and then parted.
‘Okay, Sebastian, let’s go.’ The car jerked forward, knowing what lay in its wake: a two-hour wait beside a bunch of pretentious automobiles he had nothing in common with. How similar our lives would be. The long gravelled driveway gave way to a car park with a water fountain of an open-mouthed lion spewing up murky water. I parked away from Father’s bottle green Jaguar XJ and his 1960 Morgan +4 which he called his ‘weekend car’, and which he drove wearing his weekend attire of vintage leather gloves and goggles as though he were Dick Van Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He also wore clothes with these items, in case the image was more disturbing than intended. Beside Father’s cars was my mum’s black SUV. She had specifically asked for something that would require minimum driving effort on her part, and she had parking sensors covering so many angles that if a car drove by three lanes away on a motorway it beeped to signal its proximity. On the other side of the gravelled area was my eldest brother Riley’s Aston Martin and my brother Philip’s – the middle child’s – family Range Rover that had been pimped up with all the upgrades including television screens in the backs of the headrests for the kids to watch on their ten-minute drive from ballet to basketball practice.
‘Leave the engine running, I’ll be out in two hours max,’ I said, then patted Sebastian on the head.
I looked up at the house. I don’t know what era it was, but it was not ‘Georgewardian’ as I had joked at the Schuberts’ Christmas party much to my brothers’ amusement, my father’s disgust and my mother’s pride. The house was striking, it was originally built as a manor by Lord Somebody who later gambled away his fortune and it was sold to somebody else who wrote a famous book and therefore we were required by law to place a brass plaque with his name outside the gates for literary geeks but mostly for passing power-walkers with raisin bottoms to look at and frown at because they didn’t have a brass plaque outside their own houses. Famous Literary Writer had an illicit relationship with a male Depressed Poet who built an East Wing in order to get away on his own. The house had an impressive library containing communications from Lord Somebody to Lady Whatever, then more sweet talk from Lord Somebody to Lady Secret while he was married to Lady Whatever, and original writings from Famous Literary Writer which were framed and hanging on the walls. Depressed Poet’s works stood unprotected on the shelf beside a world atlas and Coco Chanel’s life story. He didn’t sell well, not even after he died. After a well-documented tumultuous affair, Famous Literary Writer drank all his money away and the house was sold to a well-to-do German family who brewed beer in Bavaria and used it as their holiday home. While here, they also added on a very impressive west wing and a tennis court, which from the evidence of their faded black-and-white photographs their overweight and seemingly unhappy sailor-suited son Bernhard did not like to avail of. It was also possible to find an original bottle of the family beer in a walnut cabinet in the Silchester bar. The memories and traces of these other lives were palpable in the house and I often wondered what exactly it was Mum and Father would leave behind apart from Ralph Lauren’s latest interiors.
Two animals which I still couldn’t identify greeted me with scowls at the base of the stone steps leading to the front door. They looked like lions but they had horns and two legs twisted together in what could only be described as a debilitating stance that made me think that hundreds of years of staring at the fountain had left them desperate for the toilet. Unless Ralph Lauren was going through a dark phase, my money was on the drunk writer or the depressed poet to have chosen them.
The door opened and my brother Riley grinned out at me like a Cheshire cat.
‘You’re late.’
‘And you’re disgusting,’ I referred to the intercom exchange.
He laughed.
I trudged up the steps and passed over the threshold into the black and white marble-floored hall with double-height ceiling where a chandelier the size of my flat dripped down.
‘What, no gift?’ he said, giving me a hug longer than I wanted just to annoy me.
I groaned. He was joking but I knew he meant it. My family belonged to a very serious religion called the Church of Social Etiquette. The heads of their church were People. As in, every action acted and word spoken was done on the basis of what would ‘People’ think? Part of that etiquette required you to bring a gift to a person’s house even if that person was family and you were just calling by. But we didn’t just do calling by. We did arranged visits, made appointments, spent weeks, months even, trying to rally the troops.
‘What did you bring?’ I asked him.
‘A bottle of Father’s favourite red wine.’
‘Suck-up.’
‘Only because I want to drink it.’
‘He won’t open it. He’d rather wait until everyone he loves is long dead and buried before he even thinks about sitting in a locked room to open it himself. Bet you ten, actually twenty,’ I needed petrol money, ‘he won’t open it.’
‘Your understanding of him is almost touching but I have faith in him. It’s a deal.’ He held out his hand.
‘What did you get Mum?’ I looked around the entrance hall to see what I could swipe for a gift.
‘A candle and bath oil but before you make a thing about it, I found it in my apartment.’
‘Because I bought it for what’s-her-name, that girl you dumped who laughed like a dolphin.’
‘You got Vanessa a gift?’
We were walking through the endless spaces of the house, room after room of seating areas and fireplaces. Couches we were never allowed to sit on, coffee tables we couldn’t put our drinks on.
‘As a consolation prize for going out with you.’
‘She can’t have appreciated it much.’
‘Bitch.’
‘Yeah, dolphin-laughing bitch,’ he agreed, and we smiled.
We reached the final room in the back of the house. Once Lady Somebody’s drawing room and then Depressed Poet’s rhyming room, it was now Mr and Mrs Silchester’s entertainment room: a walnut built-in bar with beer on tap and a smoky mirror on the back wall. In the glass case along the bar stood the original German beer from the 1800s with a black-and-white photo of the Altenhofen family posing on the front steps of the house. The room had plush salmon-toned carpets that your feet sank into, tall leather-upholstered chairs at a cocktail bar and smaller leather chairs dotted around walnut tables. Its main feature was a bay window which overlooked the valley below and the rolling hills beyond. The garden was three acres of rose gardens, a walled garden and an outside swimming pool with fresh water. The double doors from the bar were open and gigantic limestone slabs led down to a water feature in the centre of the lawn. To the side of the fountain and beside the rush of the babbling brook a table had been set up with white table linen, crystal and silverware. In my family there was no such thing as informality. It was such a wonderful picture. Shame I’d have to ruin it.
My mother was floating around the table in a white tweed Chanel to-the-knee number and monochrome flats, swatting away the wasps that threatened to invade her garden party. There wasn’t a hair out of place on her blonde head, she held the same small smile on rose pink lips regardless of what was going on in the world or in her life or in the room. Pimped-up Range-Rover-owner-slash-reconstructive-plastic-surgeon-slash-closet-boob-job-surgeon and middle child Philip was already seated at the table talking
