Summertime (28 page)

August 29th

Have been dodging the telephone since my mother's pep talk, in case Hedley rings, as he is always better face to face. Am also dodging the children. This is surprisingly easy considering how large they are and how small the house is, due to their very predictable habits. Left alone, Giles and Felix wear pyjamas and eat cereal in front of the television with the curtains drawn all day. The Beauty takes the biscuit tin and all her dolls into the dogs' castle and makes a boudoir deep within it. There she bosses babies and dogs to her heart's content.

When I sneak past on tiptoe, she is arranging a wedding between Mouldy Baby and Lowly, with Gertie as clergyman.

‘No, no, no,' she insists, ‘don't eat it, Lowly. You have to wear the crown and so does Mouldy. That's right. Now Gertie, say a prayer.'

Move on stealthily to hang out the washing. Folding the dry clothes, I close my eyes and inhale deeply,
loving the fresh-air scent, enveloped in it. Things have moved on from fresh-air candles, and now Rose tells me that in America, the vogue is for sheets to be ‘Line Dried', an expensive process involving specially altered tumble driers, perhaps indeed broken ones able to let fresh air in.

‘Of course, what everyone there longs for is a washing line. There's something so grounding about actually pegging out your clean laundry every day.'

Sometimes Rose goes too far.

Anyway, my limbo life cannot go on. Hedley has left nine messages on the answerphone, most of which are rants, due to the delivery of thirty tons of pig manure outside his front door. He has been engaged in a boundary dispute with a neighbouring pig farmer, who believes that actions speak louder than words. From the choleric nature of the messages, it is clear that Hedley has not even noticed that I am avoiding him. His voice transmits a tone of massive ill use and fury, which he seems convinced I will share.

It is another hot, windless day, with the sun high and bright and the sky bleached pale blue. Nothing is moving in the hedgerows, but beyond, the fields are in turmoil as great yellow combine harvesters charge to and fro, trailing clouds of dust and shards of bright straw, as they perform their alchemy by devouring the
last of the corn crop in order to deliver sliding mounds of gold into the waiting trailers.

Drive everybody to the weekly auction in Aylsham as a delaying tactic for work as well as life. Have run completely out of inspiration, and in the hope that they will just vanish, have taken to leaving the as yet unworked-on cardigans on the bench in the hall. The result of this is that The Beauty has started wearing them, but with her legs rather than her arms in the sleeves.

‘They're just soft pants,' she explains, when asked what she is doing. ‘You try them.'

Park at the auction by wedging the car in between a van full of caged ferrets and another delivering seven sludge-green lavatories to the outdoor part of the sale. ‘Can we have one?' yell all the children in one voice, but looking in different directions at different objects of desire. Giles has seen the ferrets, Felix the bicycles just beyond, and The Beauty is entranced by the green loos being tenderly wrapped in blankets and deposited on the concrete outside one of the cavernous saleroom sheds. A bell rings; milling people herd towards a smaller shed for the fur and feathers sale. We join them, blinking to acclimatise to the clanking, sawdust-scented darkness of the shed. The usual bedraggled and demented chicken line-up, with
the occasional proud, single cockerel, is augmented today by a big array of ferrets. Become transfixed by family of spectral white ferrets, slinking and rolling in a wooden box with a mesh top. The biggest one has yellowing fur at its neck, but the young are dazzling white, tumbling and playing, breaking off to uncoil their bodies and stand up on their hind legs to sniff the air. Can feel myself succumbing to their fascination, so concentrate on their rat-like pink eyes to put myself off and turn away towards the more harmless guinea pigs and rabbits. Discover The Beauty clinging like a rock climber to the mesh wall of cages, stroking a fudge-coloured rabbit.

The auctioneer opens the cage, reaches in to grab the occupant and holds the hapless creature up for a quick last-minute look before beginning his melodious bidding murmur. Giles looks at me.

I nod, weakly, relieved he isn't attempting to buy the ferrets, and whisper, extremely generously as I perceive it, ‘But not more than five pounds.'

‘OK.' He hoists The Beauty on to his shoulders to wait for the bidding to open.

The auctioneer, a fellow parent at The Beauty's nursery school, grins in an avuncular fashion, wipes his face with a red spotted handkerchief and begins, ‘Three-fifty, who'll give me three-fifty, three-twenty then.'

