Man at the Helm (20 page)

And just to round it off, Farmer Turner came round and produced the letter that Little Jack had posted through his door on the morning after the accident.

‘I didn’t hit your bitch. If I wanted ’er dead, she’d be dead. I don’t want ’er dead. I’d prefer you keep ’er safe on yer own property and the reason she’s not dead is because I ant seen ’er in the ewe field. But I will shoot ’er if I see ’er there and that’s all I can say.’

So we weren’t so sure after all that it was Farmer Turner who ran Debbie over. In fact we thought it must’ve been a real accident and that maybe Debbie toppled into the ditch herself and that made us feel better too. And Debbie didn’t roam quite so much after that, anyway. She preferred to stay on our property. Maybe she understood what the farmer said. And we added him to the list again but only briefly, saying we didn’t want anyone who wore a vest and had a gun.

We wrote to Mr Swift, the vet, thanking him for saving Debbie’s life. Our mother was keen that we should and she was quite particular about the wording (‘You were most sensitive’). I felt it unnecessary – he was just doing his job after all. None of us thought to write and thank Doris the whiskery old lady in the slippers who had saved Debbie’s life just as much as the vet had, but that’s the way the world is (vets being thanked and old ladies being forgotten) and who knows if she’d have liked that kind of thing.

I don’t know what became of the Christy’s Soft Sensation bath sheet. My sister said she thought the nurse would have taken it home as a perk of the job, it being so luxurious and almost brand-new.

Writing about the Debbie situation reminds me how good our mother was when bad things happened. It always came as a surprise, her being so rubbish at the ordinary everyday things. She was especially good when
really
bad things happened or people died, not so much the practical stuff but the other often-neglected stuff such as actually going to see the bereaved. Crucially, she knew not to run away or to pretend it hadn’t happened. She knew that you should immerse yourself in it.

When her granny choked to death on a Lucky Black Cat pendant made from Whitby jet that had fallen into some rice pudding, she flung herself at her mother and showered love upon her. And even though she disliked both her mother and the granny, she was there at Kilmington pouring Scotch on the rocks, lighting two cigarettes at a time and saying what a good eye Granny had had for scarves. When the husband of a family friend suddenly just died for no reason one night and didn’t come down to breakfast, she zoomed over there in the car and said things about the deceased that no one else would even think of saying. He was so kind. He was such a considerate driver. He
had such a sensitivity for Beethoven, and other things that seemed far-fetched, but the friend didn’t mind because the person had died and needed bolstering.

Sadly, though, when her own father ceased upon the midnight with no pain, her goodness in a tragedy failed her. She was like a useless little pebble on a riverbed. She hadn’t been expecting the death and had some bad feelings about it. She got it into her head that her mother and the family doctor had been a bit hasty in the helping. It was a shame because she’d always been the person who knew how to behave and how to make the bereaved feel better, but suddenly there she was saying the very worst things and reminding her family what a menace she was. My sister and I tried to steer her into normality – e.g., ‘Come on, Mum, don’t say stuff like that’ – but she shook herself free metaphorically and raged down the telephone, ‘If he was so fucking ill, why didn’t you telephone me to come and say my farewells?’ and her mother had said, ‘I thought you’d be too drunk.’

My pony Maxwell turned out to be nothing but trouble, as I knew he would. I don’t want to write too much about him as I’m planning a whole book (all about him) and he should only have a bit part in this one.

In the beginning he behaved in such odd ways that I was genuinely afraid of what it all meant. He was an attention-seeker, an escape artist, a thief, and so utterly selfish it wasn’t true. He wasn’t like any ordinary pony and it was typical of me to end up with him.

If I rode Maxwell when it didn’t suit him, he would do his best to knock me off by walking or trotting very close to a tree or a wall. And when I learned how to lift my leg to avoid being hoicked off, he would fake a stumble and put his head down so that I might topple off the front, and when I got used to clinging on to the pommel and holding myself on until he’d corrected himself, he’d roll over. But that was only if he didn’t fancy a hack out. To be fair, he sometimes
did
fancy a hack out – however, on these days he’d always return home exactly when he wanted to and when the moment arrived he’d simply turn round and trot me home.

