Read Playing with the Grown-ups Online
Authors: Sophie Dahl
Playing with the Grown-ups (2 page)
The house was surrounded by ancient orchards whose sturdy trees were made for climbing. There was an aviary in the main garden,
home to a rainbow of sherbet-coloured canaries who keened lovingly when Bestepapa came to shut them up at dusk.
Kitty's school was a sixteen-minute walk down the lane, a walk that she loved most in the winter where, still bathed in the
porridgy half-light of morning, she walked feeling that she was the first to see the world as it was just shaking awake. Stepping
firmly on the frost, in her red winter boots, she was the first to hear the longing whistle of the train as it flew over the
bridge, the first to hear the neighbour's car splutter alive in protest at the cold, Classic FM sending her on her crackling
way.
Kitty liked school. Her mother and her aunts were legend in the village and some of this stardust by association rubbed its
coppery sheen on her, even though she had glasses, and unlike her mother she could not play netball, or, like Ingrid and Elsie,
win a prize for the high jump. She did have her mother's eyes, silvery grey, and a fortune teller at the village fete once
told Kitty they would get her in trouble. She hoped so. She felt a pretender to the family glamour, even when girls from the
fifth form showed her a picture in Vogue, her mother gazing soulfully out of its pages, her sadness palpable perhaps only
to her oldest child.
Her illegitimacy too, was a badge of separation, though not one that she could divine. The absence of her father, given his
marital status, was not something that she questioned - she had Bestepapa and Bergerac. The girls at school found it ceaselessly
fascinating, so Kitty answered their questions with studied affront, because she realised early on that it was considered
a social hindrance to have an unmarried mother. She manufactured hysteria when Katrina Donnelly called her a bastard after
fouling her in netball as the other girls stared on in mawkish sympathy waiting for her tears.
When her mother wasn't prone, painting, or in London, she waited for Kitty by the gate after school. She wore vintage thirties
chiffon dresses, her long pale legs and knickers whispers through the fabric. Her short scarlet nails and gypsy hoops cemented
her fate: she was a magnet for the pursed lips and scorching eyes of other mothers and the slavish open-mouthed worship of
their daughters.
If her mother was up in London Elsie and Ingrid would dress Kitty up and smuggle her into the pub. They had done this since
she was small and they barely qualified for pub drinking themselves. Elsie was seventeen to Kitty's eleven, Ingrid eighteen.
Her mother was twenty-seven.
Walking down the lane holding her hands, they told her who they fancied. In the dark their blonde hair glinted and swirled
behind them like mist. They shared a B & H, but Ingrid got angry with Elsie and said that she was disgusting because she always
'bum-sucked' cigarettes.
'Who do you fancy, Kitten?'
'Don't be stupid,' she said gloomily. 'I go to school with girls.'
'What about that heavenly boy with acne in the chemist's . . . I know you love him.' Elsie dug her in the ribs.
'Shut up,' Kitty said. Her neck was hot in the dark.
She liked the fuggy pub. They made steak sandwiches and crispy chips, and she was allowed Appletise in the bottle with a straw.
'Stop,' Kitty said. 'One moment. I have a pain in my ovaries. A serious pain. I think I have to go back to the house, and
get one of my sanitary towels.'
'Not this again,' Ingrid said. 'Kitty, you do not have your period, OK? Just stop it. You probably won't get it for another
two years. You're completely flat-chested. Why do you want it so badly? It's really strange. When you get it you'll be sorry:
it's not fun.'
'I think I have it, I do. I can feel things moving inside me, and I have a cramp.'
'We're going to ignore you if you carry on. It's called the curse not the blessing. I'll bet you your pocket money it's not.
Are you willing to take a bet?'
'No,' Kitty said.
'Would you like to go to another school? Boarding school, like we did?' Elsie asked.
'Don't think so. Maybe, if there were boys.'
* * *
Boarding school was a topic of tired discussion at Hay House. Kitty had wriggled out of it for years. The others had all gone
from eight to sixteen. Kitty knew secretly that one of the reasons her mother wanted her to go was so she could go up to London
and not feel guilty. If she was away at school, she wouldn't be there to stare at her mother with accusing eyes when she came
back the next day from a Party.
