Behind me, from Mum, came the muted whistle of a blow and the sickly smell of a tunnel of smoke.
‘The last four or five years have been very hard on my mum.’ Grandma: I pictured Grandma, her piled-high white hair like a Mr Whippy on her head. Her home-made toffee which she broke into pieces for us with a special tiny hammer. I was struck that Grandma, Grandpa, could never have come all this way, from London to here, to see the little boy.
I asked the girl, ‘Where’s your real home, then?’
‘We were in a caravan but there was a fire.’
‘We’re in a caravan, but for our holiday.’ I rocked myself up onto both elbows, to look closer at her: ‘Are you a gypsy, then?’
‘No,’ the eyes returned, the mouth became as round as the eyes, ‘we had to live in the caravan because we did have a room, but the landlord told us to move.’
Down beside me, the dark reflection of a bird crossed the shiny surface of the tray.
Mum was telling Miriam, ‘You know that Dad had his own shop?’
I told the girl, ‘At home, we have a landlady.’ But could our nice Mrs Gresham ask us to leave? Could she seem to be our friend – dropping in for cups of tea – but then ask us to leave? Because what if she decided to live in our house? What if Mum had made our house so nice that Mrs Gresham decided to return? I did not think that we could live in a caravan. I had to know, ‘Did you have a telly, in your caravan?’ Because this was my chief complaint about our caravan: no telly.
‘No,’ then her face rounded, ‘but we have one here.’
Mum was saying, ‘He had to sell up. That shop was his whole life. Had been our home.’
Now I wanted to know, ‘Do you have any friends, around here?’ I could hear no one in the neighbouring gardens. I wanted to know what would happen to me if I was moved to the middle of nowhere, I wanted to know how I would survive.
She tracked a colour in the tartan of the blanket, then looked up and the blue of her eyes rippled. ‘There’s Miriam and Nat,’ then came the laugh, a popped bubble, ‘and Goldie.’ She was laughing but I could see that she was serious.
I asked her, ‘Do you want to stay here?’
The blue became smooth. ‘Yes.’
Mum continued. ‘And Asians took over. And now the shop smells Asian. The old smell was – what? – I don’t know – vanilla, soap flakes, dust, I don’t know, nice dust. And now the place smells of Asians. And I think that Dad felt responsible.’
The girl hunched, lowered the knob of each elbow onto each knee, lowered her chin into raised, splayed hands. ‘But the Council will find us a new home, when Mum is better.’
‘Oh.’ So, her mum was ill, which explained her appearance in a dressing gown in the middle of the day.
Mum was saying, ‘We were brought up in that shop. And everyone knew our business. So, yes, we had to behave, and, yes, Dad had standards, but he was fair, he was fair.’
There was a silence, in which I asked the girl, ‘Is your mum okay?’
Her two front teeth peeped, testing her lower lip. ‘She has to stop worrying,’ she confided.
Mum was telling Miriam, ‘The problem was that they had Connie too late in life; that was the problem, I think.’
The girl continued, ‘She worries about everything,’ this came much more quietly, close to a whisper. ‘People. Shadows. Voices. Ghosts.’
‘Ghosts?’ This was ridiculous. ‘But ghosts don’t exist.’
Mum was saying, ‘My husband isn’t happy to have her name said in our house.’
The girl told me, ‘The worries are like bad dreams, but when she’s awake.’
‘She sleepwalks?’ I remembered that Mum had a story about once having found Blossom on the stairs in darkness and asking her where she was going, to which Blossom had replied gravely, ‘To the yacht.’
I asked Suzette, ‘What do you do with her? Take her back to her bed?’
She thought for a moment, suddenly still, not quite frozen. ‘I try to tell her that everything’s okay, I suppose. And to carry on as normal.’
This is as far as I have remembered. And until now, until I tried harder, all that I had ever remembered was the snapping away of that Tupperware lid to reveal the ice-cream, too pink to be true, flush with the walls of the box. Frozen yet malleable, frozen on a hot day, boxed pink sheen on a day rich with shade. The strawberries’ raw redness tempered by cream. The taste of those invisible, disappeared, drowned strawberries. And Suzette: the dark spine of hair; the knuckles which were pearls; the deep-water blue around her sunken eyes. And her mother in the distance, shuffling, smoking, worrying. I had remembered next to nothing of the little boy, or of Miriam.
