Human Croquet Page 17

  Vinny scrimped but couldn’t save. The Widow’s huge meals were replaced by watery scrambled eggs, like lemon vomit, toast and dripping or Vinny’s ‘speciality’ – steak-and-kidney pie, a glutinous grey substance sandwiched between cardboard crusts. They were always hungry, always trying to squirrel away food into their hollow insides. Sometimes Isobel felt so hungry that she wondered if there wasn’t someone else inside her, an insatiably greedy person who had to be fed continually.

  The Widow’s white linen tablecloths and silver cutlery, her flower-sprigged crockery and ivory napkin rings had all been put away as being ‘too much trouble to look after’ for Vinny. Now they ate with Wool-worths cutlery and old plaited raffia mats from Vinny’s house. ‘Serviettes,’ said Vinny, ‘are for people with servants,’ and Vinny, God forbid, was no-one’s servant. ‘God gave us a tongue to lick our lips,’ Vinny pronounced, ‘he didn’t create us with serviettes in our hands,’ an argument full of logical holes – what about cigarettes? Teacups? Rich Tea biscuits? What indeed about ‘God’, who didn’t get much of a look-in in Arden.

  Mrs Baxter was quick to try and step into the mothering breach, clearly horrified by the sudden subtraction of family members – a grandmother, a father and a mother – within the space of such a short time. How? she frequently asked Mr Baxter. How could a mother leave her own children? Her ain weans? (Mrs Baxter was bilingual.) Especially such bonny ones? She must be off her head (or ‘aff her heid’).

  Isobel watched for Mr Baxter marching off early for school and ran round to the back door of Sithean so that Mrs Baxter could dress her hair instead of Vinny, twirling it into neat plaits (‘pleats’) because the little girls under Mr Baxter’s care weren’t allowed to unleash their female tresses anywhere near the school building. Mrs Baxter also bought new navy blue hair-ribbons to tie up Isobel’s plaits in big bows and said, ‘There – don’t you look pretty?’ with a tremendous new-moon smile of encouragement that couldn’t quite disguise the look of doubt on her face.

  Audrey’s lovely red-gold hair, hair that, let loose, flowed down her back like a rippling volcanic stream, a banner of flame, had to be roped into a big fat plait that hung almost to her waist. There was something about long untamed hair that induced Mr Baxter’s bile. ‘You should have all of that cut off,’ he said, and it seemed a miracle that Audrey’s long locks had lasted this long without being shorn.

  Summer came. The back garden of Arden was taken over by weeds. Mr Baxter complained to Vinny about the state of the garden. ‘I don’t want your ruddy dandelions,’ he shouted angrily over the beech hedge. Charles waited until he’d gone inside and then blew his dandelion clocks over the hedge while Vinny crowed her approval from the back doorstep. She just didn’t understand neighbourliness.

  It was Mrs Baxter who hefted out the dandelions though, Mrs Baxter who did all the gardening in Sithean. She grew raspberries and blackcurrants, potatoes, peas and runner-beans and tended the pretty Albertine rose that grew up the trellis which divided the lawn from the fruit bushes and vegetables. Bushes of rosemary, starred with tiny blue flowers, and dark spikes of lavender brushed against your legs as you walked along the garden path and the borders around the big semicircular lawn were soft and ragged with Canterbury bells that chimed delicately and delphiniums that nodded in the breeze at a pale honeysuckle braiding itself in and out of the beech hedge.

  There were new people – the McDades – on Willow Road. You could tell what Mr Baxter thought of Carmen McDade’s name from the way his moustachioed top lip sneered whenever he had to pronounce it. The McDades had moved up from London and were such a big family that Mr McDade (a builder, of sorts) and Mrs McDade (a termagant) occasionally mislaid one of the smaller McDades without even noticing. ‘Backward,’ was Mr Baxter’s professional judgement on most of the McDade clan, although Mr Baxter’s definition of ‘back-ward’ was generous and had frequently included Charles. And even Mrs Baxter.

  Carmen tucked her dress into her greying knickers and cartwheeled across the green lawn of Sithean. ‘A bit forward, that girl,’ Mr Baxter said with a look of distaste on his face. But how could she be both backward and forward? There was no pleasing Mr Baxter. ‘She’s only a little girl,’ Mrs Baxter protested.

  ‘So?’ Mr Baxter said darkly. ‘They’re all the same.’

