Clouds among the Stars

There was a corner of the park made gloomy by a circle of trees. It was a long way from any path and here we set up our kingdom, named Ravenswood by Rupert. At that time he was devoted to the novels of Sir Walter Scott. It was made entirely from what we thought of as valuable finds and what others would have called junk – old boards, broken deck chairs, tea chests, sheets of corrugated iron, even the prow of an old boat we had dug from the mud by the river. Rupert nailed and glued these riches together to create an eccentric structure that seemed to my infant eyes a palace.

The entrance was by way of a home-made ladder up to the lowest branches. When you had climbed up, collecting a new set of splinters each time, you found yourself in a baronial hall. Rupert had brought back several pairs of antlers from his grandmother’s estate. He hung these on the walls that we painstakingly constructed from mud and sticks mixed with animal hair. Rupert said that was how houses had been made for centuries until they thought of bricks. Sometimes the walls dried out too much and broke down. Rupert said this was because there was not enough hair binding the mud. We carefully trimmed the fur from Mark Antony’s predecessor and took surreptitious snips from the coats of dogs we befriended in the street. My parents were mystified and annoyed when we insisted on returning from a holiday in Devon with three large bags of sheeps’ wool collected from barbed wire fences.

Rupert was furious with Bron for cutting off a horse’s tail. He gave us all a lecture on cruelty, and reduced Portia and me to tears with a harrowing picture of a poor animal tormented by flies and unable to chase them away. He received my donation of two plaits that I had cut from my own head with proper expressions of gratitude and they were immured in mud with suitable ceremony. Predictably, my mother was angry about my sadly altered appearance and blamed Rupert. Bron made me unhappy by refusing to be seen with me in public until my hair had grown to a more becoming length but Rupert said I had the Dunkirk spirit. It was some years before I knew what that was but I was comforted. Naturally my parents knew nothing of Ravenswood. We had all cut our fingers and sworn in blood not to divulge the whereabouts of our hideaway. I remember Rupert losing his temper with Bron over a bottle of red ink.

Many blissful hours were spent excavating for shards of broken china to decorate the walls of the refectory, which was built higher up and could be reached only by a perilous scramble along a rickety walkway between two trees. On one occasion Portia fell and broke her arm. There was an almighty row, with Rupert once again getting the blame. He said Portia was a great gun for not telling and gave her his brass inkwell that was shaped like a frog as a reward for bravery. After that I tried to pluck up the courage to hurl myself to the ground but I always funked it.

Almost the best bit of Ravenswood was the dungeon. One of the trees was hollow and you could slide right down inside it. We covered the floor with an old rug and lit our secret chamber with candle ends, and Rupert read us bits from The Bride of Lammermoor, his eyes glittering in the lambent light. I barely understood one sentence in ten. But my imagination was fired by that far-off place, hemmed about with dark forests and peopled with quarrelsome characters of compelling beauty.

Rupert was very fond of my father. His relationship with my mother was always complicated. My mother really only liked people who were in love with her and Rupert, even at that age, was not fond of women. I don’t know how I knew that.

When Rupert left school and went up to Oxford it was the end of things. I suppose he spent his holidays abroad. I remember him coming to the house for dinner several times, occasions from which we children were excluded. Once when he was standing in the hall saying goodbye, I crept to the head of the stairs in my dressing gown and whispered his name. He looked up and caught sight of my face pressed against the banisters. He had waved, a gesture no one else saw. I treasured that secret communication for a long time.

Bron and Ophelia grew too old for the pleasures of Ravenswood and so it came to belong to Portia and me. It wasn’t the same without Rupert. We visited it infrequently and let it fall into disrepair. Years later, when Cordelia was five or six, I took her to see it. I had to search for a long time before I found it. All but two of the trees had been cut down and only the discovery of several pieces of china and a broken antler convinced me this really was the place where I had spent so many glorious hours of my childhood.

I was thirteen when Rupert came under sentence of excommunication from the Byng family. The severance was, on the surface, conducted with civilised calm but as with a banked-up fire, there were fiery gleams that threatened to combust. For weeks my mother went silently about with a face carved from stone. We avoided her, depressed by the charged atmosphere of imminent storm. The decorators were called in and the strawberry-coloured walls of the dining room were painted pewter, with black skirting boards and silvered shutters and doors. The effect was chic but chilling. For a few days my mother insisted on food to match the new scheme but it was too expensive and troublesome to keep up. Everyone except Cordelia, who was still more or less a baby, liked caviar, olives and sardines but we children refused to eat prunes and even Ma couldn’t manage the black pudding. Whenever we gathered for lunch or supper the silence was broken only by my father’s vain attempts to pretend that nothing was wrong. He talked of literature, architecture, painting, music and even the weather – of everything in fact except the theatre – while we children sat mute and cowardly, afraid of freezing reproofs from the personification of Bale who sat at the end of the table, smiling at grief.

Rupert Wolvespurges, always precocious, had, at the age of twenty-three, been appointed drama critic for the London Intelligencer. It was he who had made the comparison between my mother’s Lady Macbeth and the fraught society hostess. My mother had never forgiven him.

ELEVEN (#ulink_ab610b43-cbed-50bf-b371-17b10eff3a6e)

A canal, bordered on each side by a leafless framework of pleached trees, flowed between two rows of terraced houses. Gas lamps, placed sparingly along the cobbled pavements, cast ribbons of light on the water and moving shadows across the soft red-brick façades. The houses had severely plain sash windows and graceful fanlights. This small Georgian utopia on the cusp of Richmond, where Beauty frolicked, was called Horn-on-the-Green, presumably because one end of the terrace adjoined a park. This I had discovered from my A – Z, for now it was too dark to see it. At the town end was a pair of wrought-iron gates, padlocked and admitting pedestrians only, through a wicket gate.

