Human Croquet Read online

  The Widow ran her dust-seeking fingers over the black bottles of amontillado, checked the moulded butter-pats (thistles and crowns), the bacon-slicer, the cheese-wires. She rang sales into the huge brass till, as big as a small pipe organ, with such ferocity that it flinched on the solid mahogany counter. Straight as an ironing-board and almost as thin. Her skin as pale as pale can be, like white paper that had been creased and pleated a hundred times. The old hag. The old hag with her wormwood tongue and her hag-hedge hair the colour of gunmetal and ashes. Eliza sang to cover her thoughts because no-one was going to hear what went on inside Eliza’s head, not even Gordon. Especially not Gordon.

  Eliza’s belly was like a drum. She placed Charles down on the floor. The drum was beating from the inside. Vinny could see something pushing against the drum-skin – a hand or a foot – and tried not to look, but her eyes kept being drawn back to this invisible baby. It’s trying to escape, Eliza said and, from the handbag at her feet, she took out her powder-compact, the expensive one that Gordon had bought for her – blue enamel with mother-of-pearl palm trees – and put on more lipstick. She rubbed her red lips together, as red as fresh blood and poppies, and smacked them open again for Vinny and the Widow’s disapproval. She was wearing a funny hat, all sharp angles like a Cubist painting.

  I’m going out, she said, standing up so quickly, so awkwardly, that the bentwood chair crashed onto the wooden floor of the shop. ‘Where?’ the Widow asked, counting money, making little piles of coins on the counter. Just out, Eliza said, lighting up a cigarette and dragging hard on it. To Charles, she said, Darling, will you stay here with Auntie Vinny and Granny Fairfax?, and ‘Auntie Vinny’ and ‘Granny Fairfax’ glared at this interloper in their lives and wished that the war would finish and Gordon come home and take Eliza away and set up house with her somewhere far, far away. Like the moon.

  The baby arrived three weeks early and Eliza claimed to be as much surprised as anybody. The Widow, determined not to be caught unawares a second time, was already on a war-footing.

  The fire had been laid in the hearth ready (these were drizzling spring days) and the Widow had the bed made up with sheets both boiled and bleached. A rubber sheet and a chamber pot were stowed discreetly under the bed and an army of washbasins and ewers had been marshalled for the natal conflict.

  Widow’s intuition made her come in from the conservatory where she was worshipping her cacti and she found Eliza on the stairs, clutching an acorn finial, doubled up in pain. Eliza was wearing her hat and coat and carrying her handbag and insisted that she was going out for a walk. ‘Fiddlesticks,’ said the Widow, who could recognize a madwoman when she saw one, not to mention a madwoman in an advanced state of labour, and she escorted Eliza firmly up the stairs to the second-best bedroom, Eliza struggling all the way. ‘Hellcat,’ the Widow hissed under her breath. She left Eliza sitting on the bed while she went off to boil important kettles. When she returned she found the bedroom door locked and no matter how much she rattled and shook, shouted and cajoled, the entrance to the delivery room remained barred. Vinny was summoned, as was the lumpen maid Vera and the man who helped the Widow with the garden. He eventually managed to kick the door in, but only after many encouraging shrieks from the Widow.

  They found a tranquil scene in front of them. Eliza was lying on the bed, still with her outdoor clothes on, and was cradling something small and new and slightly bloody, wrapped in a pillowcase from the bed. She smiled triumphantly at the Widow and Vinny, Your new granddaughter. When the Widow finally managed to get her hands on the baby she found that the cord was already severed. A thrill of horror, like invisible electricity, jolted the Widow’s flat body. ‘Gnawed,’ she whispered to Vinny and Vinny had to run to the bathroom, hand clutched over her mouth.

  And so Isobel was born on the streets of trees, near the muddled middle of the twentieth century, in a country at war, on the lumpy feather mattress in the second-best bedroom of Arden, her very first breath scented with the sour sappiness of new hawthorn.

  The next morning the Widow went into the second-best bedroom, piously bearing a cup of tea for Eliza, and found Eliza, Charles and the baby all in a muddled heap together in the middle of the lumpy bed. The Widow put the cup and saucer down on the bedside table. The bedroom was awash with Eliza’s expensive underwear, flimsy garments made from silk and lace that provoked the Widow’s disgust. Charles was snoring gently, his forehead damp with sleep. Eliza rolled over exposing a naked arm, round and thin, but didn’t wake. For a second, the Widow had a troublesome vision of her son in this bed, his clean, heroic limbs trammelled in semi-naked harlotry. She had a sudden desire to retrieve the chamber pot from under the bed and beat Eliza about the head with it. Or better still, she thought, looking at Eliza’s white throat, strangle her with one of her own black-market stockings.

