Man at the Helm (4 page)

In the post-mortem following Mr Lomax’s visit my sister and I were self-critical and rightly so. Our aim had been that they should have a drink and then have sex in her sitting room and do it enough times until they got engaged and then married. But we’d let him slip through our fingers with bad planning and shoddy execution.

And though we agreed Mr Lomax wasn’t the ideal, we evaluated our efforts as if he had been, even though he most definitely hadn’t. It had been a mistake, we agreed, not to have offered any snacks or put on any music, and this might have led to Mr Lomax feeling uncomfortable and probably peckish and if there was one thing I knew for definite about men it was that they cannot perform sex if hungry. We also agreed that doing the play had only made things worse – especially that particular scene with Debbie and her being a bugger to lift. It wasn’t surprising that it freaked him out.

We didn’t let it put us off, though. My sister consulted the Man List, crossed off Mr Lomax and added Bernard, our father’s chauffeur. I objected, saying he and our mother hated each other’s guts, but my sister mentioned the very fine line between love and hate (i.e., that you’re more likely to want to have sex with and marry someone you hate than someone you don’t care one way or the other about). Which, when I thought about it for long enough, made sense. Worryingly.

With that in mind we added a semi-retired mechanic called
Denis who offered a taxi service in his Ford Zodiac – whom our mother also hated.

I wondered if it might be simpler just to instigate a reunion with our father. My sister disagreed. In her opinion they were still chalk and cheese. Also, he’d begun to fade as a notion. It was the way with divorced fathers in those days. They tended to keep out of the picture from sheer politeness and convenience. Ditto non-divorced fathers, except with divorced ones you actually never saw them except for the odd Sunday lunch or to trudge across a field with a picnic. They were absent from your private life and this was hard on leftover boys like Little Jack because there was no man at home to show them how to make the noise of an explosion or tell them that West Germany were better than Ecuador. Not that our particular father would have been able to do either of those, but it was the principle of the thing. And, worse than that, they were absent from your public life, never attending parents’ evenings, sports days, school plays, and never seeing nature displays or topic books. They never saw you perform, excel, try, succeed, fail, and this was hard on my sister because it meant he never got to hear about her extraordinary cleverness in school and therefore couldn’t possibly admire her as much as he should. She did occasionally tell him about it but it always sounded boastful and far-fetched and it sickened all concerned, so she stopped.

I was the least bothered by our father’s private and public absence. Probably because I was certain he’d have been a fine father if it hadn’t been for the divorce. I somehow didn’t need his reminders to save lolly sticks in case of a sudden urge to make a model of Leicester prison as he had done as a boy (albeit with matchsticks). I had a good memory and had heard plenty of his advice on life. Neither did I need his seal of approval. I just happened to think that, compared with everyone else on offer,
he was the nicest and the best and, more importantly, the wellest known. He remained on the Man List, theoretically, but (before you get any ideas) there was never a romantic remarriage, there wasn’t even a try-out; we decided it was all just too tangled and unlikely, not to mention the travel.

For the time being though, we decided we shouldn’t invite any of the other men on the list to meet our mother until we’d done more research and honed a routine. In the meantime we devised some in-between projects to cheer her up and hopefully prevent the writing of the play. My sister’s ideas were quick fixes – getting another foal or going to the theatre fifteen miles away or building a feed-shed. She even toyed with the idea of pretending something really bad had happened and then saying it was a false alarm so our mother could experience the sense of intense relief that makes a person count their blessings. But I thought it risky.

I preferred longer projects with multiple outcomes – planting a line of poplar trees like they have in France as a barrier against strong, hot winds, for instance, or trying to befriend someone like Mrs C. Beard across the road, who seemed like the only nice person in the village and who told us off for littering but only if we
were
littering, and if we weren’t she’d smile and sometimes even wave for some reason.

