Clouds among the Stars. Victoria Clayton

had to kneel on a broom handle for an hour because she forgot her gym pants. Her parents were furious and she wasn’t allowed back after that. She goes to school in Switzerland now and her skiing instructor buys her chocolate cake in return for favours – you know.’ Cordelia assumed her grown-up, knowing face.

      ‘Some people come cheap.’ I suppressed a smile, not believing a word of it.

      ‘Well, poor Camilla has braces and glasses,’ Cordelia conceded. ‘It’s a dump and I’m never going back. I shall kill myself if you try and make me.’ I sighed, unable to contend with so much violence. Cordelia scented victory. ‘I’m going to make Pa a cake.’ She fetched the flour jar as she spoke. ‘That’ll cheer him up. I’ll put it in a tin so the rats can’t get at it.’ She found Maria-Alba’s folder of recipes and began to weigh ingredients.

      I was touched by this instance of thoughtfulness in one so young. It seemed a good example to imitate. I began to cast about in my mind for something I could do to console the weary prisoner. I wondered if he would be allowed music. I could take along my portable gramophone and some of his favourite records. Prison furniture was probably uncomfortable. Perhaps they wouldn’t mind a very small bergère armchair. The piece of Brussels tapestry that hung on the stairs would conceal ugly paint or wallpaper. I began to form a picture of quite a cosy cell with pictures and books and a few pieces of his favourite Vincennes porcelain.

      It occurred to me that someone ought to inform Cordelia’s headmistress that she would not be coming to school. My mother’s voice, issuing from the receiver as I lifted it, said sharply, ‘I am trying to have a private conversation. Whoever that is, put it down at once.’ I was disappointed. I had assumed the telephone’s silence was because the reporters had given up using it as a medium to contact us. It shows how naîve I still was.

      When I wandered down again an hour later, having refreshed myself with a bath and a few lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins, I was surprised to find Max Frensham in the drawing room. Max was a member of the cast of King Lear and a friend of my parents’.

      ‘Harriet!’ He came towards me and took my hand in both of his. ‘I had to come and see you were all right. How is Waldo bearing up?’

      ‘How did you get in?’

      ‘Through the back door. I expect you’ve forgotten, but last year at your mother’s birthday party, you let me in on the secret of the maze.’

      I remembered that Max and I had spent half an hour last summer exploring its intricacies and I had told him Loveday’s masterplan. Caroline Frensham, Max’s wife, had been waspish when we re-emerged and had devoted the rest of the afternoon to flirting with my father. She was good-looking, if one overlooked the blankness in her eyes. In fact the Frenshams were considered a handsome couple and were much in demand socially. Max was auburn-haired with a pale, ascetic face, in which hazel eyes burned, and one of those thin, finely modelled noses with a slight dent at the tip. He had considerable charm. Being Edgar to Basil’s Lear was the high point of his career so far but he was only thirty-four and great things were foretold.

      ‘It is good of you to come.’

      ‘This is so terrible for you. Of course he didn’t do it. Waldo would be the last person on earth to hurt anyone. He is quite simply, and without any qualification, my hero. He can act anyone else off the stage. Certainly poor old Basil. But you mustn’t worry. The police have made a stupid mistake. We’ll all testify to the fact that Waldo is incapable of murder.’ This was like a lungful of oxygen to one who had been breathing thin, foetid air. I was ready to tell anyone who would listen that my father was innocent, but to hear someone else say it was balm to the soreness of my heart. ‘Poor Harriet, you must be having a wretched time of it.’

      ‘Max! Dear boy!’ My mother glided towards us across the drawing room carpet, her lilac peignoir fluttering like a sail head to wind, one arm held out before her like a bowsprit. ‘You find us supping full with horrors! Harriet,’ she added, in her ordinary voice, ‘ask Maria-Alba to bring us some coffee.’ She shook out a fan. ‘Time has been my senses would have cooled to hear a night-shriek.’ She fluttered her hand. ‘And, darling, some of those delicious little almond biscuits.’

      ‘What do you think?’ Bron was up unusually early. It was not yet eleven o’clock. He was looking soigné in his best suit with a blue silk shirt and a scarlet tie. He twirled on the spot. ‘Elegant or what?’

      ‘Elegant,’ I said, though Maria-Alba and Cordelia said ‘what’ in unison. After all it would do no good if we allowed ourselves to marcher à la ruine. This was one of my mother’s most damning phrases and applied to anyone who had allowed a centimetre of fat to accrete to their hips or the tiniest wrinkle to quilt their cheek. ‘Are you going out?’

      ‘My press conference.’

      ‘What are you going to tell them?’

      ‘I shall point out how few decent parts there are for good-looking young classical actors. Rudolf Rumpole is playing Romeo at the Tivoli and he’s nearly forty. What chance is there for the rest of us? I’d like to know.’

      ‘I meant, what are you going to tell them about Pa?’

      ‘Oh, I don’t know. Something will occur to me.’ He waved his hand in a lordly way. ‘Is there something to eat? I don’t want to look pale.’

      

      Maria-Alba, Cordelia and I had breakfast together in the dining room, with the curtains drawn against the photographers, who were back, jostling for place like thirsty buffaloes round a water hole. I lifted a corner of the curtain and counted sixteen of them milling about among the clipped box and bay trees in the front garden. Probably this was trespass but ordinary citizens’ rights no longer seemed to belong to us. One reporter sat on a gate pier, his legs either side of the stone ball and another shinned up the lamppost to get a bedroom shot. One of them spotted me and immediately they were shouting and pointing cameras. Cordelia turned to look at me in surprise as I dropped to the floor, my heart beating fast. Her huge blue eyes, in a face as yet unmarked by weal or woe, looked angelic. Supposing this terrible experience had a permanent affect on her happiness?

      ‘This is silly.’ I got up and tried to laugh. ‘Like being besieged in a Royalist stronghold during the Civil War. With hordes of Roundheads camping beyond the barbican.’

      ‘We wouldn’t hold out for long with only Bron to do the fighting.’ Cordelia cracked the top of her egg with a spoon.

      ‘Women fought too, even in those days. At least they helped with dropping boiling oil and quicklime on the enemy’s heads. Though sometimes the sieges went on for months or even years with nothing much happening. The worst thing must have been running out of food and having to eat dogs and cats and candles and soap and things.’

      ‘I’d rather starve to death than eat Mark Antony.’ Cordelia punctured the yolk of her boiled egg with a toast soldier. We were drinking hot chocolate with whipped cream. Maria-Alba’s instinctive response to any crisis was to try to fatten us up. ‘Think of his dear little whiskery face poking out of a pie.’

      ‘How stupid it all seems now, looking back,’ I said, in a vain attempt to turn our thoughts from our own difficulties. ‘All those young men killed in battle and then poor King Charles having his head chopped off. He put on an extra shirt so he wouldn’t shiver. He didn’t want people to think he was afraid – it was so unfair.’ I paused, remembering Pa, and felt a twist of pain in my stomach. It was odd how one managed to forget for nearly a minute at a time and then memory would come lurching back, to terrorize.

      ‘How’s he going to go to the lav?’ asked Cordelia anxiously. I realized she meant Mark Anthony not Charles II. ‘You know how he hates doing it if anyone’s looking.’ A fastidious propriety in such matters was one of Mark Antony’s good points.

      ‘He’ll have to nip into the maze when no one’s looking. What’s that?’

      ‘It is the front door. Some man is got in.’ Maria-Alba stood up and seized the poker