The next day, she offered her first piece of assistance, enabling her mother to slip away from her stepfather, Charles, and Ben Souther from his wife of 35 years, Lily. How else could she hope to get nearer to the centre of Malabar’s world? In return, she was duly elevated to the position of Malabar’s confidante-in-chief, a role she longed for, in spite of the likelihood that it would involve lying to everyone. “You deserve this,” she reassured Malabar, as if they were college friends talking of new boyfriends over a bottle of cheap chardonnay. Brodeur tacitly agreed to help facilitate the affair on which her mother was about to embark, even though the man in question was her beloved stepfather’s best friend. In the seconds that followed, a Faustian pact was struck between parent and child. What was the problem? In a state of high excitement, Malabar whispered her confession: “Ben Souther just kissed me.” Sounding like a teenager, she repeated herself: “I still can’t believe it. O ne summer night in 1980, Adrienne Brodeur was woken up by her self-obsessed, larger-than-life mother, Malabar Adrienne was then a 14-year-old schoolgirl, her mother a cookery writer in her late 40s.
0 kommentar(er)
