by Patrick Gale
Apparently the change to home with a big H had come about by degrees. ‘Stealthy degrees,’ his mother said, implying she had been hoodwinked into allowing it.
His father had grown up there, in what had still been a pleasant, spacious family house. He was the youngest of four brothers, a crowded luxury Eustace found unimaginable, but three of the brothers had died in the war and then his grandfather had died of grief and Granny had taken to her room and lost the use of her legs. So she had needed someone to cook and clean and care for her. His parents had met somehow – at a dance, Dad claimed, though that was as unimaginable as having brothers – and married and her father, Grandpa, needed help as well, as he was confused and used to having things done for him because of the army. So, with two parents living with them and needing help, which was expensive, it made sense to take in a few other similarly needy residents, carefully vetted because Granny had ferocious standards, even when confined to her room. And of course this meant his mother did no cooking or cleaning like other mothers, which was nice, but also meant they never knew what was for supper and had to live with the smells and noises.
He had yet to master the art of making or, more complicatedly, keeping friends. Occasionally, though, a boy from St Chad’s had casually taken him back home and Eustace had been struck each time by the relative silence and cosiness of normal houses, their lack of bells, their compact sense of family. His lack of siblings left him feeling exposed and outnumbered. He felt oppressed by the need to behave well and unobtrusively at all times and thought that, in principle, it would be good to have a brother or sister so that he could be childish sometimes. In fact, the lack of one meant he had never really learnt how to play. At school he would naturally gravitate to the nearest available adult, who would be unnerved or irritated by his interest, which did not win him the trust of other boys.
He assumed a brother or a sister was a possibility – he wasn’t a fool – but something forbidding in his mother’s manner warned him off asking her about the matter. When he tried asking his father, he characteristically joked his way out of having to answer the question.
‘Much better being an only. Your mother was an only and look how well she turned out! This way you get more cake! And all our attention!’
(They were taught at St Chad’s only to use exclamation marks sparingly but Father spoke with them all the time.)
It was Granny who told him, when she grew bored of playing bezique with him.
‘You had two older sisters,’ she said.
He hadn’t even asked her a question. They hadn’t been talking about families. She just fixed him with her gloomy gaze, her blue eyes made even bigger by her thick glasses.
‘You had two sisters, twins, four years older than you. But they died. One died being born, strangled by the other’s cord and the survivor lived an hour then sort of gave up. The other was bigger and stronger but the little one’s cord got her. So. You were very welcome but you’ll be the last and you can never talk about it. Your mother nearly lost her mind with it. Now, fetch me a barley sugar from my dressing table and take one for yourself.’
The taste of barley sugars, not a sweet he or any boy he knew would ever actively choose for themselves, was always associated for him with the peculiarly burdensome sensation of secrets, of knowing a thing yet being unable to share it.
To have shared it with any confidence, he’d have needed to understand what he was sharing and there were elements of the revelation that baffled him. He had watched pregnant women out of the corner of his eye when out shopping, knew the way their extra bulk changed their gait, and failed to imagine either his mother or Granny in such a condition. And he knew husbands were involved in the process but Granny’s gladiatorial talk of cords and strength alarmed him.
It offered an explanation, at least, for why his parents were so unlike the ones on television or in children’s stories. Their connection to one another seemed arbitrary; their characters lacked common ground.
It seemed to Eustace that his father could quite happily have remained a bachelor. He was a happy man – flippant , his mother called it – entirely lacking in the energy to go out and make money, build tree houses, play football with other fathers on Saturdays or assist in the making of further babies. He had never settled in any job, drifting (his mother’s word again) from National Service to helping run a factory that made wooden toys, to working at Wilton Carpets before marriage and fate handed him the endless job of running his mother’s house as a Home. Now he did things like change lightbulbs or re-stock bathrooms with lavatory paper and did them with a cheerful slowness that could have been designed to make Eustace’s mother cross but was probably no more than what it seemed: lighthearted, oblivious self-absorption. Eustace had always taken his jokey manner at face value; his father was a happy sun to his mother’s clouded moon.
After Granny’s shocking revelation, however, Eustace reassessed him. As the father of two dead daughters, and a man with three dead brothers, he should have been crying all the time. His father’s cheeriness now seemed brittle and unconvincing, a clay mask which the wrong response might cause to crack, revealing something frightening, something not quite a face.
Eustace was essentially a kind boy; he knew that when people were sad, you were supposed to reach out to them to make them feel better, but he began, if not actively to avoid engaging with his father’s constant jokes and irony, then to treat them with wariness. Those exclamation marks were like little prods now, keeping one at a distance.
Mother was not like the other women in Weston. She had a lot of headaches, which involved her retreating to a darkened bedroom where she was not to be disturbed and which seemed to be directly related to sunny weather or being cross. And she was cross a lot.
