Free A Disturbing Influence by Julian Mitchell

roads, but the pudding is going away, thank God, and it won’t be back till tonight, because Daddy’s away at the office and I wish I had an idea of how much he gets paid, because I’m sure he could easily afford to give me an Aston Martin for my birthday, my seventeenth birthday. How long will that be? Another five months and then I can take my driving-test, and then I’ll be free, in my Aston Martin, and zoom … But he’d never give me an Aston Martin, not in a million years, no, never, never, never.
    *
    So an explosion that evening when Father returns, like some furious giant, from London, and then it’s forgotten, but no driving for a few days, you hear me? So, what shall I do? And Molly is coming tomorrow, with her parents, for drinks, so I read all her letters, they’re on pink paper, and I think of the mornings at school when they used to come, Tuesday mornings, always Tuesdays. I’d be up and shaved a few minutes early, knowing a letter was coming, then wait, elaborately casual, for the post, and seize my letter before anyone could see the pink envelope or guess at the faint scent of the sheets, and off to my study to read it quietly and quickly, then in to roll-call and breakfast, heart fluttering, to kippers (this was Tuesday, Molly and kippers), and then after breakfast to read it more slowly in the lavatory, because now the study wasn’t safe, Jackson would be there, who shared it with me, Jackson with the tuft of red hair and pale eyes from whom no secrets were hid, who jeered and gibed, coarse humorist that he was, no sensitivity, none whatsoever, and no sense of privacy, opened my letters quite shamelessly, Jackson who made such lewd comments about my photo of Molly, I had to take it down. What a picture that was! Molly on Shylock, her pony, soaring over a gate at the Cartersfield gymkhana. Oh, myMolly! What earnest endeavour in that photograph (courtesy of the local paper, the nerve of them, to print my Molly without so much as a by-your-leave, and then to charge me for her!), what black-and-white attention to the matter in hand, though your hands reach forward, giving Shylock his head, just resting against his neck, ready to pull him up, to steady him, and your knees gripping him, squeezing him, one with the saddle, one with the pony. Oh, Molly, my Amazon, my pony-club heroine, we’ll have you co-driver before we’re done.
    *
    I walk beneath the yews, the avenue supposed to be haunted by a medieval lady. The branches meet. It is quiet and dark, smells rich and mysterious. I raise my head from the roots like anatomy lessons. You walk towards me, slowly and seriously, gentleness in your face.
    But that is tomorrow. She must find me here, and we will stroll, watching the sun as it sets at the end of the avenue. (Does it really set there? It must.) The house looks fine from here, from the sunrise end (and will we be found here at sunrise?) it looks old and mellowed and English (all that’s best in Britain) and the old part, the Elizabethan part, with its one fine wide window, reflects the day, dying expansively in pale green and blue, one vapour trail, shaped like the whisker of a crab, orange across the sky.
    *
    They come at six and drink in the drawing-room. Molly and I go out to play croquet. Oh, the games we could be playing! What shots through what hoops, Molly, dear Molly! And then we stroll off the lawn and round the garden, past the roses, past the sweet peas, past the herbaceous border, and we have nothing to say. Yes, I was in the second eleven, and next year, perhaps, I will be in the first. No, she hadn’t done anything worth talking about. And here we are under the yews, their great thick trunks like the feet of some vastancient animal, gnarled and wrinkled, rhinoceros-coloured, and the long sweeping branches of dark hard green. Did I know that yew was poisonous to horses? And how is Shylock? How many gymkhanas this summer? And she is rather bored with riding, it seems, because she