Human Croquet Page 18

  Almost as soon as Vinny declared herself ready to take on all-comers, their first lodger appeared. Vinny was a little surprised because she hadn’t even worked out how to advertise for one yet, but Mr Rice turned up on the doorstep ready with references and a proper-lodger kind of job – travelling salesman.

  Mr Rice was aged somewhere between thirty-five and sixty-five and had an enormous handlebar moustache, possibly to compensate for the fact that most of his dark brown hair had been devoured by baldness so that the thing he most resembled was a boiled egg. Charles and Isobel exchanged dismal looks because they couldn’t imagine anyone more boring. ‘Don’t worry,’ Vinny said, ‘there’s plenty more where he came from.’

  Mr Rice wore loud dogtooth-check jackets and mustard waistcoats and claimed he was a pilot during the war. ‘Who’s he kidding?’ Vinny scoffed, but behind his back because she wanted his money.

  ‘Here we are,’ Vinny said, heading new lodgerwards, ‘a nice plate of “Sweetbreads Royale”.’ Chatelaine Vinny – a bleak housekeeper in hard times. ‘Well, Mr Rice,’ Vinny said, shaving slices off an unidentified roasted mammal at the Sunday dinner-table, ‘how d’you like it here then?’ Mr Rice is ‘a gentleman’ in Vinny’s estimation and his arrival makes her quite skittish for a while.

  At first she simpered, bowed and scraped to Mr Rice, wringing her hands in ever-so-humbleness and Mr Rice responded by praising her landladying skills to the skies when you might have expected him instead to puzzle over the ‘Haddock Soufflé’, and query the damp in his room and the disturbing character of some of his dinners (‘Boiled Toad in the Hole,’ Vinny announced, shy, yet proud, of her newfound talents).

  At breakfast and tea, Mr Rice regaled them with tales from the road. ‘A very funny thing happened to me in Birmingham this week, did I tell you?’ he asked over a dish of ‘Scotch Sheep’s Pluck’, that Vinny had laboured over all afternoon. Mr Rice had no sense of humour, in fact, if it was possible he had a negative sense of humour so that they knew that any story prefaced ‘A funny thing happened’ was inevitably going to be unbelievably tedious. What’s more, funny things happened to Mr Rice all the time so that they rarely endured a mealtime without passing out from boredom.

  ‘Mr Tapioca! Mr Sago!’ Charles hooted, his forehead hitting the table as he doubled up in a maniacal sotto voce laugh. Isobel worried for Charles. He was nine years old now, yet half the time he behaved like his three-year-old self. Mr Rice appeared not to notice and helped himself to a spoonful of grey boiled potatoes and waxed lyrical about home comforts. ‘Silly, silly boy!’ Vinny hissed at Charles.

  ‘Ah,’ Mr Rice said, sniffing like a Bisto Kid as Vinnie handed over his slice of ‘Sheep’s Tongue Shape’.

  Vinny took a cigarette packet from the pocket of her Empire overall and lit up. Her gnarled hands cupped around the cigarette would have looked better on a large bird of prey. She closed her eyes and sucked hard, with an expression that suggested pain rather than pleasure, and then blew the smoke out of her nostrils, while she dished up an exotic ‘Railway Pudding’.

  ‘Delicious,’ proclaimed Mr Rice, a dribble of yellow custard creeping down his chin. Vinny batted her meagre eyelashes in a way that might have been interpreted as flirtatious. ‘Something in your eye, Mrs Fitzgerald?’ Mr Rice inquired through a mouthful of pudding.

  * * *

  ‘Parallel universes,’ Charles said to Mr Rice, eager to expound his new theories to a listening ear, over a tea-table groaning with ‘Croquettes of Liver’. ‘What if there were other worlds where we had other selves – living out quite different lives, so say, Vinny was a film star [flattered, Vinny cast a rare smile of appreciation in Charles’ direction] or Izzie here was the queen of an unknown country and I was –’ Charles searched for a parallel life he would like – ‘I was an Olympic athlete or a famous Shakespearian actor or a rocket scientist …’ All this while, Mr Rice was staring at Charles as if he were a lunatic and when Charles’ imagination finally ran down he fixed him with an unpoetic eye and said to him, ‘You need to get a life, son,’ and Charles blushed a colour that clashed horribly with his hair. But really there was only one parallel universe that they wanted to inhabit – the one where they had parents and, for preference, the same ones they had had before.

