Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  Francis Fairfax fulfilled the requirements of a cursed man – burning to death in his own bed in 1605 along with most of his household. William, his son, was rescued by servants and grew up to be a sickly kind of boy, hanging on to life just long enough to father his likeness.

  The Fairfaxes abandoned the charred remains of Fairfax Manor and moved to Glebelands where their fortunes declined. Fairfax Manor crumbled to dust in the air, the fine parkland reverted to nature and within a handful of years you would never have known it had ever been there.

  Over the next hundred years the land was parcelled up and sold at auction. An eighteenth-century Fairfax, Thomas, lost the last of the land in the South Sea Bubble and the Fairfaxes were all but forgotten – except for Lady Mary who was occasionally sighted, dressed all in green, disconsolate and gloomy, and occasionally with her head under her arm for good effect.

  The forest itself was gradually removed, the last of it taken during the Napoleonic War for fighting ships. By the time the nineteenth century really got going, all that remained of the once great Forest of Lythe was a large wood known as Boscrambe Woods, thirty miles to the north of Glebelands and – just beyond the boundaries of Lythe – the Lady Oak itself.

  By 1840 Glebelands was a great manufacturing town whose engines thrummed and throbbed and whose chimneys smoked dark clouds of uncertain chemicals into the sky over its crowded slum streets. The owner of one of these factories, Samuel Fairfax, philanthropist and manufacturer of Argand gas burners, briefly revived the family fortunes with his mission to illuminate the entire town with gas lamps.

  The Fairfaxes were able to buy a large town house with all the trimmings – servants and a coach and accounts in every shop. The Fairfax women wore dresses of French velvet and Nottingham lace and talked nonsense all day long while Samuel Fairfax dreamed of buying back the tract of land where Fairfax Manor once stood and making a country park where the people of Glebelands could clean their sooty lungs and exercise their rickety limbs. He was hoping that this would be his living memorial – Fairfax Park, he murmured happily as he looked over possible designs for the massive wrought-iron entrance gates and just as he pointed to a particularly rococo pattern (‘Restoration’) his heart stopped beating and he fell face first on to the pattern book. The park was never built.

  Gas lamps were overtaken by electric ones, the Fairfaxes failed to see the new technology coming and grew slowly poorer until, in 1880, one Joseph Fairfax, grandson to Samuel, realized where the future lay and put the remaining family money into retail – a small grocery shop in a side street. The business gradually prospered, and ten years later ‘Fairfax and Son – Licensed Grocers’ moved into the High Street.

  Joseph Fairfax had one son and no daughters. The son, Leonard, wooed and won a girl called Charlotte Tait, the daughter of the owner of a small enamelware factory. The Taits were of stern Nonconformist stock and Charlotte was not above lending a hand in the shop when required, although she soon fell pregnant with her eldest child, an ugly girl named Madge.

  The villagers of Lythe meanwhile waited for Glebelands to crawl across the remaining few fields towards them and swallow them up. While they were waiting a war happened and took three-quarters of the young men of Lythe (three to be precise) and as the war drew to a close no-one cared very much when most of the village, along with the land where Fairfax Manor had stood, was sold to a local builder.

  The builder, a man called Maurice Smith, had a vision, the dream of a master-builder – a garden suburb, an estate of modern, comfortable housing for the postwar, post-servant world of small families. Streets of detached and semi-detached houses with neat front gardens and large back gardens where children could play, Father could grow vegetables and roses and Mother could park Baby in his pram and take afternoon tea on the lawn with her genteel friends. On the land that once housed Sir Francis and his household, Maurice Smith built his streets of houses. Houses in mock-Tudor and pebble-dash stucco, houses with casement windows and porches and tiled vestibules. Houses with three and four bedrooms and the most up-to-date plumbing, porcelain sinks and efficient back boilers; cool, airy larders, and enamelled gas cookers.

  Streets with broad pavements and trees, lots of trees – a canopy of trees over the tarmac, a mantle of green around the houses and their happy occupants. Trees that would give pleasure, that could be observed in bud and new leaf, unfurling their green fingers on the streets of houses, raising their sheltering leafy arms over the dwellers within. Different trees for every street – Ash Street, Chestnut Avenue, Holly Tree Lane, Hawthorn Close, Oak Road, Laurel Bank, Rowan Street, Sycamore Street, Willow Road. The forest of trees had become a wilderness of streets.

