by Morag Joss
‘Och, Fleur…’
‘Oh, for God’s sake…’
‘That’s enough. We’ve all had enough now.’
Both their voices were wary. Fleur drank some of her tea, her eyes still fixed on Raymond as he stirred at the stove. Just the prospect of Uncle George’s presence seemed to create between them, if not harmony, then a slight benefit of the doubt.
‘Eliza, make some toast, will you? Give your father a hand.’
‘You leave Lizzie be, I’m managing. Want another cup?’
Lila went to the dining room to lay the table, not wanting to test the strength of the truce. A little later they sat down to eat, her parents grudgingly. Lila, between them, kept watch.
‘You’ll have to do something about the door. Before he comes. That spare room door won’t close. It swings open.’
‘It’s holding moisture. You just need to push it hard so it clicks. I’ll tell him he just needs to push it hard.’
‘You’d better open the window. I can’t reach it and the room needs airing.’
‘There’s damn all in the pantry. I’ll get extra bread and eggs tomorrow. Lizzie could call at the butcher.’
‘There’s enough till the order comes. You can get the meat. I need her to help with the bed.’
‘George likes an English paper. Is it The Times he likes?’
‘He likes the Listener too. Order that.’
Later Lila asked again, ‘How long’s he staying?’
‘He’s on his summer holidays now, he’s a free agent,’ her father said. ‘He’s getting off crack of dawn, he should be here this time tomorrow,’ he added more robustly, with a slight, head-of-household raising of his voice. Then he sucked his teeth and shook his head. ‘Traffic permitting. It’s July the first when all’s said and done.’ He had to tone down anything that might be veering towards optimism.
‘But how long? How long’s he staying for?’ Lila asked.
Fleur raised one eyebrow and looked past Raymond.
‘I told him his sister’s been having hysterics,’ he said. ‘Right hysterics.’
‘At least he understands,’ Fleur said complacently, though her voice wavered. She lit another cigarette and shook out the match. ‘George understands what it’s like, suffering from nerves.’
Her mother was making every gesture prettier than usual. She nipped the match daintily between finger and thumb while her lips pouted smoke into little feathers over her head. Claiming George’s understanding was all she needed to do to excuse herself. As long as George understood, she could call it ‘nerves’, as if setting the garage on fire and painting giant swear words all over it were just extra, mildly challenging facets of her attractiveness, so quirky and endearing there was no question of their having to be forgiven.
Lila felt sick. It was she, not her mother, whom Uncle George loved and approved of. His visits were so irregular and infrequent that Lila was a different person each time he came and yet each time she was certain, just from the way he looked at her, that his reserves of affection were hers. He was obliged, of course, not to make it too obvious; it was their shared knowledge, private and unspoken. How she adored him, how her love for him squeezed her heart, was her secret alone. She turned from the sight of her mother’s cigarette between her long fingers and looked down at her own hands. They looked pink and boneless, unbearably childish. She wanted to be the one Uncle George could really love. Suppose she were just to die? He would never forget her then.
‘Aye, right hysterics, and he says he’ll stay till she’s not having them anymore,’ Raymond said. ‘Sends love to you as well, Lizzie, says nil desperandum.’
Lila caught the lifeline. Nil desperandum was their phrase. Uncle George had first said it years ago when she was little, bawling over a scraped knee; if he was saying it now he was sending a message to say he understood and remembered how it was between them. Nil desperandum. He would be here tomorrow. A shiver of expectation sparkled down her spine and she prayed silently for her mother to have hysterics indefinitely.
it’s getting towards four in the afternoon when I leave the undertakers and finish my errands. I register the death, do a little bit of food shopping and go back to the car. It’s too late for the newspaper office so I’ll have to call them after all.
