Human Croquet Part 8

Vinny dipped a Rich Tea biscuit into her tea and nibbled it like a large rodent. The Widow's old liverspotted hand trembled and her cup rattled on its saucer as she said, 'Daddy can't come back, Charles.'

'Why not?' Charles knocked his cup of cocoa over in his agitation. 'Cloth, Vinny,' the Widow said in a tone that suggested she was warning Vinny about the cloth rather than asking her to go and get one. They could hear Vinny saying, 'Clothvinnyclothvinny,' once she got into the hallway.

The Widow gathered herself together again. 'He can't come back because he's in heaven.'

'Heaven?' they both repeated in unison. The Widow forced them to Sunday School every week so they knew about 'Heaven' it was blue and contained a lot of clouds and angels, but no-one in a trilby and a gabardine mac.

'Is he an angel?' Charles asked, puzzled.

'Yes,' the Widow said, after a moment's hesitation, 'Daddy's an angel now, looking after you from heaven.'

'He's not dead, is he?' Charles said bluntly and the Widow grew even paler, if that was possible, and said, 'Well, not dead exactly ...' and put her hands over her face so they couldn't see it and sat like that for a long time saying nothing until they grew very uncomfortable and tip-toed out of the room and up the stairs. They went to bed not much the wiser, more confused, in fact, than before she imparted her 'sad news' to them.

It was ever-helpful Vinny who clarified the situation for them next morning at breakfast. The Widow was still in her room and Vera had slammed the big chrome teapot down and gone off to burn toast. Charles and Isobel were spooning in their porridge, keeping quiet because Vinny was never at her best in the morning. She lit up a cigarette and said, 'I hope you two don't think that things are going to be the same as they were before.' They greeted this remark with the silence it deserved. They were only too woefully aware that things were not as they were before.

'You're going to have to behave very well now that your daddy's dead.'

'Dead?' Charles repeated in horror. 'Dead?' And he turned as white as the Widow's suet pastry, as white as the Widow, and ran from the table. Later, he had to be dragged with some force from the understairs cupboard where he could be heard howling like a wolf-cub.

Gordon had died of a bronchial infection, in a London fog. 'Lots of people died,' Vinny said, as if that made it better. 'A real pea-souper,' she added, sounding quite proud of Gordon, for once. 'He was an asthmatic,' the Widow could be heard telling everyone, 'ever since he was a little boy,' and they could hear the murmurs of surprise and dismay from their sentry-post on the stairs. They had no idea what an asthmatic was, but it sounded serious.

There was a photograph of Gordon in an ornate silver frame on the sideboard. They'd never really noticed it while they had the real thing in front of them, but now it a.s.sumed a totemic kind of significance how could Gordon be so visible and tangible (if only in two dimensions) and yet be so beyond their reach? War-handsome in his RAF uniform, cap tilted rakishly, he was like a dashing stranger that they regretted not having paid more attention to.

Isobel lay in bed at night, imagining him walking off into a wall of white fog, fog like cotton wool wrapping his body, cotton-wool-fog filling his lungs and choking him. Sometimes in dreams he walked back out from the fog wall, walked towards her, lifting her up and tossing her towards the sky, but when she floated back down to earth Gordon had disappeared and she was alone in the middle of a vast dark wilderness of trees.

Where was Gordon buried? The Widow looked startled when they asked her. 'Buried?' She cranked up the gears in her brain, her eyes were full of little cog wheels 'Down south, in London, where he died.'

'Why?' Charles persisted.

'Why what?' she responded tetchily.

'Why was he buried down there? Why didn't you bring him home?' But the Widow didn't seem to know the answer to this question.

Of Eliza, nothing remained. Except her children, of course. Charles asked to see photographs of her and the Widow said there weren't any, which seemed strange considering how many times Gordon had produced his old Kodak camera and said, 'Say cheese now, everybody!' Alarmingly, the picture they carried of her in their heads was beginning to fade a little more each day, like a photograph undeveloping, time unravelling like the jumpers that Vinny laddered down to knit up afresh as something equally horrible. Perhaps Eliza would appear in a few years' time, knitted up as a quite new mother. 'Don't be ridiculous, Isobel,' the Widow said, her patience with them almost all used up. 'Maybe it's because you're such naughty children that she left you,' Vinny remarked one day when Charles had borrowed Vera's tin of Mansion polish to make the parquet of the dining-room into a skating-rink and Vinny had skidded its length on an Indian scatter rug.

