A Surrey State of Affairs Read online

  The scene cut to the dungeon, where all the cell mates—even those who openly despised one another—were holding hands in a circle. It looked like a cross between an evangelical prayer, a séance, a nightclub, and death row. Sophie had clearly made an effort for the occasion: her eyes were encrusted in emerald eye shadow and she was wearing her gold sequined halter top. The overall effect reminded me slightly of Darcy, although I’m sure this is not what she intended.

  Eventually, as the crowd was whipped up into a fury, as a cacophony of shouts rose from a thousand moronic mouths, and as the camera panned over Sophie and Renita, both of whom had small tears welling in the corners of their eyes, the result was announced: Sophie had 53 percent of the public vote; she was out on her ear. Jeffrey kicked over the wastepaper basket in disgust, spilling advertisements for Norwegian fjord cruises and dentures across the floor; Rupert patted my hand and said, “There you go, it’s over.”

  But it wasn’t quite. A teary Sophie reappeared on the television to be interviewed about her experience. In such circumstances, I would have advised her to maintain a dignified silence. She did not, preferring to bad-mouth all the other contestants, grudgingly admit that the Peter Andre impersonator was “quite fit,” accuse Renita of turning everyone against her, and then wail “I should still be in there in the hot tub, not that Mexican slut” and start sniveling. Luckily, the interview ended there. The music started up; her television career was over. I grabbed the phone and began calling. Would she have her mobile on yet? On the sixth attempt, I gave up, having left a long answerphone message that incorporated my shock, anger, and humiliation, but, ultimately, emotional support.

  A few minutes later, she texted back, saying: bummed, stayin with a m8.

  SATURDAY, JULY 19

  Another long and eventful day. It began with a trip to the newsagent first thing to buy all the papers for what I hoped would be the last time. It can’t get any worse, I thought, as I crossed the threshold into the cheerily white-lit store, the tins and cans and packets of rice neatly stacked from floor to ceiling for those too disorganized to send their housekeepers to a proper supermarket.

  I was completely unprepared for what I saw next. Splashed across all the tabloids, and even some of the proper newspapers, was the headline DUNGEON RACE ROW. From the tone of the coverage, Sophie’s admittedly rude and inappropriate “Mexican” comment was some kind of outrage that put her on a par with the worst perpetrators of apartheid South Africa. “But she wasn’t even Mexican!” I muttered to myself, aghast, as I read that channel 4 had been deluged with complaints and that the ambassadors of both Mexico and Brazil had demanded an apology from the British government.

  My fingers were shaking as I handed the change to Niral. He smiled at me sympathetically, shook his head, and tut-tutted.

  “Your Sophie is not one of these racialists. I remember her playing tag on the green with Mehak when they were little ones. If these newspaper types were not too lazy to come down from London and find out what is really going on before writing their mumbo jumbo I would set the message straight.”

  I thanked him sincerely.

  “And besides,” he added, leaning toward me across the counter. “That Renita, she WAS a Mexican slut, if you will pardon me my French. I have told Mehak: do not fall for these sorts of girls! Do not fall for them.” He was wagging his finger toward me like a man facing down a wild tiger. “If he dares to bring home a girl like that, he will get the flogging of his life, of that he can be sure. Now, that does not make me a racialist, does it?”

  No sooner had I nodded then shaken my head in confusion and left the shop than my mobile bleeped with a text message from Sophie. It read: yo mo at stashun can u pik me up?? xx.

  As you can imagine, it was with mixed emotions that I drove to the station. As soon as I pulled in I saw her there, waiting, one hand on her suitcase, the other punching a text message into her mobile, looking tiny, fragile, so much smaller than the angry photos emblazoned across the newspapers. I felt my anger soften. She stuck her suitcase in the trunk and then hopped in. I looked at her big open eyes, delicate, blue, and bare of makeup, and her baby-soft skin. I reached out to touch her cheek. “Oh, Sophie,” I said.

  “All right, Mum, wassup?” she said, before turning back to her text message.

