Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  He dropped to his knees, his body collapsing with relief, and Isobel stumbled into his arms and burst into tears, but Charles held back, looking on with empty eyes as if he suspected Gordon might be just another woodland mirage. An appearing trick.

  ‘Come on, old chap,’ Gordon coaxed softly and held out a hand towards Charles until finally Charles fell against the paternal gabardine breast and started to sob – deep, ugly sobs that racked his small body. Gordon laid his cheek against Isobel’s curls, so that they formed another wretchedly sentimental tableau (‘Where have you been, Daddy dearest?’ perhaps). Gordon stared at a tree in front of him as if what he was seeing wasn’t a tree but a gibbet.

  ‘Time to go,’ Gordon said eventually, reluctantly. Charles sniffed hard and wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘We have to help Mummy,’ he said, the urgency of his message punctuated by woebegone hiccups.

  Gordon hoisted Isobel up and carried her high on his chest, the other hand holding on to Charles. ‘Mummy’s all right,’ he said and before Charles could protest they were brought up short at the sight of Vinny – Vinny whom both of them had completely forgotten about since she’d gone to do you-know-what. She was sitting on a moss-covered tree-stump with her head in her hands. She looked dark and gnarled like some ancient forest-dwelling creature. But when she stood up, with no word of greeting for Charles or Isobel, they could see that she was the same old Vinny and not some mythic creature. ‘There you are,’ Gordon said, as if he’d just encountered her in the back garden and – apparently sharing the same delusion – she replied, ‘You took your time.’ Her thick brown stockings were laddered and she had a scratch on her nose. Perhaps she’d been clawed by a wild animal.

  The familiarity of the insides of the black car made them weak with happiness. They inhaled the seat-leather drug, Isobel thought she might die of hunger any minute, thought she might eat the seat-leather, perhaps Charles was thinking the same thing as he ran his hands over the leather of the back seat as if it was still attached to an animal. Their feet dangled above the floor of the car, their socks filthy, their legs latticed by scratches. ‘Mummy,’ Charles reminded Gordon, who gave him a stiff smile of reassurance in the rear-view mirror. ‘Mummy’s fine,’ he said, pressing his foot down on the accelerator.

  They didn’t see how she could be fine, she didn’t look fine the last time they saw her. Where was she now? ‘Where is Mummy?’ Charles asked plaintively. Gordon’s eyelid tremored slightly and he stuck his indicator out and took a sudden right turn instead of answering. ‘Hospital,’ he said, after they’d been driving down this new road for a while. ‘She’s in hospital, they’re going to make her better.’

  Vinny, who was collapsed in the passenger seat, looking as if she needed a blood transfusion, came to life for a moment and said, rather groggily, ‘Don’t worry about her,’ and gave a grim little laugh. ‘At last, I get to sit in the front,’ she added with a sigh and closed her eyes.

  Charles took Eliza’s shoe out of his pocket where it had been since last night and handed it silently to Gordon who dropped it and nearly lost control of the car. Vinny woke up, snatched the shoe and stuffed it in her bag. By now, the heel was hanging off like a tooth about to drop out.

  ‘Are we going home?’ Charles asked after a while.

  ‘Home?’ Gordon repeated doubtfully as if this was the last place he was thinking of going. He glanced at Vinny, as if to glean her opinion, but she’d dropped off to sleep and was snoring with relief, so with a heartfelt sigh, Gordon said, ‘Yes, we have to go home.’

  Back in Arden the Widow made them porridge and bacon and eggs before putting them to bed. ‘The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast,’ Gordon said, staring gloomily at his bacon and eggs. He cut his bacon up into small pieces and stared at it for a long time before placing a piece in his mouth as if it was a delicate thing that he might damage if he chewed it too hard. After a considerable effort he managed to swallow a piece and then put his knife and fork down as though he would never eat again. Vinny had no such problems and ate her way through breakfast as if a night in the woods was just the thing for giving an edge to your appetite.

  The Widow woke them from their dreamless morning’s sleep with lunch in bed as if they were invalids. They ate ham sandwiches, the last tomatoes from the greenhouse and lemon Madeira cake and fell asleep again and didn’t see the Widow come in and clear away their trays.

  At tea-time she roused them again, and they came downstairs for boiled eggs and soldiers of toast followed by leftover apple-pie. Perhaps this would be their lives from now on – eating, sleeping, eating, sleeping – it was certainly the kind of regime the Widow would approve of for children.

