Patrick Parker's Progress

by Mavis Cheek

  But for the whole hour of her stay, Audrey had never felt so unwanted. To Hell With Everyone, was the way she felt about it. And she very grandly rang for a taxi to take her to the station. Patrick offered her the money for it, with Florence looking on, lips pursed, as she pressed out her pastry for the big day.

  'No thanks’ she said. 'I've got my own money'

  'Hoity-toity’ said Florence quietly to the short crust. But she was pleased. The girl would not keep him if she behaved like that.

  Patrick might be a Genius and Geniuses might need to be handled differently from ordinary men, but all the same ... A girl has her pride and her limits, thought Audrey. He went to kiss her on the cheek and she stepped back. Too late, far too late, she began to get an inkling that she, also, had power.

  The taxi driver set off towards the station. Anger won over forlorn. You could excuse Patrick when he was being dedicated - and she did

  -but not for something so emotional, not for your father's funeral, which was so very much the right occasion for having the woman you loved by your side to see it through with you. That was not the way the Tracys and the Hepburns, the Hudsons and the Days did it in films, and neither was it the way people did it in real life. In real life there was always kindness and romance and the seeing-through of things together. Up to the surface came the memory of Coulter Hall and how he had gone without her; up to the surface came the standing in the rain for two hours because he couldn't be bothered to remember her - and bubbling alongside them came a little burst of rebellion. How dare he? And for some reason, alongside that thought, came the memory of the woman and the note and the bicycle. How careless Patrick had been. All those sweets and she'd bet he never passed the message on. She'd bet a hundred pounds on it.

  And then it occurred to her that George was dead. Really dead. And who was there to care about that, really? She had seen no tears in that house. None at all. She leaned forward - suddenly determined - and told the taxi driver to take a detour. He did so cheerfully enough, after all, it was a quiet afternoon. And when she stepped out of the cab saying grandly, 'Just wait,' as she had also seen in films, he smiled and saluted her. If this was the wrong thing to do, she thought, it was the wrong thing to do, but it felt right. Best not to think, she decided, as she pushed open the door and marched into Willis's Stores.

  The woman was there on her own. Just about recognisable. Audrey thought that the horrors time wreaked on people must never happen to her. Patrick would not be able to bear it. The woman's scarlet mouth was still there too, bright as ever, and so was the nail varnish. Odd the way women who were beyond all help still went on doing such things. The woman was humming softly as she swept behind the counter, so it couldn't be all bad. She looked up and said, very nicely, 'We're just about to close. Be quick now.' And she resumed the humming and the sweeping.

  Audrey nearly failed and was on the point of asking for a quarter of mints instead. But she had come this far and surely the worst that could happen, when she gave her news, would be the woman staring at her blankly. Besides, right at that moment she hated Florence and if her suspicions were correct, this was a little bit of getting even that no one need ever know about. ‘I don't know if I'm doing right,' she said to the woman. 'But George Parker died yesterday. Would I be correct in thinking that you would want to know that?'

  The woman stopped her sweeping and her humming immediately and stood very still. She stared, half puzzled. The silence was chilling. Then she said, hesitantly, 'You might be . ..' Which was really a question.

  Audrey said, ‘I came in here with his son a few years ago, and you gave him a note to pass on to George. Patrick - his son - never did. And I am very sorry.' She could not bear the way the woman's face changed, how miserable she suddenly looked - and suspicious.

  'How do I know it's true?' she asked-

  For a moment Audrey thought she was going to hit her with the broom and she made to leave. The woman called her back.

  'I'm sorry’ she said. 'My name is Lilly.' She crossed the floor of the shop to snag the door. 'Come through to the back.' 'I've got a taxi waiting’ said Audrey, afraid suddenly. 'Ten minutes’ said Lilly.

  She put her finger to her lips as they went into the sitting room and pointed at the dingy ceiling. 'My husband's in bed up there’ she said. 'Don't want to wake him.' Somehow the whispering added to the bond between the two women. 'Please’ she said in a shaky voice, 'tell me...'