My best idea, though, bearing in mind our mother’s underweightness, was a cookery spree, seeing as we were sick of toast and parsley sauce anyway. My sister considered all my ideas either too ambitious or ‘unlikely to bear fruit’, meaning they might never make it out of the idea stage. Or, in the case of the cookery spree, too unrealistic, seeing as our mother hated food almost as much as she hated the chauffeur (her worst word in the English language being ‘portion’).

And my sister, being far more practical than me, came up
with a good and simple idea, which she introduced so naturally I hardly noticed it when it popped out. We were in our mother’s bedroom. She had a heavy four-poster bed with ugly drapes and a few pieces of awkward walnut heartwood furniture whose open-grained appearance I hated and which I would have painted a pretty greeny-blue. We liked being in her bedroom nevertheless. It smelled nice and had a feeling of things before the split – the same linens, the same little bottles of scent etc. She even had her Ophelia in oils hanging above a cold hearth. Other old paintings had been dumped in the loft and replaced by abstract shapes in orange and yellow and quaint old signs from market stalls advertising motor oils and digestive powders.

‘I think we should start going to church,’ my sister said, looking into our mother’s magnified eyes via the dressing table mirror. (That was her good and simple idea.)

I spoke up in surprised agreement – reminding them both that the church, being handily situated across the road, would be easy to get to. Our mother didn’t respond for a while. She looked as if she were preparing to leave the house – a drop of Eyedew in each eye and pale lipstick dragged across her stretched lips. She didn’t use much make-up, preferring to look natural. Her hair was plain and long, and her brown face was bony and scattered with a few tiny square freckles which looked like pieces of a broken plant pot. She was uncluttered, which I thought impressive when so many others were so done up.

‘You can go to church if you want,’ she said eventually, with a sniff of sarcasm, gazing at herself.

‘No, I meant us as a family,’ said my sister, ‘to get to know people in the village.’

‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in the place,’ said our mother, ‘not after the visit from that idiotic little vicar, and his ridiculous little speech.’

‘What did he say?’ I asked.

‘He said we were more than welcome at church,’ said our mother, ‘but I wouldn’t be permitted to join the Mothers’ Union on account of being divorced.’

‘Well, then, we’re “more than welcome” – we should go,’ I said, opening my hands in a gesture that means ‘you see’, which was funny because it looked like a prayer book.

‘No, Lizzie, when people say you’re “more than welcome” it means you’re not welcome at all,’ said our mother.

‘Does it? What do they say if you
are
welcome, then?’ I asked.

‘They don’t say anything,’ she said, ‘you just know.’

My sister looked a bit crestfallen, her idea having been so thoroughly rejected, but then Little Jack piped up with an idea, which was strange because we never included him in our planning, him being a worrier and too young for the whole truth. It just showed how clever and perceptive he was. And not only did he have an idea, he had a leaflet about it.

Little Jack’s leaflet gave details of the Easter Fancy Dress Parade and he was very proud of it. Jack was not interested in the parade per se, but loved waving the leaflet around. He always picked up leaflets. They weren’t as prevalent then as nowadays and there was some novelty value, if you can believe it. And he was particularly pleased with this one because of getting so much attention for it – that being the purpose of most things with youngests.

We followed our mother downstairs and huddled together on the chesterfield at the chilly end of the kitchen and discussed the parade and the fancy dress competition. Our mother wasn’t going out after all: she was writing a one-act play called
The Female Vixen
about the wife of a huntsman who tames a wild fox just to prove she can and is then stuck with a tame fox that
can’t ever be returned to the wild and gets addicted to Shredded Wheat. Which sounded quite exciting.

The thing was, though, by the time that leaflet appeared my sister and I had already grown to hate the village and I am not keen on villages to this day. Having said that, I must also admit that more than anything I wanted us to fit in and belong and be liked by the village. The tiniest gesture of friendship, however lukewarm, would have made things seem so much better and I was quite prepared to do whatever necessary to be included.

