Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  By this time she can hear Mr Baxter groaning in agony, vomiting (‘boaking’) in the upstairs toilet. She thinks she might just have another cup of tea before she goes upstairs to see how he’s doing. He’s not doing very well – writhing in agony on the floor of his study, his face a dreadful colour, his muscles in spasm. He splutters something unintelligible and Mrs Baxter kneels down on the carpet to hear him better. ‘What’s that, Daddy?’ He seems to be querying what has happened to him and Mrs Baxter explains, very gently, that it must be the Death Caps having an effect.

  Mr Baxter isn’t going to get better, there is no antidote to Mrs Baxter’s special soup, so she takes his well-oiled service revolver from the secret drawer of his desk and puts him out of his misery. The same happened to their old cat, the vet had to put him down after he’d eaten rat poison. Mrs Baxter always suspected that it was Daddy who put the rat poison down.

  The noise from the gun is tremendous, a crack that echoes around the streets of trees. Mrs Baxter wipes the gun clean and puts Daddy’s fingers round it and then lets it drop to the floor. Poor Audrey is woken from her drugged sleep by the report of the gun and comes in the room and sees Daddy lying in a pool of his own blood. She doesn’t flinch.

  Trevor Randall, the young policeman who is first on the scene, used to go to Mr Baxter’s school. Mr Baxter used to beat Trevor a great deal with his strap and Trevor has no kind feelings about him. ‘Suicide then,’ he says.

  ‘Suicide,’ says the coroner. It was so obvious that Mr Baxter had died because he’d lost his head that no-one ever looked at the contents of his stomach. Real right justice. Done.

  ‘The shoe?’ I ask Charles. The lock of hair? The handkerchief? He shakes his head sadly, ‘If only, Iz.’ Wishful thinking. I’ve been cheated by my own imagination. The imagination unbound, unconfined by cause and effect. But then how else can we make things work out right? Or find redemption? Or real right justice? But then Charles reaches into his breast pocket and with a smile hands over –

  ‘The powder-compact?’ I handle it reverently, press open the blue and gold oyster-shell of memory and find the pearl-pink powder. Charles snatches it back when my tears begin to moisten the powder. I expect there is little chance that we can reconstitute our mother from such meagre remains.

  It’s like Alice waking up and finding she dreamt the looking-glass world. It is difficult to believe that all those things that seemed so real have not happened. They felt real then, they feel real now. Appearances can be very deceptive.

  I am home for May. By June I feel almost normal. Whatever that is. Although still a little confused by the different versions of reality. The Dog, for example, is delighted to see me and is virtually the same Dog as before, but not quite (doG, perhaps). Its brown eyes have turned blue and its tail is shorter. And The Lythe Players’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is due to take place as before, but Debbie for some reason is now playing Hermia rather than Helena, only a few letters different and much the same plot function, but none the less mystifying. It’s these little differences that are the most puzzling to me, like having permanent deéjà vu.

  Debbie’s standing at the cooker, waiting for milk to boil for her bedtime cocoa. She’s not long in the house from a rehearsal. (Will she have another nightmarish experience in the forest of Arden, I wonder?) In this current version of history, Debbie betrays no great signs of madness, certainly her problems with the identity of close relatives now extends no further than scowling at Vinny’s back and asking, ‘Who does she think she is?’

  She’s wearing a little frown on her face. I feel differently towards her since she saved my life, as if somehow by giving me life a second time I could permit her to have a maternal role now. The frown deepens. ‘What’s wrong, Debbie?’

  She turns to look at me and the milk boils over. I snatch the pan off the cooker and turn off the gas. Debbie clutches her stomach and gasps. ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask her more urgently. ‘Have you got a pain?’ She nods her head and grimaces. I coax her through to the living-room and she sits heavily on the sofa.

  ‘God, that was horrible,’ she says.

  ‘But you’re all right now? Shall I fetch Gordon?’

  ‘Oh no, don’t be silly,’ she says, ‘I’m fine, I just –’ She breaks off and gives a little scream, clutching herself round the middle. ‘I’ll call the doctor,’ I say hastily. Her eyes open so wide that they look almost big, she takes a huge breath of air and chokes on the word ‘No!’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No,’ she grunts, ‘s’too late.’

