The Amours & Alarums of Eliza MacLean. Annie Warwick

merely represented an opportunity for him to pursue his amours.

      The Note came home. “What the bloody hell is this?” was Richard’s initial response, since his daughter’s school reports had never before been sullied by anything as crass as a cat-fight.

      “Girls have been inviting me for sleepovers because their mothers have a crush on you,” said Eliza, who felt it was time he took some responsibility. “And sisters,” she added, pedantically. “I got angry.” She told him what Angie said, and what she said, and what happened. “Dad, I want to be normal,” she added, with emphasis.

      Richard’s Anger immediately looked abashed and tried to hide under a chair, as he began to remember his sister having similar complaints when they were at school. Even then, Richard’s saturnine good looks and air of smouldering sexuality caused schoolgirl hearts to beat faster. Their schools were segregated, of course, but there were brothers and sisters attending each school, and it didn’t take much: family attendance at school recitals, or a school play in which Richard would, of course, be appearing. Danielle, only fifteen months younger and in the year below him, was inundated with invitations and overtures of best-friendship as a ploy to get to know him.

      Danielle loved her brother, but once he started to make a name for himself, she never admitted to their relationship and would deny it most elegantly if questioned. “I wish!” she would say, as convincingly as one would expect of a MacLean. “But no, he’s no relation. I expect there’re lots of MacLeans in the phone book!” Fortunately for Danielle, she took after her mother in appearance, however Eliza’s resemblance to her father was so striking that denial was futile.

      “Sorry, poppet,” Richard apologised belatedly. “I had no idea females could be so manipulative.” He smiled at her a little ruefully. “What should we do if we find school mums dancing naked on the lawn?”

      “Hose ’em down?” suggested Eliza, much entertained by the possibility.

      Eliza felt that females were often unreliable and usually hard to fathom, except for Mehitabel. At present she didn’t even have Mehitabel, who had been sent off, under protest, to live with Auntie Danni in the Cotswolds.

      Chapter 2 ~ Distance Develops

      Billy adopts an Unpleasant persona. Eliza encounters Puberty and is very cross; Richard, being impatient of such foul humour, instructs Eliza to take herself in hand.

      In due course, and as planned, Richard’s dastardly character was killed off after a car chase ending in an unfortunate encounter with a B-Double, and with some relief he returned to London and the stage. He never could stand all that waiting around and spitting short bursts of lines out of context, sometimes without the person to whom he was talking having to be there. Eliza was present for this final makeup session and jumped up and down in fiendish glee at the sight of her father bleeding from the mouth and ears. Her cup was full to overflowing when the makeup artist kindly decorated her with a cut throat, which she wore home with pride.

      Eliza returned from Australia after a year’s absence, with the stoic acceptance of a child who gets carted around on the whim of her adored father. In fact, she had enjoyed living in another country without the inconvenience of a different language. She got to see how a televised drama series was produced, to go on location when she was allowed, and it merely reinforced her opinion that this was not the career for her, although she remained devoted to the makeup and wardrobe departments.

      Richard was no longer teaching drama to eager juveniles, having accepted a position at the tertiary level, and Eliza returned to her old prep school, according to his wishes. She tried again to talk him into sending her to a school for “normal” people, but he just stared at her uncomprehendingly and grunted dismissal. Obviously some kind of payback was imperative, and for the next couple of days she adopted a broad Australian accent and some peculiar expressions learned from a friend’s father.

      “Are you busy?” Richard asked her, seeking her assistance.

      “Yeah sorry, mate,” she said. “Flat out like a lizard drinking.”

      “You’re still not going to join the unwashed masses,” he told her promptly, without bothering to look up from his task.

      * * *

      Billy was by now sixteen, and still attending the local comprehensive. Eliza was just eleven. In the beginning, she went around to his place to see him, and his mother fed her muffins and hot chocolate, in the hopes of saving her from starvation. Once, Billy’s father, Dave, fixed her bicycle, which had bent on the way over, when she rode over a tree root and did a spectacular somersault, narrowly missing two elderly ladies. She didn’t usually see Dave much, but as she watched him in his shed, she was struck by his incredibly neat array of tools and spare parts. She had seen that sort of order in Billy’s room, and tried unsuccessfully to emulate it in her own bedroom. Everything in Dave’s shed was labelled, organised, packaged and tinned.

      Dave was kind to her, put a plaster on her knee, and even laughed and made a humorous comment. She wondered vaguely why Billy’s father made himself out to be so grumpy and hid himself away, when Billy was the opposite. It occurred to her that people were more complicated than she had thought, and felt a sudden shift in her brain which was strangely satisfying.

      On one of her visits, Billy was actually in. He greeted her fondly, pulled her ringlets, and asked her about her year in Australia, being particularly interested in her father’s television role. But a generation gap had sprung up between them in little more than twelve months. She noticed he was irritable and snarky with his mother and sister, he smelled of cigarette smoke, his beard had gathered bristly momentum in the year she had been away and he seemed to have grown about six inches. This wasn’t her Billy; he had turned into a stranger while she wasn’t looking. Or, to be more precise, he had turned into a young man, and she was still a child. She didn’t like it at all, being left behind so absolutely.

      “Billy’s changed,” Eliza commented to his mother.

      “Oh, yes,” said Lauren, bitterly, “and not a change for the better.” Eliza looked up at her curiously, waiting for clarification. Lauren found herself explaining to an eleven year old. “He’s never home, he’s moody, he’s rude, he drinks and smokes, and he gets into fights,” she said, like a thesaurus under pressure. His mother also implied that his friends were of dubious parentage. “Somebody broke his nose for him, and he won’t say who. It’ll never be quite the same. I think you’d better stay away from him, love. I found a nasty knife in his school bag the other week. He’s not a nice young man at the moment. But you come and visit me whenever you want, okay?”

      So Eliza visited whenever she thought Billy wouldn’t be at home, as she didn’t like him much anymore. She liked Lauren’s kitchen and the homey smells in it, and Lauren was one of the few women she felt she could rely on, but she was growing up, and in time her visits just came to a natural end. She sometimes missed her Prince, but she knew he was living on another planet, so being a practical child she didn’t grieve overmuch.

      It hadn’t occurred to either family that the sudden departure of Richard and Eliza for a year would have caused any void in Billy’s life. Or that the sudden withdrawal of his mentor and role model would leave him at a junction, scratching his head and staring at a road sign with Continue as previously or Go straight to the devil being the two options.

      Eliza continued to apply herself to the violin, the works of the classical composers being interspersed with jigs and reels as the mood took her. Her irreverence toward this worthy instrument enraged her teacher, but there was no doubt that Eliza had a formidable talent and practised more than even her teacher thought she should. In fact, Eliza wasn’t practising. She was as joined to her violin as she was to her arms or legs, and it was natural to carry it around with her and be continually learning new pieces, even while sitting on the loo and waiting for nature to take its course. Occasionally, the pieces she learned were the ones that her teacher had asked her to learn.

      One would assume that with such a musical focus, Eliza’s destiny would be a foregone