As the boys grew, Dad seemed to shrink. Brown pill-bottles and little inhalers like periscopes appeared in the house and followed him wherever he went. He coughed a lot, and when I asked him what he wanted me to bring from London he looked solemn and said, ‘A pair of wings for when I go to join the angels.’
‘What do you mean?’ My voice, intended to be bantering and no-nonsense, quavered on a sob.
Dad leaned forward and winked in conspiracy. ‘Get me a cigarette, kid, and don’t tell your mother. The doctor thinks I’ve given up, and Ellie’s been policing me.’
A sheet of ice slid between my skin and the swathed warmth of silk. He was really ill. He was about to die, I was never going to see him again. I knew that, in years, he was old enough to be our grandfather, but in spirit he was younger than all my friends’ parents. His mortality hit me coldly in the face. My nose prickled and began to run as tears swelled in my eyes. Miserable, guilty, I gave Dad a cigarette from my packet. How could I refuse his final request? Mum came in, bringing a cup of tea and a piece of dark, wet cake for Dad.
‘Where did you get that cigarette?’ she demanded, and my face crumpled in a weeping slide.
‘Dad said he wanted one last one,’ I gulped, wiping streaming eyes on the hem of my dress, and followed her out of the room. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Mum looked blank. ‘Tell you what?’
‘How ill Dad is.’ I was off. Trembling, exploding with sobs, smearing black drips of mascara down my peerless, priceless, borrowed yellow dress.
I heard Mum laughing, soothing, close to my ear as she stroked my hair. ‘Pay no attention to him at all,’ she insisted. ‘He’s been ill, and Dr Jones wants him to stop smoking, but he’s as strong as an ox, and as stubborn. He particularly enjoys getting cigarettes by blackmail, and even had a bet with Flook about how many he would achieve today.’
Relief turned to outrage. I marched back into the playroom. ‘How could you, Dad. Look what’s happened to my dress, all because you had some stupid bet with Flook.’ I flashed the damp skirt towards him and he bowed his head and looked sheepish. ‘Why can’t that goddam woman mind her own business,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth.
But later, he stood up very slowly and paused to catch his breath before leaving the room. I glanced at Brodie stretched full length on the sofa, black boots lolling on the rocking-horse beyond. He was watching Dad, and his expression was lopsided and dismayed.
Chapter 17
Neither of the cars was working on my first day at Mary Hall’s School. Louise offered to drive me to school and Mummy, with Poppy in tow, came too. We sat in a row on the front seat of Louise’s pea-green camper van. Mummy and Louise chattered and laughed, Poppy slept, and I clenched my teeth and gazed out of the window, trying to plot an escape from the camper van at an invisible distance from the school.
I had never had a school uniform before, nor indeed a whole outfit of new clothes. Daddy took me to Norwich armed with a pale-green list of school requirements and we bought them all. On the school outfitting floor of Blond’s department store we hailed a matronly woman. She had frizzy grey hair and a badge with ‘Madge Wilkins’ written on it. Madge had never met anyone like my father.
‘My dear lady.’ He leaned on the counter and pushed his dark glasses on to his forehead. ‘Would you be kind enough to render us assistance in dressing my daughter as befits a pupil of Mary Hall’s School?’ He lowered his glasses again and lit a cigarette. Madge patted her hair and overlooked the cigarette. She led us to a rail of drab green clothes. Daddy removed his glasses for a closer look. ‘Remarkable,’ he drawled. ‘Do you think they deliberately dress these poor children like lesbian aunts, or is it done through ignorance?’
Madge bridled. ‘Mary Hall’s is the most expensive uniform on our racks,’ she reproved.
‘Dear God,’ said Daddy, ‘let’s get this damn thing over, then.’
Madge reached into shelves and boxes and brought out cream shirts, fawn jerseys, socks, and bile-green heaps of skirt and blazer. Daddy became bored before we got to ties and gym knickers and left me, speechless and bewildered, by the pile of my acquisitions.
‘I don’t really like that,’ I said. Madge was holding up a jersey the colour and texture of thick porridge. ‘Do I have to have it?’
