Play Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘Toby will stop in a minute or two,’ she said. ‘I’m terribly sorry. I’m afraid they’re drenched.’

  ‘I’ll find him something. This way. Close the bathroom door, please.’

  They carried the yelling infants into Deborah’s bedroom. Mrs Capstone put Deborah down, opened a cupboard and began to pick out clothes. Deborah stood where she’d been placed, concentrating on her note.

  ‘More baa! More baa!’ bellowed Toby.

  Poppy had never seen him so outraged. Perhaps he had sensed her own discomfort at the visit to this formidable woman’s home having begun with such a display of ill-discipline, mess and temper. (Mrs Capstone’s latest campaign was for stiffer penalties for football hooligans.) He was making more noise than Deborah, so much so that she must have noticed that she was being upstaged. Her scream continued but the look in her eyes changed. She took a couple of paces forward. Her hand rose to her mouth and moved to and fro, making the note waver.

  Poppy knelt and twisted her threshing burden round till he faced Deborah.

  ‘Look, darling. Look what Deborah’s doing.’

  He took no notice, still wrestling, still trying to make for the door. Deborah came up and put her face only inches from his, yodelling away, and all at once he gave in. Poppy could sense a sort of inner male, ‘Oh, well. Women!’ He gave one more sulky look towards the door before he set up an alto hoot, stopping and unstopping his mouth with his hand. At last Poppy was able to let go and wipe her specs dry.

  The children kept the game up, with variants, while they were laid side by side on the bed, stripped and changed into dry clothes. The noise was possible to talk through.

  ‘I haven’t heard her do that before,’ said Mrs Capstone.

  ‘It’s something they invented. Deborah’s taught him to sing, too, after a fashion. She’s very musical, isn’t she?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. If she is it comes from her father. You’re Mrs Tasker, aren’t you—his grandmother?’

  ‘Poppy Tasker.’

  ‘I’m Clara Capstone.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry about the mess in the bathroom. He’s never seen a bidet before. He simply has to find out how things work and what you can do with them, but then Deborah joined in and it got out of control.’

  ‘Would he be allowed to play with a bidet at home, supposing there were one?’

  ‘He’s pretty good, really. He knows where he’s allowed to make messes, and my daughter-in-law organises it for that.’

  ‘I discourage messes of any kind.’

  Time, Poppy decided, to rise above the level of acquiescent contrite worm, though it had in fact taken her time to get used to what Janet regarded as acceptable levels of chaos—painting sessions, for instance, in which floor and walls, clothes and flesh, moved towards a sort of visual entropy of puddled blue and yellow smears.

  ‘I brought my own children up like that,’ she said. ‘Now I’m not sure I was right. Of course it’s so much easier with the kind of paints you can buy, and everything washable.’

  Mrs Capstone rose without replying.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s better. You’re dry now, Deborah, so you can stop making that racket and we’ll go and have some tea. I’ll tell Peony to put Toby’s clothes in the tumbler and they’ll be dry by the time you go home. What about you, Mrs Tasker?’

  Poppy fastened the Velcro shoulder-strap on the loaned overalls and took off her specs for a final wipe.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘It mostly went over my face. I’ll steam off during tea. I was going to wash my hair this evening anyway.’

  She settled her specs on and saw that Mrs Capstone was gazing at her, openly weighing her up, as if considering whether to hire her as an employee. She did this in a perfectly straightforward way, so that it didn’t seem an intrusion on inner privacies. It was the sort of look the young give you sometimes on meeting, those adventurers for whom the decades seem to spread away before them like rich provinces waiting to be sacked. Mrs Capstone still had that look of youth, though she was thirty-nine according to Janet, a child of the squirearchy, reared and educated to marry her kind and breed more of the same. She must have decided that the power which was her birthright had left the ancestral acres, and she must seek it elsewhere for herself, but she still had that look about her, the forthright gaze, the slightly plump assurance, the blonde and tended hair, the good bones.

  ‘More baa?’ said Toby hopefully, now that he had a whole set of dry clothes to soak again.

