Human Croquet (39 page)

‘Stop it,’ she hissed at him.

‘Why should I bloody stop it? Admit it, you’re having an affair.’

‘You’re hurting me. Gordon!’ He
was
hurting her, he had his hands round her throat, pressing her windpipe, she began to struggle, he was frightening her. ‘Admit it,’ he growled, his voice unnatural. He let go of her throat. ‘Admit it, you’ve been unfaithful, haven’t you? And before me,’ he said suddenly, ‘were there a lot of men? There must have been a lot of men, weren’t there?’

‘Yes,’ she spat at him, ‘there were absolutely hundreds, I’ve no idea how many!’

He slapped her face, ‘Liar!’ and she kneed him hard in the groin so that he crouched down on the forest floor, gasping. Immediately Eliza felt sorry, gave him her hand, pulled him up, said, ‘Oh, Gordon,’ sadly, ‘you’re such a fool.’ She wanted to tell him everything, sink onto his breast, feel the shelter of his arms around her, find redemption in this awful world. She leant her back against a tree and said blankly, without emotion, ‘I was a whore, a common or garden whore who got paid for it. I fucked anyone who paid me, darling.’ She could hear her voice, knew her tone was all wrong, couldn’t do anything about it, she was so tired.

Gordon grabbed hold of her hair either side of her head and crashed her head backwards against the tree. She sank down on to her knees, on to the carpet of golden leaves and Gordon ran off through the trees, wildly, like a mad disciple of the great god Pan.

‘Oh it’s you,’ she said coldly, trying to pretend she wasn’t frightened. But she was. ‘What are
you
doing here? You’ve followed me, haven’t you? This has to stop—’ Eliza’s voice grew more high-pitched, terror crept over her, she broke out into a cold sweat, he was mad, unhinged.

She tried to pull herself together, to placate him. ‘Come on, let’s go back and find the path, let’s be sensible, Peter, darling – please…’ Eliza wasn’t very good at pleading, she knew it was no good. He had one of her shoes in his hand. She looked down at her feet in surprise, she only had one shoe on. He lifted the shoe up, it had a very thin heel, her heart was fluttering, it was trying to escape from the cage of her ribs, she was clammy all over, her body felt as if it was going to shut down with fear.

Her feet wouldn’t move, she had to move, she turned and started to run but he was on top of her, hitting her with the shoe on the back of the head. ‘If I can’t have you,’ he said breathlessly, ‘then nobody will, you bloody whore.’ She cried out and dropped to her knees and started to crawl away. She looked back. He was lighting his pipe, very calmly, as if he was in his living-room at home. Eliza thought maybe that was the end of it, maybe he’d got rid of his anger now and would leave her alone. She crawled further away, further into the forest.

She was beneath a tree, kneeling on a carpet of leaves and acorns. A golden leaf drifted down past her eyes and brushed her cheek. Eliza struggled into a sitting position, her back against the stout trunk of the tree. For a moment she couldn’t see him, but just when she thought he must have gone, he stepped out from behind a tree. The aura of madness around him was a sulphurous yellow and he was grinning like a skeleton. ‘I am older than you, you know,’ he laughed, ‘and I do know more.’

‘Please,’ Eliza whispered. She was shivering uncontrollably. She was so very cold. ‘Please don’t,’ but he grabbed hold of a handful of hair and yanked her head forward and began to hit her skull again with the heel of the brown shoe, grunting with the effort. Again and again he hit her, long after the trees around grew dim and Eliza had slipped into blackness. Then he walked away, discarding the shoe like an old piece of paper.

He bought her in Paris. You can always buy children. Gypsies probably—

I drift out of a heavy drug-induced sleep. ‘Where’s the woman in the other bed gone?’

‘Who?’ the brown-haired nurse says absently, preoccupied by a syringe she’s about to jab me with.

‘The woman in the other bed.’ The bed is neatly made and empty.

The nurse furrows her brow. ‘There hasn’t been anybody in that bed.’

‘I’ve seen you taking her temperature and talking to her.’

‘Me?’ the nurse laughs.

She frowns. ‘April twenty-third, I think.’

‘April twenty-third?’ Can I really have lost that much time? ‘Really?’

‘I know,’ she says with a smile, ‘we lost you for a couple of weeks there, didn’t we?’ She fills up the water jug on my bedside locker, smoothes the sheets and looks at my chart and says, ‘That’s right – you came on the first of April, that’s over three weeks you’ve been here now.’

‘The first of April?’ I repeat, puzzled, but she’s gone and I’m soon asleep again. I think I must be catching up on all the sleep I’ve been deprived of over the years. Or maybe I’m turning into a cat.

When I wake up there’s a student doctor investigating my chart and trying to look as if he knows what he’s doing. He smiles encouragingly when he sees I’m awake. ‘What year is it?’ – a familiar question somehow – I mumble at him. He looks disconcerted, ‘1960.’

‘April twenty-third, 1960?’

‘Yes.’

It’s still happening then. Or is it? I fall asleep, I just cannot keep my eyes open.

‘How did I get here?’ I ask a staff nurse when she brings me my lunch.

‘In an ambulance.’

‘A tree fell on you.’

‘A tree fell on me?’

‘That old elder by your back door, it was rotten and your dad was chopping it down. It fell the wrong way or something. It was really windy.’

‘It was your birthday too,’ Carmen adds sympathetically, trying to inhale a sweet cigarette.

‘They thought you were going to die,’ Eunice carries on, ‘they had to give you the kiss of life.’

‘Better than the kiss of death,’ Carmen says, nodding her head sagely.

‘An ambulanceman?’

‘No, Debbie.’

‘Debbie?’

‘Debbie.’

