Read the book: «Clouds among the Stars»

ONE

The day my father was arrested for murder began promisingly. It was early November. Usually by mid-autumn the walls of my attic room were spotted with damp and the ancient paraffin heater had to be left on all night. On this particular day the sky was like opaline glass faintly brushed with rose and there was a seductive mildness in the air. I felt unusually hopeful about my life and prospects. I was young – twenty-two – almost certainly in love, and I had a vocation. I was going to be a poet. I could not remember who said that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds but I was prepared to put money on it.

Through the window beside my bed the remaining leaves on the topmost branches of the tulip tree looked as though they had been dipped in bronze. I began to compose a line. ‘Bronzed leaves unfurled like faerie banners –’ Banners? Perhaps ‘pennants’ was better. I got out of bed, put on my writing robe, sat at my desk and sharpened my pencil while I thought.

Pennant, banner, flag, burgee – no, wholly unsuitable, making one think of pink gins and yacht clubs – what about ‘oriflamme’? That was a beautiful word and perfect for a pastoral epic. I abandoned the leaves altogether and thought about my work in progress, entitled ‘Ode to Pulcheria’. Since I had given up writing poetry about myself I seemed to be getting on much better. I had written twelve stanzas and was gratified and disgusted in equal amounts. It had quite a zip to it, but it would keep turning into a poem by somebody else.

I turned again to Nature for inspiration and saw that Mark Antony was stalking a sparrow. I banged on the glass. He looked up in annoyance as the bird flew off. Considering Mark Antony’s remarkable girth and the brightness of his ginger fur it would have to be a particularly stupid, short-sighted bird to allow itself to be caught, but I do hate Nature’s predatory schemes. I waved to show all was forgiven and caught the sleeve of my writing robe on the edge of my desk.

I looked sorrowfully at the long tear. It was a beautiful robe and one of my most treasured possessions, dark-blue silk velvet embroidered with silver stars and gold lozenges. My father, Waldo Byng, had worn it playing Prospero in an acclaimed production of The Tempest. He had received wildly enthusiastic notices and been much lionised for a time. It would not be putting it too strongly, even allowing for family partisanship, to say that my father was still one of the most famous actors of his day. But the Prospero role had been in 1973, five years ago. Since then, things had not gone quite so well with him.

It is difficult to say what had gone – not wrong exactly, but slightly awry. Experimental theatre was all the rage so there were a lot of classical actors wanting the few good parts available. Probably being made a fuss of went to my father’s head. He had turned down several leading roles on the grounds that they were insufficiently ‘mesmeric’. He had thought himself so deeply into the part of Prospero that he could not stop being him. He was convinced he possessed magic powers and for a time our house was crammed with amulets, scarabs, lamps, rings, wands, pendulums and philtres. He offered to lay hands on every invalid he met. A Russian painter, who had TB, actually got better and my father exhibited Serge’s miraculously pink cheeks and red lips at parties as though he were a hermaphrodite chicken or a two-headed lamb. We were all sorry when Serge died a few months later.

I looked out of the window again and saw Loveday, our gardener, weeding round what my father claimed was an antique bust of Shakespeare. It was indisputably a man with a bald head, whose features were indistinguishable from burst blisters. It stood at the centre of Loveday’s maze. Originally it had taken up only a small part of what was a large garden for Blackheath, where we lived. Then Loveday had become obsessed. He had extended the maze, making it more and more elaborate until it filled almost the entire three-quarters of an acre behind the house. He had begun it in yew but in later years went over to privet because it grew so much faster. Of course it needed trimming more often as well. During the summer the drama of our daily lives was played out to the sound of clashing shears as Loveday clipped from dawn till nightfall.

Loveday had constructed the maze with the idea of baffling the Devil. He believed that all difficulties in this world were the works of Satan. Despite the ubiquity and industry of the Lord of Pandemonium Loveday was confident his maze would go some way to confound him. We children were frequently required to test the ingenuity of the newest layout and, to keep Loveday happy, even if we weren’t lost, we pretended to be. My father said Loveday was a man in a million and, though a hopeless gardener, was a wonderful illustration of Rousseau’s thesis of the boundless creativity of the untutored mind. Honestly though, when it came to wild credulity, I sometimes thought it would be difficult to choose between Loveday and Pa.

