Human Croquet Part 9

Mr Rice wore loud dogtooth-check jackets and mustard waistcoats and claimed he was a pilot during the war. 'Who's he kidding?' Vinny scoffed, but behind his back because she wanted his money.

'Here we are,' Vinny said, heading new lodgerwards, 'a nice plate of "Sweetbreads Royale".' Chatelaine Vinny a bleak housekeeper in hard times. 'Well, Mr Rice,' Vinny said, shaving slices off an unidentified roasted mammal at the Sunday dinner-table, 'how d'you like it here then?' Mr Rice is 'a gentleman' in Vinny's estimation and his arrival makes her quite skittish for a while.

At first she simpered, bowed and sc.r.a.ped to Mr Rice, wringing her hands in ever-so-humbleness and Mr Rice responded by praising her landladying skills to the skies when you might have expected him instead to puzzle over the 'Haddock Souffle', and query the damp in his room and the disturbing character of some of his dinners ('Boiled Toad in the Hole,' Vinny announced, shy, yet proud, of her newfound talents).

At breakfast and tea, Mr Rice regaled them with tales from the road. 'A very funny thing happened to me in Birmingham this week, did I tell you?' he asked over a dish of 'Scotch Sheep's Pluck', that Vinny had laboured over all afternoon. Mr Rice had no sense of humour, in fact, if it was possible he had a negative sense of humour so that they knew that any story prefaced 'A funny thing happened' was inevitably going to be unbelievably tedious. What's more, funny things happened to Mr Rice all the time so that they rarely endured a mealtime without pa.s.sing out from boredom.

'Mr Tapioca! Mr Sago!' Charles hooted, his forehead hitting the table as he doubled up in a maniacal sotto voce laugh. Isobel worried for Charles. He was nine years old now, yet half the time he behaved like his three-year-old self. Mr Rice appeared not to notice and helped himself to a spoonful of grey boiled potatoes and waxed lyrical about home comforts. 'Silly, silly boy!' Vinny hissed at Charles.

'Ah,' Mr Rice said, sniffing like a Bisto Kid as Vinnie handed over his slice of 'Sheep's Tongue Shape'.

Vinny took a cigarette packet from the pocket of her Empire overall and lit up. Her gnarled hands cupped around the cigarette would have looked better on a large bird of prey. She closed her eyes and sucked hard, with an expression that suggested pain rather than pleasure, and then blew the smoke out of her nostrils, while she dished up an exotic 'Railway Pudding'.

'Delicious,' proclaimed Mr Rice, a dribble of yellow custard creeping down his chin. Vinny batted her meagre eyelashes in a way that might have been interpreted as flirtatious. 'Something in your eye, Mrs Fitzgerald?' Mr Rice inquired through a mouthful of pudding.

'Parallel universes,' Charles said to Mr Rice, eager to expound his new theories to a listening ear, over a tea-table groaning with 'Croquettes of Liver'. 'What if there were other worlds where we had other selves living out quite different lives, so say, Vinny was a film star [flattered, Vinny cast a rare smile of appreciation in Charles' direction] or Izzie here was the queen of an unknown country and I was ' Charles searched for a parallel life he would like 'I was an Olympic athlete or a famous Shakespearian actor or a rocket scientist ...' All this while, Mr Rice was staring at Charles as if he were a lunatic and when Charles' imagination finally ran down he fixed him with an unpoetic eye and said to him, 'You need to get a life, son,' and Charles blushed a colour that clashed horribly with his hair. But really there was only one parallel universe that they wanted to inhabit the one where they had parents and, for preference, the same ones they had had before.

Another year pa.s.sed. And then another. Eliza grew dark, stranded in the pa.s.sage of time, growing into a memory. People were always telling Isobel that she looked foreign Spanish or Italian could Eliza have had Spanish blood? Vinny peered down the long dark tunnel to the past and saw something dimly, heard the vague word 'Celtic' and said, 'Not Spanish Irish, I think.'

