The Stories of Jane Gardam

by Jane Gardam

  And Betty drank port-and-lemons down the golf club and was always well away by eight o’clock, talking of her husband who thought he had a diamond in his neck.

  Clockie used to walk the beaches of the estuary in time, among the sharp sand-grasses and the grey flowers. He met folks there. Once he met a daft fairground girl, white-headed. He was an old man now and they lay quiet in the sand dunes. The girl lay beside him like a pearly fish.

  She said: ‘You’ve got this thing in the back of your neck. It’ll be a diamond.’

  ‘Have you heard tell of this, then?’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ she said, ‘long since. There’s them with the diamond.’

  ‘Where you from, girl? Which country?’

  But she didn’t seem to know.

  He fettled for himself at home till his hip went and he had it done and a date fixed for the other one, but by then he was failing. He was no great age, but old for a man of his history always living in the reek of the Works. The road he’d swept was a bit of a motorway now, the chimneys all plumed with gases. In hospital he grew poorly and they sent for his children and a son came he’d not seen for years bringing a little one with him called Meg, golden-haired. Before they left, Clockie put out a calloused old hand and touched her hair. He put his hand under the hair and at the back of the neck he felt the diamond. They looked at one another.

  The doctors had wanted him to have the foreign body removed on the occasion of the first operation and they were still on about it now. ‘It can’t be doing you any good, Grandad. Is it First War shrapnel? You’re a lucky old devil.’

  ‘I wasn’t born First War,’ said Clockie. ‘It’s said to be a diamond.’

  Well, they were full of it. Clockie lay thinking of Meg.

  ‘’Ere,’ he said late one night, ‘nurse. Tell them O.K. I’ll have it done. They can take out the diamond when I’m under the knife for the hip. They tell me it’s but a matter of lifting it off. Now then, if it does turn out to be a diamond, it’s to be for Meg. She’ll not need it, she’s got her own. But you’re to tell her I said.’

  The surgeons laughed their heads off. One said he’d once had a patient with a tin of Harpic stuck up his bum. They put off the hip for a week, until the big man could come down from Newcastle.

  ‘Let’s have another look at the little lass,’ said Clockie, and when she was brought he sent her father out and said: ‘Meg, you and I are old friends. What’s this behind the curtains?’

  And she said: ‘It’s a diamond.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Clockie. ‘You’ll be grand. You’ll always be grand, girl. You and me, Meg, we know the ropes of living and dying. We’re safe, girl.’

  The next day they did the hip successfully and nipped out the diamond from the back of the neck and they killed him of course.

  The thing rattled into the kidney-dish, a vast great lump of glass. They all went mad. One doctor who was South African said he’d seen many an uncut diamond but never one as fine as this. The great man said: ‘You know, this could be a diamond.’

  Then Clockie began to die and it was all hands to the pump, and in the midst of the red alerts going off, and Clockie going out, a soft young nurse (she was an Armitage) cleared away the kidney-dish and washed the diamond down the sluice. It was a wide-lipped sluice without a grille and so the diamond was taken straight down into the Middlesbrough sewers and then far away out into the North Sea, where it is likely to be washing around for ever.

  When she was told of her grandfather’s death, Meg put her face in the back of his chair to savour the nice salt smell of him. She put her thumb in her mouth, and the other hand she wound round to the back of her neck to make sure of the diamond.

  MISS MISTLETOE

  Daisy Flagg was a parasite. Nothing wrong with that. Hers is a useful and ancient profession. In Classical times every decent citizen had a parasite. There were triclinia full of them. They flourished throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, though later demoted in England to the status of mere court jesters—demoted because your pure parasite does not have to sing for his supper. Not a bar. Not a note. His function is to sit there smiling below the salt cellar; not ostentatiously below it, but as ami de maison.

  Now and then the parasite was noticed by those upstream above the salt, among the silver platters. Sometimes he was taunted and had to pretend to enjoy it. There was a Roman parasite who was teased by his host that he had only been invited because the host was having his way with the parasite’s wife, and Ha! ha! ha! the parasite had to reply.