The sun is going down with one of those attention-seeking sunsets that occur here, great luminous sheets of pink and turquoise billowing up from the horizon. As I drive I find I am rather taken by it, garish though it is. The flat land between Burnhead and Seaview Villas is still empty, but now there is a long lay-by on the shore side of the road. I pull in and park, knowing it is useless to think I can capture the sunset by getting out of the car but wanting at least not to see it through glass, even though the wind buffets the door and I know it is getting cold. At the end of the lay-by I come across one of those clumsy stone tables tilted at an angle, with a map and diagrams of what you are supposed to look out for. Seagulls, apparently. Three kinds. This is news? It tells me also that this stretch of land down to the sea is no longer the pointless, marshy waste ground it was in my day. Now it is designated. They have made paths across it that are marked on the map by lines of meandering green dots. It seems I may not look at this landscape simply because its empty darkness reflects my present mood or because I am drawn by the sunset. It is now an area of local ecological interest and I can ‘access’ more information if I visit some bloody website.
So even this small moment, my tiny, unplanned detour into melancholy has been anticipated and catered for and in a manner that seems to me typical of Burnhead: invasive, crass, and beside the point. Whether I’m ogling all the shades of pink or scanning the clouds for a glimpse of the Divine Shepherd or just depressing myself, I can’t simply be left for a while to idle in a lay-by and watch the sky; I must count seagulls and be ‘oriented’ along phoney bark footpaths, grateful to the Burnhead Civic Amenities Trust and a clutch of minor charities. I feel jaded and empty, and I turn to go.
Then I hear it—a little fluting note sounding in the wind, a voice calling a name. A long way away, almost at the point where the flat land becomes the shore, I can see someone walking, rising into the sunlight and dropping down again, following the undulations of the dunes. The glowing light makes the figure almost a silhouette but I think I can see that it is wearing red—is it her, Christine from next door? Is she calling for the child? It comes again: two notes, a singsong call across the reeds. What did she say the child’s name was? Why did I not listen when she told me the child’s name?
The roadside is not a bad vantage point. I stand and wait, hoping for a slight, sudden movement or a flash of colour that will show me where the little one is. I cannot go out onto the marsh looking and calling because I do not remember her name. My not knowing what she is called feels part of the reason she may be lost, and I find my mind suddenly crowded with all my names—Eliza, Lizzie, Lila—and I hope for her own sake that Christine’s child goes by just one and that it is a name she likes. The person on the dunes—I am sure now it is Christine—calls again. Perhaps there is no note of urgency in it, after all. Perhaps they are playing a game.
But I continue to stand and watch just in case, and as Christine’s voice unhurried and faint lilts across the flat ground, I hear also, across a landscape of years, both my parents’ voices: hers high and edgy and his a dry, enclosed one that sounds unnatural out of doors. I think I must be remembering a particular day when I was very little, on a picnic or something.
The sun is almost below the horizon now; its rays stretch down the water in a widening, sparkling path of broken stars. Christine has dipped out of sight onto the shore side of the dunes.
I think I have a memory of that day, of the sun shining too brightly. The wind is in my face and my eyes are stinging. They are calling for me. Lila. Li-la! And then there is no sound at all except a roaring in my ears that might be deep water or could be my own gasps. Have I fallen in the sea? Am I crying? From somewhere above I hear my n
ame again—Lila! Li-la!—no sooner heard than carried away, voices calling across so huge a distance that I know I have strayed past some important limit. On that day I wander from the place where my name is spoken, and when I hear it being called I cannot believe that a word so lonely-sounding can really mean me. The shock of it is that then I know—know it for certain with an ache that seems for a second to stop my heart—that I am alone. Not that it’s a discovery, quite. It confirms something I am born knowing, knowledge that lies in the blood. Did I that day let go of a hand and run, stumble, fall and lose myself, along with my baby name?
I don’t remember. I don’t know when I stopped being Lila to everyone but myself. It would be some row or another of theirs, not related to any picnic, that would mark me as Eliza or Lizzie, perhaps some theory that I shouldn’t start school with my baby name. They probably disagreed about what I should be called instead and then simply ignored each other’s opposition. I’m not under any illusion that by calling me by different names either of them was trying to lay claim to me.
