Human Croquet (22 page)

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Authors: Kate Atkinson

Tags: #Fiction, #General

BOOK: Human Croquet
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Charles’ clown face mooned out from beneath his Billy Bunter cap – Charles had developed a huge stock of silly expressions through which he communicated with the world, as if perhaps it would love him more because he could cross his eyes and ping-pong-ball his cheeks at the same time. Sadly this was not the case.
The cold that Charles was suffering from the day the Widow died seemed never to have left him – his nose was permanently plugged with yellow-green snot and his ears bunged up with something similar. He inhabited the underwater world of the hard-of-hearing and it was only when the school nurse referred him to the hospital that anyone discovered the extent to which Charles was lip-reading his way through life, unscrambling words, like a dyslexia of the ears or aural Scrabble. ‘You’d think he’d be able to hear,’ Vinny said, disgruntled at having to sit in the hospital waiting-room for hours, ‘when his ears are so big.’

Poor Charles, his pink Dumbo-flap ears stuck out from his head like his princely namesake’s. ‘Flying yet?’ Trevor Randall – the arch-bully at school – asked him, and instead of being sensible and slinking away in cowardice, Charles punched him in the eye and had to be beaten into repentance by Mr Baxter.

Eventually, Charles was operated on and a kindly surgeon poked a hole through his eardrums and drained out all the yellow-green snot. Unfortunately, this didn’t help him read any better and Mr Baxter still had to bounce wooden rulers off the palms of Charles’ hands to help him make out the words on the page.

Charles refrained from telling Mr Baxter that when she came back, Eliza was going to rip Mr Baxter’s head off and pull his lungs out through his neck. He was looking forward to savouring the look of astonishment on Mr Baxter’s face.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwackkk!
went Mr Baxter’s leather strap (or the ‘tawse’ in Mrs Baxter’s quaint language).

Vinny’s meagre nursing skills were tested to their limit by coughs and colds, viruses and infections, aches and pains, warts and verrucas – the parental loss documented by germs. Charles was hospitalized again, with a suspected appendicitis, and then discharged again, unable to explain the mysterious source of his pain.

Housekeeping of any kind was sadly wanting in Arden. Widowless, it had grown into a cold cheerless place. Vinny would only light the coal fire in the living-room when the thermometer dropped to Arctic depths. (‘Watch out for that polar bear!’ Charles said, russet eyes wide with horror and Vinny screeched and looked behind her.
Ha-ha-ha.)
They wore gloves in the house and Charles sported a navy wool balaclava (knitted, very badly, for him by Vinny) that made him look like a goblin, all he needed were the two holes for his big pointed ears and the disguise would have been complete. Isobel had a pullover knitted by Mrs Baxter that had an intricate pattern of knots and ropes and cables all over it, like something a sailor might have knitted in a dream.

The house was unheated on the grounds of economy. Economy was pinchpenny Vinny’s religion (yet she made a very poor economist). ‘I’m trying to keep the wolf from the door,’ she said, and narrowed her eyes (North Sea grey) and added, ‘We’re one step away from the poorhouse.’ How could Vinny run the business and bring up children? What was she supposed to do? She brought in assistant after assistant to help in the grocery, all of whom seemed to have no purpose in life other than defrauding Vinny.

She spent long hours at night sitting at the dining-table cross-eyed over double-entry bookkeeping, unable to make sense of profit and loss. Not such a good businesswoman as Mother, it turned out.

Vinny scrimped but couldn’t save. The Widow’s huge meals were replaced by watery scrambled eggs, like lemon vomit, toast and dripping or Vinny’s ‘speciality’ – steak-and-kidney pie, a glutinous grey substance sandwiched between cardboard crusts. They were always hungry, always trying to squirrel away food into their hollow insides. Sometimes Isobel felt so hungry that she wondered if there wasn’t someone else inside her, an insatiably greedy person who had to be fed continually.

The Widow’s white linen tablecloths and silver cutlery, her flower-sprigged crockery and ivory napkin rings had all been put away as being ‘too much trouble to look after’ for Vinny. Now they ate with Wool-worths cutlery and old plaited raffia mats from Vinny’s house. ‘Serviettes,’ said Vinny, ‘are for people with servants,’ and Vinny, God forbid, was no-one’s servant. ‘God gave us a tongue to lick our lips,’ Vinny pronounced, ‘he didn’t create us with serviettes in our hands,’ an argument full of logical holes – what about cigarettes? Teacups? Rich Tea biscuits? What indeed about ‘God’, who didn’t get much of a look-in in Arden.

