The first time that any of Gordon"s family met the not-so-blushing bride was at the wedding. The Widow had been hoping for a nice quiet wife for her baby boy drab with brown hair and an ability to budget. A girl who hadn"t been too educated and with ambitions that stretched no further than a local public school for the clutch of Fairfax grandchildren that she would produce. Whereas Eliza was a "Vamp?" Madge supplied eagerly.
For her wedding, Eliza as slender as a willow, as straight as a Douglas fir (pseudotsuga menziesii) wore a navy-blue suit with a tiny pinched-in waist, with a white gardenia in her b.u.t.tonhole and a little black hat made of feathers, like a ballerina"s headband. The bad black swan. No bouquet, just crimson fingernails. The Widow gave a not-so-discreet little shudder of horror.
With her long steel-wool hair wired back in a bun, she looked like a Sicilian Widow rather than an English one. Her feelings about the wedding might be deduced from the fact that she had chosen to dress in black from top to toe. She watched intently as Gordon ("my baby!") slipped the wedding ring on to the finger of this peculiar creature. You would almost think she was trying to will Eliza"s finger to drop off.
There was something odd about Eliza, they were all agreed, even Gordon, although what it was no-one could quite say. Standing behind her in the register office, Madge experienced a convulsion of envy as she noticed how thin Eliza"s ankles were beneath her unpatriotically long skirt. Like bird-bones. Vinny wanted to snap them. And her neck like a stalk. Snap.
The Widow had insisted on paying for the reception at the Regency Hotel in case anyone thought that the Fairfaxes couldn"t afford a proper wedding. It was clear that no-one on Eliza"s side was going to turn up, let alone pay. Eliza, apparently, had n.o.body. They"re all dead, darling, she murmured, her dark eyes tragic with unshed tears. The same tragedy seemed to have infected her voice, throaty with notes of whisky, nicotine, velvet. She was Gordon"s treasure, found accidentally, Gordon plucking her from the wreckage of a bombed building in London when he was there on leave, even going back to retrieve her missing shoe (they were so expensive, darling).
My hero, she smiled as he placed her gently on the pavement. My hero, she said and Gordon was lost, drowning in her whisky eyes. The age of chivalry, bomb-dusted Eliza murmured, is alive and well. And is called?
"Gordon, Gordon Fairfax."
Wonderful.
"Bit of a rush do, eh?" Madge"s bank clerk husband winked, at no-one in particular, and Eliza swooped on him from nowhere and said, Darling, are we really family now? So hard to believe, and he retreated under a cascade of Hempstid vowels. "Hoity-toity, that one," Vinny said to Madge.
Eliza had dark, dark hair. Glossy and curly. Black as a crow, a rook, a raven. "A bit of the tarbrush?" Vinny mouthed across the wedding cake to Madge. Madge semaph.o.r.ed amazement with her sherry gla.s.s and mouthed back, "Wop?" Eliza, who could lip-read at a hundred paces, thought her new sisters-in-law looked like fish. Cod and Halibut. "Plummy," said Vinny dismissively to Madge over the sherry-toast to bride and bridegroom. "Fruity," said Madge"s husband, raising a lecherous eyebrow.
Really, Eliza said to the bridegroom, anyone would think I was a piece of wedding cake, and Gordon thought that he"d like to eat her up. Every last crumb, so that no-one else could ever have her. What wedding cake? grumbled the Widow, for this was a wartime cake made with prewar dates found at the back of the licensed grocery"s store-room. A hasty affair, "an expensive do," the Widow said to her fish daughters, "for a cheap you-know-what." Why have they married so quickly? "Something fishy," said Vinny-the-Halibut. "Suspicious," said the Widow. "Highly," said Madge-the-Cod.
Do they know Queen Victoria"s dead? Eliza asked her new husband. "Probably not," he laughed, but nervously. The Widow and Vinny lived in the Dark Ages. And they liked it there. Eliza said she couldn"t decide which would be worse, to be Vinny in Willow Road or to be Madge-in-Mirfield. She laughed loudly when she said this and everyone turned to stare at her.
