Read Playing with the Grown-ups Online
Authors: Sophie Dahl
Playing with the Grown-ups (4 page)
Ingrid and Elsie stared dumbly, in disbelief.
'I understand it may take some getting used to . . . Secondly I have decided that in order to practise my spirituality freely,
when Swami-ji goes back to America in September I will follow. I'm going to live in New York so I can be closer to his ashram
in Pennsylvania, but so I can also carry on with my painting. I've already found a gallery there that wants to represent me.'
'What about your children, Marina?' Bestemama whispered, pale-faced, her hands scratching in the air.
'Violet and Sam and Nora will come with me, but I've decided it would be too disruptive to Kitty's education at this stage
to put her in a foreign school system. So I've started looking at boarding schools in England.'
Kitty shut her eyes and held her breath. If I can hold my breath and keep my eyes shut for two minutes, she thought, when
I open them everything will be normal and this will all have been a horrible joke.
She heard Bestepapa say in a strangled voice, 'Kitty must stay here. This is her home.'
She started counting, one elephant, two elephant, squeezing her eyes so tightly that not a glimmer of light penetrated them.
Her lungs felt like they would burst.
When she was at ninety-seven seconds she heard her mother say, 'Swami-ji thinks Kitty should stay in England. Not here, but
at boarding school. He has given his blessing.'
Kitty heard Shanti warble, 'Swami-ji knows best.'
She thought she was going to die, right there in the dining room with her eyes shut and her family gathered around her.
She cried out, 'But he doesn't even know me! How can he know what's best?'
Her mother turned and stroked her face tenderly.
'I know it doesn't make sense now, darling. I know this is a shock. I know it may seem selfish. But I'm doing what in my heart
I know is best. Best for all of us. I promise you, it WILL make huge sense when you are a grown-up.'
After that there was more shouting. Shanti shuffled out towards the garden, dabbing at her moist face with a tissue. Her mother
said awful things to Bestepapa. She said he was controlling, that he was incapable of showing his love, that she was a grown
woman and that he had ruined every relationship with a man she'd ever had.
She started crying when she said, 'I would have had a chance with Fitzgerald if it wasn't for you. He would have left his
wife. He loved me, he really, really loved me. You frightened him away. You threatened him. Kitty could have had a father,
you bastard.'
Bestemama sprang up like a lioness.
'What did you say?' She spoke just above a whisper, but it filled the room like a scream.
'He's ruined my life,' her mother said in a child's voice.
'You are a fantasist, Marina, if you think any of what you're saying is true.' She looked as if she were seven feet tall.
Her whole body radiated with anger. 'Your father has worked hard his entire life to make sure you girls are secure. He has
given you EVERYTHING. But it's never enough for you. Nothing is ever enough. What more could we have done? Answer me that.
You have been pandered to and indulged more than anyone else in this house. And this is how you respond to us? With this poison?
Your father is TIRED, Marina. He has fought in a war. He built this house with his hands. You are exhausting him with all
of this.'
Kitty looked at Bestepapa's hands, as though she was seeing them for the first time. They were long and limply mottled with
age. They were tired hands. She had never noticed before.
Elsie and Ingrid flanked Bestepapa's chair. Marina and Kitty sat alone at the other end of the table. Kitty saw they were
now two separate families. She did not want her mother to cry, but she did not want to see Bestepapa folded in, as though
he had been shot. She certainly did not want to go to boarding school. The shouting continued, unabated.
Kitty took her mother's hand.
'Mummy didn't mean it!' she said. 'She's just upset, aren't you? Mummy?'
There was a palpable shift in the room. In a breath, Bestemama took Bestepapa to his bedroom to lie down. Ingrid and Elsie
muttered something about going to the village, and sped off in Ingrid's MG, leaving Kitty and Marina alone in the dining room.
Her mother looked into her eyes.
