Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asks me gruffly.

  ‘Just killing time until the play,’ I mumble through a mouthful of cake. (‘Oh dearie me, don’t do that,’ Mrs Baxter murmurs.)

  Mr Baxter sits down, rather abruptly, on the grass next to where I’m sprawled in a deck-chair, exposing his thin, hairy legs above his grey socks. He’s out of place in Arcadia, he prefers sitting on straight-backed chairs and watching parallel lines of desks stretching towards infinity. ‘There’s greenfly on the rose,’ he says to Mrs Baxter in a tone that’s suggestive of moral improbity rather than pest infestation. ‘You’re going to have to spray it.’ Mrs Baxter hates spraying things. She never flattens spiders or bashes wasps or cracks! fleas, even house-flies are allowed to buzz freely around Sithean when Mr Baxter’s back is turned. Mrs Baxter has an agreement with creeping and flying things, she doesn’t kill them if they don’t kill her.

  Mr Baxter’s smell rises up on a current of warm air towards me – shaving-cream and Old Holborn – and I try not to inhale.

  ‘I spy with my little eye,’ Mrs Baxter says hopefully, ‘something beginning with “T”,’ and Mr Baxter shouts, ‘For God’s sake, Moira, can I get a bit of peace, please?’ so that we don’t find out what the “T” is. Perhaps it’s Theseus, even now striding across the field under the harsh suburban sunshine to exclaim that his nuptial hour is drawing on apace. ‘Oh, they’ve started!’ Mrs Baxter says excitedly, ‘I must go and fetch Audrey.’

  The play’s the thing, but in this case a very bad thing and I shall draw a non-existent curtain over the Lythe Players’ version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is comic where it should be lyrical, tedious where it should be comic and there is not even the slightest speck of magic in it. Mr Primrose, playing Bottom, could not be a rude mechanical if he rehearsed until the crack of doom and the girl pretending to be Titania, Janice Richardson who works in the Post Office on Ash Street, is fat with a squeaky voice. (But who knows, perhaps that’s what fairies are like.)

  Debbie comes home ashen-faced and at first I think this is on account of her dreadful performance – she may as well have handed the part over to the prompt – but she whispers to me over a mug of Bournvita, ‘The wood.’

  ‘The wood?’

  ‘The wood, the wood,’ she repeats, like Poe trying to write a poem, ‘in the play,’ she hisses, ‘Midsummer what’sits?’

  ‘Yes?’ I say patiently.

  ‘My thingie.’

  ‘Character?’

  ‘Yes, my character gets lost in the wood, doesn’t she?’ (The Lady Oak has heroically stood in for a thousand trees for the Players.)

  ‘Yes?’

  Debbie looks round the kitchen, a weird expression on her face, she seems to be having a lot of difficulty putting her thoughts into words.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  She drops her voice so low that I can hardly hear her, ‘I was in a wood, for real, I was lost in a bloody great forest. For hours,’ she adds and begins to cry. I think she’s been too much in the sun. Shall I tell her about the ginnels and snickets and vennels of time? No, I don’t think so. ‘Perhaps you should see a psychiatrist?’ I suggest gently and she runs out of the room in horror.

  So there we have it. We are both as mad as tea-party hatters.

  It’s late, Midsummer’s Eve has nearly given way to Midsummer’s Day. Not a mouse stirs in the house. I draw a glass of water from the kitchen tap; tap water always tastes slightly brackish in Arden as if there’s something slowly rotting in the cistern.

  The kitchen feels as if someone’s just walked out of it. I stand on the back doorstep and sip the water. My skin feels warm from the heat it’s soaked up in Mrs Baxter’s garden. I can smell the warmth still rising from the soil and the bitter-green scent of nettles. A thin paring of yellow moon has made a sickle-split in the sky and a star hangs on its bottom cusp, a rich jewel on the cheek of night.

  I miss my mother. The ache that is Eliza comes out of nowhere, squeezing my heart and leaving me bereft. This is how she affects me – I’ll be crossing the road, queuing for a bus, standing in a shop and suddenly, for no discernible reason, I want my mother so badly that I can’t speak for tears. Where is she? Why doesn’t she come?

  The clock on the Lythe Church chimes the witching hour. Caw. A shuffling of feathers and leaves from the Lady Oak.

  Under my feet moles mine and worms tunnel unseen. A bat flits through the ocean of darkness. Somewhere, far away, a dog howls and something moves, the black shape of a figure walking across the field. I could swear it has no head. But when I look again, it’s disappeared.