He was much better behaved with my sister on him because she was a proper horsewoman and didn’t mind using the crop on him. I wasn’t a crop-using type and Maxwell knew this. It got so that I couldn’t go out riding with my sister because she would get so cross with Maxwell that she’d snap a twig from an elder tree and give him a whack. And so if he saw her ready for a hack, he’d refuse to accompany her, knowing he’d get a whack.

As far as this story is concerned, we got into trouble for taking Maxwell upstairs. Our mother hadn’t been at home when it happened. We didn’t tell her exactly what occurred but she found out. When she knew the main details, she became like any normal nasty mother and made us clean out the hen house as a punishment (a job that Mr Gummo would usually do) and it put me right off the hens and almost off eggs. It seemed unfair because we
didn’t
take Maxwell upstairs as such, he just came when we called – we never really thought he would. He came up because he was such an unusual pony. An unusual pony that our mother had insisted on buying – that I had never wanted in the first place.

I tried to explain this to our mother, but she hated long sentences and judged you on the first few words.

‘We didn’t take Maxwell upstairs, as such,’ I began, and before I could add the rest she’d accused me of trying to tell her black was white.

That day had started out OK. Our mother had gone to a hospital appointment in a taxi – Denis the retired mechanic’s Ford Zodiac. She hadn’t wanted to drive herself because she didn’t want to have to drive home again afterwards because she was having a pregnancy terminated. Mr Oliphant was the father (and in my opinion should have done the driving) and had apparently been mortified to hear about the pregnancy as he already had four children with his wife, that awful clingy woman we’d seen at the summer fair who kept linking arms with him even though the marriage was on the rocks.

Our mother said that had made it doubly disappointing (that we could behave so stupidly while she was out of the house having a horrible procedure and was utterly miserable and sad).

This is what happened.

She’d gone off in the retired mechanic’s Ford Zodiac and we’d
gone to play on her four-poster – a thing we loved but seldom got the chance to do, her being in it so much. From the bed we could see through the open balcony doors that Maxwell had escaped from the paddock and was in the garden, nosing around, as he often did. We called him in the style of his ex-owner at the riding school (‘Come oi, come oi’) and to our astonishment and delight we soon heard him clopping up the interesting staircase. And he appeared at the doorway of our mother’s bedroom and walked smartly across the polished boards. I liked him then, for a moment, his big brown eyes full of wonder at the new place, his chestnut lashes tinged black at the tips. He was a handsome pony, I can’t deny it. Much handsomer than Sacha, who was grey and a bit wishy-washy.

Unfortunately, once fully in the room, he stepped on a rug, skidded slightly and became fretful. In this state, he stepped on the draped bed-curtain, which began popping off its brass rings, and a section flopped down over his head. In all the head-tossing that followed, our mother’s walnut dressing-stool broke in half and clattered to the ground.

Maxwell then clip-clopped into the landing and that’s when he looked out of the window. He let out a loud whinny and bashed at the mullioned panes with his muzzle. The window rattled and banged and miraculously didn’t break. Mr Lomax the Liberal candidate happened to be in the street posting his manifesto at the time and he looked up with a most unhappy expression.

My sister and I ran down the stairs and called Maxwell to follow. But he just stood at the top of the sweeping staircase, trembling and pawing the ground like a nervous little bull.

‘Come, Maxie, come,’ called my sister. But he wouldn’t. He just whinnied and pawed.

‘Come on, you bastard,’ I called, feeling desperate and responsible and resentful and thinking how I always knew something
like this would happen (him being an unusual and charismatic pony).

My sister said, ‘Swearing at him won’t help.’ She went away and came back with a bucket of nuts, which she rattled. ‘Come, Maxie, come,’ she coaxed.

