by Nina Stibbe
‘We were that close, he and I,’ she said, holding her gloved finger and thumb close together.
Matron blathered on about what a total let-down it all was, her high hopes for a decent recovery—their talk about a possible cruise around Asia Minor.
It was less awful than I’d imagined—the laying out—it being a preliminary thing rather than the actual real undertaking procedure. But it was still affecting and gave me cause to imagine it being my grandmother, mother or me lying there all creamy with chubby little Matron clanging around, swearing and forcing cotton-wool balls into my cavities.
Finally, she chucked the instruments into the kidney dish, signalled me to close my eyes, and muttered a prayer. In the quietness, we could hear Bruce Forsyth’s voice—or was it Val Doonican’s?—drifting up from the telly, which was always on high volume because of the hard of hearing, and Matron sped up a bit, said Amen and sloped off to catch the end of whatever it was. On my own with Mr Godrich I tried to feel the importance of being beside a dead person without being silly, but the feeling of wanting to watch the telly took over, like it had with Matron. I picked up Rick and trotted off too.
Later that day, Matron—in a very sad mood—told us all about a life-changing incident. It was the early 1960s when she was recovering from a disease that had ‘pained her beyond endurance’ and her parents—themselves quite elderly and decrepit—had gathered all their money and bought her a telly. One of the very first tellies in her village (it was so early I don’t think they even called it a telly). And they wired it up and got the aerial sorted so Matron could watch it from her recovery bed, even though there wasn’t much on—it being so new—except the news, and the odd cartoon. And that one day when she had nipped out to see the doctor—because it was cheaper than the doctor calling in—and returned and was getting her nightie back on, she realized someone had burgled her telly.
It was bad enough losing the telly, but what made it a life-changing experience and so deeply affecting was that the burglars had simply thrown the telly into the river. They hadn’t wanted it for themselves—they’d just not wanted her to have it. And not only that, the local council had charged her father to have it removed from the river.
‘That’s awful,’ we all said and meant it. I thought it a rather good and thought-provoking story and a cut above her usual lies and fantasies.
Later Matron seemed a bit better and we chatted in the kitchen.
‘What are your plans now, vis-à-vis leaving to take up a live-in companion job?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I’m looking in The Lady magazine, and keeping my ear to the ground,’ she said. ‘And if you really must know, I’m thinking about Mr Simmons,’ she added.
‘NO!’ I said. ‘You can’t. He’s got that horrible stepdaughter, you’d never inherit, plus, she’d make your life hell.’
I didn’t want Matron getting involved with Mr Simmons while I was still trying to secure my place in the ‘O’ Level group. I was struggling with Animal Farm and now Matron was going to lure Mr Simmons away from me luring him away. I couldn’t see how it was going to end well—either thing.
Matron looked at me for a moment, saddened.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘it’s just that she’s my Deputy Head at school, I know her, and she really is a total cunt.’
I had to put it in the strongest terms, talking to Matron.
‘I’m desperate, Lizzie, I need a job and a home. This place is going to go to the dogs, Saleem doesn’t believe in me, and what’ll become of me?’ she said. ‘I’m sixty-five.’
‘Sixty-five?’ I said. ‘Crikey, I thought you were at least seventy-five.’ It was the new straw-coloured hair, it made her look ancient.
‘I’m going to have to try for Mr Simmons,’ she said, ‘I’ve no choice; there’s no one else.’
Early one morning I went to the cemetery with Mr Simmons in his Rover. It was a thing he really wanted to do—it being his late wife’s birthday—and the others were too squeamish to go. I thought it’d be a bit of a skive. The normal thing to do, apparently, was to drop the patient off at the warden’s post with a few details and wait in the car. I could have let Miss Pitt know about the outing, I suppose I was contractually obliged to, but I hadn’t the heart on this particular day.
