Chapter 11 Martin
XI.
Martin
MY LAST VISIT TO TIPWORTH PRIORY, the Fitzmaurice country pile, was on the night of Ben’s fortieth birthday party, when it was bedecked and bedazzled with sagging white chandeliers and oversized white vases filled with sickly sweet-scented white flowers.
Today, I’ve been invited for a ‘kitchen supper’ and to stay the night.
‘Nothing special,’ Ben said when he called. To which I silently added, like you, Martin. In any case, it’s too enticing an offer to refuse. I want to see what they’ve done with the place.
It turns out my bedroom is pleasant and overlooks the kitchen garden.
There is a particularly fine Arne Jacobsen chair set by the window, although an Hermès blanket has been folded over the arm which feels de trop.
Someone – Serena, possibly – has left copies of my books on the bedside table.
A nice touch. But everything is a bit too pleased with itself.
True elegance shouldn’t have to try this hard.
I take my suit out of the wardrobe and hang it from the four-poster bed.
It’s an Anderson & Sheppard, purchased at considerable expense from Savile Row.
Serena told me when I arrived that I didn’t need to dress for dinner (‘Just come as you are, darling’) but I know from past experience that the Fitzmaurices don’t do casual and I’m not about to be caught out again.
I decide against a tie – too mannered – but instead choose a pocket square in cornflower blue, which works well against the light grey of the jacket.
I look at myself in the full-length mirror.
I’m satisfied. I think back to the Burtonbury schoolboy I once was, with the wrong shoes and the second-hand uniform, so desperate to fit in and be one of them.
Now, I look to the manner born. I close the door behind me and make my way downstairs to the dining room.
The table isn’t set. No lights apart from a garish Tracey Emin neon sign hanging on the far wall, the words ‘More Love’ illuminated in bright pink.
That would have cost them around ￡90,000.
‘Martin, darling!’ Serena’s voice is at my shoulder. ‘There you are.’
She’s in a sleeveless caramel tracksuit, the legs of which taper flatteringly around her ankles. Her upper arms are crêpey, the skin loose. A Cartier bracelet dangles from her left wrist with excruciating nonchalance.
‘Goodness, you are smart,’ Serena says, looking me up and down. ‘What a dashing suit. You look like James Bond! Come …’ She links her arm through mine and walks me to the kitchen.
Ben is wearing chinos, old deck shoes and a faded pink polo shirt as he uncorks a bottle of wine with an elegant flourish. Pop! His face bears the puce tan that only certain Englishmen can afford from days in the garden and summers on yachts.
A plump woman who must be in her sixties is busy at the La Cornue stove, stirring a pot of something that smells of tomatoes and bay leaves. The housekeeper, I presume. She looks like my mother.
The Fitzmaurice children register as a homogenous mass of giant trainers and ripped denim, lounging on various sofas and chairs. The eldest girl, whose name I can’t remember, goes to the fridge and gets herself a Coke Zero.
‘Gimme one,’ the older boy says rudely and she throws him a can which he scrambles to catch. When he opens it, sticky black liquid fizzes over onto the tiled floor. This, I think, must be my godson. What an absolute chump.
‘Hector!’ Serena says. ‘For goodness’ sake, sweetheart, be careful. Cozzie, would it really be too much to ask for you to get a glass rather than swigging from the can like a savage?’
Serena rolls her eyes at me, as if we are sharing a joke.
‘That’s actually racist, Mum,’ Cosima says.
Hector sniggers. He has an unsqueezed whitehead on the tip of his nose and absolutely none of Ben’s visual appeal at the same age.
‘Cozzie’s at an age where she thinks everything’s racist,’ Serena tells me.
‘That’s because most stuff is,’ Cosima says. ‘Where do you think the money came from for houses like these? Slavery.’
‘It was a monastery,’ Serena snaps.
‘How many Black friends do you actually have?’
‘Enough, Cozzie,’ Ben interrupts, at just the same moment as Serena mutters, ‘Iso Malik-Edwards is Black.’
‘Some wine, Martin?’ Ben hands me a glass. ‘This is a lovely little Tignanello. We got it last year when we stayed near Siena. Tell me what you think.’
I take a sip. It tastes like any other red wine.
‘Delicious,’ I say. ‘A real intensity of flavour.’
I make a show of swirling my glass and examining the consistency of its contents before taking another swig.
‘I’m getting rich plums and leather.’
He slaps me on the back.
‘Fucking good, isn’t it?’
‘Swearing, Daddy!’ the younger girl exclaims.
‘Sorry, Cressy. All of you, say hello to my old mate, Martin.’
I still haven’t got used to Ben using my actual name rather than constantly referring to me as Little Shadow, or LS.
