Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  I’ve been bullied by Eunice into attending the Lythe Players’ pantomime in the church hall on Poplar Road. Eunice is making her acting début, playing the back end of the cow, and for some reason wants people to witness this public humiliation. I try to entice Charles to come with me, although I suppose the sight of Eunice as half a cow is hardly going to endear her to him sexually. But, sensibly, he’s having a quiet night in with the Dog. Debbie is fully occupied with the baby and the world of moving objects and Gordon is fully occupied with Debbie. ‘Go on,’ I urge Vinny, ‘you might enjoy yourself.’ (Highly unlikely.) I must be desperate for company if I’m reduced to asking Vinny. But there you go. And anyway, since encountering her younger self I feel differently about her somehow.

  ‘Oh, all right then,’ she says sticking her hat on her head. ‘I know I’ll regret it but I can’t listen to that little bastard [she means the baby] yelling a minute longer.’

  As we walk along Chestnut Avenue, a very weird thing starts to happen. Every time we walk towards a lamppost, the light starts flashing on and off. When we’ve passed it, it stops flashing – and the next one ahead of us begins to flash instead. On-off-on-off.

  We stop-start along Chestnut Avenue, testing each lamppost, trying to work out some pattern. Are they signalling something to us? Is my body interfering with the national grid in some way? (My body electric.) Or Vinny’s? I explain to Vinny that the doors of perception are hanging crazily off their hinges these days.

  I am at odds with the material world – every day confirms some new alienation. Perhaps I am from another planet, I think glumly, as we approach the church hall, and my alien compatriots are trying to send me morse code via the streetlamps.

  * * *

  The pantomime goes according to plan – Jack scatters his magic beans everywhere, Mr Primrose as the Dame (naturally), dressed in what look like kitchen curtains, makes many a double entendre and Eunice and her anonymous other half hoof clumsily to the music provided by a Boy’s Brigade drummer and a couple of brass band rejects who play cheerful, tinny music at such a lick that even the village lads and lassies can’t keep time, let alone the poor cow. (Do you keep time in the same place that you save it? If so why is it so difficult to find? It must be in a very safe place. Gordon’s always doing that, going around with a puzzled expression looking for something he can’t find, saying, ‘But I remember putting it in a safe place.’)

  Jack’s beanstalk is pulled on a string up to the roof, its green-painted paper leaves growing and reproducing miraculously as it climbs towards the heavens where the moon and all her starry feys will be twinkling prettily in the dark to greet it.

  ‘Look,’ Charles says cautiously to Gordon who’s in the middle of preparing a bottle for the baby which is propped up awkwardly in its pram uttering more variations on the basic cry than a song-thrush.

  ‘What?’ he says, looking over his shoulder. The feeding-bottle slips out of his hand when he sees the black curl, lying like a big inquisitive comma on the palm of Charles’ hand. Gordon stands rigid and unmoving for several seconds and then snatches the curl from Charles and dashes from the room.

  Wearily, I pick up the bottle and plug the baby with it.

  I’m lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, in a bedroom flooded with blue moonlight, wondering why sleep doesn’t come (perhaps the Cats have used it all up) when I hear a soft footfall coming up the stairs. The doorknob turns – gleaming in the moonlight thanks to Debbie’s incessant polishing – and I await expectantly. Will it be my personal phantom or the Green Lady (perhaps they are the one and the same thing)? But no – the shade that stands on the darkened threshold is my father.

  ‘Izzie?’ he whispers through the dark. ‘Are you awake?’ He tiptoes over and sits on the end of my bed, staring at something in his hand. I struggle into a sitting position and he holds the thing in his hand up for my inspection. It’s the lock of black hair, darker than black in the moonlight. ‘Hers,’ he says in a wretched voice. A thrill goes through my whole body, at last he’s going to tell me about Eliza. About how beautiful she was, how much he loved her, how happy they were, what a terrible mistake it was when she walked off, how she always meant to come back –

  Instead I can feel his gaze through the gloom as he says in a flat voice, ‘I killed your mother.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  PAST

  THE FRUIT OF THIS COUNTRIE

  Up in the thin blue air Gordon was free, it was only when he came down to earth that the problems began. Falling to earth in flames like some metal-bound Lucifer was easier than facing the narrow future that lay ahead of him if he survived the war. Gordon didn’t care much either way for his sisters but he loved his mother and he didn’t want to hurt her.