Charles was born on a train, an event due to the capriciousness of Eliza who decided she needed an outing to the Bradford Alhambra when any normal woman in her condition would be sitting at home with her feet up, resting her piles and her varicose veins.
"Premature," the Widow said, warily cradling tiny Charles in her arms. "But healthy, thank goodness." Softened, momentarily, by grandmotherhood, she attempted a smile in the direction of Eliza. Vinny inspected Bradford from the ward window. She"d never been this far from home.
"And big," the Widow added, admiring and sarcastic and moved all at the same uncomfortable time. "Just think," she said to Eliza, her eyes narrowing as the sarcastic won the battle, "what he would have been like if he"d gone the full nine months."
Oh please don"t! Eliza said, shivering theatrically and lighting up a cigarette.
"A honeymoon baby," the Widow said speculatively, as she stroked the baby"s cheek. ("Whose honeymoon though? Eh?" Vinny wrote to Madge-in-Mirfield.) "I wonder who he looks like?" Vinny wrote to Gordon. "He certainly doesn"t look like you, Gordon!" No-one had more artificial exclamation marks than Vinny! (No-one had written so many letters since the decline of the epistolary novel.) He"s an absolute cherub, Eliza said and, Oh G.o.d, I"d give anything for a gin, darling.
Charles" arrival even made the papers GLEBELANDS BABY BORN ON TRAIN.
the Glebelands Evening Gazette wrote possessively. That was how the Widow found out about her grandson, Eliza having neglected to send a message from the hospital where she was taken when the train finally pulled into the station. "Trust her to make the headlines," snapdragon Vinny sniffed.
Born on a train. People falling over themselves to help, the guard upgrading her to First so she had more room to grunt and groan (which she did in a very ladylike way, everyone agreed), the guard thinking that the way she said Darling, you"re an angel showed she was a First Cla.s.s type anyway. It was difficult to know what to put on Charles" birth certificate. He was a philosophical conundrum, like Zeno"s arrow, a paradox on the s.p.a.ce-time continuum. "Where would you say he was born?" Gordon asked, when he was next home on leave. Why, First Cla.s.s, darling, Eliza replied.
Charles, sadly, was rather ugly. "Handsome is as handsome does," declared the Widow, the mistress of the baffling cliche.
Eliza, however (naturally, being his mother), declared that he was the most beautiful baby that ever existed. Charlie is ma darlin, she sang softly to a nursing Charles, who stopped the suck-and-tug at her breast long enough to smile a gummy smile up at her. "What a smiley baby," the Widow said, unsure whether this was a good or a bad thing. Eliza bounced Charles on her lap and kissed the back of his neck. Vinny unclamped her lips long enough to say, "He"ll be spoilt." How wonderful for him, Eliza said.
Gordon came home on leave at last and met his son, by now freckled like a giraffe and with a carrot-coloured tuft of hair sprouting from the middle of his large, bald head. "Red hair!" Vinny said gleefully to Gordon. "I wonder where he got that from?"
"He"s a st.u.r.dy little chap, isn"t he?" Gordon said, ignoring his sister. He had already fallen in love with his red-haired son. "He doesn"t look a bit like you," Vinny persisted, as Gordon carried Charles around the house on his shoulders. "He doesn"t look like Eliza either," Gordon said and that much, certainly, was true.
Then Gordon had to go and fly through the greyer skies of Europe. "You would think", Vinny sneered, "that he was fighting the Luftwaffe single-handed." "Nerves of steel," the Widow said. A man of iron. Heart of gold, said Eliza and laughed her bubbling, rather frightening laugh. Before the end of his leave Gordon had managed to get another baby started (an accident, darling!).
