Her legs go limp and her eyes water; and I realise that, despite the colloquialism, children are the hardest people to kid. I sit her on my lap and explain in my best ice-cream voice that, when they came to tea, her grandparents did not like the way that I was looking after her and so they are sending someone – a sort of teacher – to check.
‘Miss Lister’s my teacher.’
‘She’ll just ask a few questions. It won’t last long. And if it makes Granny and Grandpa happy.’
‘I don’t want them to be happy. I hate them.’
‘Then you must say so to the lady.’ I abandon all pretence of objectivity. ‘You must tell her everything.’
‘They’re old,’ she repeats, ‘they’re old.’
‘It’s very important that you say how much you want to stay with me.’
‘If they send me away, I’ll run away like Tom in The Babies.’ You were right; Kingsley is not suitable reading for a five-year-old. ‘Or 101 Dalmatians.’ There again, I am beginning to wonder what is.
‘You mustn’t worry; it’ll all be fine, so long as you say everything – absolutely everything – to the lady. Then she’ll say it all for you and in big, long words.’
At supper she is subdued; but she rallies as she slips on her pyjamas, using the two-legs-in-one-hole trick to re-run the school sack race. She lies back and falls asleep during one of Gorby’s and Raisa’s more involved adventures, somewhat to my own chagrin since I am keen to see how it ends. Then, at half-past midnight, my doorknob turns slowly as she appears, clutching a teddy, teetering on the brink of defiance.
‘You should be in bed, miss.’
‘I had a bad dream; it was horrid. It was all about Mummy and she had a face like a doll.’ I pat the mattress and she runs towards me. ‘She had eyes like buttons and they didn’t look at me.’
‘It’s all over; don’t think of it.’ Her hot heart pounds against my chest.
‘Dreams are so nasty. Why do we have to have them?’
‘It’s like clearing up your room when there’s mess on the floor. All the mess gets brushed into dreams, so that in the morning it will be neat and tidy.’
‘I wish we didn’t have dreams. I wish we didn’t have sleep at all.’
‘Then think how tired we’d be.’
‘I’m going to learn to sleep with my eyes open.’
‘Come on, I’ll take you back to bed.’
‘Can’t I sleep in your bed?’
‘You know you’re not supposed to.’
‘Please … I’ll only take a teeny much room. I’m still small.’
‘Well alright. Just this once.’ She jumps in. ‘I don’t remember saying anything about teddy.’ She clutches him to her chest, too tired to play games. I switch off the light; she absorbs my warmth and falls asleep. The kicks to my thigh attest to her restlessness; but, after a while, I doze, only to wake to feel something hot and sticky on my leg. She has wet the bed. I hear you complain that women always have to sleep in the damp patch and hate myself for making the connection. Then I am knocked in the groin as she twists and turns, shouting ‘fast forward’. I know that I am tired, but ‘fast forward’…? ‘Fast forward … fast forward.’ Of course. Has video culture even invaded our dreams?
I shake her gently out of her nightmare and lull her back to sleep before she opens her eyes. I carry her to her room and fetch her clean pyjamas, reassured by the soapy freshness of the smell. Too exhausted to attend to my sheets, I opt for your room. The bed is cold and unfamiliar and sleep is hard. In the morning, I apologise to Consuela for the extra work and explain that Pagan was disrupted. She says nothing but rips off the soiled sheet, screws it tight, and, holding it at arm’s length, feeds it to the machine.
From her look of disgust, more profound than any I have known since my mother discovered my teenage copy of Health and Efficiency, I sense that she does not believe me. Does she think that I am using Pagan as an excuse for my own incontinence? It is almost funny. But the smile freezes on my lips, as the thought flicks through my mind, that she may suspect something infinitely worse.
I keep my memories under lock and key; they would be prime evidence in your parents’ case against me … since November my only confidant has been death. And yet I fail to keep them under control; the past shows no more respect in retrospect. Memory is the mockery of the well-ordered mind.
