by Bruno Noble
‘Does he now?’ asked Uncle James.
‘How are you, Uncle James?’ I wasn’t aping grown-ups. I actually wanted to know. He seemed sad to me, as though wrestling with someone else’s guilt.
Uncle James sat with his elbows on his knees. ‘I used to be a soldier. I learnt to fight.’ He threw a playful punch at me and cocked his thumb in imitation of a pistol. ‘Now all I can do is fight back the tears.’ He hung his head again and, to my surprise, I found myself comforting him, patting him on the back as Mama had patted me.
‘We’re all sad, Uncle James,’ I said.
‘So you’re Uncle James,’ said a husky voice. Mrs Baldock sat down next to him and, as if in afterthought, extended her hand to him. She looked older, dressed all in black. Her style was the same, a caftan, a headpiece that resembled an elegant turban and a necklace of dark, polished wood. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’
Uncle James shook her hand and looked from her to me.
‘Well, not all about you. Just that you’re Isabella’s favourite.’ Mrs Baldock spoke loudly, indifferent as to who might hear.
‘Oh, and she’s mine,’ said Uncle James.
‘How many nieces have you got?’
‘Just the one.’
‘That makes it easier, doesn’t it? Have you got a cigarette?’
Uncle James shook one free from a packet, held it to her and lit it for her.
‘You need to eat something, sweetie,’ said Mrs Baldock, blowing smoke in the direction of the tea that had been laid out. ‘Eleanor, take Isabella to get something to eat.’
I felt not a little guilty at the pleasure I felt at the attention I was getting, and placed my hand in Eleanor’s outstretched one. We left Uncle James and Mrs Baldock together and headed to the kitchen. Papa and Grandfather were in the butterfly pavilion now, I could see, though at opposing ends of it. Aunt Patricia and Uncle Neville were seated and going on about the importance of her eating for two to a group of Mama’s former colleagues. Grandmother was overseeing Cosmo picking up the cake he’d dropped from his plate. Aunts Linda and Mary stood arm in arm, exuding an air of anguish, either out of mortification that no one was speaking to them or out of fear that someone might.
Mama was dead and we were having a tea party.
*
There was no longer any place to hide. Mama’s lap, bosom, apron strings, her embrace, her sweet voice were no longer there. The kitchen, her sitting room, the house were no longer the same. Her posters and paintings had faded. Any illusion that things would turn out all right was no longer possible to maintain. If Mama’s wilful blindness to her husband’s nocturnal transgressions had been a betrayal of her children of sorts, her death was a perfect perfidy, an absolute breach of her children’s trust and of the security, love and comfort Cosmo and I had had every right to expect from her. Resenting her absence as much as missing the one person whose love had been deepest and unconditional was doubly upsetting for me.
I missed Mama most suddenly when my periods began: the time of my metamorphosis from pupa to butterfly, from child to young adult. I had thought I had known what to expect; Eleanor and older girls at school spoke freely about menstruation. But all the same it came as a shock, and I felt the absence of the one person to whom I would have turned for guidance and comfort sorely. My periods rooted me more in my body; I considered them abhorrent and fought futilely against that sentiment. Bloody tendrils, keeping me earthbound. Finding me bleeding, earthy, soiled, my butterfly would stay away in an undesired rebuttal of the physical me, of the woman I had become. But then, so would Papa, Drs Dearman and Feben and Professor Rennet and, realising this, I came to look upon my periods no longer as an affliction to be endured but as a benevolent force field. The men lost interest in me – not just while I had my periods, but in between them too; they had no appetite for a woman.
At a remove, in bed and yet aware of the activities in Papa’s study, I considered that I was failing Cosmo. Not finding his Mama, he had turned to me. Assuming responsibility for what was happening to him was too much for me to bear.
*
Mrs McKey became Mrs Baldock’s best friend. She was Irish – she sang when she talked. She had long fine hair and elegant, tapered fingers that were either pushing her hair behind her ears or lifting cigarettes to and from her lips. She and Mrs Baldock sat by the kitchen window, smoking, while Deborah and Sarah McKey tackled colouring-in and puzzle books and Cosmo and Sarah’s brother, James, sulked because they had been forbidden from playing football in the rain. They slouched, hands in pockets, by the closed French doors to the patio, Cosmo copying the older James in his posture and attitude.
