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Two:
Every time I refer to my mum and dad as Pete and Hillary, you go pink
and tighten your lips.
Three: When you first talked to Pete and---all right, I'll let you off---when
you first talked to Mum and Dad, you let them go on and on about private
education and private health and how terrible it was and how evil the
government is and you never said a word. About your dad being a Tory MP,
I mean. You talked beautifully about the weather and incomprehensibly
about cricket. But you never let on.
That's what the row today was about, in fact. Your dad was on Weekend
World at lunchtime, you prolly saw him. (I love you, by the way. God,
I love you so much.)
"Where do they find them?" barked Pete, stabbing a finger at the television.
"Where do they find them?"
"Find who?" I said coldly, gearing up for a fight.
"Whom," said Hillary.
"These tweed-jacketed throwbacks," said Pete. "Look at the old fart. What
right has he got to talk about the miners? He wouldn't recognize a lump
of coal if it fell into his bowl of Brown Windsor soup."
"You remember the boy I brought home last week?" I said, with what I'm
pretty sure any observer would call icy calm.
"Job security, he says!" Pete yelled at the screen. "When have you ever
had to worry about job security, Mr. Eton, Oxford, and the Guards?" Then
he turned to me. "Hm? What, boy? When?"
He always does that when you ask him a question---says something else
first, completely off the subject, and then answers your question with
one (or more) of his own. Drives me mad. (So do you, darling Neddy. But
mad with deepest love.) If you were to say to my father, "Pete, what year
was the battle of Hastings?" he'd say, "They're cutting back on unemployment
benefit. In real terms it's gone down by five percent in just two years.
Five percent. Bastards. Hastings? Why do you want to know? Why Hastings?
Hastings was nothing but a clash between warlords and robber barons. The
only battle worth knowing about is the battle between . . ." and he'd
be off. He knows it drives me mad. I think it prolly drives Hillary mad
too. Anyway, I persevered.
"The boy I brought home," I said. "His name was Ned. You remember him
perfectly well. It was his half term. He came into the Hard Rock two weeks
ago."
"The Sloane Ranger in the cricket jumper, what about him?"
"He is not a Sloane Ranger!"
"Looked like one to me. Didn't he look like a Sloane Ranger to you, Hills?"
"He was certainly very polite," Hillary said.
"Exactly." Pete returned to the bloody TV, where there was a shot of your
dad trying to address a group of Yorkshire miners, which I have to admit
was quite funny. "Look at that! First time the old fascist has ever been
north of Watford in his life, I guarantee you. Except when he's passing
through on his way to Scotland to murder grouse. Unbelievable. Unbelievable."
"Never mind Watford, when did you last go north of Hampstead?" I said.
Well, shouted. Which was fair I think, because he was driving me mad and
he can be such a hypocrite sometimes.
Hillary went all don't-you-talk-to-your-father-like-that-ish and then
got back to her article. She's doing a new column now, for Spare Rib,
and gets ratty very easily.
"You seem to have forgotten that I took my doctorate at Sheffield University,"
Pete said, as if that qualified him for the Northerner of the Decade Award.
"Never mind that," I went on. "The point is Ned just happens to be that
man's son." And I pointed at the screen with a very exultant finger. Unfortunately
the man on camera just at that moment was the presenter.
Pete turned to me with a look of awe. "That boy is Brian Walden's son?"
he said hoarsely. "You're going out with Brian Walden's son?"
It seems that Brian Walden, the presenter, used to be a Labour MP. For
one moment Pete had this picture of me stepping out with socialist royalty.
I could see his brain rapidly trying to calculate the chances of his worming
his way into Brian Walden's confidence (father-in-law to father-in-law),
wangling a seat in the next election and progressing triumphantly from
the dull grind of the Inner London Education Authority to the thrill and
glamour of the House of Commons and national fame. Peter Fendeman, maverick
firebrand and hero of the workers, I watched the whole fantasy pass through
his greedy eyes. Disgusting.
"Not him!" I said. "Him!" Your father had appeared back on-screen again,
now striding towards the door of Number Ten with papers tucked under his
arm.
I love you, Ned. I love you more than the tides love the moon. More than
Mickey loves Minnie and Pooh loves honey. I love your big dark eyes and
your sweet round bum. I love your mess of hair and your very red lips.
