by Marie Joseph
Ben’s eyes glinted dangerously as he let in the clutch.
‘Stop jumping up and down!’ he barked. ‘You have the rear window completely blocked.’
With obviously hurt feelings, Benjie subsided, and Nell wiped a film of perspiration from Angus’s grubby upper lip.
Immediately the invalid sat up, dug his heels into her ribs, and gave Benjie a conspiratorial leer.
‘He wants to sit next to me again,’ Benjie translated smugly, and to save further argument, she pushed the wriggling, roly-poly little figure over to the back seat. Determinedly she started another unappreciated chorus of ‘Jingle Bells’.
Halfway through, Benjie’s bullet-shaped head bumped painfully into hers.
‘Are we nearly there?’
A sleek grey Bentley streaked past at about ninety miles an hour. Ben steeped on the accelerator, and the needle crept up to a steady fifty-five.
‘Daddy! Mummy! Mummy! Daddy!’ Benjie was nothing if not single-minded. ‘Are we nearly there? I said. I said are we nearly there?’
‘Sit down!’ Ben thundered. ‘And look at a comic, or count things, or go to sleep. Anything, but sit down!’
‘Daddy’s cross,’ Benjie informed Angus without rancour, and there was the popping on and off again of the biscuit-tin lid.
‘I don’t really think that Angus should –’ Nell began, and glanced back.
Angus’s little fur mitten dangled from his wrist, and his thumb was wedged firmly into his mouth. The colour had come back into his round, shiny cheeks. His fat, trouser-clad legs splayed out with all the abandonment of a week-old puppy’s. Angus was blessedly fast asleep.
Nell relaxed as the road unwound behind them, for a while running parallel to the railway. When a train curved into sight, Benjie bellowed joyously:
‘Faster! Faster, Daddy! Don’t let a silly old train beat us.’
To her astonishment, Ben grinned and pushed the accelerator pedal to the floor.
The window was open slightly at the top in deference to Angus’s indisposition, and the ice-cold wind tore at her hair and whipped her breath away.
‘Faster! Faster!’ Benjie implored, but perversely the train curved to the left and was lost to sight.
Ben asked for a cigarette.
‘Plenty of life in the old tub yet,’ he enthused, and Benjie told a deeply unconscious Angus that they had raced and outpaced a train.
‘We raced a train! We raced a train!’ he chanted, and he was still chanting when the car emerged triumphantly from the Ml and followed the now winding road to the north.
‘Check that we’re on the right road, lovey,’ Ben said, indicating a large and tattered road map in the glove compartment.
Nell wrestled with it for five minutes, and with a probing finger calculated that they were on the wrong road. Not only on the wrong road, but in the wrong county, and going in the wrong direction.
Ben laughed heartily when she told him.
‘I know exactly where we are, lovey. I know that road like the back of my hand.’
‘Well, why ask me to look it up?’ she asked, reasonably.
‘I said check, lovey, not plot us a course.’
‘Well, I must say –’ she began, when Benjie made a gleeful announcement:
‘I can hear a funny noise. There’s a funny noise, and I can hear it.’
Nell turned round and smiled at the energetically bobbing little figure.
‘What kind of noise, darling?’
Ben hung on to the wheel and looked grim.
‘Be quiet! All of you! There is a noise, and if it’s what I think it is . . .’
He swung the car on to the grass verge, and disappeared for the briefest of moments underneath the bonnet.
He emerged looking grimmer still. His face was crimson, and there was oil on his cheek.
‘If it is what I think it is, we’re finished!’ he said dramatically.
Nell said nothing. She felt that this was definitely one of the times when silence was not only golden but positively glittering! And yet, ten unspeakable minutes later, a burly garage man was quite chatty about the whole thing.
‘One of your big ends has gone, guv’nor,’ he informed them cheerfully, and watched with a blandly impassive stare as they transferred two children, one drop-side cot, hot water bottles, blankets and a case full of presents to a hired car.
For the rest of the journey, Nell sat diplomatically in the rear with Angus, but even the back of Ben’s neck reproached her.
