On New Year’s Eve, Mummy and Daddy went to a party. Helen had come to stay again, and she and Rex roared off on a motorbike, outriding Mummy and Daddy. Helen looked ill. She was very pregnant, and her face was swollen as well as her stomach. Mummy tried to stop her going on the motorbike, but she wouldn’t listen.
‘Heart of my heart, daughter of mine, you are a bloody idiot,’ said Daddy, watching Helen scoop her hair into a yellow helmet. She rolled her eyes like an exasperated teenager and winked at me as she bundled out of the door in Rex’s spare leathers. ‘They never let you grow up, you know,’ she whispered.
Zoe and Vinnie arrived in a taxi from Liza’s house. They had brought presents for us all. Zoe and I bustled about lighting the fire and enjoying having the house as our own, without parents.
Before midnight, Helen and Rex were back, their leather clothes sparkling with frost. They were drunk. Brodie had taken down the oval mirror from above the fire and we stuck candles on to it with wax drops to celebrate the New Year. Dan and Poppy were asleep in the playroom, their eyes shuttered against Benny Hill as he whooped and insinuated across the television screen. The rest of us grouped around the mirror, glasses filled with stolen wine, poised for midnight. Rex lurched head first on to the sofa, kicking one of the candles over.
‘Watch out, this is a mirror,’ said Brodie, alarmed by the large, creaking presence.
Rex leapt up, his face a snarl, long yellow teeth bared, pointed like peeled nuts. ‘All a mirror does is bring you bad luck,’ he jeered. Smiling unpleasantly, he picked the mirror up and threw it, shattering silvered splinters in the glowing fire. Then he turned on Brodie.
‘Leave him alone,’ screeched Helen, and I grabbed Rex’s arm, pulling hopelessly at his sleeve. He whipped back his shoulder to shake me off and towered over Brodie, reaching to grab him out of the shadows. From the playroom, Big Ben tolled midnight as Zoe, Helen and I heaved and rocked with Rex. He shook me off again, hitting my nose with his elbow. My eyes watered, and I squeezed past him and knelt with Brodie. ‘Go away. Leave us alone,’ I sobbed. Rex whirled round, breaking two glasses and standing on Zoe’s foot.
‘You bastard.’ Helen was at his throat, her face white fury, veins raised and pumping as she reached for his neck. Rex roared and punched her, then bounded over the sofa and out into the garden. Helen wiped her nose, smearing a trickle of blood across her cheek. She laughed shakily. ‘Happy New Year, you lot,’ she said.
After New Year, winter unfurled sharp claws and slashed deep into the earth, freezing the ground and drawing all colour and life out of trees and plants until everything was grey. Feeble snowflakes fell hesitantly from an ice-white sky, and ceased; it was too cold for the soft comfort of snow. From my bedroom I looked out at Shalimar, a soft black blur huddled beneath an oak tree.
Downstairs, Mummy was the only person who would talk to Bertrand Bougie, the French exchange student whom Brodie had visited in Paris last summer. Le Boogy, as the boys called him, was not a success. He sat at the kitchen table, his hair shiny and slicked down as if a tin of treacle had been poured over his head. As he sat he fiddled miserably with a cold piece of toast. At the beginning of his visit, Brodie and Flook had invited him to come and admire their collection of army gear. They gave him a gun to shoot rabbits with and offered their most prized unexploded shell for him to polish.
The shell, and other pieces of live ammunition, had been found when an American airforce plane hurtled into the field across the river. We came home from school one day to find khaki-clad soldiers guarding the white bridge at the edge of the village. Brodie and Flook were overjoyed. They were always delighted when a plane crashed nearby. Scrambling out of the car, they made friends with the soldiers, wheedling and cajoling until they were taken to the wreckage of the plane. There Flook absorbed the two young Americans in conversation, while Brodie, unnoticed, picked glinting explosives out of the twisted metal and mud and stuffed them under his blazer. They hid their booty in the hayloft, and only those armed with the password ‘raphonidomai’ (a word Mummy had taught us in our infant Greek lessons, meaning ‘I stick a radish up the fundament’) might enter. The boys were wary of Mummy discovering their treasured armoury, and although I was terrified and begged them at least to defuse their weapons, I knew I could not sneak.
But Le Boogy, an uncomprehending alien ill-clad for the Norfolk winter in neat shirts and sharply creased shorts, did not appreciate the honour of entering the hayloft. He sidled out, smiling and nodding, and went back to the warmth of the kitchen. He read comics and munched chocolate from a secret supply he stashed behind Mummy’s French dictionary. He was afraid of animals and horrified by dirt. He clung to Mummy’s kindness as if it were the last drop of human affection he would ever receive, and he went everywhere with her. Mummy urged me to be nice to him. ‘Please, couldn’t you talk to him? Tell him what you learned in French or something. He’s so lonely,’ she begged in a desperate whisper, using a moment when Le Boogy was rootling for another bar of chocolate on the musty bookshelf. But I refused, retreating to the telephone for an hour-long string of inanities with Sasha. Brodie and Flook, exasperated at the failure of their overtures, and unable to offer Le Boogy anything more thrilling than ammunition, simply ignored him and went on with their ever more sophisticated and bloody war games.
So Le Boogy went to Mr Cardew’s with Mummy, he went to the Norwich hairdresser with her, and he went shopping in Aylthorpe with her. This he enjoyed, bustling ahead of the supermarket trolley, his rounded rump swinging as he made for the cheese counter and the chocolate biscuits. Mummy allowed him to choose his favourite things, and his responsibility made him forget his homesickness a little. Le Boogy brought home piles of smoked cheese, tins of sardines, packets of garlic sausage and plastic tubs bursting with coiled salted herrings. We were all appalled. ‘What’s this gross stuff?’ asked Brodie, holding up a thin, viscous anchovy. ‘It looks like a worm. I’m not eating it. Why can’t we have fish fingers?’ Le Boogy looked at him astonished and went on tucking into his own plate of anchovies, pâté and olives.
Mummy still wore the blonde wig when driving. Daddy thought that driving lessons, like buying the cats and dogs tinned food instead of giving them scraps, were a waste of money, and flew into a spitting frenzy if he discovered Mummy was taking them. She somehow kept up a secret weekly tryst with her driving instructor. Although Mr Ball bowed to her insistence occasionally and let her take a driving test, each time fear paralysed her and she failed. Le Boogy became accustomed to the last-minute search for the wig, and solemnly hunted it out. He offered it to her, watching with unblinking concentration as she wedged it on to her head. She found his gaze unnerving, and once forgot to take off her beret before applying the wig. Le Boogy silently rose from the rocking-chair beside the Aga. Climbing up on to another chair next to Mummy, he gently removed the wig and then the beret. He replaced the wig with great care, tweaking it a little like a couturier addressing the final fitting of a gown. He spoke not a word as he completed the adjustments and climbed down.
He had never referred to the wig at all. Mummy had been attempting unsuccessfully to construct an answer to the inevitable question and was relieved when Le Boogy’s last day came and he had still not commented on her disguise. But preparing for the final shopping trip, Le Boogy, wig in hand, having retrieved it from the dog chair in the playroom, shook his head sorrowfully and looked up at Mummy with his great bovine eyes. ‘Why you do this thing, Madame, why?’ he pleaded, and Mummy was astonished to find herself answering firmly, ‘It is a British custom.’ Le Boogy smiled happily and nodded, a weight lifted from his mind, and they drove to Aylthorpe to purchase some offal, Le Boogy’s special request for his last supper.