"You"ll keep an eye on Eliza, won"t you?" Gordon said to his mother before he left. "How can I not?" she said, her syntax as stiff as her back. "She"s under the same roof, after all." In the bathroom, damp and steamy, the Widow had to brush through a forest of Eliza"s stockings hanging everywhere and wondered how this could be part of her duty. And another thing, the Widow thought, how did she get these stockings? Eliza was never short of anything stockings, perfume, chocolate what was she doing to get them? That"s what the Widow would like to know.
"At least this child won"t be born on the move," the Widow said to Eliza. The Widow was worried that Eliza might be thinking about the Turkish Baths in Harrogate or a day-trip to Leeds. Eliza smiled enigmatically. "b.l.o.o.d.y Mona Lisa," Vinny said out loud to herself as she smoked cigarettes for her lunch at the back of the licensed grocery.
Eliza drifted into the shop, as pregnant as a full-blown sail. She sat on the bentwood chair reserved for weary customers next to the huge red, gold and black tea-caddies with their faded paintings of j.a.panese ladies, big enough to hide a small child in. Eliza pulled Charles on her knee and sucked his fingers, one by one. Vinny twitched with disgust. He makes me laugh, she said, and as if to prove it she laughed her ridiculous laugh. A lot of things made Eliza laugh and not many of them seemed very funny to the Widow and Vinny.
The Widow ran her dust-seeking fingers over the black bottles of amontillado, checked the moulded b.u.t.ter-pats (thistles and crowns), the bacon-slicer, the cheese-wires. She rang sales into the huge bra.s.s till, as big as a small pipe organ, with such ferocity that it flinched on the solid mahogany counter. Straight as an ironing-board and almost as thin. Her skin as pale as pale can be, like white paper that had been creased and pleated a hundred times. The old hag. The old hag with her wormwood tongue and her hag-hedge hair the colour of gunmetal and ashes. Eliza sang to cover her thoughts because no-one was going to hear what went on inside Eliza"s head, not even Gordon. Especially not Gordon.
Eliza"s belly was like a drum. She placed Charles down on the floor. The drum was beating from the inside. Vinny could see something pushing against the drum-skin a hand or a foot and tried not to look, but her eyes kept being drawn back to this invisible baby. It"s trying to escape, Eliza said and, from the handbag at her feet, she took out her powder-compact, the expensive one that Gordon had bought for her blue enamel with mother-of-pearl palm trees and put on more lipstick. She rubbed her red lips together, as red as fresh blood and poppies, and smacked them open again for Vinny and the Widow"s disapproval. She was wearing a funny hat, all sharp angles like a Cubist painting.
I"m going out, she said, standing up so quickly, so awkwardly, that the bentwood chair crashed onto the wooden floor of the shop. "Where?" the Widow asked, counting money, making little piles of coins on the counter. Just out, Eliza said, lighting up a cigarette and dragging hard on it. To Charles, she said, Darling, will you stay here with Auntie Vinny and Granny Fairfax?, and "Auntie Vinny" and "Granny Fairfax" glared at this interloper in their lives and wished that the war would finish and Gordon come home and take Eliza away and set up house with her somewhere far, far away. Like the moon.
The baby arrived three weeks early and Eliza claimed to be as much surprised as anybody. The Widow, determined not to be caught unawares a second time, was already on a war-footing.
The fire had been laid in the hearth ready (these were drizzling spring days) and the Widow had the bed made up with sheets both boiled and bleached. A rubber sheet and a chamber pot were stowed discreetly under the bed and an army of washbasins and ewers had been marshalled for the natal conflict.
Widow"s intuition made her come in from the conservatory where she was worshipping her cacti and she found Eliza on the stairs, clutching an acorn finial, doubled up in pain. Eliza was wearing her hat and coat and carrying her handbag and insisted that she was going out for a walk. "Fiddlesticks," said the Widow, who could recognize a madwoman when she saw one, not to mention a madwoman in an advanced state of labour, and she escorted Eliza firmly up the stairs to the second-best bedroom, Eliza struggling all the way. "h.e.l.lcat," the Widow hissed under her breath. She left Eliza sitting on the bed while she went off to boil important kettles. When she returned she found the bedroom door locked and no matter how much she rattled and shook, shouted and cajoled, the entrance to the delivery room remained barred. Vinny was summoned, as was the lumpen maid Vera and the man who helped the Widow with the garden. He eventually managed to kick the door in, but only after many encouraging shrieks from the Widow.
