Human Croquet (12 page)
The next morning the Widow went into the second-best bedroom, piously bearing a cup of tea for Eliza, and found Eliza, Charles and the baby all in a muddled heap together in the middle of the lumpy bed. The Widow put the cup and saucer down on the bedside table. The bedroom was awash with Eliza’s expensive underwear, flimsy garments made from silk and lace that provoked the Widow’s disgust. Charles was snoring gently, his forehead damp with sleep. Eliza rolled over exposing a naked arm, round and thin, but didn’t wake. For a second, the Widow had a troublesome vision of her son in this bed, his clean, heroic limbs trammelled in semi-naked harlotry. She had a sudden desire to retrieve the chamber pot from under the bed and beat Eliza about the head with it. Or better still, she thought, looking at Eliza’s white throat, strangle her with one of her own black-market stockings.
I wish,
Eliza said softly,
that she will blossom and grow.
‘What a silly thing to wish for,’ Vinny said.
Look,
said Eliza softly, pulling back the shawl from the sooty head,
isn’t she perfect?
Vinny made a face.
‘What are you going to call her?’ the Widow asked. Eliza ignored her. ‘You could call her Charlotte,’ the Widow pursued, ‘it
is
a lovely name.’
Yes, but it’s yours,
Eliza purred and stroked the shell-whorl of the baby’s ear.
Her ears are petals,
she said,
and her lips are little pink flowers, and her skin is made from lilies and carnations and her teeth
—
‘She hasn’t got any teeth, for Christ’s sake!’ Vinny snapped.
She’s a little May bud. A new leaf. I might call her Mayblossom,
Eliza laughed her gurgling laugh that set everyone’s nerves on edge.
‘No you bloody won’t,’ said the Widow.
Rock-a-bye-baby,
Eliza sang,
on the tree-top,
and whispered the baby’s name in its petal-ear.
Is-o-bel,
a peal of bells.
Isobel Fairfax.
Now the baby’s life could begin.
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.
‘Isobel?’ snorted the very unmerry Widow, and then was unable to think of anything else to say.
Eliza wrote to Gordon,
you’d better come home soon or I’m going to kill your bloody family.
a bloody bore,
Eliza, hissing,
we have to get a place of our own,
at every opportunity. To Gordon. Gordon was no longer a hero, no longer flying in skies of any colour. He’d wrapped himself in his long white apron again and turned himself back into a grocer. Eliza was disappointed with this civilian transformation. The Widow, needless to say, was delighted.
Eliza said as if the word itself was distasteful. ‘Well, what did you expect him to do?’ the Widow snapped. ‘It’s what he was born to,’ she added grandly as if Gordon were the prince-in-waiting to some vast grocery empire.
Gordon was still a hero to Charles, especially when he did magic tricks for him, learned in the idle hours when he was waiting to scramble into the air. He knew how to take coins from Charles’ fingers and make eggs appear from behind the Widow’s ears. He was particularly good at disappearing tricks. When he worked his magic on the Widow she said, ‘Oh Gordon,’ in the same tone that Eliza said,
Oh Charles,
when Charles did something that amused her.
She might as well try to sweep the stars from the sky.
‘I wish she’d just let us play in them,’ Charles said glumly and Eliza laughed,
Play? The word’s not even in the old hag’s vocabulary.
Vinny’s blood,
Eliza informed them). Charles wrote the name of the tree beneath each leaf – sycamore and ash, oak and willow. The leaves had been salvaged from the Widow or scavenged off the pavements when Eliza and Isobel walked Charles home from school in the afternoons.
From the horse chestnuts on Chestnut Avenue they’d collected handfuls of the spiky green seed-pods that looked like medieval weapons and Eliza had shown them how to open them, splitting one with her sharp red fingernails, peeling back the soft white shawl around the brown chestnut inside, saying,
You’re the first person in the world to see that.
Gordon stood in the doorway and laughed, ‘Not quite the same thing as discovering Niagara, Lizzy,’ and then he offered to take Charles away for a manly tutorial on soaking conkers in vinegar, because it turned out that they really
were
medieval weapons, but before he could, Eliza threw a handful of unpeeled chestnuts at Gordon’s head and he said, very coldly, to her, ‘Let’s have a bit of peace in this house for a change, shall we, Lizzy?’
Eliza made a face at his retreating back and when he’d gone said,
Peace, ha! There’ll be no peace in this house until that old hag is dead and in her coffin and six feet under.
‘Six feet under what?’ Charles asked. Charles had got glue all over him, a big leaf was stuck to his elbow.
Why, under the bed, of course,
Eliza said breezily as she glimpsed Vinny in the hall.
