Human Croquet Part 3

It keeps waving its huge heavy paw around in a determined effort to introduce itself so I bend down and take the proffered paw and look into its chocolate-brown eyes. There's something in its expression ... the clumsy paws ... the big ears ... the bad haircut ...

'Charles?' I whisper experimentally and the dog c.o.c.ks one of its floppy ears and thumps its tail enthusiastically.

I suppose a better sister would have set about weaving him a s.h.i.+rt from nettles and throwing it over his furred-over body so that he could be released from his enchantment and resume his human form. I give him some cat food instead. He's absurdly grateful.

'Look,' I say to Gordon when he comes into the kitchen.

'Have you seen Debs anywhere?' he asks, scratching his head like Stan Laurel.

'No, but look a dog, a poor, lost, homeless, hungry, lonely dog. Can we keep it?' and Gordon, who looks as if he might have been playing the game of Lost Ident.i.ty from The Home Entertainer says vaguely, 'Mm, if you like.'

Of course, I know the Dog isn't really Charles under an enchantment and anyway he comes back from wherever he's been in time to drink Horlicks with Gordon. Neither Vinny nor Debbie are speaking to Gordon having simultaneously discovered the usurper dog finis.h.i.+ng off the remains of supper in the kitchen. It will eat anything, it transpires, even Debbie's cooking.

With the arrival of the warm weather and the Dog, the flea population of Arden is on its way to achieving mastery of the planet, not to mention driving Debbie to the edge of it. 'Fairly louping with them,' Mrs Baxter laughs as one of them leaps off the Dog on to her nice white tablecloth.

'A lot of fuss about nothing,' Vinny says, catching one expertly and squas.h.i.+ng its little jet-bead body between her thumbnails with a tiny explosive crack! (I imagine it's Richard Primrose's head.) Life at the level of the minutiae is fairly teeming in Arden the fleas, the dust, the tiny fruit flies. And the invisible world, of course, is even more crowded than the visible one.

'Vitamins!' Vinny says. 'Who needs them?' 'Everyone?' I murmur. 'Molecules!' Charles says. 'Who understands them?' 'Scientists?' I venture. (Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it isn't important.) Vinny is so scrawny, and probably cold-blooded, that no flea ever bothers biting her. Debbie, however plump, warm-blooded and fine-skinned is a banquet for them, a moveable feast.

Debbie blames the Cats (there's a musical waiting to be made), always a source of contention between the warring mistresses of Arden (A Word about the Cats: There were no cats in Arden until the arrival of Vinny. Vinny used to have her own house, a dingy little terrace on Willow Road, but when our parents disappeared so thoughtlessly she had to give it up and come and live with us. She's never forgiven us. She brought the First Cat with her, the begetter of the Arden dynasty Grimalkin, a bloodthirsty, belligerent grey female from whom we have bred many a fat fireside companion.) Debbie is not the only person who dislikes the Cats. Mr Rice is not above administering the odd kick catwards when he thinks no-one is looking, unaware apparently that Vinny has radar in her ears and eyes on revolving stalks.

Sensing her unpopularity a la lodger, Elemanzer, Grimalkin's youngest and fiercest daughter, goes out of her way to annoy him, sleeping on his pillows when he's out and lying in wait on the stairs to trip him and even going to the length of getting pregnant and delivering her litter in Mr Rice's sock drawer.

For days after, we are entertained by the idea of Mr Rice delving into his drawer in the bleary light of dawn, expecting to come out with a blue and grey Argyle and screaming in horror as he discovered his socks have come to life wriggling, damp and furry, in their little nest. And one very, very large, silver-grey tabby sock sinking its angry maternal teeth into his hand.

By the time summer comes one of those mewling socks, a handsome young kitten called Vinegar Tom, has gone missing and Vinny has become obsessed with the idea that Mr Rice had somehow had a hand in this disappearance.