  But at night, in the quiet of the dead time, if you listened carefully, you could imagine the wolves howling.

  The Lady Oak grew on, solitary and ancient, in the field behind the dog-leg of Hawthorn Close and Chestnut Avenue. Points of weakness in the tree had been plugged with cement and old iron crutches propped up its weary limbs but in summer its leafy crown was still green and thick enough for a rookery and at dusk the birds flew caw cawing into its welcoming branches.

  At the end of Hawthorn Close was the master-builder’s first house – Arden – the one he built as his showpiece, on the long-lost foundations of Fairfax Manor. Arden had fine parquet floors and light-oak panelling. It had a craftsman-built oak staircase with acorn finials and its turret follies were capped with round blue Welsh slates, overlapping like a dragon’s scales.

  The master-builder had intended the house for himself but Leonard Fairfax offered him such a good price that he couldn’t bring himself to refuse. And so the Fairfax family returned, unwittingly, to its ancestral abode.

  Charlotte Fairfax had given birth (difficult though it was to imagine this) to two more children after Madge, in order – Vinny (Lavinia) and Gordon (‘my baby!’). Gordon was much younger, an afterthought (‘my surprise!’). When they moved into Arden, Madge had already left to marry an adulterous bank clerk and moved to Mirfield and Vinny was a grown woman of twenty, but Gordon was still a little boy. Gordon had introduced Charlotte to a new emotion. At night she would creep into his new little room under the eaves and gaze at his sleeping face in the soft halo of the nightlight and surprise herself with the overwhelming love she felt for him.

  But time has already begun to fly, soon Eliza will come and ruin everything. Eliza will be my mother. I am Isobel Fairfax, I am the alpha and omega of narrators (I am omniscient) and I know the beginning and the end. The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories. This is one of mine.

  PRESENT

  SOMETHING WEIRD

  Is-o-bel. A peal of bells. Isabella Tarantella – a mad dance. I am mad, therefore I am. Mad. Am I? Belle, Bella, Best, never let it rest. Bella Belle, doubly foreign for beautiful, but I’m not foreign. Am I beautiful? No, apparently not.

  My human geography is extraordinary. I’m as large as England. My hands are as big as the Lakes, my belly the size of Dartmoor and my breasts rise up like the Peaks. My spine is the Pennines, my mouth the Mallyan Spout. My hair flows into the Humber estuary and causes it to flood and my nose is a white cliff at Dover. I’m a big girl, in other words.

  There’s a strange feeling on the streets of trees, although what it is exactly I wouldn’t like to say. I’m lying in my bed staring up at my attic window which is full of nothing but early morning sky, a blank blue page, an uncharted day waiting to be filled. It’s the first day of April and it’s my birthday, my sixteenth – the mythic one, the legendary one. The traditional age for spindles to start pricking and suitors to come calling and a host of other symbolic sexual imagery to suddenly manifest itself, but I haven’t even been kissed by a man yet, not unless you count my father, Gordon, who leaves his sad, paternal kisses on my cheek like unsettling little insects.

  My birthday has been heralded by something weird – a kind of odoriferous spirit (dumb and invisible) that’s attached itself to
me like an aromatic shadow. At first I mistook it for nothing more than the scent of wet hawthorn. On its own this is a sad enough perfume, but the hawthorn has brought with it a strange musty smell that isn’t confined to Hawthorn Close but follows me everywhere I go. It walks down the street with me and accompanies me into other people’s houses (and then leaves again with me, there’s no shaking it off). It floats along the school corridors with me and sits next to me on buses – and the seat remains empty no matter how crowded the bus gets.

  It’s the fragrance of last year’s apples and the smell of the insides of very old books with a base note of dead, wet rose-petals. It’s the distillation of loneliness, an incredibly sad smell, the essence of sorrowfulness and stoppered-up sighs. If it were a commercial perfume it would never sell. Imagine people being offered testers at brightly lit perfume counters, ‘Have you tried Melancholy, madam?’ and then spending the rest of the day with the uncomfortable feeling that someone has placed a cold pebble of misery in their stomachs.