The Beauty's hand flies up and she yells, ‘Me. I'm doing it. Shuddup Giles.'

The auctioneer winks at her and accepts her bid, and we are off: ‘Starting at three-twenty with the young lady, three-twenty, three-twenty, thank you, three-fifty, three-fifty, three-seventy, four.' A thin man with blurred pale skin and yellow dyed hair is bidding against her.

The Beauty glares balefully at him, and Felix tugs my sleeve to whisper, ‘That man looks like a banana.'

Felix and I begin to snort with laughter, distracting those around us and, most fortunately, the banana man, who misses the final bid. ‘It's four-four, four-fifty, five-five, five – any advance on five pounds? Five pounds then, selling at five pounds …
sold
to the young lady.' The auctioneer whacks his hammer against the cage and moves on.

We stand, flooded with euphoria, looking at our purchase. Bunny has resolutely turned her face to the corner of her cage and shows no sign of wishing to meet us.

‘It's called Fat Rabbit,' says The Beauty. ‘But it's a bit lonely. Shall we get another one? Right now?'

‘She's right, Mum, it'll be lonely on its own. We should have two, you know. There are some really sweet lop-eared ones just coming up now.' Felix could be a rabbit social worker with the level of concern he is
displaying. I am completely taken in by the pleading, serious expressions on all three children's faces, but make a last-ditch attempt to save myself.

‘Who will do the mucking out? Who will feed them and gather hogweed every day?'

‘We will, Mummy, honestly. We've always wanted some rabbits,' says Felix.

‘But you never take the dogs out,' I remind them.

‘We're older now,' coaxes Giles, ‘and anyway, you never ask us to take the dogs out. We look after Gertie.'

‘Well that's because Gertie likes doing what you do. She even eats cereal with milk and sugar now.'

‘No she doesn't, she eats—'

‘Look, look, what a sweet poppet rabbit,' shrieks The Beauty, pointing as a small grey lop-eared bunny is hoisted from its cage. The bidding has already started, but Giles and Felix insinuate themselves like smoke into the tight-pressed crowd around the auctioneer. They push The Beauty forwards and she shoots up her hand as the bidding reaches three-fifty. Praying they will stop at five, and quite unable to squeeze myself past anyone to be near them, I hang around at the edge, trying to see over a dirty baseball cap to where the children are.

‘Sold
, to the young lady and her brothers for nine pounds,' shouts the auctioneer. I hear him in disbelief.
Nine pounds? They can't have bought a rabbit for nine pounds, it's absurd. I told them they could only go up to five pounds. What are they thinking of? I raise my hand to try to lodge a complaint, but the children emerge at my side, lit with excitement and clutching three small grey rabbits.

‘Fat Rabbit can be yours, Mum. We're having one of these each. And there are two more in the cage, which I thought we should give to The Beauty's nursery when term starts again,' says Felix.

‘That was why it was nine pounds,' explains Giles, stroking the ears of the rabbit disappearing into his crooked elbow. ‘Actually it's a real bargain. Five for nine pounds is less than two pounds each.'

Six rabbits. How ghastly. ‘Can't we just leave a few of them here?' I ask hopefully. ‘I'm sure some nice person would rescue them.'

Giles and Felix both look shocked. ‘Mum, you couldn't abandon them in the saleroom, could you?' asks Felix.

Have to do deep breathing and struggle to reach a higher spiritual plane in order not to snap back, ‘Yes, I bloody well could.'

Beaten down, and keen to leave before we purchase any other life-changing errors, I meekly suggest that we take them home to settle them in.

August 30th

The rabbit house is palatial. Giles suddenly remembered his museum, untouched for several months and now home to several mice and probably a few rat squatters too. The construction, cocooned by cobwebs and dust, consists of four chest-high walls made by David and painted to look like a Roman temple, with glass cases found in a junk yard propping them up from the inside. The rabbits were installed yesterday and immediately vanished behind the artefacts we gave them to play with. The boys too vanished, muttering something about skateboarding into the village, and promising vaguely to do the rabbits later. The same has happened today.