In theory you could join one of the village clubs or groups and there were some good ones, only you needed to be nominated, seconded or have your name reach the top of a list and therefore you were always at the mercy of someone in charge. For example, our mother tried to join the choir but was told it was full of sopranos like her and they’d contact her when someone died or lost their voice or got ill. My sister – a true bird lover – was keen to join the Young Ornithologists but she was too old for the juniors (eleven) as they were full except for under-eights, but when Little Jack said perhaps he’d join and we rang the man, suddenly the under-eights had become the under-sevens and therefore he was too old too.

In reality – apart from going to church, which had been ruled out because of the idiotic little vicar saying we were ‘more than welcome’ and our mother having the intelligence to translate it into its true meaning – opportunities to join in were fairly limited and depended on already being happily integrated. However, the Easter Fancy Dress Parade was open to all and something we could join in with no waiting list, hoops or hurdles.

‘The judges will be particularly looking for unusual and timely home-made costumes,’ Little Jack read out in his machine-gun voice.

I say ‘no hoops or hurdles’ though there was the small hurdle of my sister and me deploring those kinds of things (fancy dress parades). She, because she hates being on display, and me, because I hate it that you only win if you’re in a brilliant costume and it’s quirky and timely and you need to have a quirky, timely idea and still have the time and materials and skill to produce the costume itself. Or a mother who will. And it’s always the same lucky few who can rise to the occasion, when actually it would be nice if someone else won for a change.

My sister refused to even consider dressing up and I’d almost given up on it when our mother came up with a quirky idea that was so brilliant and timely I almost fainted and thought I must be dreaming. I honestly think it was the best idea she’d ever had or ever would have. Even she said so. It was better than the award-winning play she had written in 1957. Better because that was just an accident and this was a good
idea
and they’re almost impossible to have. I was to be Miss Decimal.

Our mother set to work and got the whole outfit made in an hour. A plain white crêpe-paper dress with a giant Bacofoil-covered cardboard fifty-pence piece stuck on to the front of it. The idea was so up-to-the-minute it was still in the news even. Decimalization had only occurred in the February and there I’d be, on Easter Monday, a walking, talking fifty-pence piece. I felt sure this parade would be the start of our being embraced by the community, not least because of our mother’s fantastic and timely decimal idea, but also its simplicity and lack of ostentation.

I made this observation and badgered my sister to agree, which she did reluctantly, and our mother offered to construct a simple outfit for my sister called the Divorce Reform Act, which had also come into effect that year and would therefore be timely (and home-made).

‘What would the Divorce Reform Act look like?’ I asked, feeling slightly that it might trump Miss Decimal.

After a few moments our mother said, ‘I’d start with a simple calico dress, pin-tucked at the bust and embroidered with words of love and bound with a red sash. But the skirt would be rudely shredded and the embroidery unpicked with threads hanging …’

‘And the hair all messy and smudged mascara,’ I added.

‘No thanks,’ my sister interrupted.

Little Jack decided that he’d like to enter the parade, but not as the Divorce Reform Act and our mother, being in the right mood, got to work on a simple John Lennon outfit.

The day of the parade dawned and Jack and I got into our costumes and trotted hand in hand to the vicar’s garden by the church. Mrs Longlady, our almost neighbour, was one of the judges and she spoke into a microphone to the entrants and their mothers. Seeing her there in her role as boss of the village, she seemed tall and important – like her name. And she kept saying ‘thrice’, which seemed important too. I’d never before heard anyone say ‘thrice’ and it became my favourite word.

‘The entrants will be viewed thrice,’ she announced to the entrants and their mothers in her echoey mic voice, ‘walking, standing and close up, before we adjudge who is to be awarded the prizes.’

I was in the under-twelves class and we were the first to be looked at. We had gathered in a huddle under the chestnut tree and a helper came along and unhuddled us so that the judges could view us (thrice). I was bang in the middle of the line. To my left was Bo-Peep with a fluffy sheep under her arm and to my right a boy in his swimming trunks with a flap who I guessed was Mowgli. I tried to talk to my fellow contestants, but they turned away from me when I spoke. A couple of them smirked
at my costume and one said, ‘What’s she come as?’ and another answered, ‘Ten bob!’ and the whole line laughed.