In a Good Light (6 page)

OUR PARENTS WERE
different from other people's, and they had different rules. They didn't mind if we were noisy or boisterous, or if we traipsed mud through the house, or slid down the compost heap, or caught nits. They didn't rant and fume when we came home from school with indelible ink on our uniforms, or pockets torn loose, or our shoes scuffed grey. When we left our pens all over the kitchen floor, Mum and Dad stepped over them, and when we trampolined on the beds and crippled the springs, and left footprints on the wall from sliding down the banisters, they just shrugged.

Dad's position on discipline owed much to his job at the prison. He spent all day among young people for whom rage was the normal mode of expression; he had no wish to witness or participate in angry scenes at home. His sternest reproof was likely to be ‘Now, now . . .' and a telling off was referred to as ‘a kind word'. Mum's attitude to child-rearing – in fact
to everything – had been shaped by those years with the mission. She had seen so much poverty and suffering, and so much resilience of spirit, it had left her with a contemptuous disregard for life's petty problems. What was faulty wiring, or a dirty carpet to a woman who was in mourning for a whole continent? Her view – not one widely held in the suburbs at that time – was that children in good health, who had food and shelter, were already thrice blessed and needed no further cosseting. Money that could be given to charity was not to be wasted on frivolities like television, sweets and trashy plastic toys.

Instead, we had the run of the garden and its amenities: the trees, the rope swing with the tyre on the end, the shed and its collection of ancient tennis rackets, bats and balls, the nettle patch. We seldom had other children back to play. Mum had tried it once but it hadn't worked: a girl from my nursery school had come to tea and got an electric shock from one of our loose light switches. She had cried so much that Mum had to take her home early. The invitation was never returned and the experiment wasn't repeated.

In return for considerable latitude in the matter of dirt, disorder and noise, we were expected to observe three general rules: we were not to moan; we were not to be bored; we must share everything and hoard nothing. Although we were rarely told off and never smacked, there existed a powerful deterrent to misbehaviour in the form of Mother's patiently delivered lectures. She would sit the offender down and explain, at great length and in fine detail, the historical, moral and sociological reasons why certain actions were undesirable, citing many examples, and alluding frequently to
the Less Fortunate.

The Less Fortunate were often a spectre at our feasts, and were sometimes there in person. Since the house was large, and our parents had philanthropic tendencies, the spare rooms would occasionally be offered as temporary accommodation to the homeless of the parish, visiting clergy, or young offenders at the end of their stretch.

The most recent lodger was a plump teenager called Cindy, who was having ‘problems at home', the details of which were known only to Mum and Dad. She was introduced to visitors, for tact's sake, as our au pair, although she never lifted a finger in the house, and seldom climbed out of bed. She passed most of the days in her room listening to Capital Radio, making the odd foray into the kitchen to raid the fridge. Sometimes she let me perch on the window sill and watch her applying her make-up, from a staggering array of bottles and tubes, ranged in height order on the dressing table. She had tan foundation to cover her red cheeks, and red blusher to paint them back on again, lipsticks in every colour including black; a whole paint palette of eyeshadows, and a tiny brush and comb for eyebrows. For someone who never went out, she spent an awful lot of time on grooming. Her knowledge of the subject was encyclopaedic, and she enjoyed nothing more than passing on her wisdom to a novice. The relative merits of block or wand mascara, and the difference between cream and powder blusher were secrets I would never hear from my mother's unpainted lips. Mother was evidently less impressed with Cindy than I was: one afternoon I caught the tail-end of one of her famous lectures. They were in the kitchen; Mother was tending a pan of blackberry jam; Cindy was staring at her with her painted peacock's eyes, bottom lip drooping, in an attitude of helplessness.

‘The point is, Cindy,' Mother was saying, dripping hot jelly onto a plate and prodding it with her finger, ‘by sitting around here all day listening to pop music you aren't really fulfilling your potential, are you?'

Cindy's bottom lip, glossed to a high shine with Midnight Cherry, drooped still further.

