Paradise Lodge (15 page)

But hearing it from Mike Yu really made me think. He had absolutely nothing to gain from my actions. Mike Yu sensed something in me. And suddenly it felt as though my education should be a priority.

Mike had said so.

He'd called me an intellectual.

One result of my mother's running off to Carrie Frost's was that we almost missed Little Jack's birthday. Realizing this, close to the end of the actual day—the day Mr Holt had proposed—my mother rushed out and bought Jack some grown-up clothing and a book of poetry by Ted Hughes because it was all she could think of.

‘It's poetry, but manly,' explained my mother.

And Mr Holt had tried to look neutral.

‘But where were you?' asked Jack—no one ever told him anything. ‘Where have you been?'

‘She went to see Carrie Frost,' said my sister, ‘and had an art lesson.'

Little Jack frowned. I knew his boy mind was whirring and he was remembering wanting Carrie to pick him up and her misunderstanding, thinking he was just saying her name. Not that it was her fault exactly, but it was frustrating and enough to make you mildly dislike her all the same. I could tell all that was going round in his mind. I knew him.

It annoyed me (the carry/Carrie thing) and I was annoyed further with Carrie Frost for spending two whole days teaching my mother how to draw people. Why couldn't she have taught her how to thread the needle on her Singer sewing machine? We all knew Carrie was a dab hand at dress-making and that our mother had the basics but lacked confidence on the needle-threading and casting off. Think what an enormous help it would have been had she come home from Carrie's saying, ‘Let me alter that nursing tunic for you.'

There'd be no hunting for intangible credibility if she'd been able to say that. No need to make malt loaf or read Marge Piercy—unless she really wanted to.

Anyway, Jack seemed to like his clothing and Ted Hughes, and I gave him a Terry's Chocolate Orange and my sister gave him a
PEACE
badge—with a tiny dove and olive branch—and a bar of Golden Crisp. And our Granny Benson sent him a
WHS
mith token and our father sent him a cheque for double his age in pounds to put into the Leicester Building Society for a rainy day or driving lessons when he turned seventeen—whichever came first.

Mr Holt gave him the best gift of all. A Saturday/holiday job folding linens, sweeping the depot, cleaning vans, breaking or fixing pallets and oiling things. I should have been pleased for Jack but the truth is, the luxury of sibling rivalry had come to us when Mr Holt had moved in and I was resentful of him having the perfect job handed to him on a plate—a job where he'd get a door-to-door lift into work and home again and was pretty much the boss's son and it didn't involve the general public or wearing a dress or a hat or Pop Sox or anything challenging at all.

One day, as I entered the kitchen to help with the coffees, there was a note on the table that made my blood run cold. It had been written on one of Sister Saleem's official telephone message memorandum notes.

It was horrible knowing Sister Saleem had had to write a message for me from this woman who was pretty much barred from the premises. On the other hand, I was certain I was about to get a full apology and be reinstated to the ‘O' Level group—which was a good thing. I didn't phone Miss Pitt immediately because phoning was a big deal back then and not to be taken lightly and I needed to pluck up the nerve. I folded the note and put it in my pocket and imagined it coming in useful if any of this went to court.

When things had quietened down after milky coffees I went to make the call. Rather than use the phone on the special phone table in the hall with everyone around earwigging, I went up to Lady Briggs' room and asked if I could call from there. She said, ‘By all means,' which meant yes.

Miss Pitt sounded nicer than usual. ‘Can you speak?' she asked.

Can you speak? I'd never been asked that before. I have many times since, of course, but it was the first time and I couldn't think what she meant.

‘I think so,' I said.

‘Look, Lizzie, Dad's point-blank refusing to talk to me,' she said, ‘I mean, Mr Simmons.'

‘Yes, I heard about that,' I said.

‘The thing is, Lizzie, I'd love to have a chat with him.'

‘Right.'

‘Yes, but in a neutral place and with our
GP
and maybe our solicitor.'

‘What has this got to do with “O” levels?' I said.

‘Yes, well, I need you to lure the fox out of his hole, as it were.'

‘You mean, lure Mr Simmons out,' I whispered.

‘Precisely,' said Miss Pitt, ‘lure Dad out.'

She had it all worked out. She was going to forward bundles of tickets to the free lunchtime piano and operatic recitals that took place in St James the Greater Church near Victoria Park and I was to let her know if and when one of them appealed to Mr Simmons so that she could ‘bump into him' there—accidentally on purpose.

‘What do I have to do?' I asked.

‘Make sure he sees the tickets. Be enthusiastic and, I don't know, go with him if you can,' she said, ‘and most importantly, let me know if he bites.'

Since Mike Yu had spoken so passionately about the need to continue my education, it seemed to me that Mr Simmons was quite capable of handling this situation with Miss Pitt—he was her father, after all, or stepfather. And now that I'd got him going on the garden revamp I couldn't see Miss Pitt finding it easy to lure him out on a permanent basis. He loved being at Paradise Lodge, and everyone was on to her.