For reassurance I felt in my pocket for the sheet of paper my father had given me. I had read it several times and was familiar with its message. In a large hand, in black ink, beneath an engraved address on thick cream paper, were the following words: ‘Dear Waldo, I have read with distress of your misfortune. If I can be of any service to you, I am yours to command, Rupert Wolvespurges.’ Though well-expressed, the letter lacked warmth. Remembering it now, I felt thoroughly discouraged from asking a virtual stranger if he would lend me two thousand pounds.

I had been amazed to discover that my father had kept in touch with Rupert Wolvespurges all this time, without saying a word to anyone. My mother would have been absolutely furious if she had known. From the moment of his exclusion, visitors had quickly learned not to mention Rupert’s name in our household if they wished to avoid the permafrost of her displeasure. It had seemed strange to me, then, how rapidly he had passed out of our lives. Only Portia and I had felt, apparently, that the sentence of permanent exile had been too harsh. Bron and Ophelia, precociously attractive to the opposite sex, were already profoundly absorbed by their own lives. Anyway, neither of them had been more than vaguely attached to Rupert. Maria-Alba’s dislike of men was too deeply ingrained to permit her to take any man’s side against a woman. Cordelia was just a baby. In a house so filled with sociable comings and goings Portia had soon lost interest in someone she never saw. As the years passed, I thought of Rupert only occasionally, in disconnected images, as someone almost imaginary like a character in a book, for ever lost.

The sound of voices strained to shrillness came from number 10, which was Rupert’s house. The escaping warmth from the open front door sent wisps of steam into the night. I walked into the hall, threw my scarf on to the pile of coats and asked myself if I would rather be at the dentist. I usually answer this question with an unequivocal ‘no’ and feel heartened as a result. But for once I was in two minds. A cheque signed by my mother and marked ‘Return to Drawer’ had been brought round that morning by the local butcher. He had made a plaintive appeal through the letter box. My errand could not be put off.

‘How’th the chick?’

A girl with a large bust and blue sequins on her upper eyelids kissed my cheek and put a glass of something sparkling into my hand. I recognised her voice. A few hours earlier I had telephoned in a state of trepidation and asked to speak to Rupert. A girl with a lisp and an inability to pronounce her Rs had answered. She said Rupert – only she called him Woopert – and Archie were expecting one or two people for drinks. I had made polite noises about not liking to turn up uninvited. She had said not to be a thilly ath and come. Apparently Rupert was flying to New York the next day so if I wanted to see him urgently I must take my chance.

It was after nine now and the racket suggested large numbers of la jeunesse dorée warming up for a night of revel. I recognised a decadent Weimar Republic chic, brought into vogue by the film Cabaret. Two men wearing basques, stockings, high heels and bowler hats leaned against a piano on which a black man in a pink suit was playing something jazzy.

I was conscious that the hem of my skirt was hanging down at the back, that there was a run in my tights and that Portia’s suede jacket had a blob of makeup on the sleeve, which I had tried, unsuccessfully, to scrub off. My yellow silk dress would have done wonders for my self-confidence but Portia had left it at Dimitri’s house and the police had impounded it.

‘I’m Harriet Byng.’ I tried not to stare at her breasts. ‘I telephoned earlier.’

‘Hello, darling. I’m Wothalind.’ Rosalind’s freckled bosom swelled within the bodice of her dress as she leaned over to pour herself another glass of champagne. There is nothing sexual about my interest in other women’s breasts. But it is difficult not be curious when you have next to none of your own. ‘Who did you thay you were?’

‘Harriet.’

‘Hello, Harriet darling.’ She took a swig and looked at me over the rim of her glass with large swimming eyes. ‘Isn’t thith fun? Woopert and Archie alwayth have thuch lovely partieth.’

‘Actually I was hoping to be able to talk to Rupert. But perhaps this isn’t the right moment –’

‘I do love Woopert. Tho much! But he never taketh me theriouthly.’ Her eyes swum a bit more.

‘I’d probably better go – another time –’

‘Don’t be bashful, darling. Woopert’th over there, being nithe to evwybody.’ She pointed to the corner of the room. ‘Exthept me.’ She hiccuped sadly and turned away.

A fair young man of epicene beauty who wore a dinner jacket and tiger-skin shorts, winked at me and blew me a kiss. An equally gynandrous figure with long red hair and a stubbly chin offered me the cigarette he or she was smoking. I did not like to refuse, though the butt was uninvitingly soggy. I was careful not to inhale.

Peering between the heads of the crowd gathered around him, I had a chance to observe Rupert. He was dressed in a striped blazer with a bow tie and his black hair was slicked back from his forehead with glistening pomade. His face was covered with white makeup. His eyebrows were upside-down Vs, pencilled starkly in black, and his lips were cherry red. He was recounting a story that was drowned by explosions of laughter from his audience. His was an interesting face, expressive, mocking, almost wicked. I wondered which of us had changed most during the intervening years. It ought to have been me, since I had grown from a child to a young woman. Trying to get a better view of Rupert, the man next to me trod hard on my foot without noticing. As soon as I could I limped away to the other end of the room where it was less crowded.

A pair of French windows revealed a garden of wavering beauty. I cupped my hands round my face and pressed my nose to the glass to see it better. Lanterns in jewel colours were strung from dark masses of trees. A helmeted statue, perhaps Hermes, stood on one leg in the centre of a long rectangular pond. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness I saw stone fish – dolphins, probably – on each corner, spewing water.