Free Sabine by A.P.

on longer, they began earlier, with a preparation stage to which, like a trusted prop girl, I was sometimes admitted. Caroline is coming tonight, Viola. You remember Caroline? Teddy’s moll. The thin blonde one who models for
Vogue,
who we all got so excited about until we realised it was only hands and legs. Well, tonight I am going to get her to cry. Don’t ask me how, when she’s tough as they come, but before eleven – no, let’s make it harder, let’s make it half past ten – I am going to have her in floods. Angry ones, not sad ones, I don’t want anyone to be sad except me. You don’t believe it’s possible? Wait and see. Rosie is coming too. Goody. What shall we do with Rosie? Where shall we put her? And what about old Sir Bas, who she always drags along in her wake? I would like to rattle Sir Bas, oh yes, indeed I would. They say that when he was a diplomat he once drank Mustafa Kemal under the table: what about getting him to show some of his old form tonight? Ply him with the pink gin, lovekin, and we’ll have a bash. Remember,always say to him: Would you like a drink, Sir Basil? Never, Would you like another drink? And that applies to everyone.
    Obedient, admiring, attentive, conniving – I was no longer any of these things. And not out of pure rebellious spirit, which he might have liked, might have found flattering, but simply because I was often elsewhere in my thoughts. I ate my meals in England, took my baths in England, but that was about it: the rest of the time, save for brief spells when I was in Luxembourg listening to the radio there, I was in France. I read Saint-Simon and de Montherlant – ostentatiously, not taking in much of either. A snob and a loony – my French would have to progress a lot before I would appreciate why Sabine had recommended them. However, for sheer size they served as a good bulwark against my father’s soundings.
    What’s up with you, Viola? You’re so silent. Have you fallen for a frog, or what? Don’t fall for a frog. They don’t wash enough. And oh, that garlic, you can smell it the moment the porters step on the ferry for your luggage: it rolls before them like a bank of dust before bisons. No, I would hate a French son-in-law. Come on, leave those dreary tomes and let’s have a game of chess.
    Chess, our old sparring ground. I was no match for him but sometimes, flukily, through sheer stubbornness and refusal to quit, I could give him a bit of a battle. Now I just moved the pieces around,wondering inside myself what he would make of a French daughter-in-law.
    I’ll have your queen if you do that.
    Take her then, the silly old trout, I muttered to myself, shoving my bishop to a random square. Let’s get it over with.
    And if you do that it’s check. Where’s my old bottle of water/daughter got to, eh? Where’s my budding Botvinnik? You may well have learned some French with that Madame Whatshername, but at the expense of half your brain cells by the looks of things.
    No, he was wrong, at the expense of my entire being. I was not his bottle of water any more, or his budding Botvinnik or his anything else, and he knew it. Tonight, I vowed silently, I’ll leave you to cope alone with your guests and your manoeuvrings and your storm-in-a-wine-glass dramas, I have better things to do. And tomorrow morning I’ll fill the house with ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and sunshine. I am tired of abiding by your cranky rules: if you have morning-after headaches it’s your own fault: you shouldn’t drink so much.
    Or smoke so much either. Cigarettes – another point of contention between us, perhaps the most symbolic of all. Following a shaky theory of my father’s that if he actively encouraged me in the habit I would smoke less not more, cigarettes were always strewn around the house, in big help-yourself silver boxes, one to practically every room.They were his own