Kehua! (5 page)

She had checked with Cynara, rather hoping she, fearing Scarlet would distract her daughter’s mind from serious issues by
taking her to beauty parlours and Harvey Nic’s, would say no. One way or another, Scarlet thought, Cynara would get Lola back
to school and resitting her exams, and she, Scarlet, would be safe. But Cynara seemed to have lost all interest in her unfortunate
daughter.

‘I hadn’t heard about the Haiti bit,’ was all Cynara had said. ‘And she’ll have lied about her age. But I’ve had enough. Take
her, keep her, and for your sake pray she leaves the country soon.’

Which Scarlet took as permission, which she would really rather not have had. She checked with Louis, assuming at least he
would object.

‘If it’s okay by Cynara,’ Louis had said. ‘Take the poor girl in. She’s family.’

Scarlet was surprised but on reflection supposes Louis can put up with Lola because she is so smart, smart enough to qualify
for the Government’s special needs subsidy as a gifted pupil. She is also
quite ornamental, as he puts it. She has a teenage figure, skinny legs and middle, but a somehow blurry, fleshy face, with
a jawline that is never quite clean and firm. It stays over-padded. She takes her features from her potato-faced father, not
her mother, which as Louis observes is rather a pity. On the other hand Lola has a perfect polished dark-ivory skin, very
large blue eyes beneath strong eyebrows, and an overbite that makes her full upper lip stick out in a surprisingly sexy way.
Scarlet has every reason to believe Lola is a virgin. She has dismissed any fears that Louis might become sexually interested
in Lola, though they have flashed through her mind. Louis has too great a sense of his own dignity not to feel and behave
responsibly.

Besides, Lola speaks through her nose. When she gets excited she talks with a sharp whine that Louis admits to finding trying.
Lola confided in Scarlet, as she was settling into the upper alcove, that recently someone at a party had told her the reason
her voice was the way it was, was because she took too much coke and had damaged the tissues of her nostrils.

‘But that’s terrible,’ said Scarlet.

‘I haven’t snorted a single line since,’ said Lola. ‘It’s bound to get better. I’m only young.’

Scarlet reported the conversation to Louis in the hope that he might think better of having Lola in the house but no such
luck. She wonders if Louis has a suspicion of Jackson’s existence, and wants Lola around for the same reason that Scarlet
does not, but dismisses that fear too. Guilt can make you paranoiad.

All he said was, ‘You were the same at her age. You took Ecstasy, ran away from home and lived with Cynara. That’s when you
changed your name to Scarlet, just to annoy your poor mother. I expect now Lola’s here she’ll change hers to Mary. Don’t fuss
so,
Scarlet. It doesn’t suit you. She’ll be off soon enough.’

Scarlet had indeed started life with the name Joan, and Cynara’s real name was Mary, but both daughters, at the earliest opportunity,
had subverted their mother’s domestic dreams for their futures. The romantic spirit which afflicted the rest of the family
had bypassed Alice.

So here Lola was, it seemed, in Nopasaran until her ticket from Help the Harmed came through, which never quite seemed to
happen. It had been three weeks already.

‘That was quite a night,’ Lola complained as she squeezed the juice from the last grapefruit. There was not even the most
primitive electric juice extractor. The kitchen, state of the art in 1937, was short of power points. ‘Why do you put up with
it? You have these rows and when you have sex afterwards it usually goes on only for about ten minutes, shouldn’t it be longer?
My friends say half an hour is more usual. And last night it didn’t go on at all.’

Scarlet is mortified. Of course Lola
hears
. So much for Wells Coates and his design for living in. There is no way Scarlet can go on sharing a roof with Lola, forget
with Louis. All she wants is to be with the simplicity that is Jackson, away from Lola, away from Louis, away from the embarrassments
of the past. But this would mean leaving Lola alone with Louis, and Lola, Scarlet suddenly perceives, has the gift for what
Scarlet can only think of as manifold disruption. It may be one step down from having poltergeists manifest themselves around
her, but somehow nothing in Lola’s ambience ever quite goes smoothly. At the very least electrical impulses discharge themselves
around her.