  Vinny couldn’t cope, she was losing the family business. It was all the fault of Eliza. Mrs Baxter had a solution, hovering on the back doorstep with a plate of little pink cakes. Vinny picked one up suspiciously. ‘Take them, take them, all of them,’ Mrs Baxter urged.

  The fairy cakes are not themselves the solution, but ‘fostering?’

  Vinny’s eyes narrow suspiciously. ‘Fostering?’ Surely not, someone prepared to take the ‘poor orphaned bairns’ off her hands? Vinny contemplated. And then nearly choked on the little cake, ‘Not orphans,’ she said, somewhat inaudibly on account of the choking, ‘they’re not orphans, their mother’s alive.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Mrs Baxter said hastily. Mrs Baxter couldn’t remember what Eliza looked like any more. When she thought about her she saw a figure in the distance – at the bottom of the garden, in the field – someone walking away. Vinny licked her fingers clean of icing and said, ‘Why not?’ But foolish Mrs Baxter hadn’t discussed this proposition with ‘Daddy’ and he looked at her in complete disbelief. ‘You’re off your bloody head, Moira [so another one], I have to see that stupid boy all day long at school, I don’t want him in my house as well. And that girl is sullen. Do you hear?’ (‘Charles can be rather silly sometimes,’ Mr Baxter wrote in a restrained way on his Christmas report.)

  Sometimes Mrs Baxter read to Isobel and she rested her head on the cushion of Mrs Baxter’s pigeon-plump breast, balanced on the other side by Audrey, and for a brief moment she forgot about Eliza and Gordon and the Widow as she listened to Mrs Baxter’s lilting peat and heather voice. Mrs Baxter was a surprisingly good storyteller, able to turn herself from a rampaging giant one minute into a tiny kitchen mouse the next.

  Mrs Baxter knew the same stories as Eliza but when Eliza had told them they had frequently ended badly and contained a great deal of mutilation and torture, whereas in Mrs Baxter’s versions, the stories all had happy endings. Mrs Baxter’s Red Riding Hood, for example, was rescued by her woodcutter father who butchered the wolf and slit it open to reveal a grandmother as good as new and, needless to say, everyone lived happily ever after. In Eliza’s version, on the other hand, everyone usually died, even Little Red Riding Hood.

  Sometimes when they got to the end of a story, where everything had been put right and justice done, Mrs Baxter would sigh and say, ‘What a shame that life’s not really like that.’ Mr Baxter didn’t know about these reading sessions – Mr Baxter disapproved wholeheartedly of fairy stories (‘stuff and nonsense’) although whether he had a whole heart was debatable.

  One day, Mr Baxter came home unexpectedly early from school and found the three of them in front of a blazing fire. Mrs Baxter was reading, her index finger following every line – because she couldn’t find her reading-glasses – and at the point when Red Riding Hood was filling up her little basket with custards, they all suddenly became aware of Mr Baxter’s presence in the doorway. Mrs Baxter’s body gave a little spasm, like a frightened rabbit, and her reading-finger halted mysteriously on the word ‘bobbin’.

  Mr Baxter fixed them with his little pebble eyes behind his little pebble glasses for a long time before saying, ‘Unlike her stupid brother, the girl can read perfectly well for herself, Moira – I should know, I taught her myself. And as for you, Audrey, you can go up to your room and do the extra arithmetic I set you.’ Audrey scurried out of the room and Mrs Baxter said, ‘Oh dear, Daddy, we were only reading. What harm is there in that?’

  Next day, Mrs Baxter had one eye so swollen that she couldn’t open it. ‘Walked into a door,’ she explained while brushing Isobel’s hair, ‘silly me.’ Audrey was sitting at the breakfast-table with a bowl of cornflakes i
n front of her and kept lifting her spoon to her lips except it was the same spoonful of flakes over and over again. There were no more stories after that.

  ‘Wait till our mother comes back!’ Charles shouted at Vinny after a particularly vicious attack with the Mason and Pearson and Vinny snarled, ‘I’d like to see that!’ Vinny was doing her best to eradicate all traces of Eliza. The past wasn’t a real place to Vinny. She never talked about it, she was a non-historian, the anti-archivist of all that had happened to them – retaining no souvenirs, no artefacts, no documents, no photographs, obliterating the evidence of their previous happy existence. Vinny made bonfires of the past, made bonfires of everything, nothing was safe from her flames.

  Every week Vinny would stand in the back garden of Arden tending her bonfire, enveloped in a pall of smoke, ashes being tossed in the air around her like a medieval witch at the stake.