Later memories are even less clear. The years from then until the Turandot summer bunch themselves into uniform clumps of silence, resentment, boredom. I perform, sincerely but badly, in the roles allotted me by my other names. As Lizzie, I am beetle-browed and sullen with my father and at school I keep in with Enid and fight off the torments of Senga and whoever happens to be in her gang. My mother reminds me that nobody likes a sourpuss and tells me to smile, and then I wear the name Eliza like a showy, embarrassing hat that she—stronger and capable of cruelty—has chosen for me and is insisting I keep on. Her yearning for a daughter to match the name she thinks so sophisticated flits around me constantly, not as a stated desire but like blinking, a fraction’s distortion between one frame and the next in the drama playing out between us every day, as hard to catch as a concealed wince. Eliza is the name of the daughter she could be proud of. Lizzie is the straightforward, reliable girl with her feet on the ground. Answering to either one, I feel muddy inside. Nobody knows who I really am or what I am for, except Uncle George.
6
Between visits Uncle George became an abstraction. From the moment his car disappeared over the bridge and Lila stopped waving he was again an idea, a private absence. She could almost lose hold of the fact that she knew him personally; he acquired a film star’s perfection and distance. And London assumed cinematic grandeur; it was all clean avenues and squares overhung with blossom or drifting with papery fallen leaves, where well-dressed people walked pretty dogs and ladies hailed shining taxis with a gloved finger and were whisked off to the Ritz or the London Palladium. Lila marked his road in a street map he once left behind; it smelled leathery and ashy, like his car. She kept it in her room and took it out and looked at his page often, sprawling on her bed. She memorised the names of the streets and pictured herself setting down her suitcases and Uncle George calling from an upper window, so here you are at last!
When she was little, saying goodbye, she used to cling and beg to go back to London with him and he would promise that one day she would. Wait until you’re old enough, he said. She would be different too, in her London life. The sun would not always shine, of course not. But when it rained she would be adorably mackintoshed for it, tight-belted and accessorised like Audrey Hepburn, and the rain would be cleansing and amusing, unlike Burnhead’s mucky obscuring drizzle. Buses would swing into view when required. Just the name Crouch End, where Uncle George lived, had a ring of civilised magic.
She never tried to picture the flat precisely but knew it must be high-ceilinged and airy. She would take the smaller bedroom and get a job in a high-class but friendly dress shop, and would come home in the late afternoon to find light pouring through the drawing room windows. She would have flowers in a glass bowl on the low table in front of the fire, always. Uncle George would wonder how he had managed all this time without her cheerful and economical ways. He and his artistic but respectful friends would include her in everything—trips to the country, rolling back the rug for impromptu rock ’n’ roll—and they would pay her teasing, affectionate compliments.
One day. Wait until you’re old enough, he said. She had waited. There was no reason why one day should not be now.
The real Uncle George could not live up to the perfected version who was forever charmed, forever laughing and in bright sunshine, so his arrival at 5 Seaview Villas required at the very least an adjustment to everyday lighting. When Lila watched his car draw up into the evening shadow that the house cast over the road, he seemed part of the shade. He was crumpled and less tall. He frowned over the bringing in of his luggage and didn’t stand straight. Lila came along last, worried in case she did not love him. She had forgotten that the pores round his nose and chin sometimes looked like a sprinkling of black pepper.
As it always was when Uncle George came, tea that day was special. While Fleur had rested, Lila and Raymond sliced cucumber and tomatoes, opened a tin of vegetable salad and spooned it into a dish. Lila’s potato salad, tepid, floury chunks coated with salad cream that had turned translucent, sat in a bowl on the sideboard next to a jelly with tinned pears suspended in it. On the table were four plates on which, under wrinkled sheets of lettuce, beetroot was bleeding into slabs of pink ham and halved hardboiled eggs.
George said what a spread it was and how they spoiled him. As he always did, he had brought a bottle of wine and Raymond, as he always did, had put out cups and saucers instead of glasses because Fleur said it was boorish to expect it.