  Professional parasites turn up even today in Italy—at country weddings, sloping around at the back of the chairs, jollying people along at the wine-feast, nobody knowing who they are. The host sees they get their dinner.

  Oh, the parasite was always a self-respecting fellow in his chosen profession. He knew he was easing the host’s passage through this world and into the next. He was Lazarus raised up from the city gate. He was the rich man’s ticket to heaven.

  And there’s something of him left still, especially at Christmastime, in England. We’ve all met him: the friend who’s always at the Honeses’, the Dishforths’, the Hookaneyes’; who provides none of the spread, is no relation, doesn’t do a hand’s turn, seems to have little rapport with the rest of the company and is not particularly inspiring. Dear Arthur. Jim’s friend Alan Something. Dorothy-she-was-something-to-do-with-your-grandmother. Mr. Jackson (Beatrix Potter knew all about Mr. Jackson). And it is excellent for all, because the host of any one of these people can say, ‘And there’ll be Mr. Jackson of course as usual, God help us. But it is Christmas,’ and Mr. Jackson can say when the drunken invitation is at last extended at the office party on Christmas Eve, ‘Oh, thanks, but at Christmas I always go to the Infills.’

  And so it was with Daisy Flagg, the Christmas parasite known to the Infills behind her back as Miss Mistletoe. For years and years she had come to the Infills for Christmas, always arriving late following extensive devotions in her parish church some hundred miles away. She drew up in her ancient and decrepit car (which she maintained and serviced, patched and painted herself), its windscreen hazy, its tyres criminally worn, its back seat of rubbed-away, hollowed-out leather laden with awful presents. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she would cry, springing through the back door into the kitchens, leaving the car in the middle of the frosty drive below the Renaissance urns on the terrace, all the eighteenth-century windows glittering in disdain. ‘Happy Christmas, happy Christmas, all. Terribly sorry.’ She would enter by the kitchens as a privileged member of the family, a family that now cooked its own Christmas dinner rather better, if more chaotically, than when there were cooks, and who because of the presence of Daisy Flagg/Miss Mistletoe behaved rather less badly among the bread sauce and the prune stuffing and the whirling machinery that resulted in the brandy butter than they otherwise would have done.

  Daisy Flagg/Miss Mistletoe sat to table with her face in its permanent rictus grin, giving the impression of a delighted grasshopper in a paper hat. She was flat as a child, sideways almost invisible, transparent as a pressed flower. She was very clean. Her clothes seemed to have been boiled, her hair almost shampooed away. Her nails were scrubbed seashells. (‘Some sort of guilt there,’ said Laetitia the year she was doing Psychology.) Her shoes came from the jumble sales of her spiky church. They were often the old dancing slippers of dowagers, and once were gigantic Doc Martens found in a paper bag on the pavement in Victoria Street. Miss Mistletoe, who was very poor, had of course taken these straight to the police station. To the very top police station, Scotland Yard, just across the road. They had told her there that lost shoes were not their speciality and if they were her they’d keep them.

  Miss Mistletoe wore miniskirts. Always. She must have acquired a great number of them some hot summer in the Beatles’ time, for they were all very flimsy and her knees seemed to knock together beneath them in the icy wastes of I
nfill Hall. Her hair was always done for Christmas in a Cilla Black beehive circa 1975. It made her look steady and controlled; the permanent spinster, if the word still exists.

  She ate voraciously, keeping the conversation flowing, trooping with the rest out of the dining room to listen to the Queen. She ignored the children. She didn’t like children. And she never walked the dogs in the park. Long ago she had been dissuaded from helping with the washing-up, for she tended to hop and giggle and drop the Infill Spode on the flagstones. ‘Just sit and be comfortable,’ they said, and disappeared with the retrievers into spinneys and woodlands and to trudge round the ornamental lake in the park.

