I used to ask myself why he bothered – how he could even want to sleep with my aunt. It must, I thought, be rather like making love to a mound of old bicycles, except that – chances were – the bicycles would be more appreciative.
Now that I’ve seen more of the world, I accept that however weird Tom might have appeared to me then, he wasn’t even half-way up the twisted scale of weirdness. Take, for example, the petroleum engineer from Peterborough, who I met while I was on the lam in the Gulf, shortly after Aunt Sadie’s unfortunate accident. His name was Brad, and he was a Hollywood dream – tall, broad and handsome. He could have had any woman he wanted, yet he was totally infatuated with a camel – and a bad-tempered, ugly one, at that.
So Tom’s obsession with my aunt, whilst hard to understand, is not totally inconceivable. Even so, if I were given the choice between Jacqueline and the camel, I’d plump for the camel every time.
4
I don’t wish to create the impression that I had the kind of childhood which would have made Oliver Twist’s experience look like a fortnight at the Club Med. It was difficult at first, I admit, but conditions did gradually improve. Aunt Jacqueline was quite prepared to shop for food, as long as I organised it, and, thanks to Mother, I already knew how to cook a few simple meals. Nor did my aunt object when I started to clean and tidy up, and by the end of the year I had the living room so presentable that even Mother would have approved.
And whilst it is true that Aunt Jacqueline wasn’t the most affectionate of relatives, nor was she really intrusive, either. She was out most of the day – pounding at the keyboard of an estate agent’s PC with her nicotine-stained fingers – and her nights were usually spent at the clubs.
How many clubs there were! She and Tom put in thousands of miles every year, just travelling to different venues. They played in the Liberal Club and the Conservative Club, the British Legion Club and the Country Club. Had the National Union of Poisoners opened a branch in the area, they’d have played there, too – as long as there was a Strychnine Cup to compete for.
How ironic it is then, that for all her fanaticism, Aunt Jacqueline was not that good a player. I don’t mean she was actually bad. She came consistently top of the list, and no doubt impressed all her local opponents, but as I came to really understand bridge properly over the next couple of years, I began to appreciate just how limited her understanding of the game was.
‘I can’t see how they could squeeze an extra trick out of that,’ she said, one Sunday afternoon when we were analysing the 1968 World Championship.
‘I can’t see it either, Auntie,’ I told her.
‘How could he have known the king was lying there?’ she asked on another Sunday, in reference to the 1971 European heats.
‘I don’t know, Auntie.’
Of course I saw. Of course I knew. It was all so obvious to me, but I thought it wise not to make her aware of the fact that, although I’d never sat down at a proper bridge table in my life, I was already out of her class.
So I lied, knowing that Mother would have understood and forgiven me, because Aunt Jacqueline was the only person standing between me and the orphanage where – I still believed – the rats ate your eyes out in the night.
****
Oh, that aunt of mine! How she dreamed of going on to greater things.
‘One day,’ she’d repeat over and over again, almost as if were a prayer, ‘one day I’ll be an international player.’
It was pathetic really – rather like hearing an amoeba expressing the wish to become Brain of Britain.
5
A few days after I went to live with her, Aunt Jacqueline enrolled me in the nearest primary school. It was a pleasant enough place – light and airy and filled with all those kinds of resources that middle-class parents provide from the proceeds of countless bring-and-buy sales – but on the whole, it bored me.
I don’t blame the school. The teachers were all caring, well-meaning people, but I had little interest in the knowledge they attempted to impart to me. What did I care about how Eskimos lived, when sitting at home – just waiting for me – was an account of the 1934 Culbertson-Lenz clash of the bridge titans?
How could I show enthusiasm for the New Maths, when the only mathematics which concerned me was the percentage variants on a finesse?
The other kids, equally, failed to stimulate me. I tried, once or twice, to teach a few of the brighter ones how to play bridge, but they were soon floundering. I did my best to share their interests, but moronic children’s television quiz shows held no appeal for me, and kicking a ball to and fro seemed so pointless as to be hardly worth contemplating.
In the end, I found I was spending most of my time alone, and it’s not surprising that despite attending the school for two years – and being blessed with an exceptional memory – I’m unable to recall a single person I met there.
Actually, that’s not quite accurate – I do remember Les Fliques.
But does he count? After all, he was a visiting lecturer, not a teacher or a pupil at the school, and perhaps my memory of our first meeting has been reinforced by the fact that since then we’ve locked horns far more regularly than I personally would have chosen to.
No! Thinking about it, I’m sure that if I’d only seen him once, the image of Les Fliques – only a humble constable back then – would still have been firmly burned into my mind. That was the kind of impact Les had – once seen and he’d be visiting your nightmares for years.
We’d had several guest lecturers that term before Fliques made his appearance. A large man, whose face contained so many broken veins it resembled a road map, had preached temperance to us. A thinner man, with a hacking cough almost as bad as Aunt Jacqueline’s, had warned us of the dangers of smoking. An obese woman, weighed down with jewellery, had asked us to collect used stamps for the starving millions in Africa. So it was as veterans that we trooped into the gym/hall and sat on the floor in class lines to await the arrival of Constable Fliques.
