In a Good Light (16 page)

‘I know, I know,' sighed Mum. ‘I never liked that story.'

Aunty Barbara's resolution to put it all behind her proved no more successful than Donovan's to eat his greens. I knew that he had been spending his golf money at the Southern Fried Chicken shop on the way home because I found a serviette and a salt sachet in his bedroom when I went in looking for the fish flakes to feed Hutch. This was why he was able, when dinner appeared, to request only the smallest portions of everything, particularly Mum's parboiled veg, which he would nibble and maul and hide under his knife and fork.

Aunty Barbara, it emerged, had also been enjoying alternative refreshments. The experience with Mr Spragg had taught me to be suspicious of anyone who took long walks in the afternoon for no good reason, so when Aunty Barbara started going out for a breath of fresh air in the foulest weather imaginable I knew trouble was not far off.

It was January 6 and we were all sitting around the kitchen table for breakfast, apart from Aunty Barbara, who was doing something in the bathroom with wax. Dad was testing us on the feast of Epiphany.

‘How many wise men?'

‘Three,' we replied, in bored voices.
Too easy. Ask us another
.

He shook his head. A trick question. ‘It doesn't actually say how many in the Gospels.'

‘Why do they always put three on Christmas cards, then?' asked Christian.

‘What about We Three Kings of Orien-tar?' Donovan wanted to know.

Dad shrugged. ‘It's purely supposition that there were three. But we're not actually told. There were three
gifts
, but that doesn't necessarily mean there were three wise men.'

‘They could have clubbed together,' Donovan said.

‘Yeah,' I agreed. ‘Especially for something expensive, like gold.'

‘Gold, frankincense and myrrh – spazzy presents for a baby,' was Christian's verdict.

There followed a conversation about what gifts a modern messiah might expect. Premium bonds. An engraved pewter tankard. Cufflinks. A napkin ring.

We were still trying to top this last contribution for sheer uselessness, when the morning post hit the doormat. Donovan, who was nearest, went to fetch it: there was only one item, a postcard.

‘It's Dad's writing,' he said, pausing to read the message aloud before handing it over. ‘
Thanks for all you're doing. So sorry you've been landed with B. If you've been put to any expense, please let me know. Yours ever, Alan
.'

Donovan's delivery of this message, in an uncomprehending monotone, unfortunately coincided with the entrance of Aunty Barbara, who froze in the doorway, nostrils dilated with fury. Before Mum and Dad, who looked equally paralysed, could intervene, she had recovered the use of her muscles sufficiently to snatch the card from Donovan's hand.

‘What's he say?' she hissed, squinting at the card and holding it at arm's length to bring the writing into focus. She had reading glasses in her handbag, but never wore them because they put ten years on her. She'd told me she'd rather not read any more than look like a geriatric before her time. ‘I knew it!' she said triumphantly. ‘I knew there
was something going on between you.
Landed
. The smug, patronising git. Go and get your things, Donovan. We're going.'

He hesitated, glancing at Dad for a ruling.

‘NOW!' his mother shrilled, slamming her hand on the table and making the crockery rattle.

‘Barbara, I've told you, there's nothing “going on” between us,' Dad protested as Donovan fled from the room. ‘This is the first communication we've had from Alan.'

‘Then how does he know we're here? Eh?'

Mum and Dad gave identical shrugs expressive of innocence and bafflement. ‘Maybe Donovan's written to him.'

‘He's been onto you, hasn't he? Telling you I'm off my trolley.'

‘He honestly hasn't. We've not spoken a word since he . . . went off.'

‘I know what it's all about. I'm not stupid. He wants Donovan back. He's putting it about that I'm a bad mother, so he can get custody.'

‘I really don't think . . .' Mum began, but her words of reassurance were bitten off by a fresh attack.

‘Well, over my dead body is all I can say. And over his, too, for that matter.' She picked up the bread knife, which had a serrated blade divided into two sharp points at the end, and stabbed it through the heart of the uncut loaf with such force that it embedded itself in the chopping board beneath. Before any of us could speak she had stalked out of the room. The four of us exhaled as one. A minute later we heard her bedroom door slam with a terrific crash.

