In front of her at the checkout, a young man was piling box after box of Cornflakes on to the counter. As she reached for her purse, her overloaded trolley nudged his hip.
‘Watch out,’ he said, glaring at her.
Patrick’s mother had a huge crystal vase which she filled with flowers from her garden.
‘White carnations for truth,’ she’d say, pushing a stem of blooms into the water. ‘Striped carnations for refusal, ambrosia for love returned, ivy for fidelity’ She always added sugar, stirring until, like magic, it disappeared. ‘Invisible food,’ she said. ‘Flowers need to eat too.’
It seemed as if she were talking more to herself than to Patrick, but he stood watching anyway, transfixed by her agile fingers twisting the flowers into a bright globe, sweet violet for modesty, azaleas for temperance, white daisies for innocence, sweet pea for delicate pleasure and departure. The scent was heavy and delicious, like warm honey. Then Mr Morrin died.
‘He fell down dead at the bus stop,’ said Patrick’s mother. ‘He was on his way to visit his sister,’ she added, as if his death would have been explicable had his destination been more oudandish.
Patrick wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral, but through the venetian blinds he watched the mourners arrive at the Morrins’ house for morning tea. In they marched, black-clad clusters of twos and threes, worker ants bearing shortbread and sandwiches and Swiss rolls, making their way to Mrs Morrin who sat huge and terrible in her front room. And there were his parents, filing in with the others in their dark finery. He rarely saw them so dressed up, and as they passed he wondered if they really were his parents at all, or just actors pretending to be the Morrins’ neighbours. His mother was wearing her cornflower eyeshadow and had a gauzy veil covering her eyes, and his father had his hat positioned low on his head like a film-star spy. For a moment Patrick wanted to tap on the window to them, but then they were inside and the street was empty.
They were gone for a long time. Patrick made himself some toast and a boiled egg around one o’clock, and some tea a couple of hours later. He cut himself two large wedges of sultana cake, too, hoping his mother wouldn’t notice how much had been eaten, and was just settling into a third slice when she appeared at the front door. She stumbled slightly over the mat and leaned on the hall table.
‘Patrick sweetheart,’ she said, ‘get the crystal vase for your mother would you, there’s a good boy. Mrs Morrin has so many flowers and nowhere to put them all.’
When Patrick returned she was examining herself in the mirror, turning her head this way and that.
‘Do you think this hairstyle makes me look frumpy?’
‘I think you look like a film star,’ said Patrick. ‘In a spy film.’
His mother laughed and took the vase from him. Her breath smelled stale and sweet at the same time, like the sugar water smelled after the flowers had started to turn slimy. ‘Poor Mr Morrin,’ she sighed, reapplying her lipstick. ‘Fell down dead at the bus stop.’
Patrick watched her teeter down the drive and up to Mrs Morrin’s front door, and decided that she didn’t look like a film star at all any more. She was back to being an ant.
Mrs Morrin took her time returning the vase. After a fortnight or so, when Patrick’s mother was gazing out the sitting-room window at her beds of chrysanthemums, their heads heavy with the weight of petals, she said, ‘I must get my vase back.’ A week more went by, and she said, ‘Surely all her bouquets have died by now, the shop-bought ones never last.’ After another week she said, ‘I hope she doesn’t think it was a present.’
‘Why don’t you just ask her for it?’ said Patrick’s father, stoking the fire with dry pine logs. ‘I will if you don’t.’
‘I need it back,’ said Patrick’s mother. ‘All my chrysanthemums are going to waste, it’s a crime.’ She stared through the glass at them, and as the new logs caught and flared behind her, the flower beds seemed to burst into flame.
Patrick and his parents spent their evenings in the sitting room, his mother knitting, his father reading the paper. Sometimes Patrick read, and sometimes he drew pictures of the Meccano constructions he and Andrew made, and sometimes he just sat and listened to the flames hissing and spitting in the grate like a nest of bright snakes. The fire was kept in check by his father, who stood every half hour to feed it careful logs. If no wood was required, he still made a point of inspecting it, neatening it with the brass poker. Patrick wasn’t allowed to touch it.