  Gordon, Vinny and the Widow sat at the tea-table with them but ate nothing, though the Widow poured endless cups of tea – the colour of young copper-beech leaves – from the big chrome pot with its green and yellow knitted cosy. Their eggs waited for them in matching green-and-yellow jackets as if they’d just hatched from the teapot. Vinny sipped her tea daintily, her little finger crooked. The Widow observed Charles and Isobel very carefully, everything they did seemed to be of the greatest interest to her.

  Charles took the cosy off his egg and hit its rounded skull gently with his teaspoon until it was crazed all over like old china. Gordon, watching intently, made a funny noise, as though his lungs were being squeezed and the Widow said, ‘Stop doing that!’ to Charles and leant over and sliced the top off his egg for him. She did the same to Isobel’s egg and commanded, ‘Eat!’ and, obediently, Isobel poked a finger of toast into the orange-eyed egg.

  The silence, for once, was astonishing – no head-nipping from Vinny, no lofty pronouncements from the Widow. Only Charles chewing his toast and the funny gulping noise Vinny made when she swallowed her tea. Gordon stared at the tablecloth, lost in some dark dungeon of thought. He looked up occasionally at the thick cotton nets at the bay window as though he was waiting for somebody to step from behind them. Eliza perhaps. But no – Eliza was in hospital, the Widow confirmed. Vinny’s tongue flickered like a snake whenever Eliza’s name was mentioned. Neither Gordon nor Vinny nor the Widow wanted to talk about Eliza. It seemed that nobody wanted to talk about anything.

  But what had happened? Everything that had seemed so clear yesterday – the wood, the fear, the abandonment – today seemed elusive, as if the fog that enveloped them last night was still invisibly present. Charles was clinging to the one thing they were sure of – absence of Eliza. ‘When can we see Mummy?’ he asked insistently, his voice reedy with misery. ‘Soon,’ the Widow said, ‘I expect.’ Gordon put his hands over his eyes as if he couldn’t bear to look at the tablecloth any more.

  As if to help him, Vinny cleared away the dishes on a big wooden tray. Vera had been given ‘a couple of days off’ the Widow said and Vinny whined, ‘Well, I hope you don’t think I’m going to take her place,’ and just to show what a bad servant she would make she managed to drop the entire tray of china before she got to the door. Gordon didn’t even look up.

  Before they went to bed for the third and last time that day, they came downstairs in their pyjamas to say good-night. The Widow gave them milk and digestive biscuits to take upstairs and in exchange they gave goodnight kisses – depositing little bird-pecks on the cheeks of Vinny and the Widow, neither of whom could handle anything more affectionate. The Widow smelt of lavender water, Vinny of coal-tar soap and cabbage. Gordon hugged them one at a time, tight, too tight, so that they wanted to struggle, but didn’t. He whispered, ‘You’ll never know how much I love you,’ his moustache tickling their ears.

  * * *

  For a moment Isobel thought she was back in Boscrambe Woods. But then she realized that she’d woken up in her own bed and that the maniac making enormous gestures, like a mad mute, in the semi-darkness was in fact Charles, trying to get her to follow him down to the first-floor landing.

  A wand of light beamed through the gap in the curtains and they could hear the familiar prut-prut-prut of th
e black car’s engine. They watched the scene down below from behind the curtains. Gordon (gabardine collar up and hat-brim down – like a villain) was standing by the open door of the car, saying something to the Widow that made her give out a little cry and hang on to his lapels, so that Vinny had to prise her off him. Then Gordon got in the car and slammed the door and without looking back drove away from Hawthorn Close.

  The same fat lantern moon that had guided them in the wood only twenty-four hours ago, was hung now in the blackness over the streets of trees. At the top of Chestnut Avenue they could see the car pause as if it was deciding whether to go left up Holly Tree Lane or right along Sycamore Street. Then the black car made up its mind and turned left on to the road north, its rear lights disappearing suddenly into the night.

  At breakfast next morning, Vinny was still there, cutting big doorsteps of bread and jam and saying, ‘I’m going to come and live here for a while and help to look after you.’ She waited for them to say something in response to this news but they said nothing because the Widow was always telling them, ‘If you can’t think of anything nice to say don’t say anything at all.’

  ‘Your daddy’s had to go away on business,’ Vinny continued, looking at them in turn, first one, then the other as if she was checking for signs of disbelief on their faces.