  ‘Like animals,’ the Widow said, slicing the cheese-wire fiercely through the centre of a big Cheddar, ‘all in the same bed, and her with hardly anything on. What will they grow up like? She’ll suffocate that baby. That isn’t how we dealt with babies in my day.’ Vinny imagined Eliza’s milk-swollen breasts, smelt her scent – perfume and nicotine – and grimaced.

  The Widow peered into the depths of the rosewood fretwork of the crib. ‘There,’ she said with unaccustomed affection, and Eliza tucked in the baby blanket with blue rabbits embroidered on it, blue for Charles. ‘Gordon’s daughter,’ the Widow said, with more certainty than she’d ever said, ‘Gordon’s son.’

  ‘She’s got your eyes,’ the Widow added generously. ‘She’s got your everything,’ Vinny said, uncharmed. I wish, Eliza said softly, that she will blossom and grow. ‘What a silly thing to wish for,’ Vinny said.

  Look, said Eliza softly, pulling back the shawl from the sooty head, isn’t she perfect? Vinny made a face.

  ‘What are you going to call her?’ the Widow asked. Eliza ignored her. ‘You could call her Charlotte,’ the Widow pursued, ‘it is a lovely name.’

  Yes, but it’s yours, Eliza purred and stroked the shell-whorl of the baby’s ear. Her ears are petals, she said, and her lips are little pink flowers, and her skin is made from lilies and carnations and her teeth—

  ‘She hasn’t got any teeth, for Christ’s sake!’ Vinny snapped.

  She’s a little May bud. A new leaf. I might call her Mayblossom, Eliza laughed her gurgling laugh that set everyone’s nerves on edge.

  ‘No you bloody won’t,’ said the Widow.

  Rock-a-bye-baby, Eliza sang, on the tree-top, and whispered the baby’s name in its petal-ear. Is-o-bel, a peal of bells. Isobel Fairfax. Now the baby’s life could begin. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.

  ‘Isobel?’ snorted the very unmerry Widow, and then was unable to think of anything else to say.

  Darling, Eliza wrote to Gordon, you’d better come home soon or I’m going to kill your bloody family.

  Life in the ever-after wasn’t as happy as it should have been. Life, in fact, was a bloody bore, Eliza, hissing, we have to get a place of our own, at every opportunity. To Gordon. Gordon was no longer a hero, no longer flying in skies of any colour. He’d wrapped himself in his long white apron again and turned himself back into a grocer. Eliza was disappointed with this civilian transformation. The Widow, needless to say, was delighted.

  A grocer, Eliza said as if the word itself was distasteful. ‘Well, what did you expect him to do?’ the Widow snapped. ‘It’s what he was born to,’ she added grandly as if Gordon were the prince-in-waiting to some vast grocery empire.

  Gordon was still a hero to Charles, especially when he did magic tricks for him, learned in the idle hours when he was waiting to scramble into the air. He knew how to take coins from Charles’ fingers and make eggs appear from behind the Widow’s ears. He was particularly good at disappearing tricks. When he worked his magic on the Widow she said, ‘Oh Gordon,’ in the same tone that Eliza said, Oh Charles, when Charles did something that amused her.

  Eliza watched the Wido
w sweep up leaves on the back lawn. The Widow brushed furiously at birch and sycamore and apple, but the leaves were coming down like rain and every time she managed to make a pile the wind whisked them up in the air again. She might as well try to sweep the stars from the sky. ‘I wish she’d just let us play in them,’ Charles said glumly and Eliza laughed, Play? The word’s not even in the old hag’s vocabulary.

  Charles and Isobel pasted dead leaves into a scrap-book, with glue that smelt of fish (Vinny’s blood, Eliza informed them). Charles wrote the name of the tree beneath each leaf – sycamore and ash, oak and willow. The leaves had been salvaged from the Widow or scavenged off the pavements when Eliza and Isobel walked Charles home from school in the afternoons.

  From the horse chestnuts on Chestnut Avenue they’d collected handfuls of the spiky green seed-pods that looked like medieval weapons and Eliza had shown them how to open them, splitting one with her sharp red fingernails, peeling back the soft white shawl around the brown chestnut inside, saying, You’re the first person in the world to see that.

