Inigo says he will stay up for the boeuf-en-daube, although he has school tomorrow. He is in his last year there. If he gets his A-levels he will go to York University. Inigo is too old to be told how to behave, when to eat, how to dress, how to speak, how to get on in the world – anything, in fact. He comes and goes as he pleases. He is a well-built dramatic looking boy of eighteen, with his father’s hook-nose and upstanding black hair – which, being uncut, forms a wide curly halo round his head – and hard blue eyes. He plays rugger.
Inigo seems nothing to do with Chloe any more. Inigo is his father’s child, and she just a servicing machine. She is irritated with him. He seems to admire Oliver for having got Françoise to bed – Oliver tells Inigo, too, as well as his mother, believing as he does in sexual frankness with the young, and she suspects them of having oh-you-dog snicker-snicker sessions when they listen to records or go fishing together.
Chloe is hurt. Was this what she raised Inigo for? Trained him in understanding, forgiveness, patience, love: raised him with open, liberal consideration and care? And see, he is as prurient and predatory on the female sex as any young man of her own generation! Inigo is not to be her champion, either.
Kevin is fourteen. He is a thin wiry child with his father’s coarse red hair, and blue eyes, and the same cleft chin – but he is wiry as his father is stocky. He is always hungry. He piles food on to his plate, pulls it towards him, crooks his left arm round it to protect it from scavengers whilst he bolts it down with his right. He was hungry for his first three years. It seems that no amount of food will ever make up for it. He goes to the Masonic boarding-school, now in recess for the Easter holidays. His hair is cropped short and he has a pasty look, and his vowels do not have Inigo’s ringing purity. He collects anything – stamps, wild flowers of England, car registration numbers. His room is awash with notebooks and cardboard files. He plods doggedly through school, and work, and holidays with Chloe, and never inquires after his father.
He opts for fish-fingers now. So does Kestrel.
Kestrel, his sister, is twelve. Her birthday is on Christmas Eve. She goes to the same school as her brother – girl’s division. She is determined not to grow up. She wears ankle socks and sandals and would wear her school-uniform throughout the holidays if Chloe didn’t wrench it from her. She has her hair short and carries her homework wherever she goes, like a weapon. She loves school and is Form Prefect and, Chloe thinks, can hardly be popular. Kestrel likes to tell everyone what to do, and how, and when, and has spots on her chin which she covers with plasters. She has her mother Midge’s mousy colouring and round innocent face, but hard blue eyes and Patrick’s chin.
Stanhope will have fish-fingers too. Boeuf-en-daube sounds foreign. His birthday, also, is on Christmas Eve. He and Kestrel were born on the same day, in St George’s hospital at Hyde Park Corner. Kestrel’s mother Midge had booked in properly. But Stanhope’s mother, Grace, was taken there from Selfridges, where she’d tapped a lady at one of the perfumery counters on the shoulder and said ‘excuse me, I’m having a baby’.
Stanhope looks bewildered and brave. He goes to a rather small public school.
Stanhope is not unlike Kevin, whom he admires, but has a more delicate and refined cast of countenance. Clearly unsuited to competitive sports, Stanhope talks of nothing else. He runs himself ragged on cross-country runs. Last term he was picked up collapsed three-quarters of the way round the course. He was leading. The school let Grace know but she forgot to pass the message on to Chloe and no-one came to visit him in the school san. No-one.
On Grace’s instructions, Chloe is obliged to maintain the myth that Stanhope is the son of an airline captain who crashed the day after his birth. ‘He’ll like that,’ says Grace, ‘anything is better than having Patrick Bates for a father.’ When Chloe remonstrates at the impracticality of such a story, Grace becomes quite offended. ‘I am the child’s mother,’ she says.
One day, when Stanhope seems strong enough, Chloe means to tell him the truth. But every holiday he appears more fragile, more delicate, more emotional, and not tougher at all.
Imogen is Chloe’s darling. She is an artful prattler. Imogen loves Oliver with an all-pervasive love. He melts before it, even as he resents her.
How can Chloe leave? How can she carve through these patterns of dependency and hope, in the interests of something so impractical and elusive as personal happiness?
Françoise cooks twenty-four fish-fingers. She has to. Oliver has found the two packets in the tiny ice compartment where he keeps the champagne, and such is his dislike of packaged foods that naturally he removes them, and puts them on top of the refrigerator, where they soon thaw and turn soggy, and if not cooked quickly will be wasted.
Chloe has turned four pounds of potatoes into chips. There is no chip basket because Oliver despises chips, but Françoise manages very well with the egg slicer and a deep frying pan.
Chloe opens two cans of peas.
Françoise and Chloe sit at either end of the table, the children sit in between. There is laughter and frivolity. Stanhope finds the secret bottle of tomato sauce. Oliver will not emerge till midnight.
They are all remarkably happy.