Playing with the Grown-ups

'Kitty, it's Violet. I'm sorry to ring you in the middle of the night, but it's Mummy. Something's happened.'

She sits up, scrabbles for the phone in the dark.

'Violet?' she says.

She looks at her husband's broad back, every inch of which she cherishes.

'Coffee,' he says as greeting, disappearing to their kitchen. She laughs. She has always been able to wake, her brain engaged
from the moment she opens her eyes. He needs to be cajoled from sleep, with coffee and tendresse, something she has joked
with his mother about. His mother maintains it's a Southern affliction, a by-product of sugary heat, dawns so hot they make
the pavement steam.

'The sleepy South', his mother calls it.

'What time is it?' he says. 'I feel like we only just went to bed.'

'It's four-thirty,' she answers. 'The flight's at seven.'

'You're sure you don't want me to come? I can figure it out. I hate the thought of you being there on your own.'

'I won't be on my own. The others are all there. I'll be fine. It's what I'm good at, remember? Good in a crisis, that's me.'
She smiles at him.

'I don't think crisis management suits you. You were made for calm. You're my little Buddha.' He cups her stomach gently.

'At least her timing was good. Three months more and I couldn't have got on a plane if I'd wanted to.' She looks at her belly
with rue. 'Poor baby. There she was minding her own business in New York, and now look. Let's hope it's character building,
and I won't have scarred her for life before she's even out of the womb.'

'Mark?' she says. 'About the baby . . . You don't think I'll damage her before she's even left the gate? I wanted it all to
be so perfect.'

He wraps her in his arms.

'What's perfect, Kitty? Life is flawed. She has to meet her loopy relations sometime. Why not now? Life is full of imperfect,
my old sweetheart. Just say the word and I'll park the car and get on that plane with you.'

'I'll be fine. You can't take the time if we want a summer holiday,' she says, gathering herself.

As he drives away she looks at him from the kerb like a child with big serious eyes, and he feels his heart lurch.

She steadies herself, places her hand on her stomach as if for luck, and walks into the terminal, her overnight bag hanging
from her arm like a charm.

'Will you be QUIET, small child?' he roared, his huge hand banging on the wooden table, a full stop to the meandering chat
around him. 'A hen house; I live in a hen house! All of you women talk too much . . . peck, peck at my poor ears! Men do not
like this endless feminine banter. Men like women with MYSTERY don't you know?'

Starling chatter lulled, the chorus (Kitty's mother, aunts and grandmother) practised looking like enigmatic women with secrets,
until someone, likely her Aunt Elsie, spoiled it by laughing.

'Sexist,' Kitty muttered, her second favourite word. Since she turned eleven it had been replaced by 'alacrity'.

Her mother and her younger sisters were considered to be spectacular beauties. Not just valley beautiful, but beautiful all
the way to London. The telephone rang for them incessantly.

Kitty thought the routine was riotously funny. Her mother and her aunts did not.

Her mother said, 'You know, Papa, you can't keep us here for ever.'

'But I can try,' he answered. 'You're safe here.'

One out-of-wedlock baby born to his eldest teenage daughter was quite enough for him. Kitty saw it in the grim set of his
mouth as he hung up the phone.

'She is sad, Harald,' Bestemama answered, always with Scandinavian simplicity.

'Well, what does she have to be sad about, woman?! She is beautiful and she has this one, and the other two. . .' He motioned
angrily in Kitty's direction. 'Give her a gin and tonic, and let's be done with the tears. Exhausting stuff, all of this crying.'

Marina flashed him a look of sodden fury.

'Come on, you,' he said to Kitty. 'I've had enough of this. Let's take Ibsen for a walk in the bluebell woods.'

Ibsen was his mongrel, fast as a blade. His sleepy-eyed demeanour belied a sly murderous instinct. The farmer at the top of
the lane crossed himself when he saw him.

'Do I have to wear shoes, Bestepapa?' Kitty said.

'No. It's good to harden up your feet for the summer.'