Mrs Baxter was quick to try and step into the mothering breach, clearly horrified by the sudden subtraction of family members – a grandmother, a father and a mother – within the space of such a short time. How? she frequently asked Mr Baxter. How could a mother leave her own children? Her ain weans? (Mrs Baxter was bilingual.) Especially such bonny ones? She must be off her head (or ‘aff her heid’).

Isobel watched for Mr Baxter marching off early for school and ran round to the back door of Sithean so that Mrs Baxter could dress her hair instead of Vinny, twirling it into neat plaits (‘pleats’) because the little girls under Mr Baxter’s care weren’t allowed to unleash their female tresses anywhere near the school building. Mrs Baxter also bought new navy blue hair-ribbons to tie up Isobel’s plaits in big bows and said, ‘There – don’t you look pretty?’ with a tremendous new-moon smile of encouragement that couldn’t quite disguise the look of doubt on her face.

Audrey’s lovely red-gold hair, hair that, let loose, flowed down her back like a rippling volcanic stream, a banner of flame, had to be roped into a big fat plait that hung almost to her waist. There was something about long untamed hair that induced Mr Baxter’s bile. ‘You should have all of that cut off,’ he said, and it seemed a miracle that Audrey’s long locks had lasted this long without being shorn.

Summer came. The back garden of Arden was taken over by weeds. Mr Baxter complained to Vinny about the state of the garden. ‘I don’t want your ruddy dandelions,’ he shouted angrily over the beech hedge. Charles waited until he’d gone inside and then blew his dandelion clocks over the hedge while Vinny crowed her approval from the back doorstep. She just didn’t understand neighbourliness.
It was Mrs Baxter who hefted out the dandelions though, Mrs Baxter who did all the gardening in Sithean. She grew raspberries and blackcurrants, potatoes, peas and runner-beans and tended the pretty Albertine rose that grew up the trellis which divided the lawn from the fruit bushes and vegetables. Bushes of rosemary, starred with tiny blue flowers, and dark spikes of lavender brushed against your legs as you walked along the garden path and the borders around the big semicircular lawn were soft and ragged with Canterbury bells that chimed delicately and delphiniums that nodded in the breeze at a pale honeysuckle braiding itself in and out of the beech hedge.

There were new people – the McDades – on Willow Road. You could tell what Mr Baxter thought of Carmen McDade’s name from the way his moustachioed top lip sneered whenever he had to pronounce it. The McDades had moved up from London and were such a big family that Mr McDade (a builder, of sorts) and Mrs McDade (a termagant) occasionally mislaid one of the smaller McDades without even noticing. ‘Backward,’ was Mr Baxter’s professional judgement on most of the McDade clan, although Mr Baxter’s definition of ‘back-ward’ was generous and had frequently included Charles. And even Mrs Baxter.

Carmen tucked her dress into her greying knickers and cartwheeled across the green lawn of Sithean. ‘A bit forward, that girl,’ Mr Baxter said with a look of distaste on his face. But how could she be both backward and forward? There was no pleasing Mr Baxter. ‘She’s only a little girl,’ Mrs Baxter protested.

‘So?’ Mr Baxter said darkly. ‘They’re all the same.’

Vinny couldn’t cope, she was losing the family business. It was all the fault of Eliza. Mrs Baxter had a solution, hovering on the back doorstep with a plate of little pink cakes. Vinny picked one up suspiciously. ‘Take them, take them, all of them,’ Mrs Baxter urged.
The fairy cakes are not themselves the solution, but ‘fostering?’

Vinny’s eyes narrow suspiciously. ‘Fostering?’ Surely not, someone prepared to take the ‘poor orphaned bairns’ off her hands? Vinny contemplated. And then nearly choked on the little cake, ‘Not orphans,’ she said, somewhat inaudibly on account of the choking, ‘they’re not orphans, their mother’s alive.’

