A Book at Bedtime

by Barrie Shore

  And this is Eva.

  Sitting at the window in the living room, happy as day, with a smear of dried chocolate still on her chin and a fragment of blue silk draped round her neck, bouncing the teddy bear on her knee, singing a lullaby.

  ‘Idabaroo, idabaree, idababy, idamarmee.’

  Jack’s in the spare room, the nursery that was, thinking of nappies and incontinence pads and the irony in them; looking at boxes, smelling the past. Nothing but rubbish, if you ask me, beats me why you’ve kept it so long. And he knows in his heart that Margaret is right and he is wrong, it can all go down to the charity shop. Except for Eva’s scatterings. Let not anyone pore over them, paw them, dismiss them, discard them. If disposal must be done, and he knows that it must, it shall be done quietly, with honour, a decent burial and himself the only mourner.

  He gathers everything up from the floor: the photographs and school reports, the letters and diaries, the ribbons and bows, the littleness of her life. He doesn’t stop to stand and stare, but packs the lot back in the suitcase, battered old suitcase, higgledy-piggledy, any old how. Only The Castlebridge Echo gives him a moment’s pause, quickly ignored; and the rusty old primrose that crumbles to dust between his fingers.

  He stands in the doorway, looking back at the room that he’s feared so long.

  ‘It’s a nice room, our boy will be happy here.’

  ‘How do you know we’re having a boy?’

  ‘We know these things. Don’t we, Will?’

  There’s nothing for him here any more, perhaps there never was. It was Eva’s room, not his; and now it’s Margaret’s, dedicated once again to a baby’s care, although not the one that was first intended. He closes the door for the last time, and he doesn’t heave a sigh of regret as he turns away, battered old suitcase heavy in his hand; he feels restored, as if he’s exorcised the past once and for all, and is ready to face whatever the future may bring. Even Dodie.

  And this is the Great Man.

  Standing at the top of the stairs, frowning at the grandfather clock, checking its time against his watch. ‘This clock is four minutes slow,’ he says, in an accusing tone. ‘Four and a half, to be precise.’

  ‘I know, it loses five minutes during the week. I’ll adjust it when I wind it tonight.’

  The Great Man watches as Jack puts the suitcase onto the stairlift. ‘What are you going to do with it all? The cellar, I suppose, along with rest of the past?’

  ‘No, I’m going to burn it. I’ll go out to the yard later on and burn the lot.’

  ‘Excellent plan,’ says the Great Man, tucking his watch into his waistcoat pocket. ‘There’s a lot to be said for a good bonfire, most cheering, even cathartic, if one may venture a psycho-analytical opinion on the matter of man’s relationship with fire without embarrassment to one’s more orthodox friends.’

  ‘Idabaroo, idabaree…’ Eva summons.

  Jack obeys her call and goes into the living room.

  ‘Idabababy, idabarmee.’

  ‘Interesting lyric,’ says the Great Man, eyebrows raised in consternation. ‘Is it a madrigal? Something she picked up in the war, perhaps, during her time in the munitions factory? To encourage the workers and dispirit the Boche?’

  ‘It’s a lullaby.’

  ‘Idabababy, baby, baby, baby.’

  ‘Dear me,’ says the Great Man, putting a protective finger to his ear. ‘A lullaby, you say? I fear for the recipient’s peace of mind under such an assault.’

  Jack would like to sit down for a while to rest his knee, but the Great Man ensconces himself in his, Jack’s, favourite armchair, places his hat neatly upon his knee, and shows no sign of imminent departure. So Jack wanders about in a purposeless way, adjusting a picture here and an ornament there, tidying piles of papers and books. And noticing dust.

  Dust everywhere. On the sideboard, the bookcase, on pictures and ornaments, on shelves and books, books that he hasn’t read for years and never will now; and he wonders a little, but not for too long, where the dusters are kept, the polish, the broom, the dustpan and brush; and remembers his mother’s devotion to cleaning, can hear the whirr of the carpet sweeper, the one that she brought from Temperance Terrace that was speckledy brown with wheels that squeaked and the handle that came off if it was worked too hard. His mother had cherished the carpet sweeper: the Ewbank, she called it, in a respectful tone, as if she were referring to a superior servant of whom she was slightly in awe. Mr Ewbank, the butler, who had seen better days and felt his position in an inferior household.

