Human Croquet (19 page)

Carmen is deep in preparation for her marriage to Bash. ‘You don’t think you should wait a bit?’ I ask doubtfully.

‘Oh come on – I’m sixteen, I’m not a
child,’
Carmen says, pushing a huge gobstopper from one side of her mouth to the other. When will I find someone who thinks enough about me to take me to the Gaumont on King Street, let alone marry me? ‘Oh, it’ll happen to you one day,’ Carmen says airily. ‘It happens to everyone – you fall in love, you get married, you have kids, that’s what you do … someone will come along.’

(‘Oh, one day,’ Mrs Baxter says, equally assured, ‘your prince will come [she almost breaks into song] and you’ll fall in love and be happy.’ But what if the prince that came looked like Mr Baxter, all rusty armour and gimlet visor?)

But no-one will ever want me once they find out how mad I am. And anyway I don’t want ‘someone’, I want Malcolm Lovat.

How shall I kill Hilary? Fly agaric? Aconite slipped from a ring on my finger? Bash her skull in like a boiled egg or a beechnut? Or better still take her with me when I next fly through time and dump her in the pre-shampoo past, twelfth-century Mongolia say. That would teach her.

‘What do boys see in Hilary?’ Eunice says dismissively. ‘So OK – she’s got long blond hair and big blue eyes and a perfect figure – but what else has she got going for her?’ (Eunice is annoyed with Hilary because she’s beaten her in a chemistry test.)

‘Hmm? What else?’ Carmen explains patiently to her that that’s enough for most boys. She fishes in her handbag for a packet of ten Player’s No 6 and shakes out cigarettes on my bed. ‘Go on,’ she urges Eunice, ‘it won’t kill you.’

We suck on cigarettes. Carmen also manages to stuff in a mint, elliptical rather than round (perhaps if her mouth stopped working for more than a minute she would die). Audrey is, as usual, absent. ‘What’s wrong with Audrey?’ Carmen asks.

‘She’s got flu again.’

‘No, I mean what’s
wrong
with her?’ Somewhere in the depths of the house the baby cries. ‘How’s she getting on?’ Carmen asks, cocking her head in the direction of what I suppose she intends to be Debbie.

‘Well … it’s hard to explain exactly. She’s kind of loopy.’

‘That happened to my mother after she had every one of us,’ Carmen says, ‘it goes away. Women’s trouble,’ she adds with a knowing sigh. I don’t think Debbie’s loopiness is going to go away, the baby is now the only person in her immediate family whom she doesn’t think has been replaced by an accurate replica of themselves. The baby’s squalls grow louder (in some ways it reminds me of Vinny) and all of a sudden the scent of sadness passes me by like a cold draught of air and I shiver.

‘Someone walk over your grave?’ Carmen says sympathetically.

‘That’s a ridiculous saying,’ Eunice says (Eunice would be happier if words could be replaced by chemical formulas and algebraic equations). ‘You’d have to be dead in order to be in your grave, but you’re sitting here alive in the present.’

‘The living dead,’ Carmen says cheerfully, stuffing lemon bon-bons into her mouth. Maybe we’re all the living dead, reconstituted from the dust of the dead, like mud pies. The cries of the baby upsets my invisible ghost, making it waver and shimmer on the spiritual wavelength like an invisible aurora borealis. ‘What’s that funny smell?’ (Spirit of health? Or goblin damned?) Carmen asks, sniffing the air suspiciously.

‘Just my ghost.’

‘Ghosts,’ Eunice scoffs, ‘there’s no such thing, it’s a completely irrational fear. Phasmophobia.’

But I’m not afraid of my ghost. He – or she – is like an old friend, a comfortable shoe. Phasmophilia.

‘That sounds perfectly disgusting,’ Eunice says, making a face which does nothing for her.

I have to translate Ovid. In
Metamorphoses
you can’t move for people turning into swans, heifers, bears, newts, spiders, bats, birds, stars, partridges and water, lots of water. That’s the trouble with having god-like powers, it’s too tempting to use them. If I had meta-morphic powers I’d be employing them at every opportunity – Debbie would have been turned into an ass long ago, and Hilary would be hopping about as a frog.