  PAST

  HALF-DAY CLOSING

  Charlotte and Leonard Fairfax, pillars of the community, although Leonard soon a broken pillar, dead of a stroke in 1925 and robbed of the chance to enjoy his fine new house on the streets of trees.

  Charlotte took over the business as if she had licensed grocery in her blood rather than enamelware. Charlotte, the Fairfax matriarch, embracing her widowhood with such Victorian vigour that she was known by all and sundry as the Widow Fairfax.

  The Widow liked her fine house, the finest of them all on the streets of trees. It had five bedrooms, a downstairs cloakroom, a butler’s pantry and airy attic rooms with fancy gables, in one of which the Widow kept Vera, her domestic drudge. Vera had an excellent view from her window of the Lady Oak, and beyond that to the haze of hills that looked like the work of a good watercolourist and, just visible in the distance, the dark green smudge that was Boscrambe Woods.

  The Widow liked her big garden with its fruit trees and bushes, she liked the long drive at the front with its pink gravel chips and she liked the pretty wrought-iron and glass conservatory at the back which the master-builder had added as an afterthought and where the Widow kept her cacti.

  The Widow had nice things. The Widow had things nice (people said). She had blue and white Delft bowls filled with hyacinths in the spring and poinsettias in her Satsuma ware at Christmas. She had good Indian carpets on her oak parquet and raw silk covers on cushions that were braided and tasselled like something from a sultan’s divan. And in the living-room she had a chandelier, small, George the Third, with ropes of glass beads and big pear-drop crystals like a giant’s tears.

  Madge had escaped long ago by marrying an adulterous bank clerk in Mirfield and producing another three children.

  Vinny looked as if she dined only on hard crusts and dry bones and was as sour as the malt vinegar that she dispensed by the pint from the stoneware flagon at the back. Vinegary Vinny, as old as the century but not quite as war-torn, born an old maid, but none the less married briefly after the First World War to a Mr Fitzgerald – a non-combatant chartered librarian with manic depressive tendencies – a man considerably older than his spinsterish wife. Vinny’s feelings about Mr Fitzgerald’s death (of pneumonia in 1926) were never entirely clear, although, as she confided to Madge, there was a certain relief in being released from the duties of married love. Vinny remained, however, in the small marital home which she had briefly shared with Mr Fitzgerald in Willow Road.

  This at least, was her own domain, unlike the licensed grocery which her mother ran with a hand of iron and in which she was relegated to the role of mere shop assistant. ‘I could be as good a businesswoman as Mother if she would let me,’ she wrote to Madge-in-Mirfield, ‘but she never gives me any responsibility.’ The business was destined to be Gordon’s and as soon as he finished school the Widow made him wrap himself up in a white grocer’s apron and was very annoyed when he sneaked out of the house at night to go to classes at the technical institute in Glebelands. ‘Everything he needs to know is right here,’ the Widow said, pointing to the middle of her forehead as if it were a bull’s-eye. Uncomfortable in his grocer’s apron, Gordon stood behind the polished mahogany counter looking like he might be living a quite different life inside his head.

  Then another war came and changed everything. Gordon became a hero, flying through the blue sky above E
ngland in his Spitfire. The Widow was excessively proud of her fighter-pilot son. ‘Apple of her eye,’ Vinny wrote to Madge-in-Mirfield. ‘Blue-eyed boy,’ Madge-in-Mirfield wrote back. Gordon was not blue-eyed. He was green-eyed and handsome.

  Eliza was a mystery. Nobody knew where she came from, although she claimed it was Hampstead. She said Hempstid the way royalty might. She indicated, although not in a way you could pin down for certain, that there was blue blood, if not money, somewhere. ‘The ruddy silver spoon’s still in her mouth,’ Madge said to Vinny when they first met Eliza. Her accent was odd, very out of place in Arden with its nicely buffed-up northern vowels. Eliza sounded stranded somewhere between a very expensive boarding-school and a brothel (or to put it another way, upper-class).

  The first time that any of Gordon’s family met the not-so-blushing bride was at the wedding. The Widow had been hoping for a nice quiet wife for her baby boy – drab with brown hair and an ability to budget. A girl who hadn’t been too educated and with ambitions that stretched no further than a local public school for the clutch of Fairfax grandchildren that she would produce. Whereas Eliza was a – ‘Vamp?’ Madge supplied eagerly.

