Relative Love (38 page)

This time the big gates were open. At the end of the long drive Maisie could see several lights on in the ground floor of the house but only a couple of cars, which surprised her. She had imagined something more along the lines of the party she had just left, with scores of vehicles and glamorously dressed guests tripping around the place in high heels, clutching glasses and evening bags. The house appeared curiously silent, too. It had never occurred to her that a pop star would give a party without music blaring out all over the place. For the first time since she had embarked on her adventure Maisie thought seriously about turning back. She had focused so much on the thrilling challenge of slipping away and the ordeal of getting herself across the village that, presented now with the stark necessity of approaching the vast white portico of Rosco’s house and pressing the bell, she felt suddenly not like a princess at all but a bumbling schoolgirl who’d bitten off rather more than she could chew.

She made her way slowly towards the door, then hovered on the steps, trying to see into the windows, hoping that Rosco might just appear as he had the last time, quite magically, with that glistening smile. Yet she felt exposed on the doorstep, almost as if she was being watched. Something rustling in the shrubbery to her left made her turn sharply. Behind her the drive
stretched back towards the black jaws of the gates, now only dimly visible in the dark. It felt impossible to retreat down it. Simply impossible. She had come this far and would go on.

She rang the doorbell and waited for what felt like an age, until a woman in red satin trousers and an orange bikini top opened it. She had long black hair and staring eyes with pupils the size of saucers. Instead of looking surprised, or even asking Maisie who she was, she nodded over her shoulder, saying, ‘We’re out the back.’ Maisie followed her across the marbled, dome-ceilinged hall, self-conscious in her long dress and pencil-thin heels, noting with dismay that, in spite of her efforts, droplets of mud were splashed liberally round the hem. They walked through the house, past several closed doors and into a sumptuous rainforest of a conservatory, furnished with vast fan-backed straw chairs, glass tables and dozens of giant Oriental urns from which thick twists of greenery with fat leaves sprawled like rampant weeds, snaking up the walls and along the sloping white rafters of the ceiling. Beyond this, open to the skies but with a covered sunbathing area, was the large kidney-shaped swimming pool Maisie remembered from her first visit. On that occasion it had had a black tarpaulin pegged across it, covered with dirt and old leaves. Now the cover was off and the water, underlit on all sides, glimmered like a turquoise jewel. Thin veils of vapour were rising off its surface, so visibly that Maisie wondered, for a moment, if the water was too hot to use. But at that second a woman, naked apart from a tiny triangular gold thong, sauntered to the far edge and dived in.

‘Maisie. Come and join us. Come here.’ Rosco, lying like some Roman god at the centre of a small group of guests, all of them on sunbeds, lifted an arm and beckoned her over. The sunbeds were arranged round a towering silver mushroom of a heater, which explained why none of them was shivering with cold. ‘This is Maisie, people, she’s my new and very special friend. Come here, sweetheart, come right here.’ He patted the end of his sunbed. Maisie approached uncertainly. This wasn’t what she had imagined. They were all so much older than her and none of the women had tops on. And Rosco, in baggy Bermudas that revealed a flabby paunch of a tummy, didn’t look nearly as handsome as she remembered from their meeting in February. He sounded different too, sort of sleepy, like he wasn’t really in control of his sentences.

‘I can’t really stay,’ she muttered, perching where he indicated and feeling daft. ‘I’m supposed to be at another party, you see.’

‘Wow – another party! Cool … Can we come?’ They all laughed and Maisie blushed.

‘I don’t think that would be possible,’ she faltered, going pinker still at the way this seemed to make them laugh even harder.

‘Oh, don’t listen to them, they’re stoned,’ drawled Rosco.

‘Talking of which, Rosco sweetie, any chance of another line?’

‘Not now, Carol, I’m busy.’ He sat up and reached out to stroke Maisie’s hair. ‘Why don’t you lie next to me, darling? Because you’re my special friend – not like this lot of bloody spongers. You like me for myself, don’t you, Maisie darling?’

The man on the sunbed nearest to his, who was wearing a skimpy, tightly packed pair of black Speedos, groaned and muttered, ‘Give us a break, Ross,’ then got up to join the woman in the pool. Instead of swimming she was standing in the shallow end, splashing the surface of the water with the palms of both hands, watching each eruption with the unblinking intensity of a child witnessing something for the first time.