‘You mustn't let the terrible experience you've had ruin the rest of your life. It's never too late to make amends. You have talents . . .' Mother snapped off the gas under the preserving pan. ‘You mustn't let them go to waste.'

‘I don't think I've got any talents,' Cindy said.

‘Nonsense. Of course you have.' Mother set to writing labels for the jam jars.
Bramble – September '73
.

‘Like what?'

‘Well . . .' A frown gathered on Mother's brow, then she spotted me eavesdropping from the doorway. ‘What are you doing skulking there, young lady?' she demanded.

‘I smelled something nice.' I pointed at the stove where the jam sat resting. ‘Is that for us?'

‘No.'

Of course it wasn't. On the rare occasions our kitchen was filled with appetising smells, the end product of all this baking, bottling and preserving never ended up in our stomachs. Cakes, chutney and jam were packed up and handed over to the church fête or the Scouts' bazaar, and sold in aid of the Less Fortunate.

A week after this conversation I walked into Cindy's room uninvited early one Sunday morning and found a strange man lying in her bed. I made the mistake of mentioning him to my parents over porridge, and that was the end of Cindy's sojourn in the Old Schoolhouse and the end of
my introduction to the cosmetic arts. Having taken to heart Mother's advice about using her talents, and decided that casual sex was their natural outlet, she was now sent packing for her trouble.

‘Where's Cindy?' I asked, when I came in from school to find her room bare and abandoned, and Mother stripping the bed. The chair was no longer draped with clothes, and all the colourful lotions and potions had vanished. Only a few traces of her presence remained: a talc footprint on the carpet, the stencilled outline of her bottles picked out on the dressing table in loose powder, and the fairy-dust glitter of crumbled eyeshadow.

‘She's gone to stay with relatives,' said Mother, peeling the undersheet away from the mattress and tossing it downstairs.

‘Is she coming back?'

‘No, I'm afraid not.' Mother folded the blanket into a neat square, hesitated a moment, and then chucked that over the banisters too.

‘Why not?'

‘Well, it didn't really work out,' she replied evasively.

‘Was it because of that man?' I asked, drawing an E in the fluff on the bedpost.

‘Partly. We couldn't have her bringing people back to the house.' Mother held the eiderdown out of the window and gave it a good, hard shake.

‘You have friends back,' I pointed out.

‘Yes, but that's different. This man could have been anybody.'

‘Do you mean a burglar?' I said, suddenly full of fear and excitement.

‘No, not a burglar,' said Mother, who was beginning to
tire of this line of questioning. ‘Go and bring me a clean pillowcase from the trunk.'

‘Will we be getting someone else?' I wanted to know.

‘Oh, I expect so,' Mother sighed. ‘Sooner or later.'

OUR FATHER WAS
the only person we knew who went to work on a Sunday, apart from the man in the newsagent's on the green.

He took two services at the prison every Sunday – Holy Communion and Evensong. Attendance was voluntary, and sometimes the homicidal altar boy would be the only person to turn up. ‘God was there,' Father used to say.

If we were very lucky he would bring home stories from work. One thing he told us, which made my scalp tingle, was that you could never let a prisoner so much as
glimpse
a key. Some of the young men in there were so desperate and so cunning that they could memorise the exact shape and dimensions of any key in the blink of an eye, and reproduce a perfect replica when it was their turn in the workshop.

But our favourite was the one about the prisoner who took a warder hostage in his cell. Father was the only person
who had been able to talk him into releasing the warder and giving up. He had succeeded where the trained negotiator had failed, because months earlier he had given the prisoner, who was going out of his mind in solitary confinement, a pack of cards. The moral of this story, Father said, was that even the most hardened criminal could be moved by a small act of kindness. ‘No,' said Christian. ‘The moral of this story is: never let a prisoner get between you and the door.'

We liked to imagine our father as a hero. Chaplaincy didn't generally offer much scope for heroics, so those few incidents that qualified tended to be somewhat exaggerated. By the time Christian and I had retold the story a few times we had managed to convince ourselves as well as our audience that it had been Father himself who had been taken hostage and very nearly murdered.