Suddenly Mr Lomax was there in our hall with us with his light tan boots on.

‘Keep back,’ he said, ‘in case it jumps.’

‘He won’t jump, he’s a calm pony,’ said my sister.

‘He’s a Welsh Mountain,’ I added, ‘he can turn on a tap with his hoof.’

Then it became clear that Mr Lomax was something of an expert on pony psychology.

‘Ponies can go most uncharacteristic when they’re in a strange environment,’ Mr Lomax said. ‘I doubt he’d have the wherewithal to turn on a tap in his current state, he’s gone semi-insane because you’ve let him look out of an upstairs window.’

‘Is that bad?’ we asked.

‘Bloody right it is. Never let a horse look out of an upstairs window, that’s my advice to anyone who likes bringing them indoors,’ said Mr Lomax. ‘If you have to bring them in, then you must draw the curtains beforehand.’

Mr Lomax said we were in a highly problematic situation, and in an ideal world four men would escort Maxwell down backwards with a twitch on his lip and, failing that, he should be sedated. My sister said she was anti-twitches and Mr Lomax said they were perfectly humane if applied to the lip, though never the ear. The two of them argued about twitches for a while, and then Mr Lomax asked my sister to fetch something with which to blinker Maxwell (if she didn’t object to a blinker). She fetched a bikini top, thinking it was the right shape. Mr Lomax ushered us to a safer area within our hall and we all looked
up at Maxwell, who stood sweating above us. Mr Lomax crept up the stairs and reached round to tie the bra over Maxwell’s eyes. But before he’d finished the bow, Maxwell leapt the first flight of steps, crashed through the banister to the parquet below and lay there with his belly heaving. Neither my sister nor I dared approach him. We just stared, not breathing, like we had with an injured wood pigeon the day before.

I imagined, briefly, dragging Maxwell’s body out of the hall by the hoof, through the front door and into the street, realizing it would be the only way, and was just imagining Mrs C. Beard rushing across to admonish us about littering, when he was up on his feet again. He looked around, shook himself and walked slowly through the kitchen, out of the back door, and began cropping the lawn with his six-year-old teeth.

‘Jesus,’ said my sister.

She thanked Mr Lomax for his help and he gave her a couple of Liberal Party posters to put in the upstairs windows.

Our mother ended up staying in the clinic for a night and our grandmother arrived to stay with us. When she saw the wrecked banister she asked how it had happened, and we told her Maxwell had done it. She was confused about who Maxwell was but didn’t admit it or ask for details. She just shrugged and tutted and tried not to look at it. We sorted out our mother’s bedroom except for the broken stool, which we hid in a cupboard.

Then when our mother returned we said that Maxwell had barged into the banister by accident. Our poor mother was too tired and sad to even think about it but rang Mr Lomax from her bed and of course he knew all about it and the truth came out. As so often, my sister and I hadn’t thought it through.

‘Mr Lomax tells me you brought the fucking pony up here!’ said our mother, suddenly more awake.

‘Not as such,’ I began to say. And that’s when she got cross
and we ended up cleaning out the hen house. I was dreading Mr Lomax turning up and giving a full account of the event, but luckily he rang back and insulted our mother by asking for a cheque upfront and waiting for it to clear in the bank before he began the work. Either that, or cash. And our mother told him not to bother and that she’d arrange for someone else to come.

Neither my sister nor I have ever forgotten the rule about horses and upstairs windows and I’ve never had one inside since. Nor that an overnight stay might be required with a pregnancy termination.

The Longladys were going to America for a whole fortnight for the holiday of a lifetime. And to see a seriously ill relative of Mrs Longlady’s who lived in Boston. Melody was beside herself as she had always longed to see Boston in the fall. I wasn’t sure what it meant to see Boston in the fall, except it meant seeing Boston.