I escape from your parents to mine. The hearing has now been postponed for a month and I make my annual pilgrimage home. My mother opens the door as the car pulls up. Her timing as always is perfect. I strain to see the shiver of a curtain or the shadow of a face pressed to the glass; but it must be second sight. ‘I have eyes in the back of my head,’ she used to tell me, as my misdeeds spilled out like contraband chocolates on the floor. And I believed her. Although her image backfired when, in an end-of-term painting of ‘my mother’, I opted for a spider-like alien with four popping eyes and three pairs of pincer-like hands. The teacher asked her in to discuss it. They decided that I should give up art.
‘It’s good of you to come,’ she says, wiping her hands on her apron in a show of anticipation and disturbance. ‘I know how busy you are.’
‘Never too busy to see my old mum.’ I sound like a travelling salesman.
‘Let me look at you.’ She looks with her hands. ‘You’re skin and bone.’
‘I’m twelve and a half stone.’
‘You don’t take care of yourself. You need someone to take care of you.’
‘I have Consuela.’
‘That’s not what I mean; and well you know it.’
‘Mother, please, I’m not yet through the door.’
We stand by a balustrade of peeling stucco. Gleneagles guesthouse: the name seems so nebulous. A No Vacancies sign in my mother’s classiest curlicue hangs in the porch. She won a prize for calligraphy at fourteen and has written the chapel notices ever since. Some of the elders took it amiss. The loop on her ‘p’s was suspiciously flamboyant, not to mention the tail of her ‘q’s. Where would it end: smells, bells and priests in chasubles? I could have reassured them. One whiff of Gleneagles and its airless, cheerless sobriety would have shown that she was sound.
She offers her cheek – she never kisses me – it is surprisingly soft. She turns to Pagan. ‘How’s my little girl then … not so little any more.’
‘I’ve grown two inches since Christmas.’
‘You’re lucky; at my age, you start to shrink.’
‘Are you very old?’
‘Not too old to give you a big hug.’ She lifts Pagan and extends the kiss that she has kept from me. Pagan responds with reassuring enthusiasm.
‘I’ve put you in number three and Pagan in number four.’
‘Next door.’
‘Not number six?’ – the Hawaii of guest rooms, added when I finally moved to London and the Egon Schiele posters were replaced by Van Gogh Sunflowers and the bean-bag by a chintzy chair. And yet I still like to use it, prompted more by fantasy than nostalgia: that I might wake up again as a boy of seventeen.
‘Not after last time. I left it empty for two weeks.’
‘I thought I’d explained: I had a work-crisis.’
‘I’m not blaming you … simply stating a fact.’
‘You’ve no need for guests,’ I say, ‘I make plenty of money.’
‘That’s nice for you.’
‘You deserve a break. Let people look after you for a change.’
‘I wouldn’t know what to do if I wasn’t working.’
‘That’s what’s so sad.’
I still expect to see the headline: Shame of TV’s Leo. Mother forced to take in guests while star lives in luxury … Oh, it is too ridiculous. I want to help her, and not out of duty but gratitude; and yet she spurns every offer. It is not her independence that she refuses to give up but her right of disapproval.
We go through to the morning room where my father sits watching cartoons. The incongruity puzzles Pagan, for whom second childhood poses a
threat to the first. She clambers on the pouffe to examine the metal plate in his head. ‘Pagan …’ I warn. But you have made her fearless of illness; its accoutrements are an adventure. He does not lift his eyes from the screen.
‘It’s the boy, Bill,’ my mother says. ‘It’s Len come to see you.’ He looks up; his gaze glazes; his dentures dribble. A bulge of belly through an open button makes me fear for the future.
‘How are you, Dad?’ I feel nothing for this man; I must feel nothing, or else I will feel too much.
‘Cats …’ It is a poor child’s Tom and Jerry: the mindless viewing of a man who used only to like westerns.
‘He hated cartoons,’ I say to my mother.
