Death of a Perfect Mother (9 page)

Thursday breakfast was a meal on tenterhooks. Lill stood tight-lipped over the stove and boiled eggs on principles of guesswork. The family scurried down one after the other, gobbled their under- or overdone free-ranges, and then dived out of the kitchen and went about their
business. Debbie came down defiantly, the whiteness of her face emphasizing the blue bruise around her left eye and the cut on the side of her mouth. When she said disgustedly, ‘This egg's hardly done at all,' the rest of the family shushed her agitatedly, as if she were tempting the wrath of the Almighty. Unconcerned, she pushed the egg aside and helped herself to toast and marmalade. She did not try to conceal the fact that she was eating with difficulty. Lill could hardly bear to look at her. But when she got up from the table Lill rounded on her and snapped:

‘You're not going to school. Not like that.'

Debbie gave her a long, cool, impertinent look, but then said: ‘All right.'

Ten minutes later, though, she hared down from her bedroom, whipped her coat off the peg in the hall, and was out the front door in a flash, meticulously timing it so as to catch the bus by a hairsbreadth and avoid pursuit and capture. All Lill could do was stand by the front gate and glower at her retreating figure.

‘Forget something, did she?' said Mrs Forsdyke from No. 18, passing in the other direction. ‘These teenagers are all alike, aren't they?'

‘You can say that again,' snarled Lill. ‘Bloody little slut, I'll teach her.'

Not quite sure she had heard, Mrs Forsdyke smiled vaguely and went on her way, but the conviction gradually came over her that Mrs Hodsden had called her daughter a bloody little slut, and the expression on Lill's face convinced her that All Was Not Well with the Hodsdens. Since she served in the best greengrocer's in Todmarsh she had plenty of chances to communicate this conviction to half the town, including many of her neighbours in Windsor Avenue and the surrounding streets, before the morning was out. Her news, conveyed in a hushed whisper, like a royal scandal, met with a
series of raised eyebrows, ‘Really's,' ‘I don't wonder's,' and ‘How that family puts up with her I don't know's.' Uniquely, nobody sympathized with the parent. Because Lill was not loved in her neighbourhood.

Nor did she do anything to make herself loved that morning. Lill spoiling for a row was one thing: that was a variety of good mood. Lill in a black, destructive temper was quite another thing, and infinitely more frightening. Her plans were in ruins, her self-love had received a blow, the arrangement of her world, that elegant construction of castles in the air peopled by admiring dummies, had been flattened by a brutal kick. Lill was livid. She felt within her a dull, throbbing, continuous rage—or, as she put it, she felt all churned up. And it was clear that someone, several people, had to get hurt. That was only right.

She began the day as she meant to go on. In the garden that backed on to her own children were playing hide-and-seek with squeals of excitement. Seeing the mother at the door, Lill marched down to her back fence and bellowed: ‘Can't you keep those bloody kids quiet? I can't hear myself think in there. They're a public menace.' Ten minutes later she swaggered round next door to ‘have it out' with her mother. Only in her most brutal moods could Lill hope to win such a contest, but by the end of half an hour the redoubtable Mrs Casey was close to tears. Finally Lill banged out of the back door with an expression of grim triumph on her face, and turning back, she shouted:

‘And if you're thinking of sneaking to Fred, you can give up the idea. I've told him about it myself, so put that in your pipe. There's going to be some changes around here before long, I'm telling you, and you're not going to like them.'

It wasn't the last brush of the day with one or other of her natural enemies. Meeting Guy Fawcett's wife slipping home from work at mid-morning, she roared: ‘Christ,
some people have it lucky. Get paid for doing nothing. But I suppose you've got to check up on that randy husband of yours.'

Mrs Fawcett looked at her with open contempt before slipping in through her front gate. Once safely inside she said: ‘I've given up worrying what Guy was up to long ago.'

‘Haven't got much choice, I shouldn't think,' said Lill, with ferocious directness. ‘Need a red-hot poker to put him out of action.'

‘I expect you'd know,' said Jane Fawcett, going into the house and banging the front door.

