Human Croquet (24 page)

Another year passed. And then another. Eliza grew dark, stranded in the passage 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.’

‘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 godmother? 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?’

‘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 glacé 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 assortment 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.

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.

The glassy 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 spacecraft 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 Identity 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.’

‘Hello 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.’