Lola finishes squeezing her grapefruit, and licks the pulped fragments in their shell with her very pink, vibrant tongue,
and Scarlet wonders how her own life would have been different if Lola had
not been born. Certainly the messy horrors of Lola’s birth had been enough to put Scarlet off motherhood for life. If Lola
had crept in unnoticed would last night’s row have been so dreadful? Had Cynara’s child turned out to be a boy, would D’Dora
now be in Cynara’s bed? D’Dora being Cynara’s new lesbian lover.

Lola is the kind of girl, Scarlet sometimes thinks, who’d once have made the milk go sour when she passed a churn. The female
equivalent of a Jonah: the unlucky one whose presence on board is enough to make the ship sink. And then she is ashamed of
herself for thinking such uncharitable thoughts.

‘When Mum did it with Dad, you could hardly hear when they had sex,’ she goes on. ‘Now she’s with D’Dora there’s more noise.
A lot of giggling and slapping and dressing up. I think perhaps it’s S&M. It can go on for hours. They never even think about
my exams and how at my age I need sleep.’

‘Too much information,’ says Scarlet. ‘Allow your mother some privacy.’

‘Why? She doesn’t hide anything. She’s all for openness. She threw Dad out and invited D’Dora in. It didn’t occur to her I
might not want two mothers, I wanted a father and a mother like other people. I can’t wait to get to Haiti.’

Lola had been tested for Asperger’s but failed to make the grade – she was normal, just too bright for her own good, they
said – but at least had qualified for the gifted category, which was a lesser grant but still useful.

‘And it’s even worse here,’ Lola persists. ‘Rows are even more upsetting than sex. And there’s not even a proper bedroom to
sleep in so I can close the door. Why do you stay with Louis? He hit you. Mother would die if I told her. Why don’t you just
move out?’

‘There’s you to look after,’ says Scarlet.

‘I’ve got friends,’ says Lola. ‘They have sofas. I don’t need you. I can be out of here by this afternoon. I will be. Can
I borrow your transparent white top thing?’

‘No you can’t,’ says Scarlet, automatically.

‘Why not?’

‘It isn’t decent.’

‘You wear it,’ says Lola, ‘when you go and meet that man.’

‘I don’t meet any man,’ says Scarlet.

‘You are such a liar. And Louis never notices a thing. Or perhaps he does and doesn’t say anything. What’s his name?’

‘Jackson Wright,’ says Scarlet.

‘Wow!’ says Lola, impressed. ‘So what stops you?’

‘You,’ says Scarlet. ‘I can’t abandon you.’

‘Like I said, don’t mind me,’ says Lola. ‘You go and I’ll be out of here before Louis gets back.’

Scarlet thinks: well then, that’s it, last obstacle to new life overcome. What was there to lose? She could work from Jackson’s
flat in Campion Tower as well as she could from Nopasaran. All you needed these days was a laptop and an iPhone and you could
be anywhere in the world. She had to put in an appearance at the office two or three times a week max; and now she’d be able
to walk from Soho, not have to make the tedious journey from Belsize Park. She was certainly not weighed down by possessions,
having accumulated so few over the partnered years. Louis’ taste reigned supreme. Early in the relationship she’d brought
home a set of really pretty dinner plates she’d seen in a sale in Selfridges’ window and he’d been so rude about them she’d
thrown them at him one by one, and even then he had only worried about the walls, which was absurd because they were rough
Bauhaus concrete anyway and the odd dent wasn’t going to show. So if she travelled light, so light that
home was merely a concept, like Nopasaran itself, not a reality, and there was nothing to bind her to it, Louis had only himself
to blame if she cut loose.

She called Jackson. He answered, presumably from bed, in his deep throaty voice. He didn’t get up until after eleven. Sometimes
Scarlet would go round to the Campion Tower penthouse at midday and find him still in bed, warm and vigorous and inviting.
Afterwards they would shower together beneath a generous blast of water and sometimes the sex would start all over again.
Nopasaran’s shower had been exceptionally fine in 1937, no doubt, but was down to a dribble now. The original shower head,
advanced for its time, was, alas, in all the architectural records, and Louis became hysterical and threatened murder and
suicide if Scarlet suggested it was replaced. Though she had to admit Nopasaran’s bath was sumptuous, Carrera marble, rather
like the ones you got in the old Savoy before the makeover. She had stayed there with a lover or two. Indeed, she had tried
out many of the best hotels in London. The beds in the Ritz were best, but there was always building work going on somewhere,
as in so many of the old hotels, and the sudden noise of pneumatic drills could be disturbing. New places, like Campion Tower,
with its ten storeys and its glassy curved frontage, sensitive to Soho’s planning requirements if not their spirit, needed
little maintenance.