Mrs Baldock leant forward and laughed. ‘Sarah! Just like Isabella!’
‘What?’ I looked up from my book.
Mrs Baldock addressed Mrs McKey. ‘Isabella always did that. She did that as a very young child. Colouring in outside the lines. Look at your people,’ she said to Sarah. ‘They sort of bleed outside of the contours of their bodies. It’s like they’re emanating something.’
‘It’s like their bodies can’t contain them,’ concurred Mrs McKey, adding, to comfort Sarah and, perhaps, me too, ‘It’s nice. It’s very modern.’ She blew smoke out of the open window. ‘I once had a red coat – bright red – God I loved that coat – and got caught in a thunderstorm some way from the car. By the time I got back to it, I was soaked right through, soaked to my skin. Anyway, we got in, drove home and, when we got out, we saw the colour had run into the upholstery – beige, it was, or cream – and the red had run into it, all over. I had left an almost perfect, scarlet imprint of myself on the passenger seat. Richard was furious.’
‘Richard is never furious,’ stated Mrs Baldock. She put out her cigarette.
‘Well, he couldn’t stay furious for long. He’d bought me the coat. Afterwards he said he liked it. The red smudge that was my shape. He said it was as though I was always with him, wherever he went in the car. The ghost of me.’ She raised her voice. ‘Do you remember the red stain in the car, James?’
‘Yes,’ said James, in a fed-up kind of voice.
‘James and Sarah never liked it. They said it spooked them or some such nonsense.’
‘Car,’ repeated Cosmo.
If I had asked Cosmo and James to play with Eleanor’s and Deborah’s dolls, they would have considered my proposal with horror and snorted contemptuously – at least, James would have done so and Cosmo would have copied him. Which isn’t to say that I disliked James; I liked him, particularly for ignoring Cosmo’s speech impediment and for standing by him when other boys teased him about it. The two of them gave me an insight into what older male friendships could be: manly camaraderie in which little conversation was necessary and an understanding was possible despite the lack of a shared spoken vocabulary. I removed a number of dolls from the box they were in and began playing with them on the carpet near where the boys stood, attempting to create, admittedly a little clumsily, a comic domestic scenario.
‘“Let’s play football,” said Daddy doll,’ I said in my gruffest voice.
‘“Okay,” said Jimmy. “Golly, this is a strange ball!”’ I said in a voice pitched just higher than mine. I had only a smaller doll’s head as a ball.
‘“Ouch! Don’t kick me! Kick the ball! Ouch! Do that again and I’ll punish you!”’ I said in the gruffer voice.
I created goal posts as best I could and then Cosmo squatted and, holding a doll in one hand, swung its leg with the other at the severed doll’s head.
‘How dare you kick Daddy!’ said the Daddy doll.
James knelt to play and I ceded the game to him and Cosmo.
Deborah and Sarah stopped colouring and looked on, smiling. The room had quietened as the drumming of the rain on the patio doors had lessened. Mrs Baldock rocked back in her chair and Mrs McKey bunched her long hair in one hand and tossed it over her shoulder. Eleanor appeared in the doorway to the kitchen and said, ‘Hello, everyone.’
Cosmo
and James entered their private worlds as I looked on expectantly. Deborah and Sarah resumed colouring. Eleanor gave her mother a hug and stayed still a moment, her arms and dark hair a multi-hued muffler around Mrs Baldock.
‘Oh, my God!’ said Mrs McKey quietly.
‘Oh, my God!’ said Mrs Baldock that little bit louder, the front legs of her chair hitting the kitchen floor with a clack.
Cosmo looked up. He looked at me, seeking reassurance that he had done nothing wrong. He had had the dolls kick the doll’s head around for a while and then adopted another game that may have started as the punishment of one doll by another, before becoming yet another, revealing game in which he, however temporarily, had acquired the exercise of power and control over another – or, at least, its illusion. He had undressed the dolls and, bending the knees of the smaller one, had it kneel before the other, had it bury its head in the other, while he made slobbering and grunting noises. He had then turned and laid the two dolls down, the bigger on the smaller one, pushing and shoving, pushing and shoving.
