Sweets From Morocco

by Jo Verity

  ‘I knew all that, you idiot,’ she smiled. ‘You can’t keep secrets like that around here.’

  Kirsty put no pressure on Lewis to meet Peggy and Dick Swinburne. His parents knew he was seeing a girl but they skirted around it. ‘She must be quite special, whoever she is,’ his father taunted, watching Lewis combing his hair before he went out, and he wished that they would be honest and ask him, outright.

  The new school term began and Lewis, now in the Upper Sixth, had decisions to make. His maths master wanted him to try for Cambridge and gave him extra tuition, twice a week, during the lunch hour. ‘Give it a go, Swinburne,’ he said. ‘You’ll kick yourself if you don’t.’

  But Lewis wasn’t sure. He could probably cope with the work but, from what he’d heard, the majority of Cambridge students were from posh backgrounds and he might end up feeling pretty isolated. Besides, he didn’t much like the idea of being separated from Kirsty.

  ‘I don’t see why we can’t go to the same university,’ he said.

  ‘Be sensible,’ she replied gently, ‘We’re only eighteen. Neither of us can know how we’ll feel next year or the year after. We must pick the course that’s right for us.’

  ‘Are you saying that what’s between us isn’t the real thing?’

  ‘No. I’m saying that if this is the “real thing”, whatever that means, it will survive. And there are trains and buses and weekends and holidays. We’ll probably see more of each other than we do now. You’re the mathematician. Work it out.’

  Reluctantly Lewis filled in the forms for Cambridge whilst Kirsty chose York.

  They worked hard at school, spending whatever spare time they had together. They held hands when they walked by the canal and, when they sat in the darkness of the cinema or whenever they parted, they kissed. After a while, and with Kirsty’s encouragement and guidance, Lewis mastered the knack of undoing the hooks on her bra. Each time he cupped her soft breasts and felt her nipples harden to his touch, he wanted to weep with pride and awe.

  They heard from Tessa once in a while – a postcard from Ireland, then a couple of scrawled notes postmarked Bristol and Gloucester, but with no address. As far as Lewis could gather, the children she had been looking after were now at school and consequently the family no longer needed her so she had been finding temporary work in offices and shops.

  The Saturday before Christmas, when Lewis and his father were out collecting a Christmas tree from the market, Peggy Swinburne received a phone call from Tessa. ‘She just rang to wish us merry Christmas. And to say that she was fine. I asked when she was coming home but the money ran out.’

  Lewis wanted to strangle his sister.

  III

  1968

  Chapter 15

  A taxi pulled up outside the front door.

  ‘She’s here,’ whispered Lewis.

  His father, struggling to adjust his slippery black tie, joined him and they peered through a gap in the closed curtains. ‘Thank God for that. It would have finished your mother if she’d missed it. Is my tie okay?’ He lifted his chin so that Lewis could inspect the knot.

  ‘Perfect.’

  There was a jaunty knock on the front door and Lewis took a deep breath. It was improper, shocking even, to feel so excited on the day of his grandmother’s funeral but Tessa was at the door and he’d seen her only half a dozen times in the past five years.

  ‘Hello, Lewis.’ She stood on the threshold, her breath a vapour cloud in the February air.

  Laughing, he pulled her inside and they clung together, her cheek icy against his, the insubstantial fabric of her coat, cold to his touch. ‘You’re freezing. Come and sit by the fire and I’ll get you a cuppa.’

  ‘Haven’t you got anything stronger?’ she asked, shivering. ‘How’s Mum?’

  ‘She’s as well as can be expected considering that her mother – your grandmother – died last Thursday.’ Dick Swinburne was standing with his back to a small, smoky fire. ‘Good of you to come.’

  ‘You don’t have to explain who Gran was, Dad.’ She crossed the room and brushed her lips against her father’s cheek. ‘And you knew I would come.’

  How long has she been in the house, Lewis wondered. Thirty seconds? And they were already squaring up for a fight. ‘Mum’s upstairs. She might appreciate a hand. We’ll be leaving in an hour or so.’

