Clouds among the Stars. Victoria Clayton
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in quite a few fantasies sitting outside the door, listening to Dimitri yodelling like an alpine goatherd every time he had an orgasm. I told Chico I was so sore he’d have to take all his clothes off so as not to rub against the bruises. Ugh, God …’ Portia clutched her head and shuddered. ‘The smell of sweat and garlic and the blubber, possibly worse than Dimitri’s blackheads and dandruff – except he came at once, thank God. Then, afterwards, he sort of drifted off for a bit, you know how men do. Well, when he was lying there, all passion spent, I grabbed his jeans and jacket and ran. Of course he came after me but he couldn’t move nearly as fast. I ran, stark naked, across fields full of cows and woods full of brambles and stinging nettles until I got to a road. I put on Chico’s clothes, and the first lorry I put up my thumb to stopped. He was coming into London and dropped me in Camberwell. I bussed the rest of the way. I told the lorry driver I was a lesbian, just in case, and he was quite interested. Actually it isn’t at all a bad idea. Thanks to Dimitri, I’ll probably be frigid for the rest of my life.’
‘Hello, Portia.’ Bron came into the hall. ‘Where have you been? What do you think of my coat?’
‘She’s been kidnapped by a homicidal sex maniac!’ I was so upset by Portia’s recital that I had forgotten about being an outcast.
Bron gave me a glacial look. ‘I call that a joke in poor taste.’
‘No, really, she has been! We must ring the police and a doctor.’
‘Oh, no you don’t!’ Portia snatched back her hand, which I had been holding. ‘If you think I’m going to go on talking about it to a lot of prurient busybodies, you must be crazy. All I want to do is lie in a hot bath for a very long time and then go to my own chaste, sweet bed and forget it ever happened. I’ve never been so tired in my life.’
‘But, Portia! You must see a doctor! Supposing you’ve got a horrible disease? Or you’re pregnant?’
‘What a comfort you are, Harriet.’ Portia, in her turn, began to look coldly at me.
‘You must, at any rate, report it to the police. If he isn’t stopped, Dimitri will find some other unsuspecting girl.’
‘That’s her lookout. If I’d known you were going to be so community-spirited I wouldn’t have told you. I thought as my sister you’d be concerned for me. It seems I was mistaken.’
‘Don’t be angry.’ I tried to take her arm but she shook me off, her mouth turned down mulishly. ‘All right, whatever you say. I still think we ought but – well, never mind. Dear, dear Portia, I’m so glad have you back. Come on, I’ll run the bath for you and bring you up some supper.’
‘Promise no officious telephoning?’
‘Promise.’
Portia was mollified sufficiently to let me accompany her upstairs. When I saw her without clothes on, I was tempted to break my word, there and then. She was covered in blackening bruises and red weals. Despite her attempts to be insouciant, I was sure she must be suffering the aftereffects of extreme fear so I decided to say nothing about Pa for the moment. Fortunately, she seemed to have forgotten about the cameras outside the front door. While she bathed, I sat on the laundry basket and we talked and made silly jokes as we always did. But there was an atmosphere of strain.
Dirk was a useful distraction, trying to get into the bath with Portia, then attempting to eat the sponge. Portia was not particularly fond of animals but she admitted that he had a wayward charm all his own. She ate very little of the supper I brought her, saying she was too tired to be hungry. I left her tucked up in bed, her hair stretched across the pillow, her damaged face very calm. I thought she seemed remarkably composed in the circumstances.
But during the night I was woken by Dirk, whining and scraping with his paw at my pillow. Before I could tell him to be quiet I heard a blood-chilling scream from Portia’s room, which was directly below mine. I raced downstairs, my heart puttering with fright. She was sitting up in bed, shrieking, her eyes and mouth wide open.
‘What’s the matter with her?’ Cordelia, her face white from sleep, came in with Mark Antony in her arms.
‘Will whoever’s making that infernal racket kindly shut up?’ called Bron’s voice from across the landing.
‘She’s having a bad dream.’ I went over to Portia and spoke soothingly. ‘It’s all right. You’re at home. You’re quite safe. I’m here, darling.’
Portia closed her eyes and then opened them again. ‘Hat? Oh, thank God! I was dreaming – horrible – horrible!’ A tear slid from one eye. She closed her eyes again and took hold of my hand. ‘Stay.’
I could have wept myself at this admission of need from my most dauntless, spirited sister. I sent Cordelia back to bed. Pulling up a chair, I sat beside Portia and made her lie down. After a while Dirk settled on my feet and I was grateful for the warmth from his body for slowly the house became very cold. Portia slept again but badly, turning her head from side to side and grinding her teeth, her eyes always a little open as though she could not trust the world enough to relax her vigilance even in sleep. More than once she sat up and cried out. When she heard my voice, she lay down again, muttering things I could not decipher.
The imp of anxiety that had taken up tenancy in my stomach chewed away. When I wasn’t worrying about Portia being permanently affected, physically and mentally, by her appalling experience, I worried about Pa. Luckily the nuns at St Frideswide’s had made us learn large tracts of poetry by heart. By the time I had got through a good chunk of Goblin Market, I felt exhausted and numb. I fetched blankets from the linen cupboard and made myself comfortable. Gradually the night wore away and I dozed, off and on. Towards dawn, when she seemed to be sleeping more peacefully, I crept upstairs to my own bed. I thought Portia might not like to find me beside her when she woke, a reminder of the terrors of darkness.
‘That’s a new photographer, isn’t it?’ said Cordelia, three days later, lifting swollen eyelids to look into the street. She was sitting cross-legged on the window seat in the drawing room, with a box of paper handkerchiefs at her elbow, reading her favourite bit in Little Women where Beth March almost dies of scarlet fever. She had Good Wives beside her with a marker at the page where Beth finally joins the choir invisible.
Idly I strolled over to have a look. We were all extremely bored with our lives. It was difficult to be purposeful with a cohort of reporters dogging our steps and quite impossible to think expansively, confronted as we were at every turn by insuperable problems. Cordelia and I had been to the cinema the evening before to see Robert Mitchum in The Big Sleep but it had been hard to lose ourselves in the story while the press chortled at the seduction scenes, rustled bags of Butterkist and blew so much cigarette smoke over us that our hair and clothes reeked like the snug at The Green Dragon.
Bron was the only one of us who did not mind having his photograph taken whenever he bought a bar of soap or went to collect his dry-cleaning. But, to his annoyance, photographs of him never appeared in the newspapers. Not a word of the interview he had given had been printed. We no longer merited headlines. Instead, articles about our clothes and our hairstyles and whether we were looking pale and haunted (Bron) or aristocratic and forlorn (Ophelia) or sparky and irrepressible (Cordelia) appeared in the society gossip columns, a whispering that continued to fan the flames of notoriety. According to the Clarion, Ophelia was suing Crispin for breach of promise and Bron was out on bail, paid by a female member of the royal family whose playmate he had been until scandal touched him.
Because she had not set foot outside the house since her return from Surrey three days ago, the wildest conjectures were made about Portia. The Clarion revealed that she had signed a lucrative contract to star en travestie as Mozart in a new play called Amadeus. The People’s Exclusive had it from a reliable source that she had been the mistress, successively, of Prince Rainier, Lord Snowdon and Ziggy Stardust. The Herald