Man at the Helm (27 page)

Our mother was astonished and stood and stared down at it. She looked up the street and then down the street. I thought for a moment she was going to be angry. But she was simply amazed.

‘What do you think it means, Lizzie?’ she asked.

‘I think it means someone saw us dump the trolley,’ said Jack.

‘Yes,’ agreed our mother.

‘And they took the trolley to the tills and paid for everything and brought it here,’ I said.

‘That means they know where we live,’ said my sister.

‘But they can’t have followed us. We stopped at the takeaway,’ said our mother.

‘They know us,’ I said.

‘It’s like
The Railway Children
,’ said my sister.

‘Oh my God, it is,’ said our mother.

And we all got teary at the thought.

As soon as we’d finished our Chinese we unloaded our lovely shopping. It had been so long since we’d had the luxury of unpacking so much, Little Jack couldn’t stop listing everything,
‘Cornflakes, Sunblest, Mr Fresh, medicated Vosene, Knight’s Castile, Jacob’s, Germolene.’

And no stammering.

‘Robinson’s, Bird’s, Fairy Bentos,’ he sang.

‘Fairy Bentos,’ said my sister, ‘what’s that?’ and she took the thing from Jack’s hand.

It was a round tin containing a steak and gravy pie with flaky pastry. It wasn’t ours; we hadn’t put it in our shopping trolley. We decided it had been added by our benefactor as a special treat, and if we hadn’t just had the ‘no beef savoury feast for 2’ from the Red Rickshaw we might have cooked it up.

We tried to imagine who it might have been. Our father? Grandmother? The vicar? Charlie? Mr Lomax? Mr Oliphant? Mr Longlady?

The next day I was shocked to see Melody Longlady at the door. Bagless. We were no longer anything like neighbours (and after the disagreement about the bag, not even friends) and her being there at the door meant she’d come all the way to the bottom part of the village and then ventured into the Sycamore Estate and looked around for our house. Plus she was wearing a maroon tracksuit and no beads.

‘Hi, Melody,’ I said.

‘Hi,’ said Melody.

‘Have you been on a run?’ I asked.

‘No, why?’ she said.

It was a bit odd and formal like that for a while until I invited her in and we went into our part of the sitting room. We hadn’t sorted out a settee yet, but there was a bouncy little Zedbed that we all sat on to watch telly. I flopped down and Melody flopped down beside me. I couldn’t turn the telly on because it had gone yellow.

‘How’s the new house?’ she asked.

‘It’s great,’ I said.

Melody looked as though she had some really bad news to tell me. Someone had died or she’d seen her father in the nude. But it was only the surprise of seeing how everything was, the general situation, the state of the house, hearing about the pets. I hadn’t wanted to tell her about the pets but had no choice when she’d gone round the back to see the guinea pigs and found only a few earwigs in the hutch. I asked her if she was OK.

‘It’s just seeing you here, and the pets all gone,’ she began, and listed the negatives. Of course I could quite see what she meant and it must have been a bit of a shock, but I reassured her that the pets had been re-homed and were happier than ever with lots of bored elderly people giving them titbits or on farms chasing rats. And that we were really happy too, living down there.

‘It’s so near the chemist,’ I said.

I remembered our kitchen full of food from the recent shopping miracle and offered Melody a glass of Nesquik and an orange Club, to cheer her up, which she accepted.

‘Will you ever regain your former status?’ she asked.

‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘Our mum wasn’t trained for anything except living the way we did and so she’s driving a laundry van.’

‘I know, we’ve seen her in the van,’ said Melody. ‘She must absolutely hate it.’

‘She doesn’t hate it, but it
is
work and that’s never that nice,’ I said.

‘Is she in the van now?’ Melody asked.

‘No’ – I pointed to the chipboard partition – ‘she’s the other side of that, asleep.’

Melody frowned and then she said something, the likes of which I had never heard and it had such a profound effect on me, it was all I could do not to cry into a cushion.

‘My dad,’ she whispered, ‘thinks your mum is the most amazing woman he’s ever met, selling up and getting that awful van-driving job.’

I did the thing that people do when they want to hear a good thing twice.

‘What did he say?’ I asked, and settled back on the Zedbed to hear it all again and, knowing Melody, expected it verbatim, but she surprised me with an elaboration that was even better.

‘He said he didn’t know many women who’d grab the bull by the horns and go out to work all hours,’ she whispered, ‘and not hang around waiting for handouts.’

