He hadn't got a wife, and if he had a girlfriend he took great care to keep her hidden from us. He came singular, bachelor Uncle Bob, placid and cheerful. If the family had ever entertained hopes of Uncle Bob taking Stella off their hands, these had been ground into dust long before Brian and I came on the scene. There was no tension between Bob and Stella, no mutual anything when they were in the same room. Bob was always his usual pale and beaming self, Stella's mind on someone else entirely.
He stayed for just the two days, always arriving on Christmas Eve evening and departing on Boxing Day straight after breakfast. Cunning Uncle Bob. Christmas for us was a time of frantic church-going. I don't know how a household that was so driven by the Christmas spirit could embody so little seasonal cheer. We spent half the holiday in church thanking God and welcoming the arrival of the Little Baby Jesus, and the rest of it thanking relatives and welcoming the arrival of the end of the whole business. But long ago Bob must have turned his bland, round face up to our mother and said, 'You don't mind, do you, Edie, if I don't come with you?' And that was it. He never had to go. He stayed at home, with the newspapers and his pipe and a roaring fire, with instructions about the oven setting, wearing new carpet slippers he had (most likely) bought for himself, and free to tuck, unhindered, into the box of Turkish delight he had brought for us. If I had a Christmas wish, perhaps it was to be Uncle Bob. Just for the day. Or two days, at the most.
My mother should have enjoyed the Christmas morning service. After all, it was her choice to be there, not ours. But she was always tortured by thoughts of the dinner to come, worrying what was happening to the turkey. Was it turning as dry as a bone, or exploding in flames? I couldn't see how this could happen, short of the turkey climbing out of the oven, rubbing its bony little wings together in glee and turning up the dial itself, then jumping back in. Bob was at home, Bob who fended for himself on the other three hundred and sixty-three days of the year, surely Bob could babysit an oven-ready turkey without it immolating itself or him or the whole bungalow? But I was aware of Mum clutching her carol sheet very tightly and singing in that high cracked voice which showed the strain. Why is it that you can always rely on the voice of your own parent to ring out over all the others, a beat in front or a beat behind?
Her attitude to the domestic – as opposed to the sacred – Christmas was 'Well, at least that's over,' at every stage. The shopping, the wrapping, the sending of cards. The buying of ingredients and slopping them all together to make a cake, weeks and weeks beforehand. Covering the cake with the hard white paste of royal icing, days and days beforehand. She would whip up the surface into a snowstorm with the blade of a knife dipped in hot water, and settle the little wooden robin on top. The last act was to place the silver plastic letters spelling out A MERRY CHRISTMAS firmly in the centre. Then she'd stand back for half a second to admire her handiwork grimly, and say, dusting her hands together, 'At least that's done.' When we rushed to open our stockings in the morning: 'Well, now that's over, we can get ready for church.' The dinner, the exchange of family presents afterwards. She leaped on the discarded wrapping paper, snatching it up before it could begin to make a mess. My father sometimes got to the point of saying, 'Sit still, Edie. You make a rod for your own back.' But 'If I don't pick it up now, it'll only get rammed down between the cushions,' she insisted, smoothing out the best bits. The best bits were always Uncle Bob's, because he bought new wrapping paper every year, unlike us, who saved it up from Christmas to Christmas, peeling off last season's sticky labels and snipping away the jagged edges. We thanked Bob for our presents, and he thanked us. 'Well!' my mother said, satisfied at last. 'Now that's over, how about a cup of tea?'