They found a tranquil scene in front of them. Eliza was lying on the bed, still with her outdoor clothes on, and was cradling something small and new and slightly b.l.o.o.d.y, wrapped in a pillowcase from the bed. She smiled triumphantly at the Widow and Vinny, Your new granddaughter. When the Widow finally managed to get her hands on the baby she found that the cord was already severed. A thrill of horror, like invisible electricity, jolted the Widow"s flat body. "Gnawed," she whispered to Vinny and Vinny had to run to the bathroom, hand clutched over her mouth.
And so Isobel was born on the streets of trees, near the muddled middle of the twentieth century, in a country at war, on the lumpy feather mattress in the second-best bedroom of Arden, her very first breath scented with the sour sappiness of new hawthorn.
The next morning the Widow went into the second-best bedroom, piously bearing a cup of tea for Eliza, and found Eliza, Charles and the baby all in a muddled heap together in the middle of the lumpy bed. The Widow put the cup and saucer down on the bedside table. The bedroom was awash with Eliza"s expensive underwear, flimsy garments made from silk and lace that provoked the Widow"s disgust. Charles was snoring gently, his forehead damp with sleep. Eliza rolled over exposing a naked arm, round and thin, but didn"t wake. For a second, the Widow had a troublesome vision of her son in this bed, his clean, heroic limbs trammelled in semi-naked harlotry. She had a sudden desire to retrieve the chamber pot from under the bed and beat Eliza about the head with it. Or better still, she thought, looking at Eliza"s white throat, strangle her with one of her own black-market stockings.
"Like animals," the Widow said, slicing the cheese-wire fiercely through the centre of a big Cheddar, "all in the same bed, and her with hardly anything on. What will they grow up like? She"ll suffocate that baby. That isn"t how we dealt with babies in my day." Vinny imagined Eliza"s milk-swollen b.r.e.a.s.t.s, smelt her scent perfume and nicotine and grimaced.
The Widow peered into the depths of the rosewood fretwork of the crib. "There," she said with unaccustomed affection, and Eliza tucked in the baby blanket with blue rabbits embroidered on it, blue for Charles. "Gordon"s daughter," the Widow said, with more certainty than she"d ever said, "Gordon"s son."
"She"s got your eyes," the Widow added generously. "She"s got your everything," Vinny said, uncharmed. I wish, Eliza said softly, that she will blossom and grow. "What a silly thing to wish for," Vinny said.
Look, said Eliza softly, pulling back the shawl from the sooty head, isn"t she perfect? Vinny made a face.
"What are you going to call her?" the Widow asked. Eliza ignored her. "You could call her Charlotte," the Widow pursued, "it is a lovely name."
Yes, but it"s yours, Eliza purred and stroked the sh.e.l.l-whorl of the baby"s ear. Her ears are petals, she said, and her lips are little pink flowers, and her skin is made from lilies and carnations and her teeth- "She hasn"t got any teeth, for Christ"s sake!" Vinny snapped.
She"s a little May bud. A new leaf. I might call her Mayblossom, Eliza laughed her gurgling laugh that set everyone"s nerves on edge.
"No you b.l.o.o.d.y won"t," said the Widow.
Rock-a-bye-baby, Eliza sang, on the tree-top, and whispered the baby"s name in its petal-ear. Is...o...b..l, a peal of bells. Isobel Fairfax. Now the baby"s life could begin. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.
"Isobel?" snorted the very unmerry Widow, and then was unable to think of anything else to say.
Darling, Eliza wrote to Gordon, you"d better come home soon or I"m going to kill your b.l.o.o.d.y family.
