itself to be caught, but I do hate Nature’s predatory schemes. I waved to show all was forgiven and caught the sleeve of my writing robe on the edge of my desk.
I looked sorrowfully at the long tear. It was a beautiful robe and one of my most treasured possessions, dark-blue silk velvet embroidered with silver stars and gold lozenges. My father, Waldo Byng, had worn it playing Prospero in an acclaimed production of The Tempest. He had received wildly enthusiastic notices and been much lionised for a time. It would not be putting it too strongly, even allowing for family partisanship, to say that my father was still one of the most famous actors of his day. But the Prospero role had been in 1973, five years ago. Since then, things had not gone quite so well with him.
It is difficult to say what had gone – not wrong exactly, but slightly awry. Experimental theatre was all the rage so there were a lot of classical actors wanting the few good parts available. Probably being made a fuss of went to my father’s head. He had turned down several leading roles on the grounds that they were insufficiently ‘mesmeric’. He had thought himself so deeply into the part of Prospero that he could not stop being him. He was convinced he possessed magic powers and for a time our house was crammed with amulets, scarabs, lamps, rings, wands, pendulums and philtres. He offered to lay hands on every invalid he met. A Russian painter, who had TB, actually got better and my father exhibited Serge’s miraculously pink cheeks and red lips at parties as though he were a hermaphrodite chicken or a two-headed lamb. We were all sorry when Serge died a few months later.
I looked out of the window again and saw Loveday, our gardener, weeding round what my father claimed was an antique bust of Shakespeare. It was indisputably a man with a bald head, whose features were indistinguishable from burst blisters. It stood at the centre of Loveday’s maze. Originally it had taken up only a small part of what was a large garden for Blackheath, where we lived. Then Loveday had become obsessed. He had extended the maze, making it more and more elaborate until it filled almost the entire three-quarters of an acre behind the house. He had begun it in yew but in later years went over to privet because it grew so much faster. Of course it needed trimming more often as well. During the summer the drama of our daily lives was played out to the sound of clashing shears as Loveday clipped from dawn till nightfall.
Loveday had constructed the maze with the idea of baffling the Devil. He believed that all difficulties in this world were the works of Satan. Despite the ubiquity and industry of the Lord of Pandemonium Loveday was confident his maze would go some way to confound him. We children were frequently required to test the ingenuity of the newest layout and, to keep Loveday happy, even if we weren’t lost, we pretended to be. My father said Loveday was a man in a million and, though a hopeless gardener, was a wonderful illustration of Rousseau’s thesis of the boundless creativity of the untutored mind. Honestly though, when it came to wild credulity, I sometimes thought it would be difficult to choose between Loveday and Pa.
‘Harriet!’ It was Portia’s voice. She rattled the door handle. ‘What are you doing?’ I put the ‘Ode to Pulcheria’ in my desk drawer, whipped off my writing robe, stuffed it under my bed and unlocked the door.
There are seven of us in my family. My mother, Clarissa, was also a Shakespearean actor, much fêted in the fifties and sixties but now retired. The eldest of us children, and the only male, is Oberon, twenty-six years old at that time, and known to everyone as Bron. Then comes Ophelia, twenty-four, followed by me, Harriet, and then Portia, aged twenty. Then a long gap before Cordelia, now aged twelve.
Portia’s eyes looked past me, scanned the room and then returned, disappointed, to my face. ‘You’re such a dark horse. Whatever do you do up here all alone? I think you’ve got a shameful secret. You’re not in the pudding club, are you?’
Though Portia was two years younger than me, people usually thought it was the other way round. She had a fierce self-assurance while I was – am – prone to self-doubt. Beneath an ancient beaver coat my mother had put out for the jumble, Portia was wearing a white dress, not very clean, that was cut low in front. A slick of scarlet lipstick hid her pretty mouth.
‘Not as far as I know,’ I said. ‘Where are you going? You’ll die of heat in that coat.’
‘It’s going to rain later on, Loveday says. Anyway, I can take it off if I have to. I’m going to have lunch with a delicious man.’
All men were, initially anyway, delicious to Portia. I looked at my watch. ‘Isn’t it rather early for lunch?’
‘I’m going to Manton’s first to borrow some jewellery.’ Manton’s was a theatrical costumier. ‘This man is a bloated capitalist,’ Portia continued. ‘I don’t want him to think I’m hard up.’ She slipped her foot from her high-heeled patent leather shoe and bent to rub her heel. ‘Ow! These shoes are hell! Why should Ophelia be blessed with small aristocratic feet and not me? It’s so unfair.’ She looked up from behind a fall of pale yellow hair, her expression half laughing and half cross.
‘You’ve nothing to complain about, I should say. Even dressed like that you look gorgeous.’
My three sisters and Bron had all inherited my mother’s looks, the same shining fair hair, huge deep blue eyes and marvellous mouth. Ophelia was generally thought to be the beauty of the family, having, in addition, my mother’s perfect nose, but I thought there might be some who would prefer Portia’s more animated features and friendlier disposition. Cordelia was already shaping up to rival the other two. I had dark hair and dark eyes like my father and the same bony frame. While my sisters were voluptuous, I was completely bosomless, to my great sorrow.
‘Thanks for the compliment, I don’t think.’ Portia took a mauve scarf from her coat pocket and tied it round her head, Red Indian fashion. On anyone else it would have looked ridiculous but it gave Portia a seductive air I really envied. ‘There’s nothing the matter with the way I’m dressed. You’re a fine one to talk, anyway. I never see you in anything but black these days. I suppose it’s all because of that frightful Dodge. That reminds me what came up to tell you. He’s on the phone.’
Dodge had been my boyfriend for the last year. Everyone disapproved of him, which was one of the things I liked about him. It is difficult to assert oneself in a large family of beautiful people overflowing with self-confidence.
‘You might have said! He has to ring from a call box.’
‘I’m surprised he condescends to use such a bourgeois means of communication,’ she called after me as I ran down the stairs. ‘I’d have thought a note written in blood and wrapped round a bullet would’ve been more in his line.’
I had brought Dodge home to have supper with us some weeks after meeting him in a bus queue. It had not been a success. Usually people adore the zany glamour so liberally dispensed by my family. My father is a marvellous storyteller and my mother likes all young men to fall in love with her.
Claremont Lodge – this was the name of our house – was Regency and very large and handsome for the suburbs. It looked out over the park and was furnished in a manner both theatrical and dégagé, on the lines of Sleeping Beauty’s castle after a decade or two of slumber. There was a great deal of peeling paint, crumpled velvet, cracked marble, tarnished silver and chipped porcelain. As much of it had been rescued from stage sets, things constantly fell to pieces and were repaired rather badly by Loveday. My mother was a keen decorator with a taste for dramatic tableaux. When Dodge came to dinner she had arranged a corner of the hall with a harp, entwined with ivy where the strings should have been, and a stool made from a Corinthian capital on which stood a clock without hands, a crown – possibly Henry IV’s – and a stuffed partridge hanging from one claw. A guttering candle lit the scene, which my mother called Caducity. I looked it up later. It means transitoriness or frailty, a tendency to fall apart. It seemed appropriate, considering the state of the furniture.
Dodge had taken all this in with cold eyes, and when my mother had invited him to sit beside her on the sofa before dinner he had said he preferred to stand. Champagne was offered but he asked for beer so I had to raid Loveday’s supplies. During dinner my father entertained us with stories of touring Borneo with The Winter’s Tale. He described