One Father, Another Part One

Lilya was in no mood for company. She had been drinking steadily since noon and was now entering that twilight state between sobriety and inebriation in which she wanted nothing more than to lie very still upon the chaise-lounge with her eyes shut. Her husband, however, had other ideas.

Thomas Hasting-Talbot, in an act so out of character that it caused his wife to inquire
as to whether he was feeling quite well, had emerged from his study for the first time in weeks, blinking in the artificial light of the drawing room he rarely entered, to declare that he had just cleared his Sunday afternoon schedule in order to spend quality time with his beloved family.

Lilya said nothing, turning to her husband with a smile like an unstitched scar,
thin lips painted dark red, a stab wound stretching into an approximation of a smile. She studied his movements, the clumsy way his fingers toyed with the sash of his out-dated Noel Coward smoking jacket, loosening the cord that cut uncomfortably into the vast expanse of his stomach, hoping she might mimic his manner, echoing back the enthusiasm it was so apparent she lacked.

“Sounds smashing pa!” Freddy declared from his permanent place of residence by the
fire-place.

As he leant upon the mantle, his cheeks flushed the colour of a thousand burst blood
capillaries, his fingertips crept towards the whiskey decanter upon the side-board, ready to re-fill his empty glass. Lilya suspected her son was so fond of the fire-place for its proximity to the liquor cabinet as she often found him lingering around the un-lit hearth, complaining of a chill, as the maid mopped the floor clean of hastily poured port.

“Can we go for dinner Daddy? I’m famished,” Eleanor announced from the sofa where she had settled herself after her morning’s riding lesson and remained for the rest of the day beside a box of assorted treats from a bakery on Primrose Hill she claimed had been given as a gift from someone at the stables, despite the fact that she was paying an absolute fortune to follow a diet plan devised for her by some nutrition guru who was terribly en vogue amongst Hollywood’s starving starlets. “I can’t eat carbs though. Liz Hurley doesn’t eat carbs after 5 P.M” she continued, each syllable punctuated with the crunch of a macaroon shell.

“I thought we’d stay in tonight pickle,” Thomas replied with a smile that transformed
his face into a Halloween mask, the corners of his eyes creasing with a compassion that caused an avalanche of loose skin, crows-feet splintering like fault lines across the scorched earth of his face. He looked at Eleanor with the doting affection of a man who could only see his daughter through the distorted lens of filial delusion and undiagnosed glaucoma.

Lilya harboured no such illusions. She saw her children exactly as they were, faults
and all, and hated them for it. They were reflections of her own failings and she found it unbearable to be around them.

She was aware of news reports on monstrous mothers, women who smothered their
darlings while they slept or swore by Formaldehyde as a salad dressing, yet she remained unmoved by their stories. The ladies at her luncheon club loved them. White linen stretched across their laps, soup bowls untouched before them, they would clutch their pearls and murmur that it was too awful to even think of, before producing newspaper clippings and half-remembered lines from police procedurals, dissecting the details as though they were gathered around an autopsy table.

Lilya found it difficult to summon the correct level of condemnation during these
conversations. There wasn’t a maternal bone in her body. She knew what it was to hate her children, her husband and the home that he had given her. At least the women were upfront about how they felt. In a way she admired them, having never said an honest thing in her life, though she wondered whether she was really like those murderous mothers whose crimes were motivated by an excessive, all-consuming kind of love – something which Lilya had never known for herself.

She would never raise a hand to hurt her family because she simply did not care
enough. Hers was a lazy, passive sort of loathing. She could not work up the energy needed for real disdain and so surrendered herself to something far crueller – disinterest.
“Your mother’s been out all morning, I suppose she’s in need of a quiet night in,
aren’t you dear?” Thomas continued, his gaze turned upon Lilya as he attempted to summon the same affection he felt for his heavy-set daughter.

“I suppose so,” Lilya murmured, not caring whether they stayed in their Finsbury
Park apartment with the tacky faux-antique furnishings or whether they ventured to SoHo for drinks at the Groucho Club, dinner at Nobu. It was all the same to her. She would not be there, not really. Already she felt as if she were standing behind plexi-glass, separated from her sturdy family with their ruddy cheeks and farmer’s tans. She no longer saw herself as one of them, if she ever had, and as such she felt as if she could do anything. She was so far removed from her situation that it seemed ridiculous to think that her actions could affect anyone but herself.

“Can we get take-out?” Eleanor was pleading, flecks of saliva and chocolate sauce
glittering in the dimple of her chin.
Lilya watched as Thomas settled himself beside Ellie, a hand upon her knee in what
could be considered a moment of paternal tenderness if it weren’t for the pained look upon his face as he lowered himself into his seat. From the high colour of his cheeks Lilya suspected his gout was acting up again but she could not summon the energy to sympathise.

It was no good. She could not feign interest in spending time with him and the children. If anything she resented the intrusion upon her own plans for the evening which had consisted of remaining by the fire-place, a decanter of whiskey upon the sideboard and an un-read edition of French Vogue open upon her lap as she abandoned herself to reverie.

It was hardly difficult for Thomas to clear a schedule which consisted solely of making surreptitious trips to the fridge and back to his study, a block of the good cheese he was under doctor’s orders not to eat hidden in his jacket pocket, briefcase filled with chocolate biscuits and hastily cut chunks of fruit cake. He thought he was being awfully clever but Lilya could always tell when her husband had been playing Russian roulette with his all but lethal cholesterol levels by the tell-tale crumbs caught in his ridiculous handlebar moustache.

