Flying Under Bridges (8 page)

Coffee
arrived, which caused a short pause in the proceedings. Jenny looked around the
shop. ‘What a handy place. Is it true what the porter said, that you’re moving?
Seems a shame. Do the press office know?’

‘No.
The thing is—’

Jenny
waved her hand in the air. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get to that. Perhaps a small
statement. Now, I am here to help you, so we need to go through one or two
essential questions.’ Inge reached for the milk and sugar but Jenny put out her
hand to stop her.

‘No,
Inge. This is where it begins. I am here to look after you. Every time you
enter a BBC building, I, or someone from our team, will be there to make sure
you are happy. So, and I think this shows how much we plan to be there for you,
how do you have your coffee?’

‘Sorry?’

Jenny
patted Inge’s hand. ‘You tell me and I do the milk and sugar. It’s no trouble.
I’ve got a space on my form for it.’

Chapter
Six

Eve liked to learn things.
She loved facts and she was good at remembering them. There was nothing she
liked better than absorbing some obscure piece of information and then passing
it on to someone else. But lately this party trick had started to worry her.
She had been explaining to someone in the charity shop that ‘More French people
die of diseases of the digestive system than any other European nationalities’
when Mrs Hoddle, who was sorting clothes in the back, had said very loudly, ‘Isn’t
it a shame that some people confuse gathering information with being clever!’

Perhaps
it had just been a passing remark, but the more that year went on, the more Eve
learnt and the less she felt she understood. It wasn’t until later that Eve
realised her mother had made a huge culinary mistake in God’s eyes on the day
of the will reading. The Bible was absolutely clear about shellfish. Those ‘bottom
dwellers’ of the sea were a definite no-no. Prawns should never have been
served.

As Eve
drove herself and Adam to lunch at her mother’s, Adam sighed. She thought it
was about the faulty car again.

‘I’ll
get it fixed,’ she said.

‘Oh, it’s
not that.’ He sighed again. ‘Just thinking about this new job. I may have to go
into the office later.’

‘Right.’

Adam
sighed yet again and reached for the cassette player.

Shirley
Bassey filled the journey, singing loudly about the fact that she was no one.

The
great Shirley Bassey no doubt wallowed daily in the impact she had had on many
lives, but she was perhaps unaware of the integral part she played in Adam and
Eve’s marriage. When Eve married Adam she might have guessed the full extent of
his obsession with the Welsh singer as they had a serious discussion about his
bride-to-be processing up the aisle to a recording of ‘Big Spender’. Over the
years it had become clear that if Dame Shirley ever arrived in Edenford with a
gleam in her eye, Adam, Eve’s devoted husband, would be off in a second. Eve
looked at Adam out of the corner of her eye while she drove. He sat with his
hands cupped over his injury.

She
loved him and he loved her, but perhaps not with the passion he reserved for
the two focuses of his life — Shirley Bassey and avocado plants. It was a
curious combination, but Adam had made it a life’s work. He had all of Shirley’s
recordings and he was hoping to be ‘avocado self-sufficient’ by the following
year. It was, at least, an ambition.

Every
time Eve and Adam had an avocado, he would take out the pip, put a matchstick
in either side and hang it over a glass of water. Once it had sprouted he’d
plant it in one of the big tubs on the bedroom windowsill (south facing — best
light). Eve hated them. She watched them grow thin and tall and could feel them
suck the sunlight out of the room. They had never had an avocado from them in
the many years he had been doing it, but Adam was not a man easily swayed from
his path of purpose.

He had
the same single-minded attitude to many things. Like not eating certain Eastern
foods. ‘They’re bound to have used cats and dogs for the meat,’ he would say,
and Eve would think about that. To her it seemed ridiculous. Why would anyone
bother? It had to be twice as difficult chasing around in the dark for a stray
moggy than popping down Dewhurst’s of a Saturday morning. Why would any
restaurant not just go to a butcher? Save all that ‘Here pussy, pussy’,
followed by fur stripping and eyes down every time you saw a hand-made ‘beloved
pet missing’ poster on a telegraph pole. ‘A pound of mince and a nice chump
chop please,’ simply had to be easier. But Adam was sure he was right and that
was that.