  Another year passed. And then another. Eliza grew dark, stranded in the passage of time, growing into a memory. People were always telling Isobel that she looked foreign – Spanish or Italian – could Eliza have had Spanish blood? Vinny peered down the long dark tunnel to the past and saw something dimly, heard the vague word ‘Celtic’ and said, ‘Not Spanish – Irish, I think.’

  ‘Did she sound Irish?’ Charles asked eagerly.

  ‘Sound?’ Vinny repeated helplessly. A whiff of Hempstid wafted down the tunnel. ‘She sounded … ridiculous,’ Vinny concluded. Eliza’s faded and forgotten image plagued them. Where was she? Why didn’t she come back? Why did no-one from her world come back? A sister or a brother? An aunt or a godmother? If Eliza couldn’t come back then why not a childhood friend, someone knocking on the door saying, ‘I knew your mother’? Someone who could tell them the little things – the books she liked to read, her favourite food, the season she liked best.

  ‘Maybe somebody’s kidnapped her,’ Charles theorized, ‘and held her captive against her will even though she pleaded with him to let her go so she could get back to her children?’

  ‘Didn’t she have a mother or a father?’

  ‘Questions, questions, questions,’ Vinny snapped irritably, ‘can’t you ask anything else?’

  Isobel discovered the provenance of Audrey’s hair (the genetic origins of Charles’ remained mysterious however). Mrs Baxter’s sister, Rhona, came to visit from South Africa and fingered Audrey’s hair as if it was something precious and said, ‘This is our mother’s hair, Moira,’ and Mrs Baxter said, ‘I ken that, Rhona,’ and their eyes filled up with tears.

  Mr Baxter didn’t approve of this sentimental hair, didn’t really approve of Mrs Baxter’s sister with her cheerful disposition and easy-going laughter. He looked put out when he came into the kitchen and found them all gathered round the Formica of the kitchen table, looking sad at the memory of maternal hair, and he rounded on Audrey, ‘You know you’d be better employed learning your times-tables – you haven’t even mastered the sixes yet,’ before beating a hasty retreat in the face of so much hair-induced emotion.

  ‘What a Gradgrind,’ Mrs Baxter’s sister laughed when he’d gone and Mrs Baxter smiled nervously and cut into a cherry and almond Madeira which signalled itself boldly with a circle of glacé cherries like big drops of bright blood.

  The advent of Mrs Baxter’s sister brought much reminiscing with it. Until their mother died they’d had an idyllic childhood apparently. ‘Full of fun and games, we were always up to high doh, weren’t we, Moira?’ Despite years under an African sun, Mrs Baxter’s sister still had her lovely lilting accent, with its hints of heather and hills, and sang ‘John Anderson, my jo’ so beautifully that Mrs Baxter wept. ‘Oh aye,’ Mrs Baxter said with a faraway smile, ‘they were grand days.’ Whenever Mrs Baxter mentioned her life before Mr Baxter she became very wistful.

  What happened in idyllic childhoods? ‘We-el,’ Rhona said, ‘picnics, dressing up, putting on wee plays’ – hoots of laughter from both of them at this particular memory – ‘then we played a lot of games, our mother knew such good games—’ At this point Mrs Baxter screamed and flapped her hands in the air and then ran from the room and reappeared, breathlessly, a few minutes later, thrusting a small red book into her sister’s hands. At this, Rhona also lost the power of speech, dancing up and down on the spot and screeching. ‘The Home Entertainer – you’ve still got it!’

  ‘I have,’ Mrs Baxter beamed.

  ‘Poison Spot,’ Mrs Baxter laughed with tears welling in her eyes. ‘Lemon Golf? Few things can roll more unexpectedly than a lemon!’ she read out loud from the instructions.

  ‘Human Croquet!’ Mrs Baxter’s s
ister said, in transports of delight. ‘That was my favourite.’ They played it, she explained, on the lawn of the manse. ‘We had a lovely lawn. So green,’ she added with an exile’s sigh. ‘Of course, you need a lot of people for Human Croquet.’

  ‘And they all have to be in the spirit of the game,’ Mrs Baxter added.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Mrs Baxter’s sister agreed.

  In the end they raided the fruit bowl, first for a game of Lemon Golf, played on the living-room carpet with an assortment of instruments – walking-sticks, an old hockey stick, a chair leg from the understairs cupboard and (as you would expect) lemons. This was followed by an energetic game of Orange Battle in which even Audrey became animated, and the untimely arrival of Mr Baxter – just as Mrs Baxter was flailing with her teaspoon at her sister’s orange – couldn’t quite dissipate the party atmosphere.

