Paradise Lodge (22 page)

‘Well, well, Lizzie,' said Miss Pitt, ‘I wish you'd told me Dad was coming out, I could have given him a lift and saved him the petrol.'

‘Dad!' she called. He didn't look round but she began walking towards him. ‘I've come to say happy birthday to Mum too.'

I grabbed her arm, ‘Please let him have a moment,' I said, impressed at my mature tone.

She pulled her arm away and went to walk again but I blocked the path. She tried to dodge to the side but I stood in front of her. She put her whole hand in my face. I shoved her backwards. ‘Leave him alone,' I hissed, and I went to push her again but she was too quick and grabbed my arm, wrenching it to the side expertly until I'd fallen to my knees—she'd probably had a lifetime of trying to break children's wrists—then she shoved me and I fell on to the grave of someone called Rose Wilston who'd fallen asleep in 1974.

She was now walking towards Mr Simmons. I crawled after her and grabbed the hem of her coat and, with all my might, pulled until she was on the ground, on her back. I sat on her and held my forearm against her throat. We looked at each other. It was the most extraordinary moment of my life so far—even more extraordinary than my breaking the telephone dial just to hear Mike Yu's voice. I still had a cigarette in my hand, and for some reason I took a puff.

‘Lizzie Vogel, get off me right now,' she said, and somehow knocked me off balance, but I wasn't long out of childhood and instinctively pulled her with me. We rolled around, she shouted, ‘Get off me, you little devil!' And I shouted back, ‘You get back to school and leave us alone—you money-grabbing cow!'

At that, Miss Pitt grabbed the decorative cross that marked Rose Wilston's grave and started hitting me with it. I wrestled it out of her hands and jabbed the pointed end at her in a threatening way. She screamed, grabbed it and held it to my throat as if she was going to throttle me with it.

Everyone for yards around, including Mr Simmons, was looking at us as we rolled about. Someone must have alerted the warden because he suddenly appeared on a scooter.

We got up and brushed the dried grass off our clothing.

‘I don't know why you're making such a fuss, Lizzie,' Miss Pitt hissed, ‘you made the deal.' And she clipped off.

‘What's going on?' asked the warden.

‘That woman was trying to interfere with that man,' I said, pointing to Mr Simmons. And Mr Simmons looked suitably shaken. In fact, he was trembling violently with his mouth open—you might describe it as ‘hyperventilating noisily'.

The warden jumped off his scooter, stood it beside the dull, cream headstone of Mrs Melitta Simmons who'd been called to God in 1973 and administered sips of water from his emergency first-aid kit—which was needed, he said, ‘every single day on some poor bugger'.

We had a sit down on the nearest bench and I told the warden it had been a domestic incident and nothing criminal. The warden said he'd seen plenty of it—especially by the Ks and Ls and Ms—and he walked us to the car park. Mr Simmons had trouble locating his car. It was a whitish Rover—that was all I knew. And the car park seemed full of white cars.

‘What's the registration?' asked the warden.

‘You Jolly Fucker 264G,' said Mr Simmons.

We scanned the vehicles and I walked away to get a different angle, until the warden shouted, ‘You Jolly Fucker—over there.'

Mr Simmons didn't feel up to driving. That's the thing with old people, it doesn't take much to put them off and then you're stuck. The warden had lingered and when I told him this, he said he'd thought it would be the case and asked if I'd like to telephone someone from his post. I phoned my mother and she must've driven like the clappers because she was with us in less than twenty minutes in the Snowdrop van. She'd been allowed to hold on to the van due to not fully resigning and making odd laundry deliveries as and when necessary for the company, and covering sick leave. She'd agreed to this because she loved her Leyland van—the height, the noise and driving with the door open, which you couldn't do in an ordinary car—and she needed the capacity for carting stuff about for her pine-stripping business. Plus, I think she imagined she could live in it—if the worst came to the worst (that's what I thought anyway). The warden was still lurking and came to join in.

‘What's happened?' my mother asked as she strode towards us.

‘The girl's had a scrap with a lady at the graveside,' he tipped my mother off, ‘very nasty, like something out of
The Exorcist
.'