‘Harriet!’ It was Portia’s voice. She rattled the door handle. ‘What are you doing?’ I put the ‘Ode to Pulcheria’ in my desk drawer, whipped off my writing robe, stuffed it under my bed and unlocked the door.

There are seven of us in my family. My mother, Clarissa, was also a Shakespearean actor, much fêted in the fifties and sixties but now retired. The eldest of us children, and the only male, is Oberon, twenty-six years old at that time, and known to everyone as Bron. Then comes Ophelia, twenty-four, followed by me, Harriet, and then Portia, aged twenty. Then a long gap before Cordelia, now aged twelve.

Portia’s eyes looked past me, scanned the room and then returned, disappointed, to my face. ‘You’re such a dark horse. Whatever do you do up here all alone? I think you’ve got a shameful secret. You’re not in the pudding club, are you?’

Though Portia was two years younger than me, people usually thought it was the other way round. She had a fierce self-assurance while I was – am – prone to self-doubt. Beneath an ancient beaver coat my mother had put out for the jumble, Portia was wearing a white dress, not very clean, that was cut low in front. A slick of scarlet lipstick hid her pretty mouth.

‘Not as far as I know,’ I said. ‘Where are you going? You’ll die of heat in that coat.’

‘It’s going to rain later on, Loveday says. Anyway, I can take it off if I have to. I’m going to have lunch with a delicious man.’

All men were, initially anyway, delicious to Portia. I looked at my watch. ‘Isn’t it rather early for lunch?’

‘I’m going to Manton’s first to borrow some jewellery.’ Manton’s was a theatrical costumier. ‘This man is a bloated capitalist,’ Portia continued. ‘I don’t want him to think I’m hard up.’ She slipped her foot from her high-heeled patent leather shoe and bent to rub her heel. ‘Ow! These shoes are hell! Why should Ophelia be blessed with small aristocratic feet and not me? It’s so unfair.’ She looked up from behind a fall of pale yellow hair, her expression half laughing and half cross.

‘You’ve nothing to complain about, I should say. Even dressed like that you look gorgeous.’

My three sisters and Bron had all inherited my mother’s looks, the same shining fair hair, huge deep blue eyes and marvellous mouth. Ophelia was generally thought to be the beauty of the family, having, in addition, my mother’s perfect nose, but I thought there might be some who would prefer Portia’s more animated features and friendlier disposition. Cordelia was already shaping up to rival the other two. I had dark hair and dark eyes like my father and the same bony frame. While my sisters were voluptuous, I was completely bosomless, to my great sorrow.

‘Thanks for the compliment, I don’t think.’ Portia took a mauve scarf from her coat pocket and tied it round her head, Red Indian fashion. On anyone else it would have looked ridiculous but it gave Portia a seductive air I really envied. ‘There’s nothing the matter with the way I’m dressed. You’re a fine one to talk, anyway. I never see you in anything but black these days. I suppose it’s all because of that frightful Dodge. That reminds me what came up to tell you. He’s on the phone.’

Dodge had been my boyfriend for the last year. Everyone disapproved of him, which was one of the things I liked about him. It is difficult to assert oneself in a large family of beautiful people overflowing with self-confidence.

‘You might have said! He has to ring from a call box.’

‘I’m surprised he condescends to use such a bourgeois means of communication,’ she called after me as I ran down the stairs. ‘I’d have thought a note written in blood and wrapped round a bullet would’ve been more in his line.’

I had brought Dodge home to have supper with us some weeks after meeting him in a bus queue. It had not been a success. Usually people adore the zany glamour so liberally dispensed by my family. My father is a marvellous storyteller and my mother likes all young men to fall in love with her.

Claremont Lodge – this was the name of our house – was Regency and very large and handsome for the suburbs. It looked out over the park and was furnished in a manner both theatrical and dégagé, on the lines of Sleeping Beauty’s castle after a decade or two of slumber. There was a great deal of peeling paint, crumpled velvet, cracked marble, tarnished silver and chipped porcelain. As much of it had been rescued from stage sets, things constantly fell to pieces and were repaired rather badly by Loveday. My mother was a keen decorator with a taste for dramatic tableaux. When Dodge came to dinner she had arranged a corner of the hall with a harp, entwined with ivy where the strings should have been, and a stool made from a Corinthian capital on which stood a clock without hands, a crown – possibly Henry IV’s – and a stuffed partridge hanging from one claw. A guttering candle lit the scene, which my mother called Caducity. I looked it up later. It means transitoriness or frailty, a tendency to fall apart. It seemed appropriate, considering the state of the furniture.