  The funeral service was uninspired and impersonal, not surprising as Doris Lloyd wasn’t a churchgoer. There weren’t many mourners. The Lloyd side of the family had dwindled and Doris had few friends, fewer still who were prepared to turn out on a bleak winter afternoon. The sparse congregation did their best with the hymns whilst Peggy Swinburne, pinched and colourless, leaned on her husband’s arm, a handkerchief clamped against her face. Earlier that morning he and his father had coaxed her to take the stronger pills prescribed by the doctor to ‘get her through the day’. To an onlooker, she might appear calm but Lewis, who was next to her, could feel her whole body quivering; he could see her gloved fingers pulling at the button on her coat.

  Tessa stood on the far side of their parents. Her face looked thinner, her nose more prominent. She wore her hair loose. It just grazed her shoulders and the long fringe that obscured her eyebrows made her look like every other girl he passed in the street. Her fingers were nicotine-stained. She wore too many rings and her nails needed a trim. She didn’t appear at all like a young woman who was having the time of her life.

  Lewis stared at the coffin, the dark wood too shiny, the handles too bright, trying to remember what his grandmother looked like, to recall her voice. But all he saw was a wizened body, curled up under a blanket on a high, metal-framed hospital bed, and a locker stacked with oranges and barley sugar sweets that she would never eat.

  After the service, a handful of men – Lewis, Dick and Frank Swinburne, a cousin and a neighbour – were going to the cemetery whilst the women returned to the house.

  Tessa whispered to Lewis that she had never witnessed a coffin being lowered in to the ground. ‘I quite fancy doing the “earth-to-earth” bit.’

  He sighed. ‘You can’t leave Mum on her own. Just for once, couldn’t you put someone else’s needs first?’

  ‘Okay. Okay.’ Tessa picked a thread of cotton off his coat. ‘So where’s this mysterious girlfriend of yours? What’s her name? Christine? Katie? I was hoping to meet her at last. Perhaps you’re ashamed of her – or maybe me?’

  He might have said that he was hardly to blame that they hadn’t met. Tessa’s visits were few and far between, and she certainly didn’t encourage people to visit her.

  ‘Of course I’m not. And her name’s Kirsty, as you well know. She wanted to come but she couldn’t take time off work.’

  This wasn’t true. She had offered to come but Lewis had dissuaded her. Today wasn’t the day for his relationship to be subjected to Tessa’s scrutiny and, besides, his parents, though civil to Kirsty, never seemed comfortable in her company.

  They stood outside the church, waiting while their father fussed about who was to travel in which car.

  ‘What did that vicar say? “Doris Lloyd led a full and happy life.”’ Tessa gave a mirthless laugh.

  ‘I’d settle for that,’ Lewis said.

  ‘Really? You’d better get a move on then.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well look at yourself. You’re twenty-three years old and you still live with your parents. Christ, you even teach in the same school you went to. What d’you want out of life?’ She shook her head. ‘What happened, Lewis? Why didn’t you go to Cambridge? You were brilliant at maths.’

  ‘I got a first. Some people might consider that to be—’

  ‘Yes, but from a second-rate dump all of twenty miles away. You didn’t even leave home to do that.’

  Tessa’s criticism contained a deal of truth. But it was truth recognised in hindsight. When he’d made his choices they’d seemed logical and for the best. Cambridge, with its ornate architecture and aura of
privilege, grew less and less attractive as the moment for his leaving drew closer. He’d discussed it with Kirsty for whom change was the norm. But he wasn’t used to change. He liked constancy; stability. Kirsty had listened then said that he had to make his own mind up. He’d talked about it to his mother, keeping the conversation light, trying to give the impression that it was all the same to him whether he went to Cambridge or not. Her quiet ‘I’ll miss you but I’ll manage. I’ll be all right,’ made it clear that she wasn’t sure she would be. What tipped the balance was nothing to do with family or class. It was his friendship with Mrs Channing and his love for Cranwell Lodge.

  ‘It wasn’t that straightforward, Tessa. I wasn’t as sold on Cambridge as everyone else seemed to be. To tell you the truth, I felt bad about buggering off to the other side of the country, leaving Mum and Dad here without anyone to keep an eye out for them. You’ll find this hard to understand, I expect, but I like this town. I feel I belong here. Lots of the blokes I was at school with are still around if I fancy a pint or a game of tennis.’

  Tessa shrugged. ‘Well, as long as you’ve got someone to play tennis with, everything’s hunky-dory.’