'Did she sound Irish?' Charles asked eagerly.

'Sound?' Vinny repeated helplessly. A whiff of Hempstid wafted down the tunnel. 'She sounded ... ridiculous,' Vinny concluded. Eliza's faded and forgotten image plagued them. Where was she? Why didn't she come back? Why did no-one from her world come back? A sister or a brother? An aunt or a G.o.dmother? If Eliza couldn't come back then why not a childhood friend, someone knocking on the door saying, 'I knew your mother'? Someone who could tell them the little things the books she liked to read, her favourite food, the season she liked best.

'Maybe somebody's kidnapped her,' Charles theorized, 'and held her captive against her will even though she pleaded with him to let her go so she could get back to her children?'

'Didn't she have a mother or a father?'

'Questions, questions, questions,' Vinny snapped irritably, 'can't you ask anything else?'

Isobel discovered the provenance of Audrey's hair (the genetic origins of Charles' remained mysterious however). Mrs Baxter's sister, Rhona, came to visit from South Africa and fingered Audrey's hair as if it was something precious and said, 'This is our mother's hair, Moira,' and Mrs Baxter said, 'I ken that, Rhona,' and their eyes filled up with tears.

Mr Baxter didn't approve of this sentimental hair, didn't really approve of Mrs Baxter's sister with her cheerful disposition and easy-going laughter. He looked put out when he came into the kitchen and found them all gathered round the Formica of the kitchen table, looking sad at the memory of maternal hair, and he rounded on Audrey, 'You know you'd be better employed learning your times-tables you haven't even mastered the sixes yet,' before beating a hasty retreat in the face of so much hair-induced emotion.

'What a Gradgrind,' Mrs Baxter's sister laughed when he'd gone and Mrs Baxter smiled nervously and cut into a cherry and almond Madeira which signalled itself boldly with a circle of glace cherries like big drops of bright blood.

The advent of Mrs Baxter's sister brought much reminiscing with it. Until their mother died they'd had an idyllic childhood apparently. 'Full of fun and games, we were always up to high doh, weren't we, Moira?' Despite years under an African sun, Mrs Baxter's sister still had her lovely lilting accent, with its hints of heather and hills, and sang 'John Anderson, my jo' so beautifully that Mrs Baxter wept. 'Oh aye,' Mrs Baxter said with a faraway smile, 'they were grand days.' Whenever Mrs Baxter mentioned her life before Mr Baxter she became very wistful.

What happened in idyllic childhoods? 'We-el,' Rhona said, 'picnics, dressing up, putting on wee plays' hoots of laughter from both of them at this particular memory 'then we played a lot of games, our mother knew such good games-' At this point Mrs Baxter screamed and flapped her hands in the air and then ran from the room and reappeared, breathlessly, a few minutes later, thrusting a small red book into her sister's hands. At this, Rhona also lost the power of speech, dancing up and down on the spot and screeching. 'The Home Entertainer you've still got it!'

'I have,' Mrs Baxter beamed.

'Poison Spot,' Mrs Baxter laughed with tears welling in her eyes. 'Lemon Golf? Few things can roll more unexpectedly than a lemon!' she read out loud from the instructions.

'Human Croquet!' Mrs Baxter's sister said, in transports of delight. 'That was my favourite.' They played it, she explained, on the lawn of the manse. 'We had a lovely lawn. So green,' she added with an exile's sigh. 'Of course, you need a lot of people for Human Croquet.'

'And they all have to be in the spirit of the game,' Mrs Baxter added.

'Oh yes,' Mrs Baxter's sister agreed.

In the end they raided the fruit bowl, first for a game of Lemon Golf, played on the living-room carpet with an a.s.sortment of instruments walking-sticks, an old hockey stick, a chair leg from the understairs cupboard and (as you would expect) lemons. This was followed by an energetic game of Orange Battle in which even Audrey became animated, and the untimely arrival of Mr Baxter just as Mrs Baxter was flailing with her teaspoon at her sister's orange couldn't quite dissipate the party atmosphere.

