Pilcrow (28 page)

Her thumbs really were squashy, and she always invited us to play with them. She would reach across a big red hand to us. Our fingers left little dimpled marks on her thumbs. They stayed visible for quite a while. I enjoyed the game so much it never occurred to me to ask why it happened. I only thought it must be nice to have a bit of
plasticine 
always with you. Possibly she suffered from a circulation
disorder
, causing some sort of œdema. At the time it seemed almost
appropriate
that someone who worked in a canteen should take on some of the characteristics of dough, and I thought that the only ill people in hospitals were the patients. I hardly understood that grown-ups could be ill too. Didn’t children have the monopoly?

After that we would be pushed to the entrance. Sarah’s mum would give a kiss to Sarah and a peck to me, and we would watch her
driving
off in her car, which looked so funny it made me laugh. ‘It’s known as a Beetle and the engine’s in the
back
and the boot is in the
front
,’ Sarah said proudly, which made me start laughing all over again. We were too poor for a car, but I prayed that when we did get one it would be a Beetle because it was wonderful in every way. Sarah’s mum gave me a ride in it once, but it was so uncomfortable I nearly clicked my back and never wanted to go in one again. I reversed the current of my prayers, pleading for any other car than a Beetle and hoping that God would ignore my previous intercession.

As their friendship developed, sometimes at weekends Sarah’s mum would pick my mum up at the station and bring her to CRX in the Beetle. Mum had nothing against Mary – no one could – but it had to be admitted that her parents, stranded as they were in Rutland, couldn’t offer to give Mum useful lifts. That was how I explained her preference for Sarah as a prospective daughter-in-law.

I knew my mum liked Sarah’s mum Jacquetta, not because she had plenty of money, I don’t think, but because she had so much
confidence
. Sarah’s dad had been in the Foreign Office and Jacquetta was used to all sorts of people. She just naturally felt at home in any
company
, and that was something Mum admired and envied. Sarah’s mum was posh in a way Mum could never be, posh without effort. Even Granny’s sense of status had a strenuous edge to it, while true posh, as I came to see, was almost blithe.

Without regular contact with her own mother, Mum’s snobbery was becoming somehow anæmic. I hadn’t yet noticed it, but in those years there was a Granny-shaped hole in my life. She wrote letters from time to time, which sometimes enclosed postal orders, but the postman brought me my only contact with her.

If I had been more on the ball I would have realised that the two of them weren’t on speaking terms. Granny and Mum hadn’t fallen out at the time of my misdiagnosis being revealed, but soon after. In a
crisis
family tension took second place, but it didn’t go away. In fact the quarrel had been about something apparently trivial, but had taken a surprising turn. Granny had been going too far for most of her life. This time it was Mum who had trespassed into an area that was off limits, and Granny was slow to forgive. So slow that it seemed likely she would die first.

Mum liked to talk about Jacquetta, and so did I. Jacquetta had given Mum her visiting card, which she proudly showed me. The address was ‘1, Melmott Court, Cookham’. As a trainee snob, I pounced on this. I thought I had found a flaw in Mum’s value system. I thought I had her cornered.

Of course, while I was in Mum’s company I had to revert to my old choice of words, pre-eminently ‘lavatory’ rather than ‘toilet’. I had to hide the fact that her apprentice snob was also a guttersnipe in the making. According to Mum, ‘toilet’ was roughly the commonest word in the world. Still’s Disease was quite enough to be getting on with, thank you, without her son being infected with vulgar word choice. I was rapidly developing a habitual hesitation, almost a
complex
about what to call the room with the personal plumbing, rather a draw-back in a life where I must ask for help, more often than most people, to be taken there. I had reached a stage where every term sounded wrong.

Now I had a chance to return the favour of embarrassment. ‘Mum?’ I said, nice as pie. ‘Didn’t you tell me that decent people never live in numbered houses? Except of course in London, where there are so many houses that the GPO insists?’

If I’d hoped to rattle Mum I was disappointed. ‘Quite true, JJ,’ she said calmly, ‘but if your address ends in Court it’s
perfectly all right
.’ It turned out that there was a whole intricate cult of addresses, seething with rules and exceptions. She felt about addresses roughly what
traditional
Japanese feel about tea, or their ancestors. ‘It’s the same with addresses which end in Park, and also Mansions.’

‘How about Palace, Mum? Would that be a proper address?’