Mum never did give up the cigarettes. Eventually they gave up on her, but only when there was no more air in her for them to burn away. And now, like a virus, the cigarettes have moved on. To Blossom, for one.
Today I rang Blossom to ask her if she knew anything about Connie’s kid. To ask if, perhaps, she had an address for him. I had forgotten to ask Mum before she died; because there had been so much else to do. Over the years, from time to time, she had mentioned him, and so I knew that his foster father had died, followed a year or two later by Miriam. Mum had said, gravely, ‘Of course, they never had been young.’
‘Deborah,’ I said, ‘it’s Hermione.’
I heard the blip of surprise in her reply, ‘Oh, hi, Hermione.’
After some pleasantries, I asked her: ‘I was thinking: do you know what happened to Connie’s kid?’
‘Haven’t a clue.’
‘There’s no address for him, or anything?’
‘Not that I know. The last that I knew, he was living near Bristol with a sister.’
‘A sister?’ Connie had another kid?
‘Not a real sister: step, or whatever, I suppose.’
I asked her, ‘Do you remember when we went to see him?’
I could almost hear the frown. ‘I don’t think that I’ve ever seen him.’
‘We were on holiday, somewhere in a caravan and Dad left us there –’
‘Well, that figures.’
‘– for a week, and one day we went on the train to see Connie’s kid. A hot day: we sat in the garden with him and Miriam and another girl, Suzette, who was staying there with her mum, and we had home-made lemonade and strawberry ice-cream.’
‘No,’ she considered. ‘Sounds nice, but rings no bells, I’m afraid.’
A few minutes later, though, when we were saying our goodbyes, there was a sudden squeak, ‘Did they have a dog?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah,’ she relaxed, ‘I do remember the dog, he was lovely.’ And she finished, ‘I’d love a dog like that,’ adding, cheerfully, probably to herself, ‘one day, eh?’
7
SLIPPING THE CLUTCH
It was said, in my family, that Uncle Robbie cut a dash. But said grudgingly, with suspicion. Then it was added with relief that he was not blood. He was married to my Auntie Helen, my father’s little sister. No one in the family had a good word to say for him, except for Auntie Helen, but the best that she could do was to say that he was worldly. I was seventeen when he turned up. Like a bad penny, my mother liked to say, which made no sense because he was new. We had never seen him before, then suddenly he was due to marry Auntie Helen. In the piggy bank of bad pennies that had been Auntie Helen’s life, Uncle Robbie was the worst and he stuck. I was seventeen and impressionable, he was twenty-six; he was impossibly and deliciously old for someone who seemed to know everything about anything that was important to me when I was seventeen. Which was love, mainly, I suppose, and ambition. And cars. He drove fast cars, and drove them fast.
But most importantly, Uncle Robbie was beautiful. I had never seen a beautiful man, before; or not one who was not made from celluloid. His cheekbones were so prominent that they seemed to precede him into rooms. They almost frightened me. His eyes were the colour of shallow water, they had the shine of water and water’s trick of moving without go
ing anywhere. His smiles slipped lazily sideways, they could have been whispers that I did not quite catch. I was an only child, and, until Uncle Robbie, men had been mere teachers or dads: men who were strapped with bulky watches and tied into grim shoes with socks which seemed wrong, socks which were somehow both too short and too long. Even the sounds of these ordinary men were alien to me, their noisy nose-blowing and throat clearing.
Over the years, I met up with Uncle Robbie on family occasions, which were occasions that we both wished to avoid: especially Boxing Day lunch, which, unfortunately, my family tended to interpret literally. This was during the seventies, when style was in short supply, and on these occasions my mother would hector me: Miranda, must you wear those eyelashes/boots? Uncle Robbie’s dress sense worried me: he reminded me of photos of my father during the fifties. He was more successful than me in his efforts to avoid the gatherings, mainly because he was older, so no one could tell him what to do. Sometimes no one even knew where he had gone. And then the word from Mum, coming away from the phone, was that Auntie Helen was hysterical. She did not say drunk, which was the truth. In those days, I was faintly amused by these scenes, relayed in earnest by Mum; but in retrospect I pity my Auntie Helen, who did not always know something as basic about her husband as his whereabouts.
