Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘Yeah,’ the other boys chorused, growing excited. ‘Who’s got a match then?’ a voice said. ‘Ere,’ another one said. They all crowded around the tree excitedly bringing bits of old wood and packing cases for the pyre. Violet Angela held the matchbox aloft so that Beryl could see it. ‘This’, she hissed, ‘is what people get for being stupid.’ The boys were all chanting like savages, they started to do a war-dance round the tree, Beryl began to scream.

  ‘Oswald!’ Mrs Reagan shouted to her husband, ‘I think you’d better get out there, sounds like our Beryl’s being murdered.’

  ‘Changeling,’ Maude Potter said out loud to herself as she put the week’s laundry through the wringer in the wash-house out back. That’s what happened when you picked up a child without knowing anything about it. For all she knew that baby in its lace-clad finery had been placed in that pram, in that park, especially to fool them. As some kind of trap.

  Violet Angela was twelve years old and a wicked little thing, she really was. ‘She’s getting beyond our control, Mother,’ Herbert said, shaking his head in sorrow. ‘That’s what happens when you don’t know anything about the history, about the parents – they might have been hob-nobs but who knows their character? They might have been liars, murderers, thieves – look at her, she’s already been brought home once by the coppers for stealing, and that thing with Beryl Reagan … she could have been killed, and I don’t know what she got up to with her fancy ways … she’s a sinful little thing.’

  Maude tried to beat the sin out of Violet Angela. ‘This is for your own good,’ she huffed and puffed up the stairs with ‘Father’s’ leather belt. How could this be right, Violet Angela wondered? To be beaten half to death by your parents? Weren’t they supposed to love and protect you?

  Deep in the night, the walrus body of Herbert heaved itself between the darned sheets in her narrow little bed. ‘Now, Violet Angela,’ he said in a hoarse whisper, as his ink-stained fingers pushed and pulled, ‘this is for your own good, and if you ever tell anyone then I swear God, who’s watching over us right now, will kill you,’ and, to demonstrate, his big hands encircled her thin little neck and when he felt how thin she was, how young she was, imagined her bird-bones snapping – then Herbert was suffused with shame at what he was doing. But it was too late now, he reasoned with himself, he’d already bought his ticket to hell, and hers with it. And, after all, it wasn’t as if she was his daughter. He bought her bags of boiled sweets to make up to her.

  Really, Violet Angela thought, I must have been stolen from my real parents, I wasn’t meant to be with these ignorant, dreary people, I was meant to be a princess wearing expensive finery and beautiful dresses, and living in a castle on top of a hill with hundreds of servants. It wasn’t fair.

  It was Mrs Reagan who discovered fourteen-year-old Violet Angela with Mr Reagan. In the wash-house. Mr Reagan could fluster and bluster all he liked, but Mrs Reagan knew what she’d seen.

  ‘Why, Vi? Why?’ Mrs Potter whined poetically. ‘Why have we been given such a wicked monster for a child?’ overlooking the fact that Violet Angela was not given but taken.

  ‘I’m not a monster,’ Violet Angela sneered. ‘Mr Reagan promised me things.’

  ‘Things?’

  ‘Pretty things,’ Violet Angela said stoutly. ‘He said he’d give me pretty things if I let him have his way.’ Mrs Potter slapped Violet Angela’s face and Violet Angela screamed, ‘And he was only doing what he’s been doing [she pointed dramatically at Mr Potter] for years!’ Mr Potter slapped Violet Angela’s other cheek. ‘You little liar!’

  ‘You little whore,’ Mrs Potter yelled and Violet Angela ran from the room before she got slapped to death.

  Violet Angela was locked in her room upstairs. ‘What are we going to do?’ Mr Potter asked, his head in his hands at the parlour table.

  ‘Maybe we should give her back,’ Maude offered.

  ‘Give her back?’ Herbert said, scratching his head.

  ‘To where she come from – those Brevilles,’ Maude said. ‘Let’s see them deal with her wicked ways.’

  ‘We ain’t got nothing to prove who she was,’ Herbert says glumly.

  ‘All I ever wanted was a nice little girl what I could dress up and show off,’ said Maude sadly. ‘This is all the thanks we get for bringing her up.’

