Patrick Parker's Progress (2 page)

Once he just went on lying there and said, half dreaming, 'Be good to go away somewhere together, Lil. How about Paris? We could go up the Eiffel Tower. I'd like to see it. I'd make you a model of it afterwards. Paris is the place for lovers.' The word lovers is heavy in the room. Lilly just stood there in front of him, hands on her hips, shockingly naked and carelessly amused, and smiling crookedly, all lipstick gone.

'Now then, George,' she said. 'Don't get all sentimental.' Then she touched his face in a different way from usual - and somewhere inside of him he felt as if a plug had been pulled out - everything was running away to nothing. He said, moving into the murky waters of taboo - 'If I had stuck with you we'd be together like this all the time.' For a moment she had looked down at him with the sweetest look on her face. And then - snap! The look was gone. 'Come on now,' she said, back to her usual self, 'gee-up. You've got a baby on the way
...
And there's a war on.' She pulled him up, aware that he did not look too happy about it. Probably, she thought, as she dressed, he was worried about the baby's future in this death-filled world. She tried not to think the other thought which hurt, surprisingly: that he and Florence made that baby, together. Unless bloody Florence was going for the Immaculate Conception. Which Lilly Willis would not put past the woman.

But it was not that then, and it is not that now. George already has an inkling that this son of his will never be his at all really. Already he feels the exclusion. Another possibility has let him down. His life all round has not been what he once thought it would be. In short, George is a disappointed man and a once-a-week pleasuring has not fulfilled him at all. Always, as soon as he has left the shop, George wonders why he bothers. Lilly is so cheerful, he is sure that she forgets him as soon as the door swings shut. He tries to be like that too. But by Monday he is running his hands through his hair and back to waiting for the following Wednesday session with a pleasurable need. If he hadn't got flat feet he might have seen something of the world, expanded his horizons, even if it did end up putting a bullet into his chest. As it is, his horizons are narrow and getting narrower. A model of the Eiffel Tower is about as far as he will get, he knows. He makes models like some men have dreams. He hopes his son will do better. He certainly hopes his son will do better in the matter of marriage and happiness and all that. He couldn't do much worse.

The little diversion from George's sensible sexual arrangement with Lilly, and from which baby Patrick occurred, happened the previous Easter when Florence ate a considerable number of liqueur chocolates. She was keeping them, two boxes, winnings from the church tombola, to give away as gifts herself, being teetotal, but since the Germans were very likely due to land at any moment, it seemed an act of Patriotic Duty to swallow the lot. Fortunately she could remember nothing of the ensuing conjugal act, except the room going round and George above her looking very surprised.

Now, down in South London, tucked up in Dolly's bed with a pink bedjacket around her shoulders, her once harsh mouth bears the soft curve of contentment. 'I never knew I wanted you until you came,' she whispers to the bald, pink head. And she kisses its pulsing tip. Like many a mother before and since, the act of maternal union took her quite by surprise, rendered her weak, and made her ready to rip the world apart with her jaws should any element in it try to hurt the babe at her breast. It surprised her all over again that such perfection should be borne out of such an ugly act, such a painful sequel. No wonder, she thought, that it was considered original sin.

After a few weeks, Florence reluctantly made the train journey back to ravaged Coventry, with George at her side. 'Ah, the proud father,' said a hearty lady in the carriage, after cooing over Florence's bundle. Florence looked up as if she were about to say something sharp and all George, who had come to accompany his wife and son, managed was a sheepish smile. He knew it embarrassed his wife. If he felt any atavistic stirrings of masculine pride, he kept them to himself. If you were a woman and you sat with a man in a railway carriage, and you held that man's baby, then it meant you had been doing unmentionable things with him. It was all George could do to stop himself leaning across the carriage and saying to the hearty lady 'It's all right you know, we only did it twice - ever.'