‘Then tell them to change the schedules. I’m sure a word in high places … It makes no difference as long as it’s colour. I always have to check it’s in colour. He’s disturbed by black and white.’
I attempt communication. ‘Dad, it’s Lenny. Don’t you have anything to say to me?’
‘Cats.’
‘He seems so much worse.’
‘No. You just blot it out. But don’t fret; it would make no difference if you came up every week; he forgets. Any case, he sees you twice a week on the screen.’
‘It’s hardly the same.’
‘Oh, it is to him. He talks to you in his way. You’re as real to him there as you are now. He’s lost all sense of touch.’
‘What happens now, when the programme’s off air till September?’
‘I tell him you’re on holiday. I show him a postcard. I keep them all in a box.’
My eyes mist. So my work is of some value. What would she have done if I had joined the Westminster Abbey choir: held up a record sleeve? That’s Len, third from the left on the back row? He could hardly talk back to a chorus.
She thinks otherwise. Her every word bears the assumption that I have wasted my life. ‘You had a God-given voice’ … in which case, why did He stop there? What about my brain and the rest of my anatomy? ‘When I think of all I had to do to get you to Bangor twice a week, not to mention Mr Llewellyn’s lessons.’
‘Yes, every sacrifice is in order as long as it’s not compromised by ambition: “God’s are the gifts and God’s is the glory.” I remember one birthday when you gave me the parable of the talents inscribed on a scroll.’
‘I copied it myself.’
‘Other mothers knit socks.’
‘You lacked for nothing. I even paid for that trip to Venice. More’s the pity.’ She looks at Pagan. ‘Your father wasn’t interested.’
‘As you never ceased to inform me.’
‘“What are you doing it for?” he’d ask; “he’ll only get above himself … and us.” Well I’m saying nothing.’
‘Any other mother would be proud of what I’ve done.’
‘It’s not that I’m not proud, son; it’s that you shouldn’t be.’
‘Don’t worry, there’s no danger of that.’
My public persona has other uses than a paternal sedative. On Saturday, I open the chapel jumble sale and, on Sunday, an Abbeyfield Home garden fete. They ask me to be a sideshow. I presume that they want me to sell kisses. When they propose that I be pelted with soggy sponges, I decline.
Pagan is delighted when I win her a goldfish, with a fluke flick of the wrist that is conveniently caught by the North Wales Weekly News. From my mother’s frown, you would think that it were riddled with some kind of mad-fish disease. I fear that she may even enforce the ‘no pets’ rule, but she lets it pass.
‘Mind you feed it now,’ she tells Pagan, ‘or it’ll die.’
‘Of course I will. At home, I have a cat.’
‘I know. That’s why I can’t come and stay. It gives me asthma.’
‘It’s all in your mind, Mother.’
‘And on my chest.’
‘I’ve told you. If you come, we’ll board it out for a few days.’
‘It wouldn’t be fair on the poor creature. Besides, any chance it had, it would make for home. Cats always do. That’s why you have to put butter on their paws.’
‘Butter?’ Pagan sounds incredulous.
‘Unlike people, they don’t forget where their home is.’
‘I’m here now, Mother.’
‘Did I mention any names? Your Uncle Lenny –’
‘She calls me Leo.’
‘And your mother had a cat when they were at university. It was called Dog, which they thought was amusing. They didn’t feed it so it died.’
‘You didn’t?’ Pagan’s eyes narrow. An animal rights activist is born.
‘It’s a long story. We went for a fortnight to Cornwall and there was no one to see to the cat. So Mummy had the idea of sending it a kipper every day through the mail. Dog would be able to smell it and tear the envelope open for its meal. It must have worked because when we came home, the hall was a mass of little bones and scraps of paper. But then the letters were stopped. A sorter at the Post Office was Italian – oh, this is very complicated – and, in Italy, there’s a gang of nasty men who, if they don’t like you, send you a fish. Which means that you have to be very careful. He found a rip in the envelope and smelt a rat –’
‘Do rats smell like kippers?’