‘Hello, Martin,’ they intone dutifully, barely looking up from their electronic devices. Only Cosima looks at me directly, staring at my face with dark eyes.
‘Martin is a friend of your dad’s from school,’ Serena says with unnecessary emphasis, walking through the open French doors to the patio. ‘They know all each other’s secrets.’
She raises an eyebrow and I catch Ben glaring at her. Serena lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. ‘I allow myself one a week,’ she says to me, with a girlish shrug of the shoulders.
‘Like Gwyneth Paltrow,’ Cosima mutters, decanting her Coke into a glass. ‘Her hero.’ She’s wearing Doc Marten boots with orange laces which stomp noisily across the flagstones.
The smallest child, built like an oblong with hair, starts growling from his seat at the table.
‘Bear, my darling, don’t do that,’ Serena says as she rushes back inside to him. ‘Shush, my sweet, shush.’
She presses his head to her chest and the child starts to grab at the zip of her top, trying to pull it down like a lecherous pub drunk.
‘Gross,’ Cosima says.
‘No, no,’ Serena admonishes while removing his hand, ‘we’ve talked about this, Bear.’
She is embarrassed and offers me a wan smile.
Their closeness repels me. I think of my own mother, of the peculiar smell of her mothballed woollen cardigans and her mid-afternoon sherry, and I remember how rarely I felt her touch.
Once, she held my hand after I nearly crossed the road in front of a speeding car because I was engrossed in a comic.
I must have been around Bear’s age and I recall being stunned by it.
I walk outside and take a seat on the patio. The evening sun is warm, but I choose not to remove my jacket. I’ve got the dress code wrong, but taking it off would be an admission of defeat. Besides, it would ruin the outfit. Ben comes to join me, bringing the bottle of red with him.
‘Sorry it’s so hectic,’ he says. ‘The nanny is only with us Sunday to Friday, so … all hands to the pump.’
I say nothing.
‘And, y’know, Serena’s struggled with Bear going to school. Last of her kids leaving home.’
‘How old is …’ For a moment I can’t bring myself to utter it, but I take a deep breath and manage to spit out ‘Bear?’
‘Eight,’ Ben says. Naturally, he thinks eight is an acceptable age for his child to ‘leave home’. It’s what happened to him. It’s what all the Fitzmaurices have done, from time immemorial.
‘Any summer plans, Martin?’
‘Not really. I’ll stay in Cambridge, catch up with some research.’
‘Good, good.’
Ben doesn’t ask anything about my research. Instead, he squints and gestures towards a well-pruned hedge.
‘Remember the maze?’ he asks.
I wonder if he knows. The last time I was here, I engaged in an ill-advised sexual encounter by the maze with one of the waiters from the party.
‘I do,’ I say and offer no further elaboration. ‘What about your summer plans?’ I ask, moving the conversation swiftly on. ‘Going anywhere with Serena and the children?’
‘Yes, we’ve got a couple of weeks in Ibiza. North of the island, obviously. Serena found the place. Nice villa. Pool, chef … She’s found a supplier of mushroom oil out there – her new thing. She’s thinking of importing it. Could be a good little business.’
He rolls the stem of his wine glass between his thumb and forefinger.
‘You should come out,’ he offers half-heartedly. ‘But with all this leadership stuff, I suspect I won’t be able to take much time off.’
I look at his mouth as he speaks. Once, long ago, I kissed it.
It was just before we left school, in the Winter Gardens at Burtonbury.
There had been months of tension leading up to that point – torturous weeks of him pretending not to want me and me pretending not to care.
His parents had taken us for lunch after prize-giving but we’d escaped and gone to smoke pot in the bushes next to the bandstand.
I waited until we were both high and then I took my chance to reach for Ben as he lay on his back, eyes shut, allowing the weed to hit.
He pushed me away but only after his lips had responded to mine, only after he’d kissed me back.
It has never been spoken of since.
‘How’s all that going?’ I ask.
‘Pretty well. I’ve got enough support – the requisite number of names and all that. You’ll have seen that a few other candidates have announced but I’m the frontrunner.’
‘So you’ll be prime minister. Just like you’ve always wanted.’
‘It’s not over until the fat lady sings,’ Ben says. ‘And there’s the child benefit issue, which is proving tricky.’
The day’s newspapers were full of a leaked briefing paper from one of Ben’s advisers suggesting the scrapping of child benefit – an absurd idea that had clearly come from some spotty, arrogant twenty-something who’d studied PPE and gone straight into a far-right think tank.
‘Can’t you just distance yourself? Blame it on the over-enthusiasm of your juniors?’
Ben squints at me. It’s the sort of look you give someone in a foreign country, speaking a language you can’t understand.