I felt a bit humbled. There I was forever moaning about the village and all its inhabitants and their handbags, and here was Melody in her tracksuit. She’d come to visit and been affected by our riches-to-rags slippage and even passed on a wonderful compliment and done nothing but good. It was like our friendship coming true and I was and still am immensely grateful.

When she left, I said, ‘It was really nice of you to come all this way.’

And she said, ‘I came yesterday as well but you were out.’

And, thinking about that for a moment, I made the assumption that it must have been Mr Longlady who’d bought our shopping for us and felt a bit disappointed.

‘Oh, was it you who brought our shopping round?’ I asked.

‘No, but I saw the man dropping it off,’ said Melody.

‘Did you? What did he look like,’ I asked, holding her elbows, ‘the man?’

‘He had brown hair and glasses,’ she said, as if that was enough.

‘Did he come in a car?’ I asked.

‘Yes, a yellow one.’

‘Mustard-coloured?’ I asked, high-pitched.

‘Yes, mustard-coloured,’ said Melody.

I knew then. It had been Mr Holt.

Then Melody fiddled around in her pocket and handed me a bundled-up woollen thing which turned out to be a knitted green hat with a lumpy yellow sun.

‘I knitted it for you,’ she said.

I put it straight on my head so I didn’t have the embarrassment of looking at it.

‘Wow, thanks,’ I said.

‘That’s OK,’ she said.

‘Did you knit it before or after our fall-out?’ I asked.

‘Before and after,’ she said.

Then she said she had to go and left. I called from the front door, ‘Thanks for the hat and thanks for coming, Melody.’

And she called, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m trying to shorten my name, to Mel.’

‘OK, Mel,’ I said, and it suited her.

When my sister got home I told her everything. Starting with the shopping and it being Mr Holt.

‘Mr Holt!’ she said, and her eyes looked from side to side and she rolled her gum frantically between her front teeth as she thought about the implications.

‘We mustn’t tell Mum,’ she said.

‘Why not?’ I said.

‘He did it secretly and I think he knows best,’ she said.

‘Better than us?’ I asked.

‘Lizzie,’ she said, with a face of great importance, ‘I think he might be it.’

‘It? God!’ I said, not knowing what to think.

I told the rest of the news about Melody. How nice she had been and about the wonderful compliment from Mr Longlady,
and knitting me the hat, coming all this way, being sad about the pets and worrying about the whole move thing.

‘A truer friend no one had,’ said my sister, which, put like that, sounded poetic but might have been a bit sarcastic.

We talked in bed that night for a long time. We agreed not to say anything to our mother about Mr Holt and that we’d just let nature take its course. We talked and talked but fell asleep before we’d finished.

Early one morning when I was still in bed, I heard our mother cry out in surprise. I thought perhaps she’d made another hole in another door or a handle had come off. Then I heard her on the phone.

‘I’m going to be late,’ she said into the phone, ‘I might not make it in today at all.’

And then she talked some more but incoherently and tearful and I knew something terrible must have happened. And it had.

I was frightened of what I might find but eventually went to see. It was still dark outside and, because the bulb had blown in the hall, she was down there, with a bicycle lamp flickering, cross-legged on the floor with her head resting on Debbie. I thought she’d had a nervous breakdown and was just wondering if I should call the police or make some coffee when the door knocked softly and, being broken, it opened on its own and Mr Holt was suddenly there, framed, in his big coat with the early dawning light behind him and the birds singing in the young hedges like something out of
Snow White
.

Our mother shuffled aside to let him in and then gave a gasp as she saw me on the stairs. And she told me, right in front of him, that Debbie had died. I didn’t want to believe it and genuinely thought I might be dreaming. It seemed very likely, bearing in mind that Mr Holt was there in a ginormous coat and my sister
and I having decided that he was our future man at the helm, plus all the tweeting birds and the dreadful news about Debbie. It was too much and too strange to be real. So I just sat down on the stairs and hugged my knees to see what would happen.

‘What do you plan to do?’ Mr Holt asked.

‘You don’t plan at a time like this,’ said our mother.

Mr Holt stood there and our mother looked up at him and said, ‘I’m not sure you understand just how sad this news is.’

Mr Holt glanced up at me. ‘I understand,’ he said.

He said he’d go and open up the depot and come back as soon as he could. ‘I want to help you with this,’ he said.

When he had gone, she looked at me and said, ‘What did he just say?’ and I just nodded, meaning he had said the thing she thought he’d said.