  ‘Too late for what?’ But she’s kneeling on the carpet making strange gestures at me and I shout for Vinny to come. ‘Something’s wrong with Debbie,’ I tell her, ‘get the doctor!’ Debbie screams again, not a high-pitched noise but a kind of groan that comes from some primitive place she didn’t know existed inside her.

  She’s right, it’s too late, the baby’s head has already appeared. ‘Bloody hell,’ Vinny says succinctly. ‘Where did that come from?’

  Vinny, more the midwife from hell than Queen Mab, gets down on the floor with Debbie while I rush and put the kettle on because we all know that’s what you’re supposed to do.

  Debbie grunts and huffs and puffs and nearly blows Vinny down in her effort to give birth to this sudden child. The Dog stands by, head cocked to express interest, ears pricked to show it’s ready to help if necessary.

  Vinny has a skirmish trying to get her to lie on her back but Debbie screams, ‘Not bloody likely!’ between two particularly violent contractions and then suddenly the baby shoots out and is caught – to her everlasting surprise – by Vinny. Vinny gets the first yell in, ahead of the baby and Debbie asks, quite calmly, for her dressmaking shears and with one confident ssslicing of blades sets the baby free of her. ‘Has that kettle boiled?’ she asks me impatiently. ‘I’m dying for a cup of tea.’

  ‘Your sister,’ Vinny says, quite tenderized by so much emotional trauma and hands me the scrap of baby, wrapped now in a towel.

  ‘Your sister,’ I say to Charles who comes home from work at that moment and takes the baby from me automatically but then nearly drops it. ‘Sister?’ he says, utterly baffled. Debbie chuckles and Vinny lights up a cigarette and I have to explain to him. Gordon comes home from work and Charles passes on the parcel, saying, ‘Your daughter.’ Gordon’s mouth drops open, ‘My what?’ and I jump up and explain to him that it’s not me, shrunk and gone backward in time but a whole new surprise Fairfax. ‘Just like that?’ he murmurs in amazement.

  The baby already sprouts a crest of soft red-gold hair from its ‘Fontanelle’, I tell Charles knowledgeably.

  ‘Fancy that,’ Debbie says, ‘she’s got Charles’ hair. Someone in your family must have been red-headed, I wonder who?’

  ‘It must be a recessive gene,’ Gordon says quietly, as if this idea makes him sad somehow.

  Apart from the red hair there are few similarities between this baby and the prototype doorstep baby. We call the baby Renee.

  Midsummer’s Eve comes round for a second time for me this year. It’s a lovely hot day and I take a book into the Lady Oak field and sit in the dappled green shade of the tree while the Dog runs marathons around the field, stopping only to investigate the steaming piles of fresh horse manure left by Hilary. (Or rather, her horse.)

  I soon fall into a pleasant summery doze in the green shade. I wake up slowly and watch the pattern of green leaves above my head, the occasional flash of sunlight, listen to the hum of bees and insects. This moment is timeless – I could be at any point in the last five hundred years, I have no way of knowing until I sit up and see the aerials, chimney pots, rooftops, trees, until I hear the sound of lawnmowers and car engines and see sheets flapping on clothes lines. It’s so nice to be myself again, free of the madness of the imagination.

  I stand up. If I look very closely at the trunk of the tree I can make out the famous faint initials of ‘WS’. I embrace the Lady Oak like a lover, feel i
ts bark, its age, its electricity. I close my eyes and kiss the faded initials. What if it really was Shakespeare himself who carved his name here? What if we had both touched, embraced, admired, this same tree.

  I call the Dog, we must be away – before the fairy king and queen make their appearance in the field. ‘Ah, Isobel,’ Mr Primrose says, striding towards me, his ass’s head under his arm, ‘come to watch the performance?’ What fools these mortals be.

  I watch A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the safety of my open bedroom window. From this distance, in the gently dimming midsummer light, you could almost imagine it was a different production. The reborn Audrey has been persuaded to take the role of Titania and she looks every inch the Faerie Queen with her beautiful hair set free of elastic bands and Mr Baxter. You could almost imagine yourself back in the past. The costumes look authentic, the dialogue is just a murmur on the air.