Debbie and I are agreed on one thing (and one thing only); we loathe Mr Rice. We loathe the way he eats with his mouth half-open and the way he grinds his teeth when he's finished eating. We loathe the way he whistles tunelessly through those teeth when they aren't eating or grinding. We particularly loathe the way, at night, those same teeth grin out at us from a gla.s.s on the bathroom shelf.

I'm repelled at having to share a bathroom with him, not just because of the teeth but for the overwhelming smells he leaves behind of shaving-foam and Brylcreem and the unmistakable (but not to be dwelt on) smell of male excrement. Once or twice I've encountered him coming out of the bathroom in the morning, with his dressing-gown hanging open and something slack, like a pale fungus, flopping out from its lair. 'Oops,' Mr Rice says with a leering grin. 'Death of a Salesman,' I fantasize grimly to Charles.

'Men,' Vinny mutters with feeling. (Vinny was herself once married, but only briefly.) It seems men fall into one of several categories there are the weak fathers, the ugly brothers, the evil villains, the heroic woodcutters and, of course, the handsome princes none of which seems entirely satisfactory somehow.

'What's wrong?' Eunice asks impatiently as we walk home, Audrey-less, as usual, from school. I don't know, I have this peculiar feeling both familiar and at the same time unknown, a dizzy, fizzy kind of feeling as if someone had dropped an Alka-Seltzer into my bloodstream. 'Bloodstream,' I say thickly to Eunice. We're taking a shortcut, to save time (but where will we put it? In the banks of wild thyme?) standing in the middle of a bridge over the ca.n.a.l and Eunice looks over the parapet in alarm at the murky wool-wasted water below.

'Maybe you've got a thing about bridges,' she says earnestly, more like Freud than Brunel. 'If you're frightened of crossing bridges it's called-'

Oh no, here we go again Eunice has disappeared, the bridge itself has gone but luckily has been replaced by another one, little more than a series of wooden planks. The snicket, Green Man's Ginnel, that the bridge leads into is still there but the lamppost that overlooks its entrance has gone, as have the warehouses either side of it, replaced now by a couple of rough-looking wooden buildings. I venture cautiously into the ginnel and emerge the other side into Glebelands marketplace.

It still is the marketplace, that much is clear the market-cross stands where it always does, in the middle of the square and Ye Olde Sunne Inne is there on the other side, no words announcing its name any more, just the sign of the sun on a wooden board not the present one, a garish yellow thing, but a muted, old-gold kind of sun. I expect it's not called Ye Olde Sunne Inne any more either, just the Sun Inn probably, because we're obviously back in the days when it was new, as it's just a hovel of its former self. Indeed, we seem to be back in Ye Olde Glebelands if the evidence of my eyes is to be believed.

Wooden carts barrel across the cobblestones, fish-wives in sixteenth-century fustian are yelling their wares. A couple of dandies in velvet preen themselves on the street corner and when I approach them I catch a smell of something rank and unwashed. Will they look at me and scream? Can they see me? Can they hear me?

When I was in a time warp last time (not often we get to say things like that, thank goodness) the man I met in the field seemed to be able to communicate very well indeed, but this pair stare right through me and no matter how much I shout and jump up and down it seems I am invisible. Of course, if the laws of physics have been overturned there's no reason for things to remain constant from one experience to the next. Chaos could break out at any moment. Probably has.

I push open the door of The Sun, or Ye Sunne, I may as well see what it used to be like. This is, after all, the underage haunt of Carmen and myself (how confused my tenses feel), we have spent many a shadowy hour lurking in the Snug when we should have been in science cla.s.s. If only I had paid more attention in Physics instead of dropping it for German. The front door in 1960 is a bright s.h.i.+ny red one, but in this unknown year of Our Lord it is a two-part wooden stable affair. Perhaps I should introduce myself with 'I come from the future'?

Maybe this is my own form of the moon illusion, maybe I've got the wrong set of references and am misinterpreting the phenomenal world?

There are only a couple of people inside, looking like extras from The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Ess.e.x, only a lot scruffier than is usual in Hollywood. They're all staring gloomily into their pewter tankards as if they don't know the Renaissance has ever happened.