‘No … no, it’s a phrase – like “something fishy”. So he told the police and they kept all the remaining kippers as evidence. In the meantime, Dog died.’
‘Poor thing! I hope no one ever sends me a fish.’
‘Of course they won’t.’
‘That’s not a story for a child, Lenny. You’ll give her bad dreams.’
‘You used to tell me that bad dreams came from my own wickedness.’
‘I expect I had my reasons.’
‘Why do you call him Lenny when his name’s Leo?’
‘It’s the name he was christened.’
‘What’s christened?’
‘It was Lenny a long time ago but your mummy changed it.’
‘Why?’
‘I think she wanted me to be more like her.’
‘Will I have to change my name?’
‘No, you’ll always be Pagan.’
I am beginning to think that I have a permanent smut on my nose. The incessant ‘is it?… it can’t be … it is too … my friend says you’re the spitting image … only taller, smaller, fatter, thinner, greyer’ is so much more intrusive here than in London. I am buying groceries for my mother when an old dear exclaims ‘you wouldn’t think he’d have to eat food’. So it comes as a considerable relief to escape. I persuade my mother to leave my father in the formidable hands of Mrs Coombes and join us for a picnic on the Great Orme. She makes a daisy chain for Pagan and teaches her the names of the different flowers. I like to watch them together; I am not sure whether it prompts a memory or a desire.
She plumps herself beside me as Pagan wanders off to pick buttercups. ‘She’s a lovely little girl. It makes me sad.’
‘Don’t worry, Mum. No one’s going to take her away from me.’
‘No, not that. Not that at all. That I don’t have any grandchildren of my own.’
‘What’s the difference? You can see her whenever you like. You have pictures of her all over the house.’
‘That’s because you send them. She doesn’t call me Granny.’
‘It’s just a word.’
‘Words count. You were the one who said so. “Don’t call it a lounge in company.”‘
‘That was years ago.’ I blush.
‘You’re so good with her. You ought to have a daughter of your own.’
‘I’m thirty-seven, Mother.’
‘I know how old you are. I was there. Three days in labour. You ripped me apart; my insides were like offal.’
‘Please!’
‘The midwife said she’d never seen a woman suffer like me.’
‘So I must make someone else suffer to make it up to you?’
‘It’s different now … with everything that’s available. Mothers today don’t know they’re bor
n. “You have a beautiful son,” the midwife said. “Don’t show me,” I said. “Not yet, or I may never forgive him.”’
‘She obviously didn’t listen.’
‘“Not after what he’s put me through.” You tore me apart then; but you didn’t know what you were doing. You do now.’
‘Perhaps we should go back to the car. It’s turning cold.’
‘There are so many pretty girls on television.’ I place my index finger and thumb around my navel and concentrate on my breathing. ‘I don’t want to speak ill of the dead and I know you were very close; but I can’t help feeling Candida wasn’t right for you.’
‘Please don’t, Mother.’
‘Oh, I know she was good company – very lively. But she held you back. You were always a part of her life rather than the other way round. And then when she became ill …’ She leaves her real resentment unexpressed. You are the daughter-in-law she never had. She blames you for my disaffection. If it were not for you, I would be singing canticles in a cathedral choir, my heart as pure as my music. It may sound absurd – and insulting – but it suits her to condemn you rather than to confront me. And you gave her ample opportunity from the start.
‘Candida, that’s an unusual name.’
‘It never ceases to amaze me that my parents named me after a disease.’
‘What sort of disease?’
‘It’s a yeast infection – of the throat and the vagina.’
My eyes drop; my spirits sink. Pagan runs into my reverie.
‘What sort of a bird is that?’
‘A thrush.’
‘What are you saying, Lenny? It’s a chaffinch.’
‘I’m sorry; I was thinking of Candida.’
‘I’m sure she was never interested in birds.’
Silence descends, both on the Great Orme and in Maid’s Causeway, where I am preparing to take my mother to choral evensong.
‘Is your friend coming?’
Pagan and her parents Page 10