‘Oh, Georgie, lovely! Chianti! Oh, are we opening it now? Eliza, glasses,’ she said, seating herself. ‘We’ll need glasses, the proper ones.’
Lila brought four instead of three. Uncle George raised an eyebrow and gave her a nod as he poured. She didn’t like the wine. She wanted it to taste of London life, richly perfumed and exciting or at least more like blackcurrants, and this reminded her of damp rubber. But Uncle George was already forgiven for being merely himself. She sipped the wine, relieved that he did not fix her with an exclusive Rock Hudson gaze full of blistering admiration. He admitted he was tired after his journey and then there was a plain, ordinary silence while they ate. Fleur picked at her food, flipping the lurid ham between her fork and knife and raising a shower of beetroot juice that fell in an arc of magenta dots onto the tablecloth.
She laid down her fork and asked questions: did he still like his flat, were his students doing well, was he still friends with what was the name again? George pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette, making a show of the first drag, moving his hair out of his eyes.
‘Oh, Florrie,’ he sighed. ‘Everything’s fine. Life goes on.’
Lila was not interested in his answers, anyway. Nothing her mother wanted to know would figure in her future life with him in London. He taught music in a college; she didn’t need more than that to be able to picture him in a grand building with columns and stone steps. The rest—the detail of his life and hers—she could embroider from her own thoughts.
‘Stop that, it’s Fleur,’ her mother said. ‘And I just like to know. Is that a crime? I worry about you.’
Uncle George cast her a look. ‘Don’t. You really needn’t.’
With a little defeated sigh Fleur got up and started dishing out the jelly at the sideboard. Lila felt safe and pleased. Although six years younger than her mother, and single, Uncle George was without doubt the head of their side of their family, not that Lila, knowing the meagre facts, thought of them as that. They were too depleted, somehow, not robust enough to be thought a proper family—more a huddle of people clinging on because they were related and the only ones left. Lila’s grandmother had died before the war; the father had been killed in early 1944. There had been a brother stillborn between Fleur and Uncle George, and that was all that Lila knew. Having no memory of them, she had never been able to make these dead people belong to her. No sound, not even the rustle of clothes, came from the sombre pair in the photograph on the piano; she could
not imagine words coming from their mouths, nor a cry from the baby on the woman’s lap. It was impossible even to connect that baby with her mother, whose life seemed dense with adult misery, so opaque with complication that no simple light from a childhood shone into it.
Fleur said, ‘But I do worry, you know I do.’
‘Well, I worry about you, too,’ George said, a little sternly. ‘And, it appears, with some cause.’
‘It’s my nerves,’ she said. Calmly handing round the jelly and pears, she seemed perfectly happy now. Lila wondered why only Uncle George seemed able to affect her mood for the better. For a while nobody spoke.
‘So, George, you winching these days?’ Raymond said. ‘Knocking on thirty, you not leaving it a bit late?’
Fleur let the use of one of his ‘coarse’ dialect words pass with an indrawn breath; as Raymond had judged, she was in too peaceful a mood to complain.
‘Ah well, Ray, you never know,’ George said, with a wink.
‘Aye, I ken what you’re up to,’ Raymond went on, pointing with his spoon. ‘You’ve got a lassie down south, eh? Scared to bring her up here in case a Scottish lad sweeps her off her feet.’
Uncle George smiled, pouring a trail of evaporated cream over the top of his jelly. He caught the white drip off the lip of the jug with one finger and sucked it clean.
‘I certainly wouldn’t risk a girl anywhere near you, Ray,’ he said, though he was looking at Fleur. ‘Lucky my big sister can keep you in line, you old Romeo. Still the best looker for miles.’
It was so naturally done. Lila knew that her parents’ meeting and marrying had been a disastrous mischance, yet Uncle George was casting them as a pair of heartbreakers, and getting away with it.
‘Romeo—that’ll be the day!’