  Mrs Baxter’s sister returned to South Africa the next day and her departure left Mrs Baxter very sad. And very clumsy, it seemed, for she was black and blue all over, like a bad joke. ‘I fell down the stairs,’ she said, ‘silly me.’ Silly Mrs Baxter really ought to be more careful.

  Time had flown. Seven years of it. Eliza was never coming back, she may as well be as dead as Gordon.

  Arden was in decay, there was wet-rot in the floors and dry-rot in the stairs. The windows stuck, the doors jammed. The wallpaper peeled. The dusty drops of the Widow’s chandelier were laced with gossamer cobwebs and chimed and tinkled in the fierce draughts that gusted through Arden, as if Boreas and Eurus were holding a competition somewhere in the vicinity of the front hall or the great eagle Hraesvelg was flying up and down just to annoy them.

  While all the other houses on the streets of trees were being modernized and brought up to date, Arden had remained untouched since the master-builder nailed in the last slate himself.

  The garden had become home to toad and frog, mouse and mole and a million garden birds. The nettles were waist-high, the soil latticed with ground-elder and a tangle of brambles was slowly clawing its way across the garden towards the back door. The Widow would have had a fit.

  ‘There’s somebody at the back door,’ Vinny said, staring into the flames of the fire like an old sibylline cat. Vinny had a mouldering air about her too – dust caught in the cracks in her skin and her thin hair was turning to cobwebs. ‘I didn’t hear anyone,’ replied Charles (now a deeply unattractive thirteen year old).

  ‘That doesn’t mean there isn’t someone there,’ Vinny said.

  The glassy eye of the remains of a ‘Baked Cod’s Head’ followed Charles as he walked through the kitchen to the back door. He opened the door and found Vinny was right. A man was standing on the doorstep. He took off his hat and, smiling sadly, said, ‘Charles?’ in a cracked voice. Charles took a step backwards.

  ‘Remember me, old chap?’ Charles couldn’t have been more shocked if an alien spacecraft had just landed in the kitchen and a squad of Martians trooped out. ‘Daddy?’ he said in a small voice.

  Vinny grumbled her way into the kitchen but when she saw Gordon the power of speech left her. She went quite green. ‘Vin?’

  ‘There you are,’ Vinny said finally. Isobel came in to the kitchen and looked with interest at this stranger – there was something odd about him, something not quite right, but she didn’t know what it was.

  ‘Daddy?’ Charles repeated. Daddy? How could this be possible? Gordon was dead, killed by the pea-souper, he’d been dead for over seven years. Was he a ghost? He had the eyes of a ghost, but not a ghost’s pallor, he was lean and brown as if he’d been working in the sun. When they thought of Gordon they thought of the man in the silver-framed photograph – the RAF uniform, the cheerful smile, the wavy hair. This Gordon – ghost or impostor – had short cropped hair, lightened by the sun and what smile he could muster was far from cheerful.

  ‘Daddy?’ Charles repeated helplessly.

  ‘Pleased to see me, old chap?’ Gordon whispered, barely able to speak for emotion.

  ‘But, Daddy – you’re dead,’ Isobel said.

  ‘Dead?’ Gordon said, looking inquisitively at Vinny who shrugged as if to say it was nothing to do with her. ‘You told them I was dead ?’ Gordon persisted.

  ‘Mother thought it was for the best,’ Vinny replied testily. ‘We thought you wouldn’t be coming back.’

  The story had suddenly changed. Gordon was alive, not dead, perhaps the first known traveller to return from the undiscovered country. The world was no longer subject to the rules of logic where the dead were dead and the quick walked the earth. He’d never walked into the wall of fog, never drowned in the pea-soup. That was all a mistake. ‘Somebody made a mistake?’ Charles said incredulously. Yes, Gordon agreed, staring grimly at the wall behind them so that they both turned to see if there was someone there. There wasn’t.

  Someone (a dead person) had been wrongly identified as Gordon, the real Gordon had been suddenly struck by amnesia and gone abroad to live in New Zealand, not knowing he was the real Gordon, not knowing who he was. Not knowing anything. Perhaps Gordon had played too many games of Lost Identity and become confused? ‘Amnesia,’ they overheard him telling people later, in the same way that they had once heard the Widow saying ‘Asthma’ after he drove away from Arden a lifetime ago. The two words were very similar – perhaps the Widow and Gordon had got them muddled up somehow?

