Oligarchy, page 12
Her trunk is still there in the hallway. She has not yet unpacked it.
Tash eats an egg on a muffin and feels relieved. One meal down: two to go. If she could just get past this and into … What? The Life of the Abused. She sighs. Thinks of home. All the ravaged ladies together in one place with their washing machine cycles and their soap operas. Babies and takeaways. People shouting at each other, but always about the wrong things. No one living for beauty. Because who can?
The life of the amused.
After breakfast she has a shower and then opens her trunk. And there it is. The slam book. Tiffanie said Tash should have it, because she was the only one going back to London. London, where the fluorescence shines brightest, and where it now carefully picks out Natasha through the window and bathes her in a complex veily light, and welcomes her back in, because whoever is in London is the one who has to go and see Caleb and find out what the fuck was under the Tippex.
*
It seems that insurgent, nihilist genes run in the Downlowe family, because Caleb, like Bianca, put a false mobile phone number in the slam book. When Tash dials it she gets a pissed-off man in a kebab shop in Ladbroke Grove.
Well, that’s that then. Tash can spend the rest of the day on the Piccadilly Line again, although the thought now bores her. She’s not really that person any more. Perhaps she can just go walking along the river, see an art exhibition. Maybe something made from elephant dung or refugees’ blood. She has to find some way to show Aunt Sonja that she is OK; that she doesn’t have to go to some terrible clinic full of Dominics and Tonys. Tash is not confident that she has properly conveyed the facts, i.e. that the sickness was a bug, a quirk of germs and biology, and now the whole school is closed until after Easter. It was uncertain at dinner last night. In fact, Natasha hadn’t liked the shift in mood, the different way Aunt Sonja looked at her, as if she was a victim of something.
Doesn’t Teddy Ross go to Harrow? Tash has his number.
After the dinner in the castle on Boxing Day, and once the elderly ladies had gone to bed, the young people, including the real prostitutes, retired to the drawing room. The freckled boy and his friends snorted cocaine off the covers of first editions of Evelyn Waugh novels while Natasha drank fresh mint tea and then pretended to look at the bookcases. Before she went up to bed, Teddy had come over to her. She’d noticed that he hadn’t been doing any coke either. Instead, he’d been sitting silently on the ancient-looking sofa with a cigar and a small crystal tumbler of Cointreau.
‘Do you like Cointreau?’ he’d asked her, standing a little too close so their arms were touching. He smelled triply of boy and man and animal.
She’d shrugged.
‘Try some,’ he’d said, offering her his glass. ‘I don’t mind the lipstick.’
It was warm, so warm, and perfectly orangepeely. Tash took another sip and then gave the glass back.
‘Do you like it?’
She’d nodded.
‘Do you want to sleep with me?’
‘Not now,’ she’d said, after a pause. Something in the Cointreau mingled with the dessert wine she’d liked despite saying she’d never drink again, and all the brandy in the trifle, and she felt firelit and comfortable and so she’d grinned at Teddy and touched his arm lightly. ‘Wait till we’re married,’ she’d said.
The next morning when the helicopter had come to get them it had been grey and drizzling, and there had been no sign of her father at all. The butler had run out of the side door, slipping a little on the wet ground, and Natasha thought he was coming to stop them, perhaps because they’d just had a call from her father who was on his way and—
But instead he’d handed her a piece of blue Smythson paper with a phone number on it, slightly smeared from the rain, but still legible.
‘From Teddy,’ he’d said.
Should Natasha send Teddy a message now? If she does, will she have to sleep with him? Does she want to? Could she just ask for Caleb’s number straight out, or will that sound wrong, like she wants to sleep with Caleb instead? Should she have already contacted Teddy? After all, it was months ago that he gave her his number. Natasha imagines Aunt Sonja’s face at dinner if she hears not only that the investigation is under way once more, but that Tash has actually done something for her father, for the family. Because she was supposed to like Teddy, right? Tash still hasn’t seen her father. He is apparently at the property in France, and will send for her in the summer.