‘Are we nearly there?’ Benjie asked for the hundredth time.
‘We are there,’ said Ben, and tooted loudly on the horn.
Stiffly, she got out of the car, led a tired Benjie with Ben carrying a damp and dazed Angus behind her, and staggered up the familiar gravel path of the house she had been born in.
Her mother and father, Lucinda, Jennifer and Robert, lined the hall in a gratifying flurry of welcome.
Now Christmas could begin.
With indecent haste Benjie and Angus were fed and put to bed, and Nell hurried back downstairs to join the happy family group around the Christmas tree.
A clever-looking young man wearing a university scarf and a shaggy haircut was waiting for Lucinda in the hall. Robert brushed past her on a wave of after-shave lotion, and with a resounding crash of the front door, disappeared into the night.
Jennifer came out of the sitting room, hugging a loudly playing transistor radio to her bosom. She smiled briefly, and passed palely upstairs.
‘I think she must be sickening for something,’ Granny remarked, and patted her new bouffant hairstyle into place. The grey hairs had been tinted a tasteful shade of dark sherry, and she looked about thirty-five years old.
In his chair by the fire, Grandpa sat, eye fixed unblinkingly on the television, and a glass of whisky balanced on the arm.
Subdued, and rather thoughtful, the eldest daughter of the family sat in a corner, and took her knitting from a plastic bag.
‘Well, tomorrow is Christmas Day. The real family celebrations will begin then,’ she told Ben later, in a bedroom bulging with presents, and two sleeping children.
But Ben didn’t seem to be listening.
‘Hope that garage bloke works as hard as he promised he would, and has the car ready for us. Only a complete fool would have driven a car that age up the M1.’
‘There was no need to race a train,’ Nell informed him coldly, and they climbed into a bed much too narrow to quarrel in.
Lucinda and Robert slept all the next morning, recovering from their parties, which had finished at four and four-thirty respectively.
Jennifer also slept all morning, nursing what was obviously a dose of flu.
At lunch-time the turkey, with all its attendant trimmings, was gulped down at a revolting speed by the three men and Lucinda, all hell-bent on a football match.
‘Angus doesn’t like it here. Angus wants to go home,’ Benjie informed her later in the day. His voice was loud and hoarse enough for everyone to hear.
Swiftly Nell moved to the piano.
‘Shall we sing some carols?’ she suggested brightly.
Lucinda and her clever-looking young man exchanged incredulous stares.
‘Are you serious, Nell?’ sniffed Jennifer, curled into the armchair with a box of paper handkerchiefs.
‘Well, actually, I’m due at another party in ten minutes,’ said Robert, making for the door.
Sadly, Nell closed the lid of the piano, and took Benjie and Angus up to bed.
When she came back downstairs again, Granny had put a record on, and was doing the twist with Ben in a corner of the room.
Unperturbed, Grandpa turnd the television contrast knob up a notch, and the sound knob up two notches, and stared fixedly at the flickering screen. A glass of rum perched itself precariously on the arm of his chair.
‘But this is exactly how happy families do behave,’ Ben told her, as she almost sobbed into his shoulder that night in the too narrow bed. ‘A
ll that going on about snow and singsongs round the piano is just the result of a figment of your over-romantic imagination.’
The snow that hit the windscreen at gale-force strength as they headed for home the next day was real enough.
And the bill for the reconditioned engine was real enough, too.
And yet Ben said nothing. Not a word. Not even when they arrived home to find the house frozen solid.
He just went on being kind, and crawled round the loft, quietly and methodically thawing them out.
Nell felt terrible.
‘I feel terrible,’ she told an uninterested Benjie who had already discarded his new toys for the well-tried familiar ones in the box underneath the stairs.
‘I feel terrible,’ she told Angus, as she wiped him over with a flannel, waiting for the water to come on again.
Ben had been right. He had been right all the time. And he wouldn’t make her feel any better by saying so much as a single ‘I told you so.’