Looking straight ahead – as we’d been taught – we watched Fliques march up to our minuscule stage. He was certainly a sight to see. His lean body seemed – like that of a jack-in-the-box – to have been constructed on a very tight spring which was held down for the moment, but would shoot forth with considerable force whenever he blew his top. His eyebrows resembled malevolent stinging caterpillars, and the eyes below were small, yet missed nothing. His nose looked as if it had been broken, then set again by a drunken doctor with poor vision. The picture was completed by a wide mouth which looked big enough to swallow a child whole, and a chin like a crudely re-shaped house brick.
He was not a tall man – I’d guess he only just made the regulation height – but he exuded a power and ferocity which, without him having to do a thing, made several of my small companions wet themselves.
‘My name is Constable Fliques,’ he said, fixing each and every one of us with his piercing eyes.
From the back of the hall came the sound of the door closing, as our teachers stepped outside for a quick smoke or – in the case of at least one of them – a stiff slug of McMeths’ Finest Accrington Whisky from his hip flask.
Fliques wrote his name on the whiteboard.
‘You don’t say the “s”,’ he told us. ‘It’s pronounced “Flick”.’ He gave us another piercing stare. ‘It’s Huguenot.’
The eyes swept the room, searching out any kid willing to dispute that his forefathers had been 16th Century French weavers of a Calvinistic persuasion.
No one did.
‘Road Safety,’ he announced, writing it on the whiteboard in thick, intimidating capitals. ‘How many of you have got bicycles?’
When it came to conditioning, our teacher would have put Pavlov to shame, and though I had no particular desire to participate in this exercise, I found my arm – surrounded by a forest of other arms – being held high in the air.
‘You!’ Fliques said, homing in on me.
‘Do you go out after dark on your machine?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And do you have proper and adequate lighting mounted on it?’
‘I think so, sir.’
‘Think so isn’t good enough, is it, laddie? Think so could not only have you under a lorry, your head squashed like an over-ripe tomato – think so could also cause you to contravene the Road Traffic Act, couldn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I replied obediently, though I had absolutely no idea what “contravene” meant.
‘What type of illumination is operative on your machine?’
‘Pardon, sir?’
‘Do you have a battery lamp or a dynamo, laddie?’
I searched desperately for some way of saying that when he’d asked us who had a bike, I hadn’t realised that what he’d meant was a bike, and that I, personally, travelled everywhere on foot.
No good.
I looked down at the floor, and wished I was dead.
‘Well?’ Fliques demanded.
‘It’s got a battery, sir.’
‘And how long, under normal conditions, would you expect the battery to last?’ he asked witheringly.
‘I don’t know,’ I confessed.
‘Then find out,’ he roared.
Fliques turned his back on me, and I thought, for one glorious moment, that my ordeal was over.
But it was just a policeman’s trick. A second later, he swung round again, and his accusing finger was back in place.
‘Have you had a look at your brake blocks recently?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir. Yesterday,’ I lied, feeling sure that on this occasion, Mother would have forgiven me.
‘Don’t believe you,’ Fliques told me. ‘I’ll be watching you, laddie.’ But he did seem, finally, to have finished with me, and his eyes swept the hall again. ‘Who’s used a zebra crossing?’ he asked.
Apparently, no one had.
‘Black and white stripes,’ Fliques said helpfully. ‘Can’t miss ‘em. Run right across the road.’
Still, nobody volunteered to step onto the firing line.
‘You,’ Fliques said, pointing to a girl called Jane who was so sickeningly good that she was both the library monitor and the flower monitor. ‘You’ve used them, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, sir,’ the class paragon reluctantly admitted.
‘Then why didn’t you say so in the first place?’ Fliques asked belligerently. ‘Now what do you do before you step off the kerb?’
It took less than a minute of Fliques’ blistering interrogation for goody-two-shoes Jane to break down and confess that once, when she was much younger and much less responsible than she was now, she’d crossed the road without looking right, left and then right again.
We’d gone into the hall as lively and reasonably optimistic children, but when Fliques released us, forty-five minutes later, we filed out like broken men and women, weighed down by our faults and convinced we were doomed to a life of inadequacy and failure.
Never, ever, would I go within a mile of Constable Fliques again, I promised myself – which only goes to show that even with a near-genius IQ, it’s still possible to get things totally, hopelessly wrong.
If only I’d known the truth back then. If only I’d realised then that Les Fliques was going to be with me for a long time, pointing the finger of guilt at me after Aunt Jacqueline’s death, Aunt Peggy’s untimely demise, Aunt Catherine’s …
But I’m getting way ahead of myself – a fault that I’ve often been prone to.
‘Your brain works too quickly, Bobby,’ Mother used to say. ‘Slow down and give your body a chance to catch up.’
Quite right, Mother.