'You're my best girl, you know that, don't you?' Her voice, though it still quavered, was strong. 'From now on it's you and
me, kiddo. That is - if you don't mind, of course.' She smiled at her.
Although Kitty thought this sounded potentially lonely, a thrill passed through her at the thought of being just the two of
them against the world. She forgot the existence of everyone else, the looming prospect of boarding school and separation,
a sea of separation.
'I don't mind,' she said, and she smiled back.
S
he calls her Aunt Elsie from inside the duty-free shop as she toys half-heartedly with miracle wrinkle creams. Elsie is up
at 6 a.m.; her Pilates teacher comes to her immaculate apartment at 6.30
every morning.
'Oh Kit-kat,' she says. Her voice is still laced with hills and home, although she has lived in New York for fifteen years.
She lives on Park Avenue in an apartment with silent polished floors.
Elsie's first apartment, on Elizabeth Street, would in its entirety fit into her present sitting room. Kitty remembers lying
with Elsie on the cream sofa in the little flat, watching reruns of Full House on Sunday mornings; Elsie drinking coffee with
smudged eyes, saying she was going to marry John Starnos one day soon. At night Kitty could hear her aunt's every footfall,
padding over uneven floorboards, as she double locked the front door to keep them safe, blew out all the candles, turned off
the lights, slipping into her bedroom, with a creaky twitch of the door. Through the thin walls that divided them, Joni Mitchell
sang them both to sleep.
Now Elsie is married to an Italian sculptor, and they have two brown-eyed sons, who call her 'Mommy'. Kitty laughs at this,
as Elsie seems shocked that she could have birthed a child with brown eyes AND an American inflection. Over a recent empathetic
cup of tea, Kitty said gently, 'Did you really think they would come out with English accents? You do live in New York.'
'Well, I did rather, darling. I thought they'd pick it up from me. I thought it might be genetic.'
At which they looked at each other and fell about.
Kitty has absent-mindedly applied half of the make-up counter to her face. She catches sight of her panda-bear eyes in the
mirror. 'Oh shit,' she says, wiping off lavender eye shadow with furious fingers.
'Do you have a warm coat?' says Elsie, interrupting her theatrics with reason. 'I was just there for the collections; it's
freezing.'
'I'm wearing a warm coat, one you'd approve of. It's cashmere, but I look like a nursery pudding spilling out of it, it's
so tight now.' Kitty looks at her body with mild affection. It is a stranger's body.
'Yum! Nursery puddings, like one of Nora's. She made the best rice pudding I've ever eaten. You will take care of yourself,
won't you?'
'I will, Else. Lots of love,' Kitty says, rubbing away the last stubborn streak.
On the plane the stewardess's chatter calms her.
'Have you been on holiday?' she asks, hearing Kitty's accent, handing her an extra blanket.
'No, I live in New York. I'm going to visit my family.'
'That's nice, lucky you. Are you going to see your mum and dad before you have the baby?' she says, casting her eyes down
at Kitty's stomach.
'Yes,' Kitty says, because that way it is easier.
I
just need distance,' her mother said, frowning. 'Bestemarna and Bestepapa don't understand the mechanics of change. I suppose
it's their age, though one would expect a bit more from Elsie and Ingrid. Amazing that we're related to a bunch of such narrow-minded
people.'
'You're having distance,' Kitty said. 'You're moving to New York.'
They were packing her mother's suitcase. Kitty put a silk shirt in the suitcase, and took it out again when her mother wasn't
looking.
'Emotional distance,' she said. 'Until they recognise my choice as being positive.'
In which case, Kitty felt, the distance was going to last a very, very long time.
'I don't mind if YOU speak to them. They're still your grandparents,' she added. 'I'm not asking you to choose or anything.'
'Will you come back for Christmas?' Kitty said.
'Yes. I will - or you'll come to me.'
'Where will I sleep?'
'In the bedroom I'll make for you.'
