Human Croquet (27 page)

‘Och, don’t worry [“dinnae fash yersel”], I’ll make time.’ What will she make it from – the fabric of time itself, or will she unravel it and knit it up anew?

Then suddenly the whole conservatory is filled with a weird green light, a fluorescent neon green, coming from above. The green light is moving, passing over the house, descending to hover over the garden. It’s like a huge green jellyfish, pulsing with energy. White lights like arc lights seem to move around at random inside it, causing it to pulsate more. The Dog, ears flattened as if it’s flying, crouches on the tiled floor and whines.

I can feel the green light flooding me, filling me with the warm static feeling that comes from thunder and sunlamps – not ultra violet, but ultra green. My mind begins to feel extremely agitated, as if it’s full of large, angry wasps buzzing around in a frenzy trying to escape. The smell of rotten eggs invades the conservatory.

I feel dizzy, gravity isn’t working properly for me, I’m going to become detached from the ground, rise up like a slow rocket, out of the hole in the conservatory roof. I forget to breathe. My whole body is being sucked up into the green jellyfish, I’m several feet off the floor.

Then, shockingly, it’s gone, disappeared – absolutely and completely – as if it was never there. The night is black again, the conservatory dismal. I look down and one ancient cactus has turned green and quick and a scarlet flower like an angel’s trumpet is slowly opening at the end of a spiny finger. I reach out to touch it and prick my own finger on a spine.

I leave the conservatory, it doesn’t feel like a dream, the steps I take seem real, the air is cold and I’m very tired. What was that? The past? The future? My people from another planet come to take me home? Surely if an alien spaceship had just spent several minutes hovering over the house someone else would have noticed? I pass Charles’ room, I can hear him snoring soundly. Poor Charles, what he wouldn’t give for these experiences. What I wouldn’t give not to have them.

If time isn’t always going forward – which apparently it isn’t in my case – then fundamental laws of physics are being broken. What about the Second Law of Thermodynamics? What about death, if it comes to that? Experimentally, I drop one of Arden’s old flower-sprigged plates on the kitchen floor where it smashes nicely. ‘What are you doing?’ a harassed-looking Debbie asks, an even more harassed-looking baby slung over her shoulder.

‘I’m just watching this plate.’ (Debbie, of all people must surely understand this.) ‘I’m conducting an experiment to see if time can move backwards – if it can, then the pieces of this plate will rise up and re-form.’ But the Second Law of Thermodynamics holds good and the plate remains in pieces on the floor.

‘You’re mad, you are,’ Debbie says, stuffing the rubber teat of a bottle into the baby’s mouth.

‘You’re one to talk,’ I say before having to rescue a choking baby. I haul it all the way up to my room and feed it lying on my bed while attempting a critical analysis on one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I don’t suppose this is how he imagined his readers. If he imagined them at all.

Mrs Baxter has had to make several adjustments already to the pink dress. ‘I swear if I watch you long enough I can
see
you grow,’ she grumbles pleasantly, letting the hem down for the second time. The dress has just made the transition to my body from the tailor’s dummy that stands guard in the corner of Mrs Baxter’s bedroom. When it was worn by the dummy it looked reasonably presentable, but on me it doesn’t look right at all somehow.

I look like a huge pink amoeba, grown to fill the whole of the cheval-mirror. Mrs Baxter, on her knees at my feet, says something unintelligible through a mouthful of pins and then starts to choke and spit all the pins out like a hail of Lilliputian arrows or a shower of elf-shot.

She cocks her head to one side like a deranged spaniel and says, ‘I thought I heard Daddy’s car.’ She shakes her spaniel-head. ‘But it’s not. I’m as mad as a mushroom, I really am. I’m growing quite dottled, I’m such a bag of nerves.’

A bag of nerves. What a truly dreadful expression that is. And what kind of a bag? A handbag, such as Mr Primrose’s Lady Bracknell might have carried? Or a soft sack (a bag of frayed nerves), like a dead cat’s body?

Mr Baxter’s baleful presence is watered down in the Baxters’ bedroom – a cut-glass ash-tray and a copy of the
Reader’s Digest
on his bedside-table and a pair of neatly folded blue-striped pyjamas on the left-hand pillow are the only indications of his presence. I can’t imagine what it must be like lying so close to ‘Daddy’ every night. Mrs Baxter’s own night attire – a pink brushed-nylon nightie – sits demurely on the right-hand pillow and a pair of pink furred slippers (‘baffies’) are parked by the side of the bed. The rest of the bedroom is sprigged and ruched in a very feminine way that must really get on Mr Baxter’s own nerves.

Mrs Baxter pins up my hem. ‘Look at me,’ she says, catching sight of herself in the mirror, ‘I look like a tattie bogle.’ She does look a bit of a mess, her hair needs a shampoo and set and her make-up is patchy, as if she put it on in the dark. It’s not helped much by the red marks on her cheekbones – like Iroquois war-paint – where Mr Baxter has punched her. ‘Silly me, I walked into a door,’ she adds, fingering her war-paint. ‘I’ve really let myself go, haven’t I?’ she says, regarding her reflection sadly. (But where has she let herself go to?)

‘There,’ Mrs Baxter says, as she puts the last pin in place in the hem of the pink dress and I twirl round to view myself, filling the cheval-mirror with whirling pink roses (for an uncomfortable second I am reminded of the young Vinny’s turquoise party dress). My mother should have been here, handing out fashion tips – telling me that pink isn’t my colour, that the roses are too full-blown and that I need a tight belt at my waist to make me look shorter. ‘Very nice, dear,’ Mrs Baxter says instead.

When the fitting of the pink dress is over we go down to the kitchen to eat cakes that are appropriate to our madness. Mushroom cakes – little pastry cups filled with sponge and topped with coffee buttercream, the butter-cream scored with a fork to look like gills and a marzipan stalk stuck in the middle. Mrs Baxter doesn’t, thank goodness, attempt to model a cake on the Death Caps that have spawned beneath the Lady Oak.

I take a cake to Audrey who’s sitting in the living-room, by the fire, with a listless look on her face. She looks at the little cake as if it was poisonous and whispers, ‘No, thanks.’ The baby’s wailing drifts on the cold wind from Arden and Audrey flinches. ‘Audrey … what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ she says miserably. (‘And … um …’ I say helplessly to Mrs Baxter, ‘how much does it cost to send a shawl surface mail to South Africa?’

‘Dearie me,’ she says with a puzzled little frown, ‘I’m not sure – it was Audrey that took it to the post for me.’) I suppose in the hatch and brood of time it might all come right.

‘I thought the baby would make everything all right,’ he mutters (I don’t think that’s how babies work), ‘but it’s just made it worse.’ Tenderly, Gordon lifts the baby from its pram and murmurs, ‘Poor thing,’ into its red-gold floss. He carries the baby upstairs and the next time I see it is through the half-open door of the second-best bedroom where it’s sleeping peacefully with the Dog lying guard by its cot. (The Dog is very subdued since it time-travelled.) We really should take it back to where it came from, or at least return it to the baby shop and explain it’s been sent to us by mistake.