Then there were a few awful minutes when the others came downstairs and had to hear the news. Debbie had died on her cushion in her corner and had looked very peaceful, our mother said. None of us had heard any barks, so we concluded she’d ceased upon the midnight with no pain and of natural causes. We were too sad to act sad. So we had a slice of Battenberg and a cup of tea and then Mr Holt was back and we couldn’t wallow with him there, as we had to be on our best behaviour.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ my sister asked.

‘No thank you, love,’ said Mr Holt.

Mr Holt asked what we wanted to do with Debbie. We all said we wanted to bury her in the garden and mark the grave with a stone memorial, but Mr Holt said that wouldn’t be possible, the garden being too small. His suggestion was to have her cremated at the vet’s and get on with life.

We agreed – none of us really wanted her out there next to that old rabbit called Bunny. Mr Holt lifted Debbie, wrapped in
a blanket, into his car boot and we all set off to the vet’s. When we got there Mr Holt placed her on a table and that was it. And Mr Holt drove us home again and went.

A few days after that Mr Holt came round with a piece of stone. It was the size of two house bricks and beige. It was Debbie’s gravestone, not that she had a grave as such.

‘What words do you want on this?’ he asked.

Jack, who was usually good with words, came up with Debdog, which wasn’t up to his usual standard and sounded idiotic.

‘Debbie, the greatest dog in the world?’ I tried.

‘Too long,’ said my sister.

‘Debbie the dog?’ said Jack.

‘Too childish,’ I said.

‘How about Princess Debbie Reynolds?’ said our mother. ‘That’s her kennel name.’

And however real and official it was, it sounded so utterly wrong for Debbie that none of us could respond until Mr Holt said, ‘PDR would be cheaper, and means the same thing.’

‘Yes,’ we all said, ‘PDR.’

‘Perfect Dog Rests,’ said Jack, but we all ignored him, it being a bit strange.

And when, a few days later, we saw the brick again, it had PDR carved into it in capitals. The chiselled letters were multifaceted and shadow-filled, so that they seemed not to be indented but standing out. It was an optical illusion, maybe a deliberate feature of the carving method. Whatever, it looked very beautiful and sombre and therefore perfect to commemorate our wonderful Debbie.

We held a stone-placing ceremony and put it in the garden as you do with memorials, and it looked rubbish (like someone had just dropped a large brick on the ground while passing through), but no one said anything aloud. We all said secret things to
Debbie in our minds. I thanked her for her support and apologized for the time I put her in the wheelbarrow.

Mr Holt didn’t want to join in with us. It was our business and he didn’t want to see all the blubbering and nonsense, plus he said he’d spent enough time faffing.

The awfulness of Debbie’s death cannot be described. Nothing helped.

By the time we’d added Mr Holt’s name to the Man List, he was already coming round twice or three times a week and watching
Call My Bluff
on a portable Philips he’d lent us. And having dinners on the Zedbed – a pie or something and a tin of marrowfat peas – and then he’d do a few jobs and go home again to his flat in town. One Sunday he’d been round to sort out our warped front door and he asked why on earth we kept going to the launderette when we had an automatic washing machine in the house. We told him it was broken. He doubted it. He looked at it a while, then showed us how to approach a problem logically.

‘The first rule is, you have a good look at it,’ he said, switching the socket on and off and on again.

‘OK,’ we said.

‘And try to work out what’s wrong,’ he said, trying to rotate the drum clockwise.

‘OK,’ we said, bored already.

‘Then you might sort it out,’ he said, trying to rotate the drum anticlockwise.

He explained that with consistent correct usage machines didn’t usually go wrong. But in the unlikely event that something did go wrong, a little bit of common sense and rational thinking might give you a clue as to the problem, then you’d have a hope in hell of fixing it and, saying that, he leant into our Electrolux and plucked a hair-clip out of the drum.

My sister and I agreed that Mr Holt’s general goodness and his extraordinary kindness over Debbie and his lending of the
telly had earned him the right to skip the full vetting process. He was a proven animal-lover (within reason) via the headstone and he certainly liked telly, especially brainy stuff like
Mastermind
, which was still quite new and exciting then and we all loved it when Magnus Magnusson said, ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish.’ And he suited Little Jack down to the ground with his interest in
The World of Facts
.

Mr Holt’s philosophy was that there was the world and there was you and you had to find your place in it and hold your course and that you had to respect yourself.

To begin with it was as though he spoke in riddles or a whole different language – let your mother and I sleep on it, we’ll see, perhaps, I’m not sure about that, I’ll have to look into it, that’s for us to know and you to find out, none of your business, get a good night’s sleep, do it again and do it properly. It wasn’t, though, it was discipline and due care, plus modesty and a lack of hyperbole, a refusal to overegg any puddings, gild lilies or say a job was done when it was shoddy. It was his way and we just weren’t used to it.

