‘Of course,’ Selina said over her shoulder from her post in the garden, ‘when they come for all this tomorrow I might simply stay.’
‘What do you mean?’ There was a slight hint of anxiety beneath the casualness.
‘I might just stay here and when the “purchaser” arrives I’ll say, “You can’t come in because you see I live here, so buzz off!”’
She knew that he knew that this bit of foolery on her part was not wholly impossible and he showed that he was aware of this by taking it humorously.
‘Good plan. Then you could smuggle me back in and we could have our cake and eat it. Though I never quite get what that means. Who wants to keep cake? It would grow mouldy.’ No need to add that he needed the money. Neither of them wanted him to have sold.
Thinking this, she said to reassure him, ‘I could stay and help you to see all this into the van tomorrow, if you wanted me to?’ It would delay her return to the dim flat in Clapham, made available to her by a not so close friend while she found a more permanent place to stay.
‘It’s all right, I can manage.’
Selina said, ‘I just wanted you to know it’s on offer.’ Tomorrow she would have to think of something else to do.
‘If you want to, of course …’ Jacob said. From his position on the blanket, he had caught a glimpse of her neck. Her neck, once a column of smoothness had, he saw, folds in it. The small gold and silver pendant that she always wore looked more than ever like a charm against a dangerous world. She’s getting old, he thought. ‘It goes without saying I’d rather you stayed.’
Selina, recognising that this was affection for her rather than any need for himself, said, ‘I shall miss all this terribly.’
‘Me, too.’
‘Terribly,’ she repeated. And then, ‘Shall I open the champagne?’
‘Why not?’
She had bought champagne, spending more than she could afford. The truth was she didn’t much like it. But Jacob did. And she wanted them to leave the house in the spirit in which they had lived there. Was it true that there had never been a cross word between them or was that sheer sentimentality? There must have been cross thoughts but she honestly couldn’t recall any. A scrap of jealousy at times, but never for his male friends. She supposed she wanted to be best for him, at least as far as women went. But that was a pipe dream. Only for babies were you ever truly number one. But she mustn’t think of babies. ‘Too late’ her breastbone screamed.
She had taken the foil from around the cork and was untwisting the little wire cage. ‘Do you want to open it?’
‘No, you do it.’
She came and stood over him and the cork exploded like a fairground gun and the pale froth anointed his forehead and newly greying hair. ‘I name this ship Jacob. God bless her, and all who sail in her.’
‘Here,’ he said, unfolding himself and holding out the couple of glasses they had spared from the packing. Not any old glasses. Long crystal glasses she had given him for no special reason. It was a rule between them that they never did Christmas or birthdays; both agreeing that the sense of requirement ruined the pleasure in buying the gift.
They polished off the bottle before they set about the last of the packing. It was past midnight before they stopped and looked at each other, disarranged and dirty but for all the sadness of the enterprise pleased at their efficiency.
‘I bet I look a fright,’ Selina said.
‘You always look good.’
‘I wish that were true.’ It had been true. Once she had almost always looked good enough.
Jacob said, ‘I wish there were more champagne.’
‘We could go out looking.’ She hoped that they might climb into his environmentally incorrect Mercedes and trawl off into the night on a forage.
‘I think I’m too weary.’
Selina said, ‘I am aweary aweary, I would that I were dead …’
‘I hope that’s not true, S.’
‘Not altogether,’ she said, as convincingly as she could, and kissed his cheek. He always smelled so nice. What a shame that the people you were easiest with were the people you didn’t have sex with. But sex, so wonderful, so terrible, so utterly precarious, brought children.
She slept fitfully and woke the following morning long before dawn. By the time Jacob appeared downstairs she had drunk four cups of coffee and smoked three cigarettes. ‘Ready, then?’ She smiled dishonestly, trying to convey cheer.
‘As ready as I’ll ever be.’
And when the van with three men arrived, one short, stocky and young, one emaciated and old, and one nonentity, whose role seemed to be to boss the other two shockingly about, it went far easier than either of them had dreamed. In two hours, the house was empty of everything but the doll’s head.