  Like a little bundle of sticks sat Miss Mistletoe beside the fire in the hall, across from vast old Archie, bibulous and asleep. She kept up her merry patter—the weather, her car, her journey, the Royal Family (not the scandals), The Archers, anything. When it was teatime she stayed on. Drinks time, she stayed on. Supper, she stayed on. A sort of pallet had always been laid out for her in a remote bedroom once occupied by a Victorian tubercular tweeny who was said to haunt it, though Miss Mistletoe never complained. Grey blankets and a towel were laid across this bed and these were always left so perfectly folded the next day that everyone wondered if Miss Mistletoe had slept in the bed at all. On Christmas night about midnight someone would say, the brandy flowing pretty free by now, though Miss Mistletoe never touched a drop of it, nor any alcohol ever: ‘Come on, Daisy; you’d better stay the night.’ ‘Would that be all right?’ was the awaited reply. ‘It’s terribly kind of you.’ And she grinned and grinned.

  The joke for Boxing Day was how to get rid of her. You couldn’t say that everyone was going hunting because nobody did now. The horses were gone and the stables rented out as craft shops and mushroom beds. Laetitia still attended the meet in the village, but in her Lagonda because she was now a hunt saboteur. Nor could you say that everyone was going to the panto in Salisbury, because Miss Mistletoe’s face seemed to say to them: Why didn’t you get a ticket for me?

  Usually they eased her out about noon with the second turkey leg and a wedge of the pudding and a tin of Boots’ Lavender talcum powder which had always been her Christmas present. After waving her off they went back into the house and gathered up the presents she had given them and put them with the stuff for the NSPCC summer fair. They shrieked and groaned about Miss Mistletoe for the rest of the day.

  Over the years some Infills died and some new ones were born but the numbers for the table at Christmas stayed more or less steady between fourteen and twenty. The year old Archie died, however, spread out peacefully beside the log fire one November morning early (though they didn’t realise it till after Newsnight), the numbers had dropped. There would be only twelve, with Miss Mistletoe making the dreaded number of thirteen, and the oft-raised but never seriously considered question began to be asked outright: Do we have to have her?

  ‘We could ask someone else and make it fourteen.’

  ‘Who?’

  Nobody could think. ‘Well, we can’t sit down thirteen. I’m not superstitious but, I mean, Christmas is a religious do. That’s when thirteen started.’

  ‘It didn’t,’ said Laetitia, who was at present concerned with Theology.

  ‘We could say we were all going away.’

  ‘She knows we never go away.’

  ‘Well, we might. We could say we are all going skiing.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Letty and Hubert are over ninety.’

  ‘We could say we’re all going on a cruise.’

  So they said they were all going on a cruise and they sent Daisy Flagg a fat cheque (ten pounds) and loving messages saying they knew that she would have much more exciting places to go than Infill Hall. Daisy Flagg wrote back on her lined paper in her schoolgirl hand to say it was quite all right, perfectly all right, and she’d be going to a friend in Potter’s Bar.

  Sighs of relief.

  ‘She’s such a bore,’ they said. ‘How many years have we had her? Twenty?’

  ‘Oh no. Not twenty. It feels like twenty. Maybe ten.’

  ‘How old is Daisy Flagg?’ someone asked as the turkey was rather wearily dismembered, paper hats lying about the table and not on anybody’s head. ‘Forty? Fifty?’

  ‘Could be any age. Could be only thirty-five. She was just a little girl in a first job when Mamma found her, wasn’t she? Glove counter in the Army & Navy. Took a fancy to her. Isn’t she still there?’

  ‘No idea. I always thought she was something to do with Nannie.’

  ‘Well, we needn’t escape all afternoon anyway. Ghastly cold out there.’ And they sat about indoors for hours, missing the Queen.

  ‘We can hear her later,’ said Jocelyn.

  ‘If we must,’ said Laetitia.

  Somehow they didn’t.

  The evening hung heavy. Children fought over videos. Nobody would sit in Archie’s splayed chair. The dogs lay around making smells because nobody would take them out. Nobody could face the second turkey leg. ‘Next year,’ said someone, ‘better have the little creature back, don’t you think?’

  When, the following October, Laetitia decided to go and work for Mother Theresa in Calcutta (calling in at Rome on the way for a new handbag), the numbers came right again and the invitation was issued. Lady Infill surprised herself by saying, ‘We missed you last year. You must tell us all you have been up to since.’