Mr Longlady wasn’t going on the holiday and wouldn’t be seeing Boston because, according to Melody, he’d seen an American film about a psychopathic American truck driver that had given him recurring nightmares, plus it was one less airfare and someone to hold the fort and feed the bees.

It was coming up to the time of the USA trip when our mother began to tell us how things were looking financially (quite bad). It was a strange and curious thing that as recently as 1970 Vogel’s, the business, had been given the Queen’s Award for Industry and was used as a business case-study and had sponsored a new department at the university. But by 1972 parts of it were in serious trouble and, sadly for our mother, the bit of the business that she had shares in, Vogel Machine Parts (VMP), was in the deepest trouble. So much so, the dividends were not forthcoming. Added to which her savings had been very much used up on bills she didn’t even know she had. Such as enormous bills from Miss Woods’s shop.

One particular bill from Miss Woods’s shop was ten times what our mother was expecting. And she did what people do when they get a bill of that kind: she asked for a breakdown.
Seeing it itemized caused her to take an intake of breath so sharp it was like a skidding car.

‘Cold cuts,’ she said. ‘It’s pound after pound of cold cuts.’

‘What are “cold cuts”?’ I asked.

My sister took the itemized bill from her and looked. Then she said, ‘What are cold cuts?’

‘Ham,’ said our mother. ‘Pound after pound of ham.’

‘And lots of this, look,’ my sister pointed. ‘What is that?’

‘Tobacco,’ said our mother. ‘I shan’t be angry, but have any of you been getting ham and tobacco from Miss Woods’s shop?’

We said we definitely hadn’t. But she’d known it wasn’t us before she asked.

‘How can he have eaten so much ham?’ she wondered aloud.

‘He did like ham,’ said my sister.

‘But pounds and pounds of it?’ said our mother, shaking her head in dismay.

We’d stopped having anything ham-like a long time ago after my sister spoke to a young woman who worked in the VG store and said that unless you can see what part of the body the meat is (e.g., leg or wing), then it’s probably all the stringy bits, nostrils and lips and so forth, all mushed up.

But we’d hated the hams even before that. There were three types: the traditional ham leg, rolled in gingery breadcrumbs that looked like the ham from
The Tale of Two Bad Mice
. The haslet, tweedy-looking and unashamedly made from bits and bobs and lips and sinew, along with porridge oats. Finally, and worst of all, tongue – the whole tongue, from far back in the throat, deeper than the mouth, and that was truly grotesque. Miss Woods would heave these monster meats between the chiller cabinet and the slicer, holding them against her body like great fat babies.

In addition to the usual reasons for hating the hams (the appearance, smell and death of the pig), I hated the influence they
seemed to have over the people of the parish. Old ladies would walk from outlying hamlets to get the haslet, and old men would buy just one slice of something for a lonely lunch and walk back the very next day to get another. Housewives bought a selection for the whole family’s sandwiches for a week.

Miss Woods’s shop was never ever empty. You never walked in and had to wait for her to come in from the back. She always had people queuing for the hams. She didn’t even boil or cure them herself. She got them from the same place that the Co-op and VG got theirs, from Gormond’s the catering butcher. But people still liked to queue for it and watch her wrestling with it and carving it.

It irritated me that the ham was so popular when it was nothing special and that so much of it was on our bill when we hated it. My sister reminded our mother that she should seek advice from her accountant about the bills and so forth. My sister knew the parlance because we’d acted out an informative little play on the subject our mother was working on. I’d played our mother and our mother had played my father (albeit only telephone voiceover).

Roderick: (
on phone
) You have shares made in your favour and you must manage them and live on the dividends.

Adele: I’m not au fait with finance and investments, as you well know. You are torturing me.

Roderick: You must manage your affairs.

Adele: There seem to be no dividends forthcoming. I’m in dire straits.

Roderick: You must see Mr Box, your accountant, and hopefully fiscal confidence might ensue.

And then in a later scene my sister had played the accountant, Mr Box.

