Human Croquet (22 page)

Poor Charles, his pink Dumbo-flap ears stuck out from his head like his princely namesake’s. ‘Flying yet?’ Trevor Randall – the arch-bully at school – asked him, and instead of being sensible and slinking away in cowardice, Charles punched him in the eye and had to be beaten into repentance by Mr Baxter.

Eventually, Charles was operated on and a kindly surgeon poked a hole through his eardrums and drained out all the yellow-green snot. Unfortunately, this didn’t help him read any better and Mr Baxter still had to bounce wooden rulers off the palms of Charles’ hands to help him make out the words on the page.

Charles refrained from telling Mr Baxter that when she came back, Eliza was going to rip Mr Baxter’s head off and pull his lungs out through his neck. He was looking forward to savouring the look of astonishment on Mr Baxter’s face.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwackkk!
went Mr Baxter’s leather strap (or the ‘tawse’ in Mrs Baxter’s quaint language).

Vinny’s meagre nursing skills were tested to their limit by coughs and colds, viruses and infections, aches and pains, warts and verrucas – the parental loss documented by germs. Charles was hospitalized again, with a suspected appendicitis, and then discharged again, unable to explain the mysterious source of his pain.

The house was unheated on the grounds of economy. Economy was pinchpenny Vinny’s religion (yet she made a very poor economist). ‘I’m trying to keep the wolf from the door,’ she said, and narrowed her eyes (North Sea grey) and added, ‘We’re one step away from the poorhouse.’ How could Vinny run the business and bring up children? What was she supposed to do? She brought in assistant after assistant to help in the grocery, all of whom seemed to have no purpose in life other than defrauding Vinny.

She spent long hours at night sitting at the dining-table cross-eyed over double-entry bookkeeping, unable to make sense of profit and loss. Not such a good businesswoman as Mother, it turned out.

Vinny scrimped but couldn’t save. The Widow’s huge meals were replaced by watery scrambled eggs, like lemon vomit, toast and dripping or Vinny’s ‘speciality’ – steak-and-kidney pie, a glutinous grey substance sandwiched between cardboard crusts. They were always hungry, always trying to squirrel away food into their hollow insides. Sometimes Isobel felt so hungry that she wondered if there wasn’t someone else inside her, an insatiably greedy person who had to be fed continually.

The Widow’s white linen tablecloths and silver cutlery, her flower-sprigged crockery and ivory napkin rings had all been put away as being ‘too much trouble to look after’ for Vinny. Now they ate with Wool-worths cutlery and old plaited raffia mats from Vinny’s house. ‘Serviettes,’ said Vinny, ‘are for people with servants,’ and Vinny, God forbid, was no-one’s servant. ‘God gave us a tongue to lick our lips,’ Vinny pronounced, ‘he didn’t create us with serviettes in our hands,’ an argument full of logical holes – what about cigarettes? Teacups? Rich Tea biscuits? What indeed about ‘God’, who didn’t get much of a look-in in Arden.

Mrs Baxter was quick to try and step into the mothering breach, clearly horrified by the sudden subtraction of family members – a grandmother, a father and a mother – within the space of such a short time. How? she frequently asked Mr Baxter. How could a mother leave her own children? Her ain weans? (Mrs Baxter was bilingual.) Especially such bonny ones? She must be off her head (or ‘aff her heid’).

Isobel watched for Mr Baxter marching off early for school and ran round to the back door of Sithean so that Mrs Baxter could dress her hair instead of Vinny, twirling it into neat plaits (‘pleats’) because the little girls under Mr Baxter’s care weren’t allowed to unleash their female tresses anywhere near the school building. Mrs Baxter also bought new navy blue hair-ribbons to tie up Isobel’s plaits in big bows and said, ‘There – don’t you look pretty?’ with a tremendous new-moon smile of encouragement that couldn’t quite disguise the look of doubt on her face.

Audrey’s lovely red-gold hair, hair that, let loose, flowed down her back like a rippling volcanic stream, a banner of flame, had to be roped into a big fat plait that hung almost to her waist. There was something about long untamed hair that induced Mr Baxter’s bile. ‘You should have all of that cut off,’ he said, and it seemed a miracle that Audrey’s long locks had lasted this long without being shorn.

There were new people – the McDades – on Willow Road. You could tell what Mr Baxter thought of Carmen McDade’s name from the way his moustachioed top lip sneered whenever he had to pronounce it. The McDades had moved up from London and were such a big family that Mr McDade (a builder, of sorts) and Mrs McDade (a termagant) occasionally mislaid one of the smaller McDades without even noticing. ‘Backward,’ was Mr Baxter’s professional judgement on most of the McDade clan, although Mr Baxter’s definition of ‘back-ward’ was generous and had frequently included Charles. And even Mrs Baxter.

Carmen tucked her dress into her greying knickers and cartwheeled across the green lawn of Sithean. ‘A bit forward, that girl,’ Mr Baxter said with a look of distaste on his face. But how could she be both backward and forward? There was no pleasing Mr Baxter. ‘She’s only a little girl,’ Mrs Baxter protested.

‘So?’ Mr Baxter said darkly. ‘They’re all the same.’

Vinny’s eyes narrow suspiciously. ‘Fostering?’ Surely not, someone prepared to take the ‘poor orphaned bairns’ off her hands? Vinny contemplated. And then nearly choked on the little cake, ‘Not orphans,’ she said, somewhat inaudibly on account of the choking, ‘they’re not orphans, their mother’s alive.’

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Mrs Baxter said hastily. Mrs Baxter couldn’t remember what Eliza looked like any more. When she thought about her she saw a figure in the distance – at the bottom of the garden, in the field – someone walking away. Vinny licked her fingers clean of icing and said, ‘Why not?’ But foolish Mrs Baxter hadn’t discussed this proposition with ‘Daddy’ and he looked at her in complete disbelief. ‘You’re off your bloody head, Moira [so another one], I have to see that stupid boy all day long at school, I don’t want him in my house as well. And that girl is
sullen.
Do you hear?’ (‘Charles can be rather silly sometimes,’ Mr Baxter wrote in a restrained way on his Christmas report.)

Sometimes when they got to the end of a story, where everything had been put right and justice done, Mrs Baxter would sigh and say, ‘What a shame that life’s not really like that.’ Mr Baxter didn’t know about these reading sessions – Mr Baxter disapproved wholeheartedly of fairy stories (‘stuff and nonsense’) although whether he
had
a whole heart was debatable.

One day, Mr Baxter came home unexpectedly early from school and found the three of them in front of a blazing fire. Mrs Baxter was reading, her index finger following every line – because she couldn’t find her reading-glasses – and at the point when Red Riding Hood was filling up her little basket with custards, they all suddenly became aware of Mr Baxter’s presence in the doorway. Mrs Baxter’s body gave a little spasm, like a frightened rabbit, and her reading-finger halted mysteriously on the word ‘bobbin’.

Mr Baxter fixed them with his little pebble eyes behind his little pebble glasses for a long time before saying, ‘Unlike her stupid brother, the girl can read perfectly well for herself, Moira – I should know, I taught her myself. And as for you, Audrey, you can go up to your room and do the extra arithmetic I set you.’ Audrey scurried out of the room and Mrs Baxter said, ‘Oh dear, Daddy, we were only reading. What harm is there in that?’

Next day, Mrs Baxter had one eye so swollen that she couldn’t open it. ‘Walked into a door,’ she explained while brushing Isobel’s hair, ‘silly me.’ Audrey was sitting at the breakfast-table with a bowl of cornflakes in front of her and kept lifting her spoon to her lips except it was the same spoonful of flakes over and over again. There were no more stories after that.