Life in the ever-after wasn"t as happy as it should have been. Life, in fact, was a b.l.o.o.d.y bore, Eliza, hissing, we have to get a place of our own, at every opportunity. To Gordon. Gordon was no longer a hero, no longer flying in skies of any colour. He"d wrapped himself in his long white ap.r.o.n again and turned himself back into a grocer. Eliza was disappointed with this civilian transformation. The Widow, needless to say, was delighted.
A grocer, Eliza said as if the word itself was distasteful. "Well, what did you expect him to do?" the Widow snapped. "It"s what he was born to," she added grandly as if Gordon were the prince-in-waiting to some vast grocery empire.
Gordon was still a hero to Charles, especially when he did magic tricks for him, learned in the idle hours when he was waiting to scramble into the air. He knew how to take coins from Charles" fingers and make eggs appear from behind the Widow"s ears. He was particularly good at disappearing tricks. When he worked his magic on the Widow she said, "Oh Gordon," in the same tone that Eliza said, Oh Charles, when Charles did something that amused her.
Eliza watched the Widow sweep up leaves on the back lawn. The Widow brushed furiously at birch and sycamore and apple, but the leaves were coming down like rain and every time she managed to make a pile the wind whisked them up in the air again. She might as well try to sweep the stars from the sky. "I wish she"d just let us play in them," Charles said glumly and Eliza laughed, Play? The word"s not even in the old hag"s vocabulary.
Charles and Isobel pasted dead leaves into a sc.r.a.p-book, with glue that smelt of fish (Vinny"s blood, Eliza informed them). Charles wrote the name of the tree beneath each leaf sycamore and ash, oak and willow. The leaves had been salvaged from the Widow or scavenged off the pavements when Eliza and Isobel walked Charles home from school in the afternoons.
From the horse chestnuts on Chestnut Avenue they"d collected handfuls of the spiky green seed-pods that looked like medieval weapons and Eliza had shown them how to open them, splitting one with her sharp red fingernails, peeling back the soft white shawl around the brown chestnut inside, saying, You"re the first person in the world to see that.
Gordon stood in the doorway and laughed, "Not quite the same thing as discovering Niagara, Lizzy," and then he offered to take Charles away for a manly tutorial on soaking conkers in vinegar, because it turned out that they really were medieval weapons, but before he could, Eliza threw a handful of unpeeled chestnuts at Gordon"s head and he said, very coldly, to her, "Let"s have a bit of peace in this house for a change, shall we, Lizzy?"
Eliza made a face at his retreating back and when he"d gone said, Peace, ha! There"ll be no peace in this house until that old hag is dead and in her coffin and six feet under. "Six feet under what?" Charles asked. Charles had got glue all over him, a big leaf was stuck to his elbow. Why, under the bed, of course, Eliza said breezily as she glimpsed Vinny in the hall.
"There are leaves everywhere," Vinny complained, coming into the room. "It"s worse in here than it is outside." The leaves drove her out of the room again and she went to find out where Vera had got to with the tea-tray, oblivious to the rowan leaf, complete with its scarlet berries, that had attached itself to her salt-sprinkled grey hair like a strange botanical barrette.
"Moan, moan, moan," Charles whispered. "Why doesn"t she like us?" Charles" mission in life was to make people laugh but he"d set himself a hard task with Vinny.
She doesn"t like anyone, she doesn"t even like herself, Eliza scoffed.
"She doesn"t even live here," Charles muttered, but was cheered by the sight of Vera slouching in with a tray piled high with tea and b.u.t.tered toast, Eccles cakes and the Widow"s apricot tea loaf. G.o.d, Eliza said, sucking hard on a cigarette, cake, cake, b.l.o.o.d.y cake, that"s all you get in this house.
"Sounds all right to me," Charles said.