Her mother sat huddled in the sitting room with Elsie and Ingrid, their hushed voices and squawks of laughter wafting under
the door as Kitty eavesdropped.
'God, I want to move to New York,' her mother said. 'What can I do here? There's nothing to do, I'll be stuck here for ever
with you and the bloody chickens.'
Kitty ran into the room, scandalised.
'There's me!' she shouted. 'I'm here! Don't forget me! And there's everything to do, the walks and the woods and the canaries
and the mornings . . .' She realised that she couldn't think of anything else and began to cry.
Marina pulled her into a familiar softness that smelled of Mitsouko and Marlboro Reds.
'Hush, hush, sweet girl, I would never leave you anywhere. Come and sit on my lap. I was just talking . . . being a silly
chatty mummy . . . Whilst I realise that Hay is joy for you, my little bird, sometimes I get a bit bored here.'
'It should be INSPIRING to you, you're a painter. No one else is bored, just you.'
'I am,' Elsie said.
'I want to move to Paris,' Ingrid said.
'Well, I don't understand you - I think you're all horrible and disloyal to the lovely place where you were born!'
They laughed and fluttered about Kitty, plastering scented kisses on her head, their soft hands pulling her this way and that,
until, sated with love and ravenous, she ran to the kitchen to pester Bestepapa for one of his bacon and marmalade sandwiches,
feeling that things were restored to their rightful order.
Kitty always measured the passing of time by the calendar of her birthday, which fell, inevitably, like a spent plum, during
the first week of the autumn term. The Larsens were big on birthdays, and from the moment she woke, Kitty was treated like
a queen. Her mother brought her breakfast in bed, and she had been there for each and every birthday of Kitty's small life.
It was the one day of the year Kitty was officially allowed coffee, and it arrived in a great oversized cup, so sweet it made
her grimace, then smile, and her mother sat on her bed and told her, each year, the story of the day she was born. Kitty loved
the story of her beginning; it reminded of her of Bestepapa's Viking stories:
My waters broke at three in the morning. I had been ready for your arrival for weeks, and my suitcase sat at the end of my
bed neatly packed, so nothing halted my trip to the hospital. I knocked on Bestepapa and Bestemarna's door, with a navy-blue
pea coat on top of my nightie, and I said, 'The baby's coming.' Bes-tepapa leapt out of bed, and he was as agitated as I was
calm. Bestemama kissed my stomach for luck (she had to stay to look after Elsie and Ingrid) and we said goodbye.
When we walked outside, everything seemed electric. The moon lit up the garden so we could follow the path to the car. It
was an Indian summer that year, and everything was still in bloom, and I remember thinking that the roses had never looked
more voluptuous, or smelled quite as beautiful. The night was so thick and alive with magic it was tangible.
As
we were getting into the car, the canaries, in the silence of the garden, sang out, as though they were heralding the beginning
of your journey, and wishing us well.
We drove to Oxford, Bestepapa and I, listening to Duke Ellington and eating boiled sweets. Just before we got there my contractions
became closer and closer together, so sharp they took my breath away.
Bestepapa had smuggled a bottle of champagne into the waiting room, and he paced there for seven hours, as I screamed and
pushed, pushed and screamed and the world was nothing but you and me, and this extraordinary, other-worldly pain, but it kept
reminding me how alive I was, how very much I wanted you, and I called out for Bestemama as you were pulled out by forceps
that looked like medieval instruments of torture. You screamed, outraged that you were in this cold place of strip-lights
and intrusion. They placed you in my arms. You had barely any hair, and because of the forceps, your little nose was squashed
to one side of your face, as though you had been in a boxing match. But when I looked at you, I had never seen such perfection,
or felt such an all-consuming love. I was on fire with love for you.
The doctor went into the hall to tell Bestepapa that you were born and he shouted and hooted so much they had sternly to tell
him to shut up. He came in and he held you in his huge hands like you were a baby butterfly, crying big salty tears that fell
on your face. You seemed undisturbed by all of the commotion, and Bestepapa declared you, in a choking voice,
'
A GOOD EGG.'
Her mother cleared her throat.
'Well, birthday girl.' She stroked Kitty's hair back from her eyes. 'You know the rest.'