I cried noiselessly as I met Mrs Baldock’s look: tears of confirmation for her that her fears were true. She stood and went to Cosmo, knelt by him and beckoned me to join them in a hug, the first time I had received such a warm, loving, non-judgemental embrace since Mama’s death. We all cried – each, I presume, for different reasons; Eleanor, Deborah, Sarah and James crying hardest because they did not know why their mothers and I were crying.
Sharon
The summer before I started at my new secondary school was a strange, dreamy one. I lost that thing, that place, the people I most identified with or, to be more precise, the institution that most contributed to my defining myself around points of reference I approved of. It was as though, cut off from tens out of ten and gold stars and absent from the admiring looks in sports and on stage of pupils and teachers, the strings that held me in place in the world had been severed. I spent that summer in what felt like a lazy freefall – not in a dizzying, anxiety-inducing sense but in a horizontal, gravity-defying passing through space that, though gentle, was too quick to allow me to latch on to anything to define myself by. The signposts and labels were there but either upside down or back to front and always just out of reach.
Those summer days turned us pink, red and amber. Sherah would examine herself critically before the mirror in our parents’ room and gauge the effect of the sun’s rays by the increased visibility of her bikini lines. Dad knew not to enter his own bedroom then but would argue with her from the corridor: she was not to wear a bikini in the park. It was indecent, in his view, to wear a bikini anywhere other than the beach. I was indifferent as to whether or not I tanned but I would pretend that I cared, if only in a deplorable attempt to endear myself to my sister and her friends. I would return my reflection’s serene stare reticently and not without some envy that I couldn’t assign a reason to. The girl with the sun-bleached hair in the mirror was becoming a stranger to me, slyly provoking me as she lifted first one arm and then the other to reveal light downy hair and then cupped the two tumescent perturbations on the front of her T-shirt with both hands. Seamus took his turn before the mirror one late afternoon, only because Mum had reflected on how red he looked and, not long after and for some time afterwards, he was crying with the pain of the sunburn. Sherah and I were both lectured on the dangers of sunstroke and severely reprimanded for having allowed him in the sun with, obviously, insufficient sun block. Sherah didn’t argue back for once; she was clearly upset at seeing her brother so distressed. I was, too, of course, but all the same I didn’t feel it was entirely our fault – the day’s strong wind had helped mask the strength of the sun – and, perversely enough, I enjoyed being told off with Sherah for a change.
Mum and Dad were around that summer but rarely together, both begging work commitments, and Mum, wanting to train for an autumn marathon and to see her younger sister – who had moved to London from South Wales – settled in, was hardly home at all.
Aunt Wanda’s arrival was the best thing that happened to me that summer, if not in my childhood, if not ever. ‘Wanda from the Rhondda’ or ‘Rhondda Wanda’, Dad liked calling her, even though, as Mum never tired of pointing out, Wanda was pronounced ‘Vanda’, Rhondda was pronounced ‘Rhontha’ and, strictly speaking, Mum and Aunt Wanda came from south of the Rhondda, from Cowbridge, a fact that Dad only remembered after arguments in which Mum had got the better of him, as in (muttering under his breath), ‘Where do you come from? Oh yes, Cowbridge.’
Mum and I took the two stops up the District Line to see Aunt Wanda. I craned my neck in an attempt to see Seamus, who had been invited to play on the swings with his friend, but the train passed too quickly. My twin-glazed reflection sped along outside, looking in.
‘Sharon! So kind of you to come to help me unpack all these boxes! Oh my God, do we have work to do!’ Wanda released me from her warm hug and ushered Mum and me before her into her newly rented East Putney terraced house. ‘Look! They put all the boxes in one room!’ We stood for a moment, Wanda’s hands on my shoulders, confronting packing boxes that reached the ceiling. Wanda was like water: she rushed in to fill the space made available to her.
Over the course of the day, I ran small boxes up the stairs to bedrooms and helped unpack the larger ones downstairs, placing items as directed by Wanda.
‘I never realised you had so much stuff,’ Mum said to her.