‘I think we're out of our depth, here, Gordon,' Mum said. ‘Once paranoia sets in . . .'

‘She seemed to be getting better. After that little upset at New Year,' said Dad.

‘The question is, what are we going to do?'

‘If she's determined to go, we can't stop her.'

‘Poor Donovan,' said Mum. ‘Why don't you two go and see how he's getting on?' She was desperate to have us out of the way so they could talk. We'd already seen and heard too much of the strange, spiky adult world for one day.

We found him in his room, retrieving balled-up items of clothing from all four corners of the room and hurling them into his open suitcase. He tended to undress explosively, I'd noticed. A single sock was still lodged on the curtain rail, where it had landed the night before.

His Christmas presents had been more carefully packed in a single layer at the bottom of his case, apart from the helmet and knee-pads, which he was wearing – a sensible precaution in my view. There wasn't much for me and Christian to do, so we just stood around trying to look sympathetic. After all, it wasn't Donovan's fault that he had an angry, knife-wielding mother.

He had just snapped home the catches on the case when there came a tremendous racket of pounding and yelling from Aunty Barbara's room.

‘Let me out of here!' she was shouting, almost drowning her own words with the frenzied clamour of fists on wood. ‘Someone unlock this door!'

We ventured out onto the landing, in time to see Mum coming up the stairs at a run. ‘It doesn't lock,' she called out, as the din subsided. ‘It just sticks when it's slammed.' There was no reply from within the bedroom. ‘Stand back!' Mum instructed, giving the handle a twist and launching her hip against the door, which resisted for the first inch
or so and then flew open, smacking into the wall and chipping a lump out of the plaster. A blast of icy air whipped around our ankles. The window had been thrown up to its full extent and Aunty Barbara had one leg over the sill, a manoeuvre complicated by the fact that she was wearing a tight, straight skirt. The word HELP had been scrawled in lipstick on the glass.

‘Oh my God,' said Mum, driven to blasphemy by this extremity. ‘Be careful, the sash is broken.'

Christian and I had been brought up to think of our windows as so many primed guillotines, and tended to keep our distance, but of course occasional visitors didn't have our advantage. As Mum took a step into the room, Aunty Barbara, with a look of pure panic in her eyes, tried to swing her other leg up and over the sill. Inhibited by her tight skirt, she lost her balance, made a grab for the paintwork, which came away in her hand in great white flakes, and toppled backwards out of the window, with a shriek that raked the air like nails.

It was very fortunate, Mum said later, that Aunty Barbara's window overlooked the flat roof of the kitchen so she hadn't too far to fall. Otherwise it might have been a different story.

Aunty Barbara didn't look like someone on whom fortune was smiling, as she went off in the ambulance with her neck in a brace. They had lowered her down from the roof on a stretcher, like the paralytic Jesus healed. But there was no Jesus at the bottom, with his kind, sad face, just a doctor in a hurry, who signed some papers, and went off in his car.

THE FOLLOWING DAY
Donovan's dad arrived to take him away in a blue Daimler with cream leather seats. He abandoned the car halfway up the drive because of the brambles. ‘I must do something about those,' Dad murmured, tugging his eyebrow, but he never did. We were used to the swish and rattle of branches along the sides of our old Austin Princess. It was the sound of coming home.

I was interested to see Donovan's dad, Alan, because of what I'd heard about him, chiefly from Aunty Barbara. But he was disappointingly ordinary: nothing but a man in a smart suit, with thinning hair and a moustache, and not at all the sort you'd imagine throwing himself off Swiss balconies. The thought struck me: what a couple for jumping out of windows.

He and Dad shook hands awkwardly on the doorstep, and then there was one of those annoying scenes so common in the adult world, where Alan tried to give Dad some
money and Dad refused, and said, ‘I don't want it,' but Alan insisted, so Dad put his hands behind his back and the whole shower of notes fluttered to the floor. ‘Well, I don't want it,' Alan said, and they both refused to pick it up, but the moment Donovan and I made a dive for it they changed their minds and back it all went in Alan's wallet.

‘Did you get my skateboard?' was Donovan's first question after his Dad had greeted him with one of those man-to-man sideways hugs.