To begin with, they haunted the second-best bedroom, trailing their fingers through Eliza's clothes hanging in the wardrobe, looking through the treasure trove of her jewellery box as if it was a reliquary. Charles found one of Eliza's red ribbons coiled up like a sleeping snake in a little Capodimonte pot with pink roses growing out of its lid. The Widow took it from him before he could hide it and said to Vinny, 'This has to stop, it's not healthy,' and the next day when the rag-and-bone man came clopping down Hawthorn Close, Vinny was despatched to stop him and all of Eliza's things were hauled out of the second-best bedroom and into his cart. Vinny was dubious, 'This stuff's worth something we could get some money for it.'

'I don't want money for it,' the Widow said coldly. 'I want rid of it.'

Mrs Baxter bringing out an apple for the rag-and-bone man's horse cried, 'Oh, all those lovely clothes, surely you're not giving them for rags?' She lifted the hem of a red wool dress and said sadly, 'Oh, I remember Mrs Fairfax wearing this, I thought she looked so lovely in it.' The Widow waited, tight-lipped, for Mrs Baxter to go away and when she was out of hearing said, 'I'm the only Mrs Fairfax around here!' which, sadly, was true. 'Nosy parker,' Vinny said and squealed as the rag-and-bone horse nudged her from behind.

People watched with interest from behind their curtains as the pile of Eliza's things made its slow progress around the streets of trees. The Widow had disseminated the facts of Eliza's disappearance ('run off with a fancy man') less discreetly than you might have expected, usually tossing in some remark about 'poor' Gordon's. .h.i.therto unnoticed asthma.

Just after the most dismal Christmas imaginable the Widow succ.u.mbed to a bad attack of flu and Vinny was left to run the business alone. The first day, the delivery boy left, the second, Ivy, their recently acquired a.s.sistant. 'What are you doing with them?' the Widow croaked frustratedly at her from her sick-bed. 'Eating them?'

On a particularly grey and miserable January Sat.u.r.day the Widow was still feeling too poorly to get up and Charles and Isobel were left to their own devices while she hacked and hawked in her bedroom. Mrs Baxter came knocking tentatively at the back door, offering her childsitting services but, regretfully, they had to refuse as they had firm instructions from the Widow to stay put because they were both harbouring thick colds themselves. Poor Mrs Baxter was forced to speak to them through the keyhole as Vinny had told them not to open the door to anyone.

They played on the first landing, Charles had his cars and trucks, Isobel had the farmyard animals. She placed her hen, with its brood of little yellow chickens, on to the back of a flat-bed lorry red die-cast, Charles' favourite.

The Widow came out of her room and complained about the noise. She was wearing a thick plaid dressing-gown and a pair of old slippers, her hair was loose, hanging in a greasy grey hank down her back. She looked like an ancient savage queen. Her voice was hoa.r.s.e but it didn't stop her from shouting at them, at the sight of so much mixed-up traffic and barnyard activity. 'What is this mess? Clear it up,' she said, towering over them where they were sprawled on the red and blue figured carpet runner.

She took hold of the banister-rail and said, 'I'm going to get an aspirin,' clutching her forehead as if she was trying to keep her head on. She had been so miserable the past few days that they couldn't help but feel sorry for her and Charles jumped up and said, 'I'll get one for you, Granny,' but Charles' reason for jumping up with such alacrity was two-fold: a) to get the aforesaid aspirin but b) because he had a dreadful case of pins and needles. The pins and needles had rendered his left leg so numb that when he put his weight on it, it gave way and he staggered into the Widow.

This alone would not have been enough to propel her down the stairs but the jolt of Charles' body made her put her foot out to maintain her balance and unfortunately the very spot on the carpet where she put the old-slippered foot was already occupied by the red die-cast lorry and its freight of yellow chicks. Her other foot kicked out, scattering cars and animals, while the lorry recklessly parked at the edge of the top step shot off the edge, taking its new cargo of slippered foot with it. Mother hen and yellow chicks were broadcast to the four winds and the Widow tumbled head over heels (or 'a.r.s.e over tip' as Vinny would have had it) grey hair-slippers-grey hair-slippers-grey hair b.u.mping off every step. Screaming. Screaming in a weird animal way, the way Mrs Baxter's old cat did when it ate rat poison. The screaming stopped when the Widow reached the foot of the stairs. She landed awkwardly on the back of her neck so that her vacant eyes seemed to be peering up at her splayed legs. It looked like a very uncomfortable position to be in.