  ‘Tea now,’ said Poppy.

  It went well enough. Baked beans and ice cream for the children, tea and digestives for the adults. Toby was too interested in his surroundings to feed himself with proper attention, so spread his meal lavishly in the general area of his mouth. Deborah concentrated on eating with the same attention as that with which she could concentrate on her scream. At home she seemed a half-different child, a handful still, but neat and self-possessed.

  Poppy, meanwhile, coped with Mrs Capstone’s inquisition. Mrs Capstone had that kind of quick, superficial intelligence which needs to be fed a mass of fact which it will then store with great efficiency, so that if they were to meet in a year’s time she would immediately know Poppy’s name and ask whether there were any more grand­children in New Zealand and what her doctor son-in-law thought of the health system there. The process wasn’t mechanical. She was genuinely­ interested, within the limits of a not very subtle imagination. Long ago Poppy, faced with the occasional need to account for her separation from Derek and knowing the impossibility of explaining­ (even to herself) the involved, self-generating network of motives and actions, of understandings and misunderstandings, which had led to the event, had decided it was simplest to say flatly ‘He left me for a younger woman.’ This was at least true, though really a crude and, in a way, unimportant part of the truth.

  Mrs Capstone sighed, shook the blonde waves and said just as flatly ‘They will do it.’

  There it was. Life. Airlines overbooked flights. Maintenance engineers failed to keep appointments after you’d waited in for them all day. Boys hit tennis bails through neighbours’ conservatories. Men left wives for younger women. Not impersonal facts, but all worth a perfectly genuine brisk sigh. It was easy to see why Peony had found her kind.

  ‘But your son is still in England?’

  The awkward moment was coming. Not that Poppy intended to lie, or even to conceal the truth if the conversation came anywhere near it. Mrs Capstone was perfectly capable of handling the trivial contretemps with complete aplomb, but the danger was that she might be able to make something of it later, to Janet’s disadvantage.

  ‘Hugo, yes. He’s in charge of the legal list at an academic publisher’s. I can’t say …’

  ‘Deborah, no!’

  Poppy turned her head and saw that while Deborah had finished her ice-cream Toby, having smeared large dollops round his cheeks, was now engaged in seeing whether by piling what was left in his bowl up into a mound he could convert it from its semi-liquid state back into its original solid. Ice-cream wasn’t regular fare at Abdale Grove; so this wasn’t an experiment he’d been able to try recently. Absorbed, he seemed not to notice as Deborah leaned across and scraped a blob of ice-cream off his face. The spoon paused in mid-air at her mother’s command. Then, with a look of defiant smugness, she popped her booty into the neat round of her mouth. Poppy laughed. Encouraged Deborah reached out for more.

  ‘You can put her down now, Peony,’ said Mrs Capstone. ‘I think Toby’s really finished too,’ said Poppy. ‘Shall I clean you up, darling?’

  ‘Num gone?’

  ‘Yes. It melts if you don’t eat it up. That’s why you have to keep it in the fridge.’

  He nodded and let her remove the bowl and wipe his face with kitchen paper.

  ‘He can’t really understand that,’ said Mrs Capstone.r />
  ‘No, of course not, but he likes to have things explained. He knows there’ve got to be explanations. It’s no use just saying “Don’t touch. Hot.” You have to tell him about electrons jiggling around to make it hot or something like that.’

  ‘You’re lucky to have the time. You were telling me about your son—Hugo, you said—law publishing. I imagine that’s been …’

  Rescue again, and what for an instant Poppy thought was a theatrical mask being poked round the door.

  ‘Daddydaddydaddydaddydaddy,’ squealed Deborah and rushed across the room. The man picked her up as he came in and held her bouncing on his arm and yelling his name. The mask effect had been only an accident of light, enhanced by the angle at which he had held his head. His features were acceptably human, though emphatically modelled on the large head, with strong black eyebrows slashed across prominent brows, a bony nose and a wide, hard mouth. He was of medium height but very broad-shouldered, the sort of build no tailoring seems to fit. His pale grey suit looked expensive but was still under strain.