Madge clucked like a broody hen as she consulted the list. She pulled out a thin, tawny cardigan. It reminded me of Ginger, Brodie’s cat, and I nodded. ‘That one is fine. I can wear it under my jacket when I go riding.’
But there was no alternative to the foul skirt, a triangle of crackling synthetic fabric. Madge insisted on one several sizes too big. Its folds reached half-way down my calves and hung there, inelegant and stiff, like mildewed cardboard. ‘It’s a polyester mix,’ enthused Madge, ‘so Mum can just pop it in the washing machine and run a cool iron over it.’
I thought of Mummy’s iron, its once shiny surface blackened and ploughed where Daddy had used it to press masking tape on to his torn jeans. ‘We haven’t got a washing machine.’
Madge gasped. Her face registered the tragic pity she would have displayed if I had told her I had no mother.
Daddy returned. ‘Dear lady’ – he leaned on the pile of uniform in front of Madge – ‘could she not have one of those black dresses that the divine Goldie wears on Top of the Pops? Are you with me? The dress is, I think, made from a black plastic bag.’
‘She’s not called Goldie,’ I hissed at him. ‘She’s called Blondie.’
Madge knew who he meant. ‘My sons love her,’ she beamed, showing white, even dentures between her frosted lips. ‘You might find those frocks on the fashion floor, but I’m not sure that we stock them.’
Daddy nodded sagely. ‘Ah so,’ he said.
We took the clothes to the cash desk and they were priced. I was mortified when the total was rung up. ‘Daddy, we can’t afford sixty pounds,’ I whispered, ‘we’ll be bankrupt.’
‘My love, I will be the judge of that. But it does seem a shame that your uniform should be so uniform. Let us go and buy a pen.’
We bought a beautiful silver pen and an atlas. We didn’t buy the regulation green Bible because Daddy leafed through it. ‘This is rubbish. You will read the King James Bible, if – which I doubt – you read the Bible at all.’
I was worried. ‘But Daddy, what will I do in scripture lessons?’
‘You will not attend them,’ he said firmly. ‘You are a Catholic and you have no need of scripture lessons.’
Daddy never went to church, and when I asked him if I was going to be confirmed, he said, ‘There is no reason for you to confirm your faith, just as there is no reason for you to confess to it.’
Chapter 18
October 1986
London was fun for me but not for my cats. Angelica and Witton sat on the high windowsills of my flat, looking out at treetops in the communal gardens behind. Guilt followed me out of the door when I went to work each day leaving a floor deep in clothes. The cats padded through the chaos, flexing luxuriating claws, then curling up plump in the folds of a dressing-gown until I returned. However stealthily I made my late-night entrance, they woke, purring machine-gun joy, twisting and cloying round my legs while I poured them milk. My dependants. The guilt turned to panic when one of Witton’s ears began to droop forward, like a shattered traffic bollard. I rang Mum and found a cardboard box. In went Witton, one ear twitching, the other at half-mast; in went Angelica, a ball of struggling orange fury. I drove them to the station and waved them off on the train like a mother abandoning her children to a new term at boarding-school.
Mum rang me that evening. ‘Darling, those poor cats, they look utterly miserable. Something’s happened to Witton’s ear. They miss you. I don’t know if it will work having them here. When are you coming down to visit them? And us?’
But there never seemed to be time. Every day I went to work, proudly arranging myself at my desk and making a hundred vital phone calls. Every evening I went to a part
y, or two, or three, chattering and bustling through unnoticed changing seasons as I plunged into London.
Brodie and Flook were in London too, but they didn’t have telephones. Sometimes they turned up in Covent Garden at the office, and I brought them up to my department for a cup of coffee, half embarrassed by their torn, faded clothes but ablaze with pride at the lingering looks from the other girls.
One day Brodie arrived at lunch-time. He was wearing a suit, and his hair was smooth, slicked black, a yellow strand from his peroxide days bleached stiff behind his ear. ‘I’ve got a job in the City,’ he said. ‘I’m selling bonds. I’ll take you out to lunch if you like.’
He wasn’t my little brother any more, striding now in grey pinstripes, his hat low on his brow like Bugsy Malone. We went to a Greek restaurant. ‘When did you last go home?’ he asked, reaching for a cigarette.
