‘I wish we hadn’t got a tree,’ Vanessa said.
‘I know. Cordelia likes it, though.’
‘I suppose so. That’s all that matters really. I mean, Christmas is for kids, isn’t it?’
Vanessa showed her the bubble bath disguised as a bottle of gin which she was buying for Him.
‘Perhaps He’ll drink it.’
‘Early on Christmas morning, nursing a savage hangover, He rips open His presents and, desperate for a hair-of-the-dog, He puts the bottle to his lips. Bubbles come out of His nose and mouth, He falls to the floor—’
‘Screaming in agony.’
‘—screaming in agony, foaming at the mouth. The heroic efforts of his distraught step-daughters fail to revive him. An ambulance is called but it gets stuck in traffic. When they finally reach the hospital all the nurses are singing carols in the wards and no one can find the stomach pump. A doctor in a paper hat tells the sorrowing sisters – or are they laughing, who can tell? – that it’s too late. He has fallen victim to His own greed. How much does it cost?’
‘Two pounds seventy-nine.’
‘Cheap at twice the price.’
After leaving the shop they collided with a superstructure formed by two supermarket trolleys lashed together and heaped with a perilous pyramid of old clothes and plastic bags and utensils and bits of hardware like taps and broken car exhausts and hubcaps, the handlebars of a bicycle fronting it like antlers and three plumes of pampas grass waving in dirty Prince of Wales feathers. The owner was dragging a large cardboard box from beneath a stall of skirts and blouses.
‘What do you think he wants that box for?’ Vanessa wondered.
‘To sleep in, of course. He probably lives in Cardboard City.’
‘Cardboard City?’
‘It’s where the homeless people live. They all sleep in cardboard boxes underneath the Arches.’
‘What arches?’
‘The Arches, of course. Shall we go home now?’
Vanessa nodded. They were wet and cold, and the rain had removed most of their makeup, saving them the trouble of doing it themselves before they encountered Him. The feet of Stella’s stockings felt like muddy string in her leaking shoes.
They were huddled on the packed escalator, two drowned rats going up to Victoria, when Vanessa screamed shrilly.
‘Daddy!’
She pointed to a man on the opposing escalator.
‘It’s Daddy, quick, Stella, we’ve got to get off.’ She would have climbed over the rail if Stella hadn’t held her.
‘It’s not him.’
‘It is. It is. Daddy!’
Faces turned to stare. The man turned and their eyes met as they were carried upwards and he was borne inexorably down. Vanessa tried to turn to run down against the flow of the escalator but she was wedged. The man was gone for ever.
‘It wasn’t him, I tell you.’
Stella fought the sobbing Vanessa at the top of the stair, they were yelling at each other in the mêlée of commuters and shoppers. She succeeded in dragging her through the barrier, still crying, ‘It was him. Now we’ll never see him again.’
‘Daddy hasn’t got a beard, you know that. And he’d never wear a balaclava. Come on, Vanessa, we’ll miss our train.’
‘It was him. Let’s go back, please, please.’
‘Look, stupid, that guy was a down and out. A vagrant. A wino. A meths drinker. It couldn’t possibly have been Daddy.’
On the home-bound train Stella carefully opened the box of chocolate Napoleons. There were so many that nobody would notice if a couple were missing. She took out two gold coins and sealed the box again. For the rest of their lives Vanessa would be convinced that she had seen her father, and Stella would never be sure. The chocolate dissolved in their mouths as they crossed the Thames.
‘Where is Cardboard City?’ whispered Vanessa. ‘How do you get there?’
‘ “Follow the Yellow Brick Road …”” ’
The silver heart-shaped balloon floated on its vertical string above the heads and newspapers of the passengers.
‘ “Now I know I’ve got a heart, because it’s breaking.”” ’
‘It’s just a slow puncture,’ Stella said. She stuck a gift label on to the balloon’s puckering silver skin. It ruined the look of it, but it was kindly meant. Vanessa looked out of the window at the moon melting like a lemon drop in the freezing sky above the chimney tops of Clapham and pictured it shining on the cold frail walls and pinnacles of Cardboard City.