  In the House of Death, Palace of Mourning, Patrick sat in his old bedroom - still with the narrow bed and its orange candlewick spread, still with the desk and chair and the blue tatting rug - and he was drawing. He had to finish the plan and he might as well finish it here as anywhere. In fact here, in the House of Death, Palace of Mourning (not strictly true this latter but he liked the sound of it) the silence and the peace were perfect for the completion of the project. And he had to get on with his life, that was all there was to it, death or no death. Time waiteth for no man, he told himself, nor for the Gold Medal. It was going to be a big year for him, a big life, and in the grand, rolling course of things, the death of a parent was both inevitable and small.

  Florence, trying not to look as happy as she felt, came in every so often to give him cups of tea and cocoa and titbits, or to summon him downstairs for a meal. For these few days there was the most perfect harmony between them and the harmony was conducive to genius ... It reminded Patrick that what he needed was a wife - or, rather, (and this amused him) what he needed was a mother with sex.

  'You'll stay on a bit after the funeral?' Florence asked, bringing him a tray of tea and scones.

  'Perhaps’ he said, not looking up.

  'You know there'll be a bit of money for you now your dad's gone. Just a little lump sum. Might be enough to buy a small house.' Not in London, he thought, but said nothing.

  Florence closed the door softly, reverently, and he heard her padding her way - a little more carefully than she used to perhaps -down the stairs. He felt that freezing in his spine again. His mother was really on her own now. So was he. And he did not like the way she looked at him. Responsibility - that had to change. He would need a wife to sort that side of things out - but first the funeral.

  13

  After the Funeral

  There is nothing romantic about the Ponte dei Sospiri (Bridge of Sighs) which merely unites the Courts of Justice in the Palace with the Criminal Prison.

  Grant Allen, Historical Guide to Venice, 1898

  The funeral took place, Patrick thought, like a series of scenes in a theatre. Scarcely a sentence about the qualities of the dead man was uttered by the Chapel Minister without a nod or a pursing of the lips and a strange and restless rustling through the crowd, all of whom, including his own mother, had a shifty look about them. And most of those shifty looks were directed towards a woman who hung back at the edge of the small group gathered around the open grave. She looked vaguely familiar but when he asked his mother about her - was she a distant relative? - his mother looked as if she might have a fit.

  Florence was not far off having a fit anyway. Her wishes having been flagrantly, flagrantly flouted. For in death, if not in life, George Parker, RIP, had got his own way. He could keep more than one secret, could George. Among other things, some years ago he had talked to the Chapel Minister about the form of his last resting place and the manner of his arrival there. It was one of several conversations of a spiritual nature he and the minister had together. George having found some comfort in the piousness of the man's humility was able to lay his burden down - in part anyway. ‘I married the wrong woman,' he said. 'And I have stuck by her . . .' (God would forgive the slight abbreviation of the whole picture.) ‘I have had precious little chance to do what I want on this earth as a result of that, minister,' was how he put it. 'But I'd like to think that I've got some say in the going out of it.'

  When it came to Florence and the minister there was quite a showdown. Florence insisted that she knew what her husband wanted, sh
e hoped, and what he wanted was to be cremated. The minister, recognising his own wife in that stout bosom and determined chin, said he must demur and say, in the eyes of God, that he made a promise which he would keep. Florence railed. The minister stood firm. God was invoked and you couldn't go higher. God and the minister (and George) won. Which was why they all now stood around a gaping hole in the ground - 'the most solemn reminder of man's return to worms and the earth from which he sprang . ..'