  Before he could reply, she pointed to the car waiting to take the men to the cemetery. ‘Off you go. Dad’s getting fidgety.’

  ‘How are you doing, Mum?’ Lewis asked when he and the men got back to the house. ‘You look a bit brighter.’

  Livid patches glowed in the centre of Peggy Swinburne’s pale cheeks and her eyes sparkled, giving her a feverish look.

  It’s all a bit unreal. I feel like I’m floating. I expect it’s the pills … and this.’ She lifted a half-empty glass of Bristol Cream sherry. ‘It’s lovely to see Tessa, isn’t it? It’s kind of her to come. I expect she’s busy.’

  Kind? Busy?

  The lights were on. It wasn’t yet five o’clock but it was dark. On Wednesdays Lewis ran the after school chess club but this evening a fellow teacher was deputising for him. He imagined the muffled plonk as the boys dropped the carved pieces into their baize-lined boxes before sliding the lids shut and returning them and the well-worn chessboards to the cupboard. Not so long ago – four or five years – he had been one of those boys. His thoughts slipped back to Tessa’s ‘What d’you want out of life?’ but, to be honest, he had no idea what he wanted other than to be nine years old again.

  Tessa stood in the kitchen doorway, beckoning, and he followed her upstairs into his bedroom.

  ‘I’m sure they can spare you for a few minutes.’ She flopped on his bed. ‘I could recognise this house from its smell alone, although I couldn’t tell you what it smells of. I suppose the rugs and the curtains get impregnated with everything that’s ever been cooked and polished and painted. L’essence de la maison. L’odeur de l’enfance. Quite pleasant if used sparingly, but nauseating in large doses.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’ He shook his head. ‘Sorry. That was a bit Dad-like.’

  ‘I have, as a matter of fact.’ She fumbled a quarter bottle of vodka out of her handbag and unscrewed the cap. ‘Want a slug?’

  He didn’t but he took a swig anyway. ‘When are you going back?’

  ‘Not sure. Depends.’

  ‘On?’

  ‘You, little brother. You.’

  ‘How?’

  She raised her forearm, palm towards him. ‘How. Pale-face heap po-faced.’

  ‘Tessa. For Christ’s sake stop arsing about.’

  She sat up straight and hooked her hair back behind her ears. ‘I’ll stay tonight as long as you take tomorrow off. I’ll skive off work if you’ll do the same.’

  ‘I can’t—’

  ‘Of course you can. What’s all the fuss about? A few snotty little boys missing a double period of quadratic equations. Big deal.’

  ‘I’ve never—’

  ‘Well it’s high time you did. And I promise you the world will go on turning. I’ll give you three minutes to decide then I’m leaving for the station.’ She pulled her sleeve back and stared at her watch.

  If she stayed, the four of them could be together this evening, watching television or simply talking. She’d be there in the morning when they had breakfast. They would be a family again, if only fleetingly.

  He nodded. ‘It’s a deal.’

  ‘Tessa’s going to stay tonight. Go back tomorrow afternoon. That’s nice, isn’t it, Dick?’ Peggy Swinburne was clearing the dirty crockery. The mourners had gone – with the exception of Frank.

  Lewis watched his father’s expressionless face. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be doing that, Peg. Not today,’ Frank said but he remained seated.

  Lewis motioned to his sister and they took over at the sink whilst the others went to sit by the fire.

  ‘What was it like? At the end?’ she asked.

  He knew what she was talking about. ‘Pathetic. Pointless.’

  ‘Nobody’s mentioned her. Isn’t that weird? I thought we’d all be reminiscing about what a wonderful woman she was. How we’ll never forget her.’ She rolled her eyes heavenwards. ‘But nobody’s said a word about her since we left the church. Doris Lloyd – who was that? It’s bizarre.’

  ‘Did you expect anything different? This family never discusses anything important,’ he said.

  ‘How long did it take you to work that one out?’

  They joined the others in the chilly sitting room. His mother perched on the edge of the sofa, repeatedly massaging her knees through the fabric of her pleated skirt, whilst his father placed a few lumps of coal on the fire. Uncle Frank was reading the evening paper. Lewis wondered if they’d all been struck dumb whilst he and Tessa were in the kitchen.

