by Lissa Evans
‘Do your boys eat porridge?’
‘Only with lots of sugar.’
‘Yes, of course their grandpa’s a bit of a sweet tooth as well, isn’t he? The Cough Candy King I call him.’ Mrs McHugh gave her a jolly, red-lipsticked smile. ‘Speaking of whom…’ she added, unzipping her holdall and taking out a diary. ‘Twenty-seventh of March! That’s what I wanted to talk about.’
‘Dad’s birthday,’ said Iris, feeling a great wash of relief. This was a topic that she could cope with.
‘Uh huh. His seventieth, which I always feel is a significant one though I’m sure to a young thing like you it just seems terribly, terribly old.’
Iris, who had not felt like a young thing since 1972, shook her head in polite and automatic deprecation. Her mind was already jumping ahead. A present. Mrs McHugh was going to ask her advice on a present. She started mentally running through the possibilities – a really good pair of secateurs, perhaps. Or a couple of deckchairs. She had already, on her own account, started checking out lawnmower prices.
‘So I thought it might be quite exciting to organize a surprise party.’
It took a moment for Iris to catch up. ‘You what?’ she said, using a phrase she’d spent sixteen years trying to eliminate from the twins’ vocabulary.
‘A surprise party.’
‘What, for Dad?’ She realized how loudly she’d spoken when the three people on the next table all looked round.
‘Nary a word from you now!’ said Mrs McHugh to them, miming a zipped lip. ‘We’re talking secrets!’ They smiled rather uncomfortably and turned away again.
‘I’ll tell you my plan,’ said Mrs McHugh, patting Iris’s hand, ‘and then you can say what you think of it.’ She leafed through the diary. ‘It’s on a Wednesday, you see, that’s midweek bowls, so I could think up an excuse for not going myself – I might say I’ve just got a little tummy upset – and then we’d have the whole afternoon to prepare. I can invite the people from the church but I’d need your help for a few others, his cousin – Kath, isn’t it? – and he’s mentioned an old army friend in Wales –’
‘Leslie Peake,’ said Iris.
‘There, you see –’ she scribbled a note in the diary ‘– Peake. You’ll have to give me his address. So we could assemble everybody in the kitchen, and when he comes back, not suspecting a thing – or perhaps just expecting a little birthday tea, nothing out of the ordinary – he’ll open the door and… there we’ll be!’ Her face was suffused with enthusiasm.
For a moment, Iris saw it all: the covered buffet on the table, Mrs McHugh in a frilly blouse trying to light seventy candles without setting fire to her cuffs, Tom and Robin pink with suppressed hysteria, their eyes fixed on Leslie Peake’s bizarre hairstyle, the sound of the front-door key, the excited shushing of the party guests, the footsteps in the hall, the door opening, and then…
What? Who would come through the door? The man who kept his tins of vegetables in alphabetical order, who stood anxiously on the pavement if Iris arrived more than five minutes late for an evening visit, who still allocated time for the television to ‘warm up’ before Coronation Street, who winced if she used the word ‘bloody’, who had chosen the same shade of beige with which to decorate the living room every five years for the last thirty, who regarded spontaneity as simply a case of bad planning? Or the one who’d just bought himself a video recorder, been out to the cinema every Wednesday since Christmas and answered to the nickname of Cough Candy King?
‘Well,’ said Mrs McHugh, eagerly, ‘you know him best – what do you think?’
15
‘There’s a lot more space in here now,’ said Fran idly, glancing around Spencer’s living room instead of bending to the task for which she had set aside Wednesday evening.
‘What, now I’ve killed half the occupants, you mean?’ Spencer was lying on the sofa with the tortoise on his lap.
‘Bit more than half I’d say.’ She did a quick mental calculation. ‘More like ninety-eight per cent.’
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘That’s a tremendous comfort.’ He tipped a little Extra Virgin olive oil into the palm of one hand and started applying it to Bill’s shell. He was looking after his remaining charges with renewed care, and had found this particular tip in the ‘Pet of the Week’ column of Reptile Monthly. There had, as usual, been no mention of paper eating.