6
If I were to pick a point at which life began to change – at which my aunt began to change – I think I would have to select my eleventh birthday. We didn’t celebrate it – birthdays, like most other aspects of existence away from the bridge table, had no relevance for Aunt Jacqueline – yet it did have an impact on her.
I noticed it in little things at first, like the way she looked at me – quizzically, appraisingly.
And then there was the question of the uniform I would need for my new school.
‘Shall we go and buy it on Saturday, Auntie?’ I asked her one day towards the end of July.
‘Plenty of time yet,’ she told me.
‘We still haven’t got my new uniform,’ I reminded her at some point in the middle of August.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she snapped.
But I did worry, or, at least, I was puzzled. Whatever her faults – and they were legion – my aunt was not a mean woman. Indeed, having no interest in the merely material world, meanness and generosity hardly featured in her outlook at all. If she had money, and I requested it, she’d usually give it to me – so why did she baulk at the idea of a new uniform, which she knew she’d have to buy eventually.
Nor was the issue of the uniform the only mystery. With the exception of Tom, people hardly ever phoned us at home. Now, however, she began to receive a large number of calls. Not only that, but when the phone rang she would rush into the hall to make sure she reached it before I did, and, when talking to the caller, would keep her mouth close to the receiver and speak in what was almost a whisper.
I caught snatches of the conversations – ‘Don’t ring me at the office’; ‘Thirty-five thousand pounds’; ‘By the end of the month’ – but never enough to explain the sudden change in my aunt’s telephonic habits.
But I have yet to reveal the strangest thing of all – there were nights when Aunt Jacqueline did not play bridge!
It’s true.
‘I’m too tired,’ she told Tom, one balmy August evening.
Too tired?
For bridge?
Even when she did play, her killer instinct seemed to have completely deserted her.
‘We did well tonight, didn’t we?’ Tom asked enthusiastically, after a session at the Liberal Club.
And my aunt, who could normally out-crow a cockerel, simply said, ‘Yes, we did,’ without any suggestion of triumph in her voice.
‘So could we … err...?’ Tom asked, glancing towards the stairs.
I was there at the time, I should mention – right in the living room – but they’d long since given up trying to hide from me that it was in the bedroom that Tom got his reward for his services at the bridge table.
‘Could we?’ Tom asked again.
‘Could we what?’ my bloody-minded aunt replied.
‘You know …’ Tom awkwardly. ‘Go upstairs … for a lie-down.’
‘No,’ Aunt Jacqueline said firmly. ‘I’ve got a headache, and besides, I don’t feel like it.’
Did she notice the look which flashed briefly in his eyes – the look of a much stronger man than he normally appeared to be, a man who was tired of being treated as a doormat? I don’t know, but she must have at least suspected that such a man existed, or she would not have executed her plans in the way that she did.
7
It was not until the beginning of September, a few days before I was due to start my new school – uniform-less – that Aunt Jacqueline finally chose to confide in me. We were engaged in our joint household tasks at the time – me polishing the sideboard, my aunt covering the sofa arm with a protective layer of cigarette ash.
‘I shouldn’t bother doing that,’ my aunt said, from out of nowhere.
‘Why not, Auntie?’
‘It’ll only get dirty again during the move.’
The move?
Suddenly, the spate of phone calls and her refusal to buy me a new uniform both made sense. But what about her waning interest in bridge? Even the move didn’t explain that.
‘Where are we going, Auntie?’ I asked.
‘A long way away,’ Aunt Jacqueline replied. ‘Better you don’t know where until we actually leave, just in case you let it slip out.’
‘Why
is it all such a secret?’ I asked, alarmed. ‘We’re not in any trouble, are we?’
Aunt Jacqueline laughed drily, like a snake with a bad case of laryngitis.
‘Not in trouble,’ she said. ‘Just want to avoid a scene. Tom won’t like it.’
Tom won’t like it. What could that mean?
‘Are you saying you’re not going to tell him we’re leaving?’
‘That’s right.’
Poor, faithful Tom! For years he had sacrificed himself to her obsession for bridge, and now she was abandoning him as if he were nothing more than a cigarette she’d smoked down to the filter.
‘He loves you, you know,’ I said earnestly. ‘You’ll break his heart if you just go away.’
‘I’d never have got anywhere with him,’ my aunt said dismissively, as if broken hearts didn’t really come into it.
I didn’t understand, although, having lived with her for two years, I certainly should have done.
‘I’d have been stuck in the minor bridge leagues for ever if I’d kept playing with Tom,’ my aunt continued.
‘But if you’re not going to play with Tom any more, then who is going to be your part—?’ I began, before realisation suddenly struck. ‘Me!’ I said. ‘You want me to partner you.’
‘You’re too young to play in the big tournaments yet,’ my aunt said, ‘but there’s no reason why the local clubs shouldn’t accept you.’
She’d waited for this moment ever since the day of my mother’s funeral, when we’d played our first game of Honeymoon Bridge. No wonder she’d lost patience with playing with Tom as the time for our departure grew ever closer. He’d never been anything but her hors d’oeuvre – I was to be the main course.
A Conspiracy of Aunts Page 3