Very, very quickly, they picked up the red lorry and the chickens at the bottom of the stairs. Then they scampered back up the stairs, retrieving as they went the carnage the Widow had left in her wake cows and sheep, the brown carthorse, the fire engine, the black Rover, the milk float, the tiny milk bottles and the ducks and geese throwing them in the toy box and carrying it up to their attic.

Then they went back downstairs again, trying not to look at the Widow as they skirted past her on the stairs. They threw on their wellingtons and coats, unlocked the back door and ran out into the rain in the back garden, ignoring all prohibitions not to do so.

The Widow's garden was always orderly and neat with well-mannered flowers snapdragons and stock and meticulous borders in patriotic white alyssum, blue lobelia and red salvia. The velvet green of the lawn could have graced a bowling-green and the trees lilac, pear, hawthorn and apple were never unruly. It was not an exciting garden to play in, but, as the Widow would have said if she could only have spoken they'd had quite enough excitement for one day.

They played doggedly at the bottom of the garden where even a child with acute hearing, let alone one with their clogged-up, catarrh-fuelled ears, would have had difficulty hearing the screams of a falling woman. That was their alibi anyway.

They could hear Vinny's screams though as she came running out of the back door.

Weeks later, when they were playing marbles, Charles found a lone yellow chick beneath the hallstand where his marble had rolled and he held it up for his sister's inspection. Neither of them spoke. The little yellow chick also kept its secret. Thankfully.

And so they were left to the care of vinegary Vinny, the reluctant relative, the aunt from h.e.l.l as old as the century (forty-nine) but not as modern. Nowhere near. They'd never really given Vinny much thought before, beyond how best to stay out of her way, but now that everybody else had gone there was absolutely no avoiding her any more.

Vera handed in her notice as soon as the Widow died and went to live with her sister. The idea of Vinny as the mistress of the house was too much for her. Charles moved into Vera's room and Vinny into the Widow's room (the best bedroom) with her cat, Grimalkin, and complained that the mattress was killing her which made them think of the Princess and the Pea (although Vinny would have been better cast as the pea rather than the princess) and Charles indulged himself in a series of fantasies about killer mattresses because there was many a time when they would have been more than happy to see Vinny swallowed up by horsehair and ticking.

Vinny was not the kind of person to be left in charge of children. She didn't like them for one thing, and took no pleasure in nurturing anything except her cat a creature which provided a rare glimpse of Vinny's soft side. It was unnerving to come into a room sometimes and find her on her hands and knees peering under the sofa, cajoling 'p.u.s.s.yp.u.s.s.yp.u.s.s.y' in a kindly voice, hoa.r.s.e from lack of use.

'This is all your mother's fault,' Vinny fumed as she tugged at the knotted tangles in Isobel's hair. Neglected, Isobel's curls had grown haywire, and started to resemble a bush. 'I'm not a b.l.o.o.d.y hairdresser,' Vinny muttered, duelling with the Mason and Pearson hairbrush.

Charles sought refuge in bad behaviour. He got into fights at school, kicked and bit and got sent home in disgrace so that Vinny had to wallop him with the same Mason and Pearson. He raced around as if he was possessed, knocking things over, breaking things and then standing with a stupid grin on his face. He couldn't keep still. Perhaps it was because he was born on the move. When Vinny told him off he stood with his hands on his hips and laughed like a rocking automaton ha-ha-ha and Vinny had to slap his face to make him stop.

He wet the bed nearly every night which had a particularly bad effect on Vinny, bundling his sheets into the copper boiler every morning with the kind of weepings and lamentations that usually accompanied biblical disasters. 'I don't know what's wrong with you!' she screeched, dragging him by one of his big ears up to his room.

One of the aspects of surrogate motherhood that never ceased to astound Vinny was the fact that children grew. If the Chinese could have developed a system of whole body binding, Vinny would have been their first customer. 'You can't have grown!' she screeched every time Isobel displayed stubbed toes from too tight shoes or Charles' thin red-freckled wrists poked out from blazer cuffs. She would have had them, if she must have had them at all, as midgets. There was no right size for a child in Vinny's eyes, of course, apart from grown-up and gone.

Charles, undersized and long overtaken by his peers, was not so much a problem as Isobel. Vinny refused point-blank to buy another new school uniform when the old one was outgrown within six months.