  There was a little pause before the reply came, but it was an acceptance. Daisy Flagg said that she had missed them, too, and would be arriving as usual after attending the early celebration of Holy Communion. It was to be hoped, she added, as usual, that there would be no inclement weather for her hundred-mile drive.

  And then, over the answerphone on Christmas morning—bleary-eyed Gervais pressing the button as he stood, yawning, over the kettle for the early-morning tea—came Daisy’s voice saying she hoped it would be all right but she was bringing someone with her.

  ‘Of course it’s not all right,’ screamed Lady Infill. ‘Call her back immediately.’

  ‘She’s at church. The Early Celebration.’

  ‘I don’t care what celebration. She can’t just land here with someone. We’ll be thirteen again.’

  ‘Maybe we could get in the vicar.’

  ‘We don’t know a vicar.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Auntie Pansy hopefully, ‘I could go to my London club?’

  They quarrelled their way through breakfast, through the stuffing of the turkey, through the creation of gravies and bacon rolls, through the endless trimming and cleansing of sprouts. They sulked and fumed and drank a lot of wine and began to say that Daisy Flagg was a pain, always had been a pain, always would be, and why had they got her? They’d had the chance to be shot of her. They’d let it go. Who was she anyway? Nobody had ever known. It was all their mother’s fault. Playing the eccentric grande dame. Years out of date. Egalitarian rubbish.

  ‘Well we all know who your mother was,’ said Sukey. ‘Nobody.’

  They sat at the table in disarray.

  Turkey over, there was still no Daisy.

  ‘Maybe she’s had a crash on the motorway at last,’ said someone.

  But it was after half-past two by this time and nobody quite dared to say, ‘Let’s hope,’ for they were now disquieted.

  ‘She’ll swan in with the nuts,’ said someone else. ‘You’ll see. She’s probably bringing a man. She’s probably married.’

  But she wasn’t married. Daisy Flagg the parasite never married.

  Miss Mistletoe married? Ridiculous!

  Towards the end of the orange and lemon sugar slices and the coffee, the limp wagging of the crackers, came the sound of the motor car upon the dying winter afternoon. It came into view, spluttering and clanking, between the stark branches of the avenue and jerked to a halt below the terrace.

  And out of it sp
rang a shining-faced and stocky Daisy Flagg with a three-month-old baby in her arms, and she took her place at table and put this baby on her knee.

  ‘So terribly late,’ she said. ‘Such terrible trouble with sparking plugs,’ and she grinned. ‘She’s terribly hungry. D’you mind if I do this at table?’

  And Miss Mistletoe upped with her smock and her T-shirt to reveal amazing bounty beneath.

  TELEGONY

  I: GOING INTO A DARK HOUSE

  Molly Fielding’s mother had been a terrible woman born about the same time as Tennyson’s Maud and as unapproachable.

  Nobody knew anything much about her, Molly herself being now very ancient. Molly had been my grandmother’s friend and my mother’s, before she was mine, but with the demise of each generation she seemed to grow younger and freer—to take strength. Her hair, her clothes, her house, all were up to the minute. So were her investments; and her foreign holidays became farther and farther flung.

  I had found the photograph of her mother before my own mother died. It was a coffee-coloured thing mounted on thick, fluffy, cream paper, unframed in a drawer, with the photographer’s name in beautiful copperplate across the corner: ‘Settimo’.

  I could not believe it. Signor Settimo! He had taken my own photograph when I was a child. I remembered a delicious little man like a chocolate, with black hair and eyes and Hitler’s square moustache. My Settimo must have been the son—or even grandson—of course. Molly Fielding’s mother must have known the first. Probably the first Settimo had come over from Italy with the ice-cream makers and organ grinders of the fin de siècle. It was a long-established firm when I knew it and a photographer in the English Midlands with a glamorous, lucky name such as Settimo would be almost home and dry. All he’d need would be flair and a camera and a book of instructions—a match for anyone.