Human Croquet (10 page)

‘Why are you dressed like that?’ I’ve tried very hard to forget my trip down memory lane to Ye Olde Sunne and this is an unpleasant reminder.

She looks down at her dress as if she’s never seen it before and then stares at me with her little eyes. ‘Oh, dress rehearsal,’ she says suddenly as if she’s been translating what I said, ‘Midsummer what’sit.’

I could tell her that she doesn’t smell high enough to be authentic but I don’t bother. ‘Izzie?’

‘Mm?’

‘Do you think there’s something missing from this room?’

‘Missing?’

‘Or something not quite right. It’s like—’

‘It’s like it’s the same room as before and yet it’s not the same?’

She stares at me in astonishment, ‘That’s it exactly! Does that happen to you as well?’

‘No.’

‘Your head perhaps?’ I query.

‘What?’

‘Nothing?’

Will I ever escape the madness that is Arden?

Mrs Baxter knows how to produce an amazing number of variations on a Victoria sponge, each embellished with a different decoration – chocolate cakes labelled with chocolate vermicelli, lemon cakes tagged with jellied lemon slices and coffee cakes signposted with walnut halves that resemble the brains of tiny rodents. Vinny has never even baked a cake, let alone been initiated into the protocol of decorating them.

Mrs Baxter also eats a lot of her cake of course and sometimes after she’s eaten several slices back to back she’ll put her hand over her mouth and laugh, ‘Dearie me, I’ll be
turning
into a cake soon!’ What kind of cake would Mrs Baxter turn into? A vanilla sponge, soft and crumbly and full of buttercream.

‘No wonder you’re so bloody fat,’ Mr Baxter says to her. Mr Baxter himself has never been seen to eat cake (‘He’s not a cake hand,’ Mrs Baxter says sadly).

Mrs Baxter always gives me an extra slice of cake, wrapped in a paper napkin, to take home for Charles. Anyone watching me scurrying home from Sithean would think that there was some kind of endless birthday party taking place inside.

Today, in honour of the sun, Mrs Baxter has strayed from her usual beige spectrum and is wearing a sundress with brightly coloured red and white candy stripes, like an awning, or a deck-chair. It has thin red shoelace-straps and a lot of Mrs Baxter’s flesh is on show – her fat arms and dimpled elbows and the voluptuously maternal cleft of her cleavage in which pink cake crumbs have lodged. Mrs Baxter’s skin has turned to the colour of cinder toffee from working in the garden and she’s covered in big freckles like conkers. She looks hot to the touch and I have to stifle a desire to jump down into the chasm of Mrs Baxter’s bosom and get lost there for ever.

Mrs Baxter sighs happily, ‘It’s just right for playing Human Croquet,’ but doesn’t elaborate on whether she means the lawn or the weather or the mood. ‘Of course,’ she adds, ‘we don’t have enough people just now.’

Mr Baxter appears suddenly on the lawn, casting his menacing shadow over the tea-tray like an evil sundial and Mrs Baxter’s cup trembles in its saucer. Mr Baxter gazes into the distance, far beyond the Albertine, towards the rise of green that is Boscrambe Woods.

‘Cuppie, dear?’ Mrs Baxter enquires, holding up a cup and saucer as if to make it clear what she means. Mr Baxter looks at her and seeing her sun-hat – a red plaited-straw coolie hat – frowns and says, ‘Just come home from the paddy-fields, have you?’ and Mrs Baxter knocks over the milk jug in her hurry to pour Mr Baxter’s cuppie (they are an incredibly clumsy family). ‘Silly me,’ she says with a big smile that owes nothing to being happy. ‘Nothing better to do?’ he asks, raising an eyebrow at the bird-table. It is not the birds he is questioning though.

Mr Baxter doesn’t like to see people idle. He’s an autodidact (‘That’s how I avoided the pit,’ he explains darkly) and resents people who’ve been ‘given things on a plate’. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t like cake.

‘What are you doing?’ he asks me gruffly.

‘Just killing time until the play,’ I mumble through a mouthful of cake. (‘Oh dearie me, don’t do that,’ Mrs Baxter murmurs.)

Mr Baxter sits down, rather abruptly, on the grass next to where I’m sprawled in a deck-chair, exposing his thin, hairy legs above his grey socks. He’s out of place in Arcadia, he prefers sitting on straight-backed chairs and watching parallel lines of desks stretching towards infinity. ‘There’s greenfly on the rose,’ he says to Mrs Baxter in a tone that’s suggestive of moral improbity rather than pest infestation. ‘You’re going to have to spray it.’ Mrs Baxter hates spraying things. She never flattens spiders or bashes wasps or
cracks!
fleas, even house-flies are allowed to buzz freely around Sithean when Mr Baxter’s back is turned. Mrs Baxter has an agreement with creeping and flying things, she doesn’t kill them if they don’t kill her.