There was a routine to Christmas entertaining, as there was to everything else. Stella and Gloria, Eddy (if not on the high seas), Mandy and Bettina would join us for tea on Christmas evening, and we would join them for tea on Boxing Day, when everyone was too full to eat much anyway. This meant that neither household had to buy and cook an enormous turkey, only a large one. Bettina was always left out of the obligations, being a woman on her own, and had a standing invitation to Christmas dinner at Gloria's. Tea, on either day, was mince pies and bread and butter and pickles and cold ham. And Christmas crackers, at generous Gloria's, and old silver threepenny bits pressed into what was left of the cold pud. My mother frowned on such frivolities. Perhaps it was because they were pagan. She could barely bring herself to have a tree – 'Needles all over the carpet!' – and was one of the first to buy a modern artificial Christmas tree, with leaves of shredded crispy paper and branches of palsied wire. What I hated most were its red plastic feet. We had to place our presents around its red plastic feet, which were like two clothes hangers joined at the hip. Why not, I complained, supply it in a plastic tub, with clean plastic earth, and a jolly red plasticized ribbon tied round it? 'Stop moaning,' I was told. 'Christmas is a time of goodwill.' We wired our Christmas fairy to the tree's three-foot-high top, and arranged the bells and baubles solemnly. 'It's for the children,' our mother intoned to the relatives. 'I wouldn't bother having one at all if it was only us.'
I didn't know then what secrets lay behind this modest claim.
The Hennessys went to church at Christmas, or most of them did. They went to midnight mass, a giggling, excited pack of them, Patrick's breath reeking of good cheer, leaving Tillie at home to stuff stockings and turkeys and keep the reindeers' hooves from breaking the roof lights of Patrick's attic studio.
None of this was known to me first-hand. I was next door, dining with simple Christian folk.
*
'It's all very well for Bob ...' This phrase would always surface some time in the days after Christmas, usually from my father. He never finished it off, or explained how it arose, but there was a distinct feeling that it was all very well for Bob. He came to us as a guest in our home, and not for him the washing-up, the fetching of coal, or the making of pots and pots of tea. He judged finely how infrequently to say, 'Let me do that for you,' to which my mother, with a shocked expression, would reply, 'No, you sit down, Bob. You're a guest.'
My father wasn't so sure. I saw him gaze round sometimes, restless, as if he thought that Bob might just be able to lift that tea towel, if put to the test, or carry the dishes as far as the kitchen hatch. I could see him thinking, even before Boxing Day morning had arrived, It's all very well for Bob. Bob with his purpose-built flat with every mod con purposely built in; no garden for Bob to worry about, up there on the top floor. No wife or children to get on his nerves, or drain his pockets, or press him with trivial questions – 'How long is an ell, Dad?' or 'When are you going to creosote that shed?' There Bob sat, with the newspaper open on his lap and his long legs comfortably stretched out, toes warming by the fire, and nothing we children did or our mother said or our father implied by twitches of his head or the rearranging of small coins in his pockets ever impinged on Bob's sanguine composure. I used to keep an eye on his big-slippered reflection in the convex mirror hanging on the chimney breast, and he barely stirred.
And where did Bob sleep? Why, on the settee. No worry that Bob might wreck the upholstery or ram something uncalled-for between the cushions. For two nights Bob slept with a full complement of blankets and eiderdowns and pillows (redistributed from our beds, since we had no occasion to keep spares), with the added warmth of the sinking coals in the glassy fish-tank of the Parkray. So it was certainly all very well for Bob.
At some point in his career with the roof-tile and piping company, he was allocated a company car, which he grandly parked in our drive overnight. He and my father would go and admire it every year, talking of fuel consumption and road holding and cubic capacity. In the years when the old model had been replaced by a new one, they spent almost as long contemplating it in the freezing air as my mother did, in the humid kitchen, stuffing the turkey. And whatever Bob said, in encouraging terms like 'You really ought to think about getting one like that yourself,' or 'You can't beat it for accel
eration,' or even (in consolation) 'Of course, it's not really a family car,' I knew what Dad was thinking. It's all very well for Bob.
The good thing about Uncle Bob was that he would often bring us presents we might actually want. His idea of boys and girls was gleaned from toyshop windows, which was not a bad place to start, from our point of view. The other things we got tended to be useful, things we would have needed anyway. Certainly mine were: a pen and pencil set, new socks and handkerchiefs, a hairbrush, a purse with my initial on it; never anything exciting. Brian was given more toy-like presents – Airfix kits, packs of balsa wood and glue, penknives with numerous useful attachments – though there was always an element of virtuous work in them. Even so, I was jealous.
