Every Day Is Mother's Day (17 page)

Standing on one leg, Alistair pointed to his wound. “You’ll have to get your glasses,” he said.

Florence bent over his raised knee and looked up with a face full of alarm.

“It’s all black, Sylvia. Whatever’s happened?”

“Take no notice of him, it’s nothing.”

“But it’s black.”

“It’s from a pencil. It’ll wash off.”

“I’d better get my first-aid kit,” Florence said. “I don’t think you ought to leave me with him like this.”

“I’ve told you, it’s nothing. Alistair, I’m going now, and if I hear from your Auntie that you’ve been playing her up there’ll be trouble.”

“Oh all right, you go,” Alistair said. “I expect I’ll be up all night crying with the pain, that’s all.”

Suzanne sat down on the stairs and clasped her arms round her abdomen, rocking with simulated mirth; standing amid the baggage, Karen began to scream.

“We’re off,” Sylvia yelled above the noise. “Thanks a lot, Florence, and we’ll see you tomorrow.”

“But you can’t leave me with them like this. He might be ill. What if—”

Sylvia bolted out of the front door, Colin was already in the car. Alistair’s voice followed her, “I expect my leg will be cut off and you’ll have to push me round in a wheelchair,” and Karen’s wails and Suzanne’s snorts of laughter. Mud splashed the back of her tights. She slammed the car door.

“It’s quarter to nine,” Colin said.

“How far is it?”

“Half a mile as the crow flies, that’s all.”

“As the crow flies? Does that mean you don’t know the way? Oh, what a bloody business it all is. My evening’s ruined before it starts.”

Colin edged the car out of Lauderdale Road.

“And Colin, remember you’ve to get up early in the morning to fetch the kids, and before that you’ve got to get us both home tonight.”

“When do I get drunk, Sylvia? Come on, when have you ever seen me drunk?”

“You drink too much if you get the chance. You always do, and you know it.”

“And how often do I get the chance? Come on, Sylvia, when did you last see me reeling round the estate smashing people’s windows and singing ‘I belong to Glasgow,’ and throwing up on the pavement? When was the last time, eh, when?”

Sylvia lapsed into moody silence. “They’ll settle down,” she said, after a while. “They’ll settle, won’t they?”

“I hope so. Florence isn’t used to them.”

“I mean, it’s not just them, all kids are like that. There’s many worse. Florence doesn’t know. Colin, this is a long half-mile.”

Colin saw that he was in a cul-de-sac. He slowed the car to a crawl.

“Are we there?”

“No, we’re not. Look out, will you, and see if you can see Balmoral Road.”

It was the very edge of Florence’s respectable district, bigger houses well back from the road, flat-land encroaching, street names buried in dripping hedges.

“Andover Crescent,” Sylvia said.

“That’s no help. Well, okay, I’ll just drive along it.”

“Hadn’t you better go back?”

“If it’s a crescent, it’s bound to go round, isn’t it, use your common sense. I wish you’d learn to drive, Sylvia, then I could have a drink sometimes without you nagging me.”

“Nobody’s going to get a drink at this rate. I thought you knew where Frank’s was.”

“If I knew, we’d be there, wouldn’t we? Do you think I’m doing this for pleasure?”

“There’s no need to get sarcastic. At least three times in the past two months you’ve been over to Frank’s.”

Fear shot through him, joining the anger churning his intestines. “Not from this direction. I know it from our house but not from this direction. All these streets look the same. And in the dark, too.”

They drove around for another ten minutes, and then Colin stopped the car at a phonebox. Inhaling the smell of stale urine, he leafed through the directory, a draught from a broken pane blowing piercingly down the back of his neck. The “O” section had been torn out jaggedly, cutting him off at O’Connor. He dashed back to the car.

“You’re getting soaked,” Sylvia said reproachfully. She was scrabbling through her handbag looking for change. “Haven’t you got Frank’s number in your wallet?”

“I’ll find another box.” Colin drove on. “Here, I might have, take it out and have a look through.”

They had by now reached the main road and Sylvia searched through his wallet under the generous light, unimpeded by trees. “Well, I can’t see Frank’s number. I don’t think you’ve got it. Here, what’s this? Social Services. What do you want the number of the Social Services for?”

“For school,” Colin said promptly. Sweat started out again on the back of his neck. “We have to carry it. For emergencies.”

“What emergencies? I thought you got ambulances for emergencies.”