‘I want to move in with you,’ she’d said to Jackson, just like that. ‘I want to come with my suitcases right now.’

There was only the briefest of pauses. ‘That’s fantastic,’ he said. ‘You’re actually going to leave hubby?’

She wished he had not put it quite like that. What sort of world did he live in where people referred to their partners as
hubby? Perhaps it was ironic? But Jackson, she had to admit, was not hot on irony.

‘Yes I am,’ she said, and the die was cast.

‘You’re not going to change your mind? I don’t want my life shattered, not again.’

Jackson’s life, shattered? He hadn’t told her about that, whatever it was. So far all he had dwelt upon was the shallowness
of relationships pre-Scarlet. Well, he would tell all, given time. Somehow she had assumed that Jackson, unlike Louis, had
lived a charmed life, unafflicted by pain or trauma, that he had sprung into life fully formed in order to provide her with
a bed to move into. But of course it was not like that.

‘I won’t do change it,’ she said.

‘Then I can’t wait.’

He sounded as if he meant it. It wasn’t a very good line, not an actor’s line, a worked-on line: it was genuine. The only
bad thing about Soho was the parking. But she could get a resident’s parking space as soon as she moved in. And it was not
some kind of major life decision, this was just a moving in, with not even a party to celebrate it.

Jackson told her he was on his way out now; he had one or two things to do, a meeting with the
Upstairs, Downstairs
movie people, which might drag on, but if she got to Costa’s at lunchtime he would meet her there. She should park in the
underground car park and he’d be down to help her with her suitcases. Everything was going to go right in her life from now
on in. He admired her. She was so brave. He couldn’t wait. Nor could she. He uttered a word or two of love, and she found
parting, even just putting down the phone, to be such sweet sorrow it must be true love.

And that was that. Scarlet was off. You know how it is, reader, you know how it is, even though you so sensibly equate true
love with neurotic dependency. Love has its charms, and wilful abandonment
of common sense is one of them. Jackson actually had to go to his ex-wife’s house in Battersea to collect his driving licence,
and had been dropped from the
Upstairs, Downstairs
film that very week, and knew it. But he also knew what impressed women and what did not, and being banned from driving was
one of the latter.

There were a few things Scarlet needed to clear up before Louis came back and found her gone. She must get the address book
on a memory stick, answer a few e-mails which needed to be replied to that morning, take the box files marked ‘family’ and
‘legal’, and be off. If everything was in good order when Louis returned then he’d have nothing to complain about other than
her actual absence.

Beverley! What about Beverley? Scarlet remembered she was meant to be stocking her grandmother’s fridge that very morning.
Beverley refused to have a live-in nurse while she convalesced, so it was left to her family to do it. ‘Family’ usually meant
Scarlet, the others being so preoccupied with their own affairs. Her mother was skulking up in the North, Cynara was changing
partners and her husband Jesper was now out of the picture, and Lola always looked blank if asked to help. Well, that was
okay. Scarlet reckoned she could get round to Waitrose, buy and deliver at speed, try not to get into conversation, get back
to pick up her bags and still be well on time to meet Jackson for lunch. She would ask Lola to pack for her. Lola would know
what she needed. She shared Scarlet’s taste in clothes. Cynara had done what she could to educate Lola out of excessive femininity
but had failed. One of Lola’s current complaints was that while she, Lola, wasn’t even allowed to show her tummy, let alone
navel pierce, and everything had to be machine washable at forty degrees, D’Dora had brought with her all kinds of frilly
and velvety sensuous things that had to go to the dry cleaners, not to mention – as Lola was pleased to point out – chains,
whips, black
leather hoods and long red latex boots, which D’Dora claimed was a collection of Victorian erotica, more rare and valuable
every year.

So that was how Scarlet, an unwilling listener to Beverley’s life story, came that morning to be unloading ready-made meals
from Waitrose into Beverley’s fridge, while Jackson went off to see his ex-wife and Lola packed, and did the chambermaid’s
trick of stuffing a few of Scarlet’s more delectable undies beneath a cushion to steal later.