Mrs Baxter's sister returned to South Africa the next day and her departure left Mrs Baxter very sad. And very clumsy, it seemed, for she was black and blue all over, like a bad joke. 'I fell down the stairs,' she said, 'silly me.' Silly Mrs Baxter really ought to be more careful.

Time had flown. Seven years of it. Eliza was never coming back, she may as well be as dead as Gordon.

Arden was in decay, there was wet-rot in the floors and dry-rot in the stairs. The windows stuck, the doors jammed. The wallpaper peeled. The dusty drops of the Widow's chandelier were laced with gossamer cobwebs and chimed and tinkled in the fierce draughts that gusted through Arden, as if Boreas and Eurus were holding a compet.i.tion somewhere in the vicinity of the front hall or the great eagle Hraesvelg was flying up and down just to annoy them.

While all the other houses on the streets of trees were being modernized and brought up to date, Arden had remained untouched since the master-builder nailed in the last slate himself.

The garden had become home to toad and frog, mouse and mole and a million garden birds. The nettles were waist-high, the soil latticed with ground-elder and a tangle of brambles was slowly clawing its way across the garden towards the back door. The Widow would have had a fit.

'There's somebody at the back door,' Vinny said, staring into the flames of the fire like an old sibylline cat. Vinny had a mouldering air about her too dust caught in the cracks in her skin and her thin hair was turning to cobwebs. 'I didn't hear anyone,' replied Charles (now a deeply unattractive thirteen year old).

'That doesn't mean there isn't someone there,' Vinny said.

The gla.s.sy eye of the remains of a 'Baked Cod's Head' followed Charles as he walked through the kitchen to the back door. He opened the door and found Vinny was right. A man was standing on the doorstep. He took off his hat and, smiling sadly, said, 'Charles?' in a cracked voice. Charles took a step backwards.

'Remember me, old chap?' Charles couldn't have been more shocked if an alien s.p.a.cecraft had just landed in the kitchen and a squad of Martians trooped out. 'Daddy?' he said in a small voice.

Vinny grumbled her way into the kitchen but when she saw Gordon the power of speech left her. She went quite green. 'Vin?'

'There you are,' Vinny said finally. Isobel came in to the kitchen and looked with interest at this stranger there was something odd about him, something not quite right, but she didn't know what it was.

'Daddy?' Charles repeated. Daddy? How could this be possible? Gordon was dead, killed by the pea-souper, he'd been dead for over seven years. Was he a ghost? He had the eyes of a ghost, but not a ghost's pallor, he was lean and brown as if he'd been working in the sun. When they thought of Gordon they thought of the man in the silver-framed photograph the RAF uniform, the cheerful smile, the wavy hair. This Gordon ghost or impostor had short cropped hair, lightened by the sun and what smile he could muster was far from cheerful.

'Daddy?' Charles repeated helplessly.

'Pleased to see me, old chap?' Gordon whispered, barely able to speak for emotion.

'But, Daddy you're dead,' Isobel said.

'Dead?' Gordon said, looking inquisitively at Vinny who shrugged as if to say it was nothing to do with her. 'You told them I was dead ?' Gordon persisted.

'Mother thought it was for the best,' Vinny replied testily. 'We thought you wouldn't be coming back.'

The story had suddenly changed. Gordon was alive, not dead, perhaps the first known traveller to return from the undiscovered country. The world was no longer subject to the rules of logic where the dead were dead and the quick walked the earth. He'd never walked into the wall of fog, never drowned in the pea-soup. That was all a mistake. 'Somebody made a mistake?' Charles said incredulously. Yes, Gordon agreed, staring grimly at the wall behind them so that they both turned to see if there was someone there. There wasn't.