In the shadows, in the corner of a high oak booth, there's a man with his eyes closed, he's quite young, in his twenties somewhere, and there's an odd familiar feel to him as if I've met him in the present or what was the present in my immediate past but is now the future, if I ever go back there. Dearie, dearie me.

The man opens his eyes and looks at me. Not through me, like everyone else, but at me and he gives me a smile, sort of lop-sided and cynical, a smile of recognition, and he raises his tankard to me and I have an overwhelming desire to go over and talk to him because I think he knows me, not the everyday, exterior me, but the interior Isobel. The real me. The true self. But just as I take my first step towards him everything vanishes, just like before.

It isn't opening time yet and Ye Olde Sunne Inne seems to be deserted. It's definitely the present again beer mats and beer towels and pineapple-shaped ice-buckets. I leave the Snug and wander through the Lounge and the Public Bar and finally find the back door of the kitchens open. I come down a pa.s.sage full of dustbins and open a door and find myself on the market square again and see Eunice coming out of Green Man's Ginnel looking puzzled and I hail her from the other side of the square.

'Where did you go?' she asks crossly when she's negotiated the traffic. 'Gephyrophobia,' she says unexpectedly.

'Pardon?'

'Gephyrophobia fear of bridges.'

'Right,' I say vaguely.

'Dromophobia fear of crossing the street? Potamophobia fear of rivers? Perhaps,' Eunice says airily, 'some deep-seated terror in your past is coming back to revisit you.'

What is she going on about? 'What are you going on about, Eunice?'

'You can have a phobia about anything, fire for example pyrophobia or insects acaraphobia or the sea thala.s.sophobia.'

Eunicephobia, that's what I have. I walk quickly across the road and jump on a bus without looking at the number of it and leave Eunice weaving in between cars, trying to follow me. I personally, for no discernible reason, have discovered a rip in the fabric of time, free-falling through its wormholes and snickets as easily as opening a door.

Are there other people who are dropping in and out of the past and not bothering to mention it in everyday conversation (as you wouldn't)? But let's face it, if it comes right down to it, which is more likely a disruption in the s.p.a.ce-time continuum or some form of madness?

What is the fabric of time like? Black silk? A smooth twill, a rough tweed? Or lacy and fragile like something Mrs Baxter would knit?

How can I trust reality when the phenomenal world appears to be playing tricks on me at every turn? Consider the dining-room, for example. I walk into it one day and find it has a quite different air, as if it's changed in some subtle and inexplicable way. It's as if someone's been playing What's Wrong? from The Home Entertainer, where one person leaves the room and the others move a chair or change a picture so that he (or more likely she, it seems) has to guess what's different when she comes back in. That's what it's like in the dining-room, only more so, as if, in fact, it isn't really our dining-room at all. As if the dining-room is a looking-gla.s.s room, a facsimile, a dining-room pretending to be the dining-room ... no, no, no, this way utter madness lies.

Debbie comes in the room behind me. She's wearing a home-made version of a Tudor costume that unnerves me for a moment.

'Why are you dressed like that?' I've tried very hard to forget my trip down memory lane to Ye Olde Sunne and this is an unpleasant reminder.

She looks down at her dress as if she's never seen it before and then stares at me with her little eyes. 'Oh, dress rehearsal,' she says suddenly as if she's been translating what I said, 'Midsummer what'sit.'

I could tell her that she doesn't smell high enough to be authentic but I don't bother. 'Izzie?'

'Mm?'

'Do you think there's something missing from this room?'

'Missing?'

'Or something not quite right. It's like-'

'It's like it's the same room as before and yet it's not the same?'

She stares at me in astonishment, 'That's it exactly! Does that happen to you as well?'

'No.'

Perhaps there's a G.o.d (wouldn't that be amazing) who's playing some strange game with reality on the streets of trees. Or G.o.ds in the plural, more like.

'Anyway, I'm off,' Debbie says, gathering up her skirts.

'Your head perhaps?' I query.

'What?'

'Nothing?'

Will I ever escape the madness that is Arden?