  Gordon stood in the doorway and laughed, ‘Not quite the same thing as discovering Niagara, Lizzy,’ and then he offered to take Charles away for a manly tutorial on soaking conkers in vinegar, because it turned out that they really were medieval weapons, but before he could, Eliza threw a handful of unpeeled chestnuts at Gordon’s head and he said, very coldly, to her, ‘Let’s have a bit of peace in this house for a change, shall we, Lizzy?’

  Eliza made a face at his retreating back and when he’d gone said, Peace, ha! There’ll be no peace in this house until that old hag is dead and in her coffin and six feet under. ‘Six feet under what?’ Charles asked. Charles had got glue all over him, a big leaf was stuck to his elbow. Why, under the bed, of course, Eliza said breezily as she glimpsed Vinny in the hall.

  ‘There are leaves everywhere,’ Vinny complained, coming into the room. ‘It’s worse in here than it is outside.’ The leaves drove her out of the room again and she went to find out where Vera had got to with the tea-tray, oblivious to the rowan leaf, complete with its scarlet berries, that had attached itself to her salt-sprinkled grey hair like a strange botanical barrette.

  ‘Moan, moan, moan,’ Charles whispered. ‘Why doesn’t she like us?’ Charles’ mission in life was to make people laugh but he’d set himself a hard task with Vinny.

  She doesn’t like anyone, she doesn’t even like herself, Eliza scoffed.

  ‘She doesn’t even live here,’ Charles muttered, but was cheered by the sight of Vera slouching in with a tray piled high with tea and buttered toast, Eccles cakes and the Widow’s apricot tea loaf. God, Eliza said, sucking hard on a cigarette, cake, cake, bloody cake, that’s all you get in this house.

  ‘Sounds all right to me,’ Charles said.

  After tea Eliza got out the fat wax crayons and colouring books for them on the dining-room table. Eliza was a generous art critic, everything her children did was absolutely wonderful. At the other end of the table, the Widow said something indistinct. She was sitting with her glasses perched on the end of her nose, turning collars and cuffs (‘waste not want not’). Eliza told Isobel that she should be an artist when she grew up. ‘That won’t put food on the table,’ the Widow said. ‘And you be careful with those crayons, Charles.’

  Eliza said nothing, but if you were close enough to her, you could hear the voodoo words she was incanting under her breath, like a swarm of bees. The Widow wiped the crumbs of cake from her fingerbones and left the table.

  Charles bent over his drawing, frowning in concentration. He was drawing clumsy ideal homes – square houses with pitch roofs and window-eyes and mouth-doors. Isobel drew a tree with golden-red leaves and Gordon came in and said, ‘Oh Margaret, are you grieving over goldengrove unleaving’ and gave her his increasingly sad smile and without looking at him Eliza said, She really is rather good, isn’t she? and gave Isobel a radiant, intimate smile that cut out Gordon.

  Gordon laughed and said, ‘We should have more, you never know what they might turn out to be – Shake-speares and Leonardo da Vincis.’

  ‘More what?’ Charles asked without taking his eyes off the sun he was drawing, a big golden-spoked eye.

  More nothing, Eliza said dismissively.

  ‘Babies,’ Gordon said to Charles. ‘We should have another baby.’

  Eliza pushed a lock of hair out of Isobel’s eyes and said, Whatever for? Gordon and Eliza had whole conversations now using intermediaries.

  ‘Because that’s what people do,’ Gordon said, turning Charles’ drawing round as if he was looking at it, although it was obvious he wasn’t. ‘People who love each other, anyway.’ But then he must have come under the influence of Eliza’s silent hoodoo because he suddenly left the room as well. It was all exits and entrances these days in Arden.

  ‘Where do you get babies from?’ Charles asked, after he’d finished his picture with two birds flying through the sky like dancing Vs.

  Eliza flicked open her gold lighter and lit a cigarette. ‘From the baby shop, of course.’

  The origin of babies was a confusing issue in Arden. According to the Widow, they were delivered by storks, but Vinny’s version had them being left under goose-berry bushes. Eliza’s answer seemed much more reasonable. Especially as there was a whole row of gooseberry bushes in the back garden and no baby had ever appeared under any of them. And as for storks, they didn’t even live in this country – according to Gordon – so it was hard to see how English children (let alone Welsh or Scottish) could ever get born at all.