Whenever Auntie Helen and Uncle Robbie turned up to a family occasion, Auntie Helen would, in my mother’s words, make an effort to make an effort: the fixed smile; the sparkly clutch bag in one hand, the Babycham glass in the other. But Uncle Robbie seemed to stand apart. Usually with me. He took me away from them, took me out of myself. He made me laugh, which I did not often do when I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, or not properly; I did a lot of laughing, from time to time, but not very happily. And certainly never with grown-up men. What did he say to me? Nothing very much, I realize now. I suppose what was special was that he bothered to talk to me at all. Or, what was important was the smile which came with the words. Unfortunately, in reply, I tended to talk a lot, never having had anyone to listen. Once, I remember, his smile stopped me in the middle of a monologue so that he could check, ‘Oh, yes? and what do you know about love?’
I shrugged – What do you want to know? – and replied, ‘Conquers all? Is a many-splendoured thing? Means never having to say you’re sorry? The course of, never runs smooth?’
And he laughed, ‘Well, I see that no one can teach you anything.’
But Mum, lurking and overhearing, which was her primary function in life, disparaged, ‘Words. What Clever Clogs needs to learn is what they mean.’
What Uncle Robbie had done with his life, so far, was to defect from academia to the City. He had been a mathematician (not simply clever but, of course, in the words of my family, too clever). His justification for the defection, he explained to me, was that he had never been a pure mathematician. Which I repeated to Mum, who was too ready to agree: her version was that he had been seduced by the City. And apparently this seductive City accounted for his clothes: Mum complained that he was a dandy, down to his wedding ring. Her chief charge was that he sent his shirts somewhere to be laundered. She meant somewhere other than Auntie Helen. I sensed that his pink newspaper was scandalous, too. This newspaper was linked with his job, which my parents dismissed as up-market gambling; or, no better than gambling. Gambling seemed quite good enough, to me. Certainly it seemed to work for Uncle Robbie, who preferred the term Risk Analysis. Who loved risk. Whenever Mum returned to her theme of bad penny, Dad would add, And let me tell you, no penny that he has ever had has been anything but bad. But Uncle Robbie had so very many of those pennies. My parents were fond of conversations about standards of living, which were, in fact, conversations about washer-dryers.
Sometimes I tried to ask Uncle Robbie about his own family, but his replies were evasive. On one occasion he replied with a question: ‘Remember the father in Mary Poppins, before he becomes nice?’
I nodded, vaguely.
‘Well, both my parents are like him.’
Was this an answer? What did I remember about the father in Mary Poppins? His bowler hat, his job in the bank. So why try to follow in their footsteps? I was too young, then, to understand about footsteps, that the choice is to follow or not to follow, which, somehow, is no choice at all. Our family knew from Auntie Helen that his family did not like her: she said that, in their eyes, she was a tinker. I wondered, but did not like to ask: what, exactly, was a tinker?
When I was seventeen, I was made of dreams, the most pressing of which was to learn to drive. But not in my father’s Opel Kadett. So, at one of the family gatherings, Uncle Robbie offered to teach me in his car, which was, at the time, an Alfa Romeo. The offer was secret, he asked me to tell no one in the family. Over several years, I had occasional lessons and drove a succession of absurdly expensive cars in all the usual places, in empty car-parks, on overgrown air fields, in City streets on weekends. The stereo played Gluck, which he said was the sound of angels, and, similarly, Roxy Music. Our lessons were so infrequent that I never improved, but I never went to anyone else, never considered going to anyone else; in fact, I remained loyal to my initial instructor until I was in my thirties, when I could delay no longer and had to find another.