‘I haven’t been for ages.’ I didn’t look at him as I spoke. I knew he wasn’t smiling.
‘You should go. Dad isn’t well, you know, winter is coming, and he hates it, especially when the clocks go back. It would really cheer him up to see you.’
I was defensive. ‘I saw him the other day when he came to get that prize. You were there, you know I did.’
‘That’s different. One drunken evening with thousands of people isn’t like going home, is it?’
I twisted my fork in the crumbly mound of feta cheese on my plate; an olive dropped out and rolled on to the floor. I felt sick and scared. Brodie was irritating me with his superior manner. ‘What about you, then? You only go when you need money, and you won’t need money now, so I suppose you want me to go instead of you.’
Before the flash of anger in his eyes I saw panic and fear, and I was angry too. Why should we have to look after our parents? Why should we have to worry about them? Small and sad, Brodie and I sat at the Formica table, food untouched, ashtray full, a dreadful shared, unspoken fear heavy in the air between us.
Chapter 19
Louise parked the embarrassing green van outside the school. We were late, so no little girls stood gazing curiously and sniggering as I arrived. Mummy took me in and handed me over to Miss Neilson, whose browny-red face and knot of white hair reminded me of an onion.
My new school was wonderful. Light bow-windowed classrooms, different coloured exercise books for each subject, a huge playing-field surrounded by chestnut trees, order and punctuality, and best of all, girls. I had never experienced undiluted female company before. I frisked in the soft scented air which surrounded the sixth-formers, and studiously copied the fourth-form fashions in folders and satchels.
On the first day at Rec, the new name I had to learn for playtime, I sat stiff at my desk, willing someone to come and talk to me but at the same time praying for invisibility to observe the bonds of friendship forming between the others. A sturdy girl with the face of a refined bull terrier approached. ‘I’ve seen you at Pony Club,’ she said, and I cringed. I recognized her from a day when Shalimar demolished the doughnut stand at a horse show and Mummy laughed so much that she lay down on the grass next to him, her dress beaded with sugar from the doughnuts. Humiliated by both pet and parent, I had walked away from the scene.
‘I’m Amelia Letson,’ continued the bull terrier. Searching her face for mockery, I found none, and replied, ‘I’m Gabriella Lincoln.’
Another girl, big-boned, blonde, skin the colour of rich cream, moved towards us. ‘Hello. You ride at my aunt’s stables, don’t you? I’ve seen you when I’ve been to tea at Grandma’s house.’ I recognized her as Sasha Warton and smiled gratefully. We talked about ponies until a bell shrilled in our ears and classes began again.
Each day, after assembly in the hall where wafts of lunch and beeswax polish mingled with teachers’ scent and pupils’ nail varnish and hairspray, I examined my timetable. Terrified of being late, I ran to the classrooms. The chemistry lab was my favourite room in the school even though I was not good at science. High mahogany tables ran in rows and on each table Bunsen burners were umbilically tethered to hidden gas pipes by yellow tubes. Test tubes gleamed in neat ranks, half-filled with peacock-bright crystals of blue, violet and sulphurous yellow.
Chemistry was like cooking in a well-ordered kitchen but more fun. My chocolate-brown chemistry exercise books were immaculate. I relished their pristine perfection and lost marks for writing on only one side of the page. I left the facing page blank because it looked nice. At the beginning of my third year, the school opened a new three-storey science block and I lost interest in chemistry. The subject had no charm when we sat at plastic-topped desks and worked at low white benches round the wall. The brown exercise books became blotched and crumpled like all the rest of my work, and I found no pleasure in mixing formulas. The possibility of inventing Frankenstein’s monster had evaporated like burned-off copper sulphate in the new sterile surroundings.
Briefly inspired by botany, I made a garden at Mildney. I dug a small patch by the kitchen wall and planted it with mint and tulips. Each day I weeded and tended my patch, gaining satisfaction from the regimental rows of flowers and my manicured expanse of earth. It was a hazardous pastime. The path leading from my garden to the back yard was the boundary of the conceited cockerel Cedric’s province, and its prettiness belied the danger lurking in the lupins. Cedric was a bantam. He had long russet feathers which glistened copper and green when he preened. He had a blood-red comb as plump as an ear lobe and a very high opinion of himself.