The incident at the cemetery caused me to have to tell my mother something about my tacit arrangement with Miss Pitt. She'd driven us back to Paradise Lodge. Mr Simmons had got out of the van and I was about to. ‘No, wait,' she said, ‘what's this all about?'

I gave her the barest bones and she hit the roof. I mean, she actually punched the roof of the van and screamed at me, ‘You
fucking
idiot, all you have to do is go to school, what the fuck do you think this is? A story, a play, television? Jesus, Lizzie, just
GO TO FUCKING SCHOOL
.'

And, later, at home I had to go through it step by step.

‘I'll sort this,' my mother said.

Our mother started to sell her last remaining heirlooms. Knowing this made me feel a bit guilty. Not that I could have paid our utility bills with the bits of money I was earning—but it was an irony that I was so well-off and splashing out on various hair products and assorted coffees and teas when she and Mr Holt had such profound financial worries.

She'd first got a taste for selling heirlooms when she'd sold a four-poster bed a few years before—but not the mattress, which she was ashamed for anyone to even see and had to take to the council dump secretly, at dusk, when no one else was around. She wasn't able to lift it on her own and had to ask my sister and brother and me to help. And the shedding of that mattress left its mark on all of us.

We'd been too young to be subtle about it and had asked and asked what was wrong with the mattress and why she couldn't just leave it on the bed for Dr Gurley—who'd bought the bed and was sending someone round to collect it. Finally, she'd had to tell us the mattress was badly stained and that Dr Gurley would buy a new mattress for her and Sheela. ‘What stains?' we asked. And then we clambered around in the back of the van as our mother drove and, with Little Jack's key-ring torch, we located the stains on the mattress and drew round them with our fingers and noticed one was in the shape of a dog with fat legs and another was like a pumpkin. And eventually she'd told us they were bloodstains from some terrible times and my poor little brother cried—imagining someone had been murdered on it (probably someone blameless like Maid Marion's father). And my sister told him it wasn't that. My sister and I realized that it was just the usual women's stuff, just the outpourings of things going right or wrong. And that these things, if they happened to a guinea pig or a dog, would have been all right, but happening to a woman, they were deeply shaming and to be hidden and thrown away at dusk. We didn't feel revolted, we felt frightened.

Anyway, the time had come to sell her last remaining valuable possessions so that she could catch up with some private bills—about which she hadn't been entirely honest with Mr Holt. And so she buffed up some jewellery and polished some wood. She'd inherited a dressing table from somewhere on her mother's side. It was beautiful—if you liked that kind of thing—walnut with a hinged triptych mirror and wavy piecrust edging. She advertised it for sale in the
Longston Advertiser
and hoped her sister-in-law wouldn't notice (it being a family heirloom). Her plan was to accept a price in the region of £35 (nowhere near its real worth—but just to get the quick cash). However, and this is the whole point of writing about this, the person who answered the advert was Miss Pitt and when I saw her standing there on the doorstep, in her hound's-tooth ski pants with her pal the fat doctor, I panicked.

‘Oh, shit, don't answer the door, no, tell her it's sold.'

And my mother said, ‘No, Lizzie, this is perfect.'

My mother showed her in, sat her at the dressing table and, like the girl off
Sale of the Century
, began demonstrating its features. She slid the long slim sorting drawer out over Miss Pitt's lap so she could appreciate the handy compartments for eyeshadows, lipsticks, powders and so forth. She angled the three mirrors so that Miss Pitt could see her face from every angle and even the back of her head, and showed her that the snug little stool could be tucked away when not in use. And when she was sure Miss Pitt couldn't live without it, she put the price up to £60. And after the fat doctor had loaded it into the back of his Land Rover and Miss Pitt had counted the notes out into her hand and she'd put them into her back pocket my mother said, ‘And by the way, if Lizzie isn't reinstated immediately into the “O” Level classes, I shall report you to the board of education for misconduct.'

I went to registration at school the next possible day and, like magic, Mr Mayne passed me a note telling me to go into the ‘O' Level groups for all subjects. He was pleased. ‘Now, just make sure you keep up,' he said.

As the days went by Sister Saleem was very keen to know how Miranda was getting on with
The Diary of Anne Frank
and would ask occasionally, ‘How are you getting on with Anne Frank?' And, for a while, Miranda would say, ‘I haven't started it yet.'