  For her wedding, Eliza – as slender as a willow, as straight as a Douglas fir (pseudotsuga menziesii) – wore a navy-blue suit with a tiny pinched-in waist, with a white gardenia in her buttonhole and a little black hat made of feathers, like a ballerina’s headband. The bad black swan. No bouquet, just crimson fingernails. The Widow gave a not-so-discreet little shudder of horror.

  With her long steel-wool hair wired back in a bun, she looked like a Sicilian Widow rather than an English one. Her feelings about the wedding might be deduced from the fact that she had chosen to dress in black from top to toe. She watched intently as Gordon (‘my baby!’) slipped the wedding ring on to the finger of this peculiar creature. You would almost think she was trying to will Eliza’s finger to drop off.

  There was something odd about Eliza, they were all agreed, even Gordon, although what it was no-one could quite say. Standing behind her in the register office, Madge experienced a convulsion of envy as she noticed how thin Eliza’s ankles were beneath her unpatriotically long skirt. Like bird-bones. Vinny wanted to snap them. And her neck like a stalk. Snap.

  The Widow had insisted on paying for the reception at the Regency Hotel in case anyone thought that the Fairfaxes couldn’t afford a proper wedding. It was clear that no-one on Eliza’s side was going to turn up, let alone pay. Eliza, apparently, had nobody. They’re all dead, darling, she murmured, her dark eyes tragic with unshed tears. The same tragedy seemed to have infected her voice, throaty with notes of whisky, nicotine, velvet. She was Gordon’s treasure, found accidentally, Gordon plucking her from the wreckage of a bombed building in London when he was there on leave, even going back to retrieve her missing shoe (they were so expensive, darling).

  My hero, she smiled as he placed her gently on the pavement. My hero, she said and Gordon was lost, drowning in her whisky eyes. The age of chivalry, bomb-dusted Eliza murmured, is alive and well. And is called?

  ‘Gordon, Gordon Fairfax.’

  Wonderful.

  ‘Bit of a rush do, eh?’ Madge’s bank clerk husband winked, at no-one in particular, and Eliza swooped on him from nowhere and said, Darling, are we really family now? So hard to believe, and he retreated under a cascade of Hempstid vowels. ‘Hoity-toity, that one,’ Vinny said to Madge.

  Eliza had dark, dark hair. Glossy and curly. Black as a crow, a rook, a raven. ‘A bit of the tarbrush?’ Vinny mouthed across the wedding cake to Madge. Madge semaphored amazement with her sherry glass and mouthed back, ‘Wop?’ Eliza, who could lip-read at a hundred paces, thought her new sisters-in-law looked like fish. Cod and Halibut. ‘Plummy,’ said Vinny dismissively to Madge over the sherry-toast to bride and bridegroom. ‘Fruity,’ said Madge’s husband, raising a lecherous eyebrow.

  Really, Eliza said to the bridegroom, anyone would think I was a piece of wedding cake, and Gordon thought that he’d like to eat her up. Every last crumb, so that no-one else could ever have her. What wedding cake? grumbled the Widow, for this was a wartime cake made with prewar dates found at the back of the licensed grocery’s store-room. A hasty affair, ‘an expensive do,’ the Widow said to her fish daughters, ‘for a cheap you-know-what.’ Why have they married so quickly? ‘Something fishy,’ said Vinny-the-Halibut. ‘Suspicious,’ said the Widow. ‘Highly,’ said Madge-the-Cod.

  Do they know Queen Victoria’s dead? Eliza asked her new husband. ‘Probably not,’ he laughed, but nervously. The Widow and Vinny lived in the Dark Ages. And they liked it there. Eliza said she couldn’t decide which would be worse, to be Vinny in Willow Road or to be Madge-in-Mirfield. She laughed loudly when she said this and everyone turned to stare at her.

  Charles was born on a train, an event due to the capriciousness of Eliza who decided she needed an outing to the Bradford Alhambra when any normal woman in her condition would be sitting at home with her feet up, resting her piles and her varicose veins.

  ‘Premature,’ the Widow said, warily cradling tiny Charles in her arms. ‘But healthy, thank goodness.’ Softened, momentarily, by grandmotherhood, she attempted a smile in the direction of Eliza. Vinny inspected Bradford from the ward window. She’d never been this far from home.

  ‘And big,’ the Widow added, admiring and sarcastic and moved – all at the same uncomfortable time. ‘Just think,’ she said to Eliza, her eyes narrowing as the sarcastic won the battle, ‘what he would have been like if he’d gone the full nine months.’