  ‘I’ve got someone I want you to meet,’ Gordon said, with a hopeful little smile. ‘She’s waiting in the car.’

  Charles made a funny noise as if he was suffocating. ‘Is it Mummy?’ he asked, strung out somewhere between impossible hope and overwhelming despair. Gordon’s features contracted in a grimace and Vinny said quickly, as if to explain, ‘Ran off with a fancy man.’ Gordon stared at her as if he was having trouble understanding and Vinny repeated impatiently, ‘Eliza, she ran off with a fancy man.’ Gordon looked sick at the mention of Eliza’s name.

  ‘Is she?’ Charles said urgently.

  ‘Is who what, old chap?’ Gordon looked dazed.

  ‘Is Mummy in the car with you?’

  Gordon seemed to contemplate the answer to this question for a long time but finally he shook his head slowly and said, ‘No, no she isn’t.’

  ‘Hello there,’ a bright little voice said suddenly and all four of them flinched and turned to stare at the person standing on the back doorstep. ‘I’m your new mummy.’

  The second coming of Eliza was no longer just around the corner, with its restoration of real right justice and suffering rewarded (the happy ending). And if the dead Gordon could become alive then perhaps the living Eliza could turn up dead. ‘Wherever she is,’ Charles said sadly, ‘she’s never coming back, let’s face it, Izzie.’

  PRESENT

  EXPERIMENTS WITH ALIENS

  Debbie is having trouble giving the baby a name. I think this is because it is not her rightful property, the baby’s identity is, after all, in question and to name it might be to somehow rob it of its true inheritance. (But does the baby know who it is?) ‘Sharon?’ Debbie tries out on Gordon. ‘Or Cindy? Andrea? Jackie? Lindy? We don’t want anything old-fashioned.’ Like Isobel, presumably.

  Debbie was right – the baby has been accepted on the streets of trees without a murmur and, as no-one has come forward to claim their mislaid infant, we appear to have it for life. Perhaps it really is a changeling, deposited by mistake, the fairies not realizing that we had no real baby in the house to exchange – for of course, the fairies’ tithe to hell must be paid in human life every seven years.

  The baby is the only person that Debbie thinks is still itself (perhaps because it has so little self) although she still communicates with the rest of us robotic doubles in much the same way as she’s always done.

  Debbie is now on an elephantine dose of tranquillizers which have no noticeable effect, certainly not on the strange, obsessive behaviour that she’s in the grip of – the hand-washing, the wiping of door handles and taps, the hysteria if a vase is moved so much as an
inch. Perhaps these are the rituals that ward off the madness rather than the symptoms of it. ‘She should see a bloody psychiatrist,’ Vinny says crossly, loudly, to Gordon. ‘A trick-cyclist?’ Debbie shrieks. ‘Not bleeding likely!’

  After a great deal of rummaging in the further corners of her brain, Eunice has come up (after a great deal of click-clicking) with her own diagnosis, ‘Capgras’s Syndrome.’ (‘Gey queer’ is Mrs Baxter’s diagnosis.)

  ‘Capgras’s Syndrome?’

  ‘Where you believe that close family members have, in fact, been replaced by robots or replicas.’

  ‘Gosh.’ (Well, what else can you say?)

  ‘Scientists believe (a contradiction in terms, surely?) that it’s a condition related to the well-known phenomenon of déjà vu.’

  (Now that’s interesting.) ‘It’s to do with our sense of recognition and familiarity.’ But then, what isn’t?

  ‘The first known case was cited in 1923 – a fifty-three-year-old Frenchwoman complained that her family had been replaced by identical doubles. After a while she began to complain that the same thing had happened to her friends and then her neighbours and then eventually everyone. In the end she thought her own double was following her everywhere.’ (A-ha!)

  Eunice rather spoils the scientific effect by dragging hard on a Senior Service, she has recently set foot on the primrose path (fittingly), where will it end? In sex and death I suppose.

  What if these things are real though? What if, say, I really do have a double? Mrs Baxter, for instance, reports seeing me buying shampoo in Boots yesterday when I know for a certain fact I was in the middle of a double English lesson and, to be more precise (‘about half-past-ten, maybe, dear?’), somewhere between