Human Croquet (20 page)

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Authors: Kate Atkinson

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BOOK: Human Croquet
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At tea-time she roused them again, and they came downstairs for boiled eggs and soldiers of toast followed by leftover apple-pie. Perhaps this would be their lives from now on – eating, sleeping, eating, sleeping – it was certainly the kind of regime the Widow would approve of for children.

Gordon, Vinny and the Widow sat at the tea-table with them but ate nothing, though the Widow poured endless cups of tea – the colour of young copper-beech leaves – from the big chrome pot with its green and yellow knitted cosy. Their eggs waited for them in matching green-and-yellow jackets as if they’d just hatched from the teapot. Vinny sipped her tea daintily, her little finger crooked. The Widow observed Charles and Isobel very carefully, everything they did seemed to be of the greatest interest to her.

Charles took the cosy off his egg and hit its rounded skull gently with his teaspoon until it was crazed all over like old china. Gordon, watching intently, made a funny noise, as though his lungs were being squeezed and the Widow said, ‘Stop doing that!’ to Charles and leant over and sliced the top off his egg for him. She did the same to Isobel’s egg and commanded, ‘Eat!’ and, obediently, Isobel poked a finger of toast into the orange-eyed egg.

The silence, for once, was astonishing – no head-nipping from Vinny, no lofty pronouncements from the Widow. Only Charles chewing his toast and the funny gulping noise Vinny made when she swallowed her tea. Gordon stared at the tablecloth, lost in some dark dungeon of thought. He looked up occasionally at the thick cotton nets at the bay window as though he was waiting for somebody to step from behind them. Eliza perhaps. But no – Eliza was in hospital, the Widow confirmed. Vinny’s tongue flickered like a snake whenever Eliza’s name was mentioned. Neither Gordon nor Vinny nor the Widow wanted to talk about Eliza. It seemed that nobody wanted to talk about anything.

But what
had
happened? Everything that had seemed so clear yesterday – the wood, the fear, the abandonment – today seemed elusive, as if the fog that enveloped them last night was still invisibly present. Charles was clinging to the one thing they were sure of – absence of Eliza. ‘When can we see Mummy?’ he asked insistently, his voice reedy with misery. ‘Soon,’ the Widow said, ‘I expect.’ Gordon put his hands over his eyes as if he couldn’t bear to look at the tablecloth any more.

As if to help him, Vinny cleared away the dishes on a big wooden tray. Vera had been given ‘a couple of days off’ the Widow said and Vinny whined, ‘Well, I hope you don’t think I’m going to take her place,’ and just to show what a bad servant she would make she managed to drop the entire tray of china before she got to the door. Gordon didn’t even look up.

Before they went to bed for the third and last time that day, they came downstairs in their pyjamas to say good-night. The Widow gave them milk and digestive biscuits to take upstairs and in exchange they gave goodnight kisses – depositing little bird-pecks on the cheeks of Vinny and the Widow, neither of whom could handle anything more affectionate. The Widow smelt of lavender water, Vinny of coal-tar soap and cabbage. Gordon hugged them one at a time, tight, too tight, so that they wanted to struggle, but didn’t. He whispered, ‘You’ll never know how much I love you,’ his moustache tickling their ears.

* * *
For a moment Isobel thought she was back in Boscrambe Woods. But then she realized that she’d woken up in her own bed and that the maniac making enormous gestures, like a mad mute, in the semi-darkness was in fact Charles, trying to get her to follow him down to the first-floor landing.
A wand of light beamed through the gap in the curtains and they could hear the familiar
prut-prut-prut
of the black car’s engine. They watched the scene down below from behind the curtains. Gordon (gabardine collar up and hat-brim down – like a villain) was standing by the open door of the car, saying something to the Widow that made her give out a little cry and hang on to his lapels, so that Vinny had to prise her off him. Then Gordon got in the car and slammed the door and without looking back drove away from Hawthorn Close.

The same fat lantern moon that had guided them in the wood only twenty-four hours ago, was hung now in the blackness over the streets of trees. At the top of Chestnut Avenue they could see the car pause as if it was deciding whether to go left up Holly Tree Lane or right along Sycamore Street. Then the black car made up its mind and turned left on to the road north, its rear lights disappearing suddenly into the night.

At breakfast next morning, Vinny was still there, cutting big doorsteps of bread and jam and saying, ‘I’m going to come and live here for a while and help to look after you.’ She waited for them to say something in response to this news but they said nothing because the Widow was always telling them, ‘If you can’t think of anything nice to say don’t say anything at all.’
‘Your daddy’s had to go away on business,’ Vinny continued, looking at them in turn, first one, then the other as if she was checking for signs of disbelief on their faces.