Someone (a dead person) had been wrongly identified as Gordon, the real Gordon had been suddenly struck by amnesia and gone abroad to live in New Zealand, not knowing he was the real Gordon, not knowing who he was. Not knowing anything. Perhaps Gordon had played too many games of Lost Ident.i.ty and become confused? 'Amnesia,' they overheard him telling people later, in the same way that they had once heard the Widow saying 'Asthma' after he drove away from Arden a lifetime ago. The two words were very similar perhaps the Widow and Gordon had got them muddled up somehow?

'I've got someone I want you to meet,' Gordon said, with a hopeful little smile. 'She's waiting in the car.'

Charles made a funny noise as if he was suffocating. 'Is it Mummy?' he asked, strung out somewhere between impossible hope and overwhelming despair. Gordon's features contracted in a grimace and Vinny said quickly, as if to explain, 'Ran off with a fancy man.' Gordon stared at her as if he was having trouble understanding and Vinny repeated impatiently, 'Eliza, she ran off with a fancy man.' Gordon looked sick at the mention of Eliza's name.

'Is she?' Charles said urgently.

'Is who what, old chap?' Gordon looked dazed.

'Is Mummy in the car with you?'

Gordon seemed to contemplate the answer to this question for a long time but finally he shook his head slowly and said, 'No, no she isn't.'

'h.e.l.lo there,' a bright little voice said suddenly and all four of them flinched and turned to stare at the person standing on the back doorstep. 'I'm your new mummy.'

The second coming of Eliza was no longer just around the corner, with its restoration of real right justice and suffering rewarded (the happy ending). And if the dead Gordon could become alive then perhaps the living Eliza could turn up dead. 'Wherever she is,' Charles said sadly, 'she's never coming back, let's face it, Izzie.'

PRESENT.

EXPERIMENTS WITH ALIENS.

Debbie is having trouble giving the baby a name. I think this is because it is not her rightful property, the baby's ident.i.ty is, after all, in question and to name it might be to somehow rob it of its true inheritance. (But does the baby know who it is?) 'Sharon?' Debbie tries out on Gordon. 'Or Cindy? Andrea? Jackie? Lindy? We don't want anything old-fashioned.' Like Isobel, presumably.

Debbie was right the baby has been accepted on the streets of trees without a murmur and, as no-one has come forward to claim their mislaid infant, we appear to have it for life. Perhaps it really is a changeling, deposited by mistake, the fairies not realizing that we had no real baby in the house to exchange for of course, the fairies' t.i.the to h.e.l.l must be paid in human life every seven years.

The baby is the only person that Debbie thinks is still itself (perhaps because it has so little self) although she still communicates with the rest of us robotic doubles in much the same way as she's always done.

Debbie is now on an elephantine dose of tranquillizers which have no noticeable effect, certainly not on the strange, obsessive behaviour that she's in the grip of the hand-washing, the wiping of door handles and taps, the hysteria if a vase is moved so much as an inch. Perhaps these are the rituals that ward off the madness rather than the symptoms of it. 'She should see a b.l.o.o.d.y psychiatrist,' Vinny says crossly, loudly, to Gordon. 'A trick-cyclist?' Debbie shrieks. 'Not bleeding likely!'

After a great deal of rummaging in the further corners of her brain, Eunice has come up (after a great deal of click-clicking) with her own diagnosis, 'Capgras's Syndrome.' ('Gey queer' is Mrs Baxter's diagnosis.) 'Capgras's Syndrome?'

'Where you believe that close family members have, in fact, been replaced by robots or replicas.'

'Gosh.' (Well, what else can you say?) 'Scientists believe (a contradiction in terms, surely?) that it's a condition related to the well-known phenomenon of deja vu.'

(Now that's interesting.) 'It's to do with our sense of recognition and familiarity.' But then, what isn't?

