Dominic was living above the stable block (“my garret”) and was usually to be found lying on a battered old sofa, surrounded by unfinished canvases. All that remained of the horses was the lingering smell of manure as you walked up the external stone steps to his room. Sunny’s father was in exile (“self-imposed”) from the main house.
Dominic didn’t seem to eat much either, although he usually had a chocolate bar somewhere that he portioned out between them. He hadn’t been well, he said, “hospital and all that shit,” but now he was a lot better. Every time Sunny went to see him he seemed to be asleep although he claimed to be thinking. There was no use in complaining about anything to him. He was on “heavy-duty prescription drugs,” he said. The little bottles were lined up on the window-sill. “He’s like a sloth,” Sunny’s grandmother said to his grandfather (“Grandpapa”—another mouthful) and although Sunny felt he ought to defend his father there was no getting away from the fact that his grandmother was right. In fact, sloths would get impatient with Dominic. (Sunny had watched a nature programme about sloths with Grandpa Ted.) Grandpapa had no opinion about Dominic. This was because he was “ga-ga,” according to Mrs. Kerrich. “Scrambled eggs for brains.”
“How can Dominic possibly inherit in that condition?” Sunny’s grandmother rattled on, unperturbed by the one-sided nature of all conversations with her husband—possibly she preferred it that way. “What if he doesn’t pull himself together? That child will be our only hope, God help us.” “That child” wondered at the meaning of these words. He didn’t really feel up to being anyone’s only hope. He was the “last Villiers” apparently. But what about Bertie? “She’s a girl,” his grandmother said dismissively. “ ‘The line ended in daughters.’ That’s what it will say in Debrett’s.” It seemed a good enough place to end to Sunny, but they needed a male heir, his grandmother said, even an illegitimate one. (“He’s a little baaarstard, isn’t he?” Mrs. Kerrich said to Thomas, “in more than one way.”) “We’ll make a Villiers of him yet,” his grandmother said, “but it’s uphill work.”
The “condition” his father was in was Sunny’s fault apparently. How? Why?
“Jus ’cos yew exist,” Mrs. Kerrich explained, handing him a dry Rich Tea biscuit. “If young Dominic ’an’t got ’iself involved with drugs an’ your mother and so orn,” she said, “then ’e could have gorn riding every day and married a bootful girl ’oo wore pearls and a twinset, like ’is kind o’ people are s’posed to. ’Stead ’e became”—she made rabbit ears—“ ‘an aaartist.’ And then ’e ’ad the strain orv ’avin’ a child like yew.” Mrs. Kerrich was a bottomless source of information, most of it false or misleading, unfortunately.
The dogs, divining biscuits, surged into the kitchen and boiled around their legs beneath the table. There were three of them, slobbery things, some kind of spaniel, interested in no one but themselves. Snuffy, Pippy and Loppy. Stupid names. Grandpa Ted had a proper dog called Tinker. Grandpa Ted said Tinker was as “steady as a rock.” His grandmother’s dogs were always giving Sunny secret little nips with their nasty teeth and when he complained to her she said, “What did you do to them? You must have done something to them, they wouldn’t bite for no reason,” when that was exactly what they did.
“Orf yew go, yew ’orrible ’ounds,” Mrs. Kerrich said to them, words that had no effect on them at all. They weren’t even properly house-trained and left what his grandmother indulgently called “little sausages” all over the Persian rugs, which had “seen better days.” (“Disgustin’,” Mrs. Kerrich said.) The whole house had seen better days. It was falling down around their ears, according to his grandmother, whose scratchy voice could be heard shouting from another part of the house, “Snuffy! Pippy! Loppy!” and the dogs swirled out of the kitchen as fast as they’d entered. “I’d ’ave the lot of them put down if they was mine,” Mrs. Kerrich said. Sunny suspected that she didn’t just mean the dogs.
Sunny was much better behaved than the dogs and yet was treated much worse. How could that be fair?