  I drove home in silence, a few stray tears blurring my vision. When I got back, there was a Sky Television van parked on the corner of our drive, one wheel crushing our rustic brick border, along with a few other unknown cars and about half a dozen journalists milling around. I gasped; Sophie waved cheerily. I put my foot to the floor and spattered the hacks with gravel as I sped to the front door.

  Both Natalia and Jeffrey were there to welcome Sophie home. Natalia, clearly impressed to be in the same house as a Dungeon evictee, volunteered to make her a cup of tea for the first time in living memory, said how much both she and her sister Lydia had enjoyed watching over the Internet, and asked if it was true that there was a camera in the toilet. I felt too weakened to inform her that the correct word was lavatory. Jeffrey, for his part, gave Sophie a pat on the back, and said, “Well, well, you’re home. Think tactics, girl, next time you want to form an alliance. You have to unite against a common enemy. That’s the thing.” And with that he went out to tidy the shed.

  With Jeffrey gone, I pointedly asked Natalia to go and vacuum the landing upstairs, hoping that I could finally have a proper chat with Sophie and point out the error of her ways. I had only just poured myself a cup of tea, drawn a deep breath, and begun—“Even in this day and age, there are certain rules of thumb that a young lady”—when Sophie’s mobile rang. Her end of the conversation went something like this: “Yeah? Yeah…no…yeah…yep…yeah…yeah…yeah…no…Gotcha, bye.”

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “This guy who wants to look after my publicity,” she said, tossing her hair back with a smug look in her eyes. “He said he’s had lots of practice. He told me he’d get me the best deal for my interviews as long as I didn’t go through anyone else, and that if any journos call I’m to tell them that I spent my gap year working in an orphanage in Mexico.”

  “But Sophie, who was this man? What was his name?”

  “M something or other.”

  “M? What’s his full name?”

  “He doesn’t have a full name, full names went out with the dinosaurs, just like that top you’re wearing. He said he was called…M Clo. Yeah, that was it.”

  SUNDAY, JULY 20

  You would have thought that Sunday would be a day of rest, but sadly it is not. More journalists arrived. M—I will not, cannot, say M Clo—called Sophie’s mobile and told her to stay inside. He has an exclusive interview and photo shoot set up with Hot magazine tomorrow. They will come here at ten. I have half a mind to keep the chain on and the door closed when they knock.

  MONDAY, JULY 21

  I have snapped. I have booked a remote cottage in Norfolk for the week, and I will be driving Sophie there shortly under the pretext that we are going to the orthodontist to get her teeth whitened, as M recommended. There will be no Internet, no phone, no “journos,” no newspapers, no connection to the outer world.

  Allow me to explain what has driven me to this point. Against my better judgment—and Rupert’s warnings—I allowed the Hot magazine team into the house this morning. Sophie had threatened a hunger strike if I did not, and Jeffrey said, “Let her do what she wants, it’ll all blow over,” before leaving for work, imperiously ignoring the assembled journalists on his way out.

  And so I let in a stylist, a makeup artist, an interviewer, and a photographer, who all, except the latter, looked about fifteen, while Sophie received last-minute instructions from M Clo on her mobile. The interview took place in the kitchen, from which I was debarred. Nevertheless, by putting a glass to the door, I was able to catch snatches of Sophie rattling on, a newly confident inflection in her voice, about how much she admired the physics teacher because he worked with children, wh
ich reminded her of her gap year at the orphanage in Mexico, which was so, you know, tragic, yet rewarding, and so on and so forth. When she was questioned on the infamous argument, she went quiet and then said, “I’ve always had a problem with my temper. It’s something I’m going to get therapy for. I think it’s because sometimes, when I was little, my mum used to lock me in the laundry room if I misbehaved and I’ve not yet, you know, resolved my anger issues.” There was a pause, then a sniff.

  I dropped my glass in disgust. How could she? This must be M Clo’s doing. I only ever used the laundry room as a last recourse, like for the time she put dead beetles in her grandmother’s shampoo. Still, aware that by bursting in I would only confirm the impression that I was some kind of unmaternal ogre, I kept quiet. Soon enough, the interview concluded, and Sophie was “styled” for her photo shoot. This took place in the garden, and it was the most horrifying sight I have witnessed there since Darcy’s escape. Sophie posed in front of my hydrangea wrapped in a Mexican flag of sadly inadequate proportions. Randolph, who was turning over the flower beds nearby, wolf-whistled. Next she was dressed up like some kind of Mardi Gras dancer, with a towering feather headdress and a minuscule sequined costume. I could hardly bear to watch.