  There are enough people in the field for a game of Human Croquet, and I think they’re all in the right spirit too. At last.

  The sun setting behind the Lady Oak bathes the green in gold. This is an ideal thing. Not a real thing. I sigh and turn away.

  He’s there. He’s lying on my bed, one cynical, quizzical eyebrow raised at me, a lopsided smile as he watches me. I know him. I’ve always known him. Spaniel eyes and chestnut hair. Not yet bald, slightly greasy. Leather boots. Doublet and hose and rather grubby linen. I walk over to the bed and sit on the edge, next to where he is sprawled. It’s very warm in this room, under the eaves. There is a strange quality to the air … like magic, only less real.

  I have only one question for him. ‘It is all about death, isn’t it?’ I say to him. He’s chewing a stalk of grass. A wood-pigeon on the dragon-scale slates above our heads gives a soft trill. He throws his head back and laughs. His breath smells of liquorice and he doesn’t answer, only extends an arm towards me. ‘And the end of the world, and time’s thievish progress?’ I persist, but he just shrugs.

  If I take his hand will I go beyond time for ever? His forearm is curved and manly, a dusting of dark auburn hair. His fingernails are dirty.

  The only sound is that of opalescent fairy wings, beating in the dark air and the sweeping of the tiny fairy brooms, cleansing our house. I take his hand. I let him pull me down next to him. I let him kiss me. He tastes of cloves. We melt into one and time collapses.

  Only the imagination can embrace the impossible – the golden mountain, the fire-breathing dragon, the happy ending.

  PAST

  THE ORIGINAL SIN

  The first time I ever saw Robert Kavanagh he was dancing at my wedding. He was wearing a green velvet doublet and a silver-buckled belt. He danced well for an Irishman and had a very pleasing curve to his calf. ‘My forester thinks himself a gentleman,’ my new husband said.

  The torches burned bright in the hall of my husband’s new house and the scent of fresh-cut pine still lingered beneath the smell of grease and roasted oxen. Sir Francis spared no expense on his wedding – roasted swan and breast of lapwing, jewel-like jellies and custards as smooth and pale as my Lady Margaret’s cheek. My new husband ate near on a whole suckling-pig to himself and claimed that it tasted exactly like fresh-cooked baby. That is the kind of man he is.

  Everyone was made to admire the jewel he gave me for my wedding present – but for all its gold and emeralds it was still a picture of the dance of death which, if you ask me, is not such a pretty jewel to give your bride on her wedding day. I, of course was as much to be viewed by his fawning retinue as were his trinkets and baubles. He displayed me to his assembled company, lifting a strand of my hair and observing me with his thin-lipped smile. ‘Scotch,’ he said, as if I was a prized savage creature, and I corrected him, for that is a kind of mist.

  On our wedding-night I began to understand what kind of a man it was that I had married. But I will not speak of it, only to say that he knew more tricks than the de’el himself. And then a few more. And now, also, I understood what manner of man it was he gathered around himself in his little court, the more corrupt and depraved, the more my master liked him. They pandered to his whims and inflated him like a puffed toad.

  And as for my Lady Margaret … Sir Francis claimed Lady Margaret was his ward, but there was no document to this effect, no record, no provenance for her at all. He claimed she was the bastard of his dead brother Thomas, but rumour had it that she was his own ill-gotten child. Rumour would also have had it (there was much rumour in that God-forsaken country) that his relationship to her was far from that of protector.

  Nothing there was as I thought it would be.

  I came upon my lord and his so-called ward in a position which did not suggest consanguinity, unless it was customary practice in that country for an ‘uncle’ to be so familiar with his ‘niece’. I thought Lady Margaret a sly thing, she would never meet my eye, only bob her demure little curtseys, yes m’ladying and no m’ladying to me. Yet I was a harsh judge of her for she was barely sixteen, nothing but a child, and was as much prisoner as I myself was.

  She had a tutor still, as if she was a royal bairn and spoke three languages and sang very prettily. My Lady Margaret’s tutor, a Master Shakespeare, wrote Sir Francis an epithalamium, full of flattery of my lord, which was this tutor’s character. These folk were not fit company for any woman.