'Mushrooming,' said Mrs Baxter kindly when she came round with a parcel for Vinny's inspection. 'Second-hand, but awfy good condition,' Mrs Baxter entreated.

Vinny declared that she wasn't aware that she was in need of charity, and Mrs Baxter said, 'Och no, no, no, no not charity, it's just that Mr Baxter's school has a pool of uniforms everyone agrees it's a sensible idea... and I thought that... they grow out of them so quickly ... such a waste to buy new when ... a good idea... lots of folk think so ...' and eventually when it seemed that Vinny was doing Mrs Baxter a favour rather than the other way round, she accepted her parcel. Grudgingly and with bad grace. Could you drown in a pool of uniforms?

Charles' clown face mooned out from beneath his Billy Bunter cap Charles had developed a huge stock of silly expressions through which he communicated with the world, as if perhaps it would love him more because he could cross his eyes and ping-pong-ball his cheeks at the same time. Sadly this was not the case.

The cold that Charles was suffering from the day the Widow died seemed never to have left him his nose was permanently plugged with yellow-green snot and his ears bunged up with something similar. He inhabited the underwater world of the hard-of-hearing and it was only when the school nurse referred him to the hospital that anyone discovered the extent to which Charles was lip-reading his way through life, unscrambling words, like a dyslexia of the ears or aural Scrabble. 'You'd think he'd be able to hear,' Vinny said, disgruntled at having to sit in the hospital waiting-room for hours, 'when his ears are so big.'

Poor Charles, his pink Dumbo-flap ears stuck out from his head like his princely namesake's. 'Flying yet?' Trevor Randall the arch-bully at school asked him, and instead of being sensible and slinking away in cowardice, Charles punched him in the eye and had to be beaten into repentance by Mr Baxter.

Eventually, Charles was operated on and a kindly surgeon poked a hole through his eardrums and drained out all the yellow-green snot. Unfortunately, this didn't help him read any better and Mr Baxter still had to bounce wooden rulers off the palms of Charles' hands to help him make out the words on the page.

Charles refrained from telling Mr Baxter that when she came back, Eliza was going to rip Mr Baxter's head off and pull his lungs out through his neck. He was looking forward to savouring the look of astonishment on Mr Baxter's face. Thwack! Thwack! Thwackkk! went Mr Baxter's leather strap (or the 'tawse' in Mrs Baxter's quaint language).

Vinny's meagre nursing skills were tested to their limit by coughs and colds, viruses and infections, aches and pains, warts and verrucas the parental loss doc.u.mented by germs. Charles was hospitalized again, with a suspected appendicitis, and then discharged again, unable to explain the mysterious source of his pain.

Housekeeping of any kind was sadly wanting in Arden. Widowless, it had grown into a cold cheerless place. Vinny would only light the coal fire in the living-room when the thermometer dropped to Arctic depths. ('Watch out for that polar bear!' Charles said, russet eyes wide with horror and Vinny screeched and looked behind her. Ha-ha-ha.) They wore gloves in the house and Charles sported a navy wool balaclava (knitted, very badly, for him by Vinny) that made him look like a goblin, all he needed were the two holes for his big pointed ears and the disguise would have been complete. Isobel had a pullover knitted by Mrs Baxter that had an intricate pattern of knots and ropes and cables all over it, like something a sailor might have knitted in a dream.

The house was unheated on the grounds of economy. Economy was pinchpenny Vinny's religion (yet she made a very poor economist). 'I'm trying to keep the wolf from the door,' she said, and narrowed her eyes (North Sea grey) and added, 'We're one step away from the poorhouse.' How could Vinny run the business and bring up children? What was she supposed to do? She brought in a.s.sistant after a.s.sistant to help in the grocery, all of whom seemed to have no purpose in life other than defrauding Vinny.

She spent long hours at night sitting at the dining-table cross-eyed over double-entry bookkeeping, unable to make sense of profit and loss. Not such a good businesswoman as Mother, it turned out.

Vinny scrimped but couldn't save. The Widow's huge meals were replaced by watery scrambled eggs, like lemon vomit, toast and dripping or Vinny's 'speciality' steak-and-kidney pie, a glutinous grey substance sandwiched between cardboard crusts. They were always hungry, always trying to squirrel away food into their hollow insides. Sometimes Isobel felt so hungry that she wondered if there wasn't someone else inside her, an insatiably greedy person who had to be fed continually.