“So, where have you been all morning? You’re never up before midday and there you were out before nine this morning. You’re being very mysterious darling, what do you have up your sleeve?” Thomas asked with a wink, an elbow prodding the folds of flesh that surrounded Eleanor’s rib cage as if they were co-conspirators in a particularly uninteresting rouse. Eleanor remained unresponsive, failing to share her father’s curiosity as her fingers toyed with a loose thread in the seam of her too-tight jodhpurs. Lilya noticed she had yet to remove her helmet, as though wearing an outfit suited to physical activity could excuse an afternoon of gluttony.

“Oh, just meeting up with an old school friend,” Lilya said with a dismissive wave of
her hand, surprised at the ease with which the lie tripped from her tongue. She had expected to find herself hesitant, all false starts and stutters, or worse, to find the words rushing from her lips, tripping over one another in their eagerness to be heard, sounding stilted and scripted as she clenched her teeth to keep them from escaping.

Thomas was talking but she ceased to hear him. His words came to her like stars,
dead before they left his lips and light-years away from her understanding.

After that morning’s events this life of cosy domesticity, the contented idleness that her mother assured her was as close to bliss as a girl could get, it all seemed so entirely alien to her, though it was all she had ever known. It was no longer enough. She was restless, bored. No one had ever warned her that happiness could be so tiresome.

She had agreed to meet Sebastian in a café where they sold soul music at the counter, the
once white walls jaundiced like the nicotine stained tips of her fingers, though she was told this was part of the décor, along with the chairs carved from the trunks of acacia trees and dot painted with aboriginal decals, no doubt by some dull boho-bourgeoise Notting Hill couple with hemp sandals and matted hair, well off enough to send little Percival to Eton but still refused to eat anything that hadn’t been salvaged from a refuse skip.

She settled herself in a seat by the window, feeling more like her mother than herself
in her twin-set and pearls, the pleats of her knee length skirt seeming outdated and sickeningly suburban as she snapped open the clasp of the Hermes Birkin handbag upon her lap and began to search for her cigarettes. The complicated beverage ordered under duress from a girl behind the till who could not understand that all she wanted was a bloody coffee sat untouched beside her elbow, at risk of being tipped from the table as she flicked through the pages of a paperback novel she had no intention of finishing.

Sebastian arrived several minutes later.
Though they had never met before she recognised him instantly. He looked just as out of place as she did.

He glanced around the café, his eyes searching for hers across a crowded room,
unaware that she had already risen to her feet, arms raised, her hands two white flags waving above her head to attract his attention. Her lips moved to speak his name but found her mouth a barren womb, host to a still-birth of words that could never convey what she longed to say. Where her voice failed, she resorted to semaphore.
She caught his eye and held his gaze, each waiting for the other to speak first.

“Mum?” he asked, unsure of her answer as he moved towards her, his steps slow and halting as if expecting to be turned away at any moment.
“Sebastian, darling!” she greeted him, her arms outstretched to embrace him before they fell to her sides once more, hands clasped in her lap as if to occlude to possibility of physical contact.
“Actually it’s Kevin,” he told her, sounding almost apologetic as he pulled a chair
from a nearby table and sat down opposite her.

“But I suppose you can call me Sebastian, if you’d like.”

There was something strange in the way he spoke. The cadence of his speech skipped beats and missed vowels, words mangled in his mouth and emerging from behind his teeth as entirely new mutations, as if the English language were not sufficient enough for all the wonderful things he had to say so he simply skimmed along its surface. She realised with what she could not be sure was delight or disgust that her son, in his absence, had acquired a regional accent.

“I’m not quite sure Kevin does justice to you darling,” Lilya replied, clicking her fingers to attract the attention of the young girl behind the counter, forgetting it wasn’t the sort of establishment that offered table service. “You were born to be a Sebastian.”

“I hope this is alright. It’s just round the corner from where I work so,” he gestured
around the café as his voice trailed off, his fingers restless when there was not a cigarette between them, tracing the rim of the sugar bowl, tapping 1-2-3 upon the table top. If it had been anyone else Lilya would have wanted to rip out their nails with pliers, but in Sebastian it simply seemed charming.
She studied him from across her coffee cup, the corners of her lips twitching upwards
in silent delight as he leant forward in his seat, shoulders tensed, awkward and unsure of himself in this strange new situation, though he seemed as if he would be ill at ease wherever he was.

There was something of herself in him, more so than the children she had left at home. Beneath the sharp lines and straight edges inherited from his father lay her own delicate features, the curve of his rose-petal lips as lovely as a woman’s, seeming almost out of place when set against the angular contours of his face.

He reminded her of boyfriends she had never had, pale-faced young men whose hands
she yearned to clasp in her own beneath the dinner table. Her father had not permitted boyfriends and as such she was so unused to male attention that weeks after arriving at university she had agreed to be married to the first man who had shown her any interest.

Of course it had been a mistake, but there was nothing to be done for it now. Divorce
was so déclassé and she had always been sure she would be unhappy wherever she found herself, though sitting inches away from the son she had not seen since the day she abandoned him, she began to wonder if, in another life, she may have at least been content.