Having feasted on the rich tale of her existence, Kitty got ready for the spare banality of school. Ingrid and Elsie took
her shopping in the afternoon, and there was a big birthday supper, whose menu she was allowed to dictate, like a miniature
gourmand with an eye for excess.
Her mother came back from one of her London trips flushed and dizzy. Kitty presumed she had met a man and took up her watchpost
outside the sitting room.
'Who is he?' asked Ingrid.
'It's God. I've found God,' Marina said serenely.
There was silence as her sisters waited for the punchline.
'I always felt like something was missing. I've ached my entire life; except when I was pregnant.'
This was news to Kitty. She wondered if a lifelong ache was like the flu. It sounded painful.
'But I've found God and now I feel whole.'
Elsie's giggle broke the spell.
'That's classic! Woohoo, God! . . . You are joking?' she asked nervously.
Kitty heard a match being struck, the measured drag of a cigarette.
'No, Lillian Rhodes invited me to what I thought was a yoga class, this teacher they've all been banging on about, and I went
in exercise clothes to this house in Victoria, and I was sort of dreading it, and I was meant to meet Lola and the Baron for
dinner after at La Farniglia. When I walked in, incense was burning and there was a circle of people sitting at the feet of
this, this, being. Everyone looked so happy and full of love. No one was judging anyone . . . I sat down and HE looked at
me, a look of utter compassion. I felt like a boulder rolled aside and my heart opened when I sat at the Guru's feet and received
his blessing. I can't really explain it, except to say I felt like I had come home.'
'Fantastic. Far out. So you're in love with a guru, very sixties of you, Marina,' yawned Ingrid. 'How was Peter's party? Has
the Baron said anything about me?'
Kitty could tell from the silence that her mother was giving them a withering look. She bit her thumbnail.
'Marina, can you get us tickets for the Rolling Stones?'
They were dismissing this as one of her mother's whims.
But now Marina had purpose, and carried herself as though she contained the secret of bliss. Kitty found it all infuriating.
Her new mother didn't swear and smiled beatifically whenever Kitty misbehaved. Her new mother got up early and sat crossed-legged
in the dining room deep in prayer.
'Can you try to be quiet? I'm meditating,' she said with the smile that Kitty was certain she'd copied from the photograph
of Mother Teresa that was stuck on her bathroom mirror.
'Well, WE are trying to make breakfast,' Besternama said tolerantly.
'Bugger off, Buddha!' was Bestepapa's response.
Now Marina did not cry, as she'd done before, she looked at her family as though she pitied their souls, hoping for their
liberation.
'Bloody Maggie T,' Nora said, watching the news. 'Who does she think she is?'
'I'm sure she's filled with God's love, Nora, like the rest of us,' Marina said, blissfully smoking a cheroot.
'I'll show you God's love, woman. That smile you're wearing is giving me the heebie-jeebies,' Kitty heard Nora mutter under
her breath as she flew out of the room to put the eggs on for tea.
Marina bowed her head.
The thin end of the wedge was at six o'clock, Bestepapa's sacred gin and tonic hour, where nightly he hummed tunelessly to
Beethoven's Seventh, and imbibed like a bootlegger. Kitty sat next to him and did her homework and he let her have one sip
of his drink, a big one.
They were just settling into their ritual when across the Beethoven came the mystical throb of a sitar followed by a mournful
wail from her mother. Kitty thought that maybe she was crying, and became heartened.
'Come with me.' Bestepapa gave Kitty a look that promised trouble.
A
recklessness came over her and itched like a rash. They crept up the stairs along the hall which reeked of incense, stopping
in Ingrid and Elsie's bathroom and applying orange lipstick to the spot between their eyes. Bestepapa looked deranged, and
Kitty gasped with pleasure at his theatrical touch.
'You're brilliant!' she said.
'Shush.' He winked, holding his finger to his lips.
Opening the study door, Bestepapa sprang in whirling like a dervish as she tried to keep up, doing an impromptu belly dance,
rolling her white tummy in and out with the music. They clapped their palms together in a spontaneous Hindu high five.
Her mother opened one eye and glared at them.
'It's fine,' she said. 'Laugh at me. It's your dharma. Though frankly, Kitty, I expect more of you. I thought you were interested
in other cultures, but it would seem that's not the case.'