The Widow's white linen tablecloths and silver cutlery, her flower-sprigged crockery and ivory napkin rings had all been put away as being 'too much trouble to look after' for Vinny. Now they ate with Wool-worths cutlery and old plaited raffia mats from Vinny's house. 'Serviettes,' said Vinny, 'are for people with servants,' and Vinny, G.o.d forbid, was no-one's servant. 'G.o.d gave us a tongue to lick our lips,' Vinny p.r.o.nounced, 'he didn't create us with serviettes in our hands,' an argument full of logical holes what about cigarettes? Teacups? Rich Tea biscuits? What indeed about 'G.o.d', who didn't get much of a look-in in Arden.

Mrs Baxter was quick to try and step into the mothering breach, clearly horrified by the sudden subtraction of family members a grandmother, a father and a mother within the s.p.a.ce of such a short time. How? she frequently asked Mr Baxter. How could a mother leave her own children? Her ain weans? (Mrs Baxter was bilingual.) Especially such bonny ones? She must be off her head (or 'aff her heid').

Isobel watched for Mr Baxter marching off early for school and ran round to the back door of Sithean so that Mrs Baxter could dress her hair instead of Vinny, twirling it into neat plaits ('pleats') because the little girls under Mr Baxter's care weren't allowed to unleash their female tresses anywhere near the school building. Mrs Baxter also bought new navy blue hair-ribbons to tie up Isobel's plaits in big bows and said, 'There don't you look pretty?' with a tremendous new-moon smile of encouragement that couldn't quite disguise the look of doubt on her face.

Audrey's lovely red-gold hair, hair that, let loose, flowed down her back like a rippling volcanic stream, a banner of flame, had to be roped into a big fat plait that hung almost to her waist. There was something about long untamed hair that induced Mr Baxter's bile. 'You should have all of that cut off,' he said, and it seemed a miracle that Audrey's long locks had lasted this long without being shorn.

Summer came. The back garden of Arden was taken over by weeds. Mr Baxter complained to Vinny about the state of the garden. 'I don't want your ruddy dandelions,' he shouted angrily over the beech hedge. Charles waited until he'd gone inside and then blew his dandelion clocks over the hedge while Vinny crowed her approval from the back doorstep. She just didn't understand neighbourliness.

It was Mrs Baxter who hefted out the dandelions though, Mrs Baxter who did all the gardening in Sithean. She grew raspberries and blackcurrants, potatoes, peas and runner-beans and tended the pretty Albertine rose that grew up the trellis which divided the lawn from the fruit bushes and vegetables. Bushes of rosemary, starred with tiny blue flowers, and dark spikes of lavender brushed against your legs as you walked along the garden path and the borders around the big semicircular lawn were soft and ragged with Canterbury bells that chimed delicately and delphiniums that nodded in the breeze at a pale honeysuckle braiding itself in and out of the beech hedge.

There were new people the McDades on Willow Road. You could tell what Mr Baxter thought of Carmen McDade's name from the way his moustachioed top lip sneered whenever he had to p.r.o.nounce it. The McDades had moved up from London and were such a big family that Mr McDade (a builder, of sorts) and Mrs McDade (a termagant) occasionally mislaid one of the smaller McDades without even noticing. 'Backward,' was Mr Baxter's professional judgement on most of the McDade clan, although Mr Baxter's definition of 'back-ward' was generous and had frequently included Charles. And even Mrs Baxter.

Carmen tucked her dress into her greying knickers and cartwheeled across the green lawn of Sithean. 'A bit forward, that girl,' Mr Baxter said with a look of distaste on his face. But how could she be both backward and forward? There was no pleasing Mr Baxter. 'She's only a little girl,' Mrs Baxter protested.

'So?' Mr Baxter said darkly. 'They're all the same.'

Vinny couldn't cope, she was losing the family business. It was all the fault of Eliza. Mrs Baxter had a solution, hovering on the back doorstep with a plate of little pink cakes. Vinny picked one up suspiciously. 'Take them, take them, all of them,' Mrs Baxter urged.

The fairy cakes are not themselves the solution, but 'fostering?'

Vinny's eyes narrow suspiciously. 'Fostering?' Surely not, someone prepared to take the 'poor orphaned bairns' off her hands? Vinny contemplated. And then nearly choked on the little cake, 'Not orphans,' she said, somewhat inaudibly on account of the choking, 'they're not orphans, their mother's alive.'