When she was in a good mood, though, which she often was in the mornings before she was dressed, she liked to talk about her own mother. She had several photographs of her mounted in silver frames. Maman had been a prima ballerina, and was pictured impossibly balanced on one foot, arms and other leg raised in a graceful arabesque, or lifted high by a man in make-up, both of them looking as though there could be nothing sadder than to weigh no more than a pretty cloud. In some pictures, newspaper cuttings mainly, she was pictured after a performance, her eyes still painted like a pharaoh’s daughter, her taut body wrapped in a fur coat, clutching a huge bunch of flowers, surrounded by older men who all looked at her as though she was the best possible food.
Mother said Grandpa was one of those men at the stage door night after night, an army officer who couldn’t believe his luck at being singled out but who thought it entirely unremarkable that his wife should turn her back on dancing and adulation to live on an army camp where the only theatre was a Nissen hut and where the only music was the blare of a regimental band or the wheeze of the chapel harmonium. Dancers ceased to dance in their thirties or once they became mothers, apparently, so it was not really fair to blame Grandpa. If they hadn’t married, Mother would not have existed. She blamed him, still, not just for snuffing out Maman’s glamorous career but for passing on his genes so that his daughter had his big, practical ankles and not Maman’s slim, artistic ones.
There was just one significant photograph of Eustace’s mother as a young woman. Around the time when her engagement to his father was announced, she was chosen for the Girl in Pearls feature at the front of Country Life . The picture showed her smiling (though showing no teeth), looking very clean and hopeful in a white lacy dress and pearls, with her glossy hair held back by a pale velvet Alice band. She did not look like a young woman about to spend her life in an old people’s home in Weston-super-Mare. The page from the magazine was in a silver frame in his grandfather’s bedroom, and looked like an image from an earlier, more confident era and so utterly unlike the mother he knew that it was some time before Eustace had made the connection between her and the stylized image.
It was undoubtedly his mother’s fault – because she made all the decisions requiring a
rtistry or taste – that he had been given such an impossible name. He had no idea it was impossible at first, thought it no stranger than living in a houseful of old people who weren’t relations.
Inspired, perhaps, by the keen interest he’d been showing in the photographs and clippings of Maman, Mother took him to see Swan Lake when a touring company brought it to the Bristol Hippodrome.
Eustace was transfixed by the music, the drama, the athleticism, the men wearing tights. Having seen nothing like it in his short life, he bombarded his mother with questions about it for days afterwards. If the same ballerina danced both the white and black swan, by what magic did she briefly appear both in the ballroom and outside the ballroom window? Why didn’t the men dance on their toes like the women and how on earth was choreography written down? It amused and gratified her and she followed up by buying him both Stories From the Ballet and the Ladybird Ballet book, which demonstrated the five foot positions and some of the basic French terminology. If he was really keen, she said, they could find a ballet class for him. Classes were always short of boys.
So one day he was playing the Tchaikovsky dances and, remembering the ballet, began to mimic what he remembered of it in a loose, even wild sort of way, dancing around the place, gaining courage as he went and snatching up a crocheted shawl as a prop to whirl about himself. Two of the elderly lady residents parked in the conservatory to enjoy spring warmth encouraged him, laughing and clapping. It was so unusual a sensation that he danced on, even pretending he knew how to dance en pointe . His father laughed at everything, so naturally Eustace continued to dance when he appeared in the doorway. But far from laughing, his father scowled and shouted, ‘Stop it. Stop it at once!’ He dragged the arm off the record so roughly there was an awful noise and the record was scratched deeply. ‘Now apologize to the ladies for that disgusting display.’
Eustace apologized to the old ladies, who continued to giggle, excited by his father’s shouting. There was no further discussion. The Tchaikovsky record disappeared and was replaced by Going Places by Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass, which wasn’t the same at all.
Instead of the promised ballet classes, Eustace was signed up for clarinet lessons. No one asked him which instrument he’d have liked to learn. Apparently his father had found an old clarinet in a second-hand shop and that dictated the matter. Left to his own devices, Eustace would have opted for something showier, like the harp. Mr Buck, his teacher, was a strange, humourless man with smelly hair but extremely clean hands, who lived in one of the down-at-heel art deco houses near the station. Eustace saw no more of the house than the hall and front room, where lessons happened, and felt no wish to explore further; it was so gloomy and colourless. The only decoration was a bust of Beethoven, perched on the upright piano, and a spider plant so dusty it was hard to see how it remained alive. Lessons took place after school on a Monday and, after an initial, rather stiff introduction by his mother, it was decided he was old enough to walk to them and home again unaccompanied.
Mr Buck taught him to read the treble clef. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour At Christmas was how to remember the notes on lines and, for the notes in the spaces, the illogical Boys Dance For All Cows Eat Grass, Boy. As for the clarinet, all Eustace knew was that it smelled of ear wax and he couldn’t put it in his mouth without wondering who else had put it in theirs before him.