'The first known case was cited in 1923 a fifty-three-year-old Frenchwoman complained that her family had been replaced by identical doubles. After a while she began to complain that the same thing had happened to her friends and then her neighbours and then eventually everyone. In the end she thought her own double was following her everywhere.' (A-ha!) Eunice rather spoils the scientific effect by dragging hard on a Senior Service, she has recently set foot on the primrose path (fittingly), where will it end? In s.e.x and death I suppose.

What if these things are real though? What if, say, I really do have a double? Mrs Baxter, for instance, reports seeing me buying shampoo in Boots yesterday when I know for a certain fact I was in the middle of a double English lesson and, to be more precise ('about half-past-ten, maybe, dear?'), somewhere between They flee from me that sometime did me seek and With naked foot stalking in my chamber.

Who did she see? My self from the parallel world or my doppelganger in this world? ('A doubler?' Mrs Baxter puzzles.) A figment of my own Capgras's Syndrome? We know who we are, but not who we may be. Maybe. Maybe not.

'On another planet are you, Isobel?' Debbie asks sharply.

'Sorry,' I say absently. Debbie is still rattling off a list of names 'Mandy, Crystal, Kirsty, Patty oh G.o.d, I don't know, you have a go,' she says wearily. The baby (mute for once) gazes at me as if I am indeed a complete stranger, perhaps Capgras's Syndrome is infectious. I look deep into its vague eyes, cloudy with doubt, a little red-gold floss of hair has appeared on the top of its head.

'Fontanelle,' Debbie says. I've never heard that name before. 'It's not a name, silly,' Debbie says, smug in her knowledge of neo-natal anatomy, 'it's the name of that soft spot on the skull [beneath the red-gold floss] where the bones of the skull haven't closed up yet.' I think of boiled eggs with the tops scooped off.

'I suppose you have to be careful not to drop it on that bit then?'

'You have to be careful not to drop it, period,' Debbie says sternly.

I don't know I can't imagine what to call it. Perdita perhaps.

'Do you want a lift?' Malcolm Lovat (home for the holidays) asks, encountering me walking home through town after school. Eunice has a chess match and absent Audrey supposedly has flu again. I have to speak to Audrey.

'A lift?' I repeat, feeling suddenly faint from hunger.

'In my car,' he says, waving his car keys in front of my face as if to prove it isn't a sedan chair or a donkey-cart that he's trying to inveigle me into.

'Your car?' I must stop repeating everything he says.

'My dad's just bought it,' he says in an inappropriately miserable way.

'Bought it?'

'I've been thinking of dropping out of medicine,' he says, opening the car door for me, 'the car's a bribe to keep me at Guy's.'

A pretty good bribe in my books. I'd stay at medical school if somebody bought me a car. Not that I'd ever get in to medical school. ('Do they have science or reason or logic', Miss Thompsett asks sarcastically, 'where you come from, Isobel?' Where would that be? Illogical Illyria, the planet of unreason.) 'And might you? Drop out?'

Malcolm sighs and starts the car engine. 'Sometimes I think I'd like to you know, just take off and disappear?' Why does everyone except Debbie want to disappear? Perhaps we should encourage Gordon to take up magic again practise the vanishing trick on Debbie, or better still saw her in half.

'Everyone seems to have my life mapped out for me,' Malcolm says while I root around in the glove compartment for something to eat. Not even a mis-shapen mint. 'Do you want to go home?' he asks as we stop at a set of traffic lights.

'Not really,' I answer vaguely, in case he has something better to offer (East of the Sun, West of the Moon).

'You could come to the hospital with me, I'm going to visit my mother.'

'That would be lovely.' As far as I'm concerned, as long as I'm with Malcolm we could go and visit a morgue, or a crypt, or the pits of h.e.l.l.

'Cancer,' Malcolm says as we drive into the hospital car-park. 'It's been incredibly rapid, it's eating her up.' I was just daydreaming about him flinging me on to a four-poster bed and telling me how beautiful I am compared with Hilary so the word eating suddenly jars horribly in my head.