  Patrick watched with particular keenness the drama of the mystery woman. She stood with her head bowed, her thin headscarf fluttering, the puffs of yellowish-white hair that escaped from underneath it looking oddly jaunty. She sobbed and gasped her way through the ceremonials. She had a lot more tears to shed than his mother - which was not hard since, as yet, his mother had shed none. The nods and curiosity and whisperings were directed towards this deeply affected woman, who seemed not to notice, or if she did, not to care. The few left over were for Florence. Patrick, observing it closely, felt confused, with a mixture of curiosity at the event, as if he were standing outside it watching, and a sense of something else which he took to be grief. He thought about Dylan Thomas and jazz and how his father once made Meccano constructions, and he willed himself to cry, to shed even one tear, one drop of salt water - none came. He bowed his head and remembered what he could. That was all. But the memories were dim and inconsequential, like his relationship with his father - of no real substance - evaporating even as the coffin lay in the ground. He would talk to the woman afterwards - find out why she was able to mourn with tears and he was not.

  The minister finished his few words. The woman stopped her sobbing. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved except Patrick who, feeling everybody's eyes upon him, bent and picked up a handful of soil. He threw the dirt onto the coffin, a gesture that was immediately followed by a strange choking noise. He looked up. The woman's head was bobbing up and down now, her shoulders were shaking, yet she stood alone. No one went to her, which was even more curious. People comforted his mother, who was dry-eyed; people comforted him - a pat on the back, and squeeze of his shoulder - but he too was dry-eyed. No one comforted her, who was soaked with her tears. Why?

  He had a sudden thought - was she perhaps a professional mourner? Did they still have those nowadays? If anyone needed such a thing it was his poor old dad. He looked across at her and smiled. She smiled back, waterily. His mother moved towards him and tucked her hand in his arm. He could hear her breath, firm and heavy, as if she disapproved of what was taking place before them.

  'Who is that?' asked Patrick.

  'Nobody,' said Florence.

  It might have been left there, set down by the graveside, just another mystery, had not Dickie (Cheffy's son) and Archie Bowles, old schoolfriends of Patrick's and subsequently workmates of his father's, smuggled a bottle of whisky into the teetotal post-funeral eats. At which the uninvited woman removed her headscarf and sat on the edge of the settee, knees together, cheeks very pink, eyes defiant and chewing very positively on a ham and cress sandwich. Not a pretty sight, thought Patrick. Tears had added to the effect of a pantomime dame, but at least she had managed to cry...

  Dolly pointed out that it was just not done to refuse a guest after a funeral. Besides, Lilly Willis looked as if one sharp word and she'd tip over the edge and then what would the minister say? Florence did not care particularly about what the minister said as she had her own words to say to him later - but Dolly was probably right. It was easier all round. So Florence sniffed once and made the best of it. In a way she had a lot to thank Lilly for. Discretion, if nothing else, and taking away an unpleasant marital burden. As long as Patrick never found out then all would be well. He was still such a boy. Steering him away from Lilly's gaze, she handed him a plate with an assortment of sandwiches.

  'Don't forget to eat,' she said.

  'What's her name?' he asked, pointing at Lilly.

  'Lilly Willis,' she said. 'And she's nobody'

  'Then why is she here? How does she know my father?'

  'Because they were sweethearts at school,' said Florence, smooth as butter.

  Patrick looked more kindly at Lilly. He had the vaguest idea that he knew that bit of information already. She smiled back, a little cress caught in her teeth. Patrick looked away. Such things disgusted him. When he looked again she beckoned. He stood up and Florence suddenly executed a swift turn, blocking his way. 'You haven't eaten anything,' she said with extraordinary desperation in her voice. But he moved past her. She caught up with him, shrill now. 'You ought to speak to the Boxers ... Just over there. Doesn't Peggy look a treat?'

  He nodded and moved on towards Lilly Willis. Smiling at everyone as he went, feeling that he must show dignity on his father's behalf, enjoying the status of Son to the Star of the Show even if he was starring in Death rather than Life.