If Tash had to actually marry Teddy in order to be accepted into her father’s world, would she? Of course. She would do almost anything. She has a feeling she won’t care much for this world, but he is her father. It would be good to get sex over with, with someone real. And anything beats returning to her mother’s orbit, which is damp and flea-bitten and hard, and where Nico and his sister still sleep on bare mattresses with only the family dog for warmth. Nico’s fat mother has nothing, which explains it. But Natasha’s mother keeps two ivory silk pillowcases for herself while Natasha has a single stained pillow that has never had a case and has never been washed.
Tash puts Teddy’s number into WhatsApp and composes a brief message. So our school has been condemned and I’m in London. Maybe let’s have coffee somewhere central?
It sounds more sophisticated than she feels.
It’ll have to be in Harrow, comes back the reply, almost immediately. I’ve got Theology and Philosophy this afternoon.
Tash messages Tiffanie in Paris, telling her that she won’t believe what she’s done, and for the rest of the morning there is this nice back and forth, mainly in French, with Tiffanie wanting to know what underwear Tash is planning to wear, and Tash saying she’s sure it doesn’t matter because she’s not going to sleep with Teddy and anyway she can’t because he has Theology and Philosophy. Tiffanie says that if you let on to a man that you’re wearing stockings he will give up literally anything and go to bed with you. You can tell him directly (possibly pretending it is a joke), or just drop hints, or you can just let a little bit of the tops show if you are feeling bold, although of course he may then mistake you for a whore.
Tash then reminding Tiffanie that she’s only going to see Teddy to get Caleb’s number so she can find out what was under the Tippex, like she promised. What you need to know about Bianca is … What?
Harrow-on-the-Hill is like going back in history, into one of those old-timey British novels that Tash has never read but knows exist. Like those books they were snorting coke off on Boxing Day, maybe. It’s all red brick and moss and old gravestones and lichens. Teddy is waiting for her in a café near the church. He doesn’t look the way she remembers him. He is paler, but also slightly freckled. His nose turns up a little. He is halfway through a double espresso, and looks slightly too big for the dainty table for two by the window looking out onto the graveyard.
He stands up when he sees her. Tells her where to sit. Orders her a macchiato.
‘So,’ he says. ‘You’ve come to see me.’
There is no Cointreau here. Tash feels faintly repulsed by him, more than she expected to be. But she is repulsed by Nico now too. Maybe she is becoming a lesbian, like Dominic predicted. Maybe all men will repulse her soon.
‘Do you want a cake?’ Teddy asks her.
‘No thanks.’
‘A sandwich?’
‘Urgh, no. But, I mean, thanks.’
There’s a tinkle as someone leaves the café, and it sounds like Miss Annabel peeing.
‘So, your school’s closed.’
‘Yep.’
Some colour arrives in Teddy’s cheeks as if he’s a Gala apple being polished, hard, on somebody’s pullover. He bites his lip. ‘You shouldn’t go to that school. No one’s heard of it. Why don’t you go somewhere better? It doesn’t even have an entrance exam. Are you stupid?’
‘No, I’m not stupid. Well, I don’t think so. Anyway, didn’t your father arrange it?’
‘My father?’
‘He’s a lawyer, right? Works for my father?’
Teddy glances out of the window and then pauses, as if he has noticed something being killed. ‘For now,’ he says, frowning. He sips his espresso. Looks down at Natasha’s wrist. ‘Why are you wearing that during the day?’ he says. ‘Is it insured? I’m assuming it’s real.’
Tash looks down at her bracelet. ‘Yeah, it’s real,’ she says.
‘I mean, it’s got to be worth a fortune. Please tell me you didn’t wear it on the Tube. It’s actual diamonds, right?’
Tash shrugs. She’s actually worn it every day since her father gave it to her. Even though she knows he didn’t choose it, she pretends to herself that he did. Then again, it’s not impossible. It’s not Aunt Sonja’s taste at all. Maybe someone showed him how to go on Net-a-Porter and he went to the jewellery section and chose something and clicked Add to Basket. But it’s more likely someone did all that for him. Perhaps even someone like Teddy’s father.
‘Please tell me you didn’t wear it for me.’
‘No, I didn’t wear it for you.’
They sit in silence for a few seconds as the sun moves behind a cloud and the fluorescence tickles the gravestones.