And I really needed ‘O' Levels, otherwise I'd be regretful and probably unhappy for the rest of my life—and I had a lot of life to be unhappy and regretful in (touch wood).

‘And I'll be back on the “O” Level courses?' I asked.

‘Yes,' said Miss Pitt, emphatically.

‘
OK
,' I said, ‘I've got to go now.'

Miss Pitt said she was pleased we'd come to this mutually beneficial arrangement and that I should start reading the ‘O' Level texts straight away. Starting with
Animal Farm
by George Orwell.

‘
Animal Farm
,' I said.

‘Yes, George Orwell,' said Miss Pitt.

‘I know who wrote
Animal Farm
,' I said.

The call ended.

‘Is everything all right?' Lady Briggs asked.

‘Yes, I'm back on the “O” Level course at school,' I said.

‘
School
?' said Lady Briggs.

‘I'm fifteen, remember,' I said.

And Lady Briggs said, ‘Oh, is that you? I get you all so muddled.'

‘Have you got a copy of
Animal Farm
by George Orwell?' I asked her, on the off chance—her having a pile of books in the corner of the room—and to my delight, she said she had, somewhere, she'd find it and I could borrow it as long as I promised not to dog-ear the pages.

A day or so later, she handed it to me. It had been downstairs in the library, she said, all muddled with her other twentieth-century novels—someone had had it sent up with the housekeeper. I laughed and promised I wouldn't dog-ear the pages. Lady Briggs talked beautifully about her books. She talked about
Mrs Dalloway
and
Ulysses
,
Of Human Bondage
and her favourite play
Time and the Conways
. She invited me to go downstairs and look at the books any time and borrow them if it would help. I wondered where all those books really were now. The ones in the corner were all Ulverscroft Large Prints and not a classic among them, except for
All Creatures Great and Small
.

Mr Simmons spotted me reading
Animal Farm
shortly after that and was very interested in my new allegorical reading material and kept quoting from it—which made me feel doubly guilty and awful. I kept reminding myself, ‘Mr Simmons is tough—he's from the modern age. He's come through a world war on the winning side and worked for the
BBC
.'

My sister had worked hard at school and I'd had to suffer teachers telling me how well they remembered her—meaning, I compared badly. Since my sister's failed smoking ban in our shared bedroom and subsequent move to the living room we'd not got along very well and we'd annoyed each other. But that summer, while she hung around waiting to go off and study thinkers from the dawn of civilization to the modern day and across the globe and what it meant to be human, something happened to her that brought us close again. I'm not sure what exactly, but I know it started when she went on a camping holiday to Scarborough with her boyfriend, Eric Carter, and his family.

A few days into the trip we received a postcard from her, which read:

Having a nice time. Rode a Bucking Bronco at the rodeo yesterday—won £5 for being the only lady contestant. The campsite is a microcosm. This morning, we had a walk through splendid woodland to the remains of a glacial lake—except for Eric's mother who spent all morning cooking a full Sunday roast on the camping stove—including trifle.

She sounded typically philosophical.

I was still in bed when she got home from the camping trip. Eric Carter's dad had driven home through the night to avoid the traffic because he was towing a trailer with the camping equipment on it and he preferred the B roads. My sister came into our bedroom, got into her old bed and pulled the bedclothes over her head.

It was strange—not only because she'd moved out of our room on account of the health risk posed by my cigarette smoke but because it was getting-up time in anyone's book.

‘Oh, you're back, are you?' I said, but my sister didn't answer. She just hid her face in her duvet and cried. I asked her what was wrong and even tugged the duvet off her.

‘How was the trip?' I asked, but she didn't answer and I could tell there was something wrong. I asked her to tell me what, but she couldn't. I wondered if she'd had sex with Eric and hated it. Or had sex with Eric and he'd hated it. Or she'd heard Mr and Mrs Carter having sex in the tent next door. Or something embarrassing had happened with the chemical toilet.

I was suddenly worried that something really bad had happened, so I called our mother and she came up.

It wasn't anything bad or really bad. It was an ‘epiphany', which would usually be a good thing but, on this occasion, wasn't—or maybe it was, she couldn't decide. The camping trip with the Carters had made my sister terrified of a future in which she'd have to try to exist outside of our mad, smoky little family and get to grips with the greatest thinkers in the world and at the same time be normal and cook roasts and choose the B roads (so to speak).

Seeing the family take for granted that Mrs Carter would miss the splendid woodlands and the glacial lake in order that she could cook a roast, and Mr Carter plumping to miss a whole night's camping so that they could travel at a sensible time and on the B roads on account of the trailer rendering them a ‘slow vehicle' (and even affixing a ‘slow vehicle' notice to the back of the trailer alongside the spare registration plate), she suddenly felt blind panic about interacting with normal, sensible people—who were, of course, not normal because everything is relative.