‘It was good that you killed the snails,’ said Fran. ‘It was the only correct way to deal with them. You know they’ve just found a huge colony of them at Hornsey dump – and that’s because some stupid person must have decided to cull their collection by putting them out with the rubbish. Can you believe that? They’ve had to mount a special extermination programme just to get rid of them.’
‘Oh,’ said Spencer, and then tutted disapprovingly a couple of times, not trusting his voice to say more. He turned Bill over and started on the underside.
‘You know, you look like a Roman emperor with his favourite plaything,’ said Fran. ‘You should have someone oiling you.’
‘My days of being oiled are over.’
‘Mine too. Of course, Duncan was such a cheapskate that he always used Mazola so I smelled like a vegeburger.’
‘What about Barry? I’m sure he’d fork out for some First Pressing if you gave him a bit of encouragement.’
‘He’s back with his girlfriend, didn’t I tell you? Given up on me, thank God.’ She twiddled the pencil between her fingers and looked at the blank page in front of her. After a moment’s thought she wrote the number 1 and then put the pencil down.
‘Do you want a beer?’ she asked, getting to her feet. ‘They should be cold by now.’
‘Go on then.’
‘I’ll just shield my eyes.’ She snapped on the kitchen light and blinked again at the extreme whiteness of the walls, the blinding sheet steel of the pristine work surfaces. Spencer had lashed out on a new kitchen and had chosen a style oddly reminiscent of an operating theatre.
‘I just wanted it clean,’ he’d said, a touch nettled, when she’d pointed that out. The only remaining homely touches were the photo of Mark in the park, now curling a little at the edges, and the two pages of the list. She found the bottle opener in the new lime-green revolving cutlery dispenser, and threw the tops into the chrome swingbin.
‘Spence, can I ask you something?’ she said, reseating herself.
He didn’t answer for a moment, but held Bill up with one hand and tilted him to catch the light. ‘Bit of a transformation,’ he said admiringly.
‘Are you going to paint his toenails now?’
‘Might do,’ said Spencer. ‘Self-image is very important. It’s a key element in eating disorders.’ He placed Bill carefully on the floor and they watched as he began the trek to the magazine rack, his lumbering progress now strangely at odds with his jewelled appearance. ‘Ask away then.’
‘I just wondered what had happened to the Hypothetical Blinking Man.’ She hadn’t asked him again after that day at Kew; she had managed to batten down her curiosity, but there had been a subtle change in him since the turn of the year, a lifting of mood so slight that it could only be spotted by an old friend, only measured in nanometres, but present none the less.
Spencer took a long swig of beer. ‘Nothing’s happened really. In fact, not even “really”. Just nothing. I haven’t contacted him.’
‘So you’ve got his number, then?’
‘No, but I know where he works.’
‘Which is…?’
‘The North Middlesex.’
‘A nurse?’ Spencer had always had a penchant for nurses.
‘Eye surgeon.’
‘What, he’s a surgeon and he’s got a twitch?’ said Fran horrified.
‘He doesn’t operate with his eyelids,’ said Spencer, rather severely.
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘Anyway, a lot of tics disappear completely when the person’s concentrating.’
‘Right. It’s just that I remember
you saying all surgeons are psychopathic bastards.’
He thought about this for a moment. ‘Maybe it’s only the straight ones.’
She couldn’t imagine Spencer with a psychopathic bastard. She had got to know a couple of his previous boyfriends and they’d both been rather quiet, self-effacing men, apparently content to sit in the corner at pubs and laugh at other people’s jokes. ‘Harpo’, Mark had nicknamed one of them. ‘Smiles but never speaks.’ Neither of them had stayed on the scene for very long – blown over the horizon, she always thought, by the hurricane of Mark’s personality.
‘He did say,’ said Spencer, as if struck by a new thought, ‘that if I ever went to the Changing of the Guard then I should ring him.’
‘You’ve already been, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, but I couldn’t see anything, so maybe it doesn’t count.’