And then, eventually, she said, ‘Yeah, I'm getting through it slowly, it's not the most riveting read—especially after
The World Is Full of Married Men
by Jackie Collins.'

One time she said that Anne Frank seemed like a ‘right little madam' and Sister winced.

Miranda took ages to read a book. Days. You'd see her at break times reading the same book day after day. Whereas I'd read
Girl From the Outback
in a day and was now rattling through
Animal Farm
by George Orwell even though it was highly allegorical. I mentioned this and Miranda retorted, ‘You try reading
The Diary of Anne Frank
and having a full-time boyfriend and rehearsing for the open day.'

One day Miranda was at the kitchen table reading Anne Frank's diary and she cried out in anguish.

Sister Saleem looked concerned. ‘Are you all right?' she asked.

Miranda slammed down the book and put her head in her hands. Everyone stopped what they were doing and it was a solemn moment. ‘Finally,' we all thought, ‘the significance of the book has struck her.'

‘I've been following this girl's life, day after day after day,' said Miranda, gloomily ‘and she just completely misses my birthday. She goes the 22nd blah-di-blah, 23rd blah-di-blah, 24th blah-di-blah, then the 26th. She totally ignores the 25th.'

Sister Saleem looked stunned.

Mike Yu had a secret. He'd told Miranda and sworn her to secrecy because his parents mustn't find out. He'd had to tell Miranda, though, because it involved her. It was his ambition to move to the
USA
. He was allowed because he'd lived there slightly as a baby, or maybe he was born there, and that qualified him to go back for as long as he wanted.

Miranda told me, obviously, that's how I knew. The idea captivated her and she couldn't stop talking about it. She'd had a visit to America in 1972 when her family had gone to see Boston in the Fall and it had been the holiday of a lifetime. I remembered this trip well because her sister Melody had given a talk to the class when they got back and had made it sound terrific.

‘The funny thing is,' said Miranda, ‘I had this feeling when I was there, that I sort of belonged somehow.'

‘Oh, well, that's handy,' I said.

‘Mike says he's planning to go in 1980, when he's finished his degree and his parents have paid off their mortgage. He wants me to go with him,' she said, doing a fake grimace and gripping my hand.

I was smoking on an empty stomach and hearing this awful news made me nauseous. ‘Fantastic,' I said.

And even though it was a secret, the subject of America and moving there and the American dream and so forth began to crop up all over the place.

Mr Simmons said we, as a nation, became envious of the Americans. It had started in the Second World War. And only got worse in the 1950s when things were so bleak here but looking attractive over there and they seemed to do things better. And people would go there and come back full of it. Like the Longladys—when they'd been to see Boston in the Fall and came back talking like they'd never seen a leaf go yellow and die before, or had too much to eat.

Mr Simmons had himself been there and been impressed by the place—the attitude and the confidence and the idea that a man could get on. They'd cracked it, he said, because there was an equality you'd never get here. And Sister Saleem had laughed. She'd been there too. A black woman. And Mr Simmons had apologized for his statement and backed away.

‘Will Mike be
OK
over there?' I asked Miranda, later, privately.

‘Why shouldn't he be?' asked Miranda.

Miranda didn't care about equality for Mike, she just wanted an exciting adventure and to snub her mother into the bargain. Mike was just a vehicle.

The owner still mourned his marriage and, even though he'd adopted Rick the Yorkshire terrier, he missed Lazarus—the retriever his wife had got custody of. And he missed the children he might have had but hadn't because of his ex-wife despairing of the awfulness of the world. And though they'd been in full agreement about it, he'd begun to worry that she might now have a child, with a new lover—because the world probably didn't seem so awful any more. Not that it had become any better than it was, but because she might be in love—and being in love clouds your perceptions.

‘Who'd want to bring children into this awful world—where you can be abandoned and have your dog taken from you, not to mention all the muggings on short cuts and the bombings and the way Venice is overrun with tourists?' the owner kept wondering. And the cook kept agreeing—she'd come in for a chat and a drink but wasn't working because of the money she was owed.