  Poor Mr Ewbank, nobody mourns him. Except Jack as he stoops to rub his knee and notices crumbs on the carpet and the dried globules of yesterday’s porridge, and catches an echo of the Ewbank squeak; forgotten again a moment later as a vision of Margaret in a surgical mask looms risibly into his head.

  ‘You can wipe that smile off your face, Mr C. I’m allergic.’

  ‘Oh dear, Margaret, allergic to what?’

  ‘Dust, mites, bugs, fleas… you name it, I’m allergic.’

  After which exchange, Margaret duly arrived with a friend or relation, a monosyllabic woman who had set about cleaning with the aid of a stout vacuum cleaner by the name of Henry, an upstart of a chap with a red face and relentless grin. And the consequence was that the friend or relation came once a week thereafter, on the strict understanding that her activities were confined to Margaret’s domain (kitchen, storeroom, bathroom, living room, bedroom – ho, yes, even the bedroom is Margaret’s now), but were positively banned from Jack’s territory. The shop. Is that all? Has he only the shop left that belongs to him? And even that invaded by any number of Toms, Dicks and Harrys who happen to walk in off the street on any of five and a half days during fifty-two weeks of the year, between the hours of nine and five.

  And now, in spite of Margaret’s friend or relation, into whose ready hand he counts weekly cash that he can ill afford, here is a living room covered in dust that Dodie, indubitably, will discover and comment upon in the negative.

  So. To dust, or not to dust, that is the question.

  Oh, memory…

  ‘Dusting? What do you mean by dusting?’

  That was Bob, down in the shop. How long ago? Half a century? More, long more. Jack, a boy still, Saturday boy, learning the shop, learning the books, listening to grown men teasing each other. Bob playing chess with the Reverend Bright, a man with a permanent beam on his face, as if he nursed the secret of happiness close to his breast but was damned if he’d share it with anyone else.

  ‘I like dust.’ Bob was more than a match for the Reverend Bright. ‘And so do my customers, such few as there are. They’re reassured by dust, they pay good money for it; if they don’t want dust they can go to the library.’

  ‘Very well, you may keep your dust.’

  ‘Thank you kindly, dear sir, said the maid with a curtsey, I only not done it in case you was cross.’

  Boy Jack knew about dust and maids and curtseys because his mother had told him. She’d grown up with a maid, a tweeny sort of maid from an outlying village who polished and dusted and laid the fires and waited at table, in a trembling way, if Mr Hope or Mr Hopcraft from the brewery came to call; and she’d practised curtseys as a girl in case royalty ever came her way, which she had every expectation of happening until she got married and ended up maidless.

  Jack knew the Reverend as well, high up in the pulpit, chastising his flock, and the beam on his face that belied his anger on God’s behalf. And he remembers thinking that the Reverend’s anger seemed more important than God’s, and how confusing that was; and wondering which sin was the greater, offending God or offending the Reverend; and the conclusion he came to which was that he didn’t like the Reverend very much because he smiled too much, and behind the smile there was too much in him wanting to win.

  ‘The fact remains, this shop is a shambles.’ The Reverend f
lashed his God-given smile, as if to bestow light to the world. ‘It’s an absolute mess.’

  ‘Now you’ve offended me.’ Bob, tossing his hair in the ladylike way that he did whenever the Reverend came into the shop.

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it. We men of the church enjoy upsetting you heathens.’

  ‘Don’t be so smug.’

  ‘Will try my best, but may not succeed.’

  ‘Try harder.’

  ‘If you insist.’ King to Queen’s Bishop seven. ‘Take that, sir.’

  ‘Bugger.’

  ‘Blasphemy, blasphemy…’

  ‘Buggery’s not blasphemy, it’s merely against the law.’

  Jack blows dust from the top of the bookcase, watches it rise and settle again in much the same place as it was before. He picks up the photograph of his father and Nell, both of them smiling, and watches a spider scurrying away. A son of a son of a long line of arachnids that have lived and died in the dust of the shop.