‘What shall we do with this?’ Jacob tossed the rubber sphere in the air and caught it with his other hand. The van had driven off and the two of them were alone again.
‘When do you need to get to the storage place?’ Most of his things were to go to his lover Douglas’s house. But the remainder was to go into store.
‘Douglas is seeing to all that.’
Selina said, ‘It’s Hetty’s doll. She must have left the head here when you and she were playing executioners.’ In the days before she lived there. In the days when she lived. When she and Hetty had their little council flat.
‘Oh God.’ His eyes were dark dismay. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think.’
‘Why should you?’
‘Let’s take it to her,’ Jacob said suddenly, ‘or, I mean, if you wanted to …’
But she seemed pleased at the thought after all. ‘If you wanted to …?’
Hester Emily Palliser’s grave lay at one of the outer edges of Putney Cemetery under the shadow of a lime tree whose beneficent branches had strayed over to shade the heedless dead. The small grey slab of uncut stone merely gave her name, and the dates of her coming into the world and her swift departure. Side by side they stood contemplating this account of Selina’s daughter’s life – b. 10 x 2004 d. 3 iv 2007. Selina bent and laid by the stone the doll’s head, which stared up at them with its blank speedwell eyes. She had planted a rose on her daughter’s grave. A crop of loose, pale pink blooms exhaled a faint scent of apples in the warm air.
‘What rose is it?’ Jacob asked.
‘A sport of the wild rose.’ She had planted a root of rosemary too, but it had perished. Rosemary for remembrance. But there was no need for reminders to remember Hetty.
She had put her daughter to bed, one cool April night, kissed her and left her with her musical bell playing an old lullaby. And in the morning Hetty was dead – dead as a door nail. The investigations had been lengthy, gruelling and finally inconclusive. She knew that for ever now she would be marked down as the possible murderer of her beloved child. She didn’t care. She had wished they had sent her to prison where at least her surroundings would have matched her state of heart. That she lived on at all while Hetty had gone was a cruel joke. Only some kind of sense that she ought to continue to live for the sake of her dead child – and she could not have explained or defended that decision had she been asked to – had kept her alive. That and the sanctuary of Jacob’s white room in his kind house, which had housed her and her misery. Now that was gone too where on God’s earth was her grief to be housed?
A single magpie flew past and settled on a nearby tomb. A tomb replete with waxen flowers in dirty glass domes. One for sorrow.
Selina picked up the doll’s head. ‘It looks wrong here. Would you keep it for me?’
‘But don’t you …?’
‘No. I’d rather you did. She loved playing with you.’
Taking the empty head from her hand, Jacob touched her arm and said, ‘We, I, I mean, should have brought her flowers. I’m sorry.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Nothing mattered any more. One day she would move for good. Until then, she must find other accommodation.
THE DEAL
‘No,’ Alice’s mother Rosemary Armitage said, more sternly than she had perhaps intended. ‘You can’t have a cat. I’m sorry, but you know why. Daddy is allergic.’
‘Oh please.’
‘Love, we’ve been through this.’
Alice sighed. She was six years old and an only child.
‘Please, please,’ she said again, knowing no other way but emphasis to convey her extreme need. ‘I’ll keep her in the shed so Daddy won’t sneeze.’
‘You can’t keep a cat in the shed, love. A guinea pig or a rabbit, maybe.’
But Alice didn’t want a guinea pig. She wanted a marmalade cat with a white bib. A girl cat.
‘Girl marmalades are very rare, sweetheart,’ her father said.
His wife stared at him and baffled he returned the look. What had he said now, for God’s sake?
Later, when she had got him into the kitchen his wife explained. ‘George, if we don’t want her to have a cat suggesting that females are hard to come by simply gives out a message that if we do find one she can have it.’
Her husband shook his head, confounded by this – perfectly sensible, if only he would think straight, Rosemary irritably said – piece of feminine reasoning.
The remark, as her mother feared, had sunk in. Alice, sitting before the TV watching her DVD of The Sleeping Beauty, determined that she would find a girl marmalade kitten herself. ‘To hell with them!’ she thought. She had heard this expression used by Mr Job, who had an allotment next to her mother’s, and had been storing it up since for use at a suitable moment.
