Man at the Helm (15 page)

The idea of the family reunion came to my sister at a family event. We rarely attended these, partly because we weren’t often invited and partly because we hated them. But, for whatever reason, we
had
attended on this occasion.

Our mother had been very unhappy after all the Charlie stuff and nothing seemed to help. She’d been to Steiner’s hair salon on Horsefair Street and Geraldo had taken three inches off. She’d tried a ponytail and white nail varnish, she’d donated some books to a library including
The Severed Head
, a play script with a rare signature inside, but nothing had made any difference.

We knew not to try to introduce Mr Oliphant yet, it being too soon after the Charlie/Lilian/Mr Lomax tangle, and we’d put the Man List on the back burner. And we were stuck for something to do, when we suddenly attended this family party. We arrived very late and missed whatever the thing was (the christening of a little cousin?) but arrived in time for the bit at the house for drinks and bits of bread and salmon and flaky pastry and nuts.

To be honest, it was a reversal of roles for my sister and me on that day. I could sense the antagonism towards our mother and felt dreadfully uncomfortable. My sister, on the other hand, was keen to get our mother back into the family fold. We stood to the side and talked quietly. My sister reminded me that I’d always thought of the family as ready-made friends who must surely have some affection for her deep down and as ‘minerals to be mined’, which I’d apparently once said but didn’t sound at all like me.

I wasn’t sure. ‘Look around the room,’ I said. ‘Which one of them even likes her?’

Two women were talking about vegetables. One was saying she’d had a glut of runner beans and the other was asking if you had to blanch them before freezing and the first one wasn’t sure. They were our mother’s sisters-in-law.

‘They like her,’ said my sister, and she reminded me of two incidents in which each of the sisters-in-law had been exceedingly kind.

One of the sisters-in-law had come to stay for a night when our mother had driven (accidentally) off a bridge at midnight. I shan’t go into detail except that this aunt-in-law had arrived and been so kind it was almost troubling. She’d cleaned the house from top to bottom and groomed Debbie with a shoe brush and said lovely, soothing things to us. When our mother returned, with a J-shaped scar on her forehead, the aunt had said, ‘I don’t know how you cope on your own, Elizabeth.’ And it was the nicest, most supportive thing anyone had ever said to her and she had to swallow hard and look away to stop herself from crying with gratitude. Which was a shame, because it looked so rude.

The other sister-in-law had come rushing out to Shearsby Bath in her Hillman Imp when my sister hurt herself falling off a pony. She could easily not have bothered but she did bother, even though it was miles away and petrol being so expensive and she had her own little children too. And she was nice and made nothing of her trouble. I seem to remember her buying us a round of Toffee Crisps on the way to the infirmary.

My sister reminded me, forcefully, that our well-established unpopularity within the family was a result of us having slipped out of the loop due to the divorce and not that they didn’t like us as people.

‘They just don’t like what we’ve become,’ she said, ‘feral and manless.’

It was a vicious circle, she said, a circle that we just needed to break.

Plus there was an unmarried brother of a sister-in-law who was very practical and loved books and might do for the Man List.

In the end I consented to give it a go, but we agreed also that we would sidestep our maternal grandmother – a prickly woman, as previously mentioned – who seemed to like making people feel bad about themselves, which was easy with our mother who had failed at marriage, had two abortions and a miscarriage, a drink problem, an addiction to prescription drugs and who, for some reason that I can’t explain, had a habit of storing stemware upside down in the cupboard – a thing which always infuriates the well-bred.

Then, just as we’d finished discussing and agreeing, a tipsy uncle or an aunt or a cousin in a group of uncles and aunts and cousins mentioned a pending holiday, saying, ‘We’re all off to Dorset.’

My sister butted in and asked, ‘Oh, Dorset, lovely, where exactly?’ and ‘When?’ and ‘What’s the name of your house?’ and so forth, and the tipsy aunt or uncle or whoever told her all the charming details.

On the way home our mother said what cunts they all were. My sister objected. Our mother stuck to her guns and gave examples of their cuntishness. Little Jack joined in with our mother and said that an uncle had said nasty things about our father. ‘What did he say?’ our mother asked.