  Once the ghastly charade was finally over and the Hot impostors had left, I shut the door, fastened the chain, and turned to Sophie (whose face was smeared with bronzing powder to the point that she had started to resemble a chimney sweep). “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?” I asked, arms crossed.

  Her mobile rang.

  “Yeah? Yeah…yeah…yep…yeah…yeah…bye.”

  “That was M Clo,” she said, beaming. “He wants me to write a children’s book and I’m going to launch my own perfume, called Tongue Tied. Get it?”

  You will not hear from me for some days.

  SATURDAY, JULY 26

  I am back. The scratches on my left arm are healing. As soon as Sophie realized that we were not, in fact, going to the orthodontist, or anywhere else acceptable to her, she lashed out like a feral cat. Luckily I had put the child’s lock on the doors and hidden her mobile.

  When we eventually got there, the cottage was perfect, just what I had hoped for: small, faintly moldy, no mobile reception, no main roads, nothing. Sophie said she wanted to die. However, her hunger strike lasted only a day and a half before she succumbed to a plate of sausages and mash, made from ingredients bought at the local farm. She stared down fixedly at her plate as she ate; I like to think she was dwelling on the superiority of fresh wholesome food versus her preferred diet of orange-flavored Kit Kats. By the end of the week she was going for long walks on the beach, picking up shells, drawing in the sand with sticks, and sometimes forgetting that she wasn’t speaking to me.

  Now that we are home, however, the histrionics have begun again. M isn’t returning her calls. She got hold of last week’s Hot magazine, and the first paragraph began:

  “After being broadcast to the nation hurling racial abuse at her cell mate, you would have thought that SoHa would be feeling a touch ashamed of herself. Not a bit of it. We caught up with her at her parents’ luxury five-bedroom mansion in Surrey, where the tiny blonde was happy to talk about the REAL reasons for her feud with Renita, her harrowing time at an orphanage in Mexico, her old-fashioned upbringing, and what REALLY went on behind the cameras with Phil.”

  I didn’t want to read any further. If they could turn my perfectly normal house into a “mansion,” Lord only knows what they did to Sophie’s stories.

  6 P.M.

  I heard crying coming from Sophie’s room. I knocked gently, and went in. She was curled up on the bed, back against the wall, wearing her purple minidress, with another issue of Hot magazine and her mobile by her side. I moved them gingerly aside and sat down. I put my arm around her. She leaned her head on my shoulder. “Tell me what’s the matter,” I said quietly. She gulped and sniffed onto my cappuccino-colored cardigan. No matter.

  “It’s M Clo,” she said, and sniffed again. “He finally answered.” Another sniff, and a stifled sob.

  “He called me Sophie, not SoHa. That’s when I knew something was wrong. Then he told me I was last week’s news. And I am! Look at this!”

  And she held up her new copy of Hot in a limp hand as she turned her face away and buried it in my cardigan. I looked. On the cover was a picture of Renita, who wore a tiny black bikini and a huge pout, with the headline MY ORPHANAGE HELL! “‘Only Phil could take my mind off my tragic past,’ says Dungeon’s new star.”

  As she sobbed, I stroked her hair, and told her that she was my wonderful daughter, that she could be anything she wanted to be in the world, that she was a million times more precious than this tacky world of five-minute fame and fickle headlines and silly abbreviations.

  “Whatever, MoHa,” she said, and sniffed.