‘I don’t want just a house, I want a home,’ said Wanda.
Wanda looked so much like Mum, only slighter, shorter and younger and, so, like me too. I liked our trio more than the one of Mum, Dad and me, or the one comprising Sherah, Seamus and me. I had become aware that I was happier in relationships of three than of two, when I was always the more pliant, subservient one, except for, perhaps, in the case of Seamus; but even that was beginning to change as he grew older. Three gave balance, stability and provided the judgment and moderation of a third pair of eyes.
While we worked, Mum and Wanda chatted, the elder sister quizzing the younger on her employment prospects.
Wanda looked at me admiringly and said, ‘I like your dress.’
‘Thank you.’
Wanda had a way of making people feel good about themselves. ‘Is it new? I don’t remember seeing Sherah in it.’
‘Well, it was Sherah’s but I don’t think she ever wore it.’
‘But seriously,’ said Mum to Wanda, ‘do you think it will be that easy for you to find work?’
‘Oh yes,’ replied Wanda. ‘I already have a few irons in the fire. Don’t be surprised if I do something completely different – I mean, accounting and finance still, but not in a stuffy office for a bunch of stuffy old men.’
‘Then where?’
Wanda touched the tip of her nose with a finger and arched her eyebrows.
‘What next?’ asked Mum.
Wanda looked around her. ‘Okay,’ she said decisively to her sister. ‘Help me take these big boxes of books up and then Sharon can arrange the books on the shelves in the small bedroom that I shall make my office. Or study. Whatever.’
When Wanda and Mum leant over a packing case, their heads touched and their hair blended into each other’s. Their hair was the same length and colour and for a brief moment they resembled a hairy one-headed, four-armed and four-legged monster intent on devouring a cardboard box, and I giggled.
‘What’s so funny?’ They grunted under the box’s weight.
I told them, omitting to describe the unbegrudging jealousy I felt as I watched the loving sisters, in the certainty that Sherah would never do for me what Mum did for Wanda.
The last box of books up, Mum and Wanda returned downstairs to the sitting room where more packing cases awaited them.
I knelt on a wool carpet that, brushed by my hand, released smells of carpet cleaner and disinfectant. Around me, to my kneeling head height, towered the nine stacks of, on average, seventy books that I had removed from the boxes they had been transported in. Six h
undred and twenty-one books to be exact. I pulled some of the piles carefully towards me until I felt quite surrounded, protected, like an animal in a burrow. I leafed through some books at random, idly. With the exception of Wanda, we weren’t great book readers in my family. Like Dad and Seamus and, to a lesser extent, Mum and Sherah, I didn’t understand why people would read a book when they could be hitting a ball. Or performing on a stage. The only books I had taken pleasure in reading from cover to cover were the plays I had acted in – why read a story when you could perform it or, even better, dance it?
Besieged by the bank of books, I stood and moved some aside. I dusted the shelves and, reaching for the book nearest me, paused. I wondered how Aunt Wanda would want me to arrange them. I could do it in alphabetical order of the authors’ names – obvious – or of the books’ titles. I could separate the Polish from the English books – or not. I caught sight of an author’s dates of birth and death on the back of a book and thought I could do it by date of birth, but that would be too time-consuming. I decided to ask Aunt Wanda what she wanted.
Performing a salsa in a series of side-steps to escape the towers of books in the room and the empty packing boxes in the hallway, I paused at the top of the landing by the open sash window to watch a District Line train trundle by. A few passengers stood; most sat. Although together, they seemed quite alone. Others might feel the same way I did, a fragile eggshell of a person, the yolk and albumen having leaked long ago. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty, why did you fall? I pressed my forehead against the windowpane and looked down onto the road below, taking pleasure in the cooling draught around my waist.
The train came to a stop further down the line, at East Putney. I lifted my T-shirt to encourage fingers of draught up and around me. It was unusually quiet. Not a car passed. Not a bird sang.
Quite distinctly, as clearly as if I had been gifted with powers of extrasensory perception, I heard Aunt Wanda say, ‘When are you going to tell the children?’ It was as though those words had been whispershouted in my ear, gathering volume as they reverberated in my head.