  ‘And that’s another thing.’ The Reverend beamed in his holy way. ‘Spiders.’

  ‘You leave my spiders alone. These are the spiders that catch the flies that eat the mites that live on the books that provide yours truly with a small and by no means adequate income with which to indulge my unspeakable vices.’

  ‘Revolting.’

  ‘What, vices or spiders? Speaking for myself, I am devoted to both.’

  ‘I thought it was books that were your abiding passion.’

  ‘Then you are mistaken, my philosophical friend. Think of the forests that have been destroyed in order to create these mouldering tomes, most of which no one will buy or if they do, will certainly not read. One can hardly blame them: most are as dry as the dust you complain of. And besides, one never knows where they’ve been.’

  ‘Isn’t that part of their allure? To speculate on the lives of previous owners? What about this…’ The Reverend took a book from a shelf. Little Women. He turned to the flyleaf. ‘“For darling Elsie, from Auntie Jean. Christmas, 1870.” Ah, Elsie, how many dreams did you dream as you turned these pages, how many girlish tears were shed?’

  ‘Yes, and how many nostrils were picked and earholes probed? How many scrota idly scratched, what spittle sprayed? What noxious contagion lurks even now within the covers you think so romantic? It makes one shudder to think.’

  ‘I’m sure little Elsie did nothing so vulgar.’

  ‘Don’t be too certain. The primmest of little girls may indulge in unspeakable vices within the privacy of her bedroom.’

  ‘She certainly wouldn’t have had a scrotum to scratch.’

  ‘Stranger things have been known, Horatio.’

  ‘Not in my philosophy.’ The Reverend moved his bishop, triumphally. Queen’s Bishop to King’s Bishop three. ‘Check.’

  Jack, boy Jack, silently begging, no, no, don’t let him win.

  Bob smiling his lopsided smile. ‘Not so fast, my ecclesiastical friend.’ Knight’s Pawn swipes Reverend’s Bishop. ‘Mate, I think.’

  Jack wipes the photograph frame with his sleeve and thinks of his father singing his rounds from pub to pub; and thinks of the Reverend, nursing the secret of happiness close to his breast; and knows now what he’s known all along at the back of his mind, that the Reverend was wrong, he didn’t know the secret at all, but Jack’s father did; and so did Nell, trotting faithfully back to the brewery, taking her master, snoring with drink, safely home at the end of the day. And he thinks of Dodie who’s convinced that she, too, holds the secret of happiness, a woman to whom, like the Reverend Bright, it never occurs that she could be wrong. And he touches his finger to Nell’s nose and puts the frame carefully back in the dust-free line where it stood before in the hope that the spider will return to its lair, because this is the spider that catches the flies. And he’s ready for Dodie now, is more than a match for a thousand Dodies, because he, too, has the secret of happiness: he and Eva have been married for over fifty-seven years and, in spite of his mother, in spite of Margaret and Dodie, in spite of the death of Will, in spite of everything that has conspired to drive them apart, in spite of dementia, they are still together. Like the spiders, they have survived.

  ‘Speaking of bonfires,’ says the Great Man, tidying his cuticles, ‘and in view of your friend’s imminent arrival… what did you say she was called again?’

  ‘Dodie.’

  ‘A curious name, not one that I warm to.’

  ‘No, nor I. I’ve tried my best to feel kindly about her, but I always fail. She’s a difficult woman to like.’

  ‘Ah, you have my sympathy there,’ says the Great Man. ‘My first wife – or was it the second? Both perhaps… developed intense relationships with a variety of unsuitable women, even after marriage. Dr Stopes was one whom I found especially trying.’ The Great Man discovers a hangnail at the side of his thumb and examines it with displeasure. ‘In the case of your poor wife, however, I imagine such friendships have long since become one-sided affairs. One can only congratulate this Dodie for persisting.’

  ‘I suppose so. I still can’t bring myself to like her, though, she’s so determined to find me at fault.’

  ‘In that case,’ the Great Man picks at his hangnail, ‘it might be wise to disburden your wife of the teddy bear she seems so absorbed in.’

  ‘Oh, do you think so?’

