Living In Perhaps (12 page)

They never ask the right questions in here. They never look at the
broader picture
. How can you hope to find out about a person by
asking trite questions and drawing the obvious conclusions?

When archaeologists dig up a skeleton, there's a certain amount
they can find out: the sex of the person, an approximate age at
death, maybe what they died of, some injuries or diseases they
suffered in life. If they're lucky, and really industrious, they may
be able to determine their status, how they were dressed and what
kind of burial they had, what their diet was. And what does this
tell us? Not a whole lot. Look at a skeleton and there is no means
of knowing what that person felt when those empty eye sockets
were still able to see, when inside that skull there was a brain to
think with. It seems to me that it's just foolishness to pretend that
you can know anything about them.

People have done that to me. They looked at the skeletal shape
of my life and they've drawn their own conclusions. They
sketched in a few facts and left out so much it took my breath
away. They should have taken the broader view.

Even someone as tenuous as Uncle Bob can have an effect on
you. But they're incapable of following the thread that brings
Uncle Bob to me, to the Hennessys, and wraps us all in a loop. Do
they ask about Uncle Bob? Uncle
who
? See what I mean?

We never went to visit my mother's brother, Uncle Bob. He
always came to us, a maximum of once a year, if that. I have a
memory of him in shirtsleeves in the back garden one summer.
Just like a snapshot, and over-exposed at that, his white shirt and
cheekbones and forearms blinding. But all the other years he
came at Christmas.

He hadn't got a wife, and if he had a girlfriend he took great
care to keep her hidden from us. He came singular, bachelor
Uncle Bob, placid and cheerful. If the family had ever entertained
hopes of Uncle Bob taking Stella off their hands, these had been
ground into dust long before Brian and I came on the scene.
There was no tension between Bob and Stella, no mutual anything
when they were in the same room. Bob was always his usual
pale and beaming self, Stella's mind on someone else entirely.

He stayed for just the two days, always arriving on Christmas
Eve evening and departing on Boxing Day straight after breakfast.
Cunning Uncle Bob. Christmas for us was a time of frantic
church-going. I don't know how a household that was so driven
by the Christmas spirit could embody so little seasonal cheer. We
spent half the holiday in church thanking God and welcoming the
arrival of the Little Baby Jesus, and the rest of it thanking relatives
and welcoming the arrival of the end of the whole business. But
long ago Bob must have turned his bland, round face up to our
mother and said, 'You don't mind, do you, Edie, if I don't come
with you?' And that was it. He never had to go. He stayed at
home, with the newspapers and his pipe and a roaring fire, with
instructions about the oven setting, wearing new carpet slippers
he had (most likely) bought for himself, and free to tuck, unhindered,
into the box of Turkish delight he had brought for us.
If I had a Christmas wish, perhaps it was to be Uncle Bob. Just for
the day. Or two days, at the most.

My mother should have enjoyed the Christmas morning
service. After all, it was her choice to be there, not ours. But she
was always tortured by thoughts of the dinner to come, worrying
what was happening to the turkey. Was it turning as dry as a bone,
or exploding in flames? I couldn't see how this could happen,
short of the turkey climbing out of the oven, rubbing its bony
little wings together in glee and turning up the dial itself, then
jumping back in. Bob was at home, Bob who fended for himself
on the other three hundred and sixty-three days of the year, surely
Bob could babysit an oven-ready turkey without it immolating
itself or him or the whole bungalow? But I was aware of Mum
clutching her carol sheet very tightly and singing in that high
cracked voice which showed the strain. Why is it that you can
always rely on the voice of your own parent to ring out over all the
others, a beat in front or a beat behind?

