Last Voyage of the Valentina(5)

It was easy to see why the Buffalo hated Valentina. Margo Arbuckle wasn’t beautiful. She was a big lady with sturdy legs better suited to Wellington boots than stilettos, a large bottom that molded well into the saddle of a horse and freckly English skin bare of makeup and washed with Imperial Leather soap. Her style of dress was appalling, tweed skirts and billowing blouses. Her bosom was substantial and she had lost any waist she once had. Alba wondered what her father had seen in her. Perhaps the pain of losing Valentina had driven him to choose a wife who was the opposite of her. But wouldn’t it have been better to live with her memory than to compromise in such a pitiful way?

As for the children they had had together, well, they had wasted no time in that department. Alba had been born in 1945, the year her mother died, and Caroline only three years later in 1948. It was shameful. Her father had barely had time to mourn. He had certainly not had time to get to know her child, the one he should have loved more than anyone else in the world as the living part of the woman he had lost. After Caroline came Henry and then Miranda; with each child Alba was pushed a little further into her world of pine and olive groves and her father was too busy making another family to notice how she cried. But it wasn’t her family. God, she thought unhappily, does he ever sit down and think what he’s done to me? Now she had the portrait, she was determined to tell him.

She turned off the A30 and headed down narrow winding lanes. Her headlights illuminated the hedgerows bursting with cow parsley and the odd rabbit that darted hastily back into the bushes. She rolled down the window and sniffed the air like a dog, taking pleasure from the sweet scents of spring that swept in with the rattling sound of the motor. She imagined her father smoking his after-dinner cigar and swirling brandy in one of those large, swollen-bellied glasses he was so fond of. Margo would be rabbiting on about Caroline’s thrilling new job in a Mayfair art gallery owned by a family friend and Henry’s latest news from Sandhurst. Miranda was still at boarding school—little to report there except top grades and fawning teachers. How dreadfully dull and conventional, Alba thought. Predictable. Their lives would all run accordingly, along tracks laid down at their birth like perfect little trains. “The runaway train came down the track and she blew, she blew…,” sang Alba, her misery lifting as she contemplated her unconventional, independent existence that ran along a track entirely of her own making.

Finally she turned into the driveway that swept up for about a quarter of a mile beneath tall copper beech trees. She could just make out a couple of horses in the field to her right, their eyes shining like silver as they caught the lights of her car. Hideous beasts, she thought sourly. Amazing they weren’t all buckling at the knees considering the weight of the Buffalo. She wondered whether the woman rode her father like she rode her horses. She couldn’t help but giggle at the thought, then swiftly dismissed it. Old people weren’t into that sort of thing.

The wheels of the car scrunched up the gravel in front of the house. The lights blazed invitingly but Alba knew they didn’t blaze for her. How Margo must resent her, she thought. It would be easier to wipe away Valentina’s memory if she weren’t around as a constant reminder. She parked her car beneath the imposing walls of the house that had once been her home. With its tall chimneys and old, weathered brick and flint it had withstood gales and storms for well over 300 years. Her great-great-grandfather had apparently won it at the gambling table, but not before he had lost his wife as a consequence of his addiction. She had swiftly become mistress to some duke who had an addiction of similar proportions but a much deeper pocket with which to indulge it. Alba rather liked the idea of the mistress; her stepmother had forever tainted her concept of marriage.

She sat in the car, contemplating the picture while three small dogs scurried out of the darkness to sniff the wheels and wag their stumpy tails. When her stepmother’s face appeared around the door she had no option but to climb out and greet her. Margo looked pleased to see her though her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Alba, what a lovely surprise! You should have telephoned,” she said, holding the door so that the orange light flooded the steps leading up to the porch. Alba went through the ritual of kissing her. She smelled of talcum powder and Yardley’s Lily of the Valley. Around her neck hung a fat golden locket that rose up and down on the ledge of her breasts. Alba blinked away the image she had conjured up in the car of Margo riding her father like one of her horses.

She walked into the hall where the walls were wood-paneled and hung with austere portraits of deceased relatives. At once she smelled the sweet scent of her father’s cigar and her courage flagged. He emerged from the drawing room in a green smoking jacket and slippers. His hair, although thinning, was still sandy and brushed back off his forehead, accentuating pale eyes that appraised her steadily. For a fleeting moment Alba was able to see beyond the heavy build and extended belly, past the ruddy skin and disgruntled twist of his mouth, to the handsome young man he had been in the war. Before he had sought comfort and oblivion in convention and routine. When he had still loved her mother.