And me, I am a daughter of the sun, turned by grief into something strange. For homework, I’m translating the story of Phaeton’s sisters, a story of nature green in bud and leaf. Phaeton’s sisters who mourned so much for their charred brother that they turned into trees – imagine their feelings as they found their feet were fast to the earth, turning, even as they looked, into roots. When they tore their hair they found their hands were full, not of hair, but of leaves. Their legs were trapped inside tree-trunks, their arms formed branches and they watched in horror as bark crept over their breasts and stomachs. Clymene, their poor mother, frantically trying to pull the bark off her daughters, instead snapped their fragile branches and her tree-daughters cried out to her in pain and terror, begging her not to hurt them any more.

Then slowly, slowly, the bark crept over their faces, until only their mouths remained and their mother rushed from one to another, kissing her daughters in a frenzy. Then, at last, they bid their mother one last terrible farewell before the bark closed over their lips for ever. They continued to weep even when turned into trees, their tears dropping into the river flowing at their feet and forming drops of sun-coloured amber.

(‘Rather an emotional translation, Isobel,’ is my Latin teacher’s usual verdict.) Only the lonely know how I feel.

Will I ever be happy? Probably not. Will I ever kiss Malcolm Lovat? Probably not. I know this catechism, it leads to the slough of despond and a sleepless night.

Where is Malcolm? Why isn’t he knocking at my window instead of the cold, hard rain? Where is my mother?

I fall asleep with the smell of woodsmoke in my hair and the scent of sadness coiled around me like a vine, and dream that I’m lost in an endless dark wood, alone and with no rescuer, not even Virgil come to offer me a package holiday to hell as my forfeit.

‘Come on, old chap,’ Gordon coaxed softly and held out a hand towards Charles until finally Charles fell against the paternal gabardine breast and started to sob – deep, ugly sobs that racked his small body. Gordon laid his cheek against Isobel’s curls, so that they formed another wretchedly sentimental tableau (
‘Where have you been, Daddy dearest?’
perhaps). Gordon stared at a tree in front of him as if what he was seeing wasn’t a tree but a gibbet.

‘Time to go,’ Gordon said eventually, reluctantly. Charles sniffed hard and wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘We have to help Mummy,’ he said, the urgency of his message punctuated by woebegone hiccups.

Gordon hoisted Isobel up and carried her high on his chest, the other hand holding on to Charles. ‘Mummy’s all right,’ he said and before Charles could protest they were brought up short at the sight of Vinny – Vinny whom both of them had completely forgotten about since she’d gone to do you-know-what. She was sitting on a moss-covered tree-stump with her head in her hands. She looked dark and gnarled like some ancient forest-dwelling creature. But when she stood up, with no word of greeting for Charles or Isobel, they could see that she was the same old Vinny and not some mythic creature. ‘There you are,’ Gordon said, as if he’d just encountered her in the back garden and – apparently sharing the same delusion – she replied, ‘You took your time.’ Her thick brown stockings were laddered and she had a scratch on her nose. Perhaps she’d been clawed by a wild animal.

Vinny, who was collapsed in the passenger seat, looking as if she needed a blood transfusion, came to life for a moment and said, rather groggily, ‘Don’t worry about her,’ and gave a grim little laugh. ‘At last, I get to sit in the front,’ she added with a sigh and closed her eyes.

Charles took Eliza’s shoe out of his pocket where it had been since last night and handed it silently to Gordon who dropped it and nearly lost control of the car. Vinny woke up, snatched the shoe and stuffed it in her bag. By now, the heel was hanging off like a tooth about to drop out.

‘Are we going home?’ Charles asked after a while.

‘Home?’ Gordon repeated doubtfully as if this was the last place he was thinking of going. He glanced at Vinny, as if to glean her opinion, but she’d dropped off to sleep and was snoring with relief, so with a heartfelt sigh, Gordon said, ‘Yes, we have to go home.’

The Widow woke them from their dreamless morning’s sleep with lunch in bed as if they were invalids. They ate ham sandwiches, the last tomatoes from the greenhouse and lemon Madeira cake and fell asleep again and didn’t see the Widow come in and clear away their trays.