I don't think Mother would have made a good chaplain. She wouldn't give a man a pack of cards even if he was on Death Row: she'd have him knitting blankets for earthquake victims. She refused to go to our local church, saying that it was just a club for middle class people who liked singing hymns. Instead she had a very intense and personal relationship with God that didn't require her attendance at acts of public worship. She was happy rattling collecting tins or knocking on doors for a good cause, but you wouldn't get her within half a mile of the Young Wives or the Mothers' Union. Not that they were exactly clamouring to have her.

I remember one incident in particular. It was the year after the headlice and the departure of Cindy, so I would have been six. Christian had been dragooned into the church pantomime owing to a desperate shortage of males,
and we went along to watch his performance as 1
^st
Footman in Cinderella. We were sitting near the back of the hall, and even perched on top of my folded coat I could only see the actors if they advanced to the very edge of the stage. Just before the interval I had begun to weary of my obscured view, and the elderly lady in front had twice turned round and asked me not to kick her in the back, so my parents allowed me to slip around to the back to see Christian. It was coming up to the big chorus number at the end of Act One, so most of the cast were on stage or in the wings. There was no one in the dressing room except the women who were helping with wardrobe and make-up. They were whisking between the rails of costumes, picking up discarded clothes and putting them back on hangers. Before I had a chance to make my presence known one of them held up a limp, grey rag.

‘Look at Christian's shirt!' she said, holding it up, to display its many rends and missing buttons and dark tide-mark around the collar and cuffs. ‘Did you ever see anything like it?' Her companions laughed and shook their heads.

‘He must have had it on all week. Do you think she ever does the laundry?' one of them said.

‘Too busy worrying about the ragged urchins of Timbuktu to notice the ragged urchin under her own roof,' the first woman replied.

‘Such a nice boy,' said the third woman, who had not so far contributed. ‘But, oh those shoes! It wouldn't surprise me if they'd never been polished since the day he got them.'

I didn't hear any more on the subject, because at that moment there was a loud burst of applause from the auditorium and the three women looked up and flinched violently when they saw me.

‘Esther!' said the first to recover. ‘Why aren't you watching the show?'

‘I can't see over people. I'm looking for Christian.'

‘He'll be out in a minute. It's the interval now.' One of them fetched me a drink of squash from the cast's tray of refreshments, and they all said wasn't I getting tall, and how nice my hair was looking now that it had grown back, until Christian came out and told me I wasn't supposed to be backstage.

‘Did you see my bit?' he asked.

‘No, but I heard it.' I glanced down and noticed for the first time that his shoes were rather bald and tatty, and that mine were just the same. For the rest of the interval I kept my eyes fixed on people's feet, counting the shiny shoes as they passed, until at last I saw a pair of scuffed and gaping pumps more disreputable even than ours, and I looked up with a belated jolt of recognition into Mother's smiling face.

ON SUNDAY EVENINGS
mum and dad went down the lane to Mrs Tapley's to watch the Classic Serial, leaving Christian and me alone in the house. We took this opportunity to stay up late and play Monopoly and pontoon, and other games regarded by Mother as liable to encourage the sin of avarice. We didn't have any money of our own so we gambled with the bag of silver milk bottle tops that mum was collecting for the blind. I loved the feel of them, and the noise they made, shimmering together in the bag.

‘What do blind people need milk bottle tops for?' I wondered aloud.

‘They hang bunches of them in their doorways,' Christian said confidently, ‘so they can hear them rattling when anyone comes in.'

He had broached the subject of pocket money once, without success. Instead of agreeing to hand over ten pence
every Friday, mother proposed delegating a quarter of the family budget to Christian. He would, of course, be responsible for his share of the food bills, rates, gas and electricity, not to mention clothing and household repairs. They sat down together with pen and paper to calculate how much change he might look forward to at the end of each week: the result was a deficit of £3.75 and the idea was shelved.