He loped out of the front door, sighing as his hip gave a twinge of protest. Kitty skittled out after him like a shadow.

'What are you reading at school?' he asked her. She was in the third-form reading group, though she was in the juniors.

He grimaced.

'No lovely Fitzgerald? No Steinbeck?'

'I think they're trying to warn us against perilous ways,' she said, rolling her eyes to indicate that she thought perilous
ways were beneath her.

'I had an aunt who was a drug addict in Sweden. Well, actually a pair of aunts. Opium smokers the both of them, raddled their
brains . . . Never understood it myself. I'd much rather have a lovely gin and tonic any day.'

'So would I,' Kitty said.

'That's the stuff.' He leaned on his stick, and they walked in warm silence up to the woods, Ibsen hungrily regarding the
chickens, who gazed at him, their black eyes sharp like stones.

Kitty's brother and sister, Sam and Violet, were twins. They had a different father. Theirs was a magician called Barry. Kitty's
was the husband of someone who wasn't her mother and his name was Mr Fitzgerald.

She heard the grown-ups say her mother was his kept woman, which didn't make sense to Kitty, because he hadn't kept her. He
paid for Kitty's school, and sent her vast amounts of pocket money which she never knew what to do with.

Her mother called Mr Fitzgerald her 'one great big love'. Their affair began when she was very young but because he absolutely
couldn't marry her (the contributing factor being Mrs Fitzgerald, a solid prenuptial agreement, and the iron grip of the Vatican
on his conscience), he was perfectly happy when she gave birth to Kitty (Mrs Fitzgerald was unable to have babies) and because
of having 'pots of money' (said in a whisper) he was perfectly happy to give her mother some of it.

It was an arrangement that worked, at least for them. Kitty read Daddy Long Legs and thought it might be about her. She was
compelled by shadowy, mysterious men; in particular, detectives.

When she watched her favourite programme, Bergerac, on television, she couldn't decide whether she wanted him to be her father,
or kiss her passionately, as they chased criminals together. It was what Bestepapa called 'a conflict of interest'.

When her mother ran off with Barry the magician and married him after three weeks, Nora was so angry she didn't address one
single word to Marina for a whole month. Kitty knew this was torture, because Nora's silence was more powerful then any shouting,
or the infinitely preferable quick sting of a smack. When she was spectacularly bad, within five minutes she wished she hadn't
been, because to be put in Nora's Coventry for fifteen minutes was to sit in a cold damp room with no light. Kitty was very
well behaved.

Nora was tiny like Tinkerbell with steel-blue eyes and the softest earlobes you would ever touch. She was exceedingly good
at crossword puzzles and even better as a secret keeper. Unlike her mother, who couldn't keep a secret to save her life, though
she tried.

Kitty never saw Nora cry, not even when their dog Pelly died. She grew quiet instead. When they went to smart places, she
wore pearls and a splash of Ma Griffe and navy-blue jumpers from Marks & Spencer with brown slip-on shoes. She said they were
practical. Her mother sometimes called her 'the husband'. 'I don't know,' she said when someone asked her something. 'You'll
have to ask the husband - she rules this roost.' Kitty sort of knew that this was true.

Sam and Violet were seven years younger than Kitty, who didn't count them in the grand scheme of things, because she thought
them babyish and beneath her, in the way that older children do.

Her mother met Barry the magician on a rainy day at Kitty's friend Bella's sixth birthday party in Shropshire. She was married
to him for one year. He had brown velvet eyes, a thirst for whisky, and was always broke. His final trick was to leave her
mother with a great bellyful of twins. When Sam and Violet were born, he joined the circus and Kitty's mother said she couldn't
cope with his 'wandering ways'. In the end, he went off with a woman lion tamer named Lou with strong-woman thighs. Her mother
snorted whenever Lou or her thighs were mentioned.

Sam and Violet's childhood was from a Victorian children's book. They went to nursery and finger-painted and sang, appearing
neatly before supper in the big house, scrubbed and sweet, their round faces a canvas for the shower of kisses poured forth
by the grown-ups. Kitty was allowed to have supper at the big table, and they ate in the playroom. Bestepapa thought babies
and small children were tiresome, and complained often that girl babies shrieked like fishwives. He said, 'They're all right
in small measures, but definitely small.'

