Human Croquet Page 16

  The Widow gathered herself together again. ‘He can’t come back because he’s in heaven.’

  ‘Heaven?’ they both repeated in unison. The Widow forced them to Sunday School every week so they knew about ‘Heaven’ – it was blue and contained a lot of clouds and angels, but no-one in a trilby and a gabardine mac.

  ‘Is he an angel?’ Charles asked, puzzled.

  ‘Yes,’ the Widow said, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘Daddy’s an angel now, looking after you from heaven.’

  ‘He’s not dead, is he?’ Charles said bluntly and the Widow grew even paler, if that was possible, and said, ‘Well, not dead exactly …’ and put her hands over her face so they couldn’t see it and sat like that for a long time saying nothing until they grew very uncomfortable and tip-toed out of the room and up the stairs. They went to bed not much the wiser, more confused, in fact, than before she imparted her ‘sad news’ to them.

  It was ever-helpful Vinny who clarified the situation for them next morning at breakfast. The Widow was still in her room and Vera had slammed the big chrome teapot down and gone off to burn toast. Charles and Isobel were spooning in their porridge, keeping quiet because Vinny was never at her best in the morning. She lit up a cigarette and said, ‘I hope you two don’t think that things are going to be the same as they were before.’ They greeted this remark with the silence it deserved. They were only too woefully aware that things were not as they were before.

  ‘You’re going to have to behave very well now that your daddy’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ Charles repeated in horror. ‘Dead?’ And he turned as white as the Widow’s suet pastry, as white as the Widow, and ran from the table. Later, he had to be dragged with some force from the understairs cupboard where he could be heard howling like a wolf-cub.

  Gordon had died of a bronchial infection, in a London fog. ‘Lots of people died,’ Vinny said, as if that made it better. ‘A real pea-souper,’ she added, sounding quite proud of Gordon, for once. ‘He was an asthmatic,’ the Widow could be heard telling everyone, ‘ever since he was a little boy,’ and they could hear the murmurs of surprise and dismay from their sentry-post on the stairs. They had no idea what an asthmatic was, but it sounded serious.

  There was a photograph of Gordon in an ornate silver frame on the sideboard. They’d never really noticed it while they had the real thing in front of them, but now it assumed a totemic kind of significance – how could Gordon be so visible and tangible (if only in two dimensions) – and yet be so beyond their reach? War-handsome in his RAF uniform, cap tilted rakishly, he was like a dashing stranger that they regretted not having paid more attention to.

  Isobel lay in bed at night, imagining him walking off into a wall of white fog, fog like cotton wool wrapping his body, cotton-wool-fog filling his lungs and choking him. Sometimes in dreams he walked back out from the fog wall, walked towards her, lifting her up and tossing her towards the sky, but when she floated back down to earth Gordon had disappeared and she was alone in the middle of a vast dark wilderness of trees.

  Where was Gordon buried? The Widow looked startled when they asked her. ‘Buried?’ She cranked up the gears in her brain, her eyes were full of little cog wheels – ‘Down south, in London, where he died.’

  ‘Why?’ Charles persisted.

  ‘Why what?’ she responded tetchily.

  ‘Why was he buried down there? Why didn’t you bring him home?’ But the Widow didn’t seem to know the answer to this question.

  Of Eliza, nothing remained. Except her children, of course. Charles asked to see photographs of her and the Widow said there weren’t any, which seemed strange considering how many times Gordon had produced his old Kodak camera and said, ‘Say cheese now, everybody!’ Alarmingly, the picture they carried of her in their heads was beginning to fade a little more each day, like a photograph undeveloping, time unravelling – like the jumpers that Vinny laddered down to knit up afresh as something equally horrible. Perhaps Eliza would appear in a few years’ time, knitted up as a quite new mother. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Isobel,’ the Widow said, her patience with them almost all used up. ‘Maybe it’s because you’re such naughty children that she left you,’ Vinny remarked one day when Charles had borrowed Vera’s tin of Mansion polish to make the parquet of the dining-room into a skating-rink and Vinny had skidded its length on an Indian scatter rug.