After tea Eliza got out the fat wax crayons and colouring books for them on the dining-room table. Eliza was a generous art critic, everything her children did was absolutely wonderful. At the other end of the table, the Widow said something indistinct. She was sitting with her gla.s.ses perched on the end of her nose, turning collars and cuffs ("waste not want not"). Eliza told Isobel that she should be an artist when she grew up. "That won"t put food on the table," the Widow said. "And you be careful with those crayons, Charles."
Eliza said nothing, but if you were close enough to her, you could hear the voodoo words she was incanting under her breath, like a swarm of bees. The Widow wiped the crumbs of cake from her fingerbones and left the table.
Charles bent over his drawing, frowning in concentration. He was drawing clumsy ideal homes square houses with pitch roofs and window-eyes and mouth-doors. Isobel drew a tree with golden-red leaves and Gordon came in and said, "Oh Margaret, are you grieving over goldengrove unleaving" and gave her his increasingly sad smile and without looking at him Eliza said, She really is rather good, isn"t she? and gave Isobel a radiant, intimate smile that cut out Gordon.
Gordon laughed and said, "We should have more, you never know what they might turn out to be Shake-speares and Leonardo da Vincis."
"More what?" Charles asked without taking his eyes off the sun he was drawing, a big golden-spoked eye.
More nothing, Eliza said dismissively.
"Babies," Gordon said to Charles. "We should have another baby."
Eliza pushed a lock of hair out of Isobel"s eyes and said, Whatever for? Gordon and Eliza had whole conversations now using intermediaries.
"Because that"s what people do," Gordon said, turning Charles" drawing round as if he was looking at it, although it was obvious he wasn"t. "People who love each other, anyway." But then he must have come under the influence of Eliza"s silent hoodoo because he suddenly left the room as well. It was all exits and entrances these days in Arden.
"Where do you get babies from?" Charles asked, after he"d finished his picture with two birds flying through the sky like dancing Vs.
Eliza flicked open her gold lighter and lit a cigarette. "From the baby shop, of course."
The origin of babies was a confusing issue in Arden. According to the Widow, they were delivered by storks, but Vinny"s version had them being left under goose-berry bushes. Eliza"s answer seemed much more reasonable. Especially as there was a whole row of gooseberry bushes in the back garden and no baby had ever appeared under any of them. And as for storks, they didn"t even live in this country according to Gordon so it was hard to see how English children (let alone Welsh or Scottish) could ever get born at all.
The Widow came back into the room and gave a cursory glance at their drawings. "Trees have green leaves," she said to Isobel, "not red," as if she had never opened her Widowed window-eyes and looked at autumn.
Children, Eliza said irritably after the Widow left the room, why would anyone want children? I wish I"d never had any of the d.a.m.n things, so annoyed that one of the wax crayons snapped in two in her hands.
"But you love us, don"t you?" Charles asked, a worried look on his face. Eliza started to laugh, a weird swooping noise, and said, Good G.o.d, of course I do. I wouldn"t be here now if it wasn"t for you.
Eliza spent her autumn days lying on the wicker lounger in the conservatory, wearing her sungla.s.ses as if she was on the beach, even though the skies were dull, reading library books and drinking whisky and smoking cigarette after cigarette until the conservatory was full of a hazy blue fug. The Widow"s cacti looked unhappy. So did the Widow.
"Lizzy," Gordon said, at his most reasonable, persuasive, cajoling. Helpless. "Lizzy, don"t you think you could help out around the house a bit more? Vera has all on looking after us all and Mother does nothing but cook."
My hands are full with the children, Eliza said, without taking her eyes off her book. Although as far as Gordon could see her hands were full with a cigarette and a large whisky and the children were sliding noisily down the stairs on tea-trays.
In the autumnal evenings, when the children were in bed, Gordon and Eliza and the Widow sat round the coal fire in the front room listening to the wireless or playing cards. The Widow suspected Eliza of cheating but couldn"t prove it. (Yet.) Sometimes Gordon just sat and stared at the fire while the Widow put her scratchy records on the old-fashioned wind-up gramophone.