‘I don’t want Daddy to sleep in a cardboard box,’ she said.
‘It’s a great life,’ Stella said savagely. ‘Didn’t you see those people singing and dancing?’
BERYL BAINBRIDGE
The Longstop
Words and cricket seem to go together. Whenever I watch the game, by mistake, on television, I think it’s not true that you can’t get blood from a stone.
I only ever played the game once myself, in the park with some evacuees from Bootle. I was allowed to join in because I held a biscuit tin filled with shortbread that my mother had baked. They said I could have a turn if I gave them a biscuit afterwards. I didn’t make any runs because I never hit the ball, and when I kept my promise and began to open the tin the evacuees knocked me over and took every piece of shortbread. They threw the tin over the wall into the gentlemen’s lavatory. I had to tell my mother a six-foot-high naughty man with a Hitler moustache had chased me; she would have slapped me for playing with evacuees.
Mr Baines, who was my maternal grandfather, was a lover of cricket. Mr Jones, my father, didn’t care for the game. He cared even less for my grandfather. In his humble estimation Mr Baines was a mean old bugger, a fifth columnist, and, following his self-confessed denouncing of a neighbour in Norris Green for failing to draw his curtains against the black-out, a Gauleiter into the bargain. He was also a lounge lizard, a term never satisfactorily explained, though it was true that my grandfather fell asleep between meals.
Apart from words, my father was keen on sailing ships. He subscribed to a monthly magazine on the subject. If he was to be believed, he had, when no more than a child, sailed as a cabin boy to America. In middle age, his occupation a commercial traveller, he prowled the deserted shore beyond the railway line, peering of an evening through the barbed wire entanglements at the oil tankers and the black destroyers that crawled along the bleak edge of the Irish Sea; it was a gloomy mystery to him where that fearless lad before the mast had gone.
Every week Mr Baines came for Sunday dinner. There had been a moment at the outbreak of the war when he had contemplated coming to live with us, but after three days he returned home. He said he preferred to take his chances with the Luftwaffe. His conversation during the meal was always about cricket, and mostly to do with a man called Briggs. Briggs, he said, had just missed greatness by a lack of seriousness. If only Briggs had taken batting more seriously he would have been, make no bones about it, the best all-round cricketer in England since W. G. Grace. Briggs, he informed us, took bowling and fielding in deadly earnest, but as a batsman he was a disaster; he seemed far more anxious to amuse the crowd than to improve his average.
Nobody listened to my grandfather, certainly not my father who was often heard to remark quite loudly that, had he been in control, he wouldn’t give the old skinflint the time of day, let alone Sunday dinner, world without end.
However, one particular Sunday in the summer of 1944, Mr Baines, without warning, excelled himself when describing a cricketer called Ranjitsinhji.
‘Just to set eyes on him,’ said Mr Baines, ‘was a picture in motion. The way his shirt ballooned—’
‘A black chappie,’ my father exclaimed, taken aback at my grandfather speaking civilly of a foreigner.
‘An Indian Prince,’ said Mr Baines. He was equally taken aback at being addressed in the middle of his monologue. He was used to conversing uninterrupted throughout the devouring of the black-market roast pork.
‘They�
��re two a penny,’ my father said.
‘More potatoes?’ asked my mother, worriedly.
‘Even when it wasn’t windy,’ continued Mr Baines, ‘his shirt ballooned. Whether half a gale was blowing on the Hove ground or there wasn’t enough breeze to shift the flag at Lord’s, the fellow’s shirt flapped like the mainsail of a six-tonner on the Solent.’
‘Blithering rubbish,’ said my father. He stabbed at a sprout on his plate as though it was alive.
My mother told Mr Baines that they played cricket in the park every Sunday afternoon. Not a proper team, just old men and young lads. Not what he was used to, of course. ‘But,’ she said, eyeing my father contemptuously, ‘it will do us good to get out into the pure air.’