Mr Rice, on the other hand, in this alternative version of events, is still with us, as is the Dog (‘He appeared on the doorstep one day,’ Charles says, so that much is the same). The baby, however, is non-existent. Where has it gone to? (Where did it come from?)

Eunice shrugs, ‘Who knows? The police say it happens all the time. People just walking out of their lives.’ And so it does.

It’s as if reality is the same, and yet … not the same. So, it was my comatose brain that played tricks on me, not time? Yes, says the neurologist. Although, actually – as Vinny kindly informs me – I have many of the symptoms of fly agaric poisoning, especially the hallucinations and the death-like sleep. Gey queer, as Mrs Baxter would say.

I suppose reality is a relative kind of thing, like time. Maybe there can be more than one version of reality – what you see depends on where you’re standing. Take Mr Baxter’s death, for example, perhaps there are other versions. Imagine—

At first Mrs Baxter couldn’t take it in, how could Daddy do such a thing? But then something in her, a little voice, a tiny whisper, said – yes, this is just what Daddy would do.

Mrs Baxter would like to cut her throat in the middle of Glebelands’ market square so that everyone can see how she’s failed to protect poor wee Audrey, see what a bad mother she’s been. But not as bad a mother as he’s been a father.

Audrey is all tucked up in bed now, like a small child, with blankets and hot-water bottles and aspirin and Mrs Baxter’s in the kitchen making Daddy’s tea. His favourite – mushroom soup. She makes Daddy’s soup with a lot of care, slicing the onions into moons and stirring them round and round in the frothing yellow butter. The fragrance of onions and butter filling the kitchen, drifting out of the open door into the April garden. From the cooker she can see the lilac outside the window, its purple heads still hanging wet and heavy from this morning’s shower of rain.

When the new-moon onions are soft and yellow Mrs Baxter adds the mushrooms, little cultivated buttons that she’s wiped and chopped in quarters. When they’re all nicely coated in butter she adds the big flat horse-field mushrooms that grow in the corner of the Lady Oak field, like huge gilled plates, their dark brown the colour of the earth. She stirs the fleshy slices around until they begin to wilt a little and then she adds the olive-coloured fungi that also grow in the field but are not nearly so common – a treat for Daddy, for this is Mrs Baxter’s special recipe for mushroom soup.

As she stirs and stirs Mrs Baxter thinks about Audrey upstairs in her child’s bed and thinks of Daddy creeping into that bed. Then she puts some water in the pan, not too much, and salts it with tears and sprinkles in pepper. Then she puts the lid on and leaves it to simmer.

When the soup is cooked, Mrs Baxter whirrs it around in the liquidizer attachment on her Kenwood, taking each pureéed batch of soup and placing it in a nice clean pot. And then when all the soup is smooth she adds some sherry (‘just a wee drappy’) and half a pint of cream, then leaves it to keep warm on the stove. This is such a special soup that Mrs Baxter makes
crouûtons
, crisp golden cubes that she scatters on top of the bowl of soup, along with a handful of parsley.

‘Mm,’ says Mr Baxter, coming into the kitchen and taking off his bicycle clips, ‘that smells good.’ Mrs Baxter is so unused to getting compliments from Mr Baxter that she blushes.

Mr Baxter enjoys his soup. He eats alone at the dining-room table, listening to the six o’clock news on the radio. After his soup Mrs Baxter serves him lamb chops and mashed potatoes and minted peas and for his pudding a golden, steaming, syrup sponge-pudding in a sea of yellow Bird’s custard.

‘Why aren’t you eating?’ he asks her and she says that she’ll get a bite to eat later because she’s had one of her headaches all day and is ‘fair-scunnered’. Daddy doesn’t express any sympathy, or even interest.

Mrs Baxter takes some sponge-pudding and custard up to Audrey in her bedroom and feeds it to her like she did when Audrey was a baby. Then she gives her a mug of hot milk and two of her sleeping tablets.

It is growing dark by this time and Mr Baxter has gone upstairs to his study to do some marking.

Mrs Baxter washes up all the pots and pans, scouring them with bleach and wire-wool and then cleans the kitchen, wiping everything down with hot water and Flash. Then she gives the cat a saucer of milk and sits at the kitchen table and has a wee cuppie.

By this time she can hear Mr Baxter groaning in agony, vomiting (‘boaking’) in the upstairs toilet. She thinks she might just have another cup of tea before she goes upstairs to see how he’s doing. He’s not doing very well – writhing in agony on the floor of his study, his face a dreadful colour, his muscles in spasm. He splutters something unintelligible and Mrs Baxter kneels down on the carpet to hear him better. ‘What’s that, Daddy?’ He seems to be querying what has happened to him and Mrs Baxter explains, very gently, that it must be the Death Caps having an effect.

Mr Baxter isn’t going to get better, there is no antidote to Mrs Baxter’s special soup, so she takes his well-oiled service revolver from the secret drawer of his desk and puts him out of his misery. The same happened to their old cat, the vet had to put him down after he’d eaten rat poison. Mrs Baxter always suspected that it was Daddy who put the rat poison down.

The noise from the gun is tremendous, a crack that echoes around the streets of trees. Mrs Baxter wipes the gun clean and puts Daddy’s fingers round it and then lets it drop to the floor. Poor Audrey is woken from her drugged sleep by the report of the gun and comes in the room and sees Daddy lying in a pool of his own blood. She doesn’t flinch.

Trevor Randall, the young policeman who is first on the scene, used to go to Mr Baxter’s school. Mr Baxter used to beat Trevor a great deal with his strap and Trevor has no kind feelings about him. ‘Suicide then,’ he says.

‘Suicide,’ says the coroner. It was so obvious that Mr Baxter had died because he’d lost his head that no-one ever looked at the contents of his stomach. Real right justice. Done.