Human Croquet (28 page)
As we walk along Chestnut Avenue, a very weird thing starts to happen. Every time we walk towards a lamppost, the light starts flashing on and off. When we’ve passed it, it stops flashing – and the next one ahead of us begins to flash instead. On-off-on-off.
We stop-start along Chestnut Avenue, testing each lamppost, trying to work out some pattern. Are they signalling something to us? Is my body interfering with the national grid in some way? (My body electric.) Or Vinny’s? I explain to Vinny that the doors of perception are hanging crazily off their hinges these days.
I am at odds with the material world – every day confirms some new alienation. Perhaps I
am
from another planet, I think glumly, as we approach the church hall, and my alien compatriots are trying to send me morse code via the streetlamps.
double entendre
and Eunice and her anonymous other half hoof clumsily to the music provided by a Boy’s Brigade drummer and a couple of brass band rejects who play cheerful, tinny music at such a lick that even the village lads and lassies can’t keep time, let alone the poor cow. (Do you keep time in the same place that you save it? If so why is it so difficult to find? It must be in a very safe place. Gordon’s always doing that, going around with a puzzled expression looking for something he can’t find, saying, ‘But I remember putting it in a safe place.’)
Wearily, I pick up the bottle and plug the baby with it.
‘Hers,’
he says in a wretched voice. A thrill goes through my whole body, at last he’s going to tell me about Eliza. About how beautiful she was, how much he loved her, how happy they were, what a terrible mistake it was when she walked off, how she always meant to come back –
Instead I can feel his gaze through the gloom as he says in a flat voice, ‘I killed your mother.’
‘Pardon?’
The fire brigade were already there and a lot of people standing around. Somebody said, ‘There’s people inside, you know.’ Gordon could smell the gas from the fractured pipes but he walked into the broken house, thinking that it must have had a grand entrance before it was bombed – columns lay broken across the vestibule and a length of intricate plaster cornice tripped him up. He started choking on the dust and suddenly felt very sober. She was standing there, veiled in dust so that you might have thought she was a life-sized statue fallen from a niche, but he could tell she wasn’t a statue because she smiled at him and Gordon lifted her up in his arms and carried her out.
Outside he put her down very gently, as if she might break if he was too rough with her. When he asked her if she was all right, instead of answering, she put out a hand and fingered one of the lapels on his greatcoat and smiled again – a strange smile, very inward-seeming, as if she had an amusing secret that she wasn’t about to tell him.
He took his coat off and wrapped her up in it and she looked up at him, straight in his eyes in a way that strangers never did, and whispered,
My hero.
And the rest of the world around them may as well have disappeared because the only thing Gordon could see were her tragic, exotic eyes and the only thing he could hear was the husky notes of her peculiar voice saying,
My shoe, I’ve lost my shoe,
and Gordon laughed and dashed back into the bombed-out building and actually found the shoe. He knew it was ridiculous but he didn’t care. She put a hand on his shoulder to steady herself while she put the shoe on. Her grimy naked foot was slim with a ballerina’s arch and blood-red toe-nails – erotic and incongruous amongst the broken limbs and wreckage that was accumulating around them. One poor chap was brought out on a stretcher past them as dead as a doornail. ‘Did you know him?’ Gordon asked her sympathetically but she just shook her head sadly,
Never seen him before.
Gordon was afraid she was going to walk away now she had her shoe and he knew this was urgent. He knew this was an important moment in his life, perhaps the most important – full of meaning that he couldn’t quite decipher. He was going to have to seize the moment, it would be the end of everything if he made a mess of it. He offered her his arm, ‘Can I take you for a cup of tea? There’s a café round the corner?’
The age of chivalry is alive and well,
she laughed, and took his arm and he could feel how she was shaking all over, like a leaf.
Of course, darling,
when he asked her to marry him. Just like that, so that he was frightened because nothing this wonderful could ever last. It would drive you mad if it did. And it made him as free as being in the blue sky over this tiny green country, gave him power over his mother, over Arden, over the whole world. To begin with.
Eliza stopped time. She took you into some bright circle with her where everything stopped, time and fear, even war. ‘Cheap glamour,’ Vinny muttered over the sacks of flour in the storeroom. ‘Oh no,’ the Widow said balefully, ‘it comes very expensive, believe me.’ It clutched at the Widow’s strong heart to see her own perfect manly Gordon being fooled by something as tawdry as sex. How could he be so gullible? So stupid? It pained her that he couldn’t look at his own mother and see the pattern of a good woman, but that instead he’d been seduced by all that knowingness.
Gordon had to feel sorry for his mother because it was obvious that she’d never experienced anything like this, not that he wanted for one minute to think of his mother like this and even if he wanted to think about it he would have been incapable of imagining it. His mother may have been young once (although he couldn’t imagine that either) but she had surely never been like Eliza.
The look of her – the seed-pearls of sweat that glistened on her pale apricot-fruit skin, the damp tendrils of hair sticking to the back of her long neck, the faint down on her thin, round arms, the perfect white half moons of her fingernails (rarely glimpsed except when she was removing her nail varnish), the lazy smile. The smell of her – perfume and tobacco and sex. The taste of her – perfume and tobacco and sex and salt-sweat.
Sometimes he lay awake half the night just watching her sleeping, pulling back the sheets and studying the different parts of her body, the neglected inner crease behind a knee, a perfect clavicle – thin like a hare-bone, the fragrant inside of her wrist with its vulnerable dark blue veins. Once he took her nail scissors and clipped a curl from her hair without her knowing and felt strangely guilty for days afterwards.
You wouldn’t find her match anywhere in Glebelands, in the whole of the north (‘Not outside of a brothel anyway,’ Vinny wrote to Madge).
