Clouds among the Stars

‘All right, all right! I know I was a fool to go off with him. You needn’t pretend to be so worldly-wise.’ Portia sounded offended. ‘Who was it who had to ask what fellatio meant?’

‘That was ages ago – anyway, never mind. So he raped you!’ I had forgotten all my prejudices against violence. I felt murderous. I could easily have killed Dimitri with my bare hands if he had presented his throat. I tried to stifle my anger for Portia’s sake. ‘Stan was right. He is a gangster. We must tell Inspector Foy at once.’

‘Inspector who?’

‘Foy. He’s – Oh, never mind for the moment. But what happened then? And how did you manage to get away?’

‘I had to go along with whatever he wanted or he hit me. It was – No, I’m not going to think about it. Only if I ever see another furry cushion I can’t answer for the consequences. Luckily he was out a lot so I was left for hours with nothing to do but read this dreadful book about a girl who goes to Hollywood and gets hooked on drink and drugs. She dies in the end, and a good thing too. Anyway, this morning Dimitri said he was going to be away all day. He said he’d bring me a fur coat and jewellery, but I must be nice to him when he got back because he was tired of threatening. I knew I had to escape, then or never. So I seduced Chico, one of the bodyguards. I’d seen the way he looked at me when he brought in sandwiches and things. I expect he’d indulged in quite a few fantasies sitting outside the door, listening to Dimitri yodelling like an alpine goatherd every time he had an orgasm. I told Chico I was so sore he’d have to take all his clothes off so as not to rub against the bruises. Ugh, God …’ Portia clutched her head and shuddered. ‘The smell of sweat and garlic and the blubber, possibly worse than Dimitri’s blackheads and dandruff – except he came at once, thank God. Then, afterwards, he sort of drifted off for a bit, you know how men do. Well, when he was lying there, all passion spent, I grabbed his jeans and jacket and ran. Of course he came after me but he couldn’t move nearly as fast. I ran, stark naked, across fields full of cows and woods full of brambles and stinging nettles until I got to a road. I put on Chico’s clothes, and the first lorry I put up my thumb to stopped. He was coming into London and dropped me in Camberwell. I bussed the rest of the way. I told the lorry driver I was a lesbian, just in case, and he was quite interested. Actually it isn’t at all a bad idea. Thanks to Dimitri, I’ll probably be frigid for the rest of my life.’

‘Hello, Portia.’ Bron came into the hall. ‘Where have you been? What do you think of my coat?’

‘She’s been kidnapped by a homicidal sex maniac!’ I was so upset by Portia’s recital that I had forgotten about being an outcast.

Bron gave me a glacial look. ‘I call that a joke in poor taste.’

‘No, really, she has been! We must ring the police and a doctor.’

‘Oh, no you don’t!’ Portia snatched back her hand, which I had been holding. ‘If you think I’m going to go on talking about it to a lot of prurient busybodies, you must be crazy. All I want to do is lie in a hot bath for a very long time and then go to my own chaste, sweet bed and forget it ever happened. I’ve never been so tired in my life.’

‘But, Portia! You must see a doctor! Supposing you’ve got a horrible disease? Or you’re pregnant?’

‘What a comfort you are, Harriet.’ Portia, in her turn, began to look coldly at me.

‘You must, at any rate, report it to the police. If he isn’t stopped, Dimitri will find some other unsuspecting girl.’

‘That’s her lookout. If I’d known you were going to be so community-spirited I wouldn’t have told you. I thought as my sister you’d be concerned for me. It seems I was mistaken.’

‘Don’t be angry.’ I tried to take her arm but she shook me off, her mouth turned down mulishly. ‘All right, whatever you say. I still think we ought but – well, never mind. Dear, dear Portia, I’m so glad have you back. Come on, I’ll run the bath for you and bring you up some supper.’

‘Promise no officious telephoning?’

‘Promise.’

Portia was mollified sufficiently to let me accompany her upstairs. When I saw her without clothes on, I was tempted to break my word, there and then. She was covered in blackening bruises and red weals. Despite her attempts to be insouciant, I was sure she must be suffering the aftereffects of extreme fear so I decided to say nothing about Pa for the moment. Fortunately, she seemed to have forgotten about the cameras outside the front door. While she bathed, I sat on the laundry basket and we talked and made silly jokes as we always did. But there was an atmosphere of strain.

Dirk was a useful distraction, trying to get into the bath with Portia, then attempting to eat the sponge. Portia was not particularly fond of animals but she admitted that he had a wayward charm all his own. She ate very little of the supper I brought her, saying she was too tired to be hungry. I left her tucked up in bed, her hair stretched across the pillow, her damaged face very calm. I thought she seemed remarkably composed in the circumstances.

