Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  They flee from me that sometime did me seek

  and

  With naked foot stalking in my chamber.

  Who did she see? My self from the parallel world or my doppelgänger in this world? (‘A doubler?’ Mrs Baxter puzzles.) A figment of my own Capgras’s Syndrome? We know who we are, but not who we may be. Maybe. Maybe not.

  ‘On another planet are you, Isobel?’ Debbie asks sharply.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say absently. Debbie is still rattling off a list of names – ‘Mandy, Crystal, Kirsty, Patty – oh God, I don’t know, you have a go,’ she says wearily. The baby (mute for once) gazes at me as if I am indeed a complete stranger, perhaps Capgras’s Syndrome is infectious. I look deep into its vague eyes, cloudy with doubt, a little red-gold floss of hair has appeared on the top of its head.

  ‘Fontanelle,’ Debbie says. I’ve never heard that name before. ‘It’s not a name, silly,’ Debbie says, smug in her knowledge of neo-natal anatomy, ‘it’s the name of that soft spot on the skull [beneath the red-gold floss] where the bones of the skull haven’t closed up yet.’ I think of boiled eggs with the tops scooped off.

  ‘I suppose you have to be careful not to drop it on that bit then?’

  ‘You have to be careful not to drop it, period,’ Debbie says sternly.

  I don’t know – I can’t imagine what to call it. Perdita perhaps.

  ‘Do you want a lift?’ Malcolm Lovat (home for the holidays) asks, encountering me walking home through town after school. Eunice has a chess match and absent Audrey supposedly has flu again. I have to speak to Audrey.

  ‘A lift?’ I repeat, feeling suddenly faint from hunger.

  ‘In my car,’ he says, waving his car keys in front of my face as if to prove it isn’t a sedan chair or a donkey-cart that he’s trying to inveigle me into.

  ‘Your car?’ I must stop repeating everything he says.

  ‘My dad’s just bought it,’ he says in an inappropriately miserable way.

  ‘Bought it?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking of dropping out of medicine,’ he says, opening the car door for me, ‘the car’s a bribe to keep me at Guy’s.’

  A pretty good bribe in my books. I’d stay at medical school if somebody bought me a car. Not that I’d ever get in to medical school. (‘Do they have science or reason or logic’, Miss Thompsett asks sarcastically, ‘where you come from, Isobel?’ Where would that be? Illogical Illyria, the planet of unreason.)

  ‘And might you? Drop out?’

  Malcolm sighs and starts the car engine. ‘Sometimes I think I’d like to – you know, just take off and disappear?’ Why does everyone except Debbie want to disappear? Perhaps we should encourage Gordon to take up magic again – practise the vanishing trick on Debbie, or better still saw her in half.

  ‘Everyone seems to have my life mapped out for me,’ Malcolm says while I root around in the glove compartment for something to eat. Not even a mis-shapen mint. ‘Do you want to go home?’ he asks as we stop at a set of traffic lights.

  ‘Not really,’ I answer vaguely, in case he has something better to offer (East of the Sun, West of the Moon).

  ‘You could come to the hospital with me, I’m going to visit my mother.’

  ‘That would be lovely.’ As far as I’m concerned, as long as I’m with Malcolm we could go and visit a morgue, or a crypt, or the pits of hell.

  ‘Cancer,’ Malcolm says as we drive into the hospital car-park. ‘It’s been incredibly rapid, it’s eating her up.’ I was just daydreaming about him flinging me on to a four-poster bed and telling me how beautiful I am compared with Hilary so the word eating suddenly jars horribly in my head.

  ‘How awful.’ I wonder if he’s brought any chocolates or grapes.

  In the absence of chairs, we stand like awkward bookends by Mrs Lovat’s pillow. Her head’s the only part of her visible, a bit like a character from Beckett and her hair looks like a collection of well-used Brillo pads. ‘Hello,’ Malcolm says, bending over and kissing her gently on the cheek. She bats him away with her hand as if he’s a large fly. She seems to have swallowed a couple of the Brillo pads judging by the sound of her – more of a rasping kind of bark than a dulcet dying tone. But then she is an ogress, so what do you expect, and, after all, I remind myself, she is dying.

  ‘Who’s this?’ she croaks. ‘Come here, come closer, is this Hilary?’ and she grabs my arms with her claw and yanks me nearer with a strength you wouldn’t expect from someone at death’s door.