  He wasn’t thinking about these things when he met his fate. He was slightly drunk, he’d been at some club that he didn’t know the name of, the kind of place where things got out of hand after midnight. He’d been with a group of Polish airmen and left because he knew he couldn’t keep up with their drinking. And he was tired, he was so tired, he just wanted to get back and put his head down. ‘Spot of shut-eye,’ he said, making his excuses to the Polaks. He was staying with the sister of a friend and her husband – nice place, very smart in Knightsbridge, the kind the Widow would have pursed her lips at. The sister and her husband too. Too modern. Too fast. He never got there. The clanging of bells and the air full of brick-dust stopped him.

  The fire brigade were already there and a lot of people standing around. Somebody said, ‘There’s people inside, you know.’ Gordon could smell the gas from the fractured pipes but he walked into the broken house, thinking that it must have had a grand entrance before it was bombed – columns lay broken across the vestibule and a length of intricate plaster cornice tripped him up. He started choking on the dust and suddenly felt very sober. She was standing there, veiled in dust so that you might have thought she was a life-sized statue fallen from a niche, but he could tell she wasn’t a statue because she smiled at him and Gordon lifted her up in his arms and carried her out.

  Outside he put her down very gently, as if she might break if he was too rough with her. When he asked her if she was all right, instead of answering, she put out a hand and fingered one of the lapels on his greatcoat and smiled again – a strange smile, very inward-seeming, as if she had an amusing secret that she wasn’t about to tell him.

  He took his coat off and wrapped her up in it and she looked up at him, straight in his eyes in a way that strangers never did, and whispered, My hero. And the rest of the world around them may as well have disappeared because the only thing Gordon could see were her tragic, exotic eyes and the only thing he could hear was the husky notes of her peculiar voice saying, My shoe, I’ve lost my shoe, and Gordon laughed and dashed back into the bombed-out building and actually found the shoe. He knew it was ridiculous but he didn’t care. She put a hand on his shoulder to steady herself while she put the shoe on. Her grimy naked foot was slim with a ballerina’s arch and blood-red toe-nails – erotic and incongruous amongst the broken limbs and wreckage that was accumulating around them. One poor chap was brought out on a stretcher past them as dead as a doornail. ‘Did you know him?’ Gordon asked her sympathetically but she just shook her head sadly, Never seen him before.

  Gordon was afraid she was going to walk away now she had her shoe and he knew this was urgent. He knew this was an important moment in his life, perhaps the most important – full of meaning that he couldn’t quite decipher. He was going to have to seize the moment, it would be the end of everything if he made a mess of it. He offered her his arm, ‘Can I take you for a cup of tea? There’s a café round the corner?’

  The age of chivalry is alive and well, she laughed, and took his arm and he could feel how she was shaking all over, like a leaf.

  Eliza was as mysterious as the moon, waxing and waning towards him, she had her own phases – sometimes generous, sometimes mean – and always her dark side, unreachable, secret,
hidden.

  He couldn’t really believe her. Couldn’t believe how easily she’d given herself to him, couldn’t believe how she felt. Her silk-skin, smooth and cool, pressed against his hot body made him fear that he was going to die. The way she crept up from the foot of the bed, her tongue like a cat on him, but not rough like a cat. The smell of her – the strange scent that was partly perfume, partly her skin and partly something so mysterious that he’d never smelt it anywhere before.

  The way she said, Of course, darling, when he asked her to marry him. Just like that, so that he was frightened because nothing this wonderful could ever last. It would drive you mad if it did. And it made him as free as being in the blue sky over this tiny green country, gave him power over his mother, over Arden, over the whole world. To begin with.