But during the night I was woken by Dirk, whining and scraping with his paw at my pillow. Before I could tell him to be quiet I heard a blood-chilling scream from Portia’s room, which was directly below mine. I raced downstairs, my heart puttering with fright. She was sitting up in bed, shrieking, her eyes and mouth wide open.

‘What’s the matter with her?’ Cordelia, her face white from sleep, came in with Mark Antony in her arms.

‘Will whoever’s making that infernal racket kindly shut up?’ called Bron’s voice from across the landing.

‘She’s having a bad dream.’ I went over to Portia and spoke soothingly. ‘It’s all right. You’re at home. You’re quite safe. I’m here, darling.’

Portia closed her eyes and then opened them again. ‘Hat? Oh, thank God! I was dreaming – horrible – horrible!’ A tear slid from one eye. She closed her eyes again and took hold of my hand. ‘Stay.’

I could have wept myself at this admission of need from my most dauntless, spirited sister. I sent Cordelia back to bed. Pulling up a chair, I sat beside Portia and made her lie down. After a while Dirk settled on my feet and I was grateful for the warmth from his body for slowly the house became very cold. Portia slept again but badly, turning her head from side to side and grinding her teeth, her eyes always a little open as though she could not trust the world enough to relax her vigilance even in sleep. More than once she sat up and cried out. When she heard my voice, she lay down again, muttering things I could not decipher.

The imp of anxiety that had taken up tenancy in my stomach chewed away. When I wasn’t worrying about Portia being permanently affected, physically and mentally, by her appalling experience, I worried about Pa. Luckily the nuns at St Frideswide’s had made us learn large tracts of poetry by heart. By the time I had got through a good chunk of Goblin Market, I felt exhausted and numb. I fetched blankets from the linen cupboard and made myself comfortable. Gradually the night wore away and I dozed, off and on. Towards dawn, when she seemed to be sleeping more peacefully, I crept upstairs to my own bed. I thought Portia might not like to find me beside her when she woke, a reminder of the terrors of darkness.

NINE (#ulink_09a849cb-7905-5440-8520-d2aea8787105)

‘That’s a new photographer, isn’t it?’ said Cordelia, three days later, lifting swollen eyelids to look into the street. She was sitting cross-legged on the window seat in the drawing room, with a box of paper handkerchiefs at her elbow, reading her favourite bit in Little Women where Beth March almost dies of scarlet fever. She had Good Wives beside her with a marker at the page where Beth finally joins the choir invisible.

Idly I strolled over to have a look. We were all extremely bored with our lives. It was difficult to be purposeful with a cohort of reporters dogging our steps and quite impossible to think expansively, confronted as we were at every turn by insuperable problems. Cordelia and I had been to the cinema the evening before to see Robert Mitchum in The Big Sleep but it had been hard to lose ourselves in the story while the press chortled at the seduction scenes, rustled bags of Butterkist and blew so much cigarette smoke over us that our hair and clothes reeked like the snug at The Green Dragon.

Bron was the only one of us who did not mind having his photograph taken whenever he bought a bar of soap or went to collect his dry-cleaning. But, to his annoyance, photographs of him never appeared in the newspapers. Not a word of the interview he had given had been printed. We no longer merited headlines. Instead, articles about our clothes and our hairstyles and whether we were looking pale and haunted (Bron) or aristocratic and forlorn (Ophelia) or sparky and irrepressible (Cordelia) appeared in the society gossip columns, a whispering that continued to fan the flames of notoriety. According to the Clarion, Ophelia was suing Crispin for breach of promise and Bron was out on bail, paid by a female member of the royal family whose playmate he had been until scandal touched him.

Because she had not set foot outside the house since her return from Surrey three days ago, the wildest conjectures were made about Portia. The Clarion revealed that she had signed a lucrative contract to star en travestie as Mozart in a new play called Amadeus. The People’s Exclusive had it from a reliable source that she had been the mistress, successively, of Prince Rainier, Lord Snowdon and Ziggy Stardust. The Herald insisted that she was due to fly out to join Lord Lucan, who had taken refuge in a Nazi colony in Tierra del Fuego.

Probably it was my lack of resemblance to my brother and sisters that fuelled the rumours circulated by The Daily Examiner that I was the lovechild of my father and Maria Callas. I have to admit that I was pleased to be described as svelte and enigmatic.