Of course I thought of Danny and all the babies I was planning to have later on and hoped the world would get better—but I felt a bit disheartened. And then Matron piped up with one of her long rambles about how the world was a damned sight better than it used to be and if ever there was a time for hope and babies and for women, it was now and we'd got Paul McCartney to thank for it. And I wondered if the world getting better for Matron was the same thing as it getting awful for the owner but decided it probably wasn't that neat.

Although the cook fully agreed with the owner about the awful state of the world (her being, like him, from the upper classes fallen on hard times), she did have one child now aged twenty-something. The cook defended her decision to bring Anthony into the world.

‘I've always been open and frank about how fucking awful the world is,' she said, ‘and he is suitably cynical.'

‘That's good to hear,' said the owner.

‘He rages against the establishment in satirical artworks,' said the cook, ‘and he's changed his name to “Blue”.'

‘Bravo,' said the owner.

The change in Lady Briggs was striking and occasionally alarming. For a start, she'd stopped eating all her meals from a small bone dessertspoon and had begun using a knife and fork and had even complained that the forks had only three tines, not four.

She'd become sociable. She'd gone from recluse to life and soul of the party within a matter of days. I felt it was like a starving person eating too much cake, too soon and if she didn't slow down, she'd overdose (on metaphorical cake).

She was considerably more mobile than we'd given her credit for and because she'd got hold of one of the Paradise Lodge leaflets (and believed every printed word) it meant we actually had to do some of the things listed, including chairobics, bingo and window bird-spotting and Nurse Eileen had to give the short talk that was advertised as an example of the pastoral care offered (‘Constipation: Causes, Cures and Common Sense'). Also, because the leaflet advertised ‘interesting excursions'—a thing people would like the idea of but not many would actually want to do—Lady Briggs stirred up an interest where previously there'd been none and formed an excursion committee with a few of the more able ladies and gents. Inevitably, an excursion to a farm in a nearby village was planned.

Matron fell out with Lady Briggs. The two argued like a sitcom, with Lady Briggs as the nice old girl and Matron as the spiteful old harridan.

‘Now she's given up being a recluse, she's become a show-off,' said Matron, right in front of Lady Briggs.

‘No, she's just enjoying life,' said Eileen. ‘She's an ambassador for Paradise Lodge, aren't you, Lady B?'

Matron didn't agree. ‘She's gone like a man,' she said, ‘bossing everyone around and demanding adventures, just because she's down here being listened to—I preferred her shut up there.'

Lady Briggs had chummed up with Mr Simmons, which was the real problem, now Matron had him in reserve.

Lady Briggs broadcast the possible farm excursion and recruited so many patients we needed to borrow a larger-than-average vehicle from Zodiac Cabs. A minibus was organized and the trip to Burrows' farm was confirmed and arranged. Lady Briggs herself had suggested Burrows' farm because they had a flock of Bluefaced Leicesters—a breed she'd wanted to look at, having heard the fascinating history of it. No one else knew what a Bluefaced Leicester was, except we supposed it was an animal of some sort—but it might have been a turnip for all we knew.

Anyway, the trip was on and we discovered that a Bluefaced Leicester was a sheep and this farm not only had some, they had over a hundred and they'd just been shorn. And that was just the beginning of it.

I hadn't planned to go on the trip but changed my mind when Mike Yu was drafted in to drive at the last minute because Matron's feet wouldn't reach the minibus controls without the steering wheel digging into her 18-hour girdle.

Anyway, off we went with Mike at the wheel and Matron in the passenger seat and six patients and me in the back.

Lady Briggs started off on a lecture. ‘Bluefaced Leicesters are a longwool breed of sheep which evolved from a breeding scheme here in Leicestershire in the eighteenth century. Recognizable through their Roman noses and dark blue skin which can be seen through the white hair, hence the name. They are related to the original Leicester longwool breed, and commonly used as sires for mules.' She droned on, reading from a book. ‘Fully grown Bluefaced rams can weigh as much as… and they have curly threadlike wool, yes, which is lighter than other breeds. They have no wool on the head or neck…'

She'd run out of breath and had to pause and Matron put the radio on. ‘The Price Of Love' by Roxy Music blared out and I suspect the urgent beat made Mike Yu drive a little faster than was sensible on the undulating lanes.