She didn’t mean my father to come. We were never a family who went anywhere together. My father’s opinion, had he voiced it, would have been that the family who stood together fell out together. Often we would attempt an outing, but between the closing of the back door and the opening of the front gate, misunderstandings occurred and plans were abruptly abandoned. She was astonished when, having washed up and taken off her pinny, she found my father in the hall putting on his trilby hat. She didn’t like it, you could tell. Her mouth went all funny and the lipstick ran down at one corner. Shoulder to shoulder, more or less, we set off for the park.
I wanted to nip over the garden fence and through the blackberry bushes into Brows Lane, but my mother said my grandfather wasn’t about to nip anywhere, not at his age. We trotted him down the road past the roundabout and the Council offices. The brass band was practising in the hut behind the fire station. When he heard the music, Mr Baines began to walk with his arms held stiffly at his sides, only the band kept stopping and starting and the tune came in bits, and after a little while he gave up playing at soldiers and shuffled instead. My father looked at the ground all the time; there was a grey splodge on the brim of his hat where a pigeon had done its business.
The park was quite grand, even though it had lost its ornamental gates at the entrance. My mother said they’d been removed to make into tanks. My father swore they were mouldering away in a brick field down by the Docks, along with his mother’s copper kettle and a hundred thousand front railings. The park had a pavilion, a sort of hunting lodge with mullioned windows and a thatched roof. People were worried about incendiary bombs. The park keeper kept his grass roller inside and buckets of water. In front of the pavilion was a sunken bowling green, and beyond that a miniature clock-golf course. We used to ride our bikes up and down the bumps. Behind the pavilion, within a roped enclosure, was a German Messerschmitt. It had been there for two years. It hadn’t crash-landed anywhere near our village; it was on loan. The park keeper was always telling the Council to tell someone to come back for it. At first we had all run round it and shuddered, but after a few weeks we hardly noticed it any more. It just perched there, propped on blocks, one wing tipped up to the sky, the cockpit half burned away, its melted hood glittering beetle-black in the sunlight.
When he saw the aeroplane, my father cried out, ‘Good Lord, look at that!’ He flung his arms out theatrically and demanded, ‘Why wasn’t I told?’
No one took any notice of him; he was always showing off. He stared up at the plane with an expression both fearful and excited, as though the monster was still flying through the air and he might yet be machine-gunned where he stood.
My mother and Mr Baines sat on wooden chairs pressed against the privet hedge. My mother was worried in case we were too near the wicket. She was for ever ducking and flinching, mistaking the white clouds that bowled across the sky for an oncoming ball. It wasn’t an exciting game as far as I could tell but my grandfather sat on the edge of his chair and didn’t fall asleep once. There was a man fielding who was almost as old as Mr Baines, and when the bowler was rubbing the ball up and down the front of his trousers preparing to run, the old man rested in a deck-chair on the pitch. The butcher’s boy from the village shop was crouching down behind the wicket wearing a tin hat and smoking a cigarette.
‘That fellow,’ said Mr Baines, pointing at the elderly batsman in Home Guard uniform, ‘is taking a risk. If he misses the ball he’ll be out leg before or he’ll get his skull stove in.’
‘Heavens,’ cried my mother, cringing backwards on her chair.
‘Briggs used to play that sort of stroke,’ said Mr Baines. ‘Of course, he knew what he was doing.’
My father came and sat down beside him. He said: ‘I never knew it was there. I never knew.’ He still looked excited. He’d taken his hat off and there was a mark all round his forehead.
‘As soon as he saw what ball it was,’ Mr Baines said, ‘he’d stand straight in front of the wicket and wait until it looked as if it would go straight through his body—’
‘I never knew,’ repeated my father. ‘I never even guessed.’ He was very unobservant. He’d been morosely loping to and from the railway station night and morning for twenty years and never bothered to look through the trees.
‘Be quiet,’ said my mother. ‘We’re concentrating.’
‘At the last moment,’ Mr Baines said, ‘Briggs would hook it. Glorious stroke. Poetry in motion.’
‘If I could have served,’ remarked my father, ‘I would have chosen the Merchant Navy.’
‘Mind you,’ Mr Baines said. ‘It had to be a fast ball.’
‘Failing that, I think I’d have fancied the Air Force,’ said my father.