  ‘She’ll come to a bad end, that one,’ Herbert said, shaking his head.

  They were all mad for it, her father, Mr Reagan, even Gilbert Boyd who’d stolen a diamante hair-clip of his mother’s to give her, just so he could poke about inside her one wet Saturday afternoon. They’d give you anything to do it with them and then when you did they called you all the names under the sun.

  She’d been locked in her room for days now, food shoved round the door at regular intervals as if she was in a condemned cell or something. If they could, they’d sell her into slavery rather than service. It was ridiculous. They kept telling her what a bad daughter she was, but had they no idea what bad parents they’d been? She couldn’t forgive them. She could feel the wheals where Maude had hit her with the belt. Knew that all this had to stop. Now.

  ‘I got her an interview, Mother – for a position,’ Herbert said excitedly over a tea of kippers and bread and butter. ‘Scullery maid – big house in Norfolk, what d’you think?’

  ‘I think you’re very clever, Herbert.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Locked in upstairs still,’ Maude said proudly. ‘I’ll take her up her tea.’

  Violet Angela picked up the plate of kippers and hit her mother in the face with them and ran full tilt down the stairs, slamming into Herbert, blocking her way at the bottom. ‘Not so fast, milady!’ he grunted as he grabbed hold of her, but she dodged and swerved and got past him and sprinted for the front door.

  But she hadn’t done yet. Later, much later, when the whole world was asleep, Violet Angela slipped in at the back gate, opened the outhouse door where the tools were kept and picked up the heavy woodchopping axe. She tiptoed up the stairs to Maude and Herbert’s bedroom. They lay sleeping on their backs. Ugly. Vulnerable. Maude snoring like a trooper. She had a hair-net on, like a bonnet, and her teeth were on the bedside table. A dribble of saliva trailed down Herbert’s silver-stubbled chin. Violet Angela imagined lifting the axe and letting it fall down under its own heavy weight, cleaving Herbert’s head in two on the pillow without him even waking up. His brains splattering the wall, splattering Maude’s face. Maude waking up drowsily, opening her mouth to scream at the sight of her husband’s brains spilt everywhere, Violet Angela stopping her scream with the axe.

  She could do it, Violet Angela thought, feeling the weight of the axe in her thin arms, but she wasn’t going to risk going down just for killing them. Instead she took the rent money out of its hiding-place in the tea-caddy and left the axe at the foot of the bed to give them a fright when they woke up.

  Same man every Friday afternoon. He always got the table, table 2, by the window, even when it was really busy. ‘How does he do that?’ Mavis asked and gave a little screech as she scalded herself on the hot-water jug. ‘Three teas, three teacakes, one fruit scone, table 16,’ Deidre muttered to herself as she rushed past. ‘He looks like an oily sea-lion to me.’

  “E’s a villain,’ Mavis said, ‘that’s a well-known fact.’ It was raining cats and dogs, ‘and bloody great stair-rods,’ said Deidre. It was grey and miserable outside, bright and steamy inside, but the rain brought melancholy with it wherever it went. ‘I’ve had no tips today,’ Violet said. ‘Three teas, one coffee, two Eccles, one Jamaican finger, one coffee jap, table 8.’ Deidre said, ‘You wanna go to the flicks tonight, Vi?’ The man at table 2 made a little gesture, almost imperceptible, to Violet.

  ‘Nah, don’t feel like it, let me get him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The sea-lion.’ Violet tripped over in her black and white, white broderie cap pulled low on her forehead, thick black stockings. Violet could see something in the sea-lion�
��s eyes, knew it might be good for her. He was like a sea-lion, blubbery in an overcoat, old-fashioned really, ‘Good afternoon, sir, what can I get for you today?’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Violet.’

  ‘What a pretty name. How old are you?’

  ‘Eighteen, sir,’ Violet lied sweetly. She was only sixteen.

  ‘Imagine that,’ he said with a smile and raised a small plump hand and touched her on the forearm. ‘My name’s Dickie Landers, sweetheart – have you heard of me?’ and Violet said, ‘Yes, of course,’ although she hadn’t. ‘If you work very hard,’ he said, half-closing his lazy eyes, more salamander than seal, ‘I’ll tip you very, very well, my dear,’ and out of sight of the rest of the tea-shop, he reached out and stroked her thigh, just in case she was in any doubt about what he meant. She wasn’t.

