Death of a Perfect Mother (3 page)

Mr Achituko smiled—fixedly, imperturbably. Debbie flushed and looked at the table. Fred, watching out of his washed-out blue eyes like aged overalls, said to himself: My Lill's in great form. Always gets a bit of fun going. Just what this place needs.

Darts were Fred's treat of the week, but when he drained his glass and stood up, it was almost with reluctance.

‘Well, I'd better be off,' he said. ‘Enjoy yourselves.'

‘Okee-doke,' said Lill, off-hand. Fred threaded his way apologetically through the drinkers, and as she heard the door-latch click after him, Lill beamed round at her brood and said: ‘Well, he doesn't leave much of a hole, does he?'

And it was true. That was the trouble with so many of
Lill's brutalities. They were true, or horribly close to target at worst. When Fred had left the room you couldn't remember whether he had a moustache or not, whether he wore glasses or not. He left behind himself nothing much more than a vaguely snuffed-out atmosphere and a smell of old clothes.

And now, thought Brian, this really is a rehearsal. This is how it will be next Saturday. Just Gordon and me, Debbie perhaps, and Lill. Debbie will go before long, because she can't stand being out with Lill for more than an hour or so. She'll drift off to see one of her friends. She'll be sure to be somewhere where there are people to swear to her presence. Just as there'll be people here, in this pub, to swear to us.

‘ 'Ere, look,' said Lill in a stentorian whisper, ‘look who's over there. It's that little Mrs Watson from along the road. Isn't that good? She's such a lovely girl. Sort of distant . . . aristocratic, know what I mean? She shouldn't shut herself away like she has been. She must be getting over it at last.'

In the far corner of the bar, sitting with a girl-friend, was a woman in her mid-twenties. She had long fair hair, an unmade-up face with classically perfect features, and eyes full of pain. Distant she may have been, but she registered Lill: a twitch of the mouth, a fleeting expression of annoyance, showed she was aware of Lill's interest. She leaned forward over a bag of potato crisps, talking with desperate concentration to her friend.

‘Do you know,' said Lill, still in that same ear-shattering whisper, and leaning across to Mr Achituko in hideous intimacy, ‘her husband was killed in Northern Ireland. Shot in the back. On duty. Isn't it awful?'

‘Yes, I know,' said Mr Achituko, his fixed smile disappearing for a moment. ‘I have talked with her.'

‘Oh, have you?' said Lill, withdrawing in displeasure. ‘Well, don't you go trying to cut out our Gordon. I've got
her marked down for him.'

‘Stow it, Mum,' said Gordon, who had flinched when the name was first mentioned but now responded with great geniality: ‘I can choose my own girl-friends.'

‘Well, you've never chose half such a smasher as that yet,' said Lill. ‘She's just what you need. She's just coming out of her shell too—it's taken her quite a time.' A thought struck her. ‘Crikey, if old Fred snuffed it I'd be on the look-out for my next on the trip back from the cemetery.'

She had forgotten her whisper, and bellowed it round the whole bar, looking complacently at the people at the surrounding tables. One of them said: ‘I bet you would, too, Lill,' and she chuckled in self-approbation.

Getting serious again, she turned to Gordon and said: ‘Why don't you go and chat her up a bit, Gord? She's a lovely girl, just your style. You ought to get to know her better, it's only neighbourly.' And she winked suggestively. Lill prided herself on not keeping her boys tied to her apron-strings. She was always telling them to go out and get themselves girls. Mrs Watson would make a lovely wife for her Gordon. She'd be a better housewife than most, having been married before. And he'd be living just up the road.

‘Come off it, Mum,' said Gordon, with that unabated good-humour that now, more than ever, it was essential to preserve. ‘What would I say to her? “My Mum says I was to come over and chat you up a bit”?'

‘Oh, go on with you. You've got more nous than that. You can do it casual, like.'

Gordon smiled enigmatically, but when five minutes later he went to the bar, he exchanged a few cheery words with little Mrs Watson from along the road. And Lill, pointy ears aquiver, caught them, purred, and smiled at Brian a smile of (she thought) great subtlety, full of hidden meaning.

Don't smirk at me, you old crow, thought Brian. You've got us all on a puppet-string, haven't you, or so you think? Just a little twitch from those pudgy, purple-painted fingernails and we jerk up and do your bidding. In one week's time, oh horrendous Lill, you are going to feel a jerk from your Muppets that you haven't been expecting at all.