'Yes, yes, of course,' Mrs Baxter said hastily. Mrs Baxter couldn't remember what Eliza looked like any more. When she thought about her she saw a figure in the distance at the bottom of the garden, in the field someone walking away. Vinny licked her fingers clean of icing and said, 'Why not?' But foolish Mrs Baxter hadn't discussed this proposition with 'Daddy' and he looked at her in complete disbelief. 'You're off your b.l.o.o.d.y head, Moira [so another one], I have to see that stupid boy all day long at school, I don't want him in my house as well. And that girl is sullen. Do you hear?' ('Charles can be rather silly sometimes,' Mr Baxter wrote in a restrained way on his Christmas report.) Sometimes Mrs Baxter read to Isobel and she rested her head on the cushion of Mrs Baxter's pigeon-plump breast, balanced on the other side by Audrey, and for a brief moment she forgot about Eliza and Gordon and the Widow as she listened to Mrs Baxter's lilting peat and heather voice. Mrs Baxter was a surprisingly good storyteller, able to turn herself from a rampaging giant one minute into a tiny kitchen mouse the next.

Mrs Baxter knew the same stories as Eliza but when Eliza had told them they had frequently ended badly and contained a great deal of mutilation and torture, whereas in Mrs Baxter's versions, the stories all had happy endings. Mrs Baxter's Red Riding Hood, for example, was rescued by her woodcutter father who butchered the wolf and slit it open to reveal a grandmother as good as new and, needless to say, everyone lived happily ever after. In Eliza's version, on the other hand, everyone usually died, even Little Red Riding Hood.

Sometimes when they got to the end of a story, where everything had been put right and justice done, Mrs Baxter would sigh and say, 'What a shame that life's not really like that.' Mr Baxter didn't know about these reading sessions Mr Baxter disapproved wholeheartedly of fairy stories ('stuff and nonsense') although whether he had a whole heart was debatable.

One day, Mr Baxter came home unexpectedly early from school and found the three of them in front of a blazing fire. Mrs Baxter was reading, her index finger following every line because she couldn't find her reading-gla.s.ses and at the point when Red Riding Hood was filling up her little basket with custards, they all suddenly became aware of Mr Baxter's presence in the doorway. Mrs Baxter's body gave a little spasm, like a frightened rabbit, and her reading-finger halted mysteriously on the word 'bobbin'.

Mr Baxter fixed them with his little pebble eyes behind his little pebble gla.s.ses for a long time before saying, 'Unlike her stupid brother, the girl can read perfectly well for herself, Moira I should know, I taught her myself. And as for you, Audrey, you can go up to your room and do the extra arithmetic I set you.' Audrey scurried out of the room and Mrs Baxter said, 'Oh dear, Daddy, we were only reading. What harm is there in that?'

Next day, Mrs Baxter had one eye so swollen that she couldn't open it. 'Walked into a door,' she explained while brushing Isobel's hair, 'silly me.' Audrey was sitting at the breakfast-table with a bowl of cornflakes in front of her and kept lifting her spoon to her lips except it was the same spoonful of flakes over and over again. There were no more stories after that.

'Wait till our mother comes back!' Charles shouted at Vinny after a particularly vicious attack with the Mason and Pearson and Vinny snarled, 'I'd like to see that!' Vinny was doing her best to eradicate all traces of Eliza. The past wasn't a real place to Vinny. She never talked about it, she was a non-historian, the anti-archivist of all that had happened to them retaining no souvenirs, no artefacts, no doc.u.ments, no photographs, obliterating the evidence of their previous happy existence. Vinny made bonfires of the past, made bonfires of everything, nothing was safe from her flames.

Every week Vinny would stand in the back garden of Arden tending her bonfire, enveloped in a pall of smoke, ashes being tossed in the air around her like a medieval witch at the stake.

Eliza had been gone over a year. When was she coming back? Why was she taking so long? Sometimes it seemed as though the white fog that had enveloped them in Boscrambe Woods had got into their brains in some way. Perhaps that was how Gordon died too, not fog in his lungs, but fog clouding his brain, driving him mad. Perhaps the fog in the wood had driven Eliza mad, for she must have gone mad to leave them in the clutches of Vinny. She would never leave them, not voluntarily, not all the fancy men in the world could have persuaded her away from them. Surely?

Vinny's hair had gone completely grey, every time she pa.s.sed the hall mirror, she stroked her convent coif and said, 'Look what you've done to me,' as if it was the mirror that had caused her problems.