'All right. Do you think Mr Fitzgerald will write to me at school?' Kitty asked, making a face at Swami-ji's photograph over
her mother's shoulder as Marina wrapped him tenderly in a cashmere shawl.
'Yes. I'll ask him. He should.' She turned, and placed her hands on Kitty's cheek. 'I think it will be easier for you to have
more of a relationship with him when you're a bit older. Do you know what I mean? I know that's not necessarily what's right,
but it's just the way it is now, Magpie. That is the mystery of God's grace. I understand that it's desperately confusing
though . . .'
'Because of his wife?' Kitty asked.
'Well, yes, sort of. I think the whole thing makes him feel guilty.'
'You mean me?' Kitty found it difficult to believe someone who had not even met her could feel guilty about her from afar.
'No, darling, not you. The whole thing is just rather complicated.'
'I hate complicated. I like everything to be simple, and straightforward.'
Her mother kissed her.
'I know you do. Which is one of the reasons you're going to Dourfield - it's a lot more simple.'
Her mother's god-daughter, Evie, was one of the reasons Dourfield had been chosen. Evie had been at Dourfield since she was
seven. Before school started Kitty had only met her twice in her life. They had a strained tea the week before school, up
in London, at Evie's big house in Chelsea Green. Evie was impish and wore Levi Sols, and Kitty had felt like a moron in her
stripy jumper dress and her mother's fake pearl earrings, which had looked so bold and cool when she'd put them on in the
morning.
They sat in Evie's room, which had a double bed with a canopy and her own television.
'What music do you like?' Evie asked Kitty, surveying her stripes and earrings in a way that was not covetous.
'Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday . . .' Kitty racked her brains trying to think of something she'd seen on Top of
the
Pops, because Evie looked at her blankly.
'Who?' she said, wrinkling her little nose.
'Oh!' Kitty said. 'I know! I like Seal. I think he's really handsome.'
'He's black,' Evie said flatly, as if this ruled him out. 'With creepy scars. What about Bros?'
Kitty remembered a pair of skinny blond boys who wore leather jackets.
'Uh . . . Yeah, I like them too.'
Evie pointed to a poster on her wall.
'I'm going to marry Matt,' she said confidently. 'I'll be Mrs Goss. By the way,' she added, 'you're not going to bring clothes
like that to Dourfield, are you? Because people will think you're really WEIRD.'
'My jeans are in the wash,' Kitty lied, because she didn't own a pair of jeans. She wore Elsie and Ingrid's hand-me-downs,
and her mother's costume jewellery. Her love for all things shiny had earned her the family moniker of 'Magpie'.
When they left, her mother said to Evie, after giving her a beautiful necklace of dusty bottle-green beads, which Kitty instinctively
knew she would cast to the back of a dark drawer, 'You will look after Kitty, won't you, Evie my darling?'
'Yes, Marina.' Evie smiled sweetly and Kitty's mother squeezed her gratefully, which annoyed Kitty.
When they were in the car she gave a sigh of relief.
'I feel a lot better,' she said. 'You'll have a friend.'
Kitty looked at her in disbelief. Which part of the equation didn't she get? Her mother had to be truly gormless if she thought
that a 501-wearing, Bros-loving, pixie girl and she were going to be bosom buddies. Kitty raised an eyebrow meaningfully.
'Don't be such a worry wart,' her mother said. 'You'll be fine.'
'That's what you think. And she's a racist,' Kitty said, shooting her mother a nasty look through her glasses.
Ingrid and Elsie left for Paris the day before she left for Dourfield. Ingrid gave Kitty her most treasured possession, a
soft T-shirt that said 'Never mind the bollocks'. She wrapped it up in tissue paper and left it on the top of her school trunk.
It hadn't been washed, and it smelled of her Rive Gauche and clean hair. Elsie wrote her a note that said 'If you want to
run away you can come and live with us,' and stuck silver star stickers on the envelope. Kitty thought of them, wearing ballet
shoes, drinking
café au lait,
eating baby bites of delicate French pastries, their blonde hair swinging as they shimmied down the rue de L'Uni-versite.