The best present that Uncle Bob gave Brian was the International Spy Kit. It had a code book and a set of false moustaches; a handy booklet with instructions, like how to make invisible ink, and helpful tips, such as how to follow someone without them getting suspicious. It didn't tell you how to kill a man with a single blow or where you might obtain a false passport. Then there was a magnifying glass, a fountain pen that turned out to house a secret blade, and a set of (plastic) skeleton keys. The secret blade was as blunt as a butter knife, but Brian took it down to the shed to try and work up an edge.
The most useful item was the magnifying glass. Brian tried it out on ants' nests and spiders' webs and the back of his friend Pete's hand. He had more luck with little heaps of dry grass. If he was lucky and the sun stayed out, if he waited long enough and got the angle right, the spot of light intensified. A tiny curl of smoke, and the grass stems bent and crumpled into flame. Then he'd look up at me with a happy gleam in his eye.
The skeleton keys were no good at all.
Looking back, I think we could have picked up clues to Bob's secret love life from the presents he gave us. The year we had wonderful things from Hamley's Toyshop in Regent Street (price tags still attached) must have been the year he had a girlfriend he was trying to impress, a metropolitan sort of woman. He was showing her his generous side, his ability to be extravagant when the occasion demanded it, his kindness to children, his good family-man credentials. The year we had identical puzzle books was the year of the out-of-hand office party, the bad hangover, the passing regrets, the dash to buy something – anything – in a petrol station on the way.
Although we opened our presents under his gaze, after Christmas we always had to write thank-you letters to Uncle Bob. Our mother made us. It was because, she said, he lived away, implying that we spent the weeks after Christmas continually thanking our nearby relatives every time we saw them. Which of course we didn't. By mutual consent we drew a hasty veil over the embarrassing subject.
One year Bob gave me a dictionary and a thesaurus, a matching boxed pair. None of us even knew what a thesaurus was. I thought it sounded like some kind of prehistoric monster.
'Now that's a useful present,' my mother said, with her damning praise. She didn't know. She didn't know how useful I found it, how truly grateful I was. I didn't mind writing the thank-you letter for this present. I strewed it with words, like a spy sending a message to his masters back home, so that Bob would know how unusually welcome his present was. 'I will endeavour to utilize your gift, dear Uncle Bob,' I wrote, and 'I hope you had an eventful journey back to Basingstoke. We all trust you enjoyed the festal occasion ...'
I read them obsessively, alone in my room, like dirty books. Pellucid, now there was a word, and tormentil, and Eocene. Words to charm the birds down out of the trees. English-speaking birds, that is. Lovely, wordy words, words to knock Barbara's vocabulary into a cocked hat. I savoured the words, and then swallowed them, letting them slip down my throat like melting chunks of coloured ice. I savoured them like Murray Mints, like Fruit Spangles, sucking out all their sweetness, letting their nourishment flow round my bloodstream and enliven all my cells. To me, those books were the equivalent of Mandy's shrine of sweets, everything in their pages to be worshipped and adored.
The following year Bob gave me a belt of gold chain-links, in a style no longer fashionable. Or modish, or contemporary, or topical, if you like.
19
Group
I've started going to Group. I'm not sure if this is progress.
Group is always run by someone different. I hazard a guess that it's the most unpopular job of all. I think there must be a rota system, and I imagine them up in the staff room saying, 'It can't be my turn to run Group. I did it last week!' Or maybe they just pick straws.
I assume it is a weekly thing. I go weekly. Maybe there are groups taking place all the time, every day, only I'm not in them.
The first time I went it was run by Mike, a very long thin man with a faint fluffy beard and a jumper his mother made him. The sleeves reached his knuckles. He made us all sit round in a circle and think of one word, one word to sum up how we were feeling. Of course, it was very tempting to come out with a rude word. In fact, it was very hard to think of a word that wasn't rude for how we were feeling, being put on the spot by an idiot whose mother wasn't even capable of using a tape measure. I looked round at everyone in Group and decided that an outside observer would not be able to tell that Mike was any different from the rest of us. I was only one seat away from him. They started by going in the other direction, and I just prayed they wouldn't get as far as me before we had to finish. You didn't have to explain your word if you didn't want to, you just had to say it. Of course, they all wanted to explain. Trust the loonies.