But like all braggadocios, Cedric was a coward. Camouflaged, he hid in the flower-beds awaiting his victims, the amber bead of his eye glowing malevolently from the foliage. He watched me toiling in my garden and, when my back was turned, sprang, neck extended and wings akimbo. His hooked beak jabbed my ear, his horny spurs scrabbled against my spine and I screamed and ran for the back door. Cedric let go and vanished, a ball of fire tumbling into a distant clump of nettles where he knew he was safe.
Brodie came out with a stick to chase him but Cedric crouched invisible until Brodie turned his back and then he repeated the ambush. He was Brodie’s bird, but he ignored the rules of fealty and attacked his master as much as anyone else. He deserved a gruesome punishment, but the massacre effected by the dogs was too great a price to pay.
Returning from a family outing we bumped up the drive, opening the doors of the car before it had stopped. I ran to greet Honey and my puppy, Miriam. They were newly back from the muck heap. ‘Ugh, you dogs stink.’ I edged past them towards the field. Looking back at the house, I noticed dark bundles littered across the grass, inert heaps which from a distance looked like stones. I approached one and gasped. It was Cilla Black, the mother of the Pop Stars, one of our bantam families. Cilla Black’s beady yellow eyes were closed, her beak was half open and her little pink tongue protruded pathetically. She lay, her neck twisted awkwardly on the glistening black bulk of her body, dead but still warm. A few yards away, Gary Glitter and Rod Stewart, a pair of young roosters who had been inseparable in life, were heaped together in death, their long tail-feathers trailing like a widow’s weeds.
I stood appalled, my mouth a screaming square. No one came. No one came. From all over the garden I heard the shrilling yells and bellows of my brothers as they discovered more corpses. Mummy was crouched over something by the washing line. Leaning over, I saw what she was looking at. Emerald the tame hen, who laid her eggs on the doormat for our convenience and ate from our hands, gently, not with the darting movements which frightened small children, lay panting and trembling at Mummy’s feet. Relief washed over me. At least one of them was alive.
Mummy was crying. ‘Those bloody dogs. Those bloody dogs.’ Miriam loped up, kissed Mummy with her soft tongue and whisked off again.
‘I think she was saying sorry,’ I said.
‘Don’t you believe it.’ Mummy’s tone was grim. ‘She’s deranged. Honey would never have done this. It’s all that puppy’s doing.’
We took Emerald into the coal shed and made her a
bed on Flook’s anorak. We gave her bread and milk and she fluffed up her feathers and regained her low crooning voice. Daddy appeared in the door of the shed with a spade. ‘I’m going to shoot those goddam dogs,’ he muttered, ‘but first we must bury the dead.’ He stomped off to dig a grave. Brodie and Flook, a drooping hen under each arm, trailed after him to the Wilderness. Twenty-five hens died. Only Emerald and Cedric, whose cowardice had protected him, survived. Cedric was roosting high up in the lime tree squawking hoarsely every two minutes as though he had been hypnotized. He did not come down until the next day. The hens had been frightened to death by Miriam’s game. She pranced and barked around each one, whipped into further hysteria by the flying feathers and squawks as the poor foolish hens ran round in circles trying to escape.
Mummy said we had to give Miriam away, and sadly I agreed. She could not go on living in a house with hens, even dead hens. Miriam was taken. Mummy felt a twinge of conscience as she was driven off by her proud new owners, a pair of pigeon-fanciers from Wisbech whom we had told nothing of her crime.
Emerald recovered but the shock had affected her hormones. Hearing a strangled cry a few days later, I ran out and found her perched on a log trying to crow. Every day she ritualistically made the attempt and, as her crowing improved, long tail-feathers sprouted and her comb grew raspberry red and large like Cedric’s. In three months her transformation was complete and Emerald became a cockerel, a fit sparring partner for the insufferable Cedric.
Chapter 20
Patrick loved getting up early and he made runny porridge on the Aga. Va Va heard loud classical music blare from the wireless on the kitchen windowsill and ran down to beg Patrick to draw faces on her porridge with trickles of golden syrup. The children knew that Patrick was susceptible to a certain look, eyes wide and innocent.
Come and Tell Me Some Lies Page 5
