Losing Nicola (3 page)

‘No Peeping Toms up here, you can be sure of that,' my mother said.

‘What about Peeping Dicks and Harrys?' asked Orlando, at which Miss Vane stepped over to the window and twisted her long neck this way and that, as though to ascertain for herself that no rude man could make his stealthy way across the roof tiles and peer in at her chaste disrobings.

‘He'd have to be really determined . . .' said my mother lightly, glaring at Orlando.

‘Unless he was a mountaineer.'

‘Don't be silly, dear. Why on earth would a mountaineer want to waste his time spying on Miss Vane?' She looked quickly at her potential new lodger. ‘Not that I'm . . . Of course I don't mean . . . I'm sure that . . .' The sentence trailed away, leaving behind a possible Miss Vane who wore flimsy undies and posed provocatively in the window, delighting binoculared passers-by on the promenade or even sailors out at sea, provided they had access to a telescope.

Sensing a growing reluctance on the part of Miss Vane to seize this unique opportunity, Fiona smiled at Prunella. ‘If you really feel you want to block out the view, then of course we can find curtains for the window, Miss Vane. I'm sure I have something by me.'

‘Well, I'm really not certain whether I'll be staying,' Prunella said feebly, but we all knew that it was already too late. Like so many before her, she was caught in my mother's gummed web. Anyway, by this time, she'd been offered, and had accepted, the teaching job she'd come down to the coast for, and perhaps in the end it simply seemed easier to stay than to look for alternative accommodation.

Some time later, Ava
tsked
sardonically. ‘Domestic Science teacher? Jam tarts, I wouldn't be surprised if that's all
she's
good for.'

‘She does seem to have somewhat exaggerated her cooking abilities,' Fiona said. ‘I must say I'd rather hoped she would see her way to mucking in and producing dinner for us occasionally.'

‘Why should she?' asked Orlando. ‘I bet you lured her here with false promises of home-cooked meals and all mod cons.'

‘And that's exactly what she's got.'

‘You didn't say she'd have to prepare the home-cooked meals herself. And she
is
paying rent, after all.'

‘I suppose I hoped that from natural goodness of heart, she might feel . . . Oh well . . .' Fiona's life was full of these plangent
Oh wells
. . .

‘As for home comforts, she asked me to scrape the ice off her window this morning,' said Orlando.

‘Given her circumstances, she should be grateful for a roof over her head, at a rent she can afford,' said Fiona coldly.

‘What exactly are her circumstances?'

‘That's her business, not ours.'

‘Then how do you know she ought to be grateful?'

‘Unlucky in love, you mark my words,' sniffed Ava.

Gordon Parker was another long-term lodger, a round-shouldered nervous young man who worked in the public library. He had bad teeth and a high-pitched voice, thinning hair greased back across a lumpy sort of skull and spectacles, which, in Ava's view, did him no favours. He was a member of a local choir, and behind the closed door of his room, we often heard him practising bits of Handel and Haydn in a reedy tenor.

He wore the same clothes every day, winter and summer alike: a V-necked Fair Isle sweater over a checked shirt, a shabby beige corduroy jacket, and chukka boots. There was something nakedly sad about Gordon, which brought out whatever rudimentary maternal instinct Fiona possessed. He was the only lodger she invited in to have a cup of tea with the family; the rest were confined to an electric kettle in their bedrooms. Occasionally she would even send me up to his room with a couple of lumpy iced fairy cakes, the only thing she had ever learned to bake.

My brothers teased him unmercifully, referring to him as Gordon the Barbarian or singing in a high falsetto under his window, until Fiona gave them a lecture on being kind to people who were weaker than they were.

‘What exactly did you do in the war, Gordon?' they would ask innocently, blinking the bright blue eyes they had inherited from my father, when it was painfully obvious that the poor man would have registered D4 on any physical scale you cared to use. And Gordon would retort defiantly, flushing a fiery red, that he'd Done His Bit, thank you.

‘But what
was
your bit, Gordon? What did you
do
?'

‘Not that it's any of your business, but I was employed as a factory worker.'

‘Doing
what
exactly?'