Mr Baxter’s smell rises up on a current of warm air towards me – shaving-cream and Old Holborn – and I try not to inhale.

‘I spy with my little eye,’ Mrs Baxter says hopefully, ‘something beginning with “T”,’ and Mr Baxter shouts, ‘For God’s sake, Moira, can I get a bit of peace, please?’ so that we don’t find out what the “T” is. Perhaps it’s Theseus, even now striding across the field under the harsh suburban sunshine to exclaim that his nuptial hour is drawing on apace. ‘Oh, they’ve started!’ Mrs Baxter says excitedly, ‘I must go and fetch Audrey.’

Debbie comes home ashen-faced and at first I think this is on account of her dreadful performance – she may as well have handed the part over to the prompt – but she whispers to me over a mug of Bournvita, ‘The wood.’

‘The wood, the wood,’ she repeats, like Poe trying to write a poem, ‘in the play,’ she hisses, ‘Midsummer what’sits?’

‘Yes?’ I say patiently.

‘My thingie.’

‘Character?’

‘Yes, my character gets lost in the wood, doesn’t she?’ (The Lady Oak has heroically stood in for a thousand trees for the Players.)

‘Yes?’

Debbie looks round the kitchen, a weird expression on her face, she seems to be having a lot of difficulty putting her thoughts into words.

‘What’s wrong?’

She drops her voice so low that I can hardly hear her, ‘I was in a wood, for real, I was lost in a bloody great forest. For hours,’ she adds and begins to cry. I think she’s been too much in the sun. Shall I tell her about the ginnels and snickets and vennels of time? No, I don’t think so. ‘Perhaps you should see a psychiatrist?’ I suggest gently and she runs out of the room in horror.

So there we have it. We are both as mad as tea-party hatters.

I miss my mother. The ache that is Eliza comes out of nowhere, squeezing my heart and leaving me bereft. This is how she affects me – I’ll be crossing the road, queuing for a bus, standing in a shop and suddenly, for no discernible reason, I want my mother so badly that I can’t speak for tears. Where is she? Why doesn’t she come?

The clock on the Lythe Church chimes the witching hour.
Caw.
A shuffling of feathers and leaves from the Lady Oak.

Under my feet moles mine and worms tunnel unseen. A bat flits through the ocean of darkness. Somewhere, far away, a dog howls and something moves, the black shape of a figure walking across the field. I could swear it has no head. But when I look again, it’s disappeared.

The Widow had nice things. The Widow had things nice (people said). She had blue and white Delft bowls filled with hyacinths in the spring and poinsettias in her Satsuma ware at Christmas. She had good Indian carpets on her oak parquet and raw silk covers on cushions that were braided and tasselled like something from a sultan’s divan. And in the living-room she had a chandelier, small, George the Third, with ropes of glass beads and big pear-drop crystals like a giant’s tears.

Madge had escaped long ago by marrying an adulterous bank clerk in Mirfield and producing another three children.

Vinny looked as if she dined only on hard crusts and dry bones and was as sour as the malt vinegar that she dispensed by the pint from the stoneware flagon at the back. Vinegary Vinny, as old as the century but not quite as war-torn, born an old maid, but none the less married briefly after the First World War to a Mr Fitzgerald – a non-combatant chartered librarian with manic depressive tendencies – a man considerably older than his spinsterish wife. Vinny’s feelings about Mr Fitzgerald’s death (of pneumonia in 1926) were never entirely clear, although, as she confided to Madge, there was a certain relief in being released from the duties of married love. Vinny remained, however, in the small marital home which she had briefly shared with Mr Fitzgerald in Willow Road.

This at least, was her own domain, unlike the licensed grocery which her mother ran with a hand of iron and in which she was relegated to the role of mere shop assistant. ‘I could be as good a businesswoman as Mother if she would let me,’ she wrote to Madge-in-Mirfield, ‘but she never gives me any responsibility.’ The business was destined to be Gordon’s and as soon as he finished school the Widow made him wrap himself up in a white grocer’s apron and was very annoyed when he sneaked out of the house at night to go to classes at the technical institute in Glebelands. ‘Everything he needs to know is right here,’ the Widow said, pointing to the middle of her forehead as if it were a bull’s-eye. Uncomfortable in his grocer’s apron, Gordon stood behind the polished mahogany counter looking like he might be living a quite different life inside his head.

Then another war came and changed everything. Gordon became a hero, flying through the blue sky above England in his Spitfire. The Widow was excessively proud of her fighter-pilot son. ‘Apple of her eye,’ Vinny wrote to Madge-in-Mirfield. ‘Blue-eyed boy,’ Madge-in-Mirfield wrote back. Gordon was not blue-eyed. He was green-eyed and handsome.