  He spotted Peggy Boxer across the room and bestowed his sad, grateful smile upon her but she smiled at him in a different way from the others. For a moment dignity fled in the unmistakable sensation of desire. She had a very wide smile, and very red lips and her little teeth were white and perfect. Her mother, who sat straight-backed beside her, also smiled, but a little too eagerly, and she even gave a little wave. As if this was a social event. Ruby, who had high hopes, had dressed Peggy - rather appropriately if she said so herself - to kill. Ruby Boxer might have ended up as wife to the publican but her daughter deserved - and would get - better. Let the lower set of Coventry laugh at mother and daughter's stylishness - let them say they were fools and show-offs with their fashions and their elocution lessons - let them wink, let them nudge each other in the ribs and call her A Cut Above - the main thing was to better yourself. And one very good way of bettering yourself was to avoid, at all costs, marrying a publican. Ruby was still reeling from Florence's apparent interest in her daughter as companion for Patrick - and though Peggy had cried all the way home from the Parker household at Christmas, coming here today her mother had urged her to Put It All Behind Her. They were much encouraged at the absence of Audrey. Audrey being in London, feeling very sorry for herself, sulking, and having delusions that she was being severely missed. Truth was, Patrick was relieved. Withdrawing sexual favours only works when the circumstances are right. Since arriving in Coventry and up until this moment, Patrick had not had much in the way of carnal desire - too many other things going on - but now, as he looked across at Peggy, he was reminded, very pleasantly, that he could still have them.

  Today Peggy was particularly chic, particularly dashing (perhaps a Utile too chic and dashing, thought most of the gathering) in a little black two-piece trimmed with black swansdown and with a shiny cock's feather stuck in her hat. Mrs Boxer noted, with smiling satisfaction, that even the grieving Patrick could not take his eyes off her. Nor the feather. What with the swansdown riffling and the feather flouncing, it was difficult to look away.

  Peggy lowered her eyes at Patrick's smile and then looked up again quickly so that the feather curved and trembled. It was, he thought with satisfaction, practically obscene. Peggy had perfected the art of peering from under the brim of a hat and Patrick liked the effect of it. He did not like himself for liking it, such foolishness being an old-fashioned foible of the median herd, but nevertheless he found himself wondering what she would look like naked except for the hat. The inappropriateness was good. He remembered his Nietzsche (always useful in his lack of convention) that man's sexuality reaches up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit... It was this very lust that produced his lusty designs. He realised that now. It underpinned him. The two were inextricably interwoven. To be bound by convention was to be lost to the Bourgeois. It was something he told Audrey over and over again whenever she showed signs of narrow-mindedness. Fling Off the Bounds of Bourgeois Principle, he quite often told her, which usually transposed into her flinging off her clothes.

  Peggy and her mother were settled on the same settee as was Lilly. All three waited for Patrick to arrive - but Dick and Ar
chie stepped out and blocked him.

  'Mind out lads,' he said, and went to pass them.

  They slapped him on the back, removed the plate of sandwiches from his hand, and offered him a glass of ginger ale to 'spice himself up a bit'. He took the proffered glass at face value, despite Dick and Archie winking at him. And he took a very large mouthful.

  Of course he would have spat it out but just at that very moment his Aunt Bertha came up to him to be kissed and the very large mouthful felt as if he had hot needles going down the back of his throat. His eyes watered and every instinct, including the Flinging Off of Bourgeois Principle, told him not to swallow. But if he spat it out, then, in Aunt and Fairground terms, he would gain a bullseye. So he stood, tears streaming down his face while Aunt Bertha removed her little bit of black veil and leaned towards him so that he might kiss her cheek and said, 'Ah - so you are grieving after all. Well, I'm very glad somebody is ...'

  They stood confronting each other in amazed stalemate - until he, knowing there was nothing else for it, finally swallowed. She watched the tears rolling down his cheeks.

  'There, there,' she said. 'You loved your dad after all.' And she smiled and patted him on his way and couldn't wait to get back to Florence to tell her. But Florence was gazing at Patrick as if she was about to witness some terrible calamity Lilly.