“Are you looking for a phonebox?”

“Here, stop here, I think that’s one. It’s not got a light. Here, pull up.”

“At least we know where we are now.”

Colin grabbed the directory and hurled himself back into his seat, peering at the listings by the dim light of the interior bulb. The door was half-open and rain splattered in. Sylvia shivered.

“Here’s Frank. Give me that
I
op.”

He dialled the number and was relieved to hear the ringing tone. It rang and rang. When he was on the point of giving up, the receiver was lifted and an unfamiliar voice answered. He heard it calling out for Frank.

“Here, Frank, here’s some extraordinary chap called Sidney who’s got lost.”

Frank came to the phone. “Hello? Colin?”

Colin expected him to sound irritable, but he was quite jovial, perhaps alarmingly so. Must be a good party, Colin thought, good conversation, lots to drink. His spirits briefly rallied. The directions fixed in his mind, he jumped back into the car.

“Right, got it this time. Be there in under five minutes.”

“I’m cold, Colin. Freezing.”

“Cheer up.
En avant
.”

“Is that a foreign expression?”

“Yes. Course it is.”

“I hope you won’t be using foreign expressions tonight, making a fool of yourself. And remember, about the drinking.”

Colin struggled for words for a moment, and found none. He slammed on the brakes and brought the car to rest outside Frank’s house. Some long-sealed capsule of rage seemed to
explode inside his skull, so that the rest of the night passed for him in a sort of haze, odd incidents and scraps of conversation rising jaggedly above the tide of his wrath; so that the next day, when he was forced to think it all over, he could not pin any sequence to events, or say if they were real at all.

It was nine-thirty. Frank answered the door. He looked vacant, rather slack-jawed.

“Hello,” Sylvia said. Frank took her hand and kissed it. Startled, she pulled it away and rubbed it on her coat sleeve, then took off her coat and handed it to Frank as if he were a cloakroom attendant. Looking him over, she saw that he was wearing white shoes. She raised her eyebrows meaningfully.

Frank had a large Victorian house, a bit dilapidated but gracious in its proportions; he had a few good pictures, and quantities of junkshop and repro furniture intermingled with a few antiques. He leaned to the idea that books furnish a room, and frequented jumble sales in search of leather bindings; he was not as interested in the contents of his finds as he knew he ought to be. The overall effect was harmonious, a little dusty, genteel. He had bought the house before prices shot up, with his savings and a small legacy, and financed his risk by letting off bedrooms to students from the Teacher Training College. Colin imagined they paid a high price in humiliation, for Frank loved to patronise the young. I must take a good look around, he thought, I’m supposed to have been here quite often.

Frank did not seem to know what to do with Sylvia’s coat. “This way,” he said.

They followed him into a large, high-ceilinged room, where the other guests sat with drinks in their hands. In a tiny pause in the conversation, heads turned; turned back, and the talk resumed, a touch rumbustious, grating, over-loud; collars loosened and faces glowing. They’re in full swing, Colin thought,
we really are terribly late. Perhaps it would have been better to cut our losses and not come at all. He began to stammer out fresh apologies, but Frank brushed them aside.

“This is my colleague, Colin Sidney,” Frank said to the room at large. “This is his charming wife, Sylvia, whom we all immediately notice is expecting another little Sidney, and this is Sylvia’s wet coat.”

“Why does he want us to call him Sidney?” one of the guests said. “Why can’t he use his real name?”

“Don’t be facetious, Edmund,” Frank said. “Have you seen my drawing-room since it’s been redecorated, Colin?”

“Oh well, we’ll call him what he wants,” the other man grumbled. “But either we should all go under our real names, or we should all have pseudonyms.”

“What?” Colin stared at him for a moment, and returned his attention to Frank’s question. “Of course I have, of course I’ve seen it,” he said heartily.

“I didn’t think you had. I’ve moved the idiot box into the morning room, not that I ever watch the thing except for the odd documentary, and the telephone’s through there in the junk room. They couldn’t seem to understand that I wanted it through there.”

“Why not?” the grumbling man said. “Most telephone conversation is junk. The art of letter writing is dead.”

“Colin, have you met—I’m sure you must know Edmund Toye?”

“I’m afraid not. How do you do?”