  Oh please – don’t! Eliza said, shivering theatrically and lighting up a cigarette.

  ‘A honeymoon baby,’ the Widow said speculatively, as she stroked the baby’s cheek. (‘Whose honeymoon though? Eh?’ Vinny wrote to Madge-in-Mirfield.) ‘I wonder who he looks like?’ Vinny wrote to Gordon. ‘He certainly doesn’t look like you, Gordon!’ No-one had more artificial exclamation marks than Vinny! (No-one had written so many letters since the decline of the epistolary novel.)

  He’s an absolute cherub, Eliza said and, Oh God, I’d give anything for a gin, darling.

  Charles’ arrival even made the papers –

  GLEBELANDS BABY BORN ON TRAIN

  the Glebelands Evening Gazette wrote possessively. That was how the Widow found out about her grandson, Eliza having neglected to send a message from the hospital where she was taken when the train finally pulled into the station. ‘Trust her to make the headlines,’ snapdragon Vinny sniffed.

  Born on a train. People falling over themselves to help, the guard upgrading her to First so she had more room to grunt and groan (which she did in a very ladylike way, everyone agreed), the guard thinking that the way she said Darling, you’re an angel showed she was a First Class type anyway. It was difficult to know what to put on Charles’ birth certificate. He was a philosophical conundrum, like Zeno’s arrow, a paradox on the space-time continuum. ‘Where would you say he was born?’ Gordon asked, when he was next home on leave. Why, First Class, darling, Eliza replied.

  Charles, sadly, was rather ugly. ‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ declared the Widow, the mistress of the baffling cliché.

  Eliza, however (naturally, being his mother), declared that he was the most beautiful baby that ever existed. Charlie is ma darlin, she sang softly to a nursing Charles, who stopped the suck-and-tug at her breast long enough to smile a gummy smile up at her. ‘What a smiley baby,’ the Widow said, unsure whether this was a good or a bad thing. Eliza bounced Charles on her lap and kissed the back of his neck. Vinny unclamped her lips long enough to say, ‘He’ll be spoilt.’ How wonderful for him, Eliza said.

  Gordon came home on leave at last and met his son, by now freckled like a giraffe and with a carrot-coloured tuft of hair sprouting from the middle of his large, bald head. ‘Red hair!’ Vinny said gleefully to Gordon. ‘I wonder where he got that from?’

  ‘He’s a sturdy little chap, isn’t he?’ Gordon said, ignoring his sister. He had al
ready fallen in love with his red-haired son. ‘He doesn’t look a bit like you,’ Vinny persisted, as Gordon carried Charles around the house on his shoulders. ‘He doesn’t look like Eliza either,’ Gordon said and that much, certainly, was true.

  Then Gordon had to go and fly through the greyer skies of Europe. ‘You would think’, Vinny sneered, ‘that he was fighting the Luftwaffe single-handed.’ ‘Nerves of steel,’ the Widow said. A man of iron. Heart of gold, said Eliza and laughed her bubbling, rather frightening laugh. Before the end of his leave Gordon had managed to get another baby started (an accident, darling!).

  ‘You’ll keep an eye on Eliza, won’t you?’ Gordon said to his mother before he left. ‘How can I not?’ she said, her syntax as stiff as her back. ‘She’s under the same roof, after all.’ In the bathroom, damp and steamy, the Widow had to brush through a forest of Eliza’s stockings hanging everywhere and wondered how this could be part of her duty. And another thing, the Widow thought, how did she get these stockings? Eliza was never short of anything – stockings, perfume, chocolate – what was she doing to get them? That’s what the Widow would like to know.

  ‘At least this child won’t be born on the move,’ the Widow said to Eliza. The Widow was worried that Eliza might be thinking about the Turkish Baths in Harrogate or a day-trip to Leeds. Eliza smiled enigmatically. ‘Bloody Mona Lisa,’ Vinny said out loud to herself as she smoked cigarettes for her lunch at the back of the licensed grocery.

  Eliza drifted into the shop, as pregnant as a full-blown sail. She sat on the bentwood chair reserved for weary customers next to the huge red, gold and black tea-caddies with their faded paintings of Japanese ladies, big enough to hide a small child in. Eliza pulled Charles on her knee and sucked his fingers, one by one. Vinny twitched with disgust. He makes me laugh, she said, and as if to prove it she laughed her ridiculous laugh. A lot of things made Eliza laugh and not many of them seemed very funny to the Widow and Vinny.