For a moment it appeared that Alan hadn't heard him, but then he said, ‘Yes, of course. I've left it at the office. We'll have to pick it up on the way home.' And he gave a smile that made his moustache ripple like something alive. ‘How have you been?' he asked.

‘All right,' said Donovan. ‘Except Starsky died. And Mum fell out of the window.'

‘I know,' said Alan. ‘That's why I'm here.'

‘She'll be all right, though, won't she?'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘Just a sprained wrist and some bruises,' said Mum. ‘I rang the hospital this morning.'

‘They're not letting her out, though?' Alan asked.

‘Oh no.'

‘Right. Right.'

There was a pause, and then from around the bushes at the edge of the driveway a woman appeared, dressed all in white, with blonde hair and pale eyes – Aunty Barbara in negative. She was stooping to hold both hands of a fat baby, who hadn't quite mastered the art of walking unsupported.

‘Pippa needs a nappy change,' said the woman in a reproachful voice. Now that she mentioned it, the nappy did look rather taut and low-slung.

‘Oh, you haven't left Suzie in the car all this time!' Mum exclaimed. ‘Come on in before you all freeze to death.'

We moved inside, leaving Suzie to complete her slow shuffle up the drive. There was no hurrying that bow-legged baby. I wondered why she didn't just pick it up. In the hallway there were more hugs and hellos, and some dithering over whether to remove coats.

‘Are we staying?' Suzie asked Alan.

‘I've put the kettle on,' Mum said, ushering mother and child towards the downstairs cloakroom to deal with that pungent nappy.

The rest of us adjourned to the sitting room, where the fire was alight. ‘I love your house,' Suzie could be heard saying to Mum. ‘It's so authentic.'

Dad was hunting around for something to use as a fire-guard to protect Pippa. In the end he tipped all the newspapers and chessmen and knitting and nutshells off the coffee table and turned it on its side to form a barrier, though on Suzie's return it was clear that she had no intention of putting Pippa down, especially now that the floor was covered with nutshells. Instead Pippa was passed around and made to kiss everyone – her latest trick – but before she got to me she took against the idea and buried her face in Suzie's neck. Attempts to cajole her in my direction were met with shrieks of rage. I didn't much want her moist lips and nose pressed up to my cheek anyway, but everyone else seemed to find her aversion to me hilarious.

‘Ha ha,' said Donovan, tickling the fat folds of her neck to make her turn round. ‘She doesn't like you, Esther.'

‘Well, I don't like her,' I replied, and Suzie blinked at me, affronted.

Mum frowned. ‘Go and get Pippa one of your dolls to
play with,' she said, as if I had loads to choose from. In fact I had only two: the Mary Quant doll and a Tiny Tears which had been done over with indelible red laundry marker years ago and now had an incurable case of measles. I settled on Mary Quant, somewhat against my instinct to preserve the nicer of the two, because I didn't want the marker pen lecture rehashed in front of a roomful of visitors. As I came down the stairs I could hear Alan on the telephone in the hallway.

‘Don't worry about the price, just get one,' he was saying. ‘You're an angel. We'll be along later to pick it up. Ta-ta.'

He hung up and turned round, giving a twitch of surprise to find me behind him. ‘Hello,' he said, through another hairy smile. ‘I didn't see you there. Ha ha. That's a nice dolly. Was she from Father Christmas?'

‘No. Aunty Barbara gave her to me the time before.'

‘Did she?' he said. ‘Did she? Jolly good.'

In the sitting room no one had sat down. Suzie had Pippa on her hip, and Dad was too polite to take a seat while there was a woman still standing. Christian was bowling nutshells into the fire. Pippa accepted Mary Quant greedily, gave her a good shake and then threw her down on the floor. Everyone except me laughed. I wished Mum had been there to witness the result of her bright idea, but she was in the kitchen making tea. I could hear the clink of china and the scream of the kettle.

‘Pippa. Naughty!' Suzie scolded, picking up the doll and immediately returning it to her for a second attempt.

Alan was inspecting a photograph on the crowded mantelpiece. It showed Christian and me in the dinghy in Pembrokeshire.

‘Was that taken at the caravan?' he asked.