  To begin with, they haunted the second-best bedroom, trailing their fingers through Eliza’s clothes hanging in the wardrobe, looking through the treasure trove of her jewellery box as if it was a reliquary. Charles found one of Eliza’s red ribbons coiled up like a sleeping snake in a little Capodimonte pot with pink roses growing out of its lid. The Widow took it from him before he could hide it and said to Vinny, ‘This has to stop, it’s not healthy,’ and the next day when the rag-and-bone man came clopping down Hawthorn Close, Vinny was despatched to stop him and all of Eliza’s things were hauled out of the second-best bedroom and into his cart. Vinny was dubious, ‘This stuff’s worth something – we could get some money for it.’

  ‘I don’t want money for it,’ the Widow said coldly. ‘I want rid of it.’

  Mrs Baxter – bringing out an apple for the rag-and-bone man’s horse – cried, ‘Oh, all those lovely clothes, surely you’re not giving them for rags?’ She lifted the hem of a red wool dress and said sadly, ‘Oh, I remember Mrs Fairfax wearing this, I thought she looked so lovely in it.’ The Widow waited, tight-lipped, for Mrs Baxter to go away and when she was out of hearing said, ‘I’m the only Mrs Fairfax around here!’ which, sadly, was true. ‘Nosy parker,’ Vinny said and squealed as the rag-and-bone horse nudged her from behind.

  People watched with interest from behind their curtains as the pile of Eliza’s things made its slow progress around the streets of trees. The Widow had disseminated the facts of Eliza’s disappearance (‘run off with a fancy man’) less discreetly than you might have expected, usually tossing in some remark about ‘poor’ Gordon’s hitherto unnoticed asthma.

  Just after the most dismal Christmas imaginable the Widow succumbed to a bad attack of flu and Vinny was left to run the business alone. The first day, the delivery boy left, the second, Ivy, their recently acquired assistant. ‘What are you doing with them?’ the Widow croaked frustratedly at her from her sick-bed. ‘Eating them?’

  On a particularly grey and miserable January Saturday the Widow was still feeling too poorly to get up and Charles and Isobel were left to their own devices while she hacked and hawked in her bedroom. Mrs Baxter came knocking tentatively at the back door, offering her childsitting services but, regretfully, they had to refuse as they had firm instructions from the Widow to stay put because they were both harbouring thick colds themselves. Poor Mrs Baxter was forced to speak to them through the keyhole as Vinny had told them not to open the door to anyone.

  They played on the first landing, Charles had his cars and trucks, Isobel had the farmyard animals. She placed her hen, with its brood of little yellow chickens, on to the back of a flat-bed lorry – red die-cast, Charles’ favourite.

  The Widow came out of her room and complained about the noise. She was wearing a thick plaid dressing-gown and a pair of old slippers, her hair was loose, hanging in a greasy grey hank down her back. She looked like an ancient savage queen. Her voice was hoarse but it didn’t stop her from shouting at them, at the sight of so much mixed-up traffic and barnyard activity. ‘What is this mess? Clear it up,’ she said, towering over them where they were sprawled on the red and blue figured carpet runner.

  She took hold of the banister-rail and said, ‘I’m going to get an aspirin,’ clutching her forehead as if she was trying to keep her head on. She had been so miserable the past few days that they couldn’t help but feel sorry for her and Charles jumped up and said, ‘I’ll get one for you, Granny,’ but Charles’ reason for jumping up with such alacrity was two-fold: a) to get the aforesaid aspirin but b) because he had a dreadful case of pins and needles. The pins and need
les had rendered his left leg so numb that when he put his weight on it, it gave way and he staggered into the Widow.

  This alone would not have been enough to propel her down the stairs but the jolt of Charles’ body made her put her foot out to maintain her balance and unfortunately the very spot on the carpet where she put the old-slippered foot was already occupied by the red die-cast lorry and its freight of yellow chicks. Her other foot kicked out, scattering cars and animals, while the lorry – recklessly parked at the edge of the top step – shot off the edge, taking its new cargo of slippered foot with it. Mother hen and yellow chicks were broadcast to the four winds and the Widow tumbled head over heels (or ‘arse over tip’ as Vinny would have had it) – grey hair-slippers-grey hair-slippers-grey hair – bumping off every step. Screaming. Screaming in a weird animal way, the way Mrs Baxter’s old cat did when it ate rat poison. The screaming stopped when the Widow reached the foot of the stairs. She landed awkwardly on the back of her neck so that her vacant eyes seemed to be peering up at her splayed legs. It looked like a very uncomfortable position to be in.