‘I’m so glad you came,’ Rosco growled. He heaved himself on to one elbow and began to stroke Maisie’s arm. ‘Even if you can’t stay long, it’s great to see you and in such a pretty dress too … Christ, you look pretty. Hey, Tim, doesn’t she look pretty?’

‘As a picture,’ grunted another man, who had his eyes closed and whom Maisie had assumed to be asleep. Rosco stopped stroking and tugged her arm instead, insistently enough for Maisie to find herself being pulled down alongside him until her head was in the crook of his shoulder while her legs dangled awkwardly over the edge of the sunbed. I’ll go soon, she thought, feeling stiff and stupid, I’ll simply say goodbye and go.

‘And what’s up in your life, Maisie? How’s it all going?’

‘Nothing really,’ she murmured, doing her best to sound grown-up and breezy, but thinking with sudden, terrifying clarity of her life – her real life – Uncle Peter’s party, the grind of GCSE course-work, the irritations of having a younger brother, the secret dieting of her twin sister, the zombie-like state of her mother. She remembered in the same instant that the initiation of this unlikely and extraordinary acquaintance had taken place on the day Tina died. A part of her longed to tell Rosco all this. Yet she knew that in doing so she would reveal herself to be a stressed-out fourteen-year-old instead of a sophisticated seventeen-year-old with a cool life. And uncomfortable as she was, with the curious salty smell of his chest pressing up her nostrils and her calves getting pins and needles, Maisie could not quite bring herself to do this. He was Neil Rosco, after all. With a diamond stud in his front tooth, loads of hit tracks and squillions of money and fans. Five more minutes, she told herself, five more minutes, then I’ll explain that I’ve got to go.

Elizabeth knew she was drunk. As she had bent over Roland to tuck him into bed, rubbing the sheet so he could hear the reassuring crinkle of plastic underneath, she had felt so giddy suddenly that it had taken all her willpower not to crawl under the bedclothes with him and close her eyes. When she rejoined the party, she had danced wildly with a man she didn’t know, then told Serena, who was lurking behind a garlanded pillar, that she was the bravest, most amazing woman she knew and that if Roland had been killed by a motorbike she would have wolfed a load of sleeping pills to join him as quickly as she could. Serena had murmured that no one knew how they would react to anything, then excused herself to go in search of her girls, whom no one had seen for a while.

Left to her own devices, Elizabeth tottered back on to the dance-floor, placed her handbag on the ground and began to do a little sword dance of a jig across and around it, feeling that she was in some way being true to herself in a manner that she seldom managed in everyday life. When Colin stepped into view, picked up her bag and suggested she sit down for a while, she told him to stop being so boring and leave her alone.

‘You’re making a fool of yourself,’ he hissed, clutching the bag in a way that made her want to giggle.

‘No, I’m not. I’m enjoying myself and you, as per usual, don’t like it.’

‘And what the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘Just that I’ve realised recently that all I ever do is try and keep other people happy and I’m fed up with it. And it doesn’t work anyway, does it?’ She turned sideways, wiggling her hips and clicking her fingers flamenco-style. ‘I never really please anyone – except Roland, I suppose.’ She frowned. ‘But I know I annoy the hell out of you a lot of the time and I certainly annoy my mother.’ She grinned, liberated by her own honesty, believing suddenly that she had the power to say – to be – anything she chose.

‘Elizabeth, I think maybe it’s time to think about turning in – the party’s winding up anyway.’

‘Oh, bollocks. You go to bed if you’re tired.’

‘Elizabeth, please.’ Colin glanced around anxiously. There were only a few other couples on the dance-floor. Pamela and John, slow-dancing sedately to the music, which resembled none of the rhythms Elizabeth was attributing to it, were among them and looking a little concerned.

‘You don’t want a scene, do you, darling?’ continued Elizabeth, both raising her voice and injecting a note of triumph into it. ‘Lucien did, but not you. That’s the trouble, nobody ever wants a scene, not you, and certainly not my parents over there. It’s all got to be tickety-boo.’ Liking the word, she repeated it several times, clicking her fingers to the rhythm of the syllables.

Pamela broke away from John and walked towards them, smiling. ‘They’re making more coffee – and hot chocolate. Maybe, Elizabeth darling …?’