Take comfort from the fact that The Beauty is still interested, and we have had the bunnies at home for a whole twenty-four hours. She will not come out of their run, but is sitting on a small chair she has dragged in, breathing heavily and looking around for rabbits to boss. She spies a cottontail behind the tattered Mary Poppins umbrella that was one of the feebler museum exhibits and shrieks, ‘Aha! Found you. Don't worry, sweet poppets, I won't tell anyone.' She bends forward to talk to them, hands clasped in her lap in the manner of a playgroup leader. Three of the rabbits hop over to her and sit up on
their back legs. One places a tentative paw on The Beauty's knee. Am really coming round to the sweet little fur bundles. Am sure I have read somewhere that it is good for stress to have something to stroke. I shall have a rabbit as my executive toy, and stroking will start immediately. It works. Ten minutes of calm rabbit-stroking and I am ready to face anything.

Telephone my mother and ask her to come and oversee the children.

‘I've got to go and see Hedley, and I'm sure they won't want to come, given their views, so I wondered if you would like to drive over and let them show you their new rabbits?'

‘Rabbits, how awful,' she says. ‘I expect the dogs will eat them. God, no. Don't take the children with you. Absolutely not,' she adds with feeling. ‘Have you spoken to David, though? I really think you should.'

Surprised to hear myself snap back with a blatant lie, ‘I know what I am doing.'

She ignores me. ‘All right, I'll come. But I will not hold the rabbits. I hate rabbits. I'm not gathering any dandelions for them, or putting water into those awful bottle things they have.'

‘No, no, the children will do that. See you later.'

‘When have your children ever looked after their animals?' she retorts before hanging up.

Horrible hourglass sensation of stomach sinking
into shoes has faded now, thanks to bunny-cuddling session. The Beauty is busy burying Barbie in her sandpit, the boys are not back from the village and I am able to arrange myself in the hammock with the newly developed photographs I collected this morning. Hammock creaks in protest but does not give way, and the dappled canopy of the tree is soothing. Tear open the pack of photographs in happy anticipation of reliving the camping trip, and instead find myself staring at David. David, very brown, his eyes clear silver-grey, grinning broadly in front of a log cabin. Goose pimples rise on my arms and my heart leaps thumping into my throat as I flick through the snaps, not stopping to look at any one picture properly because I so desperately want to have seen them all, to know what is in there. Reach the end and sigh; apart from the first one, they are all of monkeys, parrots and other jungle miscellanea. Recall a postcard arriving some time ago rolled around a film. These must be the pictures he sent the boys of life in the jungle. Throw the photographs on to the ground and lie back with the David picture in my hand. Am very shaken by seeing him where I did not expect him. Or am I shaken by seeing him at all? Had forgotten the electric effect of his smile, and the particular way he inhabits a crumpled white shirt.

‘Mummy, what you doin'?' Brought back to earth
by the piercing gaze of The Beauty, and find that I have the photograph almost resting on my nose, so closely am I examining it. Hurl it to one side and hug The Beauty tight, making her squeal. While she waves her toes and coos, I reach my arm out in an impossible stretch and grab the photograph, stuffing it in the pocket of my skirt. My mother appears, fanning herself with a straw hat.

‘Just go,' she sighs. I go.

‘Who is he smiling at? Who took the picture?' These questions create the rhythm for the short journey to Hedley's house, and wrestling with them occupies every scrap of ingenuity I possess. Sniffing vaguely, I park my car, wondering whether anyone ever takes Hedley's rubbish out for him, or if it always smells like this here at the end of the summer.

Hedley struts out of the front door, shouting into a telephone, gesticulating wildly. He sees me, his gestures become more expansive to include me, and his brow tilts up to the left. The brow appears to have got bushier in the days since I last saw him. Mobile, as it is now, due to the frenzied conversation he is having, it reminds me of those fluffy neon worms on transparent wire that they sell in joke shops.

‘Well get it moved today or he's toast,' yells Hedley, and jabbing at the off button he hurls the phone into
the heart of the vast heap of manure I have finally noticed.

‘Oh, God, no wonder it smells here,' I exclaim. ‘Still, it's useful for the garden, although I wouldn't normally start doing mine this early. It's not as big as I thought it would be, though. Have you got him to take some away again?'