‘I once saw a man with third-degree burns over ninety per cent of his body,’ his father said. ‘He looked like a plum that had burst its skin.’
Only when the grate needed cleaning was anyone else permitted access. Patrick’s mother took over then, dabbing the cold bars with black, wrapping dead cinders in paper and sprinkling them on the garden like a witch.
It was Andrew who showed Patrick how to make his own fire. At school, in the lunch-hour, they positioned a pocket magnifying glass to catch the sun.
‘Watch,’ said Andrew, and held an ant still with a pin. Patrick concentrated on the insect, watched its tiny legs squirm, and the sounds of the playground retreated and the sun beat down on Patrick’s neck and the backs of his legs, and he concentrated and the ant’s feelers fluttered and suddenly it was alight, and for a moment Patrick believed he had made it happen by the power of thought. Then Andrew explained how it worked, how the sun could be magnified, the light bent, and it was so easy it scared Patrick a little. He thought about Christmas, when he’d stayed at Aunt Joyce’s and slept in the room made of glass, and how he’d seen Faye flitting past in her nightdress. Andrew let him borrow the magnifying glass, just for one day, and he sat on the back porch and burned holes in dry leaves, paper, scraps of cloth from the dresses his mother had made.
The fire was nobody’s fault. Patrick’s mother said that over and over, as if trying to convince herself of it. Because what everybody knew, but what nobody said, was that Patrick was responsible.
‘The main thing is, we’re all fine,’ she said. ‘We can replace furniture and curtains and books. We can’t replace people.’
They stayed with her sister while the new house was built on the foundations of the old one. At Joyce’s suggestion they began making a list of everything they’d lost, for insurance. The bigger items—tables, beds, the hall stand, the stove—were easy to recall, as were things used every day: crockery, hairbrushes, slippers, pots. Things that were seldom needed, though, things that had been packed away in drawers or trunks or cupboards, were harder to remember. Patrick’s father kept a notebook by his bed, and each morning the list had grown, an inventory compiled, it seemed, as he slept. For the first few weeks he and his wife conducted strange conversations as, little by little, they recalled their possessions.
He said, ‘The boxes in the scullery.’
She said, ‘My blue ball-gown.’
He said, ‘The gardening books.’
She said, ‘Your leather gloves.’
It made Patrick think of the party game where a selection of things was placed on a tray, displayed for a few minutes and covered again. He’d always been hopeless at that game. His memory wasn’t methodical; he mixed things up, confused colours and names, got the order wrong.
Faye was away at boarding school so Patrick was allowed to sleep in her room again. At night he explored it, picking up china ballerinas and books and lengths of ribbon. He discovered a small wooden box containing hair clips, combs, a few fine brown hairs. In a drawer was an old pair of tights with holes in the heels and the knees. Sometimes he could hear Aunt Joyce and Ronnie giggling through the wall. Sometimes, too, he could hear his parents arguing in the guest suite, and now and again he heard his own name.
‘Accident?’ his father yelled one night. ‘Accident?’
Things were different by day. His mother flitted about like a new bride, poring over furnishing catalogues and visiting shop after shop. When she returned to Joyce’s each afternoon her handbag was swollen with sample
s of fabric and wallpaper and carpet. She tracked down replicas of their furniture, happily announcing that she’d found a kitchen table just like the old one, a sofa covered in the same material, a rocking chair that was almost exactly the same.
‘Look at these,’ she said, arranging her swatches in various combinations for her husband’s approval.
Graham liked all of them.
‘But you must have a favourite,’ she said. ‘If you had to decide between the primrose and the marigold, say, which one would you prefer?’
‘I’m happy with whichever one you like best,’ was all he would say.
Patrick waited to be asked what he thought, but his mother pressed her lips tight and continued arranging the samples in silence, as if playing Patience. After a while she said, ‘Yes, there we are,’ and Patrick looked up from his book to see the colours of their old house spread on the table. He opened his mouth to speak, but already his mother was collecting up the reject samples for disposal. He felt as if he were looking through his kaleidoscope—which he’d lost in the fire—and no matter how he turned and turned it the pieces of glass fell the same way. Their new house was to be a recreation of their old one.