  Very, very quickly, they picked up the red lorry and the chickens at the bottom of the stairs. Then they scampered back up the stairs, retrieving as they went the carnage the Widow had left in her wake – cows and sheep, the brown carthorse, the fire engine, the black Rover, the milk float, the tiny milk bottles and the ducks and geese – throwing them in the toy box and carrying it up to their attic.

  Then they went back downstairs again, trying not to look at the Widow as they skirted past her on the stairs. They threw on their wellingtons and coats, unlocked the back door and ran out into the rain in the back garden, ignoring all prohibitions not to do so.

  The Widow’s garden was always orderly and neat with well-mannered flowers – snapdragons and stock and meticulous borders in patriotic white alyssum, blue lobelia and red salvia. The velvet green of the lawn could have graced a bowling-green and the trees – lilac, pear, hawthorn and apple – were never unruly. It was not an exciting garden to play in, but, as the Widow would have said if she could only have spoken – they’d had quite enough excitement for one day.

  They played doggedly at the bottom of the garden where even a child with acute hearing, let alone one with their clogged-up, catarrh-fuelled ears, would have had difficulty hearing the screams of a falling woman. That was their alibi anyway.

  They could hear Vinny’s screams though as she came running out of the back door.

  Weeks later, when they were playing marbles, Charles found a lone yellow chick beneath the hallstand where his marble had rolled and he held it up for his sister’s inspection. Neither of them spoke. The little yellow chick also kept its secret. Thankfully.

  And so they were left to the care of vinegary Vinny, the reluctant relative, the aunt from hell – as old as the century (forty-nine) but not as modern. Nowhere near. They’d never really given Vinny much thought before, beyond how best to stay out of her way, but now that everybody else had gone there was absolutely no avoiding her any more.

  Vera handed in her notice as soon as the Widow died and went to live with her sister. The idea of Vinny as the mistress of the house was too much for her. Charles moved into Vera’s room and Vinny into the Widow’s room (the best bedroom) with her cat, Grimalkin, and complained that the mattress was killing her – which made them think of the Princess and the Pea (although Vinny would have been better cast as the pea rather than the princess) and Charles indulged himself in a series of fantasies about killer mattresses because there was many a time when they would have been more than happy to see Vinny swallowed up by horsehair and ticking.

  Vinny was not the kind of person to be left in charge of children. She didn’t like them for one thing, and took no pleasure in nurturing anything except her cat – a creature which provided a rare glimpse of Vinny’s soft side. It was unnerving to come into a room sometimes and find her on her hands and knees peering under the sofa, cajoling ‘Pussypussypussy’ in a kindly voice, hoarse from lack of use.

  ‘This is all your mother’s fault,’ Vinny fumed as she tugged at the knotted tangles in Isobel’s hair. Neglected, Isobel’s curls had grown haywire, and started to resemble a bush. ‘I’m not a bloody hairdresser,’ Vinny muttered, duelling with the Mason and Pearson hairbrush.

  Charles sought refuge in bad behaviour. He got into fights at school, kicked and bit and got sent home in disgrace so that Vinny had to wallop him with the same Mason and Pearson. He raced around as if he was possessed, knocking things over, breaking things and then standing with a stupid grin on his face. He couldn’t keep still. Perhaps it was because he was born on the move. When Vinny told him off he stood with his hands on his hips and laughed like a rocking automaton – ha-ha-ha – and Vinny had to slap his face to make him stop.

  He wet the bed nearly every night – which had a particularly bad effect on Vinny, bundling his sheets into the copper boiler every morning with the kind of weepings and lamentations that usually accompanied biblical disasters. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you!’ she screeched, dragging him by one of his big ears up to his room.

  One of the aspects of surrogate motherhood that never ceased to astound Vinny was the fact that children grew. If the Chinese could have developed a system of whole body binding, Vinny would have been their first customer. ‘You can’t have grown!’ she screeched every time Isobel displayed stubbed toes from too tight shoes or Charles’ thin red-freckled wrists poked out from blazer cuffs. She would have had them, if she must have had them at all, as midgets. There was no right size for a child in Vinny’s eyes, of course, apart from grown-up and gone.

