Human Croquet (21 page)

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.

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 hitherto unnoticed asthma.

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 ‘arse over tip’ as Vinny would have had it) – grey hair-slippers-grey hair-slippers-grey hair – bumping 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.

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 ‘Pussypussypussy’ in a kindly voice, hoarse from lack of use.

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.

‘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?