Patrick’s father spent his weekends there. He’d decided he needed a garden shed, and he wanted to build it himself. He was putting it right down the end of the garden, past the plum tree, he told his son, out of harm’s way. For emergencies, a torch would be kept in the workbench drawer, but no matches.
Everybody was nice to Patrick at school. The other boys gave him toy cars and aeroplanes and books to replace the ones he’d lost, and the masters took an extra interest in him, constantly asking if he was all right, if he needed anything. Mr Ross gave him a whole new set of pencils and pens, including a sleek green fountain pen in its own case.
‘Make sure you don’t lend it to anyone,’ he said. ‘Fountain pens mould to the shape of your hand, and someone else can put it off balance completely.’
Patrick wrote a few lines with the fountain pen every day so that it would take on the contours of his hand. He didn’t show it to his parents. He kept it hidden in Faye’s hair-clip box.
‘Now you’re not messing up any of Faye’s things, are you?’ his mother asked from time to time. ‘We can’t have her arriving home for her holidays to find everything in the wrong place.’
His father took no notice of the gifts Patrick received at school, until he came home with a Meccano set from Andrew.
‘The No. 2 Outfit,’ said Graham. ‘Not particularly comprehensive, but a good basic selection of parts.’
‘I’m not sure I want you accepting things from that boy,’ said his mother. ‘It was Andrew who lent him the magnifying glass,’ she told Joyce. ‘Of course, the main thing is, we’re all fine.’
‘I’ve been doing a spot of research,’ said Graham, ‘and it seems Meccano might be a good investment. The special Outfits that were made before the war, in particular, are highly sought-after. The trick is knowing what to buy’
From then on, when other fathers came home with sweets in their pockets and coins in their fists, six o’clock heroes cold from the street, Patrick’s father unpacked Meccano brochures and issues of Meccano Magazine. He studied them at great length, ticking certain pages, ringing certain pictures, noting down details from the collectors’ private advertisements.
The Meccano Magazine, read Patrick, published in the interests of boys, contains splendid articles on such subjects as Famous Engineers and Inventors, Electricity, Bridges, Cranes, Railways, Wonderful Machinery, Aeroplanes, Latest Patents, Nature Study, Stamps, Photography and Books—in fact it deals with those subjects in which all healthy boys are interested. New Meccano models and new parts are announced from time to time; interesting competitions are arranged for Meccano boys, and there are special articles for owners of Horn by Trains. The Meccano Magazine has a larger circulation than any similar boys’ magazine, and is read in every civilised country in the world.
‘Did you know,’ he said to his father, ‘that you can make a real loom from Meccano?’
His mother looked up from her knitting.
‘You can weave real hatbands and neckties,’ he said.
‘After careful consideration,’ said Graham, ‘I’ve decided to start with a No. 115 Shipbuilding Outfit. They were faithful reproductions, Doreen, made exactly to scale. I’ve found one for a reasonable price.’
On the day they moved into their new house, Joyce insisted on accompanying them. She brought Ronnie with her, and Ronnie brought his camera. Patrick soon saw why: a wide red ribbon hung across the front door.
‘If you’ll do the honours, Graham,’ she said, handing Patrick’s father her dressmaking scissors.
That was the first photo from after the fire: Patrick and his parents and their new front door, which was almost indistinguishable from their old front door. Patrick’s father was bent over the ribbon, the scissors poised like the silver hands of a clock. Another minute and the three of them would be inside, and their new life would have begun.
Patrick was uncomfortable in the new house. Every day there were sombre looks from his father, and his mother spent the housekeeping money on frivolous things like lace handkerchiefs and hair slides. Patrick learned to be very quiet, to make himself transparent, as insubstantial as a puff of smoke. And it seemed to work, because when he did speak—may I have a piece of sultana cake or may I go and play at Andrew’s—his mother would start, and look up from her knitting as if she had forgotten he was there. Knitting took up all her spare time. She made ill-fitting jumpers for Patrick and his father. She made cardigans, socks, sometimes a waistcoat or a tie. She made more than they needed; it kept her hands busy.