Midsummer's Eve. The high-point of the year, more daylight than we know what to do with. In the Garden of Eden, every day was Midsummer's Eve. We should be jumping over bonfires or doing something magical. Instead Mrs Baxter and I are taking tea on the lawn, just as the master-builder intended. Audrey is languis.h.i.+ng in her room. The Dog is sprawled on the gra.s.s, dreaming rabbits. Mrs Baxter's tortoisesh.e.l.l cat is sleeping under a rhododendron. There's a fairy ring in the middle of the lawn, the gra.s.s flattened as if a miniature s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p had landed there during the night.

Mrs Baxter's made a big gla.s.s jug of home-made lemonade and cuts slice after slice from a pink-coloured cake that looks like a bathroom sponge.

Mrs Baxter knows how to produce an amazing number of variations on a Victoria sponge, each embellished with a different decoration chocolate cakes labelled with chocolate vermicelli, lemon cakes tagged with jellied lemon slices and coffee cakes signposted with walnut halves that resemble the brains of tiny rodents. Vinny has never even baked a cake, let alone been initiated into the protocol of decorating them.

Mrs Baxter also eats a lot of her cake of course and sometimes after she's eaten several slices back to back she'll put her hand over her mouth and laugh, 'Dearie me, I'll be turning into a cake soon!' What kind of cake would Mrs Baxter turn into? A vanilla sponge, soft and crumbly and full of b.u.t.tercream.

'No wonder you're so b.l.o.o.d.y fat,' Mr Baxter says to her. Mr Baxter himself has never been seen to eat cake ('He's not a cake hand,' Mrs Baxter says sadly).

Mrs Baxter always gives me an extra slice of cake, wrapped in a paper napkin, to take home for Charles. Anyone watching me scurrying home from Sithean would think that there was some kind of endless birthday party taking place inside.

Today, in honour of the sun, Mrs Baxter has strayed from her usual beige spectrum and is wearing a sundress with brightly coloured red and white candy stripes, like an awning, or a deck-chair. It has thin red shoelace-straps and a lot of Mrs Baxter's flesh is on show her fat arms and dimpled elbows and the voluptuously maternal cleft of her cleavage in which pink cake crumbs have lodged. Mrs Baxter's skin has turned to the colour of cinder toffee from working in the garden and she's covered in big freckles like conkers. She looks hot to the touch and I have to stifle a desire to jump down into the chasm of Mrs Baxter's bosom and get lost there for ever.

Mrs Baxter sighs happily, 'It's just right for playing Human Croquet,' but doesn't elaborate on whether she means the lawn or the weather or the mood. 'Of course,' she adds, 'we don't have enough people just now.'

Mr Baxter appears suddenly on the lawn, casting his menacing shadow over the tea-tray like an evil sundial and Mrs Baxter's cup trembles in its saucer. Mr Baxter gazes into the distance, far beyond the Albertine, towards the rise of green that is Boscrambe Woods.

'Cuppie, dear?' Mrs Baxter enquires, holding up a cup and saucer as if to make it clear what she means. Mr Baxter looks at her and seeing her sun-hat a red plaited-straw coolie hat frowns and says, 'Just come home from the paddy-fields, have you?' and Mrs Baxter knocks over the milk jug in her hurry to pour Mr Baxter's cuppie (they are an incredibly clumsy family). 'Silly me,' she says with a big smile that owes nothing to being happy. 'Nothing better to do?' he asks, raising an eyebrow at the bird-table. It is not the birds he is questioning though.

Mr Baxter doesn't like to see people idle. He's an autodidact ('That's how I avoided the pit,' he explains darkly) and resents people who've been 'given things on a plate'. Maybe that's why he doesn't like cake.

'What are you doing?' he asks me gruffly.

