Mischief (7 page)

Edgar, Minette, Minnie and Mona. Quite enough to be getting on with.

Minette started going to a psychotherapist once a week. Edgar said she had to; she was impossible without. She burned the dinner once or twice – ‘how hostile you are,’ said Edgar, and after that cooked all meals himself, without reference to anyone’s tastes, habits, or convenience. Still, he did know best. Minette, Minnie and Mona adapted themselves splendidly. He was an admirable cook, once you got used to garlic with everything, from eggs to fish.

Presently, Minette went back to work. Well, Edgar could hardly be expected to pay for the psychotherapist, and in any case, electricity and gas bills having doubled even in a household almost without domestic appliances, there was no doubt her earnings came in useful. Presently, Minette was paying all the household bills – and had promotion. She became a group head with twenty people beneath her. She dealt with clients, executives, creative people, secretaries, assistants, with ease and confidence. Compared to Edgar and home, anyone, anything was easy. But that was only to be expected. Edgar was real life. Advertising agencies – and Edgar was right about this – are make-believe. Shut your eyes, snap your fingers, and presto, there one is, large as life. (That is, if you have the right, superficial, rubbishy attitude to make it happen.) And of course, its employees and contacts can be easily manipulated and modified, as dolls can be, in a doll’s house. Edgar was not surprised at Minette’s success. It was only to be expected. And she never remembered to turn off the lights, and turned up the central heating much too high, being irritatingly sensitive to cold.

Even tonight, this hot sultry night, with the temperature still lingering in the eighties and lightning crackling round the edges of the sky, she shivers.

‘You can’t be cold,’ he enquires. He is buying a property from Minnie. He owns both Get Out of Jail cards, and has had a bank error in his favour of £200. Minnie is doing nicely, on equal bargaining terms with her father. Minette’s in jail again.

‘It’s just so dark out there,’ she murmurs.

‘Of course it is,’ he said. ‘It’s the country. You miss the town, don’t you?’ It is an accusation, not a statement.

The cottage is on a hillside: marsh above and below, interrupting the natural path from the summit to the valley. The windows are open front and back as if to offer least interruption, throwing the house and its inhabitants open to the path of whatever forces flow from the top to the bottom of hills. Or so Minette suspects. How can she say so? She, the town dweller, the obfuscate, standing between Edgar and the light of his expectations, his sensitivity to the natural life forces which flow between the earth and him.

Edgar has green fingers, no doubt about it. See his tomatoes in the window-box of his Museum Street gallery? What a triumph!

‘Couldn’t we have the windows closed?’ she asks.

‘What for?’ he enquires. ‘Do
you
want the windows closed, Minnie?’

Minnie shrugs, too intent on missing her father’s hotel on Northumberland Avenue to care one way or the other. Minnie has a fierce competitive spirit. Edgar, denying his own, marvels at it. ‘Why do you want to shut out the night?’ Edgar demands.

‘I don’t,’ Minette protests. But she does. Yes, she does. Mona stirs and whimpers upstairs: Minette wants to go to her, close her windows, stop the dark rose heads nodding, whispering distress, but how can she? It is Minette’s turn to throw the dice. Her hand trembles. Another five. Chance. You win £10, second prize in beauty contest.

‘Not with your nose in that condition,’ says Edgar, and laughs. Minnie and Minette laugh as well. ‘And your cheeks the colour of poor Mona’s. Still, one is happy to know there is a natural justice.’

A crack of thunder splits the air; one second, two seconds, three seconds – and there’s the lightning, double-forked, streaking down to the oak-blurred ridge of hills in front of the house.

‘I love storms,’ says Edgar. ‘It’s coming this way.’

‘I’ll just go and shut Mona’s window,’ says Minette.

‘She’s perfectly all right,’ says Edgar. ‘Stop fussing and for God’s sake stay out of jail. You’re casting a gloom, Minette. There’s no fun in playing if one’s the only one with hotels.’ As of course Edgar is, though Minnie’s scattering houses up and down the board.

Minette lands on Community. A £20 speeding fine or take a Chance. She takes a Chance. Pay £150 in school fees.

The air remains dry and still. Thunder and lightning, though monstrously active, remain at their distance, the other side of the hills. The front door creaks silently open, of its own volition. Not a whisper of wind – only the baked parched air.

‘Ooh,’ squeaks Minnie, agreeably frightened.

Minette is dry-mouthed with terror, staring at the black beyond the door.