  ‘We’re having a tea-party, darling,’ said Mrs Capstone. ‘Do you want Peony to warm you some milk?’

  ‘No, thank you. I came to say I have to go to Trieste. I shall be back on Thursday.’

  The voice was harsh and flat, reviving the mask effect—hidden actor inside the tank-like body, behind the modelled visor, using a mechanical vocaliser. Nobody knew much about him, Janet had said. No wonder.

  ‘What time do you land?’ said Mrs Capstone.

  ‘Eighteen-fifty, supposedly.’

  ‘That’ll do, provided you’re not more than forty minutes late. I’ll have your dinner-jacket in the car. If you’re later than that Constantin will meet you in the Mercedes and I’ll go direct to the Coombeses in your car.’

  Deftly he tilted Deborah back, caught her by the ankles and swung her to and fro pendulumwise in front of him with her dark hair streaming down. As her laughter verged towards hysteria he flipped her over, crouched and set her on her feet. Clearly she sensed he was about to go, but instead of screaming tried to prolong his interest by showing off her new trick, singing on a pure high note and using her hand to make a flutter effect. Toby at once joined in. The result was discord, but Deborah altered her pitch to make it tolerable.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ said Poppy. ‘That’s what I mean about her being musical.’

  ‘Mrs Tasker says Deborah is musical, darling,’ said Mrs Capstone.

  ‘Even when she screams she’s really singing,’ said Poppy. ‘Like a prima donna.’

  ‘When prima donnas scream, they scream,’ said Mr Capstone, evidently speaking from experience. ‘I’m afraid I have to take Constantin with me.’

  He tousled Deborah’s hair as he rose.

  ‘No, that won’t work, darling,’ said Mrs Capstone. ‘We need him to …’

  ‘Can’t be helped. You’ll have to make some other arrangement.’

  ‘But really … !’

  ‘I haven’t time to talk about it now.’

  Mrs Capstone kept her voice and face under perfect control. Poppy merely sensed the surge of anger.

  ‘Well, if you’ve got to have him … In that case … I’ll get my diary and we’ll sort things out in the car. At least then I can drive it home.’

  ‘If you’re free …’

  His glance at Poppy registered that she was of no interest or importance.

  ‘I’ll need to go in ten minutes,’ he said, and left. Deborah made no attempt to delay him by clinging, though she looked for a moment as if she was thinking of trying the effect of a scream. Mrs Capstone rose.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘My husband’s a busy man, and I don’t see as much of him as I’d like.’

  The charm seemed unforced, though no doubt a lifetime in politics would coarsen the act.

  ‘I quite understand,’ said Poppy. ‘Toby will have a lovely time investigating Deborah’s toys.’

  ‘She doesn’t have as many as some children. I don’t believe in that, but … oh well, why not, once in a way? Put plenty of towels down in the bathroom, Peony, and they can play with the bidet again.’

  2

  When she got home Poppy found Nell sitting on the steps down to her basement flat, reading a cloth book to Nelson.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter? Have you been waiting long?’

  ‘Council are closing the commune. Tonight it’s going to be. They wanted to take us by surprise but we got told.’

  Poppy saw a crammed old rucksack in the corner under the arch made by the steps up to the house above.

  ‘I’m so glad you took me at my word,’ she said. ‘I was afraid you mightn’t. Come in and we’ll make a pot of tea.’

  ‘Tea would be great. Thanks a lot, Poppy. It’ll be just two or three days till we can sort something out.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  Elias tolerated Toby, but viewed other children with deep distrust. As Poppy opened the kitchen door he rose royally from his cushion on the dresser, purring with the prospect of food, but seeing Nelson he assumed a look of affront and stalked out through the cat-flap. Nelson, a gentle and sweet-natured boy, gave a coo of delight and ran to the glass door into Poppy’s little back garden, pressing his nose close against the pane so that he could watch Elias taking out his resentment on what had once been a lilac but had degenerated into a scratch-pole with occasional sad leaves. Poppy made tea, found biscuits, showed Nell how the cooker worked so that she could warm milk for Nelson, put out half a can of Whiskas for Elias and led the way back to the living-room.