Mr Buck produced a fine, full tone without hesitation but Eustace either blew too hard or not quite hard enough, so that he elicited either alarming squawks or whispery stutters: nothing that sounded like music. Obediently he learnt fingerings and battled his way through the short pieces in the book Mr Buck sold him. These weren’t really pieces, he soon realized, but themes lifted from proper works, curtailed and simplified. Their familiarity was designed as an incentive to the early learner but the gap between the stump of melody and its more glorious source material was simply humiliating. What was worse, the book included pop songs alongside the classical morsels, so Eustace would have to go from picking out New World Symphony to squawking Yellow Submarine . He knew he had to practise. Mr Buck filled out a little notebook each week with what he had to have done before the next lesson – B flat major scale, Da Doo Ron Ron or whatever – and he knew the lessons cost money so were not to be squandered but, even shut in his bedroom, he was self-conscious about the noise and felt it must be as unwelcome and raucous as a trumpet’s parping. And then people would comment on it in ways that made him sure the sound was awful.
He knew how clarinets could sound – on a trip to Bristol he had bought an ‘Exploring the World of Music’ recording of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet and Concerto with his pocket money – but there was an agility and humanity to the tone when proper players performed that he felt he could never achieve. In his hands the instrument remained a crude machine, smelling of someone else’s decay, which would never sing.
But then, all at once, Mr Buck was removed from his life.
‘You can’t have any more clarinet lessons,’ his mother flatly announced. ‘Mr Buck has had to go away. Awkward really, as we hadn’t had his bill for the last three—’
‘Yes, well,’ his father cut in, in the way he did when he wanted a subject dropped.
‘Do you mind very much?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Eustace told her, heart soaring. ‘I mean, I love music but . . . I don’t think the clarinet is for me.’
His parents managed a smile at that, so he knew he must have unwittingly used an adult turn of phrase.
‘Perhaps the violin,’ his mother suggested.
‘Perhaps,’ he agreed. ‘Or . . . the harp!’
‘No. Not the harp,’ she said. ‘I think that’s for women, really. We can sell your clarinet in the local paper and I’ll ask around.’
It was only through boys at school he heard that Mr Buck had been sent to prison for being a kiddy fiddler . This was surely an unjust mistake, he thought, since Mr Buck was a clarinetist. Then an older boy explained and Eustace was obliged to deny that Mr Buck had ever touched him or taken naked pictures of him for his collection, which he kept upstairs, apparently, and which was extensive.
In the weeks that followed, during which he ceased learning scales and fingerings on the clarinet, since there seemed no point, he experienced moments of odd excitement at having spent time alone with a known criminal and moments of equally odd disappointment that, given ample opportunity, Mr Buck had never touched or asked to photograph him. Had Eustace been off-putting? Rude? Insufficiently alluring? He found himself obsessively reliving the dreary hours of their lessons, the lugubrious house, Mr Buck’s unsmiling demeanour and very neat fingernails, the way the place felt quite unlike a home. But perhaps upstairs was different. Perhaps upstairs Mr Buck expressed himself in lavish, even exotic ways, and a world of unspeakable wonder had lain waiting to be discovered, beguiling yet frightening, had Eustace only thought to ask to visit the lavatory or requested to go upstairs to admire the view of the station.
He noted, in the light of the kiddy-fiddler revelation, that no adult asked him if Mr Buck had done anything to him.
It wasn’t that he revised his opinions – Mr Buck had been joyless and uninspiring – more that it was a revelation that a person could have so much more to them than they showed. It made him aware that he might have secrets in turn and grow to be someone other than the ordinary boy for whom people took him.
CHAPTER THREE
‘It’s a recital and we’re going,’ his mother announced by way of explaining why they couldn’t watch World About Us , which was a Sunday evening custom for him and his father, like winding the clocks and taking out the dustbins. ‘God knows, we get little enough high culture in this town. When we do, it needs supporting.’
She had even dressed up in a long black dress and silver sandals, which meant he had to wear his school uniform and his father, a suit and tie.
The recital happened in St Joseph’s, the Catholic church, which was an adventure in itself, and was given b
y a cellist called Carla Gold, who had inexplicably moved to the area from London, and a pianist from Bristol.
Eustace was resentful at missing World About Us , since he disliked changes in routine, but forgot everything, television, homework, the hardness of his chair, the moment Miss Gold strode on to the stage. She was young, younger than his mother and tall and very striking, with a great mass of tawny, curling hair like a mane, a dramatic nose she regularly turned aside on her longer bow strokes and hands and arms as gracefully controlled as a ballerina’s.
Her pianist was as glamorous as she was and wore white tie and tails, which set off his olive skin and neatly trimmed black beard. He had an exotic surname.
‘Persian, apparently,’ his father informed them, rather too loudly, ‘or must we say Iranian now?’
They played two sonatas. The third Beethoven one and the one by Rachmaninov and, for an encore, Carla Gold returned to the stage alone and finally spoke. Her voice was warm and lightly accented.
‘Told you,’ his father told his mother, again too loudly. ‘She was born Goldberg or Goldstein. They often do that.’ His mother shushed him and he laughed, nudging Eustace so they could be boys together, united against the impossible woman with whom they lived.
