Free Come and Tell Me Some Lies by Raffaella Barker

with a strident, horsy voice, was proudly announcing, ‘Patrick and his wife Eleanor are great friends of ours. Of course, the man’s a genius.’ I craned, hoping the woman might add, ‘Charming children, inherited his genius apparently,’ but she was gurgling with echoing laughter at something her consort had said.
    â€˜Well, everyone here enjoyed it,’ I whispered back to Mummy. ‘They didn’t move for twenty minutes.’ I stood up, my pride in Daddy making me feel tall, sophisticated and confident.
    A cream carpet as thick as a lawn lay across the drawing-room floor and the walls were spattered with paintings of black blobs. Daddy leaned against the mantelpiece, talking to a woman with thin red hair. She was smoking a pipe.
    â€˜Are you, in fact, a man? Could you be the reincarnation of my great hero Sherlock Holmes?’ I heard him ask her, and my ballooning pride deflated.
    The woman laughed. ‘No. This is a pipe, not a way of life. I’m married to Richard, actually.’
    â€˜Ah, well, Holmes would never have done that, would he?’ A martial light sparked in Daddy’s eye. Mummy, tilting a glass of wine precariously towards the carpet, struggled through the tightly knit mob to his side.
    â€˜Let’s get the hell out of here, Ellie. I will not talk to these people,’ he whispered to her. But Mummy was talking to Richard’s wife, asking about their recent wedding, encouraging her to make light of Daddy’s remarks. Mummy leaned on a small wooden table and sipped her wine. A man with grey hair came up to Daddy and asked him to sign a book. Mummy and Sonia, the wife, were talking about roses, their voices melting in the cloud of conversation and smoke. A splintering crash broke like ice across the room. The tiny table Mummy had been leaning on collapsed, and she and her glass of red wine spilt on to the creamy carpet. Her black-clad legs splayed against pale fluff; next to her a wine-dark pool seeped. Mummy didn’t know what to apologize for or what to try and salvage. The table was a heap of jagged wood. I felt her embarrassment as Sonia poured salt over the carpet, and it reached me over my own hot-faced humiliation.
    Daddy laughed, one huge ‘Ha ha’, and knocked back his own wine, saying gently, ‘Eleanor, Eleanor, when will you learn to behave?’ He took Mummy’s hand, smiling as he turned to Richard. ‘I must apologize for my wife, and to cover her shamewith a veil of diplomacy I shall take her home.’ He was laughing, and Mummy, wet with wine and speechless with mortification, mumbled ‘Of course we will pay for the table’ as we left. I hung my head, blushing, too humiliated to catch anyone’s eye.
    Outside, stars swooped low in the black autumn sky and the air was heavy with the dank reptilian scent of the moat. ‘Your Mummy is wonderful,’ Daddy said to me as we got into the car. ‘She got us out of there in less than five minutes, and what’s more, we won’t be asked back.’ He was gleeful, driving very fast along the tiny lanes, the headlamps cleaving a path between dark, heaped hedges.
    At home, the boys were watching television and Marmalade had knocked over a bottle of milk in the kitchen, purring with deep satisfaction as her pink tongue lapped up the puddle on the table. Mummy relaxed and laughed too when Daddy told the story to the boys, and I was left lonely, washed up on a dirty shore of embarrassment from which I longed to be rescued.

Chapter 22
    August 1987
    On a hot summer morning, Dad arrived at my front door in London wearing dark glasses and carrying a small black suitcase. He looked suntanned and healthy, and it was hard to believe that he had ever been ill.
    â€˜Have you got a passport?’ he asked.
    I made tea and took it on to the balcony with its view of cars inching along the A40. ‘Yes, why?’
    He looked at his watch. ‘We have