'Just killing time until the play,' I mumble through a mouthful of cake. ('Oh dearie me, don't do that,' Mrs Baxter murmurs.) Mr Baxter sits down, rather abruptly, on the gra.s.s next to where I'm sprawled in a deck-chair, exposing his thin, hairy legs above his grey socks. He's out of place in Arcadia, he prefers sitting on straight-backed chairs and watching parallel lines of desks stretching towards infinity. 'There's greenfly on the rose,' he says to Mrs Baxter in a tone that's suggestive of moral improbity rather than pest infestation. 'You're going to have to spray it.' Mrs Baxter hates spraying things. She never flattens spiders or bashes wasps or cracks! fleas, even house-flies are allowed to buzz freely around Sithean when Mr Baxter's back is turned. Mrs Baxter has an agreement with creeping and flying things, she doesn't kill them if they don't kill her.

Mr Baxter's smell rises up on a current of warm air towards me shaving-cream and Old Holborn and I try not to inhale.

'I spy with my little eye,' Mrs Baxter says hopefully, 'something beginning with "T",' and Mr Baxter shouts, 'For G.o.d's sake, Moira, can I get a bit of peace, please?' so that we don't find out what the "T" is. Perhaps it's Theseus, even now striding across the field under the harsh suburban suns.h.i.+ne to exclaim that his nuptial hour is drawing on apace. 'Oh, they've started!' Mrs Baxter says excitedly, 'I must go and fetch Audrey.'

The play's the thing, but in this case a very bad thing and I shall draw a non-existent curtain over the Lythe Players' version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is comic where it should be lyrical, tedious where it should be comic and there is not even the slightest speck of magic in it. Mr Primrose, playing Bottom, could not be a rude mechanical if he rehea.r.s.ed until the crack of doom and the girl pretending to be t.i.tania, Janice Richardson who works in the Post Office on Ash Street, is fat with a squeaky voice. (But who knows, perhaps that's what fairies are like.) Debbie comes home ashen-faced and at first I think this is on account of her dreadful performance she may as well have handed the part over to the prompt but she whispers to me over a mug of Bournvita, 'The wood.'

'The wood?'

'The wood, the wood,' she repeats, like Poe trying to write a poem, 'in the play,' she hisses, 'Midsummer what'sits?'

'Yes?' I say patiently.

'My thingie.'

'Character?'

'Yes, my character gets lost in the wood, doesn't she?' (The Lady Oak has heroically stood in for a thousand trees for the Players.) 'Yes?'

Debbie looks round the kitchen, a weird expression on her face, she seems to be having a lot of difficulty putting her thoughts into words.

'What's wrong?'

She drops her voice so low that I can hardly hear her, 'I was in a wood, for real, I was lost in a b.l.o.o.d.y great forest. For hours,' she adds and begins to cry. I think she's been too much in the sun. Shall I tell her about the ginnels and snickets and vennels of time? No, I don't think so. 'Perhaps you should see a psychiatrist?' I suggest gently and she runs out of the room in horror.

So there we have it. We are both as mad as tea-party hatters.

It's late, Midsummer's Eve has nearly given way to Midsummer's Day. Not a mouse stirs in the house. I draw a gla.s.s of water from the kitchen tap; tap water always tastes slightly brackish in Arden as if there's something slowly rotting in the cistern.

The kitchen feels as if someone's just walked out of it. I stand on the back doorstep and sip the water. My skin feels warm from the heat it's soaked up in Mrs Baxter's garden. I can smell the warmth still rising from the soil and the bitter-green scent of nettles. A thin paring of yellow moon has made a sickle-split in the sky and a star hangs on its bottom cusp, a rich jewel on the cheek of night.

I miss my mother. The ache that is Eliza comes out of nowhere, squeezing my heart and leaving me bereft. This is how she affects me I'll be crossing the road, queuing for a bus, standing in a shop and suddenly, for no discernible reason, I want my mother so badly that I can't speak for tears. Where is she? Why doesn't she come?

The clock on the Lythe Church chimes the witching hour. Caw. A shuffling of feathers and leaves from the Lady Oak.

Under my feet moles mine and worms tunnel unseen. A bat flits through the ocean of darkness. Somewhere, far away, a dog howls and something moves, the black shape of a figure walking across the field. I could swear it has no head. But when I look again, it's disappeared.