There wasn’t anything one could reply to that piece of poppy-cock. If my father had been healthy enough to join up, he wouldn’t have been any use. When Wilfred Pickles said on the wireless, ‘And how old are you, luv? Ninety-seven!’, my father had to blow his nose from emotion. If he happened to hear ‘When the lights go on again all over the world’ on Forces’ Favourites, he had to go out into the scullery to take a grip on himself. According to my mother, Auntie Doris had turned him into a sissy. He was a terrible cry-baby. He cried one time when the cat went missing. My mother said that most of the time his carrying on like that was misplaced. Once he went all over Southport pressing shilling pieces into the hands of what he called ‘our gallant boys in blue’. They were soldiers from the new hospital down by the Promenade. My father told them he was proud of them, that they were the walking wounded; he had a field day with his handkerchief. Afterwards it turned out there was nothing wrong with them, nothing wounded that is, it wasn’t that sort of hospital. They were soldiers all right, my mother said, but they’d all caught a nasty disease from just being in the army, not from fighting or anything gallant like that, and it was certainly nothing to be proud of.
‘I’m not criticising,’ said Mr Baines, looking at the fielder resting in his deck-chair, ‘but these fellows lack self-discipline. The true sportsman is a trained athlete. He dedicates himself to the game. Only way to succeed. Same with anything in all walks of life – cotton, fishing, banking, shipping—’
‘Doesn’t he ever get tired of his own voice?’ said my father savagely.
I sat on the grass with my back propped against my mother’s knees. I could feel her trembling from indignation. My grandfather began to clap, slapping the palms of his hands together above my head as the elderly batsman left the crease and began to trail towards the pavilion. Mr Baines was the only one applauding; there were few spectators and most of those had swivelled round the other way to look at the bowling green. The new batsman was younger and he had a gammy leg. When he heard Mr Baines clapping he glared at him, thinking he was being made fun of.
‘One time,’ said Mr Baines, ‘Briggs got stale. The Lancashire committee suggested that he should take a week’s holiday. He went to a remote village in Wiltshire—’
‘Don’t think I don’t know what the old beggar’s getting at,’ said my father. ‘Talking about cotton like that. Did he think I wanted to come a cropper in cotton—’
‘Word got round as it will,’ Mr Baines said. ‘Second day there a fellow came up to Briggs and asked him how
much he’d take for playing in a local match. Ten pound, said Briggs, thinking that would be prohibitive—’
The park was shimmering in sunshine. You couldn’t see the boundary by the poplar trees; all the leaves were reflecting like bits of glass. The man with the gammy leg was out almost at once. I didn’t know why, the bails were still standing. I couldn’t follow the rules. A fat man came out in a little peaked cap. I could hear the dull clop of the ball against the bat and the click of the bowls on the green as they knocked against each other. Behind me the voices went on and on, another game in progress, more dangerous than either cricket or bowls, and the rules were always changing.
‘Briggs’s side lost the toss,’ said Mr Baines, ‘and he had to begin the bowling. His first ball was hit out of the ground for six—’
‘If I’d had any appreciation all these years,’ my father said, ‘things might have been different. When I think how I tramp from door to door in all weathers while you and your blasted Dad put your feet up—’
‘Finally he had two wickets for a hundred and fifty runs. The crowd was looking quite nasty,’ Mr Baines said. ‘But what finished them off was that when he went into bat he was bowled second ball.’
‘All I needed was a few bob at the right moment,’ said my father. ‘Just a few measly quid and the old skinflint wouldn’t put his hand in his pocket—’
‘Don’t speak about him like that,’ cried my mother. ‘I won’t have him called names.’
‘Only a stalwart policeman and the train to London saved him from a jolly good hiding,’ said Mr Baines. ‘He never tried village cricket again.’
‘If you’d been any proper sort of woman,’ groaned my father, ‘you’d have been a help-mate.’
‘Be quiet,’ my mother cried. ‘Shut your mouth.’
‘You’ve only been a bloody hindrance,’ my father shouted. He jumped up and knocked over his chair. He walked away in the direction of the aeroplane, leaving his hat on the grass.
‘What’s up?’ I asked. Though I knew. ‘Is he off home, then?’
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 66