And although we soon realized he was the best of all the men we’d ever had on the Man List (including the very nice Mr Oliphant), he did sometimes seem a million miles away from us in everything he thought and did, and we did occasionally wonder whether we wouldn’t ultimately disappoint each other. My sister, for instance, had a horrible feeling that he might be one of those people who insist on solving every problem and cannot be satisfied with just talking through and moaning about a thing. We’d seen people like it before (problem-solving fathers) and thought it the one thing that would be unliveable with.

So it was decided that he’d have to undergo one simple test. I was to go to him with a dilemma rather than a problem – dilemmas being that bit more tricky than problems – and see
how he responded. My dilemma (a real one) concerned my pen-friend.

This was the dilemma and how I presented it. Many of my classmates at school had exciting Spanish and French pen-friends (arranged by the school) called Olga and Maria who lived in mountainous areas or in Paris, but my own Rebecca Bellamy-Briggs lived in the north of England (I got her via
Pony
Magazine
). The thing was, Rebecca had written to say she no longer wanted to be my pen-friend. Which suited me because I’d been thinking the same thing and was keen to move on (to a Spanish or French one, with future exchange visits in mind). The dilemma/problem aspect being that Rebecca’s ‘breaking off’ letter had contained a letter from
Georgina
Bellamy-Briggs, the horse-loving older sister of Rebecca, introducing herself as my new pen-friend.

Georgina Bellamy-Briggs wrote that although Rebecca was sick to the back teeth of hearing the same old things about my peculiar life, she (Georgina) found my letters very amusing and would therefore be taking Rebecca’s place as my pen-friend. She then ran straight into a pen-friend letter and said all the things a pen-friend would. She told me about her beautiful mare, Dido, and their goat and its two kids called Hepzibar and Nancy. So there was the dilemma: should I go along with the switch from Rebecca to Georgina? Or should I decline the offer and be free to seek a Spanish (or French) one?

I told him the whole story and while I spoke he held his newspaper down so as not to inadvertently look at it. When I’d finished, I asked for his advice. He was flummoxed and scratched his head to prove it. He remained silent for so long I thought he’d forgotten the story.

‘What do you think?’ I said, and recapped, ‘Should I go with Georgina or not?’

‘I don’t know, love, I think you’ll have to work that one out for yourself,’ he said, and went back to his paper.

Which seemed a perfectly reassuring response.

Mr Holt and our mother swapped life stories slowly. And she passed on snippets. He was from East Anglia originally. He was thirty-three years old but seemed older because of his authoritative manner and disciplinarian ways and wanting things just so. He was self-sufficient emotionally due to being the only child of elderly parents, and never made a fuss unless witnessing laziness.

My sister and I wondered what on earth our mother had told him about herself. I mean, him, a hard-working disciplinarian and her,
her
. But whatever it was, they grew closer.

My sister broached the subject one Saturday morning.

‘Does Mr Holt know all about you and all your pills etc.?’ she asked.

‘Yes, he does,’ said our mother, ‘I told him.’

‘And was he OK about it all?’ she asked.

‘Yes, eventually. The two of us are going to tackle it together,’ said our mother.

‘So are you together as a couple?’ asked my sister.

And they were, somehow. Though they had very little in common – only a love of cricket and a sense of the absurd. Soon he moved out of his flat and into our broken little house. He didn’t bring much with him, only a few clothes, books, tools, a mattress and a can of WD40.

Our mother spoke to us about the new situation. She warned us that it might take some getting used to and that occasionally Mr Holt would seek solitude and we mustn’t take it personally (or go bothering him), just that he would want some time to himself and might listen to the radio in the bedroom. She warned us that he wouldn’t allow us to be slipshod and that we
may as well save time and energy and just do things properly in the first place.

Mr Holt had a few words with us about the new situation too.

‘You might have noticed that I’m here quite often,’ he said.

We said we had noticed.

‘Was it you who picked up our shopping at Woolco and brought it round for us?’ I asked, wanting this outstanding mystery solved while we’d got his attention.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.

‘We thought it was you because of the tinned pie that was definitely not in the trolley when we left it,’ said my sister.

‘Yes,’ said Jack, ‘we’ve noticed you like that type of pie.’

‘Oh,’ said Mr Holt, and gave himself away with his expression of surprise.