Dodge had taken all this in with cold eyes, and when my mother had invited him to sit beside her on the sofa before dinner he had said he preferred to stand. Champagne was offered but he asked for beer so I had to raid Loveday’s supplies. During dinner my father entertained us with stories of touring Borneo with The Winter’s Tale. He described a feast of woodworms, considered a delicacy but tasting like the sawdust of which they were composed, and told of an embassy dinner where guests in white tie and long dresses were politely offered a pair of pillowcases to tie on to their feet as protection against the bites of mosquitoes. He drew a vivid picture of natives launching little rafts bearing rice, eggs and flowers into the sea, a custom intended to propitiate the gods of fishing.

My mother had said she was sure Dodge was frighteningly clever and she longed to hear all about his fascinating political views. He had scowled at his plate and answered her in monosyllables. After he had gone home my mother gave an elaborate yawn, flapping her hand at her mouth in a parody of boredom.

My father, with one of the darting, caustic looks he had perfected playing Iago years ago, said, ‘What an extraordinary choice, Harriet. I think he may have given Mark Antony fleas.’

Dodge had black hair that stood up in spikes. His eyes were grey and generally filled with scorn. Just occasionally I saw this level stare of defiance waver and a look of doubt creep in, and then I felt sure that I loved him. At least I wanted to put my arms round him, which was probably the same thing.

Dodge was an anarchist. He wanted to rebuild the world and he was making a start with me. It was hardly possible to remark on the weather without provoking a diatribe on my hopelessly class-bound attitudes. He lectured me about my feeble capitulation to society’s attempts to abort the creative expansion of my spirit. In protest I had shown him some of my poetry and he had verbally torn it to shreds. Milton, Spenser and Shakespeare were merely propagandists for corrupt regimes. He threw my gods to the ground and trampled on them. I was not to despair altogether, though. He could teach me to free myself from the bondage of erroneous constructs. By going to bed with him I would take the first steps towards enlightenment. I was only too ready to believe that I was hopelessly in error and I was grateful for his interest.

Dodge lived on a piece of waste ground by the river in Deptford, in a disused lighterman’s hut. In one corner was a pile of ropes and tackle, and in another was Dodge’s bed, the frame made from flotsam picked up on the shore. Instead of a mattress there were heaps of sacks. Beside his bed he had a homemade bookcase filled with anarchic texts. It was all rough, damp and pretty uncomfortable. Yet it had, for me, a strange attraction. When we sat together on the steps of the hut, frying sausages over a driftwood fire and throwing pieces of bread to the seagulls while Dodge outlined his plans for the world, I was happy. He was a seeker after truth and there are not too many of these.

When we made love Dodge changed altogether from his austere public persona. Without the regulation black jersey, donkey jacket and jeans his body was soft and white and his hands were gentle. He would growl like a dog as he got excited and yelp at key moments. I have always liked dogs. I loved it when he lay with his head in the crook of my arm afterwards, sleeping like a child, his expression unguarded and a smile on his lips. I knew it could not last, that Dodge was not the man with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life but there was something about the rank smell of the river, the scream of the gulls, the hooting of the river craft and the scratchiness of the sacks that made me feel alive, a real person living in the real world.

I picked up the receiver.

‘Hello, Ekaterina.’ Dodge objected to Harriet on the grounds that it was too upper class. He was a great admirer of Prince Kropotkin, the famous anarchist, and almost anything Russian, apart from Communism, met with his approval. Of the social connotations of Ekaterina we were both in happy ignorance. ‘I suppose you were asleep. Dissipation will kill you in the end, you know.’ Dodge thought lying in past six o’clock was immoral. One ought to be in the streets, destroying the fabric of society. No doubt it is easier to rise early from damp hessian. ‘We’re having a meeting. At Nikolskoye. Twelve o’clock. Be there.’

There was a click followed by buzzing. Dodge was always terse on the telephone in case MI6 was tapping the line. Nikolskoye was the code word for 14A Owlstone Road, Clerkenwell, headquarters of SPIT, the Sect for Promoting Insurrection and Terrorism. I sighed. I had hoped to spend the morning peacefully mending my writing robe and reading Emily Dickinson for inspiration. I went down to the kitchen.