Rosemary Armitage was pleasantly surprised that her daughter had agreed so readily to accompany her to the allotment the following Sunday. As a rule, this took much cajoling if not outright bribery. Alice didn’t like the muddy earth which got on her shoes or boots. It was not her opinion that boots were for getting dirty, whatever her mother said. And most decidedly she was not, as Rosemary Armitage was, ‘into’ vegetables. And yet she was quite agreeable when her mother, summoning her patience for a fight, suggested that they go to dig the allotment.
Alice had a plan. She intended to sound out Mr Job and if possible recruit him in the cause of the marmalade kitten. He had shown an admirable sense of equality towards her over his use of language and general demeanour, which was that of a large and sympathetic, if slightly unpredictable, child. And luck was on her side. As they arrived at the allotment, they met Mr Job carrying a large, leaking metal watering can.
‘Turning out a nice evening again, Mrs Hermitage.’ Mr Job was a little deaf. Or maybe it was that he was a little mischievous. In any case he never quite seemed to manage Rosemary Armitage’s name. ‘Hello, Alice.’ He had no trouble with hers. ‘Going to pick those runner beans?’
Alice had no thoughts of helping with the beans. She made a half-hearted attempt at collecting a few of the lower ones and then sidled over to Mr Job, who was picking off the tops of his tomatoes. ‘See the little ‘uns here? We have to squeeze them off so these others below grow nice and fat. Want one?’
Alice, who drove her mother to distraction by dismissing tomatoes along with most other vegetables as ‘yukky’, sank her teeth into a large firm yellow-and-red-skinned tomato and pronounced it ‘delicious’. This not entirely truthful response was made in the service of the marmalade kitten. Alice had not yet heard of the French Protestant king who felt that Paris was worth a Mass but she shared his essential pragmatism.
‘They’ve come on grand, that strain of toms this summer,’ Mr Job said, collegiately. His tone and manner decided Alice.
‘Mr Job,’ she said, discreetly wiping some stray tomato pips from the sleeve of her pink-glitter mermaid T-shirt. ‘I need a marmalade kitten. A girl kitten,’ she added with emphasis, lest there be any mistake.
‘A girl ginger? They’re not so thick on the ground.’
‘I just need one,’ Alice said, with perfect simplicity.
‘Your mum say you can have it?’ Mr Job was not unshrewd. For all that he liked to tease Rosemary over her name, he had nothing against her. And he had heard the arguments with Alice over the kitten.
Alice made a split-second decision and set off across the causeway which we must all pass over and which, once crossed, permits no return. ‘She says I can keep it in the shed.’
‘Oh well. Guess it won’t know the difference. Tell you what. I’ll get you a kitten for a bottle of Newcastle Brown. That’s my poison. Is that a deal?’
‘It’s a deal,’ Alice said, pleased with her newfound powers of negotiation.
Alice was preoccupied on their way home. She answered her mother abstractedly, in a manner which made Rosemary Armitage inwardly pray that the child was not going to take after her father. That night after her bath Alice asked, casually, ‘What is Newscastle Brown?’
‘Newcastle,’ her father corrected, just as her mother asked, ‘Why do you need to know that?’
‘It was on TV,’ Alice said.
‘It’s a kind of beer, love,’ her mother said. ‘Not a very nice one.’
‘Do you have some?’
‘Why?’ asked her mother again, as her father was saying, ‘No we don’t. Revolting stuff.’
‘They said on TV you could use the bottle to make a model,’ Alice said, thereby answering her mother and taking a further stride away from the paradise of unquestioning childhood truthfulness.
‘That’s life,’ she said later to her doll, Fancy Pansy. This was another expression she had been saving up. ‘People believe in stupid models from TV more than in kittens.’
Rosemary was delighted at the way Alice had become so devoted to the allotment. Not that she ever did much when they got there, but, as Rosemary explained to George, the fresh air did her good and it couldn’t be bad for her faddiness to be among vegetables. Much of Alice’s time at the allotments, it was true, seemed to be spent with Mr Job. But he was a harmless old man, if rather deaf, though oddly he seemed to have no trouble hearing Alice. It was probably a matter of the pitch of the voice and it was nice to see their child befriending an old man.