  The Widow came back into the room and gave a cursory glance at their drawings. ‘Trees have green leaves,’ she said to Isobel, ‘not red,’ as if she had never opened her Widowed window-eyes and looked at autumn.

  Children, Eliza said irritably after the Widow left the room, why would anyone want children? I wish I’d never had any of the damn things, so annoyed that one of the wax crayons snapped in two in her hands.

  ‘But you love us, don’t you?’ Charles asked, a worried look on his face. Eliza started to laugh, a weird swooping noise, and said, Good God, of course I do. I wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for you.

  Eliza spent her autumn days lying on the wicker lounger in the conservatory, wearing her sunglasses as if she was on the beach, even though the skies were dull, reading library books and drinking whisky and smoking cigarette after cigarette until the conservatory was full of a hazy blue fug. The Widow’s cacti looked unhappy. So did the Widow.

  ‘Lizzy,’ Gordon said, at his most reasonable, persuasive, cajoling. Helpless. ‘Lizzy, don’t you think you could help out around the house a bit more? Vera has all on looking after us all and Mother does nothing but cook.’

  My hands are full with the children, Eliza said, without taking her eyes off her book. Although as far as Gordon could see her hands were full with a cigarette and a large whisky and the children were sliding noisily down the stairs on tea-trays.

  In the autumnal evenings, when the children were in bed, Gordon and Eliza and the Widow sat round the coal fire in the front room listening to the wireless or playing cards. The Widow suspected Eliza of cheating but couldn’t prove it. (Yet.) Sometimes Gordon just sat and stared at the fire while the Widow put her scratchy records on the old-fashioned wind-up gramophone.

  The Widow made a fuss about giving Gordon supper. ‘He needs looking after,’ she said pointedly to Eliza, as she cut him a piece of last year’s Christmas cake and put a windmill-sail of Wensleydale on the top. Oh God, Eliza muttered to the George the Third chandelier, they even have the bloody stuff with cheese. ‘Oh, I am sorry,’ the Widow said, in her grand northern duchess voice, ‘Did you want some, Eliza?’

  While Gigli sang ‘Che Gelida Manina’ on the old wind-up, the Widow poured tea into flower-sprigged cups. Eliza took her tea without milk or sugar and every time the Widow poured her a cup she said, ‘Oh, I don’t know how you can!’ and crumpled up her white paper face.

  Through a mouthful
of cake, Gordon made the mistake of making a joke, for his mother’s benefit, about how Eliza never made cakes and Eliza looked at him through half-closed eyes and said, No, but then I do fuck you, so that Gordon sloshed his tea into his saucer and started to choke on his old Christmas cake. The Widow smiled the bright, polite smile of the partially deaf and said, ‘What was that? What did she say?’

  By November, the trees on the streets were almost bare apart from, here and there, a stray leaf that lingered, flapping like a mournful flag, and there were no more leaves to collect when Charles went to and from Rowan Street Primary School. Charles hated school. Charles hated school so much that he couldn’t eat his breakfast in the morning.

  The Widow’s philosophy of child nutrition was simple – as much as possible at every opportunity. She paid particular attention to breakfast and insisted Charles and Isobel ate porridge, eggs, poached or boiled, toast and marmalade and drank half a pint of milk from big glass tumblers. They’ll blow up like balloons, Eliza said, breakfasting on her usual cigarettes and black coffee. ‘You’ll waste away to nothing,’ the Widow said accusingly to her and Charles looked up in alarm from his egg. Eliza did look thin, but surely she couldn’t get so thin that she disappeared?

  Charles was wiped clean of his marmalade (rather roughly by the Widow, with an old flannel) and hustled into his blazer and cap. His fat lower lip started to tremble and he said, very quietly, in Eliza’s direction, ‘I don’t want to go to school, Mummy.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ the Widow said sharply, ‘everyone has to go to school.’ Rowan Street Primary was a dark cramped place that smelt of wet gabardine and plimsoll rubber and was staffed by sour-faced spinsters who must all have been found under the same gooseberry bush as Vinny. An extraordinary amount of physical violence took place within its brick walls – Charles came home with reports of daily floggings, canings and whippings (thankfully on other boys so far) perpetrated by the headmaster, Mr Baxter. ‘There’s nothing wrong with him being a stern disciplinarian,’ the Widow said, mercilessly strapping Charles’ huge leather satchel on to his small shoulders. ‘Little boys are naughty and they have to find out what’s what.’