Next to my own attic fastness, I liked the kitchen best. It was a large room running the length of the basement, with windows at each end, and it was always warm because of the boiler, which stood in one corner. Loveday considered the boiler one of the Devil’s more fiendish creations. It required constant feeding and riddling and spewed fine ash everywhere, but I associated the smell of coke and the screeching sound of the door swinging on its hinges with the long, sweet days of childhood. In the wall opposite the boiler was the dumb waiter, a useful piece of equipment like a small lift worked by ropes that brought food piping hot into the dining room on the floor above. We children used to give each other rides in it on wet days. It marked a boundary between childhood and adolescence when our legs grew too long to be squeezed into the shaft.

The decoration of the kitchen had been entirely neglected, as my mother hardly ever visited it. Its homely fifties wallpaper – yellow blobs like scrambled egg against a grey background – and red Formica counter-tops, blistered by hot pans, were tasteless and friendly. A large table was marked by pen-nibs, scissors and poster paints. Almost my happiest times had been spent at that table, making glittering Christmas cards that buckled with too much glue or lumpy potholders knitted in rainbow wool.

Maria-Alba was frying mushrooms and bacon. She shot me a glance from small black eyes. She was cook and housekeeper to our family but to me she was far more than that. Maria-Alba’s plump breast had been my first pillow. I had insisted on entering the world feet first and my mother had been ill for a long time afterwards. Maria-Alba had fed me, bathed me and rocked me to sleep. Bron and Ophelia had been pretty babies but I was fat and plain so probably Ma was relieved that we got on so swimmingly. Maria-Alba’s nature was prickly and suspicious, but having got hold of me in a raw state, she could not doubt that my motives and intentions were innocent. From the first moment that I was capable of entertaining a feeling of confidence in anything, my trust had been in Maria-Alba.

Though she ran the household Maria-Alba was not treated as a servant. My parents had an intellectual prejudice against caste. When she wished she ate with us. Usually she preferred to eat alone in the kitchen or in her basement room, which was cosy with brightly flowered curtains and chair covers and embellished with lace mats, plates depicting windmills in relief, china donkeys and fat children peering into wishing-wells or sitting under toadstools. When I was little I loved these ornaments passionately and it was a sad day when my taste evolved to the point when I could no longer look on them with uncritical affection. From the age of about fifteen I preferred the carved ivory crucifix and the reproductions of religious paintings, which as a child I had found gloomy.

Maria-Alba’s Catholicism was quite unlike the kind practised by the nuns of St Frideswide’s Convent where we girls had been to school. The saints were her friends, good-natured and capricious, only tuning in to her incessant demands when the mood suited them. She wore her faith like a second skin and constantly upbraided God and his henchmen for their mistakes. The nuns who had taught us were placatory and subservient to God. Their saints were unsympathetic taskmasters and their religion was a system of pleasure-proscriptive rules.

Perhaps the differences had something to do with climate. Maria-Alba had spent her childhood in the broiling hills of Calabria, where the earth was the colour of cinnamon and violent storms rolled in daily from the sea. Maria-Alba’s mother had been a prostitute and had died from syphilis. I thought this might account for Maria-Alba’s abhorrence of sex and distrust of men, though she never said so.

Maria-Alba liked to cook and she was good at it. She enjoyed eating as all good cooks do and, by the time the events I am about to describe took place, she was generously proportioned even for her height, which was just under six feet. She had trouble with her legs, and her ankles had spilled out over her shoes like proving dough. Her black hair, now streaked with grey, was always a little greasy. Her best feature was her nose, which was large and curved like a parrot’s beak and gave her face distinction.

No doubt the reason Maria-Alba put up with us was because we understood and sympathised with her illness. She suffered from agoraphobia and the older she grew the worse it became. Once I was with Maria-Alba in Marks and Spencer – I must have been about twelve – surrounded by cheerful woollens and bright mirrors and comfortable smells of newness and cleanness. To my surprise, I saw Maria-Alba clinging with closed eyes to a rack of tangerine botany twin-sets. She was panting and trembling. When, in the taxi going home, I asked her what had frightened her she said that people were looking at her and thinking her crazy. She feared she had been iettata – in other words, that someone had cast the evil eye on her. Her belief in this superstition was quite as strong as her devotion to the Virgin. Frequently she made the sign to protect herself against the iettatore, the first and little fingers outstretched and the middle ones curled. After that Maria-Alba rarely went out, groceries were delivered, and I bought most of her clothes, with varying degrees of success.

