One of the servants’ bells in the hallway started to ring. The bells clanged horribly as if the person on the other end who was ringing them was furious (although, actually, they usually were). “Oh, my giddy arnt, there’s ’is lordship again,” Mrs. Kerrich said, heaving herself out of her chair. “Summoned by bells.” (She said this every time.) His lordship—again not a lord, but “Colonel Villiers.” Sunny’s grandfather (supposedly) rarely moved from his armchair by the fire. He had pale-blue rheumy eyes and tended not to speak so much as to make a sound somewhere between a bark and cough, like a seal, that Sunny’s grandmother and Mrs. Kerrich seemed to have no trouble interpreting but Sunny had enormous difficulty translating into recognizable English. Whenever Sunny was anywhere near his grandfather he would grab him and hold on to him, frequently pinching him at the same time, and bay into his ear, “Who are you?”
Sunny wasn’t at all sure what the answer to this question was. He wasn’t Sunny any more, apparently. His grandmother said she couldn’t bring herself to call him such a silly name. “Sun” was even more ridiculous and so she said from now on he was called Philip, which was his ga-ga grandfather’s name.
“Oh, man,” his father said wearily when Sunny went to inform him that he was called Philip now. “Just let her call you anything she wants. It’s easier than fighting her. What’s in a name anyway? It’s just a label they hang round your neck.” It wasn’t just his name, his grandmother had taken him into Norwich and kitted him out in completely new clothes so that he no longer wore his clownish stripy hand-knitted jumpers and dungarees but instead sported khaki shorts and “smart” sweatshirts, and his jelly sandals were replaced with old-fashioned Start-Rite ones. Worst of all, she had taken him to a “gentleman barber” who had sheared and shaved his long locks into something called a “short back and sides” that transformed his appearance completely. He truly was no longer himself.
He didn’t tell Grandpa Ted about this new identity, sensing it would lead to more questions than he was capable of answering. There was a weekly phone call. His grandmother stood next to him while he fumbled with the big awkward telephone receiver in his hand and “had a little chat” with Grandpa Ted. Unfortunately, the strangely threatening presence of “Grandmama” prevented Sunny from shouting out the truth about how wretchedly miserable he was. He wasn’t very good at “chatting” and so on the whole gave monosyllabic answers to Teddy’s questions. Was he enjoying himself? Yes. Was it nice weather? Yes. (It was usually raining.) Was he getting enough to eat? Yes. (No!) And then Teddy usually finished by saying, “Do you want to speak to Bertie?” (Yes) and, as she was as hopeless at “chatting” as Sunny was, there followed two minutes of silence while they listened to each other’s adenoidal breathing until his grandmother said impatiently, “Give the telephone back to me,” and ordered Bertie on the other end to return the receiver to her grandfather. Then his grandmother put on a nicer voice and said things like, “He’s so settled here now, I think he should stay a little bit longer. Yes, all the fresh country air, and being with his father. And, of course, it’s what dear Viola wants.” And so on. Dear Viola? Sunny thought, unable to conceive of a scenario that contained both “Grandmama” and “Dear Viola” in the same room.
Sunny wished that he knew a code or had a secret language in which he could have conveyed his distress (Help me!) but instead he said, “Bye bye, Grandpa,” even as he felt something horrible (grief) rising up from his (pretty empty) stomach.
“Stockholm syndrome,” Bertie said. “You began to identify with your captors, like Patty Hearst.” This was 2011 and they were sitting at the top of Mount Batur, watching the sunrise. They had hiked up here by flashlight before dawn. Sunny had been living on Bali for two years by then. Before that he had been in Australia and before that in India for years. Bertie had visited him several times, Viola never.
Bertie would have fared better at Jordan Manor. She knew how to please but she also knew when to rebel. Sunny had never really learned how to do either properly.
“They were like vampires,” Sunny said to Bertie. “They needed an infusion of fresh blood. No matter how tainted.”
“Do you suppose they were as bad as you remember?” Bertie asked.
“Worse, much worse,” Sunny laughed.