  She doesn’t recognize me at all (‘Well, of course not!’ Mrs Baxter exclaims. ‘You used to be an ugly duckling and now you’re a—’ She hesitates.

  ‘A beautiful swan,’ I prompt her. But we all know what ugly ducklings grow up into. Ugly ducks.) ‘I thought you said she was pretty?’ Mrs Lovat says accusingly to Malcolm and then sighs and says, ‘I suppose she’ll have to do.’ For what? Some kind of maiden sacrifice to restore Mrs Lovat to health? But no, for she appears to be bequeathing me her son on her death-bed – ‘Take him,’ she says carelessly, from somewhere inside the crisp white sheets of the hospital-bed. ‘Look after him for me, Hilary, someone has to.’

  I laugh nervously and begin to explain that I am not Hilary – the cancer has obviously begun to nibble her brain by now – but then it strikes me that I quite like deputizing for Princess Hilary so I close my mouth and instead stare at the shape of Mrs Lovat’s body under the pale-blue hospital counterpane. Perhaps she’ll conjure up a priest from inside the bedclothes and marry us so that when Malcolm finally realizes I am not Hilary it will be too late.

  Mrs Lovat seems quite big for someone who’s being eaten up, although if you look closely you can see that there isn’t actually a definite outline of legs. That would be a strange thing, wouldn’t it, if diseases started at the feet and ate their way upward? I suppose the head would get pretty vociferous as time went on.

  It seems churlish to upset a dying woman – none the less it is a little presumptuous of his mother (if not unnatural) to be handing him over so eagerly to the first person she sees. And although I want him, do I really want to look after him? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way round? (The head suddenly floats before my eyes, Help me …) My stomach is rumbling embarrassingly loudly but there is nothing to eat, unless you count Mrs Lovat herself, of course.

  Eventually, after an interminable amount of very poor small talk, Mrs Lovat bids us a rather unfond goodbye. At the hospital entrance we encounter Mr Lovat, walking around importantly with a stethoscope round his neck. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks bullishly when he sees his son. ‘You should be studying, just because it’s the holidays doesn’t mean you can become a layabout!’ This seems a little harsh, your mother only dies once after all (unless you were unlucky and she took it into her head to defy the laws of physics).

  Poor Malcolm, I suppose all unhappy families resemble one another (but all happy families are happy in their own way, of course). But then, do happy families exist, or happy endings come to that, outside of fiction? And how can there be an ending of any kind until you die? (And how can that be happy?) My own imminent death – of starvation – can hardly be happy, unless I kiss Malcolm Lovat first, of course.

  ‘Have you got anything to eat, Malcolm?’

  ‘There’s an apple in my jacket pocket, I think.’ How intimate a thing it is to place your hand inside someone else’s pocket – and have the bonus of pulling out food as well, a lovely rosy-red apple the kind that in another plot would be smeared with poison. But not this one. ‘Thanks.’

  We stop at the fish and chip shop in Tait Street – this is more like it – and eat our pokes of chips parked up on Lover’s Leap, a hill from which no Lover has ever Leapt, certainly not in living memory. In the memory of the dead it may be different, of course.

  From Lover’s Leap there is a panoramic view of Glebelands and the surrounding countryside – the great industrial valleys to the west, the wild moors to the south, the pastoral hills and woods to the north. In t
he daytime the sky is so big here that you can see the curve on the great ball of Earth. In the dark, at our feet Glebelands twinkles like an earthbound constellation.

  ‘It’s like –’ Malcolm suddenly says, furrowing his handsome brow in the effort to find the right words for something, ‘it’s like you’re just pretending to be yourself – and there’s a completely different person inside you that you have to hide.’

  ‘Really? Not a completely similar person dogging your footsteps then?’

  He gives me an odd look, ‘No – someone inside that you know people aren’t going to like.’

  ‘Like a fat person hiding inside a thin one? And anyway, everyone likes you,’ I point out to him, ‘even Mr Baxter likes you.’