  Dickie installed Violet in a flat in Bayswater, nothing fancy – a living-room, a bedroom, a scullery and her own WC, gas fires in the old-fashioned hearths and a gas water-heater over the sink. He called himself an ‘entrepreneur’, which, as far as Violet could see, meant that he had his fingers in lots of pies, and most of them very shady, if you could call a pie shady. He stayed at the Bayswater flat most of the time and bought her a lot of nice things. What did it matter? Violet thought. You did it for boiled sweets, you did it for a new dress, you did it for a roof over your head. And Dickie Landers was powerful, he even got her a new identity after she’d had a spot of bother with the law.

  ‘Easy,’ Dickie said, handing her a new birth certificate.

  ‘Who am I then?’ Violet asked. Eliza Jane Dennis.

  ‘She was real,’ Dickie Landers grinned, ‘little girl, died before she was two.’

  She made a mistake, falling pregnant and not managing to do anything about it, beyond gin and hot baths and jumping off the table. Dickie was furious and sent her to an ‘acquaintance’ of his, a struck-off surgeon, but he was so sleazy and his instruments so terrifying that, unusually, Eliza turned coward and left and had to pay the consequences four months later in the shape of a little boy. Dickie took him from the hospital and when she asked what he’d done with him, Dickie lit a cigar and laughed. ‘Sold him back to the baby shop, sweetheart,’ he said and when he saw the grimace on Eliza’s face he patted her hand, rather awkwardly because Dickie wasn’t too comfortable with emotion, and said reassuringly, ‘Very respectable couple, a doctor and his wife, Dr Lovat.’

  He took her out – to the theatre (‘That’s you,’ he laughed when they saw Pygmalion), to night-clubs, to restaurants, even to the opera. There wasn’t anybody that Dickie Landers didn’t know, from high court judges to common criminals. Dickie himself was an aristocrat amongst criminals. He owned a West End club called the Hirondelle. The club was where he did ‘business’, reaching over the tables to murmur things in willing ears, rubbing his greasy fingers together to illustrate what he meant, leaning back and laughing expansively, stretching the stiff shirt of his evening suit. Eliza perched on a stool at the bar, drank gin, learned who was who. And what was what. She learnt to do all kinds of things, things that nice girls didn’t know about, wouldn’t have believed if they’d been told. ‘But then I’m not a nice girl, am I?’ Eliza said to her mirror.

  Eliza wasn’t just one of Dickie’s girls any more, she was special. ‘You’re special, darlin’,’ he laughed and hired her out only to his best customers (‘top whack’). Eliza learned to talk properly, learnt from films and from the aristocracy who slummed it at the Hirondelle, draping themselves on the arms of semi-criminals, wishing that Daddy could see how wicked they were being. ‘I’ve made you into a lady,’ Dickie Landers said to her and Eliza laughed and said, ‘Darling, you’ve made me into a high-class tart, that’s all.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Dickie said, running his hands up her back.

  ‘I’m just like this bloody war,’ Eliza sighed, ‘a phoney.’

  A nice town house in Knightsbridge (‘top whack’), the owner in America for the duration. ‘Got the lease, legal and proper,’ Dickie said. ‘God, I love this war, you know that?’ Dickie smelt of money. Eliza went to the house two or three times a week. It was always someone high-ranking, an English general, a visiting American here in secret, a Free French officer, a Polish colonel. Dickie was working for the government, he thought it was a great joke. ‘You’re doing your bit for the war effort, really, that’s how I look at it,’ Dickie said to her.

  Eliza was getting fed up with this life, she wasn’t going to give up the money but she wasn’t going to open her legs for it the rest of her life. Was she?

