Moonshine. Victoria Clayton
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put in an extra bottle of cognac while you were coming off the courts. It’s a relief that it’s all gone so well. I feel I owe it to the old place to try to make these things a success. Don’t know why I should care but I do.’
‘Let me give you a hand with those.’
Dickie handed me the bag of old balls. ‘Thanks. We always change them before the final match though there’s nothing wrong with them. They’re not heavy but a bit awkward with this damned leg. I thought I’d put them behind the screen in the China House for the time being. Really, I want an excuse to look at the ferns. I’ve been too busy getting the garden ready for the tennis to check they’ve been properly watered.’
We turned off along the path that led to the Chinese garden. Regal lilies with white, waxy throats and garnet streaks on the backs of their petals leaned over the rosemary hedge. Their powerful exhalations were like a drug, setting one’s mind free to dream. Tortoiseshell butterflies fluttered like twists of coloured paper among the frothy stands of Verbena bonariensis.
The ferns were taking root and beginning to put out new fronds. The interior of the China House seemed velvety dark to our dilating pupils. I leaned against a bedpost while Dickie stowed the balls out of sight.
‘The silk for the bed came this morning,’ said Dickie. ‘I’ll pop back to the house and fetch it, shall I, so we can get an idea of how it’s going to look?’
‘Lovely,’ I said, marvelling at the myriad emerald flecks that buzzed round the room everywhere I rested my eyes. When I closed them they were still there, swirling like clouds of gnats.
‘I may be five minutes or so. I want to check that everyone’s got what they need.’
‘No hurry.’
After Dickie had gone I sat on the Chinese bed. The old counterpane that was its temporary covering was deliciously cool and soft. I removed my shoes and stretched out full length. The room revolved in time to the strange music inside my head, a combination of buzzing bees, singing birds and the pulse of my own blood. I heard Dickie come back. Felt the bed sink beneath his weight, felt his arm slide beneath my head that was as weak as a snapped stalk. Heard him say, ‘My love, my love. Don’t resist me any longer. This had to be.’
It was not Dickie. I knew this by a violent quiver of joy that ran from my burning forehead to my naked feet.
‘Of course,’ I murmured. ‘But I … so terribly … didn’t … want …’
‘It’s too late for regret. It always was.’
He was right. I had been a hypocrite, paying lip-service to propriety, trying to cheat myself into believing that my own sense of probity could conquer selfish desire. From the moment we had stood in that hideous room at the Carlton House Hotel sharing a dish of stale peanuts I had known that it was only a matter of time before I became Burgo’s lover. I gave myself up to the inevitable.
‘Do look at those sheep.’ I peered through slashing rain at bundles of grey and white wool crouching down beside rocks. ‘They’ve got the most magnificent curling horns.’
‘Remember what it says in the Bible about dividing the nations, the worthy from the unworthy? You’ll never make a shepherdess if you can’t tell sheep from goats.’
‘You mean there are wild goats here? How romantic! We might be in Ancient Greece. Apart from the weather.’
‘Those are the Maumturk Mountains.’ Kit pointed to our left. ‘And beyond them in the distance a group called the Twelve Bens.’
All around us were sombre mountains, water running down them in rills. At their feet the ground fell to the road in tracts of undulating green dotted with rocks and clumps of spiky grass.
‘That’s cotton grass,’ said Kit. ‘It means the ground’s boggy. Thousands of years ago prehistoric man lived by slashing and burning the woodland that covered these parts. Eventually a layer of carbon formed that stopped the land from draining and thus the bog was created. When the woodland was all destroyed, the people who lived here could only get wood by digging up ancient trees from beneath the peat layers. Hence bog oak. A useful lesson for today.’
‘I’ve seen furniture made from black bog oak but I’d no idea how it was formed.’
‘So, during the game of tennis that so effectively demolished your defences, what was it, exactly, that you suspected? Are you unique among girls, do you think, in finding incompetence more disarming than proficiency?’
‘I thought you were the expert on female psychology.’
‘What was troubling you? Besides a sense of what you persist in seeing as impending moral collapse on your own part?’
‘Don’t you ever forget anything?’
‘Not when it’s a story.’ Kit slowed to let a ewe and her lamb, their underbellies brown with mud, cross the road. ‘Agents have to carry details in their heads. They’re the long stop for major authorial blunders.’
‘All right. Something made me think that he might be losing the game on purpose; that he was a much better player than he’d pretended. Then, in the excitement that followed, I didn’t think anything more about it. But weeks later the suspicion resurfaced when I was returning some gumboots I’d borrowed to the downstairs cloakroom at Ladyfield. The walls are hung with old school photographs, mostly of Dickie at Harrow: the usual rows of blazered, boatered boys, plus photographs of Dickie in the First Eleven and the Second Fifteen. I’d never bothered to look at them properly but something must have registered subliminally because I spotted at once a photograph of Westminster School’s Senior Tennis Team and guess who was sitting in the middle of the front row holding a large silver cup?’ I waited politely for Kit to finish laughing before adding, ‘Given that Burgo may not have played for a long time, is it possible for anyone’s game to deteriorate so drastically?’
‘I shouldn’t think so. You either have good hand – eye co-ordination or not. Besides, Burgo had been keeping his athletic prowess honed playing polo, hadn’t he?’
‘My goodness, I hope your authors deserve you.’
‘Did you take him properly to task?’
‘No. I tried to forget about it. I suppose I didn’t want to discover anything that made me trust him less. I wanted so badly to see him as perfect … and perfectly irresistible. In order to justify what we were doing I had to make myself believe he was the love of my life. And that I was of his.’
‘And despite everything you still believe that.’
I did not answer. I was no longer capable of interpreting my own feelings.
‘We’ve only ten miles to go until Kilmuree,’ said Kit. ‘Just tell me a little about the good times and I’ll pretend the tale’s been nicely rounded off. A sort of happy ever after that fades into oblivion. That’s what we all want from a story. Physical consummation isn’t enough. It wouldn’t be enough for Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy to climb between the sheets and indulge in erotic acts before going their separate ways. Or for Mr Rochester to take Jane Eyre through the Kama Sutra. The climax of a narrative is actually the moment when two people reveal themselves to each other by declaring a deeply felt, highly significant attachment.’
‘It’s strange that we get such vicarious pleasure from imagining other, wholly fictitious people falling in love. Is it just because we identify with one of them?’
‘I don’t see myself as Burgo Latimer. A public man, an orator, a manipulator of minds. Sorry if that sounds slanderous. Of course I’m jealous. In my mind he’s as fantastical a being as the Minotaur. He’s made you unhappy and left you to defend yourself.’
‘I