One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [45]
And Seffy… well, Seffy had always been more like Daisy: in less of a hurry. Quite studious and musical – he played the cello beautifully – he was a prolific reader, but then a year ago… well, they were bound to grow up, weren’t they? I swallowed. Narrowed my eyes to the road. Bound to want to push the boundaries. And the rules at his old London day school had been so petty and ridiculous, just asking to be broken. So he’d got into a bit of trouble, which was unlike him. As the headmaster had said at the time, totally out of character; but then he’d been led astray. Nothing terrible, a few smokes in the park, a bottle of wine… but he’d seemed to be kicking against something. So I’d moved him to Lightbrook, a boarding school in the country – a huge financial stretch – but what Seffy had wanted. Had indeed asked to go to. Insisted. Well, I imagine it was rather quiet for him at home, with just me, no brothers and sisters, and certainly he seemed to be thriving there. He’d settled down a bit, was starting to work again, which he hadn’t been doing at Westminster, where he’d totally lost interest. And he was a bright boy, he’d catch up. For a while he hadn’t come home much either, even though he could at weekends, which had hurt a bit, and then when he did, he was much less affectionate. They all were, Laura assured me. Biba was just the same; they move on, which is away from us. But Seffy and I… well, being just the two of us, were so close.
I gave myself a little inward shake. But that was last year. This year, these past few months, had been better. He’d rung me more, been more communicative, and his grades were steadily going up, hopefully in time for GCSEs.
‘How’s the play going?’ I asked him in the rear-view mirror. Was it my imagination or was there always a slightly guarded look now, just fleeting, before he answered me?
‘It’s good, going well. We’ve still got a way to go, but rehearsals are OK.’
‘What’s the play?’ Biba demanded.
‘King Lear.’
‘Oooh,’ she said mockingly. ‘Ambitious, Seffy-boy. And who are you, the crazy king?’
‘No, I’m Edmund, a rather dashing young earl who I’m playing with one hell of a swagger, I can tell you.’ He flicked up his coat collar and smouldered at her, waggling his eyebrows.
‘Oh God,’ she spluttered, ‘please don’t tell me you’re the love interest.’
‘Honey, I’m the sex interest.’
Both girls roared and I smiled at them all in the mirror. He liked playing to the gallery, making the girls laugh, they loved having him around and I knew they were proud to call him their cousin. Tall, good-looking, floppy-haired, he was considered cool, even though he didn’t try, and his rather exotic background didn’t detract either: son of Croatian revolutionaries whose father had fought and died for his country, and whose family we’d tried but failed to trace any further back than the priest grandfather.
When Seffy had been about ten he’d become very absorbed with his background and asked to go back to Croatia. We’d taken a package tour one week in the summer, and found a very different place from the one I’d left. The Dalmatian coast, quite rightly, had become a tourist resort. Full of holiday-makers, the picturesque little quayside villages were crammed with tavernas spilling onto pavements and heaving with families, in flip-flops and shorts, buying postcards. A very different atmosphere prevailed from the one I’d left. I’d shown him the house where his parents had lived and where I’d stayed, freshly painted now, bright blue, with bougainvillaea trailing from pots in the yard. But a suspicious dark-eyed family lived within, who, I think, fearing we were laying some sort of claim to the place, were reluctant to let us in. Neither could we find anyone who remembered Seffy’s family, the Mastlovas being refugees anyway, and before it got too depressing, we moved on, to a resort down the coast for some sailing and snorkelling. Seffy, I think though,