Mr Simmons’ driving was awful and I had to keep saying, ‘Keep to the left,’ because he constantly veered over into the middle of the road. I realized he really shouldn’t be driving when he turned into a gateway for no reason and had to reverse out again and couldn’t see in the mirror because he couldn’t move his head in that direction. When we finally arrived at the cemetery I could tell the drive had stressed him too much for me to simply dump him with the warden—especially as the warden looked quite grumpy.
‘We’re very popular today,’ said the warden, nodding towards a group of visitors. And he offered us a map of the graves. Mr Simmons said he knew the way but he took the map for reference.
We walked along a few paths and it did seem to be busy. Clusters of people and single figures stood beside graves and sat on benches and the place was alive with activity.
We reached Mrs Simmons’ grave. I expected Mr Simmons to lay the flowers down and cross himself but he stood and looked at the stone. I lit a fag, more out of self-consciousness than actually wanting one, and walked away a bit in case he burst into tears. But he didn’t, he spoke quite formally, his feet planted on the tiny, gravelly garden with his hands by his sides. I didn’t hear it all, only, ‘… I didn’t make you happy, but I remarried, you know.’ It was quite conversational, and like a play where people say things they’d never say in real life just to explain to the audience what’s going on.
‘… and I was happy. I think you’d be pleased about that.’
And then he saluted the stone and began to walk away. I thought we were going back to the car but Mr Simmons said, ‘No, hang about, I need to see my other wife.’
‘How many wives have you had?’ I asked.
‘Two,’ he said, and we chatted as we strolled. His first marriage had been twenty years of mild misery. His second, only three of near bliss until his wife had died stupidly from flu because they’d not realized how bad she was and not wanted to bother the doctor. And now Miss Pitt—who he barely knew and had seen probably twice all the time his wife had been alive—had swooped in and spoilt his already broken life with her voice, her bossiness, her leotards, her awful taste and a mirror with a rainbow surround that made him sick to look at.
He was all tangled up with her now because the will pretty much made him a caretaker—until he died, when everything became hers—and she would badger him about the state of the paintwork on the window frames. ‘She doesn’t want to inherit a wreck,’ said Mr Simmons.
We had some difficulty locating the second wife’s plot on the map and when we worked it out (K45), it was quite a walk up a long slope and past the baby graves which were little toadstools and bunnies and I couldn’t help wondering whether or not Bluebell had qualified for a toadstool or a bunny or whether he’d been too premature. And by the time we got to K45 Mr Simmons was exhausted and we both felt wretched. It was obviously a less expensive plot with no view—except of a grey stretch of the railway just before it reaches the station—and no trees, no benches and no glassy green gravel, just the dead stems of something in an ugly square vase in a rectangle of stubbly grass, and a hundred similar plots. It was where the newest graves and most of the visitors were and it felt strangely crowded and desperate.
Mr Simmons started speaking to K45. Here his hands, rather than hanging by his sides, flapped around expressively as he spoke. I walked away again so as not to hear. But caught this.
‘Well, happy birthday, lovey. I’ve been to see Floss and she’s fine.’
And I saw his hanky come out and suddenly understood why no one else could face coming here. I lit another fag and watched a train stop for a signal and, turning to see if I could make out the university, I saw a figure rushing towards u
s.
‘Well, well, Lizzie,’ said Miss Pitt, ‘I wish you’d told me Dad was coming out, I could have given him a lift and saved him the petrol.’
‘Dad!’ she called. He didn’t look round but she began walking towards him. ‘I’ve come to say happy birthday to Mum too.’
I grabbed her arm, ‘Please let him have a moment,’ I said, impressed at my mature tone.
She pulled her arm away and went to walk again but I blocked the path. She tried to dodge to the side but I stood in front of her. She put her whole hand in my face. I shoved her backwards. ‘Leave him alone,’ I hissed, and I went to push her again but she was too quick and grabbed my arm, wrenching it to the side expertly until I’d fallen to my knees—she’d probably had a lifetime of trying to break children’s wrists—then she shoved me and I fell on to the grave of someone called Rose Wilston who’d fallen asleep in 1974.