On Sunday night, Elkie Brooks sang on the radio as they turned into Willow Road, the street that housed Dourfield School.
If the next song is by James Taylor, Kitty said to herself, then we'll turn around and go home. It will be a test. There was
no next song though. It was a phone-in for the saddest love story; Barbara from Epping won.
They unpacked her trunk, watched the parents mill around uncomfortably drinking tea and eating digestive biscuits, making
small talk with the eager house-parents.
Trying to postpone the terrible, inevitable departure, she kept stalling her mother.
'Come and look at the bathroom - there are four little baths all neat in a row!' Kitty was gay, a hostess.
'We saw it together before. I should really make a move, my darling,' her mother answered.
They had walked into the garden of the boarding house. Kitty could hear children outside the stone walls playing 'Mother May
I' on the street. She thought irrationally, I will never be able to play again. The sun was going down. She tugged at her
blazer. They made their way to her mother's red Beetle.
A
scarlet letter in a sea of Volvos.
Her mother opened the door and kissed her head.
'Mummy, please don't leave me here,' Kitty said urgently. 'You can't. Please let me come back to Hay with you.' Snot and tears
were pouring down her face but Kitty didn't care.
Marina started to cry too.
'Goodbye, Kitty. You'll be all right. I promise.'
She navigated her limbs into the small car and shut the door.
Kitty longed to throw herself at the car but the other parents were watching and she wanted them to think she was brave. She
watched as the car pulled out of the driveway, disappearing behind the wrought-iron gate.
Lying in a room full of strangers, shivering in her foreign sheets, in her checked pyjamas with their scratchy nametag, she
was too ashamed to cry. She wondered if Bestemama and Bestepapa were thinking of her. They would be finishing supper now,
in the all-pervading silence that had descended since her mother's departure. Marina's studio was stripped to an old bleached
shell. There was nothing left of her at Hay but the views she once loved.
The lights were turned out, a blissful nod to succumb privately to the tears that had been pricking at her eyes, for hours.
She held her breath so she wouldn't make a noise that was audible, and buried her face in her pillow. She wanted to run away,
but she realised she was in the middle of nowhere, the nearest train station twenty-five miles away. Her hand scrunched up
in the sheets by her side. She felt something brush against it that could have been a ghost, or a moth. Kitty thought the
dormitory was haunted and more tears came.
Seconds later she was clasped by a hot little hand, and Evie's voice whispered, 'Don't cry, Kitty, the first night is always
horrible, but you'll get used to it. I did.' And she held Kitty's hand tightly in the dark, so tightly she could feel Evie's
pulse beating steadily against her own, calming like the hands of a clock.
In the morning Kitty smiled at her shyly.
'Why are you looking at me like that? Are you spastic or something?'
The dorm was frigid with cold; Evie was putting on her tights and vest under the sheets.
'Just because your mother's my godmother, does not mean we have to be friends.' She said it loudly, so the other girls heard.
Kitty quickly recognised what Evie was offering her. She would be an ally only in the dark.
On the day she was twelve, there was no breakfast in bed. Kitty woke in her narrow bed as the electric overhead light flickered
on to illuminate the other nine narrow beds in the room.
'Up you get.' The strident voice of the housemistress Mrs Phelan rang out.
There was a thin chorus of dissonance.
Kitty didn't tell anyone it was her birthday. She got up and went over to the sink in the corner of the big hospital white
room to see whether her face looked any older. It didn't, but there were the scarlet beginnings of a spot between her eyebrows.
'A
bindi spot', her mother would have called it. She realised grimly that this and the two straggling hairs under her left armpit
was the puberty she longed for, the thought of which, along with her mother, made her eyes well. She wanted to ring and tell
her mother, but they weren't allowed to speak on the phone for the first two weeks so the boarders could 'adjust'.
