At half past nine Chloe suffers a spasm of fear at the prospect of going to London, and annoying everyone, and by five past ten, with the assistance of some inner fairy godmother, finally stirring from sleep, has regained her courage. She telephones.
Inigo, Imogen, Kevin, Kestrel and Stanhope are out on the lawn, marking up a badminton court for the season’s playing. Chloe’s fleshly children are the youngest and eldest. Inigo is eighteen, Imogen is eight. Chloe’s spiritual children, Kevin, Kestrel and Stanhope, come in between. Their cheerful, easy profanity drifts across the garden as Chloe tries to get a line through to London, and once in London to the BBC, and once at the BBC, through a succession of receptionists and secretaries, to Marjorie.
Who’d have believed it, thinks Chloe? That these children can use the words so lightly, which once were hurled, with such malignant ferocity, across their cradles. Bitch and bastard, Christ and cunt.
Although Chloe is fleshly mother only to Imogen and Inigo, all the children, she likes to feel, owe their existences to her. Four of them, Kevin, Kestrel, Stanhope and Imogen, share a common father – one Patrick Bates. Inigo has Oliver for a father. Stanhope has Grace for a mother. Kevin and Kestrel’s mother Midge (Patrick’s legal wife) is dead. Imogen supposes, wrongly, that Oliver is her father. Stanhope is not told, for reasons clear to his mother Grace but no-one else, the true identity of his father. And as guilty adults have a way of protecting children from truths which are probably less painful than the lies, the children live in supposedly blissful ignorance that Stanhope and Imogen are not only half-brother and half-sister to each other, but to Kevin and Kestrel as well.
Or so Chloe believes they live.
Eventually the voice at the other end of the line is Marjorie’s.
‘Why are you ringing?’ asks Marjorie. ‘Are you all right? What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ says Chloe.
‘Oh,’ says Marjorie. Is there a faint disappointment in her voice? ‘Did you have trouble getting through? I’ve been in four different offices in four weeks. If I was a man they wouldn’t dare. Do you know what they’re making me do now? The most boring series they can think of. Whole departments have toiled weeks to produce it. They told me so. A thirteen-part adaptation of a novel about the life of a middle-aged divorced woman, victim of modern times and a changing society. It is my punishment for asking to do Z-cars for a change. I like cops and robbers so they give me human suffering, not to mention staff directors who’re so permanent they can’t fire them.’
Chloe has little idea of what Marjorie is talking about, but is obliged to admire her for her capacity to cope with, and earn money in, the outside world. Marjorie, however, has neither husband nor children, which to Chloe seems a great misfortune, and emboldens her to ask, insignificant though she feels she is, a housewife up in London, knowing nothing of directors or contracts, if Marjorie will have lunch with her that day.
‘Is that French girl still with you?’ inquires Marjorie.
‘Yes,’ says Chloe, as one might say, and what of that?
‘In that case I’ll have lunch with you,’ says Marjorie, ‘and put off two bad directors and a worse writer. Because you know what will happen. She won’t just be content with your husband. She’ll want your children and your house as well. You’ll be eased out within the year and end up with nothing.’
What a simple view of life, Chloe thinks, the unmarried have. What can Marjorie know about it? She says as much.
‘I read scripts all day,’ Marjorie replies, ‘and it is the kind of thing which always happens in them. You might say I knew life well by proxy. And fiction, or so my writers swear, is nothing compared to real life. Watch out for poison in the soup. The Italiano, then, at twelve-thirty.’
She rings off, with that talent she has for giving with one hand and taking away with the other, without telling Chloe where the restaurant is.