Much changed that year, especially Brodie’s and Flook’s hairstyles. Each week brought a new patch of bald scalp to gleam beneath peaks of rainbowed hair. Mummy walked into the bathroom during a bleaching session. Flook, bare to the waist, sat on a chair in front of the mirror, his hair half white and half invisible, tucked away in neat silver foil pouches. Poppy and Dan perched on the edge of the bath, holding strips of foil and watching, absorbed, as Brodie worked.
‘Jesus Christ! What are you doing to him?’ Mummy screamed. Brodie jumped, spilling peroxide in a glut across Flook’s naked shoulders. Flook leapt up roaring. Dan and Poppy flung down their foil and slunk out guiltily.
‘This stuff is agony. Get it off me, get it off me!’ Flook plunged his torso into the bath.
Behind him, Mummy rocked back and forth in rage, eyes narrowed, her lips tight and puckered white. ‘How can you be so stupid? Thank God it’s the summer holidays. Do you realize that in term-time you would be expelled for this, quite apart from the unutterable damage you are doing to your hair. And it looks ghastly.’ She stalked out, slamming the door so hard that one of the panels fell out.
‘I don’t see what she’s making such a fuss about.’ Brodie continued to unwrap the foil parcels. Flook sat still, tensed like an old lady at the hairdresser’s. ‘We’ve been dyeing our hair for months.’
‘I don’t think she’s ever really taken it in before,’ replied Flook.
The boys told me about this row the next day. I had been out. Suddenly I was out a lot. Imogen’s inexhaustible social energy and her desire to have someone to giggle with made her invite me to the many parties she was asked to that summer. I stayed with her for a weekend which grew into a week, enjoying the world away from my family and absorbing luxury with heady greed.
Everything at Imogen’s house operated like clockwork. Her mother drifted into the walled garden carrying a trug, and beheaded limp roses while Imogen and I lay by the stinging blue pool, inhaling the scent of honeysuckle mingled with chlorine. Delicious lunches of cold salmon and crisp salad appeared like magic at one o’clock, and no one ever came and told us to feed the hens or muck out the stables. Imogen’s brother Edward was given a little blue car and he taught me to drive it, trundling through a hayfield, weaving erratically between vast cotton-reel bales.
At night I lay in a sprigged bower, stretching my limbs over stiff linen sheets and looking up at the ruby canopy of a four-poster bed. I wallowed in soft comfort and thought of my room at home: the slanted ceiling dotted with Blu-Tack where my horse pictures had fallen down; the bed, its chipped paint surrounding a gaping hole in the wickerwork, excavated, I was sure, by busy mice as I slept. I thought of the cobwebs rattling with the last throes of flies, of the bathroom where the taps in the basin had not worked since I was four, and of the fridge full of nothing more sustaining than a pool of milk spilt from an overturned bottle. I tried to think of something my home had in common with Imogen’s; some small corner of it which mirrored the smooth, structured existence at Wallby Hall. There, flowers swanned on graceful stems above gleaming polished tables, and a lady in a blue nylon coat, a yellow duster in her pocket, vaccumed and scrubbed every morning. At home there were dog hairs on the carpet and springs rearing like serpents from the sofas. Mummy picked bunches of wild flowers, thrusting cow parsley and hogweed into buckets and urns and placing them, towering and sweet-scented, on a mantelpiece where they stayed until they had become ghosts, skeletal and colourless, with the scent of old hay. No one cleaned our house. Mummy once had a vacuum cleaner, a green globe which coasted proudly along the landing for a week after Trixie had donated it. But Mummy failed to love it, and one day negligence toppled it down the stairs and on to the flagstones in the hall with a splintering crunch, followed by a high-pitched moan. After that it would only exhale air, and soon became a home for Martians in the playroom.
The only element of Imogen’s house which faintly echoed Mildney was the library. Imogen’s grandfather had collected books, and his passion was ranked neatly from floor to ceiling in a high panelled room. Imogen never went in there, dismissing the books as ‘really ancient and dull’, but I loved it. It reminded me of home, where every corridor and room was panelled with books piled one upon another.
At lunch, talking to Imogen’s father about his books as his moustache bounced above his masticating jaws, I oozed superiority when he said, ‘Of course, the library is very fine, but nothing to the one your father must have.’
‘Well, we haven’t got a room full of books like your one,’ I answered cautiously, longing but not daring to lie, ‘but there are a lot there, and I think Daddy has read every one of them, and Mummy too.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Imogen’s father, and the moustache sat inert for a second while he wiped it with his napkin, like a good dog waiting for praise. ‘I only read the Shooting Times myself, but they always say “horses for courses”, don’t they?’ The moustache shot off again in pursuit of a spoonful of summer pudding.