‘A visitor,’ cries Edgar. ‘Come in, come in,’ and he mimes a welcome to the invisible guest, getting to his feet, hospitably pulling back the empty ladderback chair at the end of the table. The house is open, after all, to whoever, whatever, chooses to call, on the way from the top of the hill to the bottom.

Minette’s mouth is open: her eyes appalled. Edgar sees, scorns, sneers.

‘Don’t, Daddy,’ says Minnie. ‘It’s spooky,’ but Edgar is not to be stopped.

‘Come in,’ he repeats. ‘Make yourself at home. Don’t stumble like that. Just because you’ve got no eyes.’

Minette is on her feet. Monopoly money, taken up by the first sudden gust of storm wind, flies about the room. Minnie pursues it, half-laughing, half-panicking.

Minette tugs her husband’s inflexible arm.

‘Stop,’ she beseeches. ‘Don’t tease. Don’t.’ No eyes! Oh, Edgar, Minette, Minnie and Mona, what blindness is there amongst you now? What threat to your existence? An immense peal of thunder crackles, it seems, directly overhead: lightning, both sheet and fork, dims the electric light and achieves a strobe-lighting effect of cosmic vulgarity, blinding and bouncing round the white walls, and now, upon the wind, rain, large-dropped, blows in through open door and windows.

‘Shut them,’ shrieks Minette. ‘I told you. Quickly! Minnie, come and help –’

‘Don’t fuss. What does it matter? A little rain. Surely you’re not frightened of storms?’ enquires Edgar, standing just where he is, not moving, not helping, like some great tree standing up to a torrent. For once Minette ignores him and with Minnie gets door and windows shut. The rain changes its nature, becomes drenching and blinding; their faces and clothes are wet with it. Minnie runs up to Mona’s room, to make that waterproof. Still Edgar stands, smiling, staring out of the window at the amazing splitting sky. Only then, as he smiles, does Minette realise what she has done. She has shut the thing, the person with no eyes, in with her family. Even if it wants to go, would of its own accord drift down on its way towards the valley, it can’t.

Minette runs to open the back door. Edgar follows, slow and curious.

‘Why do you open the back door,’ he enquires, ‘having insisted on shutting everything else? You’re very strange, Minette.’

Wet, darkness, noise, fear make her brave.

‘You’re the one who’s strange. A man with no eyes!’ she declares, sharp and brisk as she sometimes is at her office, chiding inefficiency, achieving sense and justice. ‘Fancy asking in a man with no eyes. What sort of countryman would do a thing like that? You know nothing about anything, people, country, nature. Nothing.’

I know more than he does, she thinks, in this mad excess of arrogance. I may work in an advertising agency. I may prefer central heating to carrying coals, and a frozen pizza to a fresh mackerel, but I grant the world its dignity. I am aware of what I don’t know, what I don’t understand, and that’s more than you can do. My body moves with the tides, bleeds with the moon, burns in the sun: I, Minette, I am a poor passing fragment of humanity: I obey laws I only dimly understand, but I am aware that the penalty of defying them is at best disaster, at worst death.

Thing with no eyes. Yes. The Taniwha. The Taniwha will get you if you don’t look out! The sightless blundering monster of the bush, catching little children who stumble into him, devouring brains, bones, eyes and all. On that wild Australasian shore which my husband does not recognise as country, being composed of sand, shore and palmy forest, rather than of patchworked fields and thatch, lurked a blind and eyeless thing, that’s where the Taniwha lives. The Taniwha will get you if you don’t watch out! Little Minette, Mona’s age, shrieked it at her infant enemies, on her father’s instructions. That’ll frighten them, he said, full of admonition and care, as ever. They’ll stop teasing, leave you alone. Minette’s father, tall as a tree, legs like poles. Little Minette’s arms clasped round them to the end, wrenched finally apart, to set him free to abandon her, leave her to the Taniwha. The Taniwha will get you if you don’t watch out. Wish it on others, what happens to you? Serve you right, with knobs on.

‘You know nothing about anything,’ she repeats now. ‘What country person, after dark, sits with the windows open and invites in invisible strangers? Especially ones who are blind.’

Well, Edgar is angry. Of course he is. He stares at her bleakly. Then Edgar steps out of the back door into the rain, now fitful rather than torrential, and flings himself upon his back on the grass, face turned to the tumultuous heavens, arms outspread, drinking in noise, rain, wind, nature, at one with the convulsing universe.

