already. Manon, superb production, I’m told.’
‘We have,’ said Octavia, ‘but thank you for thinking of
us. And it is a superb production. We saw Sylvie Guillem in
it.’
‘Good. Well, I’m taking Marianne anyway. Maybe her
children will be able to come.’
‘I hope so.’ Marianne was her father’s mistress of a great
many years: she and Octavia enjoyed a rather taut
friendship. ‘Is - is she there now?’
‘No, no, I’m here on my own,’ said Felix. A notional
sigh hung in the air.
There was a silence. Then, ‘Well, good night, Dad,’ she
said. ‘I’ll get Tom to ring you.’
‘Now why did you say that?’ said Marianne Muirhead,
lifting her head from the magazine she was reading, and
looking at Felix with cool green eyes. ‘As if I needed to
ask.’
‘Say what?’ said Felix.
‘That you were on your own. Felix, you are a nightmare.
It’s a miracle poor Octavia isn’t even more of a neurotic
mess with you for a father.’
‘She’s not a neurotic mess!’
‘Of course she is. Well, maybe not a mess, but certainly
neurotic’
‘I would call it highly strung. And it’s the life she leads
that contributes to that, nothing I do.’
‘I would beg to differ. She was obviously upset about
something and the last thing she needed was all that loaded
stuff about her husband. Or to be told you were all alone in
the house, after she’d turned down your invitation to the
ballet. The words “lonely” and “neglected” hanging heavy
in the air. Really, Felix!’
‘Look, I don’t interfere with the way you manage your
children,’ said Felix irritably, pouring himself a large
Scotch, ‘so perhaps you’d be kind enough to allow me to
handle my own.’
Marianne didn’t answer, returned to her magazine. Felix
turned up the stereo; Bruch’s violin concerto filled the
room.
‘Felix, not quite so loud, please. It was perfectly all right
before.’
‘I thought you liked this. You always say it’s one of your
Desert Island Discs.’
‘I do, but not when it precludes all thought.’
‘You’re only reading Vogue, for Christ’s sake. That
doesn’t require much thought.’
Marianne closed her magazine, stood up. ‘I think perhaps
I might go home tonight after all,’ she said. ‘I’m rather
tired.’
‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous,’ he said irritably. ‘Now
who’s playing games?’
‘Felix, I’m not playing games. I don’t play games. I am
tired, and I don’t find your mood very restful.’
It was true: Marianne didn’t play games. She was an
extraordinarily straightforward woman, coolly intelligent
and self-assured. She was thirty-nine years old, with a pale
blonde beauty, slender, elegant, always perfectly dressed. It
had once been famously said of Marianne Muirhead in an
article in Vogue that she did not follow style, her own
particular version followed her. Neither ultra-fashionably
nor classically dressed, she had evolved a look of her own
over the years that she simply adapted as she felt required to;
a long lean silhouette, a splash of primary colour added
fairly sparingly to black, always high heels, almost always
hats, skirts just above the knee, and a wardrobe that
contained at any one time (also famously) at least thirty
white Tshirts, in every possible fabric and style. She looked
as good on the golf course, which she claimed was her
natural habitat, as she did lunching at Caprice, or on the
floor at a charity ball. Any slight tendency to severity in her
appearance and manner was counteracted by her laugh,
which was loud and exuberant.
She had married Alec Muirhead, a London-based American
lawyer, in 1975 when she was only eighteen. Her own
father had been in the diplomatic service, based for much of his life in Washington, and she was herself half American and,
her only brother was entirely American-based — so she
settled happily into what most Englishwomen would have
found a difficult life. But