Bestepapa adored Nora, and was the only person that dared to question her on salacious matters; the rest of them feared her
wrath too much.

'Have you had lovers, Nora?' he asked one night, slurping his oxtail stew with marathon gulps.

Everyone held their breath waiting for the tight-lipped-Nora rage that was bound to follow.

Nora smiled a slow, secret smile.

'Ooh yes, Mr Larsen, of course I have.'

This was news to Kitty. She imagined Nora a sacred vessel that none had sailed in. She envisaged an anonymous manly hand,
creeping swarthily through Nora's steely curls. It made her feel anxious.

'And how many lovers have you had?' Bestepapa's eyes, bright and Arctic-blue, beamed into her.

Bestemama started to cough, and asked whether anyone thought it was hot.

Nora fanned her hand airily.

'I'm never hot, Mrs Larsen. Going back to your question, Mr Larsen, which is obviously not one for small company, I'd say
yes. Then I'd tell you to mind your own beeswax. All right?'

Bestepapa roared with laughter.

'Good show,' he said. 'Good show.'

Nora smiled again; her foreign, girlish smile and Kitty was plagued by thoughts of her in amorous clinches with every man
in the village.

Before she went to bed Kitty was allowed to watch half an hour of television with Nora in her little sitting room. Nora was
the programme dictator. She liked videos from the National Geographic and things about history. Kitty thought Nora was the
cleverest person she knew.

'Nora?' Nora had painted her nails maroon, and Kitty knew this was new evidence of her femme fatale status.

'Yes, Kitty?'

'You're not planning to run away, are you?'

'Oh, no imminent plans. I'll tell you when I am. If Sam and Violet give more trouble like they did tonight over bedtime, I
may.'

'No, but you're not going to run off with Gareth Jackson from the farm, are you? Because I think he likes you. When he talks
to you he goes bright red like a big fat sunburnt bum.'

'Is that what you think?' Nora's eyes twinkled.

Kitty nodded.

'No. I'm going to stay and look after you lot till you're big, if you haven't sent me to an early grave.'

She smiled, and wiping the frown from Kitty's forehead with a finger, said, 'Oh you've got your mother's imagination, that's
for sure.'

Kitty loved being told she had the traits of her mother, even if they were small.

When she was on her best form, Marina was Kitty's most favourite thing. At school they were asked to write a list of their
favourite things, and hers was all about her mother. Her mother loved to laugh as much as she loved to cry. She took her on
outings to antique-clothes shops, where they tried on tea-stained wedding dresses and tiaras. In the garden they had a christening
for Kitty's doll, Jumble Sale, where her mother was the vicar, baptising Jumble Sale in the bird bath, and Nora was the godmother,
even though she was an atheist.

On Sundays, if it was warm, her mother took her for picnics on the hill by Hay House, a hill that looked out to for ever.
When she smiled at her, Kitty felt like she was the only person in the entire world, because her mother's smile covered her
from head to toe. Marina's smile reached past her eyes way up into her golden crown of hair. Everyone said she should have
been a film star.

In the summer they lay in the garden with lemon juice on their hair to bleach it blonder. She showed Kitty the exact tree
in the bluebell woods where Richard McDonald the doctor's son had pressed her up into the bark and kissed her when she was
twelve.

She taught her, over miniature cups of coffee, thick with milk and sugar, how to do the twist in her studio. Her studio was
at the edge of the orchard, and it was yet another facet of Hay House's magic, filled with silk butterflies and orchids, old
love letters, and postcards from people who knew her so well they didn't sign their names. To be invited in was a treat, to
be drenched in a world that reeked of her mystery. Kitty got the same feeling she had at church when they went at Easter or
Christmas. Sometimes when her mother was up in London, Kitty stole in like a ghost, breathing in the air so still and full
of her.