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Mrs Baxter said hastily. Mrs Baxter couldn’t remember what Eliza looked like any more. When she thought about her she saw a figure in the distance – at the bottom of the garden, in the field – someone walking away. Vinny licked her fingers clean of icing and said, ‘Why not?’ But foolish Mrs Baxter hadn’t discussed this proposition with ‘Daddy’ and he looked at her in complete disbelief. ‘You’re off your bloody head, Moira [so another one], I have to see that stupid boy all day long at school, I don’t want him in my house as well. And that girl is
sullen.
Do you hear?’ (‘Charles can be rather silly sometimes,’ Mr Baxter wrote in a restrained way on his Christmas report.)

Sometimes Mrs Baxter read to Isobel and she rested her head on the cushion of Mrs Baxter’s pigeon-plump breast, balanced on the other side by Audrey, and for a brief moment she forgot about Eliza and Gordon and the Widow as she listened to Mrs Baxter’s lilting peat and heather voice. Mrs Baxter was a surprisingly good storyteller, able to turn herself from a rampaging giant one minute into a tiny kitchen mouse the next.
Mrs Baxter knew the same stories as Eliza but when Eliza had told them they had frequently ended badly and contained a great deal of mutilation and torture, whereas in Mrs Baxter’s versions, the stories all had happy endings. Mrs Baxter’s Red Riding Hood, for example, was rescued by her woodcutter father who butchered the wolf and slit it open to reveal a grandmother as good as new and, needless to say, everyone lived happily ever after. In Eliza’s version, on the other hand, everyone usually died, even Little Red Riding Hood.

Sometimes when they got to the end of a story, where everything had been put right and justice done, Mrs Baxter would sigh and say, ‘What a shame that life’s not really like that.’ Mr Baxter didn’t know about these reading sessions – Mr Baxter disapproved wholeheartedly of fairy stories (‘stuff and nonsense’) although whether he
had
a whole heart was debatable.

One day, Mr Baxter came home unexpectedly early from school and found the three of them in front of a blazing fire. Mrs Baxter was reading, her index finger following every line – because she couldn’t find her reading-glasses – and at the point when Red Riding Hood was filling up her little basket with custards, they all suddenly became aware of Mr Baxter’s presence in the doorway. Mrs Baxter’s body gave a little spasm, like a frightened rabbit, and her reading-finger halted mysteriously on the word ‘bobbin’.

Mr Baxter fixed them with his little pebble eyes behind his little pebble glasses for a long time before saying, ‘Unlike her stupid brother, the girl can read perfectly well for herself, Moira – I should know, I taught her myself. And as for you, Audrey, you can go up to your room and do the extra arithmetic I set you.’ Audrey scurried out of the room and Mrs Baxter said, ‘Oh dear, Daddy, we were only reading. What harm is there in that?’

Next day, Mrs Baxter had one eye so swollen that she couldn’t open it. ‘Walked into a door,’ she explained while brushing Isobel’s hair, ‘silly me.’ Audrey was sitting at the breakfast-table with a bowl of cornflakes in front of her and kept lifting her spoon to her lips except it was the same spoonful of flakes over and over again. There were no more stories after that.

‘Wait till our mother comes back!’ Charles shouted at Vinny after a particularly vicious attack with the Mason and Pearson and Vinny snarled, ‘I’d like to see that!’ Vinny was doing her best to eradicate all traces of Eliza. The past wasn’t a real place to Vinny. She never talked about it, she was a non-historian, the anti-archivist of all that had happened to them – retaining no souvenirs, no artefacts, no documents, no photographs, obliterating the evidence of their previous happy existence. Vinny made bonfires of the past, made bonfires of everything, nothing was safe from her flames.
Every week Vinny would stand in the back garden of Arden tending her bonfire, enveloped in a pall of smoke, ashes being tossed in the air around her like a medieval witch at the stake.
Eliza had been gone over a year. When was she coming back? Why was she taking so long? Sometimes it seemed as though the white fog that had enveloped them in Boscrambe Woods had got into their brains in some way. Perhaps that was how Gordon died too, not fog in his lungs, but fog clouding his brain, driving him mad. Perhaps the fog in the wood had driven Eliza mad, for she must have gone mad to leave them in the clutches of Vinny. She would never leave them, not voluntarily, not all the fancy men in the world could have persuaded her away from them. Surely?

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