Ivoria by Tanith Lee (uplifting novels .txt) 📕

Nick did note the part was far smaller than he had anticipated.

In 1990, when Claudia was forty-eight, she played the nurse-chaperone Clemence, in the 18th Century drama The Scholar’s Handicap. This was a contrastingly large part, the character a wicked, meddling schemer and poisoner, formerly a beautiful courtesan in her own right. Nick, at thirteen, had been better satisfied. Yet he knew Claudia was not. He had only understood long after, by five years initially, and then again in a slow-burning revelation as his knowledge of women increased, that Claudia, exactly like Clemence herself, flinched at and loathed the comments of the play’s other characters on her former extreme attractions, now lessened, or even “Withered like dying violets” by age.

That previous afternoon about five years on, when Nick was eighteen, he had come out on the lawn at Joss’s current country house, and paused, to inhale the sunshine.

It was October, but the weather had stayed faultless.

A long, smooth lawn here sloped gently down to a picturesque bank, where the river idled by, brown and hung with reeds. Claudia was lying on a blue recliner under the cedar tree, and Laurence, (looking strikingly handsome and perhaps misleadingly adult at thirty) was sitting out on the grass in the sun, drinking beer. He wore a white Ax-Creston shirt and tailored jeans, stretching his long legs before him. And Claudia, though she lay in shade, wore a dark red bathing suit under a black and red cotton skirt.

From the distance, she looked actually younger than Laurence. Her short blonde hair, now always flawlessly peroxided to conceal any greyness, flamed white against the deep blue horizontal of the chair.

Nick stayed where he was, observing her.

He had always loved to see her, to look at her, to be around her. Both he and she often liked utter privacy too, and each fully grasped that need in the other. They had never impinged, never got on each other’s nerves. They had always seemed to know exactly when to stay, or to vanish.

Not so Laurence. Because Nick did not like Laurence, he wondered if he should shunt Laurence off now, saying so-and-so had called him and asked if Laurence could call straight back. Laurence’s ire later on would only be funny, and would not matter either, as tomorrow Nick was going to Paris with a woman of twenty-three who was paying the fare. Laurence had to go off on some dig, too, in Ireland, by the end of the week.

Nick did not think they had seen him.

Birds, unsinging, lulled by the heat, were winging to and fro, or feeding by the tennis court where unlucky worms and beetles proliferated. It was very quiet. A plane glinted in the upper sky, disembodied and too high to offer sound.

So he heard Claudia speak very sharply.

It carried knife-like to where Nick stood.

“Stop it, Laurie. For Christ’s sake.”

They had not looked as if engaged in any type of argument. And even now Laurence shrugged, and murmured something with a relaxed wave of his hand.

But Claudia said again, sharply, her actor-trained voice crossing the auditorium of the lawn, “I said shut up. It’s none of your bloody business anyway, and you know nothing about it. Go away. I’ve had enough.”

At that Laurence rose indolently, brushed himself down in case any single mote of loose grass had marred his jeans, and said, also now heard by Nick, “All right. You know best. A mother always knows best.”

“Fuck off,” said Claudia.

And she turned on her left side away from him, and also indirectly from Nick.

As Laurence approached Nick en route to the house, Nick made no attempt to obscure either his presence or the fact he had overheard the last of their exchange.

Laurence smiled at him, a sneer of white teeth in his very tanned face.

“Better go and calm the old girl down.”

“Why? What have you done?” Nick had not meant to blurt this out, but out it had blurted.

“I have done nothing. Life has done it. Even she can’t blame me for that. Stupid bitch.”

Two years before Nick would have tried to punch Laurence. Sometimes he had or might have succeeded. Generally, physically taller, heavier, older, and reared in a public school, Laurence could get the better of him.

Now Nick said, “Why upset her?”

“Because, you cretin, if I don’t, a lot of other people will. Dad is useless. He lets her do what she wants. And Serena lies. Even that cunt Samson lies. He’s been a regular in Claudia’s knickers if you ask me…”

“Did anyone ask?” Nick had said.

But Laurence only shrugged once more. “Go and ask her about it.”

“About what? Samson?”

Laurence sighed, and raised his eyes to heaven.

“Some berk has offered her a part in a movie. It’s just some fucking awful cameo, some Sc-Fi crap, some aged temptress, God knows, in some pile of US rubbish. And she is considering doing it. Even Torvind apparently advised against.”

“If she wants to - why not?”

“Why not? Apart from the moronic movie itself, go and look at her, Nicky. Go on. Pull the rose-stained specs off your face and look. She can’t do that any more, in front of a camera. Why spoil it for all her so-called legions of fans. Let them remember her golden bloody days.”

“You mean you think she will look too old…”

“She is meant to look old in the movie. That’s why they want her. Only Claudia hasn’t got that sussed yet. And she will look even older, if she does it, than in real life. She’s in her fifties, Nicolas. All she can play now are slobs and grannies and has-beens and never-wases.” He scowled. “She embarrasses me. But you’re such a muppet, you think she’s still fucking eighteen.” He walked straight by Nick, and into the shadows of the house.

“Hello,” Nick said softly when he reached her.

“Hello, darling,” she said. “Just a moment, I fell asleep.” She had not yet turned to face him, and he saw that she touched her face, or her eyes, before she did