‘That dad was a bloody disgrace,’ said Little Jack.

Our mother was furious then and we sped home. ‘The fucker, how dare he!’ she ranted, as we flew over the very bridge she’d driven off the year before and got the J-shaped cut.

‘He only said he was a bloody disgrace,’ said my sister.

‘He shouldn’t have said it in front of Jack,’ snapped our mother.

Back at home, my sister told our mother that we’d been invited to join the group of uncles and cousins and their various offspring on the holiday – not really expecting her to believe it or be prepared to actually go to Dorset at such short notice, but to feel a bit better about them and have nicer feelings towards them.

But she did believe it and she was prepared to go and so, can you believe it, we went. We asked a lady at Merryfield’s bakery (the only nice person for miles around, bar the doctor and Mrs C. Beard) to feed the ponies and she was delighted. And we asked Mrs C. Beard to have Debbie but she wasn’t delighted, so we went back to the lady who was delighted about the ponies and asked her to have Debbie as well and, lo, she was delighted about that too.

‘We’ve been invited, at the last minute, to stay in a holiday house with our family,’ we told her, ‘in Dorset.’

‘Well, you don’t want to miss out on that,’ said the nice lady at Merryfield’s. ‘It’s important to get together.’

And in our excitement, we sort of believed we had been invited too and it was the most wonderful feeling – to have been included – and we all felt marvellous about it. Our mother was cheerful as we packed and bought us new stripy beach towels from Woolco on the way, and I used deodorant for the first time in my life – Three Wishes ‘Woodland Fern’ – and the smell was glorious and fresh and I reapplied it when the smell wore off until my armpits were white.

My sister hated the cold strangeness of my aerosol and preferred Mum roll-on, the blue version, same as our mother. I would have loved all three of us to use the same, but I found the roll-on sticky and not so invigorating. My sister packed a camera
that might have been Charlie’s that she’d discovered in the garage, and Little Jack packed a torch and some tins of Scotch Broth which he loved at that time.

Our mother spoke to Mr Lomax, who had popped round to do an odd job, and he helped her look on a road atlas. Mr Lomax was a member of the Institute of Advanced Motorists (which meant he could turn on a sixpence and park in a shoebox) and he was able to give her lots of tips for driving long-distance: have plenty of coffee stops and if you find yourself nodding off at the wheel, rock back and forth vigorously and open a window, and if the worst comes to the worst, get one of the children to tap you repeatedly on the head.

Halfway there my sister and I had some feelings of anxiety and whispered to each other during a coffee stop. Suppose the uncles and aunts weren’t pleased to see us? we asked ourselves. Suppose there wasn’t room in the house? But we talked ourselves round. I think we said that once we’d arrived and settled they’d see how funny we all were and inventive and good at games and so on, and we’d have a breakthrough and all cook a communal supper together and we’d sleep on fluffy cushions in a sitting room with the tail-end of a fire in the grate.

Arriving in Dorset, we drove into the mossy gravel driveway (mossy gravel gone spongy with years and years of dropped pine needles) outside a square Georgian house standing in all-around grounds (the sort I loved and still do). In the time it took to see how utterly lovely it all was, our mother discovered it had not been an invitation at all but an embarrassing misunderstanding, and after seeing the puzzled and embarrassed expressions we went away again and drove the hundreds of miles home. No one spoke except for Little Jack, whose garbles were like an irritating tune that soon you don’t even hear.

It was worse than Mr Dodd and Charlie and the vicar and
the kitchen caper and everything. It was deeply shaming and my sister, for once, felt guilty. So guilty that she agreed with my long-held belief that she should join in with the play from time to time, and not begrudgingly but enthusiastically – just to ease the misery.

Aunt F: Christ! It’s Adele and the kids.

Uncle G: What the hell are they doing here?

Aunt D: They’ve turned up out of the ruddy blue.

Uncle C: Not that bloody menace and her brood?

Uncle G: Duck everyone, play dead.

The morning after our return from Dorset we had the embarrassment of going to tell the nice lady from Merryfield’s bakery that she wouldn’t need to look after Debbie or the ponies after all – we blamed an uncle’s tonsils – and the woman was very sympathetic and said he should consider getting shot of them.