The next day, apologetically, she went to bed with Jennifer’s flu, and Ben, without a grumble, took a week of his summer holidays to look after them all.
So, this year Nell’s keeping quiet about Christmas, and they’re staying right where they are.
After all, it wouldn’t be fair to expect Ben to take two boys and a not-quite-four-months-old baby girl all that way up to Yorkshire.
Ben had explained it all to her afterwards.
It seemed that Granny had stopped twisting long enough to tell him that she was sure there was another baby on the way.
‘It’s a pinched look Nell gets around the nose,’ she’d said.
Ben, apparently, had smiled knowingly.
‘I knew she was like that the minute she started on about the snow and the robins, and the carol-singing, and the family gathered round the Christmas tree. She goes sentimental the minute she starts a baby,’ he’d said.
So this year, she’s keeping very quiet about Christmas, and they’re staying right where they are . . .
The House with the Pink Door
HENRY HAD ALWAYS lived in the house with the pink door.
Henry was a big man, a kind and gentle man. Henry was a man’s man, and yet in his life there had already been far too many women!
His father he remembered not at all, but his three sisters had grown up from pink and white babyhood to pink and white girlhood, and Elizabeth, his mother, had a face as smooth and unlined as a pane of glass.
One evening her forget-me-not blue eyes reproached him over a scrap of knitting as fragile as a wind-blown cobweb, and the lamplight made a quivering halo of her silver-spun hair.
‘All your sisters married. Every one to a perfect gentleman . . . I’d like to see you settled before I go . . .’ She signed, a soft and fluttering sigh.
And Henry, because he loved his mother very much, and because he had always been an obedient, dutiful son, lay awake that night and thought for a while about women.
He knew exactly the kind of girl he would marry . . . Tall, with dark, crisp hair, and a sun-kissed skin. She would be his equal, well, almost his equal, at tennis and golf, and she would walk with him across the heath, her long, easy strides matching his own – well, almost matching his own.
He crossed his big hands on his pyjama-covered chest, then fell asleep, his mind made up. All he had to do now was to look, and he would find her.
It was as simple as that.
He found her the very next day at the tennis-club dance.
She was just as high as his heart; her ash-blonde hair smelled of spring, and her cheeks were the exact colour of the delicate petals of a wild rose.
Her name suited her fragile English prettiness to perfection. It was Catherine.
At the wedding, his sisters wore nodding hats of sweet-pea shades, and their husbands, like the perfect gentlemen they were, merged into pinstriped obscurity by their sides.
Elizabeth, his mother, sat in the front pew, fronds of hair curling like silvery swansdown over a lilac velvet toque, her forget-me-not blue eyes suitably dewy.
His wife, Catherine, in her froth of white tulle, was heart-stopping in her virginal beauty, and Henry felt his big bones almost liquefy with tenderness.
Later that night she lay in his arms, her soft breath fluttering the satin ribbon of her nightdress, and her long hair tickling his chin. Into the darkness of their hotel bedroom, Henry spoke his thoughts aloud.
‘We’ll have three children. All of them boys, of course!’
Catherine whispered shy agreement into his shoulder just before she fell asleep.
But Henry lay awake for a long time, holding his wife close in his strong young arms.
He could see his first-born son quite clearly . . . Sturdily built, with a thatch of his father’s dark red hair; wearing a rather grubby pullover and well-scuffed sandals; his hands, with incredibly dirty fingernails, thrust deep into the pockets of grass-stained shorts.
Henry fell asleep with a smile on his face.
Exactly one year later, in the house with the pink door, Jane was born . . .
Henry looked down at her, lying in a downy cocoon of blankets, a fringe of fair hair encircling her round, smooth head. Apologetically, Catherine smiled at him.
‘She’s perfect, isn’t she?’
Henry, his deep voice gruffer than ever with love and pride, kissed her and agreed.
He could wait a while for his son. Perhaps in a couple of years, or maybe three . . .
Just two years later his second baby was born. As skinny as a rabbit, with a whisper of silky blonde hair and a skin like full-cream milk.
