Lady Colin Campbell - Daughter of Narcissus

I ts funny how the really important moments in ones life are always squeezed between the mundane ones. I had just taken my three Springer Spaniel bitches for a walk around the domain of our family chateau in South-Western France near the great Cathedral city of Albi, birthplace of the French artist Toulouse Lautrec. It was a typical Midi-Pyrenean afternoon: warm and sunny and at least five degrees centigrade hotter outside than it was inside, where the massive stone walls, a metre thick, provided an air-conditioning system nature had neglected to give the lush and majestic countryside.

The summer of 2004 was turning out to be unusually hot, and would get even hotter still. The dogs and I walked out of the park surrounding our French home, up the old avenue of elms planted in the time of Napoleon I and into the late-nineteenth century avenue of plane trees, before heading into the woodland. Maisie Carlotta, the eldest of the three generations running around me, was really beginning to suffer from the heat, so I cut the walk short and headed back to the house with my panting pack.

It was my intention to start cooking as soon as I returned. I had a friend coming over for dinner, and my two sons had requested that I cook one of their favourites: sea-snails in garlic butter sauce to start, followed by breast of duck braised in olive oil, salt, black pepper and garlic, and ending up with a fruit salad of mangoes, bananas, oranges, pineapple and apples. As I was walking up the steps to the massive oak double doors, the telephone in the entrance hall began to ring. I ran to get it before the answering machine picked it up; frustratingly, many English-speaking people failed to leave messages, seeming to think that because the standard France Telecom message was in French, they were obliged to leave their message in that language.

This time, however, I didnt need to worry. It was my sister Libby. The way she plunged right in, I knew she had something of significance to report.

Its me, she said, before pressing on without further ado, Mummy left yesterday. Kitty flew up day before yesterday to pick her up. Shes with her tonight, and tomorrow she returns to Cayman.

I remained silent, which my sister knew meant that I really wasnt very interested in hearing that our mother was flying with our younger sister from Boca Raton, where Kitty lived with her husband and seven-year-old daughter, back to her home on Grand Cayman.

Im phoning to tell you that Ben thinks Mummy doesnt have long to live, Libby continued, referring to her husband, who is a well-known physician and diagnostician.

You can let her run rings around you if you want, I said impatiently. That bitch has had all the sympathy shes going to get out of me. Not for a second will I be falling for her latest act whatever it is. Be her dupe if it makes you feel better, but I dont intend to be so gullible.

All my life I had seen our mother, who had the constitution of an ox in the delicate casing of a beautiful petal, play the health card whenever it suited her purposes. Never would I forget the anxiety she had put the whole family through in October 1967, when she told all of us the doctor feared she might not have long to live as he was sure she had terminal cancer; then, when she had got Daddy to buy her the diamond ring upon which she had her heart set and which he had hitherto refused to get her the health threat disappeared into thin air. Well, I knew exactly where I was coming from and what she was all about. Dearest Mamma as I usually called her ironically was an inveterate manipulator and anything but anyones dearest anything. Indeed, she had never been anything like a mother at all to the four of us siblings, much less one to whom anyone could ascribe adjectives such as dear or dearest, except when being sarcastic. Those words, said without side, were ones we had always reserved for her elder sister Marjorie, our beloved Auntie, who had died the year before and whose estate had been the source of Mummys most inglorious moment in a lifetime full of inglorious moments.

No, Libby said. Its true. Shes not the same person you saw last year when Auntie died. Shes not even the same person I saw in February. That was when Libby had flown down from her house in the Midwest of America to straighten out the mess of our mothers creation surrounding Aunt Marjories estate. At the time, our mother had been seventy-five but with the looks of a sixty-year-old and the energy of a thirty-five-year-old on speed.

Shes aged twenty years in the last few months, Libby insisted. I was really surprised when I saw her.

Oh, for Gods sake, I replied irritably. When are you going to learn that Dearest Mamma is a consummate actress and utterly ruthless with it. Shell do anything to prevail. When she cant win, as she hasnt in this instance, she then tries to snatch a victory of sorts out of the jaws of defeat by making everyone feel sorry for her. That way she remains the focus of all activity and thereby satisfies her lust for constant attention, which in her sick way of thinking, means her will is still prevailing. Well, I dont feel sorry for her, and Im certainly not about to give her an opportunity to reinterpret her attempt to rip us off and her ignominious failure to carry it off as anything other than what it is: a low down, despicable act of treachery and one, moreover, which doesnt deserve anything but contempt.