  Sometimes, not often, faces became familiar. A little runt of a politician who couldn’t manage it, a fat Belgian, an admiral who only wanted to dress up in her clothes. There was an English colonel, Sir Edward de Breville, very upper-crust, who was a big-wig in the War Cabinet (‘top whack,’ Dickie said, ‘give him anything he wants’), he always brought her stockings and whisky and called her his gorgeous trollop. He said she reminded him of someone. ‘That’s what they all say, darling,’ Eliza laughed. He kissed her ear and said, ‘If my wife were dead, which unfortunately she isn’t, I would marry you.’ Sir Edward didn’t have any children, except for ‘some little by-blow by a nursemaid’ that he paid the upkeep on. ‘You’d give me a son and heir, I bet,’ he said. Sometimes Eliza daydreamed about taking Dickie’s gun and going down to the de Brevilles’ house in Suffolk and shooting Lady Cecily in the head. Then Sir Edward – very handsome and very, very rich – might really marry her. But then gentlemen rarely married their whores and Dickie would never let her go, she was his golden egg-laying goose and he’d probably kill her before he’d let her go. Life wasn’t fair, it really wasn’t.

  The shelter was cold and damp and smelt of wet earth. It was completely dark. At first Eliza thought she was the only person in there and when she heard a slight shuffling she wasn’t sure whether it was a rat or a person. She flicked her cigarette lighter open, the gold monogrammed one that Dickie had given her, and in the yellow haloed flame saw a man in uniform shrinking into the corner of the shelter, his cap pulled down. Eliza said, ‘Good evening,’ and he mumbled something in reply. A distant thud of bombs outside. ‘I don’t bite, you know, darling,’ she said and lit a cigarette, ‘Want one?’ ‘Thanks,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Why are you so shy, darling?’ Eliza asked as he came reluctantly closer to take the proffered cigarette. She expected there were government warnings about flirting in air-raid shelters, but she enjoyed it.

  ‘Ever hear of Frankenstein’s monster?’ he asked, taking the cigarette.

  ‘Why, is he in here with us?’ she laughed.

  ‘Yes,’ the man said and pushed his cap back on his forehead. He flinched away from the lighter flame when she held it up to his face. One side of his face was livid and swollen, the skin stretched tight and shiny over the flesh. The shrunken eye had been dragged downwards by the scar tissue. ‘Shot down on fire,’ he said apologetically. In the flickering light she saw ginger hair, pale gold eyelashes and russet freckles that charted his unscarred skin. He was just a boy. A line of bombs thudded closer and the boy looked as though he was going to cry. Very gently, as if he was a wild animal, Eliza reached out and stroked the scarred skin. She extinguished the lighter and said, ‘Well, all cats are grey in the night, darling.’

  Afterwards, after he’d pushed her up against the brick wall of the shelter and moaned his gratitude to her, drowned out by the noise of the docks being blitzed, he kept apologizing because she was crying, and he ‘felt an awful heel’, and he was sorry because he’d ‘never done it before with anyone’, but Eliza sniffed back her tears and said, ‘That’s all right, neither have I.’ Because really, she thought, it felt like the first time – tender and loving and, well – enjoyable, which wasn’t how she usually thought about it at all. ‘Top whack, darling,’ she murmured sweetly into his hair when he was finished.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Dickie said when she came in. ‘I thought that bloody raid h
ad got you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, darling, just doing my bit for the war effort.’

  One of Dickie’s sleep-dead arms was pinning Eliza to the bed. She moved it as she leant over to get her cigarette pack. She slid up the bed and rested on the pillows. The room was lit by moonlight, dull silver patterns moved around the walls as the net curtains billowed. Eliza searched for a match. She’d lost her lighter in the shelter. It was time to get out of this whole sordid business, become a normal person. She wanted a man who loved her, protected her, children she could dote on. An ordinary life. She dragged hard on her cigarette and thought about the ugly, scarred boy. She could still feel his cool hands on her, still smell the damp bricks of the shelter, still feel the liquid warmth of him inside her.

  She was awake when the siren went off. She was dressed. She had on a suit, a coat, a hat and her best pair of shoes. But that was all she was taking with her. She needed a grand gesture, walking out in the clothes she stood up in. So she made sure they were expensive clothes.

  She jumped at the siren but then thought that, on the whole, she couldn’t really care less if she was blown up by a bomb. Dickie rolled over and said, ‘Bloody hell,’ but it was already too late.

  The whole house shook and then again, even more violently. The noise was unbelievable, Eliza felt the house falling down round her ears, she couldn’t breathe, she kept trying to take in lungfuls of air but all she could take in was dust. The shock-wave of the blast was still vibrating in her chest, she knew she was going to die –