‘Give him a ring, then.’
He shrugged. ‘I only met him the once. He probably wouldn’t even remember me.’
‘Balls. I bet he’s saying exactly the same thing about you.’
Spencer lay back on the sofa and laced his fingers across his stomach. ‘Do you want to get started?’
‘Yeah all right,’ said Fran, reluctantly. She looked at the piece of paper again, and added a full stop to the number i; then, as an afterthought, she wrote ‘House Meeting’ at the top of the page and underlined it using a table mat as a ruler. ‘Did I tell you,’ she said, putting the pencil down again, ‘that Sylvie’s got a special saucepan for the cat?’
‘No.’
‘Tinned cat food makes it ill, apparently, so every morning she has to boil up tiny bits of chicken and fish in a pan that’s completely uncontaminated by wheat products and then shove them through a sieve. Except that the smell makes her feel ill so she gets Peter to do it while she sits in the bedroom and sprinkles ylang-ylang on an oil burner.’ It was hard to express the weirdness of the two-storey odour that ensued: upstairs smelling like the meditation tent at Glastonbury, and downstairs like a baby vomitorium.
‘Do you know,’ said Spencer, carefully, ‘that that’s the third Sylvie anecdote you’ve told me since you got here.’
‘Is it?’
‘Not that I don’t enjoy them, but I wonder if you might be getting… a bit obsessed? After all, how much do you actually see of her? You’re at work all day, you’re out a lot in the evenings, and she sticks to her room most of the time, doesn’t she?’
‘Yes but –’ Fran tipped her chair back on two legs and searched for a description that would convey the pervasive presence of Sylvie. ‘What was the name of that woman poet who was ill all the time? There’s a film of it. She lies on the sofa and marries some other poet. Elopes.’
‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning?’
‘Yup. That’s the one. That’s Sylvie. Honestly, Spence, you needn’t laugh. In the film she sits around with the curtains closed and you’re meant to feel sorry for her and think how incredibly sensitive and poetic she is, but you never see the effect on the rest of the household. You never see them being told not to flush the loo after midnight because she’s a light sleeper, or having to listen to her going on about the happy place she’s just this minute discovered in the corner of the living room and wants to share with you, or always having to do the washing-up really quietly because she gets a headache if she hears two saucepans banging together, or hosing her cat’s crap off their winter greens every bloody day, or having to explain a joke three times because she’s got absolutely no sense of humour, or being told by her that they’re “wonderfully prosaic” as if they’re supposed to take that as some sort of compliment.’ She paused for breath.
‘Is that what she said to you?’
‘Yes,’ said Fran resentfully.
‘What was the context?’
‘She was talking about reincarnation. Again.’
‘And…’
‘I said I saw the world as a sort of giant compost heap… no, listen Spence, I thought it was a really good analogy. Stop laughing.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Spencer, composing himself, ‘but Sylvie’s right, that is wonderfully prosaic. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth and the earth was a kind of giant compost heap.” ’
‘Yes, all right.’ She found herself grinning reluctantly. ‘But at least you don’t use the phrase as if you’re speaking to a peasant. And you don’t have – who was the bloke in the film? –’
‘Robert Browning.’
‘– Robert Browning agreeing with every word you say. They give me this look and I can feel my knuckles starting to scrape the ground – give me a couple of months and I’ll have forgotten how to use tools. My opposing thumbs will wither away.’
‘She’s really got under your skin, hasn’t she?’ said Spencer, bemused.
‘Yes, she has, and I don’t know how to cope with her, I don’t have a strategy. If I say anything even vaguely defensive she folds up like a deckchair and Peter gets all hurt and disappointed. You know they write in novels “she nestles in his arms”? I swear, that is literally what she does. He probably feeds her undigested food when I’m not looking.’ She took a long, soothing drink of beer. ‘And the thing is,’ she said, more meditatively, ‘when she gets upset I never know whether it’s my fault or not.’
If Spencer had been standing, he would have had to sit down.
‘What?’ she asked, noticing his expression.
He hesitated for a moment and then checked his watch.
