Читать книгу A Hard Time to Be a Father - Fay Weldon - Страница 12

‘You are so selfish,’ said Edwina to her mother. Edwina was thirty-one. She hated her name. When she was born her parents had expected a boy: ‘Edwin’ had been ready and waiting. Her father and mother had just added an ‘a’ and thereafter ignored her. Edwina was Hughie and Beverley’s first-born. Father: Hughie, Earl of Cowarth; mother: Beverley, a fortune-hunter from New Zealand. Now, decades into family disapproval, Beverley was sixty-one: Hughie had died mere months ago: Edwina, at thirty-one, had affairs, rode to hounds and drank too much. The family had just about got over the shock of Hughie’s death. Now it was all wills, or rather no wills, and inheritance, or no inheritance, and who got what title: that is to say whatever sad crumbs of comfort spilled out after death could be picked over and scrabbled for. Hughie had been much and genuinely loved.

‘But then,’ Edwina added, ‘I suppose you always were selfish.’

‘What is so selfish?’ asked Beverley, startled, ‘about wanting to live in my own bleeding home?’

‘Because it’s far too big for you now,’ said Georgina. ‘Sell the place and find somewhere small and sensible to live, and divide the money amongst us.’ Georgina had been intended to be George. Another failure. Georgina was thirty. Now she was pregnant and had long blonde curls. That should show her mother a thing or two.

‘Little middle tomboy,’ her mother had once referred to Georgina, dismissively. Or so Georgina had chosen to interpret the remark. Beverley kept her second daughter’s hair really short and occasionally tossed her a gun so she could join in the shoot. How Georgina would cry. So many poor dead birds, falling about her ears! She always wore high heels when she could, even in the country, vulgar or not.

‘If you think that just because Hughie has carked it,’ said Beverley, ‘I have too, you have another think coming!’ ‘We must hear what mother is saying,’ said Davida, the third daughter. (Three daughters. It was beyond a joke, and Hughie had never even laughed in the first place. He knew he had to produce a male heir or the title would go to his brother John.) Davida was twenty-eight. She was a therapist, married to a psychiatrist. Her once bouncy hair had flattened out and grown limp from the strain of wisdom, her bright eyes had turned soulful, her voice gone soft from understanding her own anger and that of others.

Beverley’s answer to the three of them was defiance: she meant to stay at Cowarth Court, on her own, all thirty-one bedrooms of it, three dining halls, two ballrooms, three bathrooms – hopeless, hopeless, only one to every ten bedrooms, but the water supply in these Elizabethan mansions is always tricky, and at least Hughie and Beverley’s en-suite