  Eliza had been gone over a year. When was she coming back? Why was she taking so long? Sometimes it seemed as though the white fog that had enveloped them in Boscrambe Woods had got into their brains in some way. Perhaps that was how Gordon died too, not fog in his lungs, but fog clouding his brain, driving him mad. Perhaps the fog in the wood had driven Eliza mad, for she must have gone mad to leave them in the clutches of Vinny. She would never leave them, not voluntarily, not all the fancy men in the world could have persuaded her away from them. Surely?

  Vinny’s hair had gone completely grey, every time she passed the hall mirror, she stroked her convent coif and said, ‘Look what you’ve done to me,’ as if it was the mirror that had caused her problems.

  Madge-in-Mirfield, now nursing an intimate and deadly cancer, couldn’t help, her three grown-up girls didn’t want to know. But Madge had a friend who knew someone who’d always wanted – ‘Two little children?’ Vinny asked hopefully, on a hospital visit.

  ‘No,’ Madge said, ‘a little boy.’

  ‘Well, that’s better than nothing, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s all Eliza’s fault,’ Madge said.

  Charles was very, very lucky, Vinny said. But he wouldn’t stay lucky if he was a naughty boy. Mr and Mrs Crosland had a big car and expensive coats. Mr Crosland wore long camel and Mrs Crosland wore long beaver, even though it was a hot August day, and Isobel wanted to rub her face in the fur when Mrs Crosland sat in the living-room, drinking tea. ‘Poor little thing,’ Mrs Crosland said to Charles. Not-so-little Charles (a broad and stocky eight-year-old by now) stared rudely. Mrs Crosland didn’t even glance at Isobel. Vinny pointed out Charles’ good points like a pedigree breeder and Mrs Crosland murmured approvingly at her new pet.

  Charles was in a cloud of misunderstanding – Vinny had not been entirely truthful, leading him to believe that Isobel was coming along as part of a package deal. They hadn’t seen Vinny filling only the one suitcase. When the Croslands had finished their tea and used up their limited repertoire of small talk, Mrs Crosland said, ‘Well thank you very much, Mrs Fitzgerald, I wish you all the best,’ and climbed into the back of the big car. She patted the seat next to her and said, ‘Come along, Charles,’ and Charles reluctantly got in and was lapped in fur.

  Vinny slammed the car door and Mr Crosland started the engine, lifting one hand in farewell without looking behind as he drove away in a crunching of gravel. Mrs Crosland waved a ringed hand and mouthed goodbye with her big crimson lips. Charles’ pale face rose up behind the glass of the car window, his yelling silenced by the noise of the car engine. The car moved away slowly, down Chestnut Avenue and Charles’ face reappeared in the back window. He seemed to be trying to claw his way through the glass.

  His head disappeared suddenly as if someone had just yanked invisibly on his ankles and the car accelerated down the road and turned into Sycamore Street, performing exactly the same disappearing trick as Gordon had already performed, but going in the opposite direction. As with him, there was no reversing back round the corner, no cries of ‘Surprise!’ from the car’s occupants.

  Isobel ran after the car until she got a stitch and could run no more and then stood helplessly in the middle of the road so that the butcher’s delivery boy, whizzing carelessly round the corner on his bike, had to swerve so wildly to avoid the little sobbing figure that he toppled over and the road was strewn with ration-sized parcels of meat and Vinny was able to secure a thin link of sausages in her apron pocket as she pulled Isobel to her feet and dragged her all the way home.

  The dead of night, the world was dark and empty but nothing was frightening any more, not after the wood. Not so dark really, a full moon at the window gave everything a dull gleam, like pewter. This was the time to escape, to shin down the drainpipe, run across the wet grass of the lawn. The only noise in the house was the creak-creak sound of Mrs Crosland’s snoring. Charles slid out of bed and felt the long carpet pile between his toes. His clothes were lying on a chair and he crept over to them. He seemed to have shrunk. His eyes were lower than the level of the top of the chair, his nose only reached the doorknob. His toenails click-clacked on the lino at the edge of the room.

  Everything in the room was drained of colour, everything turned to shades of grey. When he listened, he could hear that the house wasn’t silent at all – he could hear the mice eating in the pantry, the Croslands’ old cat dreaming (about chasing the mice). Smells flooded his brain – the dust trapped in the rugs, the old gravy scents coming up from the kitchen, the carnation talcum powder Mrs Crosland had spilled in the bathroom. The smell of petrol seeping up from the garage made him heady, he prowled around the room trying to think, for once strangely comfortable inside his skin.

