One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [18]
Stalking. My first encounter with the clothes, the whiff of the great outdoors, the purple heather, the glamour, the exclusivity, the money, the danger, the guns: it all seemed to breathe at me in that dingy Edinburgh basement kitchen.
‘Brought you these, Hal; shot them in an idle moment. Or perhaps I should give them to the girls.’
Two dead rabbits, eyes glassy, heads hanging, were offered from a bag, and I just managed not to scream. Kirsten did, though, and took a leap backwards too.
‘Skin them for you if you like?’ Dominic said in surprise, as I reached and took them from him, trying not to heave. I’d never touched a dead animal. ‘No, no, I’ll do it. How kind!’
He smiled into my eyes, and it seemed to me we had a moment.
‘I’ll do them later,’ said Hal, quickly taking them from me. ‘You’d better change.’ This to his brother. ‘The ceremony starts in an hour.’
Dominic and Letty were in loco parentis, Hal’s mother being abroad, his father dead. When they emerged from Hal’s room and then later, as we all trooped across campus with our families to McEwan Hall, I thought how glamorous they looked: Dominic in a dark grey suit, Letty in a floaty cream linen dress, beads, quirky straw hat, witty little shoes: she had an alternative bohemian style and even my mother, stunning as ever in grey shot silk and never liking to be outdone, noticed them.
‘Who is that very attractive man, darling? With your flatmate?’
‘Oh, Dominic Forbes, his brother. He’s an MP.’ I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Or keep the excitement from my voice.
‘Of course. Darling,’ she nudged my father. We were filing into the hall, now, finding our seats, ‘it’s Dominic Forbes.’
My father, who’d taken an order of ceremony sheet and put his reading glasses on to survey it, raised his head to peer over them. ‘So it is,’ he said in his soft Bostonian accent. ‘The acceptable face of capitalism. Or so they tell us.’
‘You’ve heard of him?’
‘Of course,’ said Mum. ‘He’s always in the papers. He’s the youngest member of the cabinet for fifty years, and his father was Peter Forbes, the film director.’
‘He’s not in the cabinet yet,’ murmured Dad, resuming his perusal of the programme. ‘Still on the back benches.’ But Mum was on a roll.
‘Oh, yes, it’s quite a dynasty. Go back another generation and the grandfather was the great explorer, Ernest Forbes. This one, Dominic, is supposed to be equally brilliant, and is hellbent on reforming his party and making it more – what’s the word, David?’
‘Slimy?’
‘No, more modernist, that’s it. Sweep out the old Tory blue-rinse image and introduce a more caring society – I read about it in the Mail last week. And there was a whole double-page spread on Her, all about what she did with the turkey on Boxing Day.’ Mum was fairly palpitating with excitement now, and I wasn’t far behind. The more she talked the more a shimmering glow seemed to surround Mr Forbes.
‘Apparently he’s got his sights on being Prime Minister one day, and why not? It’s about time we had some young blood running the country.’
Dad was clearly going to let her run with this, but not without raising his eyes to heaven.
‘But this article said he’d like to have a go at being Chancellor first. Sort out the economy, which badly needs doing,’ she added sagely, as if it were a teenager’s bedroom. ‘Don’t you love his pink tie?’
Dad finally cracked. ‘Your mother’s razor-sharp political insight into the man she’s tipped to head up Her Majesty’s Government seems to be based entirely on the colour of his tie and what his wife does with leftovers. Let’s hope she’s not indicative of the nation.’
‘And she is the daughter of Lord Bellington, that eccentric impoverished peer who sleeps with greyhounds on his bed and whose sisters all write gardening books. They’re always in the papers too. And her mother was a model like me in the sixties.’
Dad’s eyes had now completely rotated because