  ‘There, next to my left shoulder,’ I tell Audrey (my friend), and Audrey breathes deeply, and says, ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Audrey (also my next-door neighbour) shakes her head. Charles (my brother) makes a ridiculous snout and snuffs like a truffling pig. ‘No, you’re imagining it,’ he says and turns away quickly to hide his suddenly sad-dog face.

  Poor Charles, he is two years older than me but I’m already six inches taller than him. I am nearly two yards high in my bare feet. A gigantic English oak (quercus robustus). My body a trunk, my feet taproots, my toes probing like pale little moles through the dark soil. My head a crown of leaves growing towards the light. What if this keeps up? I’ll shoot up through the troposphere, the stratosphere and up into the vastness of space where I’ll be able to wear a coronet made from the Pleiades, a shawl spun out of the Milky Way. Dearie, dearie me, as Mrs Baxter (Audrey’s mother) would say.

  I’m already five foot ten, growing at more than an inch a year – if this does keep up then by the time I’m twenty I’ll be over six foot. ‘By the time I’m forty,’ I count on my fingers, ‘I’ll be nearly eight feet tall.’

  ‘Dearie me,’ Mrs Baxter says, frowning as she tries to imagine this.

  ‘By the time I’m seventy,’ I calculate darkly, ‘I’ll be over eleven feet high. I’ll be a fairground attraction.’ The Giant Girl of Glebelands. ‘You’re a real woman now,’ Mrs Baxter says, surveying my skyscraper statistics. But as opposed to what? An unreal woman? My mother (Eliza) is an unreal woman, gone and almost forgotten, slipping the bonds of reality the day she walked off into a wood and never came back.

  ‘You’re a big girl,’ Mr Rice (the lodger) ogles me nastily as we squeeze past each other in the dining-room door. Mr Rice is a travelling salesman and we must hope that some day soon he will wake up and find that he’s been transformed into a giant insect.

  It’s a shame that Charles has stuck at such an unheroic height. He claims that he used to be five foot five but that the last time he measured himself, which he does frequently, he was only five foot four. ‘I’m shrinking,’ he reports miserably. Perhaps he is shrinking, while I keep on growing (there’s no stopping me). Perhaps we’re bound together by some weird law of sibling physics, the two ends of a linear elastic universe where one must shrink as the other expands. ‘He’s a real short-arse,’ Vinny (our aunt) says, more succinctly.

  Charles is as ugly as a storybook dwarf. His arms are too long for his barrel-shaped body, his neck too short for his big head, an overgrown homunculus. Sadly, his (once lovely) copper curls have turned red and wiry and his freckled face is now as pocked and cratered as a lifeless planet, while his big Adam’s apple bobs up and down like a Cox’s Orange Pippin at Hallowe’en. It’s a shame I can’t transplant some of my inches, I have far more than I need, after all.

  Girls are not attracted to Charles and so far he hasn’t managed to persuade a single one to go out with him. ‘I’ll probably die a virgin,’ he says mournfully. Poor Charles, he too has never been kissed. One solution, I suppose, would be for us to kiss each other, but the idea of incest – though quite attractive in Jacobean tragedy – is less so on the home front. ‘I mean, incest,’ I say to Audrey, ‘it’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’ she says, her sad doves’ eyes staring at some point in space so that she looks like a saint about to be martyred. She is also one of the unkissed – her father, Mr Baxter (the local primary school headmaster), won’t let a boy anywhere near Audrey. Mr Baxter, despite Mrs Baxter’s protestations, has decided that Audrey isn’t ever going to grow up. If Audrey does develop womanly curves and wiles then Mr Baxter will probably lock her at the top of a very high tower. And if boys ever start noticing those womanly curves and wiles then it’s a fair bet that Mr Baxter will kill them, picking them off one by one as they attempt to scale the heights of Sithean’s privet and shin up the long golden-red rope of Audrey’s beautiful hair.

  ‘Sithean’ is the name of the Baxters’ house. ‘She-ann’, Mrs Baxter explains in her lovely douce accent, is a Scottish word. Mrs Baxter was once the daughter of a Church of Scotland minister and was brought up in Perthshire (‘Pairrrthshiyer’) which accounts no doubt for her accent. Mrs Baxter is as nice as her accent and Mr Baxter is as nasty as the thin dark moustache which outlines his upper lip and as bad-tempered as the foul pipe he smokes, or ‘a reeking lum’ in Mrs Baxter’s parlance.