He continued his words about the new situation, ‘So you’ll have noticed I’m here quite often and I suppose it’s none of your concern really, but suffice to say your mother and I want to make some kind of life together, with you three, and I hope you’re agreeable.’

We nodded and waited. And he told us that if we were (agreeable) he’d like to throw in his lot with us and see if it might be possible to stretch to a slightly bigger house, though nothing grand, just an extra bedroom.

‘What’s “your lot”?’ asked Jack, sounding manly.

‘My savings, my WD40,’ he said, but only because he had it in his hand at the time, ‘and myself, of course.’

‘What are you saving up for?’ asked Little Jack.

‘I suppose I was saving for a new car,’ he said, ‘but I’ve had a change of mind.’

So Mr Holt became the man at the helm. And to begin with, he was exactly the same as he’d been with our mother in those
first months at Snowdrop: a nightmare, a stickler, a killjoy, an eagle-eyed fusspot. He’d come home with a dustpan and brush and say, ‘Right, now there’s no excuse for not sweeping up.’ He’d ask why so much laundry was building up (we knew not to mention our temperamental unsuitability to it), and he’d insist we polish our shoes every week, pointing out that he would have been
ashamed
to leave the house with scuffed shoes – there was no excuse for it (unlike a worn collar or worn-down heels which a person might not be able to help). There was polish in the Cherry Blossom tin and two good shoe brushes. He seemed to believe that self-respect, or a lack of, centred around the shoe shine, or not.

I’m not going to pretend our mother was happy, but she was OK. Neither can I pretend Mr Holt was overly nice (he wasn’t), but he was with us and he’d open the door if someone rang the bell, which doesn’t sound like much but was. He spared us from the things that weren’t our concern but told us what we needed to know, and though he had a temper he mostly was able to find his dignity before things got too unpleasant.

He cared about us and cared about the future and with that in mind gave us the shreds of self-respect that my sister had talked about all that time ago when I was overly optimistic about the pills. And I admit now that the self-respect felt wonderful compared with the pills.

I wish I could have ended this by saying that we didn’t need a man at the helm.

Our mother taking the helm herself and coping brilliantly all alone would have been a powerful finish. The thing is, no one
can
cope alone, not
really
alone. All those brave people who seem to do things solo actually have people in the background who love them or at least
like
them, wishing them well and worrying
about them, saying kind and encouraging things and giving them a helping hand now and again. Our mother didn’t have quite enough of all that until Mr Holt appeared.

At the time of his joining our family we’d have liked it if Mr Holt had been a bit jollier, let us off the hook occasionally and given fewer verbal warnings, but now, looking back, of course we can see it was imperative that he held tight – and insisted on properness, thoroughness and respect – or we never would have toed the line and things might not have worked out.

There has been much water under many bridges since then and more tales to tell, but you’ll be glad to hear that Mr Holt is still there with our mother – albeit in a different house and us all gone – at the helm and keeping things shipshape. I don’t know if any of us has ever properly thanked him for what he did, for that first can of WD40, for giving up that new car, and for doing without his solitude.

You could say Mr Holt had been hiding in plain sight. He was there, doing the right thing from the day they met at the interview. But, being unused to such types, we mistook him for a bully and so did she. The frightening thought is how easily we might have missed him. And had Debbie not died, we might never have put him on the list. But cast him and let him remain in the wrong role and locked antlers with him.

Equally, she might not have gone for the driver’s job, or not at Snowdrop. And that would have been terrible because, whatever you might say about us and the inevitability of people like us ending up as we had, there was no one else in the world like Mr Holt. No one.

I used to wonder when exactly did she fall for him. And I think it must have been the day she’d called him from the phone box near the Fish & Quart and he’d been concerned about me being on the van. Back at the depot she’d had to speak to him.
He’d been so kind and worried about her and about me. She hadn’t told me that at the time, because it hadn’t felt like kindness at the time. It had felt like criticism and rebuke.

And when she’d said, ‘What else could I have done with her?’ he’d said, ‘You could have taken the day off.’ And she’d told him, ‘When you’re in my situation you don’t want to be at home,’ and he’d been so affected by that he’d looked right into her eyes and said, ‘I wish I knew how to help,’ and that had been that.

When had he fallen in love with her? Easy: the moment she’d walked into the depot. More importantly, he’d known he was
right
to love her when, interviewing her, he’d asked, ‘Have you ever been in employment?’ and she’d said, ‘I was a seamstress once for two weeks – but that was in a play.’

And hearing that, Mr Holt felt he’d truly met the other half of himself.