Human Croquet (6 page)

Hilary and Dorothy have an older brother, Graham, also a student at Glebelands University. Graham doesn’t share his sisters’ Aryan qualities – smaller, thinner, darker than his sisters, as if Mr and Mrs Walsh were just practising when they had him.

Good-looking boys, who are studying dentistry and law and look as if they’re members of the Hitler Youth, hover around Hilary and Dorothy like wasps round a jam-jar, keen to study their biological perfection. My chances of ever being like them are zero. Next to them, I’m a chimney-sweep, a walnut-skinned beggar girl.

‘What very
black
hair you have, don’t you, Isobel?’ Hilary remarks one day (it’s unusual for Hilary to even talk to me), stroking a finger over her porcelain (‘English Rose’) cheek. ‘And such
dark
eyes! Were your parents foreign?’

Hilary stables her white pony at the farm beyond Hawthorn Close and sometimes I see her riding round the Lady Oak field. In the early morning mist she could easily be mistaken for a centaur, half-horse, half-girl.

I can see her now riding in slow dressage circles around the Lady Oak. The branches of the tree are covered in tightly budded leaves, like little green jewels. To the Druids the tree was the link between heaven and earth. What would happen if I climbed the Lady Oak, would I reach heaven, or just some everyday giant shouting
Fee-fi-fo-fum
as he chased me down again?

‘For God’s sake,’ Vinny says, as Debbie clears away the remains of the watery macaroni cheese from under her nose. Vinny snatches her plate back again. ‘You’re not even
eating
that,’ Debbie protests.

‘So?’ Vinny sneers. (Vinny would make a good adolescent.) ‘Even the dog wouldn’t eat this stuff.’ Debbie
is
a dreadful cook, it’s hard to believe that she completed a year training to be a domestic science teacher in New Zealand. What would make a good birthday repast? Roasted swan and breast of lapwing, bud of asparagus, leaf of artichoke. And desserts, desserts moulded like castles and decorated like courtesans – studded with maraschino nipples and draped in piped swags of whipped cream. Not that I would ever eat a lapwing. Nor a swan, come to that.

Against all the odds, Debbie clings to the strict blueprint for family life that she came to us with four years ago, one which she herself received carved on tablets of stone from people called ‘Mum and Dad’. ‘Dad’ was a school janitor and ‘Mum’ was a housewife and the whole family emigrated when Debbie was ten. This blueprint dictates that she must impose order on a disordered world, which she does by means of feverish housework. ‘Someone take the key out of her back,’ Vinny sighs wearily. Soon I expect we’ll find Debbie in the hearth separating lentils from the ashes.

Arden has her in its thrall. ‘This house’, she complains to Gordon, ‘has a life of its own.’ ‘Possibly,’ Gordon sighs. The house does seem to conspire against her – if she buys new curtains then a plague of moths will follow, if she puts down lino, the washing-machine will flood. Her kitchen tiles crack and fall off, the new central-heating pipes rattle and moan and bang in the night like banshees. If she polishes everything in a room then the minute she leaves, the particles of dust will come out of their hiding-places and regroup on every surface, sniggering behind their little hands. (We must imagine those things we cannot see.) The dust in Arden isn’t really dust, of course, but the talcum of the dead, a frail composite waiting to be reconstituted.

She tries to grow vegetables in the garden and produces instead mandrake-rooted carrots and green potatoes. Greenfly and blackfly crowd the air like locusts, her runner beans are stunted, her cabbages are yellow, her pea-pods empty, her lawn as blighted as a blasted heath. Over the hedge, next door, Mrs Baxter’s garden buzzes with honey-bees and is smothered in flowers – beanstalks that touch the clouds and each white curd on her cauliflowers as big as a tree.

Poor Debbie, lingering under the Fairfax curse that dictates nothing will ever go right or – to be more specific – everything will always go wrong just when it looks as if it might go right.

‘Well, someone has to do it,’ Debbie snaps at Vinny as Vinny queries the need to get up from the dining-room table to enable Debbie to polish it, ‘and it’s obviously not going to be you.’

‘Certainly bloody isn’t,’ Vinny says, refusing to move so that Debbie has to polish around her while she chews on a cigarette, revealing her crocus-coloured teeth. Always an heroic
fumeuse
(Vinny’s been kippered by nicotine), she’s recently taken to smoking roll-ups, leaving shreds of Golden Virginia in her wake wherever she goes. ‘This is disgusting!’ Debbie proclaims every time she comes across one of Vinny’s dog-ends with the life sucked out of it. ‘This is disgusting!’ Debbie proclaims as Vinny showers the macaroni cheese remains with a garnish of tobacco. ‘Disgusting is as disgusting does,’ Vinny murmurs enigmatically.

‘Now, now,’ Gordon says, for ever trying to keep the peace. And failing. Poor Gordon. He has taken the loss of the family fortunes in his stride. ‘I never wanted to be a grocer anyway,’ he says, but did he want to be a lowly pen-pusher in Glebelands Corporation town-planning department? ‘You can’t go wrong in local government jobs,’ Debbie encouraged approvingly, ‘pension schemes and regular holidays and a chance of promotion. Like Dad.’ (‘What do janitors get promoted to?’ Charles puzzled.) What did Gordon do when he was in New Zealand? He looks wistful and smiles sadly, ‘Sheep farm.’