With her second, and then her third, drink, Lill—as usual—began to get rowdy. Her advances to Mr Achituko became more brazen than ever, and before long he downed his drink with uncharacteristic zeal and managed to get caught up in conversation by the bar. This gave Lill an opportunity to engage in raucous conversation with all the tables around her about the sexual prowess of ‘darkies'. Even the Todmarshians got a mite embarrassed at this (though it was a subject they greatly enjoyed speculating on in hushed tones). Deborah thought her mother might conceivably take it as a reproof if she took herself off, so without a word she got up and went out.

Lill's reaction, however, was no different from her reaction to Fred's departure: she took care to say to Debbie's departing back: ‘She's getting stuck up, that one. She's too proud for her own family.' Deborah, reaching the outside air and the darkness, leaned for a moment by the wall, laid her forehead against the coolness of it, and breathed deep. Then, with the resilience of youth, she shook herself and went off to play records with one of her friends.

Inside things were working up inexorably towards ‘Lily the Pink'. Lill could sing other songs: her tastes tended towards the music-hall—to the blowsier numbers that she thought of as ‘a bit of fun', where she could bring out all the innuendoes and add a few of her own. But ‘Lily the Pink' was to her what ‘My Way' is to Frank Sinatra: an irresistible mixture of Credo and blatant self-advertisement. She had been in her seventh heaven when the song
was rediscovered. It beat ‘Lily of Laguna' into a cocked hat. So now it came out on all feasts and high days, and the whole bar, after five or six hints, recognized its inevitability.

‘All right,' said Lill at last, as if giving in to overwhelming popular demand. ‘Stand back and give me a bit of room.' And pushing back the chairs in her vicinity she slipped off her apple green plasticated shoes and stood on the chintzy seats built solidly into the saloon bar wall. ‘Come along, all,' she shrieked, ‘help me with the chorus!'

And only half-reluctantly the bar turned in her direction, paid homage to the buxom bright figure standing there, bursting out of her electric blue dress and grinning encouragingly from under her outrageous mop of red hair.

‘Go it, Lill,' someone said. ‘We'll back you up.'

And as someone, from long training, began simulating the hurdy-gurdy accompaniment, Lill steadied herself on the bouncy cushions, opened up her healthy pink throat and let them have it.

‘We'll drink-a-drink-a-drink to

Lily the Pink-the-Pink-the-Pink,

The saviour of the human ra-a-ace . . .'

She was in her element. This, she thought, should have been her life. Doing the Halls. Doing the Clubs up North. No class there, of course, but lots of life. She waved her hands for the chorus and a ragged sound emanated from the saloon bar regulars. 'Course everyone had life in them, Lill thought, but with some you had to work to get it out. She grinned encouragingly at them, and the sound grew louder and more in unison. She purred. She might have been God listening to the Hallelujah Chorus. She looked at little Mrs Watson, sitting with her back to her in the far corner. Funny: she hadn't had her back to her before. She looked at Mr Achituko over by the bar. Dear
old Archie. What memories he'd take back with him to—wherever it was! Well, he can't say anyone was prejudiced here! Then her eyes rested on her boys, chairs pushed back, looking up at her smiling. That's what she liked—just her and the boys. That was how it should be. They were lovely boys. Good-looking too, though she said it herself and shouldn't. And they adored her. You couldn't put it any other way. Look at them now—you could see it in their eyes. They simply adored her.

Gordon glanced at his watch surreptitiously as he raised his mug to drink. Twenty past. A bit of applause, a quenching of the thirst, and Lill would go. Half past on the dot on Saturday night. He'd join in the applause, then he'd make himself scarce. That should be easy enough. After one of Lill's performances everything became somehow more . . . flexible.

And indeed, when Lill bleated the song to its conclusion the bar, led by her sons, burst into proprietorial applause—she was
our
Lill, after all, and quite a character when all was said and done—and then the groups began loosening up, talking, laughing, and trotting to the bar for orders. And at the centre of it, as always, Lill, standing flushed and happy, accepting the compliments and finishing her drink.

‘That's the stuff to give the troops,' she said. ‘That Olivia Newton-John's got nothing on me, eh?'