Minnie joins her mother at the door.

‘What’s he doing?’ she asks, nervous.

‘Being at one with nature,’ observes Minette, cool and casual for Minnie’s benefit. ‘He’ll get very wet, I’m afraid.’

Rain turns to hail, spattering against the house like machinegun bullets. Edgar dives for the safety of the house, stands in the kitchen drying his hair with the dish towel, silent, angrier than ever.

‘Can’t we go on with Monopoly?’ beseeches Minnie from the doorway. ‘Can’t we, Mum? The money’s only got a little damp. I’ve got it all back.’

‘Not until your father puts that chair back as it was.’

‘What chair, Minette?’ enquires Edgar, so extremely annoyed with his wife that he is actually talking to her direct. The rest of the holiday is lost, she knows it.

‘The ladderback chair. You asked in something from the night to sit on it,’ cries Minette, over the noise of nature, hung now for a sheep as well as a lamb, ‘now put it back where it was.’

Telling Edgar what to do? Impudence.

‘You are mad,’ he says seriously. ‘Why am I doomed to marry mad women?’ Edgar’s first wife Hetty went into a mental home after a year of marriage and never re-emerged. She was a very trying woman, according to Edgar.

Mad? What’s mad in a mad world? Madder than the dice, sending Minette to jail, back and back again, sending Edgar racing round the board, collecting money, property, power: pacing Minnie in between the two of them, but always nearer her father than her mother? Minnie, hot on Edgar’s heels, learning habits to last a lifetime?

All the same, oddly, Edgar goes to the ladderback chair, left pulled back for its unseen guest, and puts it in its original position, square against the table.

‘Stop being so spooky,’ cries Minnie, ‘both of you.’

Minette wants to say ‘and now tell it go away –’ but her mouth won’t say the words. It would make it too much there. Acknowledgement is dangerous; it gives body to the insubstantial.

Edgar turns to Minette. Edgar smiles, as a sane person, humouring, smiles at an insane one. And he takes Minette’s raincoat from the peg, wet as he already is, and races off through the wind to see if the car windows have been properly closed.

Minette is proud of her Bonnie Cashin raincoat. It cost one hundred and twenty pounds, though she told Edgar it was fifteen pounds fifty, reduced from twenty-three pounds. It has never actually been in the rain before and she fears for its safety. She can’t ask Edgar not to wear it. He would look at her in blank unfriendliness and say, ‘But I thought it was a raincoat. You described it as a raincoat. If it’s a raincoat, why can’t you use it in the rain? Or were you lying to me? It isn’t a raincoat after all?’

Honestly, she’d rather the coat shrunk than go through all that. Silly garment to have bought in the first place: Edgar was quite right. Well, would have been had he known. Minette sometimes wonders why she tells so many lies. Her head is dizzy.

The chair at the top of the table seems empty. The man with no eyes is out of the house: Edgar, coat over head, can be seen through the rain haze, stumbling past the front hedge towards the car. Will lightning strike him? Will he fall dead? No.

If the car windows are open, whose fault? Hers, Minnie’s?

‘I wish you’d seen that Mona shut the car door after her.’ Her fault, as Mona’s mother. ‘And why haven’t you woken her? This is a wonderful storm.’

And up he goes to be a better mother to Mona than Minette will ever be, waking his reluctant, sleep-heavy younger daughter to watch the storm, taking her on his knee, explaining the nature and function of electrical discharge the while: now ignoring Minette’s presence entirely. When annoyed with her, which is much of the time, for so many of Minette’s attitudes and pretensions irritate Edgar deeply, he chooses to pretend she doesn’t exist.

Edgar, Minette, Minnie and Mona, united, watching a storm from a holiday cottage. Happy families.

The storm passes: soon it is like gunfire, flashing and banging on the other side of the hills. The lights go out. A power line down, somewhere. No one shrieks, not even Mona: it merely, suddenly, becomes dark. But oh how dark the country is.

‘Well,’ says Edgar presently, ‘where are the matches? Candles?’

Where, indeed. Minette gropes, useless, trembling, up and down her silent haunted home. How foolish of Minette, knowing there was a storm coming, knowing (surely!) that country storms meant country power cuts, not to have located them earlier. Edgar finds them; he knew where they were all the time.

They go to bed. Edgar and Minette pass on the stairs. He is silent. He is not talking to her. She talks to him.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘you’re lucky. All he did was make the lights go out. The man with no eyes.’