The only thing in the whole world that Debbie wants is the thing she cannot have. A baby. It appears that she is infertile (‘Barren!’ Vinny crows). ‘Something wrong with my tubes,’ Debbie explains (in less biblical terms) to all and sundry, ‘women’s trouble.’ Tubes! I think of Debbie as a great Underground map – instead of nerves and veins and arteries perhaps she has the Metropolitan and the District and Circle.

‘It’s the curse of the Fairfaxes,’ Charles tells her cheerfully.

To compensate for not being pregnant, Debbie seems to be growing fatter and fatter. She’s like a big plumped-up cushion on legs. Her wedding ring is cutting into her finger and she’s developed a cascade of little chins. Her inability to spawn is in stark contrast to the empire of cats in Arden (Vinny is their queen) which is expanding exponentially.

Elemanzer, one of Vinny’s feline cohorts, entwines itself with playful malevolence around Mr Rice’s ankles under the table. He gives her a swift kick and leers at me, ‘Sweet sixteen, eh?’, wiping macaroni cheese off his greasy lips. Mr Rice, the lodger who will not leave, has lately grown almost intimate with Vinny – sharing a glass of Madeira and a game of bezique every Friday evening. ‘You don’t think they have a
physical
relationship, do you?’ Debbie whispers in horror to Gordon and Gordon snorts with laughter, ‘When time goes backward.’

Mr Rice gives a little scream as the cat claws his leg in retaliation but must stifle it with his napkin or there will be trouble from Vinny.

A more comforting smell than birthday cake greets me in Sithean. ‘Marmalade,’ Mrs Baxter says, scumming honey-coloured froth off the sugary mess bubbling in her big copper pan. The marmalade’s the colour of tawny amber and melted lions. ‘The very last of the Sevilles,’ she says sadly as if the Sevilles were some great aristocratic family whose fortunes had failed. ‘Have a wee stir of the jeely-pan,’ Mrs Baxter urges, handing me a long-handled wooden spoon, ‘and make a wish. Go on wish, wish,’ she says like a demented fairy godmother.

‘For whatever I want?’

‘Absolutely.’ (I wish, naturally, for sex with Malcolm Lovat.)

‘You could be having a party,’ Mrs Baxter says, ‘or playing a game.’ Mrs Baxter would have us playing games all the time if she could. She has a book –
The Home Entertainer
(of which she’s very fond) – a relic of the happy childhood she once had and a book that can provide a game for every occasion. ‘Indoor pastimes,’ she says, nodding happily as she stirs the marmalade, an ‘April the First Party’ maybe? ‘An April the First Party,’ she reads from the book, ‘is often highly amusing, for all the world loves a fool. You must be careful, however, that the guests are congenial and chosen carefully.’ This seems like sound advice to me.

Audrey is sitting hunched up at the kitchen table writing labels methodically in her neat handwriting –
‘Marmalade – April ‘60’
– her golden-red hair escaping in a fine halo around her hairline. She looks up and gives me her lovely melon slice of a smile, always a surprise, like sunshine coming out from behind a sombre cloud.

Mrs Baxter pours the hot marmalade in one long shower of gold into gleaming glass jars. Mrs Baxter is a hedgecomber, her pantry’s crammed full with jams and jellies and cheeses of every different kind – crabapple jelly and damson cheese, strawberry conserve and elderberry, rosehip syrup and sloe gin.

When the world has grown into eternal winter and the honeycombs are locked in ice and the sugar canes are withered, at least there will be Mrs Baxter’s jam to cheer us up.

I turn round to close Mrs Baxter’s gate and when I turn back round again – the most extraordinary thing imaginable – everything familiar has vanished – instead of standing on the pavement I’m standing in a field. The streets, the houses, the orderly lines of trees are all gone. Only the Lady Oak and the church – clustered around with a huddle of old cottages – remain. It’s the same place and yet it isn’t, how can that be?

I know from Charles’ paranormal research that it’s quite a common thing to suddenly disappear while crossing a field. Perhaps it’s about to happen to me? I feel suddenly dizzy as if the planet’s started to spin faster and I have an overwhelming desire to lie down on the earth and cling to the grass to stop myself being flung off the planet. Or the other possibility, of course – that I’m going to be sucked down through the grass and into the soil and never be seen again for seven years.

I’m relieved to see a figure advancing towards me – a man in a long astrakhan-trimmed overcoat and derby hat. He looks odd but harmless, he certainly doesn’t look like an alien about to abduct me, instead he tips his hat as he draws near and enquires politely after my well-being. In his hand he’s carrying sheaves of paper – maps and plans – and he waves them at me enthusiastically. ‘It’s going to be a wonderful year,’ he says. ‘An
annus mirabilis
as these so-called educated folk say. Right here,’ he booms, stamping his foot firmly on the muddy grass where Arden’s big hawthorn hedge was growing a moment ago, ‘right here I’m going to build an excellent house,’ and he laughs uproariously as if this was a great joke.

I find my voice which has been lost for some minutes, ‘And what year is this exactly, please?’

He looks startled. ‘Year? Why 1918, of course. What year do you think it is? And soon,’ he continues, ‘there are going to be houses. Everywhere you look, there will be houses, young lady,’ and he walks on, still laughing, marching on his way in the direction of Lythe Church, climbs over a wall and disappears.

Then I find my feet are back on the pavement and the trees and houses are all back in place.

I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am. Jings and help me Boab, as Mrs Baxter would say.