Kitty brushed her teeth and washed her face with the facewash her mother had bought from Boots the Chemist's. She then stroked
cucumber water on the way Marina had shown her, which made the other girls laugh. They said she was like an old lady. 'Be
sure to do your neck and décolleté,' her mother had said the night before she left, as they were packing her trunk. 'Then
you'll always have beautiful skin.'
'Like yours?' Kitty said.
'I have never in my life gone to sleep without washing my face,' her mother said. 'Not even if I was raddled with exhaustion.'
In the dining hall, Kitty stood in line with Rosaria and Olivia. Kitty knew from the moment she saw her that she would love
Rosaria, who was tiny and ferocious with the biggest cackling laugh she'd ever heard. It was like the rattle of a machine
gun. She could swear fluently in Italian, and her eyes were green like the orchard at Hay. Olivia was quieter and more reserved
but she had a dark wryness to her which Kitty trusted, because it reminded her of Bestemama. Olivia was tall like her, with
size seven feet. Rosaria was a size three. They were all in the same form. Rosaria and Kitty had been placed in the bottom
stream for maths, and the top for English. Olivia was in the top stream for everything. They were in different dorms.
The eggs swam in a silver tray of grease, and the sausages lay anaemic next to forlorn hash browns. Vegetarianism was now
a viable prospect, she thought.
She sat down at one of the long wooden tables with Rosaria and Olivia. The day was grey like the Lifebuoy soap in the girls'
bathroom.
'Ugh.' Rosaria looked at her fried eggs sadly. 'Do you think they're trying to fatten us up and give us spots so no one will
ever fancy us and we will remain pure and unsullied till the sixth form?'
A
shudder went through Kitty. I can't stay here till the sixth form. Be calm, she told herself. It's like Nora says, 'This too
shall pass.' Nora would have been taking Sam and Violet to nursery right now, warm in the smoky fug of her Golf, listening
to Radio 4 as Sam and Violet chattered in the back. But now Nora was in New York, taking Sam and Violet to kindergarten in
a yellow taxi. Nora was probably living in a constant state of fear due to muggers and 'the immigration'. Could she buy Angel
Delight in Manhattan? Kitty doubted it. I could get her some with my pocket money, she thought, and send it to her when I
have my first exeat: from 12 p.m. Saturday to 6 p.m. Sunday. That was six weeks away. The trees at Hay would be practically
naked by then.
She had imagined boarding school as
Malby Towers
and
The Twins at Saint Clare's
peppered with a bit of
Grease.
She'd thought she could start her own gang and they'd wear pink satin jackets at weekends. Kitty hoped she'd have a boy from
the wrong side of the tracks, and second-skin leggings. She made the fatal mistake of confiding this to Evie and her group
by the pond after lacrosse.
She sat with Veronica, Evie's best friend, Imogen Holli-day, the prettiest girl in the school, and Rosaria and Olivia. She
was good at telling the spookiest ghost stories, and she told three in succession that made them squeal. Kitty miscalculated.
She took their post-story pleasure to mean that the forum was now hers for the taking.
'I've got an idea,' she said quickly, high with a sense of belonging.
'Yeah?' Evie yawned.
'You know in Grease - the film Grease - how they have a gang of girls?'
'Yeah.' Evie looked over at Veronica.
'Well, I thought we could, you know, do it here. We could make pink jackets and stuff..'
Rosaria shook her head and gave Kitty a look of syrn-pathy, which made her heart sink.
'YOU want to start a gang?' Evie gave a yowl of laughter. 'Like in Grease? Uh, how old are you?'
'Twelve,' she said, ploughing on. 'You could be the leader.'
'If we were to have a gang, you mong, WHICH we never would, but IF we were, A, you wouldn't be in it. And B, Imo would be
the leader because she's the prettiest.'
Imogen opened her big eyes.
'I don't want to be in a gang.' She sounded worried.