The council found them the three-roomed ground floor of a house to the south of the town - with a small scullery, shared bathroom above, but its own privy out the back. Florence, though she moaned about it, realised that they were lucky compared with some. Her previous neighbours, a childless couple, were now living in one room and a kitchen and the WC was down two flights of stairs. She stroked little Patrick's head as he nuzzled at her breast - another blessing, another miracle - if it hadn't been for him who knew what kind of a tip they'd be rehoused in. He was, in every sense, his mother's salvation. In the midst of ruin and chaos, he will bring light, she thinks. She also thinks he will bring glory for her. Before her marriage Florence looked after her three brothers and her father - Mother having departed when she was in service in London and little Flo recalled to take her place. George had seemed like a miracle then. A man with a future, she thought, in the railways, a safe job throughout the Depression - only he never got further than collecting tickets and making his models and looking miserable about it.

With miracles and blessings in mind, the baby was draped in white lace and fine, hand
-
knitted woollens (this latter a present from dexterous Dolly) and taken into town to the Methodist Church where he shrieked and yelled a blue fit at the coldness of the water. Indeed, he pummelled and cried and held his breath and made the Reverend Pincher so irritated and tight-lipped
with all his kickings and wrig
glings that Florence was convinced the Man of God had lived up to his name. She very nearly took her baby back off him, but the Reverend Pincher held on tight (thus increasing the outraged volume of those little lungs) saying that it was necessary in the sight of God that he hold on to the little perisher to complete the job. With Florence shadow-close and snorting and flapping like a mother seal the baptism took place. Plain Patrick became Patrick Nigel and was handed back as such. The Reverend Pincher mopped his brow and called him a determined little lad. George, shaking the man's damp hand, could not quite hide a little smirk, feeling that if the ruddy church didn't know how to deal with the boy, it was no wonder that he, George, his own father could not. Florence strode off calming the angry child and was overheard to murmur all the way down the chapel path, 'There, there - didn't you like the nasty man with the horrid water, then?' Which the Reverend Pincher thought was somewhat against the grain of the baptismal ritual.

George's daft sister Ada stood godmother, upsetting his other sister Bertha - which pleased Florence who did not care for Bertha's outspoken ways. Although Ada lived in Coventry she was not one of those women who knew, to the nearest number, how many beans made five and she would leave well alone. The godfathers were distant relatives - one no more than a lad himself, the least godly and not at all likely to interfere. Florence was not having anyone come between her and her son.

George's daft sister Ada soon found herself under a burnt-out bus, not much more than a pile of ashes herself. The war did terrible, terrible things to communities, it was true, thought Florence, as she sat holding baby Patrick at the funeral - but there was always a bright side to everything
...
For instance, she was able to nurse baby Patrick for the first two and a half years of his life without anyone taking exception. And that kept him close to her. You might almost say, tied. Before the war it was becoming fashionable to use bottles for babies but not now. A good mother was a production unit like everything else. The war was useful in respect of this. Nobody bothered to tell you what to do and what not to do when the sirens sounded. Florence could pretend to the world, perhaps to herself, that she was still nursing him beyond his second birthday because it was convenient and best for him and natural. Nobody remarked on it. Only Dolly Wapshott's visit changed things. Dolly, whose baby girl Little Audrey arrived nine months after Patrick (the juxtaposition of two bodies, one male, one female, sharing a small single bed for several nights while Florence and son reposed in their double one awoke a surprising urge in Dolly and her husband). Little Audrey had already been weaned by the time she was one year old.

'And that,' Dolly told Florence firmly, 'was considered late
...
Who knows what's waiting for us at the end of this war?' she said firmly. 'It doesn't do to make a milksop. They need to be a bit independent in this day and age. My little Audrey can chew on anything nowadays.'

Very reluctantly, Florence yielded up her last two pleasurable moments with him - first thing in the morning and last thing at night - and it should be said that Patrick did not object very strongly. On

the first night of the withdrawal of the maternal tit, when Auntie Dolly put a sweetened dummy in his mouth at the moment the tears began to well, he sucked on it and became quite cheerful again. Mother or sugary rubber teat, it was all the same to him. It was, after all, something new and therefore interesting. Patrick might not know the word but he knew the sensation: the world was an interesting place and he was ready to enjoy each new experience.