  SUNDAY, JULY 27

  When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions. No sooner have I patched up my distraught, misguided daughter than Jeffrey drops another bombshell on me. Over breakfast this morning, he cracked the head off his boiled egg with one bold, surgical swipe of the teaspoon, uttered a self-congratulatory “Ha!” then calmly told me that Ivan the Terrible would be coming to stay. Today. For an indefinite period. He has split up with Ivanka. He is, apparently, devastated; I imagine in the same way that a hawk feels sad after losing its grip on a water vole midair. It is just as well that Natalia is off for a couple of days visiting a cousin in London. Heaven only knows how she will take the news. I called Rupert to tell him just how thoughtless his father was, but he sounded distracted and asked me who I was talking about when I was halfway through. He has been a bit off for the past few weeks; I might pop a few back issues of Crossword Weekly in the mail for him to improve his powers of concentration.

  MONDAY, JULY 28

  Ivan is here, smoking in the conservatory; his odious presence pervades the house more thoroughly than the foul stench of his Russian cigars. And it is all my fault. To my dismay, I learned last night that I had a role to play in his unwanted presence in my house. It made me want to sit down with Reginald and discuss the concept of Divine Retribution.

  Ivan arrived around seven o’clock, roaring up the drive in his show-off Alfa Romeo sports car and only just missing my terra-cotta pots of geraniums. I had prepared a casserole for dinner. Jeffrey poured the wine. Ivan poured the wine directly down his gullet, stared at me through his hooded eyes, and began telling the tale of how he has come to be divorced from his fourth wife, Ivanka.

  I did not think it a suitable conversation in the company of Sophie, who is still in a fragile emotional state, but he persisted despite my attempts at changing the subject to the disgraceful and neglected state of this country’s bell towers. It transpires that, although Ivan and Ivanka presented a smiling, united front when our paths crossed on holiday in the Bahamas, in reality a rift had already opened up between them.

  Ivan suspected her of caring more about beauty parlors and designer dress shops than attending to his needs, leaving a horrible silence as to the question of what precisely those needs might be. Ivanka, meanwhile, suspected that he had sent her to a second-rate surgeon for her boob job, which had started to go askew.

  With a small catch in his cigarette-ravaged voice, he explained that the final straw came when her failure to ensure that he was properly coated in sunscreen led to a severe bout of sunstroke. He said he still bore the scars from the blisters. He took another gulp of wine. Sophie’s blue eyes were darkened with tears.

  God may just as well have peeled back our roof tiles and smited me with a thunderbolt.

  TUESDAY, JULY 29

  Natalia got back last night, and she couldn’t have returned at a worse moment. She must have heard our voices, because she wandered into the dining room to say hello, with her duffel bag still in her hand, just as Ivan was banging his fist on the table and telling Jeffrey that Russia had every right to bomb Georgia to smithereens.

  Natalia
dropped her bag and called Ivan a Russian pig. I had no idea that her vocabulary extended to porcine insults. It appears that, along with politics and religion, the borders of South Ossetia should not be discussed at the dinner table. Ivan looked part bemused, part amused, while Jeffrey just looked like he wanted to slip between the cracks in the floorboards and disappear.

  Natalia put her hands on her hips. “I cannot live with this Russian prison-keeper of nations,” she said, decidedly. She turned to Jeffrey. “You must choose. He go, or I go.”

  I don’t know why she asked Jeffrey when I normally handle all matters relating to her employment; it must have been her sense of deference to the man of the house. In any case, there she stood, defiant, her head held high, her streaky chestnut ponytail tickling her bare shoulders. Jeffrey’s eyes swiveled from her to Ivan and back again. Ivan raised one eyebrow, looked at Jeffrey, and said sardonically, “Vell, my friend?”

  Jeffrey’s naturally ruddy complexion had darkened to a violent shade of puce. He picked up his cheese knife, then put it back down. He looked up.

  “Natalia, you must be awfully tired,” he said finally, in a flat voice. “You work too hard. Why don’t you take a break for a few weeks?”

  She stood perfectly still for a few seconds, then picked up her duffel bag, placed the straps delicately across her shoulder, and walked right out of the room without saying another word.

  And just like that, Jeffrey had stripped me of my housekeeper. Ivan guffawed, then smeared a piece of Stilton onto a cracker, placed a grape on top, and rammed it down his throat. He picked up his glass of port. “To us,” he said, looking at Jeffrey.

  “To us,” Jeffrey weakly replied.

  From the kitchen came the sound of a muffled smash and foreign words screeched in anger.