Mum put her head on one side. ‘I think so.’ On balance she was inclined to let an address ending in ‘Palace’ scrape into the paddock of privilege.

‘But we live in Bathford, nr Bath, Somerset, and we have a number, don’t we?’

‘Well, yes we do. But we’re in married quarters, you see, and with so many servicemen the RAF had to give numbers. That’s quite all right. It isn’t ideal, of course, and the neighbours – for instance Doreen Parsons, bless her! – are very suburban, but you can’t always have everything, John. We won’t live there for ever, you know, JJ,’ she added. ‘Things will change, you’ll see.’ And at least our street
number
was a single digit. Apparently that made a difference.

There were other subtleties. It was perfectly all right to have
numbers
if you were serving in the forces, or if you were in a nursing or medical college, or if you’d just left university and were quite poor, as long as you bucked up and got a proper address as soon as you
possibly
could.

It turned out that absolutely everybody who lived in America had numbers, but it was a big place and often your house number would be more than a thousand which in some strange way made it all right. There were upper people in America too, though it wasn’t at all easy to tell them from the others.

Even at the time I sensed that Mum would have found a way of keeping Jacquetta Morrison among the poshest of the poshies even if her card had read, ‘The Abandoned Railway Carriage, behind The Pigsty’. I hadn’t been able to put even the slightest dent in her dreams.

Mum had lost a little of her authority in my eyes, somehow, along the way. At first I had been amazed that she could tell if I had
disobeyed
her orders and neglected to brush my teeth, but then I worked out that she gave my toothbrush a surreptitious stroke and scolded me if it was dry. The stiff bristles bore witness against me. After that it was easy to wet it from time to time.

In those days I really loved the
Just So Stories
. Miss Reid would read them with me, sitting on the edge of my bed. I wasn’t sure that
teachers
were allowed to do that, whether they counted as doctors or only parents, but I wasn’t going to say anything. A cuddle from her would have been nice, but I knew there was no chance. It was nice enough seeing her white nylon overall with the corner of my eye, and then having her big white botty approaching and flowing in from the left. Then she’d hold up the book and start to read. I wondered if the man had asked her to marry him before she had such a big bottom. If so, she must be kicking herself for saying no while she was still young and pretty. But if he had asked her when she already had a big
bottom
, how could she have turned him down? Logic didn’t seem to help me to understand this important part of her life story. Perhaps she felt about tailies the way I felt about pockets. Not that keen. Perhaps it was as simple as that.

At about this time I wrote my own Just So Story by accident. It was all to do with Sarah’s mum, and if it had really been written by Rudyard Kipling it might have been called ‘How Muzzie Got Her Name’.

One day I had a real titbit to pass on to Mum, something that was guaranteed to give her pleasure. It was a lovely piece of intimate
gossip
about the Morrisons: I knew what Sarah called her mother when there wasn’t anyone else around. I knew the special home private nick-name the daughter had for the mother. I told Mum what it was, and she seemed very pleased. I’d only heard it spoken the once, and then I felt as if I’d stumbled over a jewel. It was so sweet and private, part of a secret language, and I treasured the knowledge of it.

Sarah called Mrs Morrison ‘Muzzie’. ‘Mummy’ was for the ward and the rest of the world, but when they were alone together it was ‘Muzzie’. I spent a lot of time with them, on the days when Sarah’s mum was the only visitor on the ward. When Sarah’s mum brought Sarah a present, she always remembered to bring something for me, so that I didn’t feel left out, but this was the best present she could
possibly
have given me, the sharing of the home word and pet name.

Mum enjoyed being in on the secret, but it was only going to be a matter of time before she revealed what she knew. Jacquetta Morrison was clearly an upper person, and everything about her was inherently interesting to Mum. Finally after the tea trolley had come round Mum said, ‘I know Sarah’s secret name for you, and guess how I found out?’

Jacquetta looked genuinely puzzled, and so did Sarah. They seemed to have no idea what we were talking about. Finally Mum and I had to announce the fact that Sarah called Jacquetta ‘Muzzie’, and still they looked blank. It became obvious that the name meant
nothing
to them. Mum covered her tracks by saying, ‘John comes out with all sorts of things nearly all the time.’ So much for loyalty.