The second time I went it was run by Moira, a tiny ant-like woman with red hair and a Scottish accent. Moira's approach was quite different. Whereas Mike sat forward in his armchair and knotted his tense white hands around one shinbone, and urged us with pleading eyes to come out with something, anything, Moira sat up arrow-straight, her short legs dangling like Goldilocks perched on Father Bear's chair, her little feet en pointe in order to make contact with the carpet. She wore black ballet shoes, which rendered the effect that much better. She commanded us with her fierce darting eyes to say something. And she didn't want just any old thing. She wanted something full of meaning. You felt likely to be picked upon. It was just like the old schooldays of spelling rounds and tables tests. 'Seven sevens – you!' And you would have to produce the answer to seven sevens, like some miracle, from out of your empty head.
Fortunately, she never picked me.
These are the people in Group. It is like something out of Chaucer, or Hieronymus Bosch. There's the Fishwife, the Old Crone, the Young Crone (they could be mother and daughter, perhaps they are), Beanpole, Wet Lettuce, Marsupial and me.
The Old Crone has a hooked nose and a chin that's curving up to reach it, and I can see the Young Crone will go this way, too, in time. Beanpole is young, perhaps as young as me, but that's all we have in common. She unfolds herself like one of those expanding clothes airers when we stand up to leave. But she's always there before me so I don't have the chance to see her sit down. She's longer and stringier than Mike, even. His mother's home-knit jumper might fit her very nicely. Perhaps she's one of these noneaters, like Hanny. The Fishwife has a voice like a corncrake and is fond of hearing it. She has a hectoring tone. Mostly it's the group leader she's hectoring, but sometimes it's herself, or the Authorities, or God. Wet Lettuce is just that – pathetic, weepy, her mimsy little-girl voice only just carrying across the vast six or eight feet of the circle to the rest of us. Marsupial is my favourite. She's not fat all over, just rather plump, but her belly is huge and saggy and she lets it swing down between her parted thighs as she sits, resting it oh-so-gently on the lap of her easy chair. My conclusion is it's the latest in a series of phantom pregnancies, a terrible recurring fantasy, and she has the stretch marks to prove it.
What a happy bunch we are.
I wish Lorna would have to come and run Group. I wish I could see the Fishwife going on and on at Lorna, not pausing for breath, not even pausing for thought. I wish she would have to face the Old Crone,
whose infrequent but always enthralling gobbets of obscenity make Mike swallow, and blink his eyes open very wide. I wish she would have to deal, all at once, with Wet Lettuce crumpling into tears and Beanpole twisting her legs round and round each other agonizingly until some vein is likely to pop, and Marsupial sighing and giving off that vivid, swampy smell which she does whenever she's about to speak. Then we'd see what Lorna's really made of.
But that doesn't seem to be her job. I wish it wasn't my job, to have to sit there with them, to associate with them, be associated with them. They're clearly not normal people, and some of them are definitely unhinged.
I always try to keep my mouth shut. I don't want to say anything untoward.
Yesterday Lorna brought someone else to our little private session. He sat in the corner, next to the waste-paper basket, and said nothing. He was like a dormouse, so quiet and self-effacing that you really could ignore him.
Except that I didn't. I stared at him. We're so starved of events here – there's nothing much to do, nothing to look at but bad art, nothing to read but what we glean from other people's leavings – that it was really quite thrilling to see a new face. At least, that's how I felt. His hair was such a fine colour that you could hardly see it, but it was thick and upright, prickling out all over his head like an American astronaut's, and his eyes were as sad as a donkey's. He wore tiny steel-framed glasses, perched on the bump of his narrow nose. His face was unlined, shockingly smooth, just like a balloon. I've no idea how old he might be. He's one of those people where you just can't tell.
'Do you mind if I sit in?' he asked, right at the end, as Lorna was letting me go. I shrugged: too late. Too late! I didn't bother saying it.
Living In Perhaps Page 12