And she worried that people like her—who couldn't cope in the real world—often ended up reclusive and institutionalized. And I thought to myself ‘like Lady Briggs' plus, I felt, it seemed quite similar to our mother's anxiety about malt loaf and trying to be like Mrs Goodchild across the road but I didn't say anything. It wouldn't have helped. You don't want to feel unoriginal.

Over the next few days my sister deferred her place at Durham University and instead enrolled on a nursing course at Leicester Royal Infirmary so that she could at least have a career and do some good, and practical things would fill her mind and block out any troubling thoughts. She was suffering from tiny, infrequent panic attacks. Every now and then she'd do something like scrape the marmalade jar, and I'd wonder if she was having another one. Other times, I'd try and cause one by pretending I'd electrocuted myself or had seen something horrible in the hedges.

Our mother spoke to me about my sister's change of direction. She was very disappointed—she'd always believed my sister would become a modern-day philosopher (like, say, Judith Hann or Iris Murdoch) and be able to show us metaphorically where to go or, failing that, a vet. She thought every family, ideally, should have a doctor for when you're sick, a vet for when your dog is, and a philosopher for when you're confused. I had to remind my mother that neither I nor Little Jack was planning to become a doctor. My mother said she had hopes for Danny—hence putting his name on the Montessori waiting list and buying him educational toys.

My mother wrote a short story entitled ‘Bird's Trifle', in which the mother of a family accidentally burns her chest area while heating milk for a trifle on a camping stove while the rest of the family visits an ancient penis-shaped monument. They return to the campsite to find the mother all decorated with Dream Topping, hundreds and thousands and glacé cherries. It was meant to be a tragedy but it really cheered my sister up.

Not long after the proposal, my sister and I went with our mother in the Snowdrop van to Market Harborough Registry Office to book the marriage. The lady there told my mother she must bring the groom-to-be (Mr Holt) into the office before the actual day. My mother said she needn't worry, he'd definitely turn up on the day, but the lady said she needed to see him—in the flesh—beforehand to check it wasn't a bogus wedding. We were allowed to provisionally book the date, though, and my mother said she'd take the first available slot—whatever day of the week—as long as it was before ten if it was a weekday. I wished she hadn't said that. It made it seem bogus.

The lady went through the ledger, she turned page after page and then looked over her spectacles at us. ‘Here,' she said, ‘nine-thirty.'

My mother peered at the date and said, ‘Yes, fine, we'll take it.'

My sister and I looked at each other. This date was the anniversary of one of the saddest events in our mother's life. A few years had passed but on that day every year since she had been quiet and deeply unhappy—sunk in regret and pain. And we were too. Had she really forgotten it? Had this forthcoming marriage buried it? Maybe it had, maybe that's what a nice wedding could do. I felt my eyes fill with tears with the thought of the sad thing and knew that a marriage—however happy—would never cover the memory of the sad thing for me. I looked at my sister and I could see by the way she jiggled her leg and by the slight tremble in her lip that she'd remembered too. Neither of us said anything, though. If our mother had forgotten and the pain was gone, that was only a good thing.

The marriage was scheduled to take place on this particular date, nice and early in the morning before Danny got crotchety—not that he often did get crotchety but he was definitely at his best early. And we sped off in the van.

‘Just think, girls,' said our mother—and she said the date—‘on that day I'll be Mrs Harry Holt.'

‘Yes,' we said.

It hit her then and she pulled in abruptly on to a gravelly bit of verge by Gartree Prison. She got out of the van and stumbled along with the wind whipping her hair about. And we got out too and stood beside her on the roadside, together in a little tripod, gripping each other's arms, and cried for a few moments. If a prison guard had peered out they might have thought we were plotting to spring a murderer.

‘How could we have forgotten?' our mother said through her tears. ‘How did we forget?' And looking at us, she knew that we hadn't. And then Danny banged his cloth octopus on the windscreen and we clambered back into the van.

We talked about the sad thing, our baby brother, who we had all longed to meet and get to know. But who'd died, almost four—or was it five?—years previously, just before he was supposed to be born. We talked about how awful things had been then, and how we'd pinned all our hopes on him, as if he was the answer to all our woes. And how we were trying to keep the pregnancy quiet for a while but because we were so excited we gave him the code name ‘Bluebell the baby donkey' so we could talk about him. And how our mother wanted to call him Jack even though our little brother was already called Jack and would have to go back to being called James or Jimmy. We remembered how Bluebell dying like that had made our mother want to die herself and she'd drunk from the bottle and shouted and cursed God. And there wasn't a soul in the world who cared about our mother—our loving her didn't count—and we'd felt a mix of fear and uselessness because nothing was going to stop us falling down and down.