  Tall and gaunt, Mr Baxter is the son of a coal miner and still carries a seam of coal in his voice, despite his tortoiseshell glasses and his tweed jackets with leather-patched elbows. It’s very difficult to say how old he is without knowing. Mrs Baxter knows how old he is though, she’d be hard put to forget as Mr Baxter makes a point of reminding her often (‘Remember, Moira – I am older than you and I do know more’). Both Audrey and Mrs Baxter call Mr Baxter ‘Daddy’. When she was a pupil in his class, Audrey had to call him ‘Mr Baxter’ and if she ever forgot and called him ‘Daddy’, he would make her stand at the front of the class for the rest of the lesson. Neither of them calls him ‘Peter’ which is his name.

  Poor Charles. I’m convinced things would be better for him if he could be taller. ‘Why – it isn’t for you, is it?’ he replies testily. Sometimes I catch myself thinking impossible things – like, if we still had our mother then Charles would be taller.

  ‘Was our mother tall?’ Charles asks Vinny. Vinny – as old as the century (sixty) but not as optimistic. Our Aunt Vinny is our father’s sister, not our mother’s. Our mother had no relatives apparently – although she must have had them once, unless she hatched from an egg like Helen of Troy, and even then, Leda must have sat on the nest, surely? Our father, Gordon, is tall, ‘but Eliza?’ Vinny screws up her face in a theatrical attempt to remember, but sees only a blur. The different features can be dredged up – the black hair, the tilted nose, the thin ankles – but the composite Eliza lacks all substance. ‘Can’t remember,’ she says dismissively, as usual.

  ‘I think she was very tall,’ Charles says, forgetting perhaps how very small he was last time we saw her. ‘Are you sure she wasn’t red-headed?’ he adds hopefully.

  ‘Nobody was red-headed,’ Vinny says decisively.

  ‘Somebody must have been.’

  Absence of Eliza has shaped our lives. She walked away, ‘up sticks and left with her fancy man’ as Vinny puts it, and for some reason forgot to take us with her. Perhaps it was a fit of absent-mindedness, perhaps she meant to come back but couldn’t find the way. Stranger things have happened; our own father for example, himself went missing after our mother disappeared and when he came back seven years later claimed amnesia as his excuse. ‘Time off for bad behaviour,’ vinegary Vinny explains cryptically.

  We have waited nearly all our lives for the sound of her foot on the path, her key in the door, waited for her walking back into our lives (I’m home, darling!) as if nothing has happened. It wouldn’t be the first time. ‘Anna Fellows from
Cambridge, Massachusetts,’ Charles reports (he is an expert on such things), ‘left her house in 1879 and walked back in again twenty years later as if nothing had happened.’

  If my mother was going to come back wouldn’t she come back in time (as it were) for my sixteenth birthday?

  It’s as if Eliza never lived, there are no remnants of her life – no photographs, no letters, no keepsakes – the things that anchor people in reality are all missing. Memories of her are like the shadows of a dream, tantalizing and out of reach. With Gordon, ‘our dad’, the one person whom you might expect to remember Eliza best, there’s no conversation to be had at all, the subject makes him mute.

  ‘She must have been off her head (or ‘aff her heid’) to leave two such bonny children,’ Mrs Baxter opines gently. (All children are bonny to Mrs Baxter.) Vinny verifies, frequently, that our mother was indeed ‘off her head’. As opposed to ‘on her head’? But then if she was on her head she would be upside down – and therefore also mad, surely? Perhaps ‘off her head’ as in no longer being attached to her head? Perhaps she is dead and wandering around on the astral plane with her head tucked underneath her arm like a music-hall ghost, exchanging pleasantries with the Green Lady.

  If only we had some maternal souvenirs, some evidence to prove she once existed – a scrap of her handwriting, say. How we would pore over the dullest, most prosaic of messages – See you at lunchtime! or Don’t forget to buy bread – trying to decipher her personality, her overwhelming love for her children, searching for the cryptically encoded message that would explain why she had to leave. But she’s left behind not a single letter of the alphabet for us from which we can reconstruct her and we have to make her up from emptiness and airy spaces and wind on water.