‘Egg?’ Maria-Alba pointed her spatula at me.

‘No, thank you.’

‘You lose weight. Troppo frequentare with the Russians.’

I had told Maria-Alba several times that Dodge had been born and brought up in Pinner. I had been touched to discover that his real name was Nigel Arthur Wattles. The staid character this suggested was reassuring whenever Dodge, in militant mood, talked of Bond Street running with blood. But Maria-Alba persisted in believing that all anarchists were Soviets, dangerous political animals bent on the corruption of virtuous females.

‘Wearing black makes one look thinner.’

‘E troppo lugubre.’ Maria-Alba liked to wear orange, yellow or red, which made shopping for her extremely difficult in these days of punk for anyone under twenty-five, and pastels for anyone over.

‘It’s a badge of solidarity with the workers in the textile industry who have to slave all day making gorgeous clothes for the idle rich and who can only afford to clothe themselves in rags.’

‘Sciocchezze!’ Maria-Alba put down a plate of food in front of me and frowned. ‘You been doing bad things with that Russian.’

‘Honestly, Maria-Alba. I’m twenty-two. Years beyond the age of consent.’

‘Allora, bene! You admit!’ Maria-Alba’s glance was triumphant. ‘He give you a baby, certo, e poi un scandalo!’

‘How could there be a scandal? Everyone expects actors’ families to have babies out of wedlock. Pa would just be annoyed with me for being careless. Probably Ma would think it rather vulgar.’

Maria-Alba widened her eyes with indignation. ‘E il bambino? You bring him into the world, with no name and despise by the grandmother! Ah, povero bebè!’

‘Harriet! You’re going to have a baby!’ Cordelia, my youngest sister, had come down into the kitchen. ‘Oh, good! I’ve been longing to be an aunt for ages. I thought it would have to be you. I can’t imagine Ophelia letting that stupid Crispin stick his thing into her. Ugh!’ she shuddered elaborately. ‘I’d better find the pram and try to get the rust off.’ She had run upstairs before I could protest.

‘Senta, the young mind of Cordelia is macchiata. I ask Father Alwyn to come to talk to her. It is not right she think of sex like she do.’

Father Alwyn was a reedy, stooping young man with a nervous manner and when, recently, our paths had crossed on the heath, he had jumped when I said ‘Good morning’ and scuttled back towards the presbytery as though pursued by a hellish host.

‘I think possibly Cordelia knows more than he does about sex,’ I said.

‘Golly, Harriet!’ Cordelia had come back down again, her speedwell-blue eyes dismayed. ‘Isn’t it going to be agony? I saw this film and the woman having the baby was screaming the place down. She was sopping with sweat and practically tying the bars on the bed-head into clove-hitches. I don’t think I could bear it to be you.’ She flung her arms around me and began to sob.

‘What’s going on?’ Bron had come down after Cordelia. He sat at the table, snatched up the fork I had put down in order to comfort Cordelia and speared my rasher of bacon. ‘Any more where that came from, Maria-Alba, my darling?’ he said, between mouthfuls.

‘Harriet’s having a b-baby,’ Cordelia’s voice rose to a wail.

‘A baby?’ My eldest sister, Ophelia, who had drifted in after Bron, wrinkled her elegant nose in disgust. ‘My dear Harriet, how ghastly for you. I can’t bear the way they smell. Cheap talcum powder, milk and sick. It’s put me off breakfast.’ She floated upstairs again.

‘Really?’ Bron began on my mushrooms. ‘How idiotic. You’ll never get your figure back. And your mind will go to jelly.’

‘No, not really,’ I said a little crossly. ‘I wish you’d leave my plate alone. I’ve got to go out in a minute. Thank goodness I’m not having a baby if this is how my family receives the news.’

‘I don’t know whether to be pleased or sorry you aren’t,’ sniffed Cordelia, wiping her nose on my napkin. ‘It would’ve been fun to teach it tricks.’