News of Lill's mood spread along Windsor Avenue like a thick, stinking cloud from a burning chemical plant. As she went by people watched from well within the shadows of their front rooms, and decided not to go down the street until she was safely back home. Poor old Miss Gaitskell, retired post-mistress, bulky and all too aware of it, had not sensed the cloud and was unwittingly weeding her front garden as Lill strode past. She did not entirely register the relevance of the remark ‘Blimey, if I had an arse like that, I wouldn't bend over' until Lill was well past her, but when she did she straightened, flushed, and looked indignantly at the retreating leopard-skin coat. In the course of Lill's daily round the butcher was flayed, the newsagent was flattened. It wasn't that Lill's remarks were acute, but if the aim is to annihilate, the meat-axe is more effective than the scalpel.

Dinner with Fred and Gordon was not a happy meal. Even Gordon, the beloved son, felt the rough side of her tongue. They shovelled the food in, swilled down a mug of tea each, and then mumbled excuses to get out of the house.

Tea was worse. Debbie came home from school exhilarated by the support of her friends, self-congratulatory about the air of sad mystery she had assumed when commiserated
with by her teachers. Her defiance was by now almost perky. It rubbed up Lill the wrong way like a pen-nib on the bottom of an ink bottle. Instinct told her that—as with her mother—brutality was the only sure weapon now. ‘I'll teach you to defy me, you little cow,' she shrieked, and grabbing her by the arms she dragged her upstairs—‘Gordon!' screamed Debbie, but Gordon didn't come—and threw her into her room. Grabbing at the key, she banged the door and locked it noisily. ‘And there you stay,' she yelled. ‘And not a bite of food do you get till I give the say-so.' She marched downstairs.

‘It's about time that girl had a bit of discipline,' she said with something approaching self-satisfaction. ‘She'll feel the weight of my hand tomorrow if I have a squeak out of her. She's been let run wild.' She looked daggers at Fred, as if it were all his fault, and threw him the key. ‘It's your job to see she stays there all evening. Keep your wits about you. Don't go dozing in front of the telly like you usually do.'

‘If the girl's locked in—' began Fred.

‘She's sharper than a wagon-load of monkeys,' snapped Lill. ‘She'll be out of that window or I don't know what if you don't keep a sharp watch-out. S
o STAY AWAKE
—I'm warning you!'

And she went off to get the tea. Something during that scene had clicked in the back of Brian's head, and it refused to come forward. It worried him. Or was he just worried by his failure to stand up for his sister? Fred also looked unhappy, and slipped out of the front door to prod futilely at the rambling rose climbing feebly up a trellis, perhaps with the vague idea of seeing if Debbie could climb down that way. When he had wandered wraithlike from the front room Gordon, on his way upstairs to wash and change, hissed to Brian: ‘Garry Prior's having a bachelor party at the Rose and Crown tonight. Registry Office do in the morning, hurried. I
said we'd go. It'll be the last dry run before the killing.'

Something still tugged obstinately at the back of Brian's mind. He said: ‘I hardly know Garry Prior. You go, he's your age. He won't want me there.'

‘Without you it won't be a rehearsal, you idiot. I said you'd be there.' He winked. ‘He's a bit down. Caught, like. The more the merrier.' And he bounded up the stairs to get out of his overalls and to soap away the rasp of work from his hands.

Downstairs, languidly flicking through the pages of a dated history book, Brian was suddenly struck by the revelation which had been struggling to come out all day. Was it revelation, or self-deception? Debbie's black eye, seen and discussed in Todmarsh and at school, had surely ditched their whole scheme. They'd been relying on the happy-family Hodsden image, and now—for the moment, anyway—that had been shattered. Kill Lill now and you only landed Debbie in it. Kill Lill now, and the whole family was in it. The first people the police would be looking at. The more he examined the idea, the more the impossibility of their plan struck him. They could not kill Lill! Not on Saturday. Not ever. A great wave of nauseous relief washed over him. They were stuck with her, but they were not going to be her killers. He'd have to hammer it into Gordon's thick skull somehow. He'd discuss it with him in bed tonight. He felt elated with a sense of—of what? Freedom? No, not that. Then could it be relief at the continuance of his bondage?

Lill was full of grim triumph at tea-time, and read the riot act to her men.

‘That little slut's not to have a bite of food until she's come round, right? I'll give you what-for, Fred, if you slip up with anything while I'm out tonight. Same goes for you two—and I don't want you talking to her at the door either. Silence and starvation—that'll bring her round. I'll have her crawling for forgiveness by Saturday.'

‘Better not keep her away from school too long, Mum,' said Brian. ‘You'll have the authorities on to you. They must have noticed the bruise.'

