‘How Ex?’
‘About two minutes before midnight last night. Listen:
Cameron pulled a long, dark-brown cashmere scarf from a gold envelope. ‘Georgie and Ralphie.’
‘I bet Georgie paid for it — kind of them, though.’
He got up and wound the scarf round Cameron’s neck, holding on to the two ends and slowly drawing her towards him.
‘It’s yours. Everything I have is yours,’ he said, kissing her, only breaking away from her because the telephone rang.
He grinned as he put down the receiver. It was the vicar of Penscombe asking if they could turn the disco down for an hour so he could take early service.
‘I must go,’ said Cameron.
‘You must not. I’ll tell those disco boys to go and have some breakfast and then you and I are going to watch the sun rise.’
Wearing three of Patrick’s sweaters, a pair of Taggie’s jeans, rolled over four times at the ankle, Caitlin’s gumboots, and a very smart dark-blue coat with a velvet collar left over the banisters by Bas Baddingham, Cameron set out with Patrick.
‘I’ve shaved so I won’t cut your face to ribbons,’ he said.
‘The wind’ll do that,’ grumbled Cameron.
The wind, in fact, had dropped, but a vicious frost had ermined all the fences, roughened the surface of the snow and turned the waterfall in the wood to two foot-long icicles. Gertrude charged ahead leaping into drifts, tunnelling the snow with her snout.
‘Wow, it’s beautiful,’ said Cameron, as the valley stretched out below them. ‘How much of it’s yours?’
‘To the bottom of the wood. The rest of the valley belongs to Rupert Campbell-Black.’
Christ, it’s a kingdom, thought Cameron, looking across at the white fields, the blanketed tennis court, Rupert’s golden house with its snowy roof and the bare beech wood rearing up behind like a huge spiky white hedgehog.
‘We’re trying to get him on your father’s programme.’
‘Why bother? Pa could interview him by morse code across the valley. He’s the most awful stud. Evidently resentful husbands all over Gloucestershire bear scars on their knuckles from trying to bash down bedroom doors.’
‘He was there last night,’ said Cameron.
‘Was he?’ said Patrick. ‘I only had eyes for you.’
They had reached the water meadows at the bottom of the wood. Here the snow had settled in roots of trees, in the crevices of walls, and in six-foot drifts anywhere it could find shelter from yesterday’s blizzard. The blizzard had also laid thick white tablecloths of snow fringed with icicles on either side of the stream which ran with chattering teeth down the valley. It was deathly quiet except for Rupert’s horses occasionally neighing to one another. But it was getting lighter.
‘Nice scent,’ said Patrick, burrowing his face in her neck. ‘What is it?’
‘Fracas.’
‘Very appropriate. Who gave it to you?’
‘Tony.’
‘Why hasn’t he got a neck?’ Patrick hurled a snowball into the woods. Gertrude hurtled after it. ‘You’d have thought with that much money he could have bought himself a neck.’
‘Shut up,’ said Cameron. ‘Tell me, do your mother and father always slope off to bed in the middle of their own parties?’
‘It’s a very odd marriage,’ said Patrick, pointing his new Leica at her. ‘Look towards the stream, darling. My father has always seen my mother as Maud Gonne.’
‘The woman Yeats was fixated on?’
‘Right. Yeats fell in love with her at exactly the same age my father fell in love with my mother. Look, badger tracks.’ Patrick bent down to examine them. ‘Maud Gonne was a rabid revolutionary. Yeats knew he wouldn’t impress her with poetry, so he got caught up in a political movement to unite Ireland. Then she married John MacBride, another revolutionary. Broke Yeats’s heart, but it made him write his best poetry. He claimed Maud Gonne was beyond blame, like Helen of Troy.’
‘But your mother isn’t a revolutionary, for Christ’s sake, and she hasn’t married someone else.’
‘No, but she has Maud Gonne’s tremendous beauty, and my father has an almost fatalistic acceptance that she’s above blame and will have affairs with other men.’
‘Doesn’t your mother care for him?’
‘In her way. I once asked her why she messed him about so much. She said that, with every woman in the world after him, she could only hold him by uncertainty.’
Cameron digested this.
‘But if he only loves her, and doesn’t want all these women, why can’t she stop playing games and love him back?’
‘That’s far too easy. She’s convinced that, once he’s sure of her, his obsession would evaporate. So the games go on.’
‘I wish they wouldn’t,’ said Cameron. ‘It sure makes him cranky to work with.’
She sat on a log and watched Patrick write ‘Patrick loves Cameron’ in huge letters in the snow. Then he got out his hip flask, now filled with brandy, and handed it to her.
‘You warm enough?’
Cameron nodded, taking a sip.
‘Do you have a drinking problem?’ she asked, as Patrick took a huge slug.
Patrick laughed. ‘Only if I can’t afford it. Whisky’s twelve pounds a bottle in Dublin. Will you come and stay with me at Trinity next term?’
It’s crazy, thought Cameron. He’s utterly unsuitable and eight years younger than me, but the snow had given her such a feeling of irresponsibility, she hadn’t felt so happy for years. The only unsettling thing was that he reminded her so much of Declan. They had the same arrogance, the same assumption that everyone would dance to their tune. Patrick seemed to read her thoughts.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not at all like my father. Being Capricorn, I have a very shrewd business head. I may be overexacting, but I’m also cool, calculating and calm, whereas my father is very highly strung and overemotional. Capricorns also have excellent senses of humour and make protective and loving husbands.’ He grinned at her. The violet shadows beneath the brilliant dark eyes were even more pronounced this morning, but nothing could diminish the beauty of the bone structure, the full slightly sulky curve of the mouth, or the thickness of the long dark eyelashes.
‘Not a very artistic sign, Capricorn,’ Cameron said crushingly.
‘What about Mallarme?’ said Patrick. ‘One of the bravest, most dedicated of poets. He was Capricorn. He knew what slog and self-negation is needed to produce poetry. He understood the loneliness of the writer. Look, here’s the sun.’
Hand in hand they watched the huge red sun climbing up behind the black bars of the beech copse on the top road, blushing at its inability to warm the day.
‘Looks like Charles Fairburn spending a night inside for soliciting,’ said Patrick.
‘God, I wish I had a crew,’ said Cameron. ‘D’you realize you can only afford to film sunrises in winter in this country? In summer it rises at four o’clock in the morning. That’s in golden time, when you have to pay a crew miles over the rate for working through the night. Christ, I hate the British unions.’
Patrick turned towards her. ‘I only like American-Irish unions. Let me look at you.’
Her dark hair, no longer sleeked back with water, was blown forward in black tendrils over her cheek bones, and in a thick fringe which softened the slanting yellow eyes, and the beaky nose. Her skin and her full pale lips were amber in the sunshine.
Patrick sighed and took another photograph. ‘Even the sun’s upstaged. You’re so dazzling, he’ll have to wear
