Nothing like you might be thinking-he was merely a kind young man. He suggested I should create a portfolio-this is a word I had never heard before-a portfolio and he would take it ’round to some agencies he knew in London. This I did. They all said the same-I was a type that was ‘in vogue.’ It was true: Grace Kelly set the standard in those days-not that I was anywhere in her league. But it was a certain type they wanted. They told me they wanted to ‘sign’ me.”
“Naturally,” interjected Sir Adrian, reaching for a decanter. “They’d have been fools not to.”
She rewarded him with a smile, her rather large, square teeth gleaming against lips outlined in a shade of red so dark it was nearly black. She looked the kind of woman who had found her style decades ago and saw no reason to change it. It was Lillian who noticed that her fine skin pulled rather too tautly against her cheekbones, exaggerating the wideness of her mouth and eyes, in a way that suggested the attentions of a plastic surgeon in the not-too-distant past.
Ruthven allowed his gaze to slide over to observe his father as he sat hanging on Violet’s every word, the silly, universal grin of the lovelorn almost transforming his dewlapped, porcine face. He looked utterly content, precisely like a hog basking in cool mud on a warm day.
“What was so funny to me was that I was-am-tall and skinny,” Violet continued. “Now this was somehow desirable, this thinness. I assure you, I was not like the others in my profession, who lived on coffee and cigarettes and nothing else. I went through all the adolescent agonies trying to gain weight but could not. And then suddenly it didn’t matter.” She shrugged at the absurdities of the fashion world.
She talked on in her high, cultivated voice, Sir Adrian beaming at her side like a proud curator unveiling a newly discovered Picasso. Sarah found herself mesmerized by Violet; this was a woman who tended to command, to dominate-qualities Sarah admired vicariously, knowing she would never possess them herself. The others were less smitten, reminding themselves they were in the presence of the enemy. Albert drank steadily, his usual response to novelty, boredom, or any condition in between; George, soon tiring of any conversation that did not revolve around himself, was surreptitiously studying his nails; Ruthven and Lillian exchanged meaningful glances across the Turkish carpet. Otherwise, the family avoided looking at one other. Natasha was wondering with admiration from what designer Violet had got her dress.
All this, in spite of his apparent state of blissful infatuation, Sir Adrian did not fail to notice.
Violet eventually subsiding, he clasped her strong, masculine hand in his pudgy, veined, wrinkled one. Sarah looked away, realizing she had never once seen her parents holding hands.
Sir Adrian raised his glass.
“To families.” He beamed. It was all going pretty much as he had hoped. The only thing to make his happiness complete would be the appearance of Chloe, the mother of this despised brood.
Sarah and Lillian each took a polite, submissive sip. George and Ruthven gave a half-hearted lift of their glasses but did not drink.
Albert drained his glass.
Sir Adrian, having set the cat among the pigeons, was content.
Sarah was in the midst of unpacking in what had been her bedroom while she was growing up-growing up being a strange euphemism for the wrenching separation from everything her childhood represented to her: hostility, sarcasm, criticism, a general feeling of being the uninvited guest at her own party.
The room in fact bore no resemblance to the bedroom of her childhood. Sir Adrian had hardly waited for each of his children to be boarded off to school before bringing in a team of decorators to remove all vestiges of their occupancy. Sarah’s was what was now called the Victoria room, festooned, quite unlike that stumpy, dark queen, in a glut of rose sateen and pink lace. Even Sarah, the most unworldly of people and the least aware of her surroundings, recognized that the room was hideous. The deep rose color reminded her of uncooked liver. The bathroom was even worse: Its ceiling, walls, and even its door were covered in red, flocked-velvet wallpaper. Shutting the door was like being sealed in a coffin. She gagged exaggeratedly as she looked about her, longing for the cramped but comforting darkness of her flat.
She was just folding one of the cavernous caftans she favored into a drawer when the knock sounded. It was Ruthven, accompanied by George and Albert. The loathsome Lillian was not in evidence, she saw with relief.
“Family council meeting? How nice,” she said, trying and failing to remember them ever having banded together in the way they had today. A saying went through her mind:
It felt strange having her brothers in her room, grown men who through some miracle had become larger versions of the small boys she remembered: Ruthven, always the bully; George, always vain, but with no particular grounds for being so. Only Albert had changed, it seemed to her-he was diminished, smaller than she remembered, his striking good looks fast fading into the pale anonymity of middle age.
“I wanted a word before tomorrow,” Ruthven said, naturally taking charge. Years of planning redundancies and squelching union organizers had given him the edge in any situation calling for hypocrisy or doublespeak. He smoothed a hand over the top of his head, as if it still held an unruly growth of hair that had constantly to be tamed into submission. “Although I certainly wish the old man well, I am sure we all arrived here with similar agendas of trying to dissuade him.”
“You wish him well, do you?” said Albert, from his roost on Sarah’s bed. “That’s rich. And when did you first notice this altruistic side of your nature coming to the fore?” Sarah, watching him throughout dinner, had noted that his intake of food had been diluted by alcohol at the rate of about seven ounces to one morsel of food. He seemed to be looking around even now for more reinforcements. Something would have to be done about Albert.
“But it’s obvious to me that for all the good we’re doing, we may as well leave tonight,” Ruthven went on, ignoring him. “There’s no hope of influencing this… course he’s set himself on. He’s clearly infatuated with the woman. Worst of all, I can even see why.”
“She is rather charming, isn’t she? Flirtatious in that rather old-fashioned way,” said Sarah. “The kind who I imagine makes a man feel the center of the universe. Some women seem to have that sort of appeal all their lives.”
George, who could seldom see the charm in any woman over thirty, grunted.
“On the way down here, we had talked of going to him
“And I gather I was to be left out,” picked up Ruthven. “Not that I don’t understand your reasoning,” he said, “and not that I hold it against you”-although he made a mental note to hold it against them when it was more convenient-“but surely you see everything’s changed now? Look, there is nothing we can say or do against this woman that would have any effect except to make him more pig-headed in his determination to go through with it. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was doing it for the publicity value. But he’s not.”
George, who was sure he understood all about publicity, perked up at this.
“What makes you say so?”
“Two reasons. He doesn’t need the publicity to sell his books. He hasn’t given an interview in years-at least not one where he wasn’t pulling the interviewer’s leg the whole time-and it’s never stopped his books from spurting to the top of the best-sellers list. Everyone wants the newest Miss Rampling for Christmas-the irony, yes, yes, we all know that better than anyone, but that’s how it is. In the season of good will, his murderous little books sell themselves.”
“The other reason?” asked Sarah.
“The other reason seems nearly impossible, but as Miss Rampling would say, in her muddled way: ‘What isn’t impossible, once all the real impossibilities are excluded, must be the truth.’”
“You’ve actually read his tosh, then?” said Albert.
“Since it’s one day going to be my tosh, you can bet I have.”
George, Sarah, and Albert exchanged glances.
“Anyway,” Ruthven went on. “I think the real reason is the old fool is in love-or in such a state of extreme
