Toast (13 page)

Quite the best thing about my brother's new girlfriend was her ability to make a decent banana custard. In fact, it was better than decent, it was sublime: warm, sweet, creamy, soothing and with just the right ratio of Bird's custard to bananas. Stevie knew not only to make the sauce thick enough to hold the bananas in suspension, but how thin to slice the fruit. Too thick and the bananas failed to flavour the custard properly, too thin and they collapsed into the sauce. She always got it right.

None of us ever quite knew when Adrian was due home. Sometimes it would be on the dot of six, other times it would be nearer eight o'clock. The dessert was always better for an hour on the back of the Aga, a time in which the fruit would steep and slowly flavour the creamy yellow depths. Stevie would start boiling the milk and mixing the custard powder and granulated sugar at about six o'clock. She would pour the foaming milk on to the dry mix and stir slowly, the sauce becoming heavier by the second. She would slice the bananas over the custard, letting each piece drop down and sink into the depths of the dish so they had no time to brown. Then she would cover the bowl with tinfoil and lift it over the hotplate to the back
of the Aga. There it would stay until my brother came home.

It is almost impossible to steal a spoonful of custard without leaving a trail of clues behind. Even if a skin hasn't formed, the tell-tale signs of theft are there for all to see. The broken calm of the yellow surface; the paler yellow showing through the deeper yellow of the skin; the all-too-careful repair. Over the months before they married I perfected my dishonesty, digging into my brother's dessert time and again while Stevie had a bath.

It was only when Adrian was extraordinarily late one night and I had returned several times to dip in that I got caught. I hadn't noiced that I had eaten all but one slice of banana. ‘If you'd eaten them all he would never have noticed,' said Stevie later, ‘he would have assumed I'd just made custard.'

During the winter months the Masonic ladies' night became an almost weekly occurrence. Neither sleet nor storm would keep my father, crisp and scrubbed in his white tux and Old Spice, from attending. His small, recently bereaved son became a regular fixture at the various Masonic lodges, the sinister male-only halls with their blacked-out windows that were hastily transformed into venues suitable for female visitors. As regular as the extravagant floral displays
that for one night each year were used to hide the urinals in the temporary women's lavatories.

I had no idea how honoured I was to be allowed to attend each lodge's annual parade of wives in their ballgowns. Mrs Wood in claret velveteen, Eunice Everard in bottle-green taffeta, and Minnie Clarke in a suitably plain blue satin number she'd obviously knocked up specially for the occasion. I was unaware of the disapproval among the more conservative members who found a little boy's attendance at such an occasion inappropriate. I should have spotted it. After all, these were the sort of men who thought a bunch of pale yellow carnations and a spray of asparagus fern were enough to disguise a six-foot porcelain trough and its hearty whiff of urine.

One early-spring chicken dinner was followed by strawberries and cream. The whipped cream piled high on the mounds of blatantly unripe strawberries found few takers on our table. ‘Hummmph. I knew they wouldn't be ripe,' chimed Eunice Everard, her face as sour as the berries that had promised so much on the copperplate menu. Dish after dish was passed down to the greedy little boy who could barely contain his excitement at such a feast. Soon, dishes of green-shouldered fruit were being passed over heads and across rows. ‘I bet you can't eat them all,' said some wag.

Coffee was served and everyone was getting up to leave the room and the little boy was still tucking in. It wasn't the berries I was relishing. It was the gritty sugar and billowing
cream with which the chef had smothered every bowl bar the one reserved for Mr Wood the diabetic.

The waiters cleared the white cloths and the coffee cups. The bare wooden trestles they had been hiding were stacked in a corner, the room swept of sugar wrappers, ready for the arrival of the band and the dancing ladies. I was left in the middle, a private island of gluttony, stuffing away green strawberries like my life depended on it.

You can get an awful lot of vomit in a wash-hand basin. Even so, once the deep white sink was full, and the two closets occupied, there was nowhere to turn but the urinal.

We did the long drive home, me half asleep in the back of the Humber. The heavy scent of vomit, strawberries and disgust filling the car. My father broke the silence just once. ‘You might have had the intelligence to pull the sink plug out first. Just think of the poor cleaner who's got to dip their hand in that lot.'

‘Oh, I forgot to tell you, Mrs Potter phoned and said she can't find her dog.'