‘What if I can’t get Newscastle Brown?’ Alice was enquiring of Mr Job as her mother was enjoying these reassuring thoughts.
‘Then no deal,’ Mr Job said. ‘No wriggling. Fair’s fair.’
This posed a problem. Grown ups drank beer so it was especially annoying of her parents that they did not drink Mr Job’s poison.
‘Why is it called “poison”?’ she had asked on one of the allotment visits. ‘Poison’s what kills people.’ She knew this for sure from The Sleeping Beauty.
‘Kind of joke,’ Mr Job said briefly. He was tying up his tomatoes. ‘Mind, plenty I’ve known’s killed themselves with drink. Not Newcastle Brown, though. That is the elixir of life.’
Alice was relieved to hear this. She was fond of Mr Job, even without his kitten-providing facilities, and did not want to be the cause of his death. She had been considering at length where she might go to find a bottle of this fabulous elixir that was so precious it was the price of a marmalade kitten. Maybe, it crossed her mind, it was just too expensive for her parents.
After some mulling, Alice settled on her father’s younger brother, Steve, as the most likely source of Mr Job’s poison. They were due to visit Steve in London, where he lived in a flat which was exactly the kind of place Alice was going to live in when she was older. It was extremely tidy and the toilet seat was a special see-through plastic, with shells and starfish stuck around inside, and the carpet in the bathroom had little green fishes swimming all over it and seaweed. They just had tiles on the floor at her house, which were freezing on your feet if you got out of the bath and missed the bath mat, and Daddy said that he didn’t want to sit on a toilet seat with crabs in it, they might pinch his bottom, which was extremely silly of him as there were no crabs and anyway you could see they weren’t live.
Uncle Steve lived with his girlfriend, Lulu, who was a dancer and standing up could put her leg behind her ear.
Lulu wore perfect clothes and let Alice dress up in them and use her makeup. And best of all on these visits, she was usually left with Steve and Lulu to babysit while her parents went out for some time alone. So the chances of finding Newscastle Brown were fairly high.
‘Don’t worry, Mummy, I’ll be fine,’ Alice said. She knew her mother needed reassurance and it was easy to give since she wanted her out of the way.
‘Of course she will,’ her father said. ‘Come on or we’ll miss the start of the film. Night, sweetheart. Don’t give your uncle and aunty a hard time.’
‘She’s not my aunty,’ Alice said. On another occasion, she might have added, ‘They are not married,’ as this was a controversial point between her and Steve for which she had more than once had to take him to task. But for the sake of the quest for Mr Job’s poison she was prepared to be indulgent.
Alice had a bath with plenty of Lulu’s ‘Pink Champagne’ bath foam. She dried the suds from her pink limbs inside Lulu’s pink towelling dressing gown and wore Lulu’s mauve and silver high-heeled mules. Then she went and wedged herself between Steve and Lulu – to stop any silly stuff – on the sofa and watched her favourite London DVD which was Bambi. Lulu liked Bambi too because it made her cry.
After it was over, Steve said, ‘Well, monkey, bed for you, I suppose.’
‘Steve, do you have Newscastle Brown in your house?’
‘What castle?’
‘I said, Newscastle Brown.’
‘That’s a kind of beer. What do you want with beer, monkey?’
‘Oh, this sand that,’ Alice said. This phrase had also been awaiting use.
‘I don’t have any, I’m afraid. Now bed for you, or I’ll be in trouble with your mum and dad.’
‘They won’t know,’ Alice said. ‘They’re out and I shan’t tell.’
‘What you want my tipple for, pet?’ Lulu asked. She was from Newcastle herself.
‘It’s Mr Job’s poison,’ Alice explained. ‘And if I get him a bottle he’ll get me a marmalade kitten. It’s a deal.’ It was a perfectly clear arrangement. She looked at her uncle and Lulu with eyes ready to pass an unfavourable judgement.
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