The Widow made a fuss about giving Gordon supper. "He needs looking after," she said pointedly to Eliza, as she cut him a piece of last year"s Christmas cake and put a windmill-sail of Wensleydale on the top. Oh G.o.d, Eliza muttered to the George the Third chandelier, they even have the b.l.o.o.d.y stuff with cheese. "Oh, I am sorry," the Widow said, in her grand northern d.u.c.h.ess voice, "Did you want some, Eliza?"
While Gigli sang "Che Gelida Manina" on the old wind-up, the Widow poured tea into flower-sprigged cups. Eliza took her tea without milk or sugar and every time the Widow poured her a cup she said, "Oh, I don"t know how you can!" and crumpled up her white paper face.
Through a mouthful of cake, Gordon made the mistake of making a joke, for his mother"s benefit, about how Eliza never made cakes and Eliza looked at him through half-closed eyes and said, No, but then I do f.u.c.k you, so that Gordon sloshed his tea into his saucer and started to choke on his old Christmas cake. The Widow smiled the bright, polite smile of the partially deaf and said, "What was that? What did she say?"
By November, the trees on the streets were almost bare apart from, here and there, a stray leaf that lingered, flapping like a mournful flag, and there were no more leaves to collect when Charles went to and from Rowan Street Primary School. Charles hated school. Charles hated school so much that he couldn"t eat his breakfast in the morning.
The Widow"s philosophy of child nutrition was simple as much as possible at every opportunity. She paid particular attention to breakfast and insisted Charles and Isobel ate porridge, eggs, poached or boiled, toast and marmalade and drank half a pint of milk from big gla.s.s tumblers. They"ll blow up like balloons, Eliza said, breakfasting on her usual cigarettes and black coffee. "You"ll waste away to nothing," the Widow said accusingly to her and Charles looked up in alarm from his egg. Eliza did look thin, but surely she couldn"t get so thin that she disappeared?
Charles was wiped clean of his marmalade (rather roughly by the Widow, with an old flannel) and hustled into his blazer and cap. His fat lower lip started to tremble and he said, very quietly, in Eliza"s direction, "I don"t want to go to school, Mummy."
"Don"t be silly," the Widow said sharply, "everyone has to go to school." Rowan Street Primary was a dark cramped place that smelt of wet gabardine and plimsoll rubber and was staffed by sour-faced spinsters who must all have been found under the same gooseberry bush as Vinny. An extraordinary amount of physical violence took place within its brick walls Charles came home with reports of daily floggings, canings and whippings (thankfully on other boys so far) perpetrated by the headmaster, Mr Baxter. "There"s nothing wrong with him being a stern disciplinarian," the Widow said, mercilessly strapping Charles" huge leather satchel on to his small shoulders. "Little boys are naughty and they have to find out what"s what."
Oh, and big boys too, Eliza said in her affected drawl, dragging hard on her cigarette and staring through narrowed eyes at Gordon, eating the Widow"s full cooked breakfast. I often show Gordon what"s what, don"t I, darling? Eliza smiled like a cat in the sun and the Widow turned the colour of her home-pickled red cabbage and looked as if she"d like to brain Eliza with the big chrome teapot that always formed the centre-piece of the table. Gordon stoically ignored all of this and, standing up, he took a triangle of fried bread from his unfinished plate and said, "Come on, old chap," (being an officer in the war had influenced his previously plebeian vocabulary) "I"ll give you a lift to school in the car." Forced to accept the inevitable, a halo of doom hovered over poor Charles" striped cap. When he went over to Eliza to kiss her goodbye, she whispered fiercely in his ear, You tell me if Mr Baxter ever lays a finger on you and I"ll rip his head off and pull his lungs out through his neck. If there was one person in the world more frightening than Mr Baxter it was Eliza.