‘Thank you, Doreen, just the thing,’ Graham would boom. ‘You’ll wear them and you’ll like them,’ he’d say when she was out of earshot, so Patrick had no choice but to inhabit these outfits, these lumpy costumes, and play at being a good, quiet boy.
The house, too, had an artificial feel, as if rebuilt by someone unfamiliar with the old place. There was a greyish blue sofa under the sitting-room window, exactly where the old one had stood, but the shade chosen was too dark, the fabric too slippery. It was like trying to sit on water. The rocking chair swung back too far, the wallpaper was too green. And the dialogues were unnatural, over-rehearsed. The more Patrick’s father chatted on about the weather, local news, the meal they were eating, the more Doreen retreated into silence. Patrick kept expecting to open the front door one day and find nothing behind it but arms of wood propping up a façade, and, smiling in the ruins, cardboard cut-outs of his parents.
One evening his father arrived home from work beaming, carrying a heavy parcel.
‘Open it,’ he said to Doreen. Inside, after she’d removed a layer of newspaper, was a dinner plate, and beneath it another layer of newspaper and another plate, and she kept unwrapping plate after plate until a complete dinner set covered the table as if for an impromptu banquet. And it was exactly the same as their old set: a rim of gold around the edge, a border of ivy leaves, and a single leaf in the centre.
Each day the Mercers ate their meals off the new plates, just as they had before the fire. Patrick watched his father cutting tidy portions of food, efficiently and sensibly pressing peas and carrots and meat into forkfuls of mashed potatoes. Each night Patrick dried the dishes, taking the wet plates from his mother one by one and moving the tea-towel across the rings of ivy, back and forth, while his father read the paper in the sitting room. Patrick focused on the leaves, drawn into the dark clusters until the kitchen receded and he was encircled by ivy, by green stars. And then his mother let the water out of the sink, and the drain sucked and coughed, and then she filled the kettle, and everything was as it had been, or close enough for the differences not to matter.
When he arrived home from school one day he found her in his room. She was sipping an amber liquid, the colour of tea without milk.
‘I’ve put your socks in with your underpants
,’ she said, ‘so you’ve got a drawer free.’ She gestured at a mound of his belongings in the centre of the room: a messy pyre of comics, writing paper, odd pieces of Meccano. ‘I’m very tired of stepping over all of this, Patrick. Just very tired.’
And she did look tired. Her eyes were bloodshot, her words ran into each other. She took another sip of her tea-coloured drink.
‘I liked them where they were,’ said Patrick in a small voice. ‘I knew where everything was.’
‘They were all over the floor. It was dangerous.’
‘It was deliberate,’ he said, but couldn’t explain that as long as he hadn’t found a place for everything in his new room, it was as if he hadn’t moved in at all. As if, at any time, he could leave this new, skewed place, where things were the same but not the same.
‘What’s this?’ said his mother. She was fingering the green fountain pen, opening and shutting its slim black case.
‘A present.’
‘Who’s been giving you presents? Its not your birthday’
‘Mr Ross gave it to me.’
‘Ah, Mr Ross.’ She pursed her lips. ‘It’s far too good for you to take to school,’ she said, and snapped the case shut. ‘We’ll put it away somewhere safe.’ And the green pen was locked away in the new sitting-room cabinet, where she’d filed the receipts for all the other new things, including the one for the cabinet. Sometimes he saw her using it to sign cheques or write letters, moulding it to the shape of her thin hand, her little fingers. He kept hoping Mr Ross wouldn’t ask where it was. When he mentioned the pen to his father, Graham told him not to bother Doreen about it, as she was very tired.
‘You can use it when you’re older,’ he told Patrick. ‘You’ve had quite enough new things lately’ But Patrick knew that the pen would never fit his hand now.
Golden Deeds Page 14