  ‘It’s difficult to believe that we’ll never see Gran again, isn’t it?’ Tessa tossed it into the room as if it were no more important than an observation on the weather.

  It was typical of Tessa – childlike and theatrical – yet Lewis couldn’t believe that his sister would choose this moment to indulge herself. He sensed, rather than saw, his father and Uncle Frank freeze as he watched his mother’s face, expecting it to crumple.

  But instead she gave a regretful smile. ‘Yes. It’s going to be hard. I wouldn’t have survived without her when … through those terrible days. I shall miss her dreadfully.’

  ‘Lewis, d’you remember how she used to make us drink cold cabbage water? She said it was good for the brain.’ Tessa looked at him for confirmation. ‘God, it was disgusting.’

  Suddenly, as though his memory had been restored, he could see his grandmother, standing in her little kitchen, wrapped in her faded pinafore.

  He laughed. ‘Yes. And how she had us undoing knots in bits of string so she could use them again?’

  ‘And how she tipped the tea leaves on the garden to stop the slugs’

  ‘And let us polish those things that kept the stair carpet in place.’

  ‘Stair rods?’ their mother suggested.

  They all joined in with recollections, even their father, reconstructing Doris Lloyd, breathing life back into her and, for a while, calming Peggy Swinburne’s restless hands.

  As the evening wore on, the lie Lewis was intending to tell niggled. Keen to get it sorted out, he telephoned the deputy headmaster who, on hearing that Lewis was needed at home, ‘to comfort my mother’, sent his deepest condolences and said that he fully understood. It crossed Lewis’s mind that his readiness to consent could have something to do with the Swinburne family’s history, the details of which were doubtlessly well known within the staff room.

  Tessa grinned. ‘There – you see – wasn’t I right? Now. What shall we do tomorrow?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to spend it with Mum?’

  ‘I suppose so. But not all day. Can’t we escape for a couple of hours? She paused. ‘Shall I tell you what I’d really like to do?’

  ‘I shudder to think.’

  ‘I’d like to go to Cranwell Lodge.’

  This was the last thing that Lewis had anticipated.
/>
  He’d been visiting Cranwell Lodge ever since the day that Tessa left. At first he’d wondered whether, without Mr Zeal and Blanche to keep her on her toes, Mrs Channing might lose her edge, but not a bit of it. When he reappeared in her life, the old lady – then, he calculated, in her early eighties – seemed to gain a second wind and stepping through the back door of Cranwell Lodge was, as ever, like a trip to the theatre without knowing, or caring, which play was to be performed. Their conversations ricocheted from topic to topic, like the shiny balls in a pinball machine. Her vocabulary was astounding. She eschewed clichés – bread and butter to his unimaginative parents – modifying them to suit her purpose. ‘A washed pot never boils,’ she confided as she measured milk for their customary Ovaltine into a grubby saucepan. ‘Cleanliness is next to uselessness.’ She made outrageous assertions, employing them as firelighters to set discussions ablaze. Arguments were, in her words, ‘As good as an iron tonic without the side effect of constipation.’

  Cranwell Lodge was not ideal accommodation for a lone octogenarian. The house was draughty, shabby and far too big, but Mrs Channing made it clear that she had no intention of moving. ‘Don’t tell me I’d be better off in a “nice little bungalow” or I’ll banish you from my presence. I’ve always gone upstairs to bed and I will continue to do so.’

  The garden had, since Mr Zeal’s death, got completely out of hand. The paths were impassable; ivy snaked up the walls, obliterating several of the windows; tree branches groaned in high winds. Lewis knew nothing about gardening but he threw himself into the task, hacking and trimming, digging out bramble roots and burning debris. The shrubs and trees thrived on his inexpert pruning and, by the second season, although it wouldn’t have come up to his mother’s standards, the garden had been reclaimed.

  When Tessa had phoned a few weeks earlier, off his guard and tired, he’d contrasted their grandmother’s deterioration with Mrs Channing’s chirpy good health, thus letting the Cranwell Lodge cat out of its bag. Until that moment his visits there had been a secret he shared with no one, not even Kirsty. He’d attempted to play the whole thing down but Tessa always could tell when he was flannelling and he ended up telling her everything. ‘Wasn’t Mrs C furious that we’d told the police about the baby-in-the-cellar conversation?’ Tessa had asked.