Harnessing Peacocks.

Lunch with N & D. Chloe's birthday lunch so I made a coffee and pecan nut cake as my contribution. There's always good wine at Auchindathin. After lunch Chloe, Nick and I watched 'Harnessing Peacocks' by Mary Wesley, which must have been dramatised for BBC TV some years ago. It is one of my favourite books and now also one of Chloe's. Potentially a sad story about a young woman who gets pregnant by a total stranger during an Italian carnival in the seventies. She has been slipped a drug by another stranger so can't remember anything about the man except an associated smell of coffe and disconnected and nightmarish flashbacks of masked figures. Her upper class English family are outraged but snap into action and organise an abortion with no care for her feelings. She runs away before it can take place and the story flips twelve years into the future when she appears as a confident and happy young woman with a son at public school. It soon becomes apparent that the way she pays for the school is by cooking for rich elderly ladies and tarting. She has formed a 'syndicate' of men who she tries out first to see if they suit her. 'I'll see if I'm happy with you. Don't worry, you will be happy with me.' The outcome of the story is that she finds the father of her child and gives it all up, but the appeal of the story for me - and I believe for Chloe too - is the freedom which this young woman feels within this arangement. Of course it wouldn't work so smoothly or happily in real life, but the idea of being so self-reliant, unattached, guilt free and carefree about relationships, whilst still being able to be warm and affectionate, is wonderful. A dream few of us attain.