'How awful.' I wonder if he's brought any chocolates or grapes.

In the absence of chairs, we stand like awkward bookends by Mrs Lovat's pillow. Her head's the only part of her visible, a bit like a character from Beckett and her hair looks like a collection of well-used Brillo pads. 'h.e.l.lo,' Malcolm says, bending over and kissing her gently on the cheek. She bats him away with her hand as if he's a large fly. She seems to have swallowed a couple of the Brillo pads judging by the sound of her more of a rasping kind of bark than a dulcet dying tone. But then she is an ogress, so what do you expect, and, after all, I remind myself, she is dying.

'Who's this?' she croaks. 'Come here, come closer, is this Hilary?' and she grabs my arms with her claw and yanks me nearer with a strength you wouldn't expect from someone at death's door.

She doesn't recognize me at all ('Well, of course not!' Mrs Baxter exclaims. 'You used to be an ugly duckling and now you're a-' She hesitates.

'A beautiful swan,' I prompt her. But we all know what ugly ducklings grow up into. Ugly ducks.) 'I thought you said she was pretty?' Mrs Lovat says accusingly to Malcolm and then sighs and says, 'I suppose she'll have to do.' For what? Some kind of maiden sacrifice to restore Mrs Lovat to health? But no, for she appears to be bequeathing me her son on her death-bed 'Take him,' she says carelessly, from somewhere inside the crisp white sheets of the hospital-bed. 'Look after him for me, Hilary, someone has to.'

I laugh nervously and begin to explain that I am not Hilary the cancer has obviously begun to nibble her brain by now but then it strikes me that I quite like deputizing for Princess Hilary so I close my mouth and instead stare at the shape of Mrs Lovat's body under the pale-blue hospital counterpane. Perhaps she'll conjure up a priest from inside the bedclothes and marry us so that when Malcolm finally realizes I am not Hilary it will be too late.

Mrs Lovat seems quite big for someone who's being eaten up, although if you look closely you can see that there isn't actually a definite outline of legs. That would be a strange thing, wouldn't it, if diseases started at the feet and ate their way upward? I suppose the head would get pretty vociferous as time went on.

It seems churlish to upset a dying woman none the less it is a little presumptuous of his mother (if not unnatural) to be handing him over so eagerly to the first person she sees. And although I want him, do I really want to look after him? Isn't it supposed to be the other way round? (The head suddenly floats before my eyes, Help me ...) My stomach is rumbling embarra.s.singly loudly but there is nothing to eat, unless you count Mrs Lovat herself, of course.

Eventually, after an interminable amount of very poor small talk, Mrs Lovat bids us a rather unfond goodbye. At the hospital entrance we encounter Mr Lovat, walking around importantly with a stethoscope round his neck. 'What are you doing here?' he asks bullishly when he sees his son. 'You should be studying, just because it's the holidays doesn't mean you can become a layabout!' This seems a little harsh, your mother only dies once after all (unless you were unlucky and she took it into her head to defy the laws of physics).

Poor Malcolm, I suppose all unhappy families resemble one another (but all happy families are happy in their own way, of course). But then, do happy families exist, or happy endings come to that, outside of fiction? And how can there be an ending of any kind until you die? (And how can that be happy?) My own imminent death of starvation can hardly be happy, unless I kiss Malcolm Lovat first, of course.

'Have you got anything to eat, Malcolm?'

'There's an apple in my jacket pocket, I think.' How intimate a thing it is to place your hand inside someone else's pocket and have the bonus of pulling out food as well, a lovely rosy-red apple the kind that in another plot would be smeared with poison. But not this one. 'Thanks.'

We stop at the fish and chip shop in Tait Street this is more like it and eat our pokes of chips parked up on Lover's Leap, a hill from which no Lover has ever Leapt, certainly not in living memory. In the memory of the dead it may be different, of course.