She was now walking towards Mr Simmons. I crawled after her and grabbed the hem of her coat and, with all my might, pulled until she was on the ground, on her back. I sat on her and held my forearm against her throat. We looked at each other. It was the most extraordinary moment of my life so far—even more extraordinary than my breaking the telephone dial just to hear Mike Yu’s voice. I still had a cigarette in my hand, and for some reason I took a puff.
‘Lizzie Vogel, get off me right now,’ she said, and somehow knocked me off balance, but I wasn’t long out of childhood and instinctively pulled her with me. We rolled around, she shouted, ‘Get off me, you little devil!’ And I shouted back, ‘You get back to school and leave us alone—you money-grabbing cow!’
At that, Miss Pitt grabbed the decorative cross that marked Rose Wilston’s grave and started hitting me with it. I wrestled it out of her hands and jabbed the pointed end at her in a threatening way. She screamed, grabbed it and held it to my throat as if she was going to throttle me with it.
Everyone for yards around, including Mr Simmons, was looking at us as we rolled about. Someone must have alerted the warden because he suddenly appeared on a scooter.
We got up and brushed the dried grass off our clothing.
‘I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss, Lizzie,’ Miss Pitt hissed, ‘you made the deal.’ And she clipped off.
‘What’s going on?’ asked the warden.
‘That woman was trying to interfere with that man,’ I said, pointing to Mr Simmons. And Mr Simmons looked suitably shaken. In fact, he was trembling violently with his mouth open—you might describe it as ‘hyperventilating noisily’.
The warden jumped off his scooter, stood it beside the dull, cream headstone of Mrs Melitta Simmons who’d been called to God in 1973 and administered sips of water from his emergency first-aid kit—which was needed, he said, ‘every single day on some poor bugger’.
We had a sit down on the nearest bench and I told the warden it had been a domestic incident and nothing criminal. The warden said he’d seen plenty of it—especially by the Ks and Ls and Ms—and he walked us to the car park. Mr Simmons had trouble locating his car. It was a whitish Rover—that was all I knew. And the car park seemed full of white cars.
‘What’s the registration?’ asked the warden.
‘You Jolly Fucker 264G,’ said Mr Simmons.
We scanned the vehicles and I walked away to get a different angle, until the warden shouted, ‘You Jolly Fucker—over there.’
Mr Simmons didn’t feel up to driving. That’s the thing with old people, it doesn’t take much to put them off and then you’re stuck. The warden had lingered and when I told him this, he said he’d thought it would be the case and asked if I’d like to telephone someone from his post. I phoned my mother and she must’ve driven like the clappers because she was with us in less than twenty minutes in the Snowdrop van. She’d been allowed to hold on to the van due to not fully resigning and making odd laundry deliveries as and when necessary for the company, and covering sick leave. She’d agreed to this because she loved her Leyland van—the height, the noise and driving with the door open, which you couldn’t do in an ordinary car—and she needed the capacity for carting stuff about for her pine-stripping business. Plus, I think she imagined she could live in it—if the worst came to the worst (that’s what I thought anyway). The warden was still lurking and came to join in.
‘What’s happened?’ my mother asked as she strode towards us.
‘The girl’s had a scrap with a lady at the graveside,’ he tipped my mother off, ‘very nasty, like something out of The Exorcist.’
The incident at the cemetery caused me to have to tell my mother something about my tacit arrangement with Miss Pitt. She’d driven us back to Paradise Lodge. Mr Simmons had got out of the van and I was about to. ‘No, wait,’ she said, ‘what’s this all about?’
I gave her the barest bones and she hit the roof. I mean, she actually punched the roof of the van and screamed at me, ‘You fucking idiot, all you have to do is go to school, what the fuck do you think this is? A story, a play, television? Jesus, Lizzie, just GO TO FUCKING SCHOOL.’