Madge-in-Mirfield, now nursing an intimate and deadly cancer, couldn't help, her three grown-up girls didn't want to know. But Madge had a friend who knew someone who'd always wanted 'Two little children?' Vinny asked hopefully, on a hospital visit.

'No,' Madge said, 'a little boy.'

'Well, that's better than nothing, I suppose.'

'It's all Eliza's fault,' Madge said.

Charles was very, very lucky, Vinny said. But he wouldn't stay lucky if he was a naughty boy. Mr and Mrs Crosland had a big car and expensive coats. Mr Crosland wore long camel and Mrs Crosland wore long beaver, even though it was a hot August day, and Isobel wanted to rub her face in the fur when Mrs Crosland sat in the living-room, drinking tea. 'Poor little thing,' Mrs Crosland said to Charles. Not-so-little Charles (a broad and stocky eight-year-old by now) stared rudely. Mrs Crosland didn't even glance at Isobel. Vinny pointed out Charles' good points like a pedigree breeder and Mrs Crosland murmured approvingly at her new pet.

Charles was in a cloud of misunderstanding Vinny had not been entirely truthful, leading him to believe that Isobel was coming along as part of a package deal. They hadn't seen Vinny filling only the one suitcase. When the Croslands had finished their tea and used up their limited repertoire of small talk, Mrs Crosland said, 'Well thank you very much, Mrs Fitzgerald, I wish you all the best,' and climbed into the back of the big car. She patted the seat next to her and said, 'Come along, Charles,' and Charles reluctantly got in and was lapped in fur.

Vinny slammed the car door and Mr Crosland started the engine, lifting one hand in farewell without looking behind as he drove away in a crunching of gravel. Mrs Crosland waved a ringed hand and mouthed goodbye with her big crimson lips. Charles' pale face rose up behind the gla.s.s of the car window, his yelling silenced by the noise of the car engine. The car moved away slowly, down Chestnut Avenue and Charles' face reappeared in the back window. He seemed to be trying to claw his way through the gla.s.s.

His head disappeared suddenly as if someone had just yanked invisibly on his ankles and the car accelerated down the road and turned into Sycamore Street, performing exactly the same disappearing trick as Gordon had already performed, but going in the opposite direction. As with him, there was no reversing back round the corner, no cries of 'Surprise!' from the car's occupants.

Isobel ran after the car until she got a st.i.tch and could run no more and then stood helplessly in the middle of the road so that the butcher's delivery boy, whizzing carelessly round the corner on his bike, had to swerve so wildly to avoid the little sobbing figure that he toppled over and the road was strewn with ration-sized parcels of meat and Vinny was able to secure a thin link of sausages in her ap.r.o.n pocket as she pulled Isobel to her feet and dragged her all the way home.

The dead of night, the world was dark and empty but nothing was frightening any more, not after the wood. Not so dark really, a full moon at the window gave everything a dull gleam, like pewter. This was the time to escape, to shin down the drainpipe, run across the wet gra.s.s of the lawn. The only noise in the house was the creak-creak sound of Mrs Crosland's snoring. Charles slid out of bed and felt the long carpet pile between his toes. His clothes were lying on a chair and he crept over to them. He seemed to have shrunk. His eyes were lower than the level of the top of the chair, his nose only reached the doork.n.o.b. His toenails click-clacked on the lino at the edge of the room.

Everything in the room was drained of colour, everything turned to shades of grey. When he listened, he could hear that the house wasn't silent at all he could hear the mice eating in the pantry, the Croslands' old cat dreaming (about chasing the mice). Smells flooded his brain the dust trapped in the rugs, the old gravy scents coming up from the kitchen, the carnation talc.u.m powder Mrs Crosland had spilled in the bathroom. The smell of petrol seeping up from the garage made him heady, he prowled around the room trying to think, for once strangely comfortable inside his skin.

He loped over to the dressing-table in the corner of the room. The moon had turned the dressing-table mirror into steel. He could see the moon in the mirror, he could see his face in the mirror no. No. It wasn't possible, it couldn't be. Charles raised his head and let out a tremendous howl of fear, running away from the mirror and leaping onto the bed and burying his head under the covers. In the morning it would all be different. Wouldn't it?