Portia joined us at the window. Her bruises were beginning to turn yellow and the swellings to go down, but the broken tooth was startlingly incongruous with her beautiful face. She had not been able to bring herself to confront the outside world in order to visit the dentist. Her sleep had been so troubled by nightmares that she had moved to a camp bed in my room. She refused to say a word more about her experiences and had made me promise not to tell the others. She insisted she was nearly over it but I was worried about her. She glanced indifferently in the direction of Cordelia’s pointing finger and then ducked down beneath the sill.

‘It’s one of Dimitri’s bodyguards!’ She clutched my ankle. ‘Not Chico, the other one! I think his name was Dex.’

‘Are you sure?’ The man, who was leaning against the lamppost, rolling a cigarette, looked quite ordinary. ‘I can’t see, Cordelia, if you’re going to put your head there.’

‘Would I say so if I weren’t sure? You think I’m having hallucinations? Or going mad, perhaps?’ Portia was extremely snappy these days, which was unlike her. ‘He’s got a birthmark on his cheek. I can hardly make a mistake about that, I suppose.’

‘Some people think it’s rude to push,’ said Cordelia bitingly.

‘Well, I can’t see one.’ I was studying the man’s profile as he fiddled about with a box of matches. ‘He’s so undistinguished, I bet thousands of people look just like –’ I broke off as the man turned his head to stare up at the house and I saw a dark red mark running from temple to chin. ‘Oh. Oh dear. It’s Dex, all right. But what can he want?’

‘I expect he wants Maria-Alba’s recipe for minestrone. Honestly, Harriet, you seem to be particularly stupid at the moment. Of course he’s looking for me.’

‘Poor man! I think it’s very sad,’ said Cordelia. ‘Imagine having people stare at you all the time. There’s a girl at school –’ Cordelia stopped speaking and begun to hum.

I was well aware that Cordelia had been deliberately avoiding all mention of school because she was afraid someone would insist on her going back.

I stared down at Portia. ‘Why?’ Portia had turned round so she could sit on the floor, out of sight. She shrugged her shoulders and spread her hands wide in a gesture of bafflement. ‘I know you don’t want to talk about it,’ I went on, ‘but I’ve been wondering – how did you meet Dimitri?’

‘Bron introduced us. He suggested we went down to The Green Dragon for a drink. He pointed Dimitri out the minute we got in there and said he was incredibly rich.’ Portia went faintly pink. ‘I thought at the time it was something of a set-up. Bron shuffled off the minute Dimitri started talking to me.’

I was silent for a moment. An unpleasant idea had at once presented itself. This might be the explanation for Bron’s new-found riches. No doubt selling one’s sister was a time-honoured method of raising the wind in many parts of the world but I was incensed with my own brother for doing it. ‘The low-down louse!’ I said aloud.

‘That’s putting it mildly, I think.’ Portia thought I was referring to Dimitri and I didn’t bother to enlighten her. ‘What’s Dex doing now?’

‘He’s talking to one of the reporters.’ Cordelia kneeled on the window seat to get a better view. ‘He’s looking very bad-tempered. I expect it’s his birthmark that makes him grumpy. If he was a girl he could wear his hair across his face like Veronica Lake in I Married a Witch. You remember, the one which starts off with a thunderstorm and the lightning strikes the tree Veronica Lake’s buried under. She and her father, who’s also a witch – or would that be a wizard? – were burnt by the Puritans two hundred years ago and the two witches come out as puffs of smoke –’

‘Oh, mercy!’ cried Portia. ‘Just tell me what’s happening, will you?’

‘He’s shaking his head. He’s looking at the house – he’s looking at me!’ Cordelia pulled her hair half across her face and began to pout. ‘Golly, he’s really staring at me. I wonder if I remind him of Veronica Lake? I love the bit when they’re going to be married and the woman keeps singing, “I love you truly” and he says, “Oh, shut up!”’ Cordelia began to giggle helplessly.

‘If you don’t want to be tied to a railway track and have your Veronica Lake locks cut off by the wheels of a passing express, you’d better shut up yourself.’ Portia put up her hand and got hold of Cordelia’s skirt. ‘Move over and let Harriet see.’

‘Don’t pull! He’s getting out a little book and writing something in it. Now he’s tearing out a page. He’s walking up the path – he’s coming up the steps!’ We heard the flap of the letter box clang and Dirk, who had been sleeping off his breakfast on the sofa, went from nought to sixty in one point eight seconds and was at the door attempting to remove the paint from the panels with his front paws. ‘I’ll get it. You beast, Portia, you’ve torn my skirt. I hope it’s a love letter. Or a poem. I shan’t mind about the birthmark. I wish he was a bit more swave, though.’