  ‘Most certainly. Otherwise this Dodie of yours will have something to say. Not to mention that rag round her neck. What is it exactly? Some sort of scarf?’

  ‘It’s a nightdress.’ Blue nightdress, blue silk, beautiful blue.

  She was at the window, gazing up at the moon, bare arms raised high, unpinning her hair, the nightdress clinging about her like a caress.

  She turned and smiled and shook out her hair.

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s bedtime.’

  ‘So it is.’

  And they kissed and smiled and kissed some more.

  ‘Bedtime,’ says Eva. Loud and clear.

  What? She’s reading his mind. No, she can’t be. It’s the teddy bear jolting her dying brain into memory, not just of the baby but of its begetting.

  ‘Bedtime, bedtime.’ Singing it out on two notes, up, down, up and down.

  Was the baby begotten at bedtime? And was there passion in the conception? Was there tenderness? Was there love?

  ‘Baby, maby, maybe.’ Bouncing the baby on her knee.

  The Great Man nibbles his hangnail. ‘Great Scott, does she never let up?’

  ‘No,’ says Jack, with a kind of tired admiration. ‘Oh, no, Eva has infinite patience, when she sets her mind to a thing she never lets go.’ All those years that she waited…

  ‘Half a dozen at least.’

  ‘Six would be better, don’t you think?’

  ‘Battercake, bettercake, butter and jam…’ shouting now at the top of her voice. Rubbish, just rubbish. ‘Beggercake, biggercake…’

  ‘God Almighty.’ The Great Man retreats to the depths of his chair.

  ‘Bugger and damn.’

  All of it rubbish.

  ‘Oh, do put in a sock in it, there’s a good fellow.’

  And she does, how surprising, with her mouth open and the bear in mid-bounce. And winks at him, waits, winks again. What on earth does she want? Why can’t she just tell him? Is it some game that she’s playing? Making him mad, killing him slowly? Would she smile one day in the old way? Jump up from her chair and ask him to dance? Would she kiss him and say, ‘Don’t be sad, dear Jack, it’s over at last, you’re punished enough, I forgive you, and…’

  And the grandfather clock strikes the half hour: twelve thirty, four minutes slow, four and a half, and Dorothy Jones will be here too soon.

  ‘Bloody Dodie,’ Jack mutters.

  ‘Buddybodie,’ cries Eva. ‘Buddybodie, b
uddybodie.’

  ‘Poor soul,’ says the Great Man, with a pucker to his brow. ‘Poor troubled soul, how long has she been in this condition? I misremember.’

  How long? It seems like a lifetime.

  Saturday, 21st July, 1990.

  Her birthday. Seventy something. Jack can’t remember it now and she didn’t know it then, wouldn’t have cared if she did. Birth, death, life itself, meant nothing at all. She was entirely absorbed in the tiny moments of her day, each one forgotten as soon as it passed. She was happy enough most of the time, the last outburst of anger, directed specifically at him, long gone. He’d learned in the end to anticipate her rages, how to deflect them, but he missed them now, anything better than the unbearable sadness of her. She seldom came downstairs any more, padded about in the flat from bedroom to bathroom and back and again, with occasional excursions into the living room, never anywhere near the spare room. The nursery. Hour after hour, hardly sleeping, seldom washing or changing her clothes, playing unfathomable games, searching for something she never found and wouldn’t recognise if she did. He stayed downstairs, sleeping in the storeroom in his mother’s old bed retrieved from the cellar; took meals up to her on a tray, rescued the remains that she hid all over the flat, under the carpet, inside the grandfather clock, down the lavatory. He took refuge in the shop, pretending he had a business to run. The last time that he’d tried to write.

  I chase rainbows, catch butterflies, clutch at gossamer,

  no sooner captured than rainbows disappear,

  butterflies flutter and die,

  gossamer slips elusive through fingers…

  Elusive gossamer slips through fingers…

  Gossamer slips through elusive fingers…

  As with butterflies, so with words.

  Words howl at the edge of my mind,

  no sooner grasped than melted away

  or dropping like…

  Like what? What is it he’s trying to say? That he’s helpless and hopeless? That his heart aches? Yes! That’s what it is, the heartache is real, so write it…