A week after he was kidnapped by the Croslands, Charles reappeared in a sudden unexpected rasping of gravel. The rear door of the car opened and surprise! Charles spilled out on to the ground so quickly that you would have almost thought he'd been pushed. The car door slammed again and the window was rolled down.

Mrs Crosland's face, powdered and lacquered like a j.a.panese geisha, appeared. 'He bites,' she announced, her voice resonating with disgust. 'He bites ferociously,' and Mr Crosland shouted over his shoulder, 'That child's backward, Mrs Fitzgerald!' Then the Croslands drove away in a bad-tempered wrenching of gears. Charles sat cross-legged on the gravel, swaying backwards and forwards like a rocking Buddha and laughing his clown laugh ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha at the sight of their car retreating down the drive.

The important thing about the disappearing trick something that Eliza and Gordon seemed to have failed to grasp is that the real skill was coming back again after you'd vanished. Unlike his parents, Charles had mastered both halves of the trick and to celebrate he executed a mad jigging polka of triumph up and down the drive until he tripped and cut himself and Vinny said, 'I could have told you it would end in tears.'

Vinny was in the process of destroying Fairfax and Son, partly through alienating the customers ('Well, which do you want Cheddar or Cheshire? Make up your mind, I haven't got all day!') and partly through appallingly bad management. Eventually she had to sell it at a knockdown price to a compet.i.tor and also sold her little terrace house on Willow Road, to a couple called Miller and every time she drove past her old house on the bus Vinny said, 'The Millers got a bargain there.' Vinny was Mrs Hard-Done-By, and nothing, but nothing, would ever be right in her world. Especially not her relatives.

'We'll be in the poorhouse soon,' she informed them. But she had an idea they will take in lodgers, for what is the use of a house with five bedrooms if only three of them are occupied? Eh? They will give one of them over to a lodger.

Dimly, Vinny discerned that her poor housekeeping might not appeal to the paying-guest and she set about improving her housecraft. She studied the Widow's housekeeping books an entire kitchen shelf of aidemenage The Housewife's Handy Book, Aunt Kitty's Cookery Book, Everything Within, The Modern Housewife's Book (for once upon a time the Widow was a very modern housewife). For a while, Vinny's enthusiasm even expanded to include the hobby section of Everything Within and she attempted, amongst other useful things, 'Sealing-Wax Craft' and 'A Dainty Craft with Cellophane and Silk Raffia'. It was very disturbing to come into the kitchen and find Vinny elbow-deep in papier mache (the colour of her skin) or attempting to scale the artistic heights of 'Loofah Craft', clip-clipping away with scissors at the bathroom loofah to make a floral still life for the Unknown Lodger's room.

But infinitely worse was the ancienne cuisine which Vinny had suddenly become a disciple of, dishes dredged up from the cookery sections of the Widow's books that reeked of England between the wars. Dishes for which they must be guinea-pigs. 'Spaghetti Fritters', 'Rabbit Soup with Curry', 'Compote of Pigeons with Brain Sauce'. Vinny liked nothing better than recipes that began, 'Take a large Cod and boil whole ...'

'This is disgusting,' Charles ventured over something called a 'Boiled Cow-Heel Pudding'.

'Disgusting is as disgusting does,' Vinny said unhelpfully. They never, ever, thought that they'd feel nostalgic for Vinny's old way of cooking.

Once Vinny considered she'd mastered landlady cuisine she turned her attention to the bedding, searching the depths of the Widow's linen cupboard and bringing out several pairs of Irish linen sheets which were only slightly mildewed. 'You wouldn't get anything better in a hotel,' she declared. Vinny had no idea what the quality of hotel bedding was, never having slept between any, but that didn't stop her fantasizing that Hotel Arden was about to give the Ritz a run for its money. Charles and Isobel couldn't imagine why anyone would want to lodge with them when the mattresses were so thin and the custard so lumpy.

Almost as soon as Vinny declared herself ready to take on all-comers, their first lodger appeared. Vinny was a little surprised because she hadn't even worked out how to advertise for one yet, but Mr Rice turned up on the doorstep ready with references and a proper-lodger kind of job travelling salesman.

Mr Rice was aged somewhere between thirty-five and sixty-five and had an enormous handlebar moustache, possibly to compensate for the fact that most of his dark brown hair had been devoured by baldness so that the thing he most resembled was a boiled egg. Charles and Isobel exchanged dismal looks because they couldn't imagine anyone more boring. 'Don't worry,' Vinny said, 'there's plenty more where he came from.'