It took me a second or two to make the connection. ‘Dickie! Hello! It was a lovely party. I’d have written to say so but I haven’t got your address. I did enjoy it.’
‘Did you?’ I imagined his pink, eager face crumpling, pleased. ‘We were all so delighted to meet you. Now, look, Roberta, why I’m ringing you is this. Burgo says you were quite taken with my little temple and had some good ideas I ought to take on board.’
‘Well … that’s putting it rather strongly. I’m sure you have your own—’
Dickie interrupted me. ‘I’m really keen to talk about it with you. What about coming here for lunch on Wednesday? No other visitors, just us. If that wouldn’t be a bore?’
I hesitated. Perhaps Burgo had put Dickie up to this? I might arrive to find the scene reset for seduction. Even that Dickie and Fleur had been mysteriously called away.
‘I’m not sure about Wednesday. I’m rather tied up …’
‘Oh.’ Either Dickie was a good actor or he was genuinely disappointed. ‘I realize it’s asking rather a lot. Particularly as Burgo will be in Leningrad so we can’t offer him as an inducement. I expect I’m being awfully self-centred asking you but I was so bucked to think you admired my little folly—’
It was my turn to interrupt. ‘Actually, I think I can rearrange things. I’d love to come.’
‘You would? That’s excellent. Shall we say twelve-thirty? Fleur will be so delighted.’
On Wednesday, having bribed Mrs Treadgold to look after my mother with the present of a scarf she had always admired, and left a breakfast tray loaded with orange juice, muesli, grated apple and vitamin pills across Oliver’s sleeping stomach (which had a greenish hue too I noticed), I drove myself over to Ladyfield at the appointed time. My father had arranged to go up to town for the day so I dropped him off at the station, looking patrician and affluent in what I could have sworn was a new suit. Naturally he travelled first class.
Ladyfield looked even handsomer in sunlight. Its lovely red-brick front was bare of climbing plants but on each side of the front door was a box hedge enclosing carpets of silver artemisias. Dickie came limping out to greet me and kissed my cheek.
‘This is good of you, Roberta.’ He glanced at the Wolseley. ‘My goodness, what a splendid old motor!’
Fleur ran out after him and flung her arms round me.
‘Bobbie! How lovely! Have you changed your mind about the puppy?’
‘I’m afraid not. My father …’
‘Aren’t fathers horrible! I hated mine. So did my mother. The minute he died she had all her skirts shortened and went down to the docks to get a tattoo. Oh, yes,’ she added, seeing from my face that I only half believed her. ‘She got the tattoo and a dose of something she hadn’t bargained for, as well. Poor darling, it killed her.’
I looked at Dickie for confirmation.
‘It’s true,’ said Dickie. ‘Fleur’s mother, poor woman, died of … of a most unpleasant contagious disease. But we don’t talk about it more than we can help, do we darling?’
‘I do,’ Fleur said immediately. ‘It was syphilis. I think people ought to know how dangerous sex can be. Fatal, in fact.’
‘Only, darling, if you sleep with people who’ve already contracted it. And even then it’s curable with penicillin. Your mother wouldn’t accept there was anything wrong, that was the trouble.’
‘She thought her hair was falling out because the hairdresser was too rough with it,’ said Fleur. ‘So she got me to wash it for her. I didn’t mind but there was so little left in the end it was rather a waste of shampoo. When her nose dropped off we made her go to the doctor but it was too late by then.’
My eyes, which must have expressed the horror I felt, met Dickie’s once more.
‘You’re exaggerating, Fleur. As usual. It was the septum, darling, not the whole nose. Anyway, you’re upsetting Roberta.’
‘Am I?’ Fleur turned to me and gripped my arm. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want to do that. I like you and I know Burgo does too. In fact, I think … Ah, well, let’s go and have lunch. I’m starving!’
My appetite was only briefly affected by Fleur’s account of her mother’s illness. The salmon was delicious, caught by Dickie’s brother and sent down from Scotland the day before, the peas and tiny potatoes were from the garden, the cucumber from Dickie’s own frames. We had tiny alpine strawberries and cream.
‘How odd,’ I said, tucking into my second helping of strawberries, ‘to think that our house is only fifteen miles distant and yet it’s the opposite of this place: dark and dismal and ugly, where nothing seems to thrive but laurel and every member of the household is either angry or depressed. Even the weather’s better here. It was raining when I left home.’
‘Is it really that bad?’ Fleur paid attention to the conversation for the first time. She had been feeding bits of salmon to a cat under the table.
‘It’s terrible.’ Because Fleur seemed interested I told her about my parents and Oliver, Mrs Treadgold and Brough.
‘Perhaps there’s a spell on the place,’ suggested Fleur. ‘Perhaps your father is a wizard.’
‘Not a very good wizard, if so,’ I said, ‘or he’d conjure up some money.’
‘He may have. He just isn’t sharing it with the rest of you so he can keep you under his brutal thumb, poor, dejected and ill used, to satisfy his sadistic impulses.’
‘Now, darling, I don’t think you should speak so impolitely of Roberta’s father,’ said Dickie.
‘It’s quite all right,’ I said. ‘It’s a most interesting theory.’
I guessed from Fleur’s expression that she was half serious. Her childlike face was dreaming, her bony wrists bent at right angles as she propped her chin on her clasped hands.
‘I wish I could do magic,’ she said. ‘I’d wish myself far away to an island covered with forest where I’d live like a savage, wearing a skirt of leaves, or perhaps nothing at all, and I’d eat nuts and berries and bird’s eggs – never taking more than one from the nest, of course – and I’d tame a wild goat and drink her milk from a wooden bowl I’d carved from a tree.’
‘How would you like cutting down the tree?’ said Dickie in a humouring sort of voice. ‘Remember how upset you were when I had those sycamores felled last year?’
‘I wouldn’t cut it down, silly.’ Fleur was scornful. ‘I’d just carve the bowl out of the trunk and leave the place to heal over. I’d have the cats and dogs and Stargazer with me, of course. And Burgo, natch. And you could come if you liked, Bobbie.’
Her exclusion of Dickie was pointed. He stirred sugar into his coffee, smiling. It was impossible to tell if his feelings were hurt.
‘I’m not good at camping,’ I said. ‘I’d be nothing but a liability. I hate that dreadful ache you get in your hip joints from lying on hard ground. I frighten easily. I should spend all my time worrying what that peculiar rustling was, imagining a man with an axe creeping up on me – when I wasn’t worrying whether that tickling sensation on my leg was a leaf or a scorpion. And I’m pretty bad-tempered without a proper night’s sleep.’
Fleur looked annoyed. ‘It isn’t always night on an enchanted island.’
‘Ah, no. But during the day I’d be hungry. I’m fond of nuts and berries but not invariably. And there wouldn’t even be those in the winter. Bark and roots don’t tempt me in the least. I’d rather stay here at Ladyfield. For me this is an enchanted place.’
Fleur scowled. ‘What you really mean is that you’re sorry for