‘Do you want to come to a party?’ Tash asks. ‘It’s in the middle of nowhere, near Cambridge. My friend’s sister is getting engaged.’
‘Who’s your friend?’
‘Melissa Porter. Lissa. Her sister’s called Susan, I think. Suze.’
‘Never heard of them.’ He sighs. ‘Maybe. It depends what the driver’s doing that night. Do you want to come to a ball with me in London?’
‘A ball?’
‘Yes, a ball. Why do you say it like that?’
Tash laughs. ‘Sounds like something from the past. From Tolstoy.’
‘Well, here in the UK all the best people still go to them,’ he says.
‘OK. Um … By the way, do you know a boy called Caleb Downlowe?’
‘Er …’
‘In Year 11?’
‘We don’t have that. Do you mean fifth form?’
‘I suppose so. He’d be like sixteen. Just sixteen.’
‘Is he really pale?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Father’s in banking? Lives in the Middle East somewhere?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Sister who killed herself?’
‘Yes! Except she didn’t. I mean, I don’t think she did.’
‘What are you, some kind of Russian Miss Marple?’
‘Er, I don’t know what that is, so maybe?’
Teddy looks at his watch. ‘You can walk back with me if you like,’ he says. ‘If he’s not in class he’s probably jerking off one of the other fifth-formers, but we’ll knock first.’ He looks into her eyes and then down to her breasts. ‘Have you ever seen a boy jerk another boy off?’
Tash shakes her head. ‘No. Have you?’
‘We used to do it all the time in Shell,’ he says. ‘It’s disgusting.’
‘Shell?’
‘Year 9.’ He sighs.
Caleb isn’t there, so Tash leaves him a note.
Later, when she tells Aunt Sonja that she went for coffee with Teddy, Aunt Sonja looks amused.
‘But what about George?’ she says, with a raised eyebrow.
‘Who’s George?’
‘The boy at the castle you were supposed to meet.’
Teddy’s friend. The one with all the freckles, who left the drawing room with three prostitutes, and his top lip covered with white powder. The one who called Natasha Teddy’s ‘mail-order bride’. But did he actually say that? Did he specify? Maybe he meant that she was his mail-order bride.
‘Oh.’
‘Nice boy, though, Teddy,’ says Aunt Sonja. ‘He has no idea what his father really does, of course.’
‘What does George’s father do?’
‘Rapes and pillages and acquires all the spoils of the world.’
‘Oh. Great.’
‘Right, fuck all this,’ says Aunt Sonja, after they’ve finished their poached fish and quinoa. ‘Let’s go out and get cocktails and buy opera tickets for the weekend.’
‘OK,’ says Tash.
They walk across the bridge and the sparkle is overwhelming, just for a second, as an unseen shoal of fish continues darkly towards the estuary and Natasha realises she is never going to marry anyone.
*
The next morning there’s a message on Tash’s phone. It’s from Caleb.
What do you want?
Tash sleepily types her reply.
I want to find out what happened to Bianca.
She died.
I know. I’m really sorry. She was my friend.
She was my sister.
Your twin, right?
Right. She killed herself.
I’m not sure that’s true.
A long pause, with the app assuring Tash that Caleb is ‘typing’.
Me neither. Like I said in the slam book.
OK but someone has Tippexed out what you wrote, so.
Who?
IDK. What did you write?
Not sure. Probably that her school killed her. Because it did.
Will you meet me?
Where?
The French House in Soho?
When?
Whenever suits you.
The French House is where Aunt Sonja took Tash after they’d bought their opera tickets. They’d walked slowly through the back streets of Covent Garden, past bookshops and apothecaries and homeopaths, then crossed Charing Cross Road and entered Chinatown, with its upside-down red chickens and Lucky Cat shops, and then crossed Shaftesbury Avenue to Soho. ‘Full of tourists now,’ Aunt Sonja had said. ‘With their vile factory-made clothes and those stupid rucksacks the wrong way around.’ She’d shrugged. ‘But I still love it. When I first came to London …’ She smiled. ‘But Soho was different then. It had real sex clubs and beautiful strangers from all over the world, and everyone was poor in money but rich in everything else. Now it is the other way around.’