Lill looked at him in outrage. ‘Cheeky bugger. I'd like to see the school inspector that would interfere between me and my daughter. I'd soon settle his hash if he tried.'

Brian kept quiet, because Lill spoke no less than the truth. And Gordon snarled inwardly at the whole episode, but told himself he'd soon be doing Debbie more good than ever he could by standing up for her now. And, after all, she had asked for it.

At the usual time Lill gathered herself together, slapped on make-up more crudely even than usual, and announced her departure.

‘I'm just off to see Mrs Corby. Now mind what I said, Fred. You're to have nothing to do with that girl whatsoever. And you drop off in front of that set and I'll skin you alive.'

‘No, Lill, I'll remember.'

Lill banged out of the front door and out through the front gate. But she did not get far along Windsor Avenue, since as ill-luck would have it she nearly ran into Mr Achituko, strolling amiably past. Alone of Windsor Avenue he knew nothing about ‘something being up' at the Hodsdens'. Only Eve Carstairs would be likely to tell him, and she as it happened had felt a twinge of guilt when she heard of the nebulous ‘trouble', and wondered whether she might not be herself responsible. So Mr Achituko was surprised (though not entirely bewildered about the cause) when he found himself grabbed by the lapels of his immaculately cut suit and found Lill's eyes—bulbous, black, outraged—two inches from his own, part of a general expression of murderous malevolence.

‘Listen to me, you bloody black stud. No, don't pretend
you don't know what I mean. I know what you and Debbie have been up to. And I tell you this: I'll have the law on you if you so much as touch her again—do you hear? I'm not having a nigger son-in-law and coffee-coloured grandchildren. You say one word to my daughter, ever in the future, and I'll get your licence revoked!'

And she let go his lapels and marched off down the road in triumph. Mr Achituko, patting his suit back into its pristine smartness, restrained his desire to run after her and do her some modest violence. Mentally he translated Lill's last phrase into a threat to have his temporary residence permit withdrawn. Ludicrous as the threat was, he knew enough about the police and immigration officials to know that people—blacks—had been expelled for infinitely more trivial or idiotic reasons. He stood in the street, dignity outraged and unrevenged, and felt very far from happy. Then, setting his face back into its usual amiable grin in case he was watched, he wheeled round and marched dignifiedly in the opposite direction.

On the way down to the Rose and Crown, Gordon was obsessed, as he had been since Saturday, with his plan of campaign. So bright, intent, absorbed was he that Brian hadn't the heart to argue the toss with him, to throw in doubt the whole plan. Gordon was a boy again, fighting global battles with toy soldiers. It was all a matter of tactics, strategy, logistics, reduced to a tiny scale.

‘Then sometime in the evening,' he finished up, ‘I'll disappear. I'll be doing it tonight—so notice. Strictly twelve minutes, or perhaps a minute or two over, to be on the safe side. I'll just stay in the bog this time. Just go on as usual, talk, notice whether I'm missed. But I won't be—no chance. There's a whole crowd coming tonight, and it'll be just like a Saturday.'

‘When it comes down to it, it's not much of an alibi,' remarked Brian.

‘It's good enough. There's nobody can prove I wasn't
there at the crucial time. Nobody remembers a blind thing on a Saturday evening, when things have got going. It'll be the same tonight.'

And certainly Garry Prior and his mates seemed determined to make quite a do of it. The cynicism behind the gaiety added an extra note of frenzy to the occasion. Half the shipyard seemed to be there, and a whole group that ten years ago had been a loud-mouthed motor-cycle gang, terrorizing roadside pubs and rendering respectable neighbourhoods hideous with their din, now sunk into a world of nappies, baked bean suppers and querulous wives.

Gordon fitted naturally into this mob, knew the indecent songs that ought to be sung on such occasions, had the inevitable follow-up remarks to the inevitable jokes at his tongue's end. Brian was at first diffident, with that feeling of apartness which is the great achievement of the English grammar school. He watched the clumsy, jolly men pretending to be boys and wondered what he could find to say to them. But little by little the barriers of ice were melted by the warm beer, and Brian found he could join in the choruses of the songs, swing his mug joyously at the crucial obscenities, and throw back his head and roar at jokes that he had trained himself to find crude or sexist. He was feeling, through his whole body, not fellow-feeling, but the lifting of a weight, the lightening of his future, a great sense of freedom-in-captivity.