  ‘That’s just the outside me,’ he says, staring through the car windscreen. There is nothing (perhaps) between us and the Northern Star. He should count himself lucky that people like his outside person, people don’t like Charles inside or out. He puts an arm round me (exquisite bliss) and says, ‘You’re a good friend, Iz,’ and gives me the last chip.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘best be getting back, I suppose.’ There is to be no kiss then, let alone any Leaping. ‘Right then,’ I say, disguising my disappointment. I am Patience on a monument. How long will I keep my passion silent? Until my tongue is cut out and my silver-scaled sardine tail is turned into awkward, unwieldy legs? Perhaps not quite that far.

  * * *

  As Malcolm drives me home along Chestnut Avenue I notice a woman, walking along the pavement ahead of us, caught in the headlamps of the car. She’s wearing an elegant kind of sheath dress in printed silk with a matching bolero top and a hat, as if she’s just been to a garden party, incongruous on a November night. The legs beneath the calf-length dress look incongruous as well – well-muscled, like a male ballet-dancer’s.

  There’s something about her that doesn’t seem quite right (‘What’s Wrong?’) and when she turns into the drive of Avalon, the Primroses’ house, I peer inquisitively through the windscreen at her as she stands underneath the porch-light. For a second I see her features quite clearly and despite the amount of make-up, not to mention the wig, those features are unmistakably the property of Mr Primrose. I suppose he could just be rehearsing for a play, improvising in character for a night out. On the other hand, perhaps not. How deceptive appearances can be.

  When I walk into Arden I’m confronted with the sight of Vinny walking up and down the hall, cradling the baby, with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth in a futile attempt to prevent ash dropping on the baby. Why has Vinny been left holding the baby?

  ‘Because there’s no-one else to do it,’ she says, keeping a wary eye on the baby, which is wailing its head off.

  ‘Where’s Debbie?’

  Vinny snorts with malign laughter. ‘Standing guard over the corner-cabinet probably.’

  Vinny’s right, Debbie is monitoring the contents of the china-cabinet in the dining-room. ‘The second I turn my back,’ she says resentfully, indicating a pair of Worcester plates and a Dresden shepherdess, ‘they all move around.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘But they’re not stupid – the minute anyone else comes in the room they don’t budge an inch.’

  This surely isn’t part of Capgras’s Syndrome? ‘You don’t think they’re close relatives or anything, do you?’

  She gives me a look of profound disdain. ‘I’m not a complete idiot, Isobel.’ But can she tell a hawk from a handsaw? That’s the question.

  She stalks off, forgetful of the wailing baby, and takes a duster and polish from somewhere about her person (soon it will be white rabbits) and starts rubbing the doorknobs. Again and again. And then some more.

  ‘So he took you to see his dying mother in hospital,’ Audrey says dubiously, ‘and you think that was a date?’

  I am lolled on Audrey’s bed. She’s looking very soulful, like Lizzy Siddal in Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix. Beata Audrey. I really have to say something to Audrey. But what can I say – ‘By the way, Audrey, did you leave a baby on our doorstep?’ Audrey is the only person I have told about the baby not being born in the normal way to Debbie, not being born at all to her, in the hope of her shedding some light on the mystery.

  ‘Are you OK, Audrey?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘There’s nothing you want to … well, tell me?’

  ‘No,’ she answers and turns her face away. (‘That lovely shawl you knitted,’ I say conversationally to Mrs Baxter, ‘you know, the one for your niece in South Africa? Did she – er – like it?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think she’s got it yet,’ Mrs Baxter says. ‘I sent it surface mail because the baby isn’t due until next month. It takes for ever,’ she adds, although it’s unclear whether she means the mail to South Africa or the gestation of a child.)

  I return to Arden, carrying a newly knitted bonnet for the baby and a still-warm pot of lemon cheese which I leave on the kitchen table without saying anything to Debbie because she’s deeply engrossed in re-ordering the cupboard under the sink in alphabetical order (Ajax to Windolene).

  Vinny appears to have taken over the cooking again and is stirring a large pot (requisitioned once as a witches’ cauldron for The Lythe Players’ production of Macbeth) in which a calf’s brain is simmering. ‘Taste this,’ she says to me, fishing something indescribable out of the pot. Hastily, I decline and go upstairs to my room.

