LITMIR.BIZ

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juice brunches. Take this glass and let’s fill it up for you. Listen you guys, the pool table is through there. You don’t have to hang out with us if you can find something better to do.’

      Jack and Merlin sidled away, not needing to be told twice. Dinah and Matt were caught up and washed along like twigs in the full flood of Ed’s hospitality.

      ‘Now, you want the house tour? Outside or in first? Perhaps we’ll do outside after we’ve eaten, maybe we can get some kind of a walk. The property stretches a good distance, way down into the dip out of sight of here. I want to take you in my study, Matt, show you the setup I’ve got in there, maybe you can tell me something about computer modelling, I’ve got this idea I want to kick around? Dinah, what do you think of this bathroom?’

      He led them through his house, flicking taps on and off and clicking remote controls of lights and blinds and screens into choreographed display. There were twin studies, a vast creamy bedroom with twin bathrooms, an exercise suite with every conceivable machine and a shipsized deck with a spa tub overlooking the descending panorama of trees. There were pictures everywhere, covering the limited wall space, excellent modern pictures. Ed had a good eye.

      Matt and Dinah tried not to look at each other because they feared a descent into giggles. They suddenly felt like children, awed and irreverent in the face of such purchasing power. The house was beautiful, but in its sheer opulence and abundance it was also comical.

      And yet, it was impossible not to like Ed himself. The energy of him was invigorating.

      ‘Quite a place,’ Matt murmured. Ed seemed to expect no more.

      One corridor on the upper north side of the building was left unexplored. Dinah glimpsed at the end of it a door, firmly closed, and guessed that this must be Camilla’s territory. Because every other nook and cranny had been so freely displayed and demonstrated, she was left with the sense of something brooding, almost sinister, contained within the open geometry of the house.

      Ed led them away from the corridor without comment and back to the big room. Sandra was setting out food and cutlery on a huge refectory table in a slate-floored annexe.

      ‘How are the drinks? Here, Matt, let me freshen you. What hardware have you got in that department of yours? Are we ready to eat, baby, those boys will be starving.’

      ‘Yes, everything’s ready,’ Sandra said.

      The boys came in from the pool table at the first summons.

      ‘Where is she?’ Ed growled. The creases in his face were no longer genial.

      Sandra picked up an intercom and pressed a button.

      ‘Milly? Brunch is ready, darling.’ She replaced the handset. ‘She’s coming,’ she said.

      The six of them were standing behind their chairs, as if waiting to say grace.

      A door slammed shut on another level. A moment later a girl appeared framed in one of the upper windows and stared down at them. There was a silence, and then an awkward clatter as they all pulled back their chairs and hurried to sit down. The girl was coming slowly down the stairs.

      There was nothing pink or wobbly or plump about Camilla Parkes. Nothing so familiar or explicable.

      She was thin and dark and her small pointy face was dead white. Her lustreless hair was matted and spiked and knotted into dreadlocks that hung around her cheeks and down her thin neck. Her eyes were painted with thick black lines and her mouth was outlined in vicious crayon. Her clothes were layers of shredded knits and torn and faded black drapes, and her spindly legs were thickened by black woollen tights with holes at the knees. On her feet she wore huge Doc Marten boots with steel toecaps. Her right nostril was pierced with two small silver rings.

      Camilla did not look at any of them, or at Sandra’s scrambled eggs and smoked salmon and bagels and the baskets artfully heaped with raisin breads and croissants. She went to the fridge and took out a small dish covered in clingfilm, tore off the film and screwed it into a ball and aimed it towards the sink. Then she sat down at the far end of the table and began to eat, spooning up a gluey mixture of rice and beans without lifting her eyes from the dish.

      ‘Camilla is a vegan,’ Sandra explained. ‘Milly, please say hello to Professor and Mrs Steward.’

      She raised her head briefly. Her eyes were full of anger.

      ‘And this is Jack, and Merlin. Some company for you.’

      Milly didn’t favour the boys with so much as a glance.

      ‘Where do you go to school?’ Jack asked, refusing to be intimidated into silence.

      ‘Milly doesn’t go to school right now. A teaching assistant from UMass comes here to tutor her.’

      Milly put down her spoon. There were dirty silver rings on every finger of both hands and her nails were painted black. She turned her burning stare on her mother.

      ‘Why do you answer everything for me, as though I’m a moron? Why do you think I can’t speak for myself?’

      Her voice was pure glottal North London.

      ‘If you can speak, why don’t you?’ It was Ed who asked, with surprising forbearance. There was a flush of colour mottling Sandra’s lovely face.

      Dinah had been watching Milly with terrible fascination, half-greedy and half-apprehensive. But as soon as the child opened her mouth familiarity embraced her and Dinah smiled, without thinking.

      ‘You make me remember London. It’s like hearing a piece of home.’

      Oh, what a crappy thing to say, she reproached herself immediately the words were out.

      But Milly only shifted her gaze in her direction.

      ‘Where you from?’

      ‘London.’

      ‘Yeah. London’s okay.’

      ‘Did you go to school there?’

      ‘Camden. Only I got expelled.’

      Dinah and Milly looked at each other. In the child’s face, as she made her boast, Dinah read the habits of defiance and aggression, and also saw from the soft and uncontrollable pout of her lower lip that she was vulnerable, and deeply unhappy. Milly was very young, however hard she might try to pretend otherwise.

      ‘Tough,’ Dinah said.

      But she was already becoming aware that Milly and her assumed disguise – fourteen-year-old part-punk, part-Goth and part-Dickens street-urchin – called on some hungry instinct ineffectively buried within herself. She was drawn to the child, and she also felt a cold stirring of fear brought on by the intensity of these feelings.

      Merlin put down his bagel. ‘Ben Burnham was expelled from my old school. He used the phone in the secretary’s office to call the Fire Brigade. He told them the science room was on fire, and two fire engines came with ladders and hoses and about twenty firemen.’

      The adults laughed and Jack sighed, but Milly gave no indication that she had heard the story. She ate the last grains of rice from her bowl and then left the table as silently as she had come. The tails of her wraps flapped behind her as she mounted the stairs and disappeared the way she had come.

      ‘Do you see what I mean?’ Sandra murmured to Dinah. ‘Somehow it’s easier just to let her …’

      Ed shrugged and ran his fingers through his hair until it stood up in a rakish crest on top of his big round head.

      ‘They’re parents as well, honey. You wait, you guys,’ he warned Dinah and Matthew. ‘They get past twelve years old and all bloody hell breaks out.’

      ‘I’m nearly eleven …’ Jack said meaningfully.

      The adults laughed again and the boys were given permission to go back to the pool table. Coffee was poured and the baskets of croissants passed round, and the mellow Sunday morning talk was resumed.

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