Elizabeth, his mother, lived just long enough to hold her in her arms. ‘She’s the image of me,’ she happily pointed out, and because she was dying, and because Henry had loved his mother very much, he said that they would call the baby Elizabeth.
It was about this time that Henry started to walk by himself on the heath. He would close the pink door behind him, and feel the gritty gusts of wind stinging his cheeks, and feel the turf alive beneath his feet. In his imagination he never walked alone . . .
By his side, a dawdling boy whistled tunelessly underneath his breath. Just ahead of him the boy would slither sideways down the grassy banks, and talk to him in a voice hoarse with eagerness.
Together they searched the pond for frogs – together they stared enchanted at newly built nests . . .
But when Henry closed the pink door behind him, he was quite alone again.
And if Catherine noticed a pensive look in her husband’s brown eyes as he looked through the mullioned windows to where the trees tossed in the wind, she gave no sign.
The sun hid all day behind jagged clouds the blustery day the twins were born. Henry, his big hands unsteady on the rail of their flower-sprigged cot, closed his eyes against their newborn smell. Anne and Katy were as pearly pink as the inside of a sea-washed shell.
Catherine turned blue, pain-dazed eyes towards him.
‘Perhaps next time . . .’ And Henry heard her catch her breath on a half-sob.
And then, because he loved her, he vowed that there would never, never be a next time.
From then on, he walked on the heath alone. From then on he kept firmly to the footpaths; and if a tow-haired, sure-footed boy hurtled past him and called him to follow, Henry closed his heart.
The years slid away, and the bedrooms of the white house with the pink door were knee-deep in frilly petticoats – or so it seemed to Henry. Perpetual clouds of scented steam hung wraithlike over the banisters, and patterns lay strewn like a discarded paper chase over the sitting-room carpet.
Henry was a man’s man, and yet women had been strung like a daisy chain through all the years of his life.
Now spotty, gangling, sad-eyed boys knocked at the pink door and took his pretty daughters out in pulsating ancient cars, or, more shamefacedly, on foot.
They answered Henry’s clumsy attempts at friendship with muttered monosyllables, and furtive glances towa
rds the door.
Henry was forty-six now, and his dark red hair had begun to recede a little from his forehead, and although he wasn’t getting any fatter, it was certainly true that his trousers were becoming a little tighter.
Catherine, still slim, and, to Henry, still infinitely desirable, chose her forty-second birthday to tell him about the baby.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ she giggled. ‘It’s undignified. It’s shocking – and yet it’s simply wonderful.’
Henry held Catherine close against his heart, his wildly beating heart, and tangled his fingers in the soft weight of her hair.
That night he walked the heath again with a red-haired boy leaping and running like quicksilver by his side. A boy who touched his hand with sticky fingers, and threw his arms wide, shouting a challenge to the tossing trees.
And Henry was afraid. He prayed to his God, and then was ashamed of himself for praying. But all the same, right up to the day the baby was due to be born, he prayed.
There was a sighing in the wind, and the soft sadness of September wreathed the little house in mist.
Upstairs, determined footsteps hurried to and fro, and once Henry thought that he heard his lovely Catherine cry out.
Later, to Henry endless years later, the warmth of the late-afternoon sun filled the pretty room with amber light. It shone on the chintz-covered chairs, the soft white rugs, and the framed flower prints that hung on the peach-washed walls.
Henry thought of the petticoat years, the scented years, drifting by behind the petal-pink door . . . He buried his head in his big, strong hands, and found himself praying aloud.
Suddenly, he knew what he had to do, knew what he should have done long ago . . .
The next hour didn’t pass, it vanished, and tired, yet strangely triumphant, Henry answered the doctor’s beckoning finger, and tiptoed upstairs.
Catherine lay back against her pillows, white-faced and equally triumphant. Henry’s son, unmistakably his son, nestled in the crook of her arm.
A tiny tuft of dark red hair grew damply against a gnome-like, pointed head, and Henry closed his eyes in an attempt to hide a sudden rush of tears.