My father glares at me. ‘When, when did she phone?' I admit it was earlier that morning and I am sorry that I have forgotten to tell him. ‘You stupid, stupid little fool,'
he says, pacing to and fro across the kitchen floor. Then he gets in the car and drives off.

Later, he gives me a lecture about not forgetting to pass on important messages and tells me how he had found her dog dead, a group of men standing round it in the doorway of the pub wondering who it belonged to. How it had been hit by a car and how he had to go and break the news to her. Then he tells me it might not have happened if I had told him earlier. I feel thoroughly wretched about it but I can't see why he's making such a big deal of it. She's only the cleaner.

Mrs Potter lived to clean. She said that dirt got on her ‘nerves'. Friends, relatives, neighbours were measured by how often they polished their brass, swept their front step and, above all, by how well they cleaned their windows. No sink went unscrubbed, no table unpolished, no shirt unironed. Even doused in Topaz, the perfume she bought from her daughter's Avon catalogue, there was a faint undernote of Pledge to her.

Mrs P. enjoyed cleaning the way some people enjoy gardening or do-it-yourselfery. What she was going to clean next was the topic of her every conversation. Cigarette in one hand, melamine mug of Maxwell House in the other, she would list everything she had scrubbed, dusted, tidied
or polished that day and then follow it with a list of everything she planned to scrub, dust, tidy or polish tomorrow. She once spent half a day removing the false patina from a much-loved wooden rococo mirror frame in the sitting room. ‘Oh dear,' said my father, seeing the packet of spent Brillo pads and explaining that it was supposed to be like that. ‘Well, it looked filthy to me.'

Filthy was one of Mrs Potter's favourite words. Like the ‘revolting' she used to describe the way I ate biscuits such as Bourbons or custard creams. She pronounced it with a short ‘o'. As in revolver. I was hardly the only child to nibble the top biscuit from a Bourbon cream, then lick off the chocolate filling with long, slow strokes as if it were an ice cream. To me the biscuit was boring, just packaging really; the filling, however, was to be savoured, allowed to melt slowly on the tongue. Mrs Do-it-and-dust-it regarded the habit as ‘disgusting', but only because it invariably left one with sticky fingers, which could, if a ten-year-old boy was so inclined, be used to sabotage her shining woodwork.

I have no idea why I have been spending so much time with Mrs Potter's family. Last week I went to her daughter's birthday party, and on Saturday I made fairy cakes from Viota cake mix with her middle daughter (she let me
spoon the icing on top and arrange the jelly diamonds and hundreds and thousands). Yesterday, I sat at the back of her youngest daughter's hairdressing business. At least two of Mrs Potter's daughters have successful hairdressing salons, no wonder her hair always looks like it's just been ‘done'. Today I'm in the little room behind the net-curtained salon reading
Rupert
annuals and trying not to breathe in the hydrogen peroxide that wafts in from the shop. It smells like stinkbombs. I don't know where Dad and Mrs Potter are. And I have absolutely no idea why I am here instead of playing with my friends. If it wasn't for the tin of biscuits on the table I would demand to go home. And to be honest, there are only three Garibaldis and a pink wafer left now.

I'm waiting patiently for Warrel to finish his tea. Minnie prises the lid off a tin of Tea Time Assorted and offers it to him. There must be fifty biscuits stacked in neat red cellophane compartments and there is a brief moment when I think she might point the tin at me but she doesn't. So I sit and watch Warrel munching his way through two Jammie Dodgers, a ginger nut and a milk chocolate wafer. Just as he is taking a swig of his Cremola Foam (and I am secretly hoping he is going to choke) Minnie asks me if Mum had a sewing machine and, if in fact she had, would my dad
like to sell it. I honestly don't know so tell her that I will ask him.

Instead, I ask Mrs Potter who goes off like a rocket, accusing Minnie Blubb of being heartless to ask such a question so soon after Mum's death. ‘She's not getting her hands on anything,' bites a spectacularly animated Mrs P., like Minnie was asking for her wedding ring. For the life of me I cannot quite see what Dad would want with Mum's sewing machine or why the cleaner is getting so het up about it. It's not like it's hers or anything. Come to think of it, I'm not sure Mum even had one.