  Charles, undersized and long overtaken by his peers, was not so much a problem as Isobel. Vinny refused point-blank to buy another new school uniform when the old one was outgrown within six months.

  ‘Mushrooming,’ said Mrs Baxter kindly when she came round with a parcel for Vinny’s inspection. ‘Second-hand, but awfy good condition,’ Mrs Baxter entreated.

  Vinny declared that she wasn’t aware that she was in need of charity, and Mrs Baxter said, ‘Och no, no, no, no – not charity, it’s just that Mr Baxter’s school has a pool of uniforms – everyone agrees it’s a sensible idea… and I thought that… they grow out of them so quickly … such a waste to buy new when … a good idea… lots of folk think so …’ and eventually when it seemed that Vinny was doing Mrs Baxter a favour rather than the other way round, she accepted her parcel. Grudgingly and with bad grace. Could you drown in a pool of uniforms?

  Charles’ clown face mooned out from beneath his Billy Bunter cap – Charles had developed a huge stock of silly expressions through which he communicated with the world, as if perhaps it would love him more because he could cross his eyes and ping-pong-ball his cheeks at the same time. Sadly this was not the case.

  The cold that Charles was suffering from the day the Widow died seemed never to have left him – his nose was permanently plugged with yellow-green snot and his ears bunged up with something similar. He inhabited the underwater world of the hard-of-hearing and it was only when the school nurse referred him to the hospital that anyone discovered the extent to which Charles was lip-reading his way through life, unscrambling words, like a dyslexia of the ears or aural Scrabble. ‘You’d think he’d be able to hear,’ Vinny said, disgruntled at having to sit in the hospital waiting-room for hours, ‘when his ears are so big.’

  Poor Charles, his pink Dumbo-flap ears stuck out from his head like his princely namesake’s. ‘Flying yet?’ Trevor Randall – the arch-bully at school – asked him, and instead of being sensible and slinking away in cowardice, Charles punched him in the eye and had to be beaten into repentance by Mr Baxter.

  Eventually, Charles was operated on and a kindly surgeon poked a hole through his eardrums and drained out all the yellow-green snot. Unfortunately, this didn’t help him read any better and Mr Baxter still had to bounce wooden rulers off the palms of Charles’ hands to help him make out the words on
the page.

  Charles refrained from telling Mr Baxter that when she came back, Eliza was going to rip Mr Baxter’s head off and pull his lungs out through his neck. He was looking forward to savouring the look of astonishment on Mr Baxter’s face. Thwack! Thwack! Thwackkk! went Mr Baxter’s leather strap (or the ‘tawse’ in Mrs Baxter’s quaint language).

  Vinny’s meagre nursing skills were tested to their limit by coughs and colds, viruses and infections, aches and pains, warts and verrucas – the parental loss documented by germs. Charles was hospitalized again, with a suspected appendicitis, and then discharged again, unable to explain the mysterious source of his pain.

  Housekeeping of any kind was sadly wanting in Arden. Widowless, it had grown into a cold cheerless place. Vinny would only light the coal fire in the living-room when the thermometer dropped to Arctic depths. (‘Watch out for that polar bear!’ Charles said, russet eyes wide with horror and Vinny screeched and looked behind her. Ha-ha-ha.)

  They wore gloves in the house and Charles sported a navy wool balaclava (knitted, very badly, for him by Vinny) that made him look like a goblin, all he needed were the two holes for his big pointed ears and the disguise would have been complete. Isobel had a pullover knitted by Mrs Baxter that had an intricate pattern of knots and ropes and cables all over it, like something a sailor might have knitted in a dream.

  The house was unheated on the grounds of economy. Economy was pinchpenny Vinny’s religion (yet she made a very poor economist). ‘I’m trying to keep the wolf from the door,’ she said, and narrowed her eyes (North Sea grey) and added, ‘We’re one step away from the poorhouse.’ How could Vinny run the business and bring up children? What was she supposed to do? She brought in assistant after assistant to help in the grocery, all of whom seemed to have no purpose in life other than defrauding Vinny.

  She spent long hours at night sitting at the dining-table cross-eyed over double-entry bookkeeping, unable to make sense of profit and loss. Not such a good businesswoman as Mother, it turned out.