Mr Box: Do you not read your statements of advice, Mrs Bird?

Adele: I do, Mr Box, but I’m not always fully up to grasping the meaning.

Mr Box: The spending of the money is easy, Mrs Bird, the understanding and managing of it are a requirement.

And our mother, directing, had said, ‘Mr Box is much less jolly than that. Play him as a bit of a bully.’

So we knew from the play that things were not only bad but that our mother was uncertain about the shares, afraid of the accountant and therefore uncertain as to the direness of the straits. None of it came as a shock. It was just a new thing to be thought about.

And I did think about it and, just like Sherlock Holmes, a recollection came to me, very clearly, from the time that I’d searched in the Longlady house for Bufo the frog. I’d noticed a thing I hadn’t been looking for at the time, a seemingly unimportant detail, and filed it away in my mind for later.

And it was this: I’d noticed that Mr Longlady had been working on a sideboard which was doubling as a desk – albeit a narrow, long one – in a hallway, his actual office having been given over to make a shower room for Mrs Longlady. Mr Longlady had been working from a battered old textbook called
The DuPont Method of Business Accounting
or
Return on Investment the DuPont Way
or something along those lines.

I told my sister this recollection and suggested that we should add Mr Longlady to the list. Not intending that he should become the man at the helm, or have grown-up conversation or sex with our mother, but to help her understand and manage her finances via his accountancy training and get her out of the financial pickle that she was most definitely in. Especially as Mrs Longlady was going to be off the scene on the holiday of a lifetime seeing Boston in the fall.

My sister reminded me that Mr Longlady had actually been on the list since the list began and for exactly such an occurrence. Which was very true when I thought about it, I just hadn’t noticed him – that’s how unnoticeable he was, even on the list in blue pen. Anyway, the letter went like this:

Dear Mr Longlady,

I would be exceedingly grateful if you could spare me a few minutes to discuss some shares I’ve had made over in my favour from my ex-husband in lieu of maintenance. I really need an accountant and would prefer one who has studied the DuPont method. Even if they don’t know that much about the DuPont, just a smattering of understanding would be impressive. Please call in for a drink and a snack one day, preferably tomorrow while my children are at school and your wife has gone on holiday.

It is imperative that you don’t tell your wife. I suspect that your coming to my house would be seen as high treason – in spite of her offering your services when we first moved to this village.

 

Yours sincerely etc.

Then one day when three of the four Longladys were safely away seeing Boston and we were waiting to see if he’d call in, our mother came into the playroom looking perturbed and holding the letter we’d sent to Mr Longlady.

‘What’s that?’ my sister asked, knowing full well.

‘It’s a letter from me to Mr Longlady,’ said our mother.

‘What are you writing to him for?’ asked my sister.

‘I’m not. I have never written to Mr Longlady, but he just called to show me this. Someone has written to him purporting to be me,’ she said, and explained that someone, she couldn’t think who, had written to Mr Longlady, alluding to our private family matters.

‘What does it say?’ I asked.

My sister read the letter with a tone and expression of puzzlement.

‘I don’t understand,’ my sister said.

Our mother boiled up a pot of coffee and tried to work out who could have or would have written such a letter and why. She got an extra cup out for Mr Longlady, who was apparently due back any minute after feeding the bees.

‘It does sound quite like me,’ she said, meaning the letter, ‘but older and more formal.’

Mr Longlady appeared at the door and they settled down to a cup of coffee.

‘I’m sorry,’ said our mother. ‘I am so embarrassed and can’t think who’d do this.’

‘Not at all,’ said Mr Longlady, ‘it’s just malicious lies.’

‘Well, the letter is quite right about the shares. And in fact it’s pretty much accurate in every way. I don’t know why but they seem to have dried up.’

And then they started discussing the situation.

‘I’m ashamed to say I’m hopeless on the whole money thing,’ said our mother.