They are very red in fact, I bet you didn't know that. Very few people
have lips that really are red in the way that poets write about red. Yours
are the reddest red, a redder red than ever I read of, and I want them
all over me right now-but oh, no matter how red your lips, how round your
bum, how big your eyes, it's you that I love. When I saw you standing
there at Table Sixteen, smiling at me, it was as if you were entirely
without a body at all. I had come out of the kitchen in a foul mood and
there shining in front of me I saw this soul. This Ned. This you. A naked
soul smiling at me like the sun and I knew I would die if I didn't spend
the rest of my life with it.
But still, how I wished this afternoon that your father were a union leader,
a teacher in a comprehensive school, the editor of the Morning Star, Brian
Walden himself-anything but Charles Maddstone, war hero, retired Brigadier
of the Guards, ex-colonial administrator. Most of all, how I wish he was
anything but a cabinet minister in a Conservative government.
That's not right though, is it? You wouldn't be you then, would you?
When Pete and Hillary both got it, they stared from me to the screen and
back again. Hillary even looked at the chair you sat in the day you came
round. Glared at the thing as if she wanted it disinfected and burned.
"Oh, Portia!" she said in what they used to call "tragic accents."
Pete, of course, after going as red as Lenin, swallowed his rage and his
baffled pride and began to Talk to me. Solemnly. He Understood my adolescent
revolt against everything I had been brought up to cherish and believe.
No, more than that, he Respected it. "Do you know, in a kind of way, I'm
proud of you, Porsh? Proud of that fighting spirit. You're pushing against
authority, and isn't that what I've always taught you to do?"
"What?" I screeched. (I have to be honest. There's no other word. It was
definitely a screech.)
He spread his hands and raised his shoulders with an infernal smugness
that will haunt me till the day I die. "Okay. You've dated the upper-class
twit of the year and that's got your dad's attention. You've got Pete
listening. Let's talk, yeah?"
I mean . . .
I arose calmly, left the room, and went upstairs for a think.
Well that's what I should have done but I didn't.
In fact I absolutely yelled at him. "Fuck you, Pete! I hate you! You're
pathetic! And you know what else? You're a snob. You're a hideous, contemptible
snob!" Then I stamped out of the room, slammed the door, and ran upstairs
for a cry. The President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had finished
his sport with Portia.
Poo. And more poo.
Anyway, at least they know now. Have you told your parents? I suppose
they'll hit the roof as well. Their beloved son ensnared by the daughter
of Jewish left-wing intellectuals. If you can call a part-time history
lecturer at North East London Polytechnic an intellectual, which in my
book you can't.
It wouldn't be love without opposition, would it? I mean, if Juliet's
dad had fallen on Romeo's neck and said, "I'm not losing a daughter, I'm
gaining a son," and Romeo's mum had beamed, "Welcome to the Montague family,
Juliet my precious," it would be a pretty short play.
Anyway, a couple of hours after this "distressing scene," Pete knocked
on my door with a cup of tea. Precision, Portia, precision---he knocked
on my door with his knuckles, but you know what I mean. I thought he was
going to give me grief, but in fact---well no in fact he did give me grief.
That is exactly and literally what he gave me. He had just had a phone
call from America. Apparently Pete's brother, my uncle Leo, had a heart
attack in New York last night and was dead by the time an ambulance arrived.
Too grim. Uncle Leo's wife Rose died of ovarian cancer in January and
now he's gone, too. He was forty-eight. Forty-eight and dead from a heart
attack. So my poor cousin Gordon is coming over to England to stay with
us. He was the one who had to call the ambulance and everything. Imagine
seeing your own father die in front of you. He's the only child, too.
He must be in a terrible state, poor thing. I hope he'll like it with
us. I think he was brought up quite orthodox, so what he'll make of family
life here, I can't imagine. Our idea of kosher is a bacon bagel. I've
never met him. I've always pictured him as having a black beard, which
is insane of course, since he's about our age. Seventeen going on eighteen,
that kind of thing.
The result of the day is that peace has broken out in the Fendeman home
and next week I shall have a brother to talk to. I'll be able to talk
about you.
Which, O Neddy mine, is more than you ever do. "Won a match. Played pretty
well I think. Revising hard. Thinking about you a great deal." I quote
the interesting bits.