‘That's for me to know and you to find out.' And he would retire to his room to practise his Handel again.

‘He's Not As Other Men,' Ava told Orlando and me once, making sure the door was closed and my mother couldn't hear her.

‘What's that mean?'

‘You know . . .' She put a finger to the side of her nose and tapped it.

‘No, we don't,' I said.

‘You're being very mysterious, Ava.'

‘The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.' Ava pursed her lips. ‘That's as far as I'm prepared to go.'

‘Well, it's not very far,' complained Orlando. ‘I suppose it's another of the things we'll find out when we're older.'

‘Exactly right.'

Our third long-term Paying Guest was Bertram Yelland, art teacher at one of the many boys' preparatory schools in the area. A chronically splenetic man in his early thirties, he was much given to reading pieces aloud from the newspaper and ranting about the state of the country.

‘Festival of bloody Britain,' he would say disgustedly in the accents of the minor aristocracy from which he sprang. ‘Designed to celebrate what, exactly? The beastly Hun being handed everything on a plate?' He'd spread a slice of toast with Ava's home-made marmalade and attack it fiercely with a set of strong yellow teeth. ‘We were supposed to be the bloody winners, weren't we? And look at us now. Christ, you'd hardly know the war was over. Conditions are a bloody sight worse now than they were during the actual conflict.'

He repeated this kind of thing over and over again. Once, Ava challenged him. ‘We're struggling to Get Out of the Doldrums,' she said.

‘Doldrums is the word,' snorted Bertram. ‘The whole bloody country's weighted down by gloom. It's enough to make you join up again. At least you had regular meals in the army, and I don't mean pigswill either. Christ, what was that muck Mrs B served up this evening?'

‘A delicious Shepherd's Pie,' said Ava loyally.

‘Made from what exactly, Mrs Carlton?'

‘Nice minced lamb, of course.'

‘Minced shepherd would be nearer the mark.' He groaned. ‘The average sheepherder would run for the hills sooner than eat garbage like that.'

‘We all have to make sacrifices, Mr Yelland.'

‘Let's face it, the woman's a hopeless cook, even if she has a damned fine intelligence.'

‘You do realize that we've recently come through a Punishing War, don't you?' said Ava, who was turning the collar on one of Bella's blouses. ‘Cooking for such large numbers isn't easy. And don't forget some things are still on ration.'

‘Realize? I should bloody say I do. What do you think I've been doing for the past five years, sitting about on my arse like that poncy little librarian upstairs?'

‘That's quite enough of that sort of talk.'

‘Making a land fit for heroes, that's what I was doing.' Bertram burped loudly. ‘Well, whatever Mrs B's inadequacies – and Christ knows there's a number of them – she's at least what my grandmother would call A Lady. In fact, she'd out-Lady my sainted grandmama any day of the week.'

‘I'm sure she'd be delighted to hear you say so.'

Bertram chuckled grimly. ‘Woman's got a way with an eyebrow that could shrivel the balls faster than a snowstorm. And when she stares at you with that don't-fuck-with-me look in her eyes, you'd damn well better watch out.'

‘I'll thank you to remember there are children in the room, Mr Yelland.'

But Ava, a fearful snob, didn't really mind Bertram's bad language. She knew that his father was a Sir and his mother the second daughter of an Earl.

‘Do you enjoy your job, Mr Yelland?' she asked once.

‘Hate the bloody place. Hate the little blighters I'm supposed to teach, hate the other so-called teachers. If I wasn't dead broke . . .'

‘Can't your father help?' asked Ava delicately.

‘Help? That's a laugh,' said Bertram. ‘He never stops sending me letters telling me to forget my highfalutin notions of being a painter, it's high time I got something behind me, whatever that might mean.' He threw himself around in his chair. ‘God, it's like some third-rate cheap romance, kicking me out of the house if I don't toe the line, no son of mine, never darken my door again, cut you off without a shilling,
all that hackneyed rubbish that fathers like Sir Chesney throw at sons like me.'

‘Really?' Ava was thrilled at these behind-the-scenes glimpses of life in the houses of the nobility.