My sister wanted to come up with something lovely to help our mother get over the utter humiliation and the long drive. We started by making bread rolls with a great lump of leathery dough given to us by the nice lady from Merryfield’s, who said there was nothing in the world better at cheering people up than freshly baked rolls. It reminded us of Mrs Lunt’s similar claim for jam tarts.

We divided the dough into four, put them into the oven and waited for them to be cooked. The nice bready smell did its best to make us feel better and then, while they cooled, we went and sat with our mother in her bed. My sister read to us from some funny memoirs and was about to offer to do more of the play, when Little Jack rushed downstairs and back again with a letter and a leaflet that had come through the letter box. The letter
was the bill from Miss Woods’s shop and the leaflet was advertising the Summer Garden Party.

‘Not another bill,’ said our mother, looking at Miss Woods’s letter, and then, ‘Not another fair,’ looking at the leaflet.

And then we all felt the need for the bread rolls. My sister said she might pop across for some raspberry jam and our mother said could we make do without the jam due to her having no money handy to pay the bill. And in fact, could we steer clear of Miss Woods’s shop for the time being.

We had the bread rolls plain and discussed the Summer Garden Party. It was to be held on the first Saturday of the July Fortnight. It was going to be run as if the year was 1945 – its inaugural year. There were to be dog classes, terrier racing, a flower show, a white elephant and second-hand clothing stalls as well as a tea dance. There was even going to be condensed-milk toffees for prizes just as there had been in 1945 (‘the prizes will be cash in appropriate amounts and toffee from a wartime recipe in the waxy paper of yesteryear’). Little Jack loved the word yesteryear but said it should mean the year before this current year, not the olden times in general which we insisted it meant.

The Garden Party reinforced my sister’s feeling that we should dump Charlie Bates once and for all because it presented an opportunity to make a proper move on the much preferable (in her eyes) Mr Phil Oliphant. My sister decided to enter Debbie in one of the dog classes in order to firm up our acquaintance with Mr Oliphant, seeing as he was to be the senior judge in all canine events bar the terrier racing. Her goal was to make sure he met and shook hands with our mother, who would be standing beside me to the left of the collecting ring. Men found it almost impossible not to fall in love with her once they’d shaken her hand – or so my father once said. So it was essential I was
there to position her while my sister manoeuvred Mr Oliphant towards us as he exited the arena.

My sister was sold on Mr Oliphant and constantly reminded me of his attributes. And overall I agreed, Mr Oliphant actually being a nice man whom people respected. You have to be extremely respected to be one of the judges at the Garden Party. And, thanks to my sister going round to his house looking for a pony, we were sort of friends of his, acquaintances anyway. Also he was handsome in a well-dressed-farmer type of way, unlike Charlie, who looked like something out of an old film – always smoking and looking sly and like he was about to kill someone with a hidden gun.

On the day of the party it took us quite some time to convince our mother to even come to the show, let alone to place her in the hand-shaking position for the dog judge.

‘I really can’t be doing with it,’ she said, sounding just like our old help, Mrs Lunt.

‘The whole village – no, the whole parish – will be there,’ I said.

Our mother groaned.

‘It’s going to be old-fashioned like the wartime of yesteryear,’ I said, which was wrong again.

‘Only a bit wartime-ish,’ said my sister, ‘but there’s a flower show and Mr Gummo’s showing his sweet peas and a rare alpine,’ she said, proving it was worth listening to gardeners when they speak. Our mother was fond of Mr Gummo since he’d covered the manhole and not minded about the rumours, and it was clever of my sister to have plucked that out of her memory when everything I plucked was such a turn-off.

Eventually, it was the idea of seeing Debbie in the dog show that appealed to our mother, and she went to her room to get ready and reappeared in a flimsy dress whose pattern could have
been the dancing shadows of a wind-blown tree – but might equally have been a coffee stain. She’d taken to wearing hats in public and that day wore a floppy one to suit the dress. And sandals which were so flimsy it was as though there was no sandal at all, only a thin leather string looping her big toe and heel. She looked a dream.