Her attitude to the domestic – as opposed to the sacred –
Christmas was 'Well, at least
that's
over,' at every stage. The
shopping, the wrapping, the sending of cards. The buying of
ingredients and slopping them all together to make a cake, weeks
and weeks beforehand. Covering the cake with the hard white
paste of royal icing, days and days beforehand. She would whip up
the surface into a snowstorm with the blade of a knife dipped in
hot water, and settle the little wooden robin on top. The last act
was to place the silver plastic letters spelling out A MERRY
CHRISTMAS firmly in the centre. Then she'd stand back for half
a second to admire her handiwork grimly, and say, dusting her
hands together, 'At least
that's
done.' When we rushed to open our
stockings in the morning: 'Well, now
that's
over, we can get ready
for church.' The dinner, the exchange of family presents
afterwards. She leaped on the discarded wrapping paper,
snatching it up before it could begin to make a mess. My father
sometimes got to the point of saying, 'Sit still, Edie. You make a
rod for your own back.' But 'If I don't pick it up now, it'll only get
rammed down between the cushions,' she insisted, smoothing
out the best bits. The best bits were always Uncle Bob's, because
he bought new wrapping paper every year, unlike us, who
saved it up from Christmas to Christmas, peeling off last season's
sticky labels and snipping away the jagged edges. We thanked
Bob for our presents, and he thanked us. 'Well!' my mother
said, satisfied at last. 'Now
that's
over, how about a cup of tea?'

There was a routine to Christmas entertaining, as there was to
everything else. Stella and Gloria, Eddy (if not on the high seas),
Mandy and Bettina would join us for tea on Christmas evening,
and we would join them for tea on Boxing Day, when everyone
was too full to eat much anyway. This meant that neither household
had to buy and cook an
enormous
turkey, only a
large
one.
Bettina was always left out of the obligations, being a woman on
her own, and had a standing invitation to Christmas dinner at
Gloria's. Tea, on either day, was mince pies and bread and butter
and pickles and cold ham. And Christmas crackers, at generous
Gloria's, and old silver threepenny bits pressed into what was left
of the cold pud. My mother frowned on such frivolities. Perhaps
it was because they were pagan. She could barely bring herself to
have a tree – 'Needles all over the carpet!' – and was one of the
first to buy a modern artificial Christmas tree, with leaves of
shredded crispy paper and branches of palsied wire. What I hated
most were its red plastic feet. We had to place our presents around
its
red plastic feet
, which were like two clothes hangers joined at
the hip. Why not, I complained, supply it in a plastic tub, with
clean plastic earth, and a jolly red plasticized ribbon tied round it?
'Stop moaning,' I was told. 'Christmas is a time of goodwill.' We
wired our Christmas fairy to the tree's three-foot-high top, and
arranged the bells and baubles solemnly. 'It's for
the children
,' our
mother intoned to the relatives. 'I wouldn't bother having one at
all if it was
only us
.'

I didn't know then what secrets lay behind this modest claim.

The Hennessys went to church at Christmas, or most of them did.
They went to midnight mass, a giggling, excited pack of them,
Patrick's breath reeking of good cheer, leaving Tillie at home to
stuff stockings and turkeys and keep the reindeers' hooves from
breaking the roof lights of Patrick's attic studio.

None of this was known to me first-hand. I was next door,
dining with simple Christian folk.

*

'It's all very well for Bob ...' This phrase would always surface
some time in the days after Christmas, usually from my father. He
never finished it off, or explained how it arose, but there was a
distinct feeling that it
was
all very well for Bob. He came to us as
a guest in our home, and not for him the washing-up, the fetching
of coal, or the making of pots and pots of tea. He judged finely
how infrequently to say, 'Let me do that for you,' to which my
mother, with a shocked expression, would reply, 'No, you sit
down, Bob. You're a
guest
.'

My father wasn't so sure. I saw him gaze round sometimes, restless,
as if he thought that Bob might just be able to lift that tea
towel, if put to the test, or carry the dishes as far as the kitchen
hatch. I could see him thinking, even before Boxing Day morning
had arrived,
It's all very well for Bob
. Bob with his purpose-built
flat with every mod con purposely built in; no garden for Bob to
worry about, up there on the top floor. No wife or children to get
on his nerves, or drain his pockets, or press him with trivial
questions – 'How long is an ell, Dad?' or 'When are you going to
creosote that shed?' There Bob sat, with the newspaper open on
his lap and his long legs comfortably stretched out, toes warming
by the fire, and nothing we children did or our mother said or our
father implied by twitches of his head or the rearranging of small
coins in his pockets ever impinged on Bob's sanguine composure.
I used to keep an eye on his big-slippered reflection in the convex
mirror hanging on the chimney breast, and he barely stirred.