  ‘I’ll sleep in here,’ she said. ‘I’ve done it before. There’s room for both of you in my bed, and we’ll get more privacy that way.’

  ‘Oh, no, that isn’t right.’

  They argued about it, but Poppy was firm. Nelson was a quite different character from Toby, who by now would have discovered the gas-tap and the telephone and the TV controls and Poppy’s sewing-machine, which she’d had out three weeks now, meaning to finish shortening the yellow skirt she’d bought for the holiday with Alex that hadn’t happened. Instead Nelson, clutching his tortoise with one arm and sucking from his mug in his other hand, made cautious forays round the sofa, looked under cushions more as if he was checking for booby-traps than hoping to find buried treasure, and at last, deciding that this was a safe, or at least neutral, environment, began a quiet game of peep-bo over the arm of the sofa. Despite his caution he didn’t seem to Poppy a boring child. His face was humorous and intelligent. When he was still you could almost sense his thought processes, much more abstract and flexible than Toby’s. His puzzlements and wonders were whys, not hows. When Elias at last padded into the room, sulky and suspicious, Nelson gave his crow of delight and his dark face shone with interest, but he allowed Nell to hold him still and simply watched Elias climb on to Poppy’s lap and settle there, glowering. While Poppy stroked Elias reassuringly Nell led Nelson over. Slowly he put his nose close up against the cat’s, squinting into the green, resentful eyes, touched the white paw with a gentle hand and allowed himself to be distracted back to the sofa.

  ‘There,’ said Poppy. ‘That wasn’t too bad, was it, Elias? They aren’t all little Genghis Khans.’

  ‘What’s the time?’ said Nell. ‘Hell! Can we have the telly on? Bet we’ve missed it.’

  ‘Yes, of course. What?’

  ‘News South-east. Soon as we heard the Council were coming we rang round the media. Look! Must have missed some of it.’

  A street scene, policemen, officials, two large semidetached houses with ornate but damaged stucco, boarded lower windows, a barricade of iron bedsteads across the front door, faces at the upper windows, beards, T-shirts, a banner across the frontage ‘E & O COUNCIL—THATCHER’S THUGS’.

  ‘… had hoped to take the squatters by surprise,’ the voice-o
ver was saying, ‘but evidently the news had been leaked and the Council officials, who refused to be interviewed, have decided against a violent confrontation. Negotiations are now taking place. Meanwhile the squatters have allowed a BBC camera crew into the so-called commune.’

  Cut to interior scenes, a tidy bedroom with three mattresses on the floor, a kitchen with women preparing a meal in large pots, a communal sitting-room with a group sitting cross-legged on the floor folk-singing, a notice-board. Zoom in to a blown-up news photograph with speech balloons drawn onto it Private Eye fashion. Mrs Capstone getting into the big Mercedes, the chauffeur holding the door, Mr Capstone in profile on the other side of the car. Poppy’s TV wasn’t good enough for her to be able to read the caption in the balloon, but she laughed all the same.

  ‘What does it say?’ she said.

  ‘Can’t remember. People kept changing it. Wasn’t that good.’

  ‘I’ve just been having tea with her, you know. I was pretty scared, but I liked her much more than I expected.’

  Nell said nothing, but stared at the TV, though the item about the squatters was signing off.

  ‘That’s one of the difficult things,’ said Poppy. ‘I mean, it seems to work out that often you like people you don’t agree with and you don’t much care for people who’ve got what you think are the right ideas. I like you. I like you a lot, as a matter of fact. I love to see you with Nelson, but I expect I’d be very uncomfortable with a lot of your ideas.’

  ‘Liking doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t agree. I think all those things matter more than anything, love, friendship, liking, affection. You don’t mean to tell me that when Nelson grows up and starts thinking for himself, you’re going to stop loving him if he thinks differently from you.’

  ‘Please, Poppy. I don’t want to talk about it. The answer is yes. If that happens. But till then. That’s why it’s so important, having him now. I don’t want to talk about it. Please.’