‘What?’ she asked again.
‘Just thought I’d better note the time for the records – nine fifteen, February the thirteenth, nineteen ninety-one, public expression of self-doubt from Fran Tomlinson.’
She looked at him uncomprehendingly.
‘It’s not something you normally do,’ he said gently.
‘Really? Don’t I?’
‘No.’ He tried to swallow his laughter at her amazement. ‘Sylvie’s clearly having a terrible effect on you.’
‘I’m sure I have private self-doubt,’ she said, a touch uncertainly.
‘Well maybe you just hide it better than the rest of us.’ Though he hoped that wasn’t true; he really hoped that Fran’s psyche wasn’t a vicious maelstrom of self-destructive angst and internal conflict, kept in check only by a meniscus of iron will. It seemed unlikely.
‘Anyway, what I meant,’ said Fran briskly, moment of introspection apparently over, ‘is that it’s impossible to know in advance what’s going to upset her. Her whole life is a minefield. You mention the word “uncle” – you find her uncle’s just died. You happen to say that you think tortoiseshell cats are hideous, you find out that her first ever cat was a tortoiseshell and someone reversed over it.’
‘Her uncle?’ suggested Spencer.
‘Exactly. You mention in passing that music therapy’s a complete waste of time –’
His jaw dropped.
‘Just kidding, Spence. But it’s a kind of power she has. Sometimes it feels deliberate – she wrong-foots me every time. Nothing’s straightforward any more.’ She finished her beer and plonked it onto the table. ‘I’ve had enough of it.’
‘I’m sure you all have,’ he said, with feeling. He wondered how poor old Peter was coping with this running battle between Morgan le Fay and Jet from Gladiators.
‘Well, yes. Hence the meeting tomorrow evening.’ She picked up the pencil again. ‘And it’s nearly two years since we bought the bloody thing so I suppose it’s time we talked through the options. What there are of them.’
‘OK.’ Spencer hauled himself upright and tried to look alert. ‘How do you want to do this?’
‘Well, you know Peter – he’ll want a thorough discussion of every single permutation, even the ridiculous ones, so I want to be prepared. I want my arguments marshalled.’ She thought for a moment, beating a little tattoo with her pencil on the table top. ‘What about if you do the pros and I do the cons? It’ll be mainly cons.’
‘Fine.’ He stifled
a yawn. The crickets that had escaped from the lizard tank had set up a breeding colony in his room, and he was finding it difficult to sleep. The noise that he had once found soporific was horribly disturbing when it came from just behind the bedside table, accompanied by unpleasant rustlings.
‘OK,’ said Fran, starting to write. ‘Number one – sell the house. Pros?’
‘Ideal solution.’
‘Cons. Completely fucking impossible.’ She marked a brisk little cross by the option and then suddenly looked up. ‘Did I tell you the house opposite’s been on the market so long that a bat hibernated in the little gap between the two halves of the sign? A pipistrelle. First sighting in Dalston, apparently.’ Her face, alight with momentary enthusiasm, resumed its expression of serious intent. ‘Right, number two. Everybody moves out and we put the house up for rent. Pros? Actually, Spence, it’s not even worth you saying anything, because the man in the letting agency said they had more stuff on their books than they knew what to do with and that it would have to be something “really special” to shift. When I said it was in Stapleton Road he laughed. Bastard.’ She put another cross on the paper.
‘I’m finding this quite easy,’ said Spencer.
‘Number three,’ she continued, ignoring him. ‘This is a good one. The good one. I move out, rent somewhere else and Sylvie and Peter get in a lodger to cover the mortgage.’
‘They’d need to do that, would they?’
‘The payment’s gone up three times in three months. It’s ironic, isn’t it – Sylvie’s actually an essential member of the household, financially speaking. Pros?’
He thought for a moment. ‘You and Sylvie would be living in different places.’
‘Yup, that has to be the top one. Any others?’
‘You could move out of Dalston.’
‘God, yes, to somewhere on the tube. That would be nice.’ She noted it down.