Eve’s
mother had made a special effort with the lunch. Her husband’s will reading was
an important family occasion, although no one was expecting fireworks. There
was no anticipation of anything exciting. He had been a local builder. There
was unlikely to be a secret slush fund in the Cayman Islands. Still, Mrs
Cameron had really laboured over the meal and it was important that everyone
realised the full extent of the effort.

As Adam
and Eve arrived at the family home, Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ was booming out of every
casement. Adam, his eyes closed with pain, his hand cupped as a flesh codpiece
for his injury, waited for Eve to ring the bell. It still seemed odd to Eve to
ring the bell at her own home, the place where she had grown up, but it was
polite. There was a small cry from the kitchen and in a moment Mrs Cameron
could be seen through the glass front door, wearing her frilly apron, flour in
her hair and with a face as red as a baboon’s bottom. Mrs Cameron had a bad
limp, but despite this she appeared to be attempting to glide across the
parquet floor.

‘Dum,
da, da, da, dum, da, da, da … dee, da da dee da da deeee!’ She opened the
door with a flourish, her arms busy conducting the music as she glided towards
daughter and son-in-law. Adam moved to kiss her hello but Mrs Cameron held up a
hand.

‘Wait …
best bit coming up.’ The music swelled and Eve’s mother twirled across the
floor as best she could, dragging her left leg behind her. Fortunately Ravel’s
piece is a short one, but Adam and Eve must have stood for at least three
minutes while she danced before them. Finally the record finished and Adam
applauded. Mrs Cameron blushed and took several modest bows.

‘The
Jane Torvill of your day,’ said Adam, smiling.

‘I
could have been, I could have been, but then my lovely Eve…’ The sentence
trailed off. Eve’s mother could have been a star if it were not for Eve. That
was the rest of the unfinished sentence. But for Eve and a terrible jump in the
county ice-dance championships, which had finished her leg and her career.

‘If
only Eve had had the gift.’ Adam knew the conversation and helped keep it going
each time. Eve silently blessed him.

‘My
lovely Eve,’ said her mother. ‘She was worth it, but yes, it would have been
nice. I think we knew by the time you were four, didn’t we, darling? You could
no more skate than…’

‘Reinvent
the mousetrap.’ Eve finished the sentence and everyone laughed at how she had
ruined everything.

Mother
gave a little sigh and wiped her nose with a hanky from her apron pocket. ‘Anyway…
Hello, my dears!’ Not one for physical contact, she handed out pretend hugs all
round which only soothed the air. ‘Bless you, bless you both.’ She made a
little sign of the cross in the air. The papal greeting of Edenford.

‘How
lovely. All my family. Did you have trouble with the… who ha?’

‘The
car? No,’ Eve said, trying to ignore Adam’s slight limp as he went up the
steps. He was limping on the opposite side to Mother. She realised that if they
walked too close together, they could bang heads.

‘No?’
Mother looked quizzical. ‘It’s just that you’re the teensiest bit late.
Nothing important, but I was hoping you would help set the table..

There
was always something. Eve smiled. ‘I’ll do it now.’

‘Oh
darling, of course, I’ve done it myself. Don’t worry, it was a pleasure.’ Mrs
Cameron sighed with the burden of her pleasures. ‘Adam! Congratulations on your
promotion. You clever boy!’

Adam
smiled and you could just see how he must have looked when he was picked for
the second eleven at school. ‘Thanks. I may have to go into the office later.’

Mother nodded.
‘Of course.’ The pressure of the insurance business. Adam was now a divisional
manager and the division could hardly manage without him. ‘Thomas?’ mother
enquired.

‘He’s
busy,’ Eve said quickly. Tom didn’t ‘do’ family functions and Eve was tired of
hearing about it. It was his life and he was entitled to it. He was doing what
he thought was right and Eve was proud of that.

‘Of
course.’ Mother leant forward and whispered although there was no one else
around, ‘Still living in a tent?’ Eve nodded. ‘Still gripped by that foreign
religion, is he?’

