful day.’

The Bruces, however, lurking in the shadows, felt otherwise, particularly when the beagles poured out of the back of the lorry after Joan’s Burmese cat before relieving themselves all over the lawns and the flower beds. The calm of the night was disturbed again as Poppet Bruce’s open-toed sandals encountered Northcliffe’s regurgitated boeuf bourguignon.

Paris fled to bed, trying to blot out the sounds of Patience and Ian arguing furiously downstairs.

Oh hell, there was the main section of the
Sunday Times
on his bed all crumpled up by Northcliffe, which Ian hadn’t read yet and would be crosser about than the booze. The paper lay open at a piece listing the advantages of boarding school which included ‘the widening of horizons, the development of autonomy, and the relief from tensions commonly built up in a nuclear family around adolescence’.

Paris buried his face in his pillow. ‘I’ve been catapulted into a nuclear family,’ he groaned, ‘but I’m the bomb.’

64

As a result of the Countryside March, Bagley received excellent coverage. Many papers carried pictures of Amber, Lando and the beagle pack. The front page of the
Western Daily Press
showed Sally and Patience waving placards. Dora was ecstatic over Nigel Dempster’s picture of herself and Cadbury. It would be so good for all her press contacts to be able to put a face to her name. There was however a bitchy piece in the
Scorpion
on the shortness of Rupert Campbell-Black’s fuse. Was it due to lack of support from his two sons, Marcus, who was gay and allergic to horses, and his adopted son Xavier, who’d been gated by Bagley Hall (fees £22,000 a year) for undisclosed bad behaviour?

The star of the day was definitely Bianca, who, combining her mother’s beauty and her father’s ability to dazzle, was considered to be carrying the Campbell-Black torch. This did nothing for Xav’s self-esteem, but his street cred rocketed when news leaked out via Dora and the
Evening Standard
that instead of marching, he and Paris had been busted for drunken trashing of the bursar’s house.