  He loped over to the dressing-table in the corner of the room. The moon had turned the dressing-table mirror into steel. He could see the moon in the mirror, he could see his face in the mirror – no. No. It wasn’t possible, it couldn’t be. Charles raised his head and let out a tremendous howl of fear, running away from the mirror and leaping onto the bed and burying his head under the covers. In the morning it would all be different. Wouldn’t it?

  A week after he was kidnapped by the Croslands, Charles reappeared in a sudden unexpected rasping of gravel. The rear door of the car opened and – surprise! – Charles spilled out on to the ground so quickly that you would have almost thought he’d been pushed. The car door slammed again and the window was rolled down.

  Mrs Crosland’s face, powdered and lacquered like a Japanese geisha, appeared. ‘He bites,’ she announced, her voice resonating with disgust. ‘He bites ferociously,’ and Mr Crosland shouted over his shoulder, ‘That child’s backward, Mrs Fitzgerald!’ Then the Croslands drove away in a bad-tempered wrenching of gears. Charles sat cross-legged on the gravel, swaying backwards and forwards like a rocking Buddha and laughing his clown laugh ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha at the sight of their car retreating down the drive.

  The important thing about the disappearing trick – something that Eliza and Gordon seemed to have failed to grasp – is that the real skill was coming back again after you’d vanished. Unlike his parents, Charles had mastered both halves of the trick and to celebrate he executed a mad jigging polka of triumph up and down the drive – until he tripped and cut himself and Vinny said, ‘I could have told you it would end in tears.’

  Vinny was in the process of destroying Fairfax and Son, partly through alienating the customers (‘Well, which do you want – Cheddar or Cheshire? Make up your mind, I haven’t got all day!’) and partly through appallingly bad management. Eventually she had to sell it at a knockdown price to a competitor and also sold her little terrace house on Willow Road, to a couple called Miller and every time she drove past her old house on the bus Vinny said, ‘The Millers got a bargain there.’ Vinny was Mrs Hard-Done-By, and nothing, but nothing, would ever be right in her world. Especially not her relatives.

  ‘We’ll be in the poorhouse soon,’ she informed them. But she had an idea – they will take in lodgers, for what is the use of a house with five bedrooms if only three of them are occupied? Eh? They wil
l give one of them over to a lodger.

  Dimly, Vinny discerned that her poor housekeeping might not appeal to the paying-guest and she set about improving her housecraft. She studied the Widow’s housekeeping books – an entire kitchen shelf of aideménage – The Housewife’s Handy Book, Aunt Kitty’s Cookery Book, Everything Within, The Modern Housewife’s Book (for once upon a time the Widow was a very modern housewife). For a while, Vinny’s enthusiasm even expanded to include the hobby section of Everything Within and she attempted, amongst other useful things, ‘Sealing-Wax Craft’ and ‘A Dainty Craft with Cellophane and Silk Raffia’. It was very disturbing to come into the kitchen and find Vinny elbow-deep in papier mâché (the colour of her skin) or attempting to scale the artistic heights of ‘Loofah Craft’, clip-clipping away with scissors at the bathroom loofah to make a floral still life for the Unknown Lodger’s room.

  But infinitely worse was the ancienne cuisine which Vinny had suddenly become a disciple of, dishes dredged up from the cookery sections of the Widow’s books that reeked of England between the wars. Dishes for which they must be guinea-pigs. ‘Spaghetti Fritters’, ‘Rabbit Soup with Curry’, ‘Compote of Pigeons with Brain Sauce’. Vinny liked nothing better than recipes that began, ‘Take a large Cod and boil whole …’

  ‘This is disgusting,’ Charles ventured over something called a ‘Boiled Cow-Heel Pudding’.

  ‘Disgusting is as disgusting does,’ Vinny said unhelpfully. They never, ever, thought that they’d feel nostalgic for Vinny’s old way of cooking.

  Once Vinny considered she’d mastered landlady cuisine she turned her attention to the bedding, searching the depths of the Widow’s linen cupboard and bringing out several pairs of Irish linen sheets which were only slightly mildewed. ‘You wouldn’t get anything better in a hotel,’ she declared. Vinny had no idea what the quality of hotel bedding was, never having slept between any, but that didn’t stop her fantasizing that Hotel Arden was about to give the Ritz a run for its money. Charles and Isobel couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to lodge with them when the mattresses were so thin and the custard so lumpy.