‘Its
not him, just some of his friends. They’re Buddhists, Mum. They’re really very
nice.’

‘It’s
still foreign.’

‘So’s
the pope’ replied Eve, ever defensive of her son. She was immediately
admonished.

‘May
God forgive you!’ Confident that he would, Mother changed tack. ‘Come and look
at this.’ The small party limped off to the dining room. Leaning against the
wall was a huge brown paper parcel. A great rectangle about four foot high and
two foot across. Mother patted it.

‘It’s
your father,’ she whispered to Eve, and wiped a tear from her eye.

‘What
is?’ Mr Cameron’s ashes had yet to arrive from the crematorium and Eve half
thought that perhaps they had been sent flat packed. Mother carefully peeled
off the paper and folded it for reuse at Christmas. Inside a heavily ornate
gilt frame was an enormous picture of Eve’s father, Derek Cameron. He was standing
in the garden, moving an azalea and smiling slightly. The photograph had been
blown up to poster size and was slightly blurred. It made him look cross
despite the smile.

‘This
way he can always be with us,’ sighed Mother. ‘Adam, I neeeed you,’ she
implored with a hint of little-girl squeak in her voice. ‘I want him in here. On
that.., who ha.’ She pointed to the wall above the sideboard. ‘Would you?’ It
was a signal to open the floodgates of manhood.

‘No
problem, Lillian. Be done in a jiffy.’

She
removed a hammer from her apron pocket and handed it to him. ‘I’ll get you a
who ha… picture hook.’

Adam
headed off to be clever with tools and Eve went and stood uselessly in the
hall. Mother scuttled past her daughter.

‘Don’t
scowl, darling, it’s not attractive.’ She disappeared into the kitchen. Eve
could hear her uneven tread on the parquet floor as she almost certainly
prepared to do wonders with a melon bailer. Mother had limped ever since her
daughter could remember. When she was little, Eve used to imagine her leaping
in the air perfectly whole and coming down on the ice a broken woman. It had
made Eve feel guilty all her life. Mother had told her many times that had she
not been pregnant with Eve then she would never have fallen. If she hadn’t been
pregnant, Mother could have been someone. A sequinned toast of the town.
Instead she had borne Eve and Eve had borne disappointment. Eve looked in the
hall mirror. She was scowling again. Perhaps she had been born scowling.

Through
the arch into the dining room Eve could see the table laid for lunch. The large
mahogany surface was entirely covered with a plastic lace tablecloth. The cloth
was to protect the table. In forty-five years Eve could never remember seeing
the actual table. What was the point in having it if all you did was protect
the wretched thing? What was the point?

Mother
had made an arrangement of bright flowers Out of multi-coloured tissue paper.
She had learnt to make them in the sixties and had been making them ever since.
They were everywhere. Fake flora and fauna in every nook and cranny. Flora and
fauna and God. Having given up the sequinned world of ice-skating, Mother had
turned to Catholicism for the show business part of her life. It hadn’t been
much at first. A few little icons when Eve, Martha and William were growing up.
Rather more candles than might be deemed necessary for a power cut, that kind
of thing. But since her husband had died it was becoming obsessive. There were
velvet pictures of Jesus, which in the right light showed his bleeding heart.
Rosaries hung from every framed prayer. Eve’s favourite item was a large clam
shell, which, when plugged in, opened to reveal the head of Pope John Paul I.
The head would rise a few inches, light up and play ‘Ave Maria’. The pope rose
and shone, rose and shone. Eve, useless Eve, stood and played with it for a few
minutes looking at the Holy Father. Mother always seemed to know what Eve was
doing or thinking. ‘Leave His Holiness’s head alone, Eve. We don’t want him to
get broken.’

Indeed
they didn’t, so Eve left the leader of the Catholic world and wandered into the
kitchen to be useless in there. Mother was very carefully cutting up tomatoes
for the salad. She had developed a new respect for salad vegetables since she
had read a report in the paper about a holy tomato being found in Huddersfield.
The article was on the fridge under a St Sebastian magnet from a holy shrine in
the Basque country.