Christmas afforded two weeks of respite for Charles and he spent many patiently maladroit hours making paper chains and fashioning decorations out of silver milk bottle tops. Lovely, darling, Eliza said, garlanding herself with a chain of milk bottle tops under the mistaken impression that Charles had made her a necklace.
Gordon drove into the country and came back with an enormous fir tree, stuffed into the boot of the big black car, its roots still clagged with soil. Eliza stroked its branches tenderly as if it were a wild animal and said, Smell that, and they breathed in the scent of coldness and pine resin and something even more mysterious. Gordon tamed it by putting it in an old barrel wrapped in Christmas paper and stringing it with tiny coloured lanterns.
Eliza made little dwarves from tissue and crepe, their tissue-paper faces had crayon smiles drawn on hastily and match-heads for eyes. Their pipe-cleaner arms and legs clung for dear life onto the tree. Sweet, aren"t they? Eliza said to everyone, delighted with her handiwork and no-one had the heart to tell her how dreadful they were.
For Christmas, Gordon gave Eliza a Victorian gypsy ring gold with little emerald and diamond starbursts. Eliza held it against her pale cheek and said, Does it suit me? to Charles. The Widow viewed Eliza through hooded hawk eyes, angry at the thought of how much the ring had cost her baby boy. She handed over her own dull and dutiful mother-in-law present a boxed set of monogrammed handkerchiefs.
Gordon had bought Charles a magic set which was far too old for him. "You bought that for yourself really," Vinny said, as p.r.i.c.kly as pine needles. (Vinny had not been herself since peace was declared.) Make her disappear, won"t you, darling? Eliza whispered (loudly) to Gordon.
The Widow carved the Christmas pork, a paper crown askew on her bun of grey hair, and Gordon proposed a toast to the future, in French wine, and Eliza gave Charles and Isobel a gla.s.s of watered-down wine. The Widow sipped at her gla.s.s of blood-red wine and said, "Liberty Hall here we all know that, don"t we?"
Summer came in and brought with it new next-door neighbours. The old people who"d lived in Sherwood since it was built died within a week of each other and the house was sold to a Mr Baxter. The very same Mr Baxter to Charles" unending horror who was the headmaster at Rowan Street Primary. It did seem particularly unfair that Charles, after dodging Mr Baxter all day at school, wasn"t even safe in his own house and garden. Charles was fated whenever he kicked a ball it had to end up on Mr Baxter"s side of the fence, whenever he chose to shout at the top of his lungs, which with Charles was frequently, it was Mr Baxter who was snoozing in a deck-chair on the other side of the privet.
There was a shy Mrs Baxter too. Younger than her husband and built to motherly specifications short and soft with no hard edges, unlike bony Mr Baxter. Mrs Baxter changed the name of her house, getting the man who did odd-jobs for the Widow to take down the bra.s.s plate on the gate that said "Sherwood" and replace it with a wooden one with the word "Sithean" carved into it. "Waste of good bra.s.s," was the Widow"s opinion, though whether she meant metal or money was unclear.
"She-ann", Mrs Baxter explained to the Widow, was a Scottish word. Mrs Baxter was Scottish too and had a lovely accent, peat and heather and soft sandstone houses.
The Baxters had a daughter Audrey the same age as Isobel. Audrey was "a timid little thing" (according to the Widow) with hair the colour of falling maple leaves and eyes the colour of doves" wings. Mr Baxter was very strict with both Audrey and Mrs Baxter. How awful other people"s families are, yawned Eliza.
The Widow didn"t respond enthusiastically to Mrs Baxter"s neighbourly overtures she believed in keeping yourself to yourself. Who else would want her? Eliza said, lying in her swimming-costume on a rug on the gra.s.s, her long thin limbs looking incredibly pale as if they"d never seen the light before.
There were very few people that the Widow wished for neighbourhood intercourse with. The Lovats were one of the few families she courted ("Invite that little Malcolm home," she said to Charles, bribing him with barley sugar). She had an unnatural respect for the medical profession and no qualms about gynaecologists, never having had women"s trouble.