‘There are leaves everywhere,’ Vinny complained, coming into the room. ‘It’s worse in here than it is outside.’ The leaves drove her out of the room again and she went to find out where Vera had got to with the tea-tray, oblivious to the rowan leaf, complete with its scarlet berries, that had attached itself to her salt-sprinkled grey hair like a strange botanical barrette.
‘Moan, moan, moan,’ Charles whispered. ‘Why doesn’t she like us?’ Charles’ mission in life was to make people laugh but he’d set himself a hard task with Vinny.
She doesn’t like anyone, she doesn’t even like herself,
Eliza scoffed.
‘She doesn’t even
live
here,’ Charles muttered, but was cheered by the sight of Vera slouching in with a tray piled high with tea and buttered toast, Eccles cakes and the Widow’s apricot tea loaf.
God,
Eliza said, sucking hard on a cigarette,
cake, cake, bloody cake, that’s all you get in this house.
‘Sounds all right to me,’ Charles said.
absolutely wonderful.
At the other end of the table, the Widow said something indistinct. She was sitting with her glasses perched on the end of her nose, turning collars and cuffs (‘waste not want not’). Eliza told Isobel that she should be an artist when she grew up. ‘That won’t put food on the table,’ the Widow said. ‘And you be careful with those crayons, Charles.’
Charles bent over his drawing, frowning in concentration. He was drawing clumsy ideal homes – square houses with pitch roofs and window-eyes and mouth-doors. Isobel drew a tree with golden-red leaves and Gordon came in and said, ‘Oh Margaret, are you grieving over goldengrove unleaving’ and gave her his increasingly sad smile and without looking at him Eliza said,
She really is rather good, isn’t she?
and gave Isobel a radiant, intimate smile that cut out Gordon.
Gordon laughed and said, ‘We should have more, you never know what they might turn out to be – Shake-speares and Leonardo da Vincis.’
‘More what?’ Charles asked without taking his eyes off the sun he was drawing, a big golden-spoked eye.
More nothing,
Eliza said dismissively.
‘Babies,’ Gordon said to Charles. ‘We should have another baby.’
Eliza pushed a lock of hair out of Isobel’s eyes and said,
Whatever for?
Gordon and Eliza had whole conversations now using intermediaries.
‘Because that’s what people do,’ Gordon said, turning Charles’ drawing round as if he was looking at it, although it was obvious he wasn’t. ‘People who love each other, anyway.’ But then he must have come under the influence of Eliza’s silent hoodoo because he suddenly left the room as well. It was all exits and entrances these days in Arden.
‘Where do you get babies from?’ Charles asked, after he’d finished his picture with two birds flying through the sky like dancing Vs.
Eliza flicked open her gold lighter and lit a cigarette. ‘From the baby shop, of course.’
The origin of babies was a confusing issue in Arden. According to the Widow, they were delivered by storks, but Vinny’s version had them being left under goose-berry bushes. Eliza’s answer seemed much more reasonable. Especially as there was a whole row of gooseberry bushes in the back garden and no baby had ever appeared under any of them. And as for storks, they didn’t even live in this country – according to Gordon – so it was hard to see how English children (let alone Welsh or Scottish) could ever get born at all.
The Widow came back into the room and gave a cursory glance at their drawings. ‘Trees have green leaves,’ she said to Isobel, ‘not red,’ as if she had never opened her Widowed window-eyes and looked at autumn.
Children,
Eliza said irritably after the Widow left the room,
why would anyone want children? I wish I’d never had any of the damn things,
so annoyed that one of the wax crayons snapped in two in her hands.
‘But you love
us,
don’t you?’ Charles asked, a worried look on his face. Eliza started to laugh, a weird swooping noise, and said,
Good God, of course I do. I wouldn’t be
here
now if it wasn’t for you.
My hands are full with the children,
Eliza said, without taking her eyes off her book. Although as far as Gordon could see her hands were full with a cigarette and a large whisky and the children were sliding noisily down the stairs on tea-trays.
Oh God,
Eliza muttered to the George the Third chandelier,
they even have the bloody stuff with cheese.
‘Oh, I
am
sorry,’ the Widow said, in her grand northern duchess voice, ‘Did
you
want some, Eliza?’
While Gigli sang ‘Che Gelida Manina’ on the old wind-up, the Widow poured tea into flower-sprigged cups. Eliza took her tea without milk or sugar and every time the Widow poured her a cup she said, ‘Oh, I don’t know how you can!’ and crumpled up her white paper face.
Through a mouthful of cake, Gordon made the mistake of making a joke, for his mother’s benefit, about how Eliza never made cakes and Eliza looked at him through half-closed eyes and said,
No, but then I do fuck you,
so that Gordon sloshed his tea into his saucer and started to choke on his old Christmas cake. The Widow smiled the bright, polite smile of the partially deaf and said, ‘What was that? What did she say?’