  And he never did think it would last and he wasn’t surprised when it didn’t because someone like Eliza was never going to be happy with the meagre slice of life he ended up offering her and he hated her for that so much that his brain hurt with it sometimes. His failure with Eliza was his failure with life and her contempt and her scorn were what, in his heart, he knew he deserved. When he put his hands round her neck he felt how easy it was to stop her, to make her quiet – to have power over her. It was astonishing, he could squeeze the life out of her as easily as if she was some small animal – a hare or a dove – and he wanted to say to her, ‘There, aren’t you sorry now?’ but she was gone and he’d destroyed the only thing that meant anything. That was the measure of what a failure he was.

  She was enchanting, spellbinding. ‘Oh she doth teach the torches to burn bright,’ Gordon said with a self-conscious laugh to the Widow, when he first told her about the momentous thing that had happened to him (Eliza) and watched the Widow’s lip curl ever so slightly at this fancy talk. Gordon couldn’t help himself, it was like being possessed. It was all he wanted to talk about at dinner and supper, and while being paraded around the neighbourhood by the Widow when he was on leave. Words about Eliza fell unbidden from his mouth. ‘She’s just not like other people,’ he said eagerly to his mother as she folded caraway seeds into dried-egg cake mixture. ‘No?’ the Widow said, raising a grey caterpillar eyebrow. ‘And that’s good, is it?’

  Eliza stopped time. She took you into some bright circle with her where everything stopped, time and fear, even war. ‘Cheap glamour,’ Vinny muttered over the sacks of flour in the storeroom. ‘Oh no,’ the Widow said balefully, ‘it comes very expensive, believe me.’ It clutched at the Widow’s strong heart to see her own perfect manly Gordon being fooled by something as tawdry as sex. How could he be so gullible? So stupid? It pained her that he couldn’t look at his own mother and see the pattern of a good woman, but that instead he’d been seduced by all that knowingness.

  Gordon had to feel sorry for his mother because it was obvious that she’d never experienced anything like this, not that he wanted for one minute to think of his mother like this and even if he wanted to think about it he would have been incapable of imagining it. His mother may have been young once (although he couldn’t imagine that either) but she had surely never been like Eliza.

  Eliza was a miracle, her human geography sublime – the long curve of body, the hills and vales, her face buried in the pillow so that all he could see was the forest of black curls on her head. The matching copse of hair between her thin legs, the extraordinary cupolas with their dark-brown aureoles – the kind of breasts that Englishwomen would have been embarrassed by, the kind of breasts that Gordon had only previously seen on foreign prostitutes.

  The look of her – the seed-pearls of sweat that glistened on her pale apricot-fruit skin, the damp tendrils of hair sticking to the back of her long neck, the faint down on her thin, round arms, the perfect white half moons of her fingernails (rarely glimpsed except when she was removing her nail varnish), the lazy smile. The smell of her – perfume and tobacco and sex. The taste of her – perfume and tobacco and sex and salt-sweat.

  Sometimes he lay awake half the night just watching her sleeping, pulling back the sheets and studying the different parts of her body, the neglected inner crease behind a knee, a perfect clavicle – thin like a hare-bone, the fragrant inside of her wrist with its vulnerable dark blue veins. Once he took her nail scissors and clipped a curl from her hair without her knowing and felt strangely guilty for days afterwards.

  You wouldn’t find her match anywhere in Glebelands, in the whole of the north (‘Not outside of a brothel anyway,’ Vinny wrote to Madge).

  Even the crudest bodily functions took on a kind of sublime meaning. The Widow would have been disgusted. ‘I worship you,’ he whispered in her ear and she rolled over and gave her strange laugh, burying her head in the crook of his arm. Gordon wondered if he sounded ridiculous. She was sublime, transcendent, not an earth-bound creature at all. ‘You can’t put your wife on a pedestal, Gordon,’ the Widow warned, chopping cabbage with her enormous knife. ‘There’s more to marriage than the physical side,’ and Gordon blushed at the idea that his mother could even begin to imagine the things he did with Eliza.

  Mothers and their sons, Eliza laughed (rather spitefully), how they want them.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  Don’t you? No, I don’t suppose you do.

  And in her room the Widow took off her layers of strict underwear and viewed her saggy, baggy wrinkled body with her ancient dugs and her chicken neck and cursed Eliza.

