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

“Yes,” says Nick.

“Mrs Lewis also told us that Mr Lewis had called her on Friday morning from Manchester, mentioning he was due to see you, sir, when he got back to London. He was unsure how long he would be with you, but said the two of you might make a night of it.”

Nick feels a wave of peculiar fear. Laurence and he have never, in their entire lives, except when forced to in family company, made a ‘night of it’. They did not and do not like each other.

“Therefore,” Pond adds, rather thoughtfully, “Mrs Lewis eventually called you yesterday evening. She said that she has, now and then, been used to her husband’s not returning after various junkets with his friends, and thought he might well have stayed on at your flat. However, when you pretended not to know who she was and refused to take her calls…”

Nick blurts, “It was a bad line, I didn’t recognise her voice…”

“And she was, I suspect, quite hysterical by then. Besides, one gets so many unwanted calls nowadays.” Pond nods.

There is silence. Pond just keeps standing there, waiting, and Nick stands there, not drinking the Volvic.

And then the landline rings loudly, and both he and Pond turn to glare at it, like two animals who have been engaged in some face-off, when a third animal of some other type bounds between them.

He had been eleven, Laurence around twenty-three, when Laurence played the joke on him. He realised afterwards Serena was almost certainly in on it too. But he was never sure of that. He had been with Claudia to London. It was a celebratory drinks party, arranged by the director that Claudia always called Samson, though that was not his name. The affair had something to do with successful funding for a movie by the US, and they had asked Claudia along, despite her not working in film since the 1970”s. She was forty-six.

Nick could recollect nothing very special about this party. It was like many he had been at, with Claudia. He was usually struck by then more by the sheer ordinariness of most ‘stars’ when seen in the flesh, or else by the alien oddness of the ones who were not ordinary. But after all he was used to his mother’s glamour. She had stayed glamorous, and besides had that strange inbuilt magic which can be seen without make-up, just out of sleep, or even aging. They were a scruffy lot often too, the new stars. Bashing about in expensive favourite old jeans or similar tatty clothes. Even when dressed to kill, they no longer ever had, for Nick, the fizz and glitter that reproduced on celluloid. In fact, he had once or twice witnessed scenes shot that looked like nothing, yet which came into vivid and gleaming life when viewed on the big screen. Or even on TV.

Claudia and he were due to drive back from the party together. But then it seemed there was to be some other thing to which Samson persuaded Claudia she really must come. Did she not know X might be there - even Y and Z?

She laughed, and said she would ‘obey’. But the extra event was scheduled to go on past one in the morning. So Nick, due for school the next day, had to travel back alone to the country house in the car, driven by one of the studio chauffeurs who knew the way from long practice. It would only take a couple of hours. Claudia would stay over at the house in Highgate.

Nick was reasonably philosophical. No lover of school or organised education, yet he grasped in this his father had to be propitiated. Once or twice Nick had escaped, going home with Claudia at 2 or 3 a.m., getting the next day off. But that had to be an occasional treat, never a foregone conclusion.

Joss Lewis’s country house then was a rambling red brick mansion, about a mile outside a village they all called, disparagingly, St Clucks, for its church and duck pond.

The house, lying behind iron railings and up a long drive massed by enormous trees, loomed out suddenly, red-faced as if with alarmingly high blood-pressure, its ranks of windows winking. There was a housekeeper, and even servants - who were never referred to as such. It was like stepping back into a curiously skewed 1925. Or, on to a film-set, Nick had later thought.

It was about 6 p.m. when he got there.

He went upstairs and into his room, a spacious attic bedsit, and pushing school impedimenta under the desk, took out his latest story and began to work on it.

His father was in Belgium, some business venture in which Nick had no interest at all. Laurence, thankfully, though just down from his university, was in London. As for Serena, God knew. Staying with friends on someone’s yacht somewhere most likely.

Nick worked on his story until almost eight o’clock, then went for a stroll round the gardens and in the woods belonging to the house. It was dusk by then. Birds were realigning themselves with their nests or perches in the trees. The sky and the house faded from crimson to blue.

He had dinner in the small dining room. He got soup and burnt steak and the usual sloppy service, of course, reserved for an eleven-year-old kid. But Nick never minded that. Why the hell should they be nice to him? He did not pay their wages.

He slept deeply, as ever, after having spent half an hour watching bats circling the carriage lights by the drive.

At seven thirty the following morning, (dressed and reluctantly ready for the walk to St Cluck’s and the school bus) he was eating toast when the phone went. It was Laurence.

“Where is she?” demanded Laurence without a greeting. He sounded tousled and irascible, but what was new?

“Who?” asked Nick.

“Bloody Claudia. Our mother. Who else, you twot?”

Nick said, “At the London place. You know? That big white skinny