Читать книгу House of the Hanged - Mark Mills - Страница 10

Chapter Five

Lucy woke with a start. She was lying on top of the covers, still in her clothes, and her face was damp against the pillow.

Then she remembered. She remembered why she was dressed, why she had been crying.

She reached for the travel clock on the bedside table. It was early, not yet seven o’clock, but someone was already moving around downstairs, clattering about in the kitchen. It couldn’t possibly be Mother; she rarely rose before nine, not even for guests.

Mr Chittenden, most likely. He had announced over dinner that he was always up with the lark. These were some of the few words he had spoken all evening. For much of the time he had sat hunched in his chair, a look of benign befuddlement on his face, chortling every so often while his wife held forth.

Barbara Chittenden liked to talk. She maundered on and on as if her life depended on it, as if the moment she fell silent someone would put a bullet in her head.

Lucy had been tempted to do just that on a couple of occasions, especially when it had emerged that Barbara was a long-standing member of the Eugenics Society and held strong views on the sterilization of the unfit.

‘Although we now prefer to call them the “social problem group”. The unfit is so very . . .’

‘. . . offensive . . .?’ proffered Lucy, with studied innocence.

This brought a little chuckle from Mr Chittenden and a warning scowl from Mother.

‘Vague was the word I was searching for.’

Apparently, the ‘social problem group’ covered a wide range of hereditary and moral sins, everything from lunatics, idiots and the feeble-minded, through deaf-mutes and the congenitally blind, to tramps, prostitutes, inebriates and epileptics.

‘Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those extreme types calling for compulsory sterilization, although it seems to have worked a treat in the United States and Germany.’

‘Be careful what you say. Lucy is young and therefore liable to go up like straw if she doesn’t agree with you.’

Lucy bristled. ‘I didn’t realize you’d been won over to the cause.’

Mother fired back a pinched smile that said: You’re on your own, darling.

‘What’s there to disagree with?’ Barbara blundered on. ‘John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, even the Cambridge Union . . . all have come out in favour of voluntary sterilization.’

‘Oh, that makes it all right, does it? The so-called intelligentsia are for it.’

‘Something has to be done. A biological disaster is looming. Reckless breeding by the “social problem group” is leading to an irreversible degeneration of the racial stock. The very future of civilization is at stake.’

Lucy fought hard to restrain herself. ‘I know some who would say that civilization has considerably more to fear from the self-interest and prejudice of the privileged classes.’

‘When she says “some” she means her godfather,’ chipped in Mother. ‘She likes to parrot his opinions.’

‘I happen to agree with some of them,’ retorted Lucy.

‘You mean Tom?’ exclaimed Barbara. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think so. I talked with him last night at some considerable length on the subject.’

‘And what did he say?’

Barbara Chittenden hesitated. ‘Well, not very much, as it happens. Although, I think I can safely say he was persuaded of my argument.’

Lucy found that hard to believe. ‘Oh really?’

‘Absolutely. He said that up until now he had never been fully convinced of the grave threat posed to society by the mentally deficient.’

Mr Chittenden erupted in a loud guffaw, and Mother only just managed to contain her own laughter.

‘What, Harold?’

Mr Chittenden, still heaving in his chair, waved her question away.

‘Ignore him,’ said Barbara. ‘He’s an archaeologist. All he cares about is stones and bones.’

The little dinner for four hadn’t been the most propitious start to the holiday, but at least it meant that things could only get better. The Chittendens would be leaving immediately after breakfast, motoring west to Spain, and Leonard would be back from Cannes in time for lunch. He liked to sneak off there from time to time with Yevgeny for a round or two of golf at the Old Course, and his return would offer a welcome buffer against Mother, who was on particularly malicious form right now.

The barbed and belittling comments were coming thick and fast, rising to a peak, the usual prelude to one of their explosive confrontations. This would be followed by a tearful reconciliation, which in turn would give way to a lengthy period of calm. Then gradually the comments would begin to intrude again – a small note of criticism here, a gentle reprimand there – the heat building once more by barely perceptible degrees.

This was the fixed pattern of their relationship, the drearily predictable cycle into which they had settled, though not by mutual consent. Lucy dreamed of an alternative future, one without the endless round of highs and lows, of war and peace. Tom was less hopeful. He had never known Mother to be any different, and not just with Lucy. They all suffered the same treatment at her hands. It was the price you paid for being loved by her.

‘It’s not so bad. You cry in her arms, you laugh in her arms, and every so often you scream blue murder at each other. I’d take that any day over the indifference I knew as a child.’

Leonard had found his own way of dealing with it, somehow managing to remain immune to her moods. Things hadn’t always been this way. Lucy could remember the rows when she was younger, the look of quiet satisfaction on her mother’s face when she succeeded in piercing his carapace of self-control and getting a rise out of him. Those days were long gone. Leonard now displayed an almost saintly forbearance in the face of her moods. Maybe he had simply been numbed into a kind of stupor. Maybe with time the same thing would happen to her.

Thoughts of Mother put paid to any possibility of dozing on for another hour or so, and Lucy swung her legs off the bed, making for the bathroom. The bathtub was still desperately in need of a new coat of enamel, and the crumbling cork mat had disintegrated further since last year, but the water was as hot as ever.

She stripped off her clothes, catching sight of her naked self in the long mirror screwed to the wall beside the sink. She examined the reflection with a cold and critical eye: too tall for the tastes of most men, and still too thin, although she had finally begun to fill out a little in the past year, her narrow hips losing some of their bony angularity.

She cupped her breasts in her hands, weighing them, as if judging between two pieces of fruit at a market stall – small fruit, sadly, oranges rather than grapefruits. There was little hope on that front, if Mother was anything to go by. Only pregnancy might improve on their modest proportions. Ten years behind the times, she mused wearily. Her lean look would have gone down a storm a decade ago. Nowadays, it was associated with poverty and deprivation and all the other unwelcome associations of the Depression.

Thank God for Claudette Colbert, the standard-bearer of small-breasted women everywhere. Only a few years before she had been prepared to frolic naked in a bath of wild asses’ milk in The Sign of the Cross – a picture which George and Harry had trooped off to watch half a dozen times, ostensibly as fans of Cecil B. DeMille, although Lucy suspected the fleeting glimpse of Miss Colbert’s nipples above the milky froth might have had more to do with her brothers’ devotion to that particular entry in the director’s oeuvre.

She ran a hand down over her pale belly, her fingers curling through the dark arrowhead of hair at the fork of her thighs, darker than dark, as good as black. That, she owed to the Spanish blood on her father’s side, along with the large eyes and the strong mouth whose lips were a touch too full for beauty.

Fortunately, the swirls of steam rising from the bath clouded the mirror, dimming her unforgiving gaze.