I know you're busy with exams, but then so am I. Don't worry. Any letter
that comes from you gives me a fever. I look at the writing and imagine
your hand moving over the paper, which is enough to make me wriggle like
a lovesick eel. I picture your hair flopping down as you write, which
is enough to make me writhe and froth like a . . . like a . . . er, I'll
come back to you on that one. I think of your legs under the table and
a million trillion cells sparkle and fizz inside me. The way you cross
a "t" makes me breathless. I hold the back of the envelope to my lips
and think of you licking it and my head swims. I'm a dotty dippy dozy
dreadful delirious romantic and I love you to heaven.
But I wish wish wish you weren't going back to your school next term.
Leave and be free like the rest of us. You don't have to go to Oxford,
do you? I wouldn't go to any university that made me stay on through the
winter term after I'd already done all my A levels and all my friends
had left, just to sit some special entrance paper. How pompous can you
get? Why can't they behave like a normal university? Come with me to Bristol.
We'll have a much better time.
I shan't bully you about it, though. You must do whatever you want to
do.
I love you, I love you, I love you.
I've just had a thought. Suppose your History of Art teacher hadn't taken
your class on a trip to the Royal Academy that Saturday? Suppose he had
taken you to the Tate or the National Gallery instead? You wouldn't have
been in Piccadilly and you wouldn't have gone to the Hard Rock Cafe for
lunch and I wouldn't be the luckiest, happiest, most dementedly in-love
girl in the world.
The world is very . . . um . . . (consults the Thomas Hardy textbook that
she's supposed to be studying) . . . the world is very contingent.
So there.
I'm kissing the air around me.
Love and love and love and love and love
Your Portia X
Only one X, because a quintillion wouldn't be anything like
enough.
7th June 1980
My darling Portia
Thank you for a wonderful letter. After your (completely justified) criticism
of my terrible style of letter-writing, this is going to be completely
tricky. It just seems to gush out of you like a geezer (spelling?) and
I'm not too hot at that kind of thing. Also your handwriting is completely
perfect (like everything else about you of course) and mine is completely
illegible. I thought of responding to your little extra (which was fantastic,
by the way) by spraying this envelope with eau de cologne or aftershave,
but I haven't got any. I don't suppose the linseed oil I use for my cricket
bat would entice you? Thought not.
Excerpted
from Revenge by Stephen Fry Copyright 2002 by Stephen Fry. Excerpted
by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without
permission in writing from the publisher.
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Synopsis
A distinct
departure from his popular comic novels, this haunting, provocative tale
of wrongful imprisonment and violent retribution is Stephen Fry’s
first thriller. A brilliant recasting of the classic story The Count of
Monte Cristo, Revenge crackles with the wit and intelligence readers have
come to expect from this hugely talented author, actor, and comedian,
yet it reveals an intriguingly deep, much darker side of his imagination.
Ned Maddstone
is a happy, charismatic Oxford-bound seventeen-year-old whose rosy future
is virtually preordained. Handsome, confident, and talented, newly in
love with bright, beautiful Portia, his father an influential MP, Ned
enjoys an existence of boundless opportunity. But privilege makes him
an easy target for envy, and in the course of one day Ned’s charmed
life is changed forever. A promise made to a dying teacher combined with
a prank devised by a jealous classmate mutates bewilderingly into a case
of mistaken arrest and incarceration. Drugged and disoriented, Ned finds
himself a political prisoner in a nightmarish, harrowing exile, far from
home and lost to those he loves. Years pass before an apparently mad,
obviously brilliant fellow inmate reawakens the younger man’s intellect
and resurrects his will to live. The chilling consequences of Ned’s
recovery are felt worldwide.
While Revenge
breaks new ground with its taut plotting, exhilarating pace, and underlying
air of menace, its sophistication and irreverent humor are vintage Fry—a
gloriously rich mix that only he could deliver. His first novel in four
years is a dramatic, powerful tour de force that is sure to enlarge the
American audience for this singularly talented author’s work.
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Author
 Stephen
Fry was
born in Hampstead, London in 1957. He is an actor, aviator, comedian,
cricket fan, novelist, poet, playwright, screenwriter and rector of Dundee
University. As an actor he has been featured in numerous films, including
Gosford
Park, A Civil Action, and Wilde,
in which he played the title role, and in such popular English TV series
as Jeeves and Wooster, Black Adder, and A Bit of Fry
and Laurie. He lives in London.
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