“Now that is a question.” Edmund Toye was a yellow-faced man, with a goatee and a snide pseudo-aristocratic expression; not unlike Cardinal Richelieu in some respects, but very unlike him in others. “Now that is a piece of what you might call conversational junk. I mean, you say how am I, but if I were to tell you about my spondylitis, you would be very put out. My dear lady,” he said to Sylvia.
“Enchanté.”
Sylvia removed her
hand hastily, fearing he might kiss it. “Now is that more meaningful, or not, Sidney? I wonder.”

“Edmund,” a woman said in a sweetly warning tone. She presented them in turn with her hand. “I am Charmian Toye.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Sylvia said.

“Now that is what I call an overstatement,” Toye said. “Or a piece of hypocrisy. At best, she might be indifferent, certainly she has no reason to be pleased, and in fact she is simply trying to impress us with her grasp of the social niceties.”

“Well, well,” Charmian said. “We may just get along stormingly together, and she may be awfully pleased in the end, so you see, Edmund, she is only anticipating. Anyway, it’s a perfectly innocuous statement. Or so I should have thought. It may pass without comment.”

“It may, but of course,” said Edmund, “it has not.”

Momentarily, Colin was alarmed. Who were these people with the odd names, and had they been drinking? Well, yes, obviously, but had they been drinking too much, or did they always talk like this? He was glad to see that one of his colleagues from school was present—Stewart Colman, who taught English—but although he was at least sanely named he was not a reassuring dinner companion. He seized Colin’s hand now and pumped it earnestly, wisely adding no spoken greeting. There was a peculiar glint in his eye, Colin thought. He was a wiry man with very black hair. During his last summer vacation he had grown a beard, which to his grief and astonishment had sprouted the vibrant shade of bitter thick-cut marmalade. Having braved ridicule on the first day of term, he would not court more by shaving it off. His wife, Gail, was a big-boned woman of thirty-five, contrastingly sober in hue, who followed him around like an apology.

“Well, you seem to be saving lots of time by recognising the Colmans,” Frank said. “Though I must say, Colin, you do appear a trifle distrait.”

“I’m just sorry we were so late. I can’t apologise enough.”
He paused, wary in case this turn of phrase should excite Edmund Toye’s derision. “We must have held up dinner.”

“Oh, we hadn’t thought of dinner,” Frank said. “We’re doing some serious drinking. Let me provide for you. Whisky, I suppose, and for you, Sylvia? Gin all right? Gin’s all right for Sylvia. Anything in it, Sylvia? Splash of something? Orange? Good Lord, I didn’t think anyone over the age of sixteen drank gin and orange. Never mind, my dear, you shall have whatever you desire, I’m no snob.” Frank whirled about, Sylvia’s coat in his arm like a comatose dancing partner.

“Here is Brian Frostick, and this is Elvie, whom we immediately notice is Brian’s very newly married wife.”

Frostick was gaunt and pallid, and intimated that he was a solicitor; his wife Elvie, no more than twenty to his forty, was brown and short, with cropped hair and sturdy bare shoulders rising from the flounces of a vivid scarlet dress. Her handshake was bone-crunching.

“Well, why don’t you sit?” Frank demanded. “I’ll dispose of Sylvia’s outerwear and give you drinkies in a trice, when I think how to manage it.” He wandered from the room.

“Frank’s well away,” Frostick said. He sniggered.

“I say,” said Edmund Toye sharply, “don’t sit there.”

Sylvia stopped, her backside in mid-air, then reached behind her to retrieve a violin, which Frank had placed carelessly on a chair in an effort to raise the cultural tone. She held on to it, looking about her helplessly. Soon, Colin thought, she would become angry.

“Oh, do,” Toye said with a gesture. “By all means, if you feel moved. I dare say Frank can provide a selection of sheet music. You do play, I suppose?”

“You suppose wrong,” Sylvia said. Her voice was flat. “I just want to know what to do with it.”

“My dear lady,” Toye said. Colin took the violin from Sylvia and edged up a very tarnished silver candelabra to place it on a sidetable. Mrs. Toye was patting the chaise-lounge beside her.
She was a tiny woman, buttoned-up and rather cross, with a small pointed face and an air of extreme self-possession.

“What a pity, Sylvia,” Frostick said. “What a pity, I really thought you would give us a recital. What a merry little Zingara you looked, in your festive red and green.”

“What’s a Zingara?” Elvie asked.

“A type of gypsy, I believe,” Edmund Toye said. “Speaking of the Romany people, does anyone, I wonder, read George Borrow nowadays?”