And, later, at home I had to go through it step by step.
‘I’ll sort this,’ my mother said.
27. Sale of the Century
Our mother started to sell her last remaining heirlooms. Knowing this made me feel a bit guilty. Not that I could have paid our utility bills with the bits of money I was earning—but it was an irony that I was so well-off and splashing out on various hair products and assorted coffees and teas when she and Mr Holt had such profound financial worries.
She’d first got a taste for selling heirlooms when she’d sold a four-poster bed a few years before—but not the mattress, which she was ashamed for anyone to even see and had to take to the council dump secretly, at dusk, when no one else was around. She wasn’t able to lift it on her own and had to ask my sister and brother and me to help. And the shedding of that mattress left its mark on all of us.
We’d been too young to be subtle about it and had asked and asked what was wrong with the mattress and why she couldn’t just leave it on the bed for Dr Gurley—who’d bought the bed and was sending someone round to collect it. Finally, she’d had to tell us the mattress was badly stained and that Dr Gurley would buy a new mattress for her and Sheela. ‘What stains?’ we asked. And then we clambered around in the back of the van as our mother drove and, with Little Jack’s key-ring torch, we located the stains on the mattress and drew round them with our fingers and noticed one was in the shape of a dog with fat legs and another was like a pumpkin. And eventually she’d told us they were bloodstains from some terrible times and my poor little brother cried—imagining someone had been murdered on it (probably someone blameless like Maid Marion’s father). And my sister told him it wasn’t that. My sister and I realized that it was just the usual women’s stuff, just the outpourings of things going right or wrong. And that these things, if they happened to a guinea pig or a dog, would have been all right, but happening to a woman, they were deeply shaming and to be hidden and thrown away at dusk. We didn’t feel revolted, we felt frightened.
Anyway, the time had come to sell her last remaining valuable possessions so that she could catch up with some private bills—about which she hadn’t been entirely honest with Mr Holt. And so she buffed up some jewellery and polished some wood. She’d inherited a dressing table from somewhere on her mother’s side. It was beautiful—if you liked that kind of thing—walnut with a hinged triptych mirror and wavy piecrust edging. She advertised it for sale in the Longston Advertiser and hoped her sister-in-law wouldn’t notice (it being a family heirloom). Her plan was to accept a price in the region of £35 (nowhere near its real worth—but just to get the quick cash). However, and this is the whole point of writing about this, the person who answered the advert was Miss Pitt and when I saw her standing there on the doorstep, in her hound’s-tooth ski pants with her pal the fat doctor, I panicked.
‘Oh, shit, don’t answer the door, no, tell her it’s sold.’
And my mother said, ‘No, Lizzie, this is perfect.’
My mother showed her in, sat her at the dressing table and, like the girl off Sale of the Century, began demonstrating its features. She slid the long slim sorting drawer out over Miss Pitt’s lap so she could appreciate the handy compartments for eyeshadows, lipsticks, powders and so forth. She angled the three mirrors so that Miss Pitt could see her face from every angle and even the back of her head, and showed her that the snug little stool could be tucked away when not in use. And when she was sure Miss Pitt couldn’t live without it, she put the price up to £60. And after the fat doctor had loaded it into the back of his Land Rover and Miss Pitt had counted the notes out into her hand and she’d put them into her back pocket my mother said, ‘And by the way, if Lizzie isn’t reinstated immediately into the “O” Level classes, I shall report you to the board of education for misconduct.’
I went to registration at school the next possible day and, like magic, Mr Mayne passed me a note telling me to go into the ‘O’ Level groups for all subjects. He was pleased. ‘Now, just make sure you keep up,’ he said.
As the days went by Sister Saleem was very keen to know how Miranda was getting on with The Diary of Anne Frank and would ask occasionally, ‘How are you getting on with Anne Frank?’ And, for a while, Miranda would say, ‘I haven’t started it yet.’