Gordon, with an athlete's grace and quietness, sauntered through the various shifting and coalescing groups and out through the door marked ‘Toilets'. The door led into a corridor with, at the far end, two doors marked with diagrams supposedly indicative of gender, which you had to peer at closely before pushing the one of your choice. But immediately to the left was a door leading out to the Rose and Crown's back yard, and close by it was a gate out to the street. Gordon was through it in a flash, and then walking coolly up the street towards
home. No point in hurrying it. Might attract attention. Anyway, he only had to be sufficiently ahead of Lill for her not to recognize his back. His watch glowed phosphorescent in the darkness. Nine-twenty-eight. He was going to time this operation like a miler making an attempt on the record.

Back in the Rose and Crown Lill was collecting up her belongings—handbag, best coat, assorted make-up gear she had scattered over the table after a ‘patching-up' operation. Once gathered together, she smiled her fearsome smile of maternal love at Brian.

‘What you fancy for supper, love? Nice hamburger with a fried egg on it?'

‘Lovely, Mum.'

‘Where's Gordon?' Lill looked around the bar in the direction of Mrs Watson, and her eyes registered disappointment.

Brian swallowed. ‘Gone for a leak, Mum.'

‘Oh, you are common. Why can't you say “Gone to the toilet”?' Lill thought for a moment. ‘Well, I suppose it being your birthday doesn't stop you having to go for a leak. I must be off. Tell him I'm doing hamburgers.'

‘Ok, Mum, I'll tell him.'

And Lill trolled through the Saloon Bar, gave a goodnight to practically everyone there, and pushed the door out into the street. Someone at the bar looked at his watch and said: ‘Good old Lill. You could set your watch by her.'

Too right, thought Brian, draining his glass. Good old Lill.

The Saloon Bar settled down to be what in Lill's absence it always was: a dull little bar in a dull little town. They'll miss Lill when she's gone, thought Brian.

• • •

That night after hamburger (under-) and egg (overcooked) Gordon and Brian undressed in their room and
conversed in a whisper—unnecessarily, since nothing they said could have been heard over Fred's snores and Lill's noisy undressing in the next bedroom.

‘I left at nine-twenty-seven,' hissed Gordon, ‘and I was in position this end of Snoggers Alley at nine-thirty exactly. Actually I nipped into old mother Mitchell's garden in case she saw me, but in fact I'll stand under the telegraph post, where the lane widens out. Lill came by at nine-thirty-four, so I could have left a minute or two later, but I don't want to hurry—people might notice. And the four minutes' rest means I'll be in tip-top condition. Two minutes to do it, and I can be back in the Rose and Crown by nine-thirty-nine. Twelve minutes away in all. Plenty of people spend longer than that in the bog.'

‘Old Fred in the mornings, for a start,' said Brian. They both giggled childishly, from nerves.

‘Anyway, it won't matter if I'm a minute or two over time,' said Gordon. ‘No one will notice I'm gone.'

Brian's face fell. ‘Don't bank on it,' he said. ‘Lill noticed, for a start.'

‘What?' Gordon's voice suddenly assumed its normal baritone, and they both jumped nervously. But they needn't have bothered. Lill was in the bathroom, simultaneously cleaning her teeth and gargling her signature tune, and Fred was snoring away in the sleep of the just and stupid.

‘What did she say?' hissed Gordon.

‘She noticed you weren't there. When she went out. She asked where you were.'

‘Oh Christ. Drawing the attention of everyone in the bar to the fact that I wasn't there.' Brian nodded. ‘What did you say?'

‘Well, I didn't say you were up in Snoggers timing an attempt to murder her this time next week . . .' They both sat on their beds, hunched forward in thought. ‘What could I say? I said you'd gone to the bog.'

Gordon thought and thought, but came up with no very comforting solution. ‘That's the trouble with Lill,' he said. ‘You think she's absolutely predictable, then she springs a nasty surprise on you. We're going to have to think about this. If we're not careful we're going to be shopped, by Lill herself.'

Sunday was a somnolent day at the Hodsdens'. It always was. Lill didn't like it, but she recognized there was nothing she could do against the collective lethargies of the other four. Saturday night was always Fred's big night of the week: darts at the Yachtsman's took it out of him, and Sundays he crept blearily about the house, all passions spent and considerably in overdraft. Brian and Gordon, as a rule, followed suit, if Gordon had nothing sporting on: they sprawled in armchairs reading the papers, they played cards or they watched television. ‘It's natural,' Lill would explain to people, ‘they work and play hard the rest of the week in their different ways—Gordon the physical, Brian more the—' she shied away from the word mental —‘more the
psychological
!' Debbie just took herself off, quite inconspicuously. As usual, thought Lill bitterly, though she would certainly have gone on at her ceaselessly if she for once had been around.