"There you are, you see -' said Dolly in triumph. 'He doesn't need it at all.'

She playfully chucked her own chubby daughter beneath the chin and the child chomped on a bickey-peg and smiled through its fat red cheeks. 'Quite the independent Little Audrey, aren't you?' she proudly said. Florence sniffed, looking at her own little angel as he lay in his cot, eyes closed, dummy moving rhythmically. Despite his having arrived early he was a perfect shape - neither fat, nor thin - and he was elegant, cautious - not one to do anything unforeseen - a thinking child, and quick on the uptake. From his earliest days, when the merest movement in his cot, the lightest change in his breath, the slightest flicker of his eyes brought his mother to his side to see what was required, Patrick had a way of looking out at the world that said he knew he was very important. Florence stroked his long, artistically shaped fingers and then looked at her friend's daughter's plump digits. 'Little Audrey?' she said suddenly, and acidly. 'Nothing little about it'

'Got George's fingers, I see,' said Dolly, by way of a counter. She knew where Flo's bodies were buried if she'd a mind to.

Florence was not one to find anything appealing apart from her son, even baby girls. Girls had a way of looking at you that went straight through and out the other side. Patrick just looked up at her, and trusted. That was what counted. To her Patrick she was everything, or almost everything. Not quite, because for some irritating reason, when they visited London, Patrick seemed to find Little Audrey fascinating - he liked to push at her and see her topple and then watch, smiling, as she righted herself, laughing and scarlet from the exertion among the cushions. He liked to pull her bottle in and out of her mouth and hear the sucking sound of the air and bubbles rushing back into the teat. Throughout it all, Little Audrey was entirely good-humoured. Florence did not like these games at all. But if she ever tried to change the mood - with a clapping song or 'Come to Mother
...'
Patrick paid no attentio
n. Until he was ready. And then
he would say so, loudly. 'Patrick stop now,' he would say, nodding sagely. And that would brook no nonsense. Florence would reclaim her prize. She swung him up in the air telling him he should go higher than the highest he had ever been before. 'You'll be something, my boy,' she would mutter. 'Not like the likes of Little Audrey. You'll look down on them all -'

Coventry remained a wasteland. On one of her visits Dolly said, 'You'd have thought they'd start rebuilding this place, Flo - it's no setting for bringing up a kiddie.'

'Oh,' said Florence. "They keep talking about doing this and that but nothing ever happens. If anyone does produce an idea then the Council can't make up its mind.'

'Your George should go along with some of his models.'

Florence just sniffed.

Dolly whispered the question. 'Still Lilly, then?' To which Florence just sniffed the louder.

Little Audrey liked to watch as Florence bathed and caressed and spoke to her baby boy. She watched the games and the rituals as Patrick meticulously put brick upon brick without knocking them down. 'Mother's little builder,' Florence would say, or 'Who's Mummy's clever boy, then?' Little Audrey saw that George looked on but said nothing. And that he built the boy things that Florence brushed aside. The general view of Patrick's great talent with the bricks was that he would one day grow up to rebuild Coventry, probably single-handedly, and be the wonder of the world. Little Audrey smiled and clapped as the bricks went higher but she was never allowed to touch. Once, overcome at the great height of the tower of coloured wood Patrick had made, she tottered over and gave it a mighty, satisfying punch and the bricks went everywhere. Patrick looked at her coldly and rebuilt his tower. He ignored her for the rest of the afternoon. She did not do it again.

But Little Audrey showed she had some tricks of her own. As soon as Patrick saw how she sat up at the table and made use of a spoon all on her own - with a few spillages which Florence made quite a bustling fuss about - Patrick followed suit. Perfectly. He also asked for another cushion. Little Audrey sat on one, he would sit on two. When his mother tried to help him guide his spoon, he pushed away her hand. His first act of extreme independence and Florence was saddened to the core.