  Certain things dawn on me slowly. For one – the strange ‘Autumn Leaves’ patterned stair-carpet has been replaced with an older and old-fashioned one – red, figured with blue and green (much nicer) – and the stairs have suddenly sprouted brass stair-rods – ‘sprouted’ may not be the correct verb for the sudden appearance of stair-rods, but what is? Apart from ‘rain’, of course? I pause on the landing to try and work this one out. The new flock wallpaper has also disappeared and been replaced with a heavy anaglypta, painted magnolia above the dado – long gone under Debbie’s regime – and dark green below.

  I must be in the past. Just like that. But is it my own past? I cast around for clues, will I see my younger self coming out of a room? (Perhaps that’s how we get doubles? Bring them back from the past?) A noise makes me look back down the stairs. A young woman (not me) has just entered the hallway and is now coming up the stairs. Judging by the way she looks – low-waisted dress with a handkerchief-point hem above her thin ankles – I must have pitched up around 1920.

  She walks past me, quite oblivious to my presence (thank goodness she doesn’t walk through me, that would be unnerving) and races up the stairs to the attic. Curious, I follow her into my own room – which is my room and yet not my room – where she sits at a heavy Victorian dressing-table and peers at her reflection in the mirror. She seems to be getting ready for a party, judging by the dress – a hand-made turquoise silk, scattered with big rosettes in the same material, astonishing in its ugliness – and the number of rejected outfits strewn around the untidy room.

  She’s rather plain to look at, but there’s something attractive and open about her expression – the kind of youthful optimism that seems to have passed by me and Charles – and Audrey too, come to think of it. She sits looking at herself for quite a long time and then suddenly loosens the chignon of hair at the nape of her neck and picks up a big pair of dressmaking shears that are sitting on the dressing-table and with one awkward cut, relieves herself of her hair.

  The result is a disaster but she tidies it up with the shears into a rough approximation of a flapper bob and ties on a squaw-type headband of sequins and looks at the result with some pleasure. An indistinct voice floats up the stairs with the message that Mr Fitzgerald is here for her and growing impatient.

  When she leaves the room, I’m close on her heels. Down on the landing she almost trips over a little boy – seven or eight years old, cute in his little sailor suit – who gasps at the sight of the shorn locks. She ignores him. We reach the downstairs hallway, the girl is ahead of
me, walking into the living-room, met by a scream from someone invisible. ‘Your hair! What have you done to your hair, Lavinia?’ and an uncertain male voice (Mr Fitzgerald, I suppose) saying, ‘Good God, Vinny, what on earth have you done to yourself?’

  Vinny! I would never have recognized our aunt in this young girl. It just goes to show. The Arden of Vinny’s youth is much nicer than the one we inhabit today, it smells of lavender and roast beef and gleams with modest wealth. I’m about to slip into the living-room behind Vinny when an extraordinary thought strikes me – the little boy at the top of the stairs – the handsome, blond little sailor-boy – must be my father!

  I turn round and run back up the stairs – but too late, the Autumn Leaves are already carpeting the stairs and the young sailor-boy is coming out of the second-best bedroom with tired eyes and thinning, greying hair and our ridiculous doorstep baby dribbling milky vomit on to his Shetland pullover. ‘Hello, Izzie,’ he says with his despondent smile, ‘what are you up to?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ I say with enforced cheerfulness. If I told him the truth he would never believe me. Soon we will all be in the hands of the trick-cyclist.

  ‘Look,’ Charles says, reaching furtively into his pocket.

  ‘What?’ He holds aloft a lock of hair, a black curl, held together by a frayed strip of faded red ribbon. ‘Hers!’ he says triumphantly. He looks completely mad.

  ‘How can you possibly know that? Where did you find it?’

  ‘On the first landing, in that dish on the window-sill.’ I know the one he means, a little Spode box with a lid on, but I’ve looked in there many times and there’s never been so much as an eyelash, let alone a lock of hair. ‘Maybe it’s materialized out of thin air,’ Charles says eagerly. ‘It’s like finding clues, isn’t it?’

  ‘Clues to what exactly?’

  ‘Her,’ he whispers as if we might be overheard. ‘Where she is.’ A lock of hair, a powder-compact, a twice-lost shoe and a strange smell – not much of a map. In court this evidence wouldn’t add up to a mother. It would add up to madness. I refuse to even touch the lock of hair. I don’t want a black curl, I want the whole Eliza, quick and breathing, an entire person inside her skin, the hair growing from roots on her head, the veins throbbing with robin-red blood. Why can’t I go back and find her?