  Eventually, inevitably everything that was once new and precious became everyday and familiar. ‘No honey in that hive any more,’ Vinny wrote, ‘only a nest of hornets.’ Why couldn’t Eliza settle for the ordinary and the familiar, for the daily round of meals and work, the comfort of children? Gordon craved ordinariness now. He wanted her to be normal, like everyone else. He didn’t want other men looking at her because he knew every man that looked at her was thinking about what she would be like in the bedroom and he knew what she was like and that made it worse.

  Not that she was like that any more, not with Gordon at any rate.

  Gordon remembered some things – he remembered putting his hands round her thin neck, he remembered her ridiculous laugh, gurgling and bubbling in her throat, he remembered how he felt when he hit her head against the tree, shaking the life out of her – exultant, triumphant at his victory over her. He wanted to say, ‘See? See – you can’t win every fight, you can’t always have your own way, you can’t drive me to madness and get away with it.’ But it was no good because she couldn’t hear him. His triumph melted into nothingness, without her there was nothing. And then – nothing. He had no idea what he’d done all night, he must have wandered round the wood, everything forgotten, even his children. In the cold light of day it was beyond belief.

  ‘I have to go to the police,’ he said as soon as the Widow had given the children breakfast (‘First things first’) and got them to bed. ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ the Widow said. ‘You’re not going to hang over her.’ But Gordon didn’t care. They could have erected the gibbet right there in the kitchen of Arden and he would have mounted the scaffold. ‘No, Gordon,’ the Widow said grimly, ‘absolutely, definitely not.’

  ‘The best thing’, the Widow said (for she was completely in charge now), ‘would be for you to go away for a bit. Maybe abroad.’

  ‘Abroad?’ said Vinny, who’d never been further than Bradford, of course.

  ‘Abroad,’ the Widow said firmly.

  ‘My baby!’ the Widow thought out loud. She always knew Eliza was trouble, would drag him down into the mire with her. She was better off dead. Poor Gordon, under the spell of a slut. Who was going to miss her? (They’re all dead, darling.) Nobody, that was who. Gordon could go abroad and they would say he’d died – dreadful accident or something. Asthma. Something. And the Widow would never see him again, but at least he would be safe. Anything was better than the noose. ‘My baby!’

  Vinny was more annoyed than she’d ever been in her life. She’d spent most of the nigh
t wandering in the wood, having taken the wrong path after going off to do you-know-what and, all in all, had probably had the worst time of her life, even counting her wedding-night.

  The wood had been so much more than a wood for Vinny, it had been an ordeal by twig and bramble, spectre and will-o’-the-wisp and for this she entirely blamed Eliza. If she hadn’t finally stumbled into Gordon after hours of wandering and weeping she would have undoubtedly gone mad. Although, of course, what happened then was almost as bad.

  Vinny was glad she was dead. That’s what she said to herself anyway, but she couldn’t forget the sight of Eliza’s rag-doll body under that tree. Vinny had touched the blood on her hair, felt the ice on her skin. Vinny had done something she never thought she would do – she’d felt sorry for Eliza.

  Vinny would very much like to forget these things. She would like to forget Gordon clutching her arm as if she was a life-belt, dragging her over to the tree, tears streaming down his face and sobbing, ‘What am I going to do, Vin? What am I going to do?’ I never wanted to go on a bloody picnic anyway, Vinny thought crossly.

  Eliza had been trouble, right from the beginning. Trouble with her big eyes and her thin ankles and her stupid voice, Oh Vinny, darling, could you possibly … always laughing at poor Vinny as if she was stupid. But that didn’t matter now, they must all save themselves as best they could.

  And Gordon went. Walked out, left everything behind, even the murder of his wife. And he put it all away in some dark place that he never threw light on and he’d gone on and worked hard and grown weather-beaten and become a different person, had met Debbie at a dance, courted her, quickly married her – she couldn’t have been more willing even though ‘Mum and Dad’ didn’t really approve – after all he was a divorced man. That’s what he told them, that’s what he told everyone, ‘divorced’ with such a sadness in his eyes that no-one wanted to probe further, except for Debbie, of course, for whom Eliza was a dark and unknown rival, the first Mrs Fairfax.