‘But I’m telling you the truth!’ I stammered, getting very
emotional
. ‘Sarah wanted a lift and you lifted her all wrong, and Sarah said “Oh,
Muzzie
… “But if you don’t believe me, I don’t care! I haven’t told a lie, I know what I heard, Sarah said “Muzzie” – and if you don’t want to believe me, I couldn’t care less. From this time on I shall think of you as “Mrs Jacquetta Morrison,
Mrs Jacquetta Morrison
!!”’ I don’t know why I was getting so worked up, why the nick-name issue affected me so passionately.

I thought of Jacquetta as being old, at least compared to Mum, but that may have been partly due to the damage done to her complexion by the sun in India. Now she had a sort of faraway look and a younger, hesitant expression. ‘I don’t remember Sarah ever calling me that,’ she said haltingly, ‘but somehow … Well I don’t see why you couldn’t call me by that name, in fact it’s rather …’ True to her destiny as an upper person, Jacquetta was capable of letting a sentence trail away forever without reaching the final word ‘sweet’.

I couldn’t wait that long. ‘So you
are
Muzzie?!’ I said. By now I was blinking back tears of rage.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I don’t see why not. I am now. Muzzie. Yes. Why ever not?’ From that day on, Mrs Jacquetta Morrison was never
anything
but ‘Muzzie’ to both our families, to me and Mum and Sarah too. The name bedded down beautifully and became second nature, and I certainly felt I’d earned the intimacy. Mum too was grateful for the existence of the nick-name, perhaps more than me. She liked Sarah’s mother such a lot, but had never been comfortable calling her Jacquetta. It was an effort for her to embark on the presumptuousness of Christian names with such an upper person. Then Sarah’s mum said, ‘Oh, call me Ketter. All my friends do!’, making it ever so much worse.

Muzzie meant to put Mum at her ease, but the task was
impossible
. For Mum, dealing with someone so posh meant scrambling over a whole series of hurdles at every meeting. Now this casually
intimidating
instruction turned every conversation into an even more daunting event, a pole-vault of social aspiration. ‘Muzzie’ was a
lifeline
. What a relief! – it sounded safe and familial.

What I said was perfectly true. I had heard the word said. What I hadn’t taken into account was the larger context. In fact Sarah always called her Mum ‘Mummy’, whoever happened to be around. It’s just that one day she had slumped a little in her chair, as happened from time to time, and needed lifting back into a more comfortable
position
. Her mum was there, and she was the best person in the whole world to lift her, but there were times when even Jacquetta Morrison didn’t quite get it right, and this was one of them. She was lifting her daughter back into place into the chair, but not to Sarah’s satisfaction.

Sarah complained bitterly when a lift was badly managed. There was nothing strange about that. We all did the same. It was painful. This time, being impatient, she started to protest before her mother had finished settling her. ‘Oh
Muzzzzie
,’ she said, almost groaning, ‘you’re doing it all wrong, now you’ll have to do it all over again!’ Her voice squeaked in a funny rattly gappy way while she was being lifted so ineptly.

She was the doll fanatic on the ward, with a large collection, but she had something in common with a doll herself. Her size was small even for that ward because of the early onset of the disease, and the subsequent impact of steroids. There are dolls that have little
speakers
in their backs, and they make an uh-uh-ah-ah-ah-uh-uh kind of staccato thrumming noise. Sarah’s diaphragm, under pressure,
produced
a very similar effect.

‘Oh
Muzzie
… ‘I had misunderstood. I overheard a chance event and turned it into a splendid secret. Life on the ward was not
eventful
, and we got our excitement where we could. Sarah called Jacquetta ‘Mummy’ and nothing else. While Jacquetta was in the process of lifting her difficult daughter, Sarah’s brain rapped out the words, ‘Oh Mummy, you’re doing it all wrong!’ but those weren’t exactly the words which came out of her mouth. She got out the ‘Mu–’ fine, but for the next bit Jacquetta must have been squeezing Sarah’s rib-cage in a funny sort of a way, forcing the air out just as it got mixed up with an emotional sob (Sarah was so looking forward to sitting
correctly
and comfortably) and then it emerged as a sort of distorted sigh. There may have been some congestion in Sarah’s lungs, as there often was. Anyway, the middle part of the word came out as a sighing ‘ZZzz.’ With that extra squeeze of Sarah’s squeeze-box the consonant was mutated. A bilabial dental came out as a voiced alveolar fricative, and that’s how Muzzie got her name.