And where did Bob sleep? Why, on the settee. No worry that
Bob might wreck the upholstery or ram something uncalled-for
between the cushions. For two nights Bob slept with a full
complement of blankets and eiderdowns and pillows
(redistributed from
our
beds, since we had no occasion to keep
spares), with the added warmth of the sinking coals in the glassy
fish-tank of the Parkray. So it was certainly all very well for Bob.

At some point in his career with the roof-tile and piping
company, he was allocated a company car, which he grandly
parked in our drive overnight. He and my father would go and
admire it every year, talking of fuel consumption and road holding
and cubic capacity. In the years when the old model had been
replaced by a new one, they spent almost as long contemplating it
in the freezing air as my mother did, in the humid kitchen, stuffing
the turkey. And whatever Bob said, in encouraging terms like
'You really ought to think about getting one like that yourself,'
or 'You can't beat it for acceleration,' or even (in consolation) 'Of
course, it's not really a
family
car,' I knew what Dad was thinking.
It's all very well for Bob.

The good thing about Uncle Bob was that he would often bring
us presents we might actually want. His idea of boys and girls was
gleaned from toyshop windows, which was not a bad place to
start, from our point of view. The other things we got tended to
be useful, things we would have needed anyway. Certainly mine
were: a pen and pencil set, new socks and handkerchiefs, a hairbrush,
a purse with my initial on it; never anything exciting. Brian
was given more toy-like presents – Airfix kits, packs of balsa wood
and glue, penknives with numerous useful attachments – though
there was always an element of virtuous work in them. Even so, I
was jealous.

The best present that Uncle Bob gave Brian was the
International Spy Kit. It had a code book and a set of false
moustaches; a handy booklet with instructions, like how to make
invisible ink, and helpful tips, such as how to follow someone
without them getting suspicious. It didn't tell you how to kill a
man with a single blow or where you might obtain a false passport.
Then there was a magnifying glass, a fountain pen that
turned out to house a secret blade, and a set of (plastic) skeleton
keys. The secret blade was as blunt as a butter knife, but Brian
took it down to the shed to try and work up an edge.

The most useful item was the magnifying glass. Brian tried it
out on ants' nests and spiders' webs and the back of his friend
Pete's hand. He had more luck with little heaps of dry grass. If he
was lucky and the sun stayed out, if he waited long enough and
got the angle right, the spot of light intensified. A tiny curl of
smoke, and the grass stems bent and crumpled into flame. Then
he'd look up at me with a happy gleam in his eye.

The skeleton keys were no good at all.

Looking back, I think we could have picked up clues to Bob's
secret love life from the presents he gave us. The year we had
wonderful things from Hamley's Toyshop in Regent Street (price
tags still attached) must have been the year he had a girlfriend he
was trying to impress, a metropolitan sort of woman. He was
showing her his generous side, his ability to be extravagant when
the occasion demanded it, his kindness to children, his good
family-man credentials. The year we had identical puzzle books
was the year of the out-of-hand office party, the bad hangover, the
passing regrets, the dash to buy something – anything – in a petrol
station on the way.

Although we opened our presents under his gaze, after
Christmas we always had to write thank-you letters to Uncle Bob.
Our mother made us. It was because, she said, he lived
away
,
implying that we spent the weeks after Christmas continually
thanking our nearby relatives every time we saw them. Which of
course we didn't. By mutual consent we drew a hasty veil over the
embarrassing subject.

One year Bob gave me a dictionary and a thesaurus, a matching
boxed pair. None of us even knew what a thesaurus was. I
thought it sounded like some kind of prehistoric monster.

'Now that's a useful present,' my mother said, with her damning
praise. She didn't know. She didn't know how useful I found
it, how truly grateful I was. I didn't mind writing the thank-you
letter for this present. I strewed it with
words
, like a spy sending a
message to his masters back home, so that Bob would know how
unusually welcome his present was. 'I will
endeavour
to
utilize
your gift, dear Uncle Bob,' I wrote, and 'I hope you had an
eventful
journey back to Basingstoke. We all trust you enjoyed the
festal
occasion ...'