The Widow came into the dining-room and sat down at the breakfast-table. ‘Your daddy’s had to go away,’ she announced hoarsely and started to dab at her eyes with a handkerchief which was monogrammed extravagantly (not with ‘W’ for Widow, but ‘C’ for Charlotte) and which suddenly reminded Isobel of something. She nearly fell off her chair in the hurry to scramble down from the table. She ran into the hallway, pushing a chair next to the hallstand so that she could reach the pegs, clambered up on to it and slipped her hand into the pocket of the plaid wool coat that had been hanging there ever since they came back from the wood, yesterday morning.

Eliza’s handkerchief was still there, neatly folded in its white sandwich-triangle, still emblazoned with its initial, still bearing the traces of Eliza’s perfume – tobacco and
Arpege
– and something darker, like rotting flower petals and leafmould. By the time Vinny hauled her down from the chair she was hysterical and pulled out a clump of Vinny’s hair in the effort to escape her bony clutches. Vinny screamed (the sound of rusty hinges and coffin lids) and gave Isobel a sharp slap on the back of the knee.

‘Lavinia!’ the Widow rebuked sternly from the dining-room door and Vinny jumped at the tone of the Widow’s voice. ‘Remember what’s just happened,’ the Widow hissed in her unlovely daughter’s ear. Vinny did an approximation of flouncing and muttered, ‘She’s better off without her anyway.’ In the tussle Vinny managed to wrestle the handkerchief out of Isobel’s hand and the Widow bent down and picked up the lace-edged, monogrammed trophy and swiftly tucked it into the stern bosom of her blouse.

In the days after Gordon drove into the night the Widow and Vinny were as nervous as cats. Every car engine, every footstep seemed to put them on the alert. They scoured the newspapers every day as if there might be secret messages hidden in the text. ‘I’m a bag of nerves,’ the Widow said, jumping and clutching her heart as Vera muttered her way into the dining-room with a tureen of soup.

The Widow tried to be nice to them, but the strain began to show after a while. ‘You’re such
naughty
children,’ she sighed in exasperation. ‘That’s what happens to naughty children,’ the Widow said, as she locked them in their attic bedroom in the middle of a Sunday afternoon as punishment for some transgression they’d committed. They didn’t care, they didn’t mind being locked up together. They almost liked it.
They were waiting for Gordon and Eliza to come back. They were waiting for the
prut-prut-prut
of the black car. They were waiting for Eliza to come home from the hospital. For Gordon to come back from his business trip. Their outer lives continued much as before – waking, eating, sleeping, starting school again after the half-term holiday – but they could have been robots for all this meant to them. Real time, the time they kept inside their heads, stopped while they waited for Eliza to come home.

Their sense of time grew distorted. The days crawled by at an unbearably slow pace, even going to school didn’t seem to make much difference to the great stretches of empty time that yawned ahead of them. Mr Baxter allowed Isobel to start school early, ‘to get her off your hands’. Mrs Baxter offered to walk them to school in the mornings and look after them until the Widow and Vinny came home at night. Mrs Baxter fed them milk and cake in her big warm kitchen, Charles pretending to be another little boy altogether in case Mr Baxter walked in.

Vinny, cross to begin with, was so much crosser at the turn that events had taken that she behaved as if she’d quite like to lock them up permanently. So she said anyway. Vinny’s face had turned into an old crab-apple and the Widow had to keep her busy at the back of the shop, away from the customers, in case she curdled the cream or made the cheese grow mould. ‘It’s the change of life,’ the Widow explained
sotto voce
to Mrs Tyndale over the broken biscuits (although not so
sotto
that Vinny couldn’t hear).

It was the change of life for all of them, but it couldn’t last, surely? Sooner or later Eliza would come out of hospital, Gordon would return from his business trip and everything would return to normal. Neither Charles nor Isobel ever thought for a moment that Gordon and Eliza had left them permanently in the clutches of Vinny and the Widow. The memory of a broken Eliza under a tree, her eggshell skull bashed and dented, her white throat, stretched (like time) beyond endurance, was something that they refused to think about. The Widow said that Eliza was getting better in hospital. ‘Why can’t we go and see her then?’ Charles frowned.

‘Soon, soon,’ the Widow replied, her old milky-blue eyes clouding over.