‘It can be tricky,’ said Mr Longlady, sounding nothing like the bullying Mr Box. ‘If you like I’ll look at your paperwork and advise, if I can.’

Mr Longlady was there all day and even had lunch with us and because, like every other man I’ve ever known, he was a huge fan of omelettes, we had omelettes with cheese and Ryvitas. And he read some paperwork and went home, taking more paperwork with him. He was back again the next day with his thoughts.

There was never any question of his becoming the man at the helm. The accounts were too important for one thing, but also
he had very clearly advertised a crop of mouth ulcers and a recent chesty cough during which he’d lived on Veno’s Lightning Cough Cure.

Mr Longlady was most alarmed by the state of our mother’s financial affairs. There was no money whatsoever coming in from our mother’s shares, he said. He suggested she speak to my father urgently. Our mother explained that she didn’t like to ask for any more money, especially after the Eccles Topaz incident, which had been humiliating in the extreme. Mr Longlady said she must clarify the financial situation as a matter of urgency. He sat again at the kitchen table with his shirt sleeves up, reading more pieces of paper and tapping his finger on lines of numbers on the statements from the bank. And wondering where it had all gone. After a while he said, ‘Mrs Vogel, I think there are some documents you aren’t showing me.’

And our mother admitted there were.

‘Everything points to the fact that you have mortgaged the house in order to pay some of your debts,’ he said.

And she had. She broke down then and Mr Longlady was very kind and said she wasn’t to blame etc. The problem was this. Somehow our mother had very little actual money and had never actually had much, only shares from which money dribbled out and kept her going. Shares in this and that, she had sold; and shares in the other thing, she had sold; and shares in Vogel Machine Parts, she hadn’t been allowed to sell due to them being her divorce settlement in lieu of maintenance. The VMP shares, though, were in a part of the business that had barely chugged along for years and had never been up to much, and now that the other parts of the business were suffering in the recession and unable to help VMP, VMP was down and almost out.

In spite of all her mixed experiences – in having a mother who disliked her and going to an unimaginative boarding school,
getting expelled for being imaginative, being coaxed into marrying an iconoclast – our mother was unprepared for anything unusual happening and, like others of her class, it hadn’t occurred to her that anything untoward would or could happen. She’d mortgaged our house to help Charlie complete his bungalow shells and when the VMP money dried up our mother was suddenly, literally, without money.

Mr Longlady came again on and off throughout the following week and went through files and files of papers and even spoke to the bank on our mother’s behalf and gave her options. He said one option was to remortgage and use the capital, and another option was to sell and buy a less expensive property. Our mother nodded. Then, suddenly, he had to go and collect his wife and children from the airport.

She thanked him. She actually said he’d gone above and beyond and that she couldn’t thank him enough and gave him a tube of Bonjela that she’d picked up while getting her prescription made up. After he’d gone our mother sat for a moment with her head dramatically in her hands.

‘Are you going to remortgage?’ I asked, really to remind her of the key part of Mr Longlady’s advice.

‘I’ve already done that,’ she said, ‘I just didn’t show him that paperwork. I think we’ll have to sell up, which is pretty much the same thing, except you have to move out.’

In the middle of the Mr Longlady accounts episode, everyone got into a tizz when Little Jack’s claim that he couldn’t hear with his eyes shut became a proper worry. It was something he’d been claiming for some time. For instance, when our mother read to us from
The Hobbit
my sister and I would doze off, lulled by her boozy slurring voice (even she was lulled by it), but Little Jack would sit staring at her as she read.

‘Snuggle down,’ she’d say, ‘close your eyes and imagine.’

And he’d say, ‘But I can’t hear with my eyes shut.’

So when there was a minor little fire in the omelette pan one day and Mr Longlady witnessed it and shouted that we should all evacuate the house as a precaution, we called and called and Little Jack just lay on the settee rotating one foot, most definitely awake but unhearing, and Mr Longlady – who was wrestling with a tiny fire extinguisher – said, ‘Is he deaf?’