  The first time we met was as I walked in the wood one spring morning. He was on his black pony and stepped off the path and dismounted for me to pass and bowed his head almost to his knee and I remembered that he thought himself a gentleman. He said nothing, but as I passed I saw that my good hound Finn, a very discerning animal, could not stop his tail from wagging at Master Kavanagh, which was the stamp of his approval.

  I came unannounced into my Lady Margaret’s bedchamber – suspicious, thinking I would catch my husband in her embrace – and instead saw my Lady Margaret’s naked back – thin and supple as a deer, a young girl’s back of arcing blades and knuckled spine – and covered over all, as a map of the world, with a vast expanse of black continent – here and there shaded in yellow or purple. She covered herself hastily but not before I voiced my distress.

  Who had made these vile marks? But I did not need to ask, my heart could tell me the answer. ‘My lord has a most foul and unnatural temper,’ she whispered. I told my husband, who was in his cups as ever, that she was not his dog to be whipped. In answer, he threw me across the room.

  The first time we spoke was in the wood. I knew him well by then, our paths had crossed many times in the great forest, each time he bowed low and did not speak so that I began to wonder if he was dumb. But he was a man of few words, unlike our Master Shakespeare who gabbled like a goose. Master Kavanagh had that look about him, as if he felt himself to be no man’s servant. I could tell.

  I was often in the forest, it was the only place in my lord’s domain where peace still reigned, for there was no peace to be had in the sty that was my lord’s house. I was not mistress there, the lord of misrule had sway. In the forest, I could imagine myself to be mistress of all the trees, they bowed their branches in obeisance, rustled their leaves in a murmur of fealty.

  ‘My lady will catch cold,’ he said, startling me half to death, for I had not seen his soft approach and my dog Finn was sleeping on the watch. But Master Kavanagh was no enemy. He wore a puzzled frown as if he could not understand why the mistress of so much should be making do with so little – and it is true I was not a happy sight, sitting on the ground in the cold and the drizzle under the shelter of a great oak tree. Wrapped in a thick wool cloak and with only my wet hound for company I was truly no better off than one of the serving-girls. And the first time I touched him was when he held out one of his brown, old-callused and new-blistered hands and said, ‘My lady, please, get up off the cold ground.’

  I would my lord had looked at me with his eyes.

  My Lady Margaret was with child. This was obvious to all. We need not ask the father. How came Lady Margaret into this den of vice? She
could not remember, she was but a little child, she said. She had had no mother, no sister, no friend or comforter all those years. Her childhood had been stolen from her. ‘My lord has had me since a child,’ she said. She meant in every way.

  Her cheek was pale. Her tutor feigned indifference for he was my husband’s pet, but he was not bereft of Christian feeling. ‘My lady is dreadful pale,’ he said to me, stopping me in the dark corridor and I replied, ‘Aye, as pale as any glass.’ I knew he had a fondness for her himself, I had seen the tender looks he gave her when he thought himself not overlooked.

  There were no torches lit in the hallway, all was darkness, a single tallow candle waved wildly in the draughts. The wind had residence in this wicked house. Poor Shakespeare’s face was all craters and hollows in the feeble light, like the moon. I could see his skull. I could see the tear in his eye glitter and reminded him that he had behaved as badly as any man in my lord’s retinue. But he had me by the sleeve and would not let me go and I had to comfort him and tell him I would look after her.

  The first time I saw him naked was in the heat of that summer when my Lady Margaret swelled and my lord grew blacker and the house that was so cold in winter became a sweltering stew.

  I was sitting under a great tree, flapping away the forest flies with my hand, in a doze of heat, when the noise of chopping raised me from my slumbers and, treading quietly on the mossy path, I was able to view Master Kavanagh at work, chopping down a tree half-felled in the great winter storms. He was stripped of leather jerkin, and of his sark also, so that I was able to admire the fine brown skin of his back with its coat of sweat, like dew and the black curls of his hair lying damply on his neck. And much more. For a moment I could think of nothing but what he would feel like if I reached my hand out and ran it over his skin.

  Lacking all shame, I followed Master Kavanagh deeper into the forest and when he left the path I left the path also and when he divested himself of his nether garments it would have taken a deal more than self-will to turn my head and not watch him dip himself in the cool black pool where the flag irises waved and the frogs were startled.