‘Were you poor then?’ asked Natasha.
‘Oh yes,’ said Aunt Sonja. She laughed hollowly. ‘You have no idea.’
‘How did you get rich?’
‘It’s complicated,’ said Aunt Sonja. ‘It started with the usual stuff. Smuggling, prostitution – just in a minor way. And then, well, I’ll show you later this week if you like. You can come to my offices.’ She winks. ‘If you’re good.’
They sat at wooden tables drinking Americanos (‘Not too alcoholic,’ Aunt Sonja had assured Tash, ‘only Campari and vermouth. You can have one.’). Natasha watched the people coming and going, but tourists are always boring to observe because they always do the same things. Instead Tash started looking at the paintings and photographs on the walls of the French House. One black and white photograph showed a wrinkled, wise, ravaged-looking androgynous woman lying on a patterned carpet holding a burning cigarette. She looked intellectual, free. Her face was un-made-up, but deep. And then on the wall above that, a painting of two women at a table drinking rust-coloured cocktails and laughing together. They seemed so very happy. Natasha could not stop looking at this particular image. It was almost an exact picture of her and Aunt Sonja, even where they were placed at their table, except that in the image Aunt Sonja was much fatter and blonder and wearing glasses. Natasha’s hair was darker, and it wasn’t actually clear whether she was thin or fat or somewhere in between.
Is it true that sometimes in life you are offered a picture of your future? That you are shown it explicitly, deliberately, in a painting, or as a glimpse of someone walking down a road? Natasha had experienced this only once before in her life, when she was leaving home for Moscow on the bus that would take her almost all the way to the airport. As the bus shuddered out of town Tash looked through the smeared window and saw a skeletony figure in a long dark coat hunched over a twin-buggy that she was pushing into the harsh wind. The woman’s face was pinched and grey, and for no reason into Natasha’s mind came the thought, ‘That’s me if I stay here. That’s me in an alternative future.’ And she felt glad, for the first time, to be leaving.
On the way home they walked through Soho a different way, past a cake shop.
‘Look,’ said Aunt Sonja. In the window was a red cake in the shape of a heart, and on it, in white icing, the words I am divorcing you. She smiled. ‘I love it here.’
Today it’s warm, and the tourists are all in cheap t-shirts. When Caleb arrives he looks so underage that they have to walk all the way down Dean Street to the Soho Hotel instead. Natasha really wants Cointreau, but as it’s only 4 p.m. she settles for Oolong tea, which she pays for on her black Amex, along with a Rooibos for Caleb. All the oos. Caleb really is astonishingly pale and tiny, like those mice that Miss White keeps in a cage for the Year 12s to experiment on. His eyes aren’t quite as red, though. Almost, but not quite.
‘I’m not sure I can do this,’ Caleb says. He’s wearing a denim jacket similar to the ones the boys at home wear. Natasha has no idea how it would be possible to obtain a garment like this in London. It’s awful. And he must be very warm.
Tash hasn’t planned what to say, and when the words come out, they aren’t quite what she expected.
‘Why couldn’t any of us come to the funeral?’ she asks.
‘That school fucking killed her.’
Natasha bites her lip. Tastes blood. Stops.
‘Not her friends. We tried to help her. Or we would have done if we’d known …’
He shrugs. Doesn’t take off his jacket. Looks like he might cry.
‘It wasn’t exactly a secret,’ he says, ‘what was wrong with her.’
Now he does take off his jacket. He folds it up and puts it on the chair. His arms look wrong in some way Tash can’t figure out. They are absurdly thin and white with silvery lines on them like tiny snail-trails.
‘No,’ says Tash. ‘I know. I’m sorry.’ She pulls up her bag from the floor and puts it next to her on the large sofa. ‘It was so weird when we got the slam book back,’ Tash says. ‘When we opened it, your bit was covered in Tippex, look.’ She removes it from her bag, and he snatches it from her as if it is a precious journal he’s misplaced. The way he’s clutching it makes it seem unlikely that Tash will ever get it back, which would be unfortunate as it belongs to the whole form.