Uncle Robbie’s cars failed to teach me very much because I could hardly sense that I was driving: they had so much power that they seemed to drive themselves. To reassure me, he would remind me that everyone else had brakes. I was particularly uneasy whenever I had to give way: he tried to teach me not to stop – not even when the sign insisted that I should STOP – but to slow down and hold back until the moment when I could speed forward. On the whole, I did not do well except for the parking. I parked so well because I was always so pleased to have stopped. Uncle Robbie liked to proclaim that I could park on a sixpence. The sixpence amused me: sixpences had not been around for years. But, then, Uncle Robbie seemed to come from a different era. Or no particular era at all. The mystery is that the only words and warnings that I remember from those hours in his cars could have come from anyone: Clutch control … Indication … Anticipation …
Throughout those years, I had to wait for him to come to me. Once, when I had not had a lesson for a while, he came to find me at university. Which, I suppose, was not so very far from home, an hour up the motorway, or, in his case, in his car, half an hour. I was pedalling my bike to a lecture when I was cut up by a Ferrari. Uncle Robbie lunged to open the passenger door, and announced, ‘Revision, today: three-point turns. Get in.’
I began to fuss, to look for somewhere to chain the bike.
‘Leave it,’ he told me. ‘If it’s gone when we come back, I’ll buy you another one.’
And I did as he said, I do not know why. My battered bike was the most expensive purchase I had ever made. I did not know if he was serious. He was smiling, so perhaps he was joking. But he tended to smile when he was serious, too. And he loved to trust to luck. Which worked very well until the end. Nowadays I realize that I would never have been insured to drive those cars, hence the secrecy.
My parents liked to say that he was supremely unreliable. Which seemed wonderful, to me, in my world stocked with parents and teachers and boyfriends who were supremely reliable. But nevertheless, somewhere along the line, I made the fundamental mistake of relying upon him to be there, for me – somewhere, or anywhere, or perhaps simply to be – and when I was twenty-four, he defaulted on me and died. He drove a Lagonda into a tanker. For days, Auntie Helen said very little except, I didn’t know anything about a Lagonda. As far as she had known, his latest car was a Porsche: the plain old top-model Porsche to which he had become entitled when he became a partner. But, then, what did she know, by then? Because he was no partner of hers: they had been separated for a couple of years. The separation had been amicable, with no mess, like the contents of an egg. She had said that she could not live with him any more, and he had moved out. And so I had learned that this was the way of the world: the woman stays, the man moves. He had
moved into a flat in Notting Hill, an area which my family dubbed shady. I did not know the area, but I realized that they were not referring to foliage. I had his phone number but – because I was grown-up, and because, ultimately, despite them, he was a member of my family – I had had little contact with him in his last few years.
But I was home when he died. I presumed that I had come home for the day because I had nothing else to do, even though I had had several months of nothing to do and had never even dropped by. I did not know that I had come home for him to die. Mum took the call; she came away from the phone without a word, which was unusual. The manner in which she replaced the receiver and backed away from the phone was unusual, too: she was rigid, not supple with speculation and insinuation.
‘What?’ I demanded to know, from the living-room doorway.
Absently wiping imaginary mess from her hands onto an imaginary apron, she looked around but, without seeming to see me, she replied, ‘I’m sorry, but Robbie has died.’
She had never called him simply Robbie: she had always said Uncle Robbie.
She said again, ‘I’m sorry.’
Which made me self-conscious, pinned into the open doorway: I felt that I should reply, say, Oh, that’s okay.
But I said nothing, and then she told me as much as she knew from the phone call, from Auntie Helen, which was not much: the Lagonda, the tanker, the ambulance, and that he was dead-on-arrival, which sounded like dead-on-time and confused me. I was saying yes to everything, I said yes whenever it sounded right, because I wanted something to sound right, and, surprisingly, I wanted this to be easy for Mum. Or perhaps, simply, easy for someone. And I was lulled by the hum of our voices, until, eventually, I started to worry: Did she say that Uncle Robbie has died? And I did not like to ask. Because if he had died, then she would think me very odd for checking so late in our conversation; and if he had not died, then she would think me even odder – she would think my question in very poor taste. So I listened more carefully, for a few seconds more, until I was certain that he – his death – was the topic of our conversation.
Tenterhooks Page 10