‘No, thanks. Not thirsty. You just want to shut me up as well. Naughty Elizabeth, mucking things up again. Clumsy Elizabeth, not being good enough at anything … Maybe the other one – the one who died –
Miranda
would have been less disappointing …’

Pamela let out a small gasp. ‘Don’t be silly, dear, you’re tired.’ She took a step backwards, looking round for John.

‘Shut up, Elizabeth, for Christ’s sake,’ hissed Colin, beside himself with embarrassment.

And then suddenly her father was there, easing his hand under her elbow. ‘Come on, Lizzy, time to sit this one out, I think.’

‘Time to shut up, you mean,’ she muttered, but unable to resist leaning on him a bit because she
was
very tired and because, for all his irritating fuddy-duddiness, her father had never been the enemy. In addition to which the floor and marquee were now spinning madly. She let him steer her away, but kept herself as proudly steady and upright as she could. Dimly, she knew that demon regrets were already sharpening their knives, waiting to pounce in the cold light of morning. Yet she was also aware that her state of inebriation had somehow brought her closer to the knowledge of a lost possibility – of being other than she was, of it not being her fault – and she wasn’t ready to give up on it.

Everyone was in the pool now, apart from her and Rosco. Maisie had said, several times, that she had to go, but he had pleaded hard, making her sip his drink when she wouldn’t accept one of her own and offering her puffs of his cigarette. ‘At eleven,’ she said, relaxing a bit because his drink was sweet and tasty, ‘I really am going at eleven or my life won’t be worth living.’

‘And we wouldn’t want that, my Maisie, would we?’ As he spoke Rosco turned and rolled on top of her, so quickly that she had no chance to anticipate the movement. The next thing she knew his tongue was in her mouth, not at all like the gentle, curious probing of Jonny Cottrall or any of his modest string of predecessors but a huge swollen snake of a thing that sucked and swelled and made it hard to breathe. Maisie tried to wriggle out from under him but he was heavy and longer than her and suddenly not sleepy or gentle, but a great breathy, lumpen urgent creature, all mouth and muscle, suffocating her. He pinned her left arm above her head with one hand, then used the other to steer her right hand down to his crotch, grunting, ‘Touch me, Maisie, touch me.’ She tried to resist, but he had her hand by the wrist and easily thrust it between his legs. Then his entire bodyweight was back on top of her, entrapping her arm so that her fingers couldn’t avoid feeling the vile rubbery stiffness of his erection. The sunbed was facing away from the pool. Squirming, Maisie managed to twist her neck sufficiently to see an upside-down snapshot of the other guests, lolling on the steps in the shallow end in a haze of cigarette smoke. One of the men was kissing the girl in the gold thong, his hand on her breast. The others sat on either side of them, looking bored and uninvolved. Maisie, who had been summoning all her
might and courage to cry out, began to sob instead. There was no point, she realised. They wouldn’t come to help her because they didn’t care. She could feel his knee digging at her thighs now, wedging them apart, while the bulk of him ground painfully into her hips. ‘Stop – please stop.’ At last she freed her hand, but in a flash he had it pinned above her head with the other, and was grinning down at her, his face an inch from hers, all hot breath.

‘You want it, you know you want it.’

‘I don’t, I don’t,’ Maisie croaked, feeling the fight go out of her. She had brought this turn of events upon herself, after all. She had come, shivering in her thin silk dress, to offer herself: a princess expecting a fairy tale, seeking something better and beyond a schoolboy hand inside her bra. Without envisaging the specifics of sex itself, Maisie had imagined that the attentions of a grown man – a famous man – would grant her entry into a more exotic, more romantic world: a place where she would shine and bask in the grown-up thrill of desiring and being desired. It had never occurred to her that such a world could turn out to be so brutish and alien. Rosco was pushing even harder now, grunting like a pig, trying to slide himself in under her pants. Her hips ached. And yet it was all her fault. So there was nothing to do but wait for it to be over, to hope that it didn’t hurt too much. Maisie squeezed her eyes shut, promising herself she wouldn’t open them again until it was over.

‘Get off her. Get off her this minute, you – you pervert!’ The voice began as a tremble, but grew louder and braver with each word.

Rosco froze and then, with a loud snort of surprise, rolled off Maisie and pulled up his swimming trunks. ‘And who the fuck might you be?’