Two or three days later I come home to find Mrs Potter wearing one of Mum's aprons. There is no reason on earth why she shouldn't, but it makes me feel uncomfortable. Especially since her outburst the other day.

It is four-thirty and I've just come home from school. I walk upstairs and see Dad's bedroom door open. Last time I tried to open the door, the morning Mum died, it banged against an oxygen tank that someone had put in the way. I open her wardrobe, and let its four hinged doors slowly unfold.

The wardrobe smells of Mum. Not her perfume or her lipstick, not her clothes or her Ventolin. Just her. I run my hands down the tight curls of her astrakhan coat, her summer dress with its white pearl buttons and blousy red poppies, her shimmery ballgown. I open the deep drawers in her dressing table and sniff her cardigans, her long
evening gloves, her hankies. I open Mum's jewellery box and pull out her pearl necklace, her cameo brooch and another gold one in the shape of a feather. The one she always wore with her mushroom twinset. Even the quilted lining of the box smells of her.

Halfway along the rail in the wardrobe is her crinkly white petticoat, the one she wore under her ballgown when she and Dad went out for the evening. When he used to wear his black suit with the satin collar and his blue silk cummerbund. When they used to come back so late. I slide the petticoat straps off the wooden hanger that says Ventnor Hotel, Isle of Wight, and run my fingers over the huge swirls of black stitching. It feels like fuzzy felt. I lower it to the floor and step into it then pull the straps up and over my shoulders. The frills at the bottom touch the floor and rustle and swish like they are made of crêpe paper. I take out her favourite shoes, the ones we walked Wolver-hampton for, the ones the colour of a foal. I slip my feet into them but they are too big. I can barely keep them on my feet. I hold Mum's pearls around my neck but I don't think she ever wore them with this petticoat.

One by one I touch everything in her wardrobe, the camel coat, the fawn jersey dress, the black woollen suit that always made her look cross, holding them against my face. In the mirror I look so small in Mum's stuff, and my feet slide around in her shoes when I walk across the room.

I take off her shoes, her white petticoat and put everything
back, then I close the wardrobe door and creep back downstairs.

On the days Mrs Potter was cleaning at York House she would leave her husband's lunch between two plates, leaving him only to put it over a pan of water on the stove. Irish stew, chops and peas, ham and parsley sauce were all heated up this way. The method worked well enough, at least it did for a man who liked his meat well done.

Mrs Potter was truly the cleaner from heaven. For the first time since Mrs Muggeridge was fired, every surface in the house sparkled. The red tiled floors in the porch and downstairs loo shone with Cardinal polish, every table and chair was given a weekly treatment with lavender wax as well as a daily one with Pledge. She cleaned places that had never seen a brush or cloth before; the bit between the Aga and the dog basket, the back of the gramophone, the vents of the venetian blinds. A dust bunny didn't stand a cat in hell's chance.

As the weeks wore on she started complaining that it was all too much for her. ‘This house is too big for one person, I can't do everything the way I want it. Could I bring my sister Ethel in to help?' The way she wanted it was far cleaner than any house deserved to be. Drop a sweet wrapper in the waste-paper basket and it was emptied
before you could say humbug. Make a skidmark on the lavatory pan and it was brushed and flushed quicker than you could say shit.

Ethel wore black and smelled of mothballs. A little shrew of a woman, she never spoke when my father was around, not a word. It wasn't that she was intimidated by him, just completely overawed by the wealthy man for whom she worked and for whom her sister quite obviously had ‘feelings'.

‘He's like a film star,' Ethel once said to her sister.

‘It's best that she comes too,' Mrs P. told my father, ‘then if “he” says anything I can tell him to ask Ethel. She'll tell him there's nothing going on.' I am not sure my father could imagine Ethel saying anything to anyone. I am not sure he believed she could even speak.

Mrs P. rarely talked about her husband, though I knew he existed. I came home to lunch one day to find the two sisters talking about him. Or at least Joan was talking. I stood outside the kitchen door and listened to her telling Ethel how much she hated going back home to him and how she had, in hushed, ominous tones, other plans. ‘And you'll never believe what the stupid old bugger did yesterday,' she cackled. ‘He put his dinner on the cooker without looking to see what it was.' She could barely speak for laughing, ‘He took the plate off and found he'd steamed himself a nice ham salad.'