PAST.

HALF-DAY CLOSING.

Charlotte and Leonard Fairfax, pillars of the community, although Leonard soon a broken pillar, dead of a stroke in 1925 and robbed of the chance to enjoy his fine new house on the streets of trees.

Charlotte took over the business as if she had licensed grocery in her blood rather than enamelware. Charlotte, the Fairfax matriarch, embracing her widowhood with such Victorian vigour that she was known by all and sundry as the Widow Fairfax.

The Widow liked her fine house, the finest of them all on the streets of trees. It had five bedrooms, a downstairs cloakroom, a butler's pantry and airy attic rooms with fancy gables, in one of which the Widow kept Vera, her domestic drudge. Vera had an excellent view from her window of the Lady Oak, and beyond that to the haze of hills that looked like the work of a good watercolourist and, just visible in the distance, the dark green smudge that was Boscrambe Woods.

The Widow liked her big garden with its fruit trees and bushes, she liked the long drive at the front with its pink gravel chips and she liked the pretty wrought-iron and gla.s.s conservatory at the back which the master-builder had added as an afterthought and where the Widow kept her cacti.

The Widow had nice things. The Widow had things nice (people said). She had blue and white Delft bowls filled with hyacinths in the spring and poinsettias in her Satsuma ware at Christmas. She had good Indian carpets on her oak parquet and raw silk covers on cus.h.i.+ons that were braided and ta.s.selled like something from a sultan's divan. And in the living-room she had a chandelier, small, George the Third, with ropes of gla.s.s beads and big pear-drop crystals like a giant's tears.

Madge had escaped long ago by marrying an adulterous bank clerk in Mirfield and producing another three children.

Vinny looked as if she dined only on hard crusts and dry bones and was as sour as the malt vinegar that she dispensed by the pint from the stoneware flagon at the back. Vinegary Vinny, as old as the century but not quite as war-torn, born an old maid, but none the less married briefly after the First World War to a Mr Fitzgerald a non-combatant chartered librarian with manic depressive tendencies a man considerably older than his spinsterish wife. Vinny's feelings about Mr Fitzgerald's death (of pneumonia in 1926) were never entirely clear, although, as she confided to Madge, there was a certain relief in being released from the duties of married love. Vinny remained, however, in the small marital home which she had briefly shared with Mr Fitzgerald in Willow Road.

This at least, was her own domain, unlike the licensed grocery which her mother ran with a hand of iron and in which she was relegated to the role of mere shop a.s.sistant. 'I could be as good a businesswoman as Mother if she would let me,' she wrote to Madge-in-Mirfield, 'but she never gives me any responsibility.' The business was destined to be Gordon's and as soon as he finished school the Widow made him wrap himself up in a white grocer's ap.r.o.n and was very annoyed when he sneaked out of the house at night to go to cla.s.ses at the technical inst.i.tute in Glebelands. 'Everything he needs to know is right here,' the Widow said, pointing to the middle of her forehead as if it were a bull's-eye. Uncomfortable in his grocer's ap.r.o.n, Gordon stood behind the polished mahogany counter looking like he might be living a quite different life inside his head.

Then another war came and changed everything. Gordon became a hero, flying through the blue sky above England in his Spitfire. The Widow was excessively proud of her fighter-pilot son. 'Apple of her eye,' Vinny wrote to Madge-in-Mirfield. 'Blue-eyed boy,' Madge-in-Mirfield wrote back. Gordon was not blue-eyed. He was green-eyed and handsome.

Eliza was a mystery. n.o.body knew where she came from, although she claimed it was Hampstead. She said Hempstid the way royalty might. She indicated, although not in a way you could pin down for certain, that there was blue blood, if not money, somewhere. 'The ruddy silver spoon's still in her mouth,' Madge said to Vinny when they first met Eliza. Her accent was odd, very out of place in Arden with its nicely buffed-up northern vowels. Eliza sounded stranded somewhere between a very expensive boarding-school and a brothel (or to put it another way, upper-cla.s.s).