Ivoria, Tanith Lee [popular ebook readers .TXT] 📗

her fifties. But she looked to Qirri absurdly pretty and elegant, and rich and graceful and - light… She looked as if it must be a lie she had ever produced such a creature as Qirri. And it rather seemed that Claudia must think this too. When Yorgos and Qirri arrived at the lunch party in the West End, everyone who noticed them seemed slightly fazed by their appearance. The handsome spivvy father, with his too sharp clothes, the unprepossessing fat daughter in her bulgy school skirt, and a top from Woolworths that Jonquil had thieved.

“Claudia,” Yorgos had fulsomely said to the blonde woman with the sea-blue eyes, dressed in the silvery white suit, “My sweetest Claudia! So long since I see you. And not a day older…”

“Several days, I’m afraid,” said Claudia flatly. Despite all her finesse and her acting talent, her face began setting like plaster of Paris. She wanted to escape, so much was very plain, but no one so far had come to rescue her.

From the conversation it came out that Yorgos had legitimately been invited to the party. He had worked on some movie or other some director or other here had valued. That old movie too had been where he met Claudia - though she was not part of the cast - and soon he had seduced and impregnated her with Qirri. But Claudia, who had not in the end aborted Qirri, instead gave birth to her in an unrevealed European nook, then handed her over to the father and his own mother. A classical name, and some money - both upfront and more importantly in trust for the child - were all Claudia left behind her when she rushed back to her English home and ‘perfectly’ married life.

As they stood before Claudia, Yorgos turned to Qirri as if afraid she might, spastic ox that she was (Granny’s English-Greek term) blurt all this and spoil his pitch. He suggested Qirri find herself a drink, a little champagne, why not.

So Qirri wandered away. The spacious reception room, in some opulent hotel, was full of elegant glamorous people. All drank, many smoked, there was the scent of cannabis among the Galoises. A few leered at her in amused mild dismay. What was this awful female thing doing here? She must have strayed in from some grosser place…

In the end, clutching a frosty can of Pepsi, that would subsequently splash her in the cab, Qirri gravitated hopelessly back towards her parents. Her parents. The scarcely known father, the mother known only by innuendo, slighting reference, hearsay, or the occasional old movie on TV.

“No, Yorgos, I don’t think she’s film material. Perhaps one day,” Claudia was saying, “when she’s older. More – organised…”

“I feared it’s so, Claudia. Hey, how come you and I, a fine feller like me and a beauty like you - how we make a kid so rubbish?” (How indeed had they made anything? Even love.)

At that moment Claudia had seen Qirri again, lurking there, peering at them. Listening. He had not. Claudia said, “Yorgos, you must excuse me. I really have to talk to some people over there.”

And this was when her father hustled Qirri out, frowning, yet grinning too his cigarette-stained, once-white teeth, determined to talk to Claudia alone. The doorman, aloof as a lizard, fetched the taxi to the kerb. “Go home to Granny, Kitty. And look, maybe - how about you diet a bit, yeah? Get one of them creams for your skin.” And then he kissed her on her forehead, which that day was unspotted, with the slightly dirty fringe combed back.

And that was the last time she saw him. He died the next spring, drowned somewhere off the mainland of Greece, perhaps in the ending stages of a fight.

She would realise eventually Yorgos had meant, had doubtless tried, to blackmail Claudia. She’s yours, get her a job, you owe her, why we gotta wait all these years for her money? All these people here - what are they to you? Get me back in the business. I need money. She needs it. What if I tell ’em all, all this fancy people, what we done, you and I? And your hubby. How he like it?

Had he said that, something like that? And what had Claudia replied? “They’d laugh at you. And my husband knows.” Did she say that? Or did she feel frightened?

In adulthood Qirri had wondered how Claudia had been so careless as to become pregnant by Yorgos. But Claudia had been in her thirties then. Her body, or only her contraception might have become unreliable. Or had she wanted it, another child - and then ceased to want any such thing?

Qirri had a dream a few nights after the party. She dreamed that Claudia was in her bedroom, the ten by nine foot box room where Qirri had been stacked, like a box, to sleep. Claudia said to Qirri: “How can you be mine? You’re hideous, a monster.” Qirri woke up and lay still. She was rigid, not with adolescent shame or misery, but with hate. She wished Claudia dead. And, for good measure, her father too.

Claudia, so the papers announced, died less than a month later. Yorgos, like an afterthought, the next year.

Qirri was too worn down perhaps to register any of this as a victory, whether due to her or not. But it influenced her. It must have done. Not that she believed she had developed psychic powers, the sort Granny thought she had when she started her curses. (If Qirri had been capable of that, Granny herself would have been long gone.) But it somehow established that Qirri alone was not to be life’s prey. Others too were prey to it, however powerful, or fair. And she had more time than they, the immortality of youth.

When she was seventeen her looks began, of themselves, to alter so much for the better, and in another year The Money entered her existence. The Money was in