Life without Gordon was marginally more boring, but without Eliza it was meaningless. She was everything – their safety (even when she was angry), their entertainment (even when she was bored), their bread and meat and milk. They carried her around like an ache inside, somewhere in the regions of the heart. ‘Perhaps Mummy’s not allowed to talk,’ Charles speculated as they played Snakes and Ladders in their attic prison one gloomy Saturday. The cause of their imprisonment was unsure but might have had something to do with the large scratch on the Widow’s dining-table and its relation to the penknife in Charles’ pocket. ‘Perhaps it’s bad for her throat or something,’ he pursued. Isobel was caught up in the coils of a particularly long snake and didn’t notice that Charles had started to cry until it was brought to her attention by a big crystal tear – almost as big as the pear-drops on the Widow’s chandelier – splashing on the board between them.
They were used to each other crying, their waiting was seasoned and watered with tears. (‘One or other of you always has the waterworks turned on,’ Vinny chided raggedly one morning as Charles started hyperventilating on the way to school and had to be thumped hard by Vinny between the shoulder blades – a remedy on the kill rather than cure side of things.) ‘Cheer up,’ Isobel urged him now – but in such a melancholic tone that it only made him worse. She passed him the dice-shaker but it was a long time before either of them could make another move.
They were sitting by the fire, listening to
Children’s Hour,
Vinny (in the armchair she’d claimed as hers) darning her thick stockings. Vinny was not a needlewoman – the darn she was labouring over looked like a piece of wattle fencing – and the Widow tut-tutted loudly at Vinny’s botched handicraft.
Vera clattered in the background, setting the table in the dining-room. The Widow looked at Vinny and Vinny put her darning down. Then the Widow took a deep breath and leant over and turned the radio off. They looked at her expectantly. ‘Children,’ she said gravely, ‘I’m afraid I have some very sad news for you. Your mummy isn’t coming home. She’s gone away.’

‘Gone away? Where?’ Charles shouted, leaping to his feet and adopting an aggressive, pugilistic stance.

‘Calm down, Charles,’ the Widow said. ‘She was never what you’d call very
reliable
.’ Unreliable? This hardly seemed an adequate explanation of Eliza’s disappearance. ‘I don’t believe you, you’re lying!’ Charles yelled at her. ‘She wouldn’t leave us!’

‘Well, she has, I’m afraid, Charles,’ the Widow said dispassionately. Was she telling the truth? It didn’t feel like it, but how could they tell when they were so helpless? The Widow signalled to Vera in the doorway and said, ‘Come along now, dry those tears, Isobel – there’s a nice cottage pie for tea. And a raspberry shape for pudding, Charles, you know how you like that,’ and Charles looked at her with incredulous eyes. Could she possibly believe that a pink blancmange, no sooner seen than eaten, could possibly compensate for the loss of a mother?

It was already nearly two months since Gordon had driven away into the night with only the moon for company. One morning, the Widow received a letter in the post – a flimsy blue bit of paper with foreign stamps. She opened it and as she read it her eyes filled with tears. ‘Well, it’s not as if he’s dead,’ Vinny muttered crossly to the teapot. ‘Who?’ Charles asked eagerly. ‘Nobody you know!’ Vinny snapped.

Before bedtime that same night, the Widow said she had some sad news to tell them. Charles’ face was a picture of misery, ‘Daddy’s not left us as well?’ he whispered to the Widow, who nodded sadly and said, ‘Yes, I’m afraid so, Charles.’

‘He’ll come back,’ Charles resisted stoutly. ‘Daddy’s going to come back.’

Vinny dipped a Rich Tea biscuit into her tea and nibbled it like a large rodent. The Widow’s old liverspotted hand trembled and her cup rattled on its saucer as she said, ‘Daddy can’t come back, Charles.’

‘Why not?’ Charles knocked his cup of cocoa over in his agitation. ‘Cloth, Vinny,’ the Widow said in a tone that suggested she was warning Vinny about the cloth rather than asking her to go and get one. They could hear Vinny saying, ‘Clothvinnyclothvinny,’ once she got into the hallway.

The Widow gathered herself together again. ‘He can’t come back because he’s in heaven.’

‘Heaven?’ they both repeated in unison. The Widow forced them to Sunday School every week so they knew about ‘Heaven’ – it was blue and contained a lot of clouds and angels, but no-one in a trilby and a gabardine mac.

‘Is he an angel?’ Charles asked, puzzled.

‘Yes,’ the Widow said, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘Daddy’s an angel now, looking after you from heaven.’

‘He’s not dead, is he?’ Charles said bluntly and the Widow grew even paler, if that was possible, and said, ‘Well, not dead exactly …’ and put her hands over her face so they couldn’t see it and sat like that for a long time saying nothing until they grew very uncomfortable and tip-toed out of the room and up the stairs. They went to bed not much the wiser, more confused, in fact, than before she imparted her ‘sad news’ to them.

It was ever-helpful Vinny who clarified the situation for them next morning at breakfast. The Widow was still in her room and Vera had slammed the big chrome teapot down and gone off to burn toast. Charles and Isobel were spooning in their porridge, keeping quiet because Vinny was never at her best in the morning. She lit up a cigarette and said, ‘I hope you two don’t think that things are going to be the same as they were before.’ They greeted this remark with the silence it deserved. They were only too woefully aware that things were not as they were before.

‘You’re going to have to behave very well now that your daddy’s dead.’

‘Dead?’ Charles repeated in horror. ‘Dead?’ And he turned as white as the Widow’s suet pastry, as white as the Widow, and ran from the table. Later, he had to be dragged with some force from the understairs cupboard where he could be heard howling like a wolf-cub.

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