Merry-Curl was living in London. He had left university and was looking for a job. I went to stay with him one weekend, and found him resplendent in a long-corridored flat above the King’s Road. The drawing-room swaggered beneath mighty red silk curtains and every surface was scattered with cigarette ash. Dazzled, I fell in love with him. Merry-Curl was taken aback. After an hour or two of red-faced fumbling, we went out and walked in the rain across Hyde Park and he held my hand.
In the evening, we climbed into a taxi and ticked across London to Soho for a party. Sandwiched between two strip-joints was a huge green metal door. We went in, and up and up. On the roof, spotlights draped in yellow and pink gauze cast hazy beams towards the night sky. The party was being given by one of Merry-Curl’s friends from Oxford, and everyone there knew him and wanted to know who I was. Intoxicated by pink champagne and attention, I danced on the slate rooftop and promised myself that as soon as my last exam was done I would move to London.
A tall girl, with a slender cylinder body and a silver mini-dress, asked where I lived. ‘Norfolk,’ I replied, wishing I could have said ‘Chelsea’ or ‘Bohemia’ or anywhere exotic. ‘Mansions or Square?’ Her fishbowl eyes swivelled frantically and focused on me again. ‘County, actually,’ I admitted regretfully. She shrieked, arching her back, rippling laughter down her long white throat.
‘Why don’t you come and live with me? Norfolk’s so far away. I’ve got a spare room in my flat.’
Nodding, beaming, I agreed. Merry-Curl came over and led me away. In the taxi on the way back to his flat, I realized I hadn’t asked the girl her name.
Returning to Norfolk on the coach did not match my new vision of myself and my life. I reached Mildney hot and nauseated by petrol fumes. I felt frustrated, frumpy, hung-over and fed up. Daddy observed my glazed, tired eyes and my scowl. ‘Burning the candle at all four corners,’ he mocked, raising his eyebrows at Brodie when I flounced out of the room.
Home. Place of revision. Crowded ants’ nest infested with the lowest form of life. Squalid and not at all aesthetic. I lay in my bed and thought dark thoughts until I fell asleep.
A month later, my exams were over. I didn’t care whether or not I had passed them because a friend of Merry-Curl’s had offered me a job running errands for a film crew working on a documentary. I was moving to London. Merry-Curl had identified the blonde cylinder girl as Palladia MacAdam, a name of unqualified sophistication in my eyes, and of gross pretension in the view of my family. Even Dan managed a Latin pun: Et in Palladia ego, he proffered during the ‘humiliate Va Va’ session the boys had the morning before I left. Daddy answered her telephone call when she rang up to confirm her offer of a room. ‘Your father is divine,’ she warbled, enraging me. ‘And his poetry … heaven, absolute heaven. We shall read it together over breakfast.’
‘Mmm …’ I was unenthusiastic, but perked up when Palladia told me I would have a telephone next to my bed.
Mummy became sentimental and kept following me around the house as I packed, offering broken china animals. ‘This was yours when you were five; I think you should take it with you.’ When I rejected the limbless pony, she folded her hands and started to recall the labour pains she suffered to bring me into the world all those eighteen years ago.
Snapping and snarling at everyone, I heaped the brown Ford Cortina with all my belongings. Daddy had given me this car as a leaving-home present. I wished it was a sports car and hardly managed to say thank you. Poppy stumbled out of the house wearing a pair of gold-painted stilettos I had thrown at her while clearing my bedroom. ‘You said I could have them, I know you did,’ she pleaded, rocking forward as she struggled to keep them on her feet. I couldn’t be bothered to argue. Looking at her, I suddenly wanted to change my mind; to unpack the car again and stay at home. I sat down on the grass, pulling Poppy down next to me, and hugged her awkwardly. She was ten, too big to cuddle on my knee, but I remembered her baby embraces, and I wanted them again now.
Brodie and Flook came out, each carrying a slumped cat. ‘We’ve given them their sleeping-pills. The vet says they’ll work for four hours, so you should get there.’ Brodie passed me the soft heap of Angelica, my ginger cat. Flook lifted Witton, the stripy one, into the car, placing him carefully inside a hat where he fitted like coiled rope.
It was time to go. I hugged everyone in turn and, shaking, crawled into the tiny space left by my luggage. Mummy and Daddy, Brodie, Flook, Dan and Poppy stood by the porch waving as I grated the gears and drove away down the drive. I cried all the way to Norwich, but when I jerked into the slow lane of the London road, I became a new person. Super-efficient and grandly independent, I chugged to London, my top speed downhill a stately forty. The cats woke up at Hyde Park Corner and were very alarmed. Climbing on to my shoulders and scrambling along the dashboard, they looked out at the whirling, grinding traffic and miaowed pitifully. I felt ashamed for having brought them.