‘But I'll make it one day, Mrs Carlton, I can promise you that. I only need a single breakthrough, and then it's fame and fortune for Bertram Yelland, and be damned to the pater.'

We children didn't like Mr Yelland, who had a nasty habit of using a wet towel to switch the backs of our bare summer legs if he found us in the passage when he emerged from the bathroom.

‘Trying to look through the keyhole, are you?' he'd roar, and with one smooth movement, off would come his black leather belt.

‘Why? Is there anything to see?' Orlando asked him, nimbly dodging. ‘Are we missing something?'

‘None of your damned impudence, boy! I've got your measure, all right. If I catch you hanging about here again, you're for the chop.'

‘You can't chop us.'

‘I most certainly can, you little blighter.'

‘But this is our
home
.'

‘Doesn't make a ha'porth of difference.' And he retreated to his own room, pulling his loose dressing-gown around him, though not before I'd caught a disagreeable view of the darkly hairy dangly thing below his stomach.

Whenever we could, Orlando and I spied on these people, gazing enraptured through keyholes at Ava strutting naked around her room, Miss Vane struggling into her ineffectual girdle, the Leaping Nun at her devotions, Gordon clearing his throat with a little flick of his head before letting go of his Handelian appeggios.

But for me, the most fascinating member of the household was undoubtedly Fiona. As well as teaching history at the nearby convent school, she also wrote short stories for women's magazines, making her unlike any of the other mothers we knew. She once told me that she could walk down the street and come back with ideas for ten stories. How she could be so successful on paper, writing about romance, children, domestic trivia, women, when her own femininity was so rudimentary, was another of her mysteries.

I spent a great deal of my childhood trying to break her down into her constituent parts, in an effort to examine wherein her difference to others lay, and also to see how much of her I carried inside myself. What was she like before she had children? What had she dreamed of, hoped for? When I knew she would be out for a while, I would tiptoe into her bedroom, treading lightly as a spider across the carpet, breathing in the ghostly smells of her scent, a precious pre-war bottle of Molyneux No 5, used only for very special occasions, and her face powder, which came in round boxes patterned with art deco black and orange flowers.

One afternoon I found a pile of journals hidden at the back of her wardrobe, each one exquisitely written in Indian ink, with an elegant calligraphic flourish at the end of every paragraph. They described journeys she had undertaken before the war in Germany and Spain and Norway, each page illustrated with witty little drawings of herself in various situations – trying not to fall off a bolting horse whose mane streamed behind it in the wind of its passing; swimming in a striped wool bathing costume with a crab pincered to her toe; rushing through a forest in a sleigh followed by slavering wolves – and with caricatures of people she had met along the way. Each volume was bound with fabric, the sheets of handmade paper sewn together with strong white thread. I was endlessly amused and intrigued by these journals, visualizing a younger, more carefree Fiona, who danced with five o'clock-shadowed men at village
fiestas
under swinging Japanese lanterns, or cycled boldly through the
Schwarzwald
in a pair of long baggy shorts and shoes with big laces. Although I didn't realize it at the time, I can see now how extraordinarily talented she was.

I searched constantly for some point of contact between us. We were the only females in a family of men but I was never able to see what linked us, made us two different and separate from the rest. Nor did I ever find any evidence in her drawers and closets. She was nothing like Ava, who possessed underwear covered in lace, padded sateen bags stuffed with filmy stockings, bottles of face cream, jars of make-up, lipsticks, eyebrows tweezers, powder puffs, orange sticks, nail-polish, cut-glass bottles with rubber balls covered in gold netting which you squeezed to produce a cloud of eau de cologne, a blue silver-topped bottle of
Soir de Paris
by Bourjois. Ava's wardrobe was packed with skirts made of shiny materials, with frilly blouses and little puff-sleeved jumpers, each hung on a hanger of padded white satin. Ava shaved her legs and under her arms.

Fiona possessed none of these feminine articles. A couple of sagging woolen skirts, a few pilled sweaters, a moth-eaten evening dress dating from well before the war. Was it poverty or simply indifference? Much later in my life I would realize that Fiona, a born bluestocking, would have been far better suited to running a women's college in Oxford or Cambridge than trying to run a home.