Birdman

15

Lucilla was half Italian, half German, the most volcanic presence in the Harteveld house. Dense-boned and walnut-skinned, as tall and wide as the door frames, at parties she couldn't be dissuaded from singing, propped against the Steinway, mascara running down her face, moved to tears by some aria. Toby Harteveld, remote behind his beautiful-English-boy hauteur, found it impossible to believe this woman, with her black flaring hair and jealous rages, was really his mother. He learned early to hate her.

It was the summer between prep school and Sherborne when he walked into an unlocked bathroom to find her naked, one leg up on the commode as she shaved the thick black hairs trailing from the pubis down the inside of the thighs.

She smiled. 'Hello, puppy. Here—' She held the razor out to him. 'You can help.'

'No, Mother.' He was calm. As if he had always known this would happen.

'No?' She laughed. 'No, Mother?' Her head lowered. 'Are you a little poofter, T? Tell me? Are you a little buggerer? Mmm?'

'No, Mother.'

'I'll tell your father you tried to touch me.'

'No, Mother.'

'No, Mother? You think I won't?' She inspected him with her shining black eyes, head on one side as if she was deciding which end to devour first, then with an impatient toss of the dark head she flung open the window and leaned out over the gravel court below, soft breasts spilling across the ledge. 'Henrick! Henrick! Please come for your son.'

Toby took the opportunity to slip out of the door. He raced down the stairs, ignoring the indignant shouts from the bathroom, past vibrating chandeliers and shocked staff, through panelled passageways and out into the grounds. He found an elm bole at the lakeside, curled up beside it and hid until the evening.

When he returned the house was quiet, as if nothing much had happened. His father ladled lobster bisque at dinner, his thin lips slightly paler than usual, and the incident was never mentioned again.

Over the following months Toby became withdrawn. He demanded a lock on his bedroom and in the afternoon lay with his pale hands folded lightly over his stomach listening to Lucilla's explosive passions in the passages outside. Her mere existence made his internal organs contract; sometimes he fancied she had slyly removed his pillowcases from the laundry and rubbed herself, her juices, into them; he seemed to be able to smell her wherever he went. He learned to sleep face down, his stomach pressed securely into the mattress in case she found a way to let herself into his room. He never, ever fell asleep until he was sure, absolutely sure, that his mother was safe in bed on the other side of the house.

Two years later, in the family library after his first hunt, Toby met Sophie, the daughter of a local barrister. Long, thin and aloof as marble, she stood erect and white against the rich panelling. Everything Lucilla wasn't. Toby, fourteen, handed her a glass of champagne, and was surprised and thrilled to notice that the fingers which took it were colder than the chilled glass stem.

Lucilla instantly sensed the attachment and chose that summer for his rite of passage. She sent father and son abroad. They washed up in South East Asia, Luzon to be precise, and Henrick, full of his own notions about how to rear his young, took Toby to a Makati whorehouse, where he was presented with fifteen girls slouched on their salung-puwets behind a floor-to ceiling pane of glass.

Toby chose the thinnest, palest of the girls. In bed he ordered her not to speak, not to move, no thrashing or wailing. Sipping coffee and eating fried sinangag on the balcony the next morning, overlooking sun-filled Pasay, he was overwhelmed with the sense that something abnormal was being born in him.

A month later his mother caught him in the yew topiary with Sophie, he with his jodhpurs around his knees, she closed eyes, long calm face, holding still as if for an X-ray. By the time Toby had dressed and got back to the house Lucilla had already created pandemonium. The staff were milling about in the sun and Toby narrowly avoided being mowed down by the grim-faced Henrick reversing the Land Rover in a spray of gravel across the forecourt and down the driveway.

The message was clear — Toby was to deal with Lucilla alone.

Watched by the staff, Toby climbed the steps and placed his white hand on the heavy oak door, his eyes half closed as he waited for the subtle trembles which would map for him where in the house his mother was waiting.

She was in the formal dining room, pacing the length of the wall under the Antwerp tapestries, breathing loudly through her nose. The blue light from the window illuminated the fine tracery of tears on her jowls. It was the first time they had been alone together since the incident in the bathroom.

'Mother.'

'Sit.'

He sat at the head of the table, his father's place. To his left the blue window held the hazy sweep of the lawns and shadowy cypresses, but the panelled dining room was dark, as if the years of tension had collected there. Lucilla dropped into her usual mahogany chair, closed her eyes, placed both hands on her hot neck and shook her head. 'That anaemic creature. Her father is a damn pederast, she is a mistake of nature.'

Toby was calm. 'I don't have time for a display, Lucilla. Just tell me what I do now.'

She opened her eyes at that, her hands trembling at her neck. 'What did I do to deserve you for a son?'

'Tell me what I do now.'

'You'll board at Sherborne until it is time to go to university.'

'Is that it?'

'And in the holidays, since you hold me in such contempt, you will stay with the Chase-Greys in Connecticut. We'll make you an allowance.'

'You don't want to see me again?'

Lucilla crossed herself, an ancient gesture he remembered her doing only once before. 'I don't want to see you again.'

Toby went back to Sherborne and he and Sophie didn't see each other again. Three years later she married a defence budget co-ordinator and went to live in Walton-on-Thames. Toby adapted well. Sophie, he had come to see, was not the cause but a symptom of something bigger. He had a sense of it gathering inside, dark and malformed, as charged as a storm.

In his last year at Sherborne he focused on getting into medical school. He was bright and the newly formed United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy's and St Thomas's — UMDS — accepted him.

It was at UMDS that Birdman first began to unfurl and examine his wings.