  The Widow came into the dining-room and sat down at the breakfast-table. ‘Your daddy’s had to go away,’ she announced hoarsely and started to dab at her eyes with a handkerchief which was monogrammed extravagantly (not with ‘W’ for Widow, but ‘C’ for Charlotte) and which suddenly reminded Isobel of something. She nearly fell off her chair in the hurry to scramble down from the table. She ran into the hallway, pushing a chair next to the hallstand so that she could reach the pegs, clambered up on to it and slipped her hand into the pocket of the plaid wool coat that had been hanging there ever since they came back from the wood, yesterday morning.

  Eliza’s handkerchief was still there, neatly folded in its white sandwich-triangle, still emblazoned with its initial, still bearing the traces of Eliza’s perfume – tobacco and Arpege – and something darker, like rotting flower petals and leafmould. By the time Vinny hauled her down from the chair she was hysterical and pulled out a clump of Vinny’s hair in the effort to escape her bony clutches. Vinny screamed (the sound of rusty hinges and coffin lids) and gave Isobel a sharp slap on the back of the knee.

  ‘Lavinia!’ the Widow rebuked sternly from the dining-room door and Vinny jumped at the tone of the Widow’s voice. ‘Remember what’s just happened,’ the Widow hissed in her unlovely daughter’s ear. Vinny did an approximation of flouncing and muttered, ‘She’s better off without her anyway.’ In the tussle Vinny managed to wrestle the handkerchief out of Isobel’s hand and the Widow bent down and picked up the lace-edged, monogrammed trophy and swiftly tucked it into the stern bosom of her blouse.

  In the days after Gordon drove into the night the Widow and Vinny were as nervous as cats. Every car engine, every footstep seemed to put them on the alert. They scoured the newspapers every day as if there might be secret messages hidden in the text. ‘I’m a bag of nerves,’ the Widow said, jumping and clutching her heart as Vera muttered her way into the dining-room with a tureen of soup.

  The Widow tried to be nice to them, but the strain began to show after a while. ‘You’re such naughty children,’ she sighed in exasperation. ‘That’s what happens to naughty children,’ the Widow said, as she locked them in their attic bedroom in the middle of a Sunday afternoon as punishment for some transgression they’d committed. They didn’t care, they didn’t mind being locked up together. They almost liked it.

  They were waiting for Gordon and Eliza to come back. They were waiting for the prut-prut-prut of the black car. They were waiting for Eliza to come home from the hospital. For Gordon to come back from his business trip. Their outer lives continued much as before – waking, eating, sleeping, starting school again after the half-term holiday – but they could have been robots for all this meant to them. Real time, the time they kept inside their heads, stopped while they waited for Eliza to come home.

  Their sense of time grew distorted. The days crawled by at an unbearably slow pace, even going to school didn’t seem to make much difference to the great stretches of empty time that yawned ahead of them. Mr Baxter allowed Isobel to start school early, ‘to get her off your hands’. Mrs Baxter offered to walk them to school in the mornings and look after them until the Widow and Vinny came home at night. Mrs Baxter fed them milk and cake in her big warm kitchen, Charles pretending to be another little boy altogether in case Mr Baxter walked in.

  Vinny, cross to begin with, was so much crosser at the turn that events had taken that she behaved as if she’d quite like to lock them up permanently. So she said anyway. Vinny’s face had turned into an old crab-apple and the Widow had to keep her busy at the back of the shop, away from the customers, in case she curdled the cream or made the cheese grow mould. ‘It’s the change of life,’ the Widow explained sotto voce to Mrs Tyndale over the broken biscuits (although not so sotto that Vinny couldn’t hear).

  It was the change of life for all of them, but it couldn’t last, surely? Sooner or later Eliza would come out of hospital, Gordon would return from his business trip and everything would return to normal. Neither Charles nor Isobel ever thought for a moment that Gordon and Eliza had left them permanently in the clutches of Vinny and the Widow. The memory of a broken Eliza under a tree, her eggshell skull bashed and dented, her white throat, stretched (like time) beyond endurance, was something that they refused to think about. The Widow said that Eliza was getting better in hospital. ‘Why can’t we go and see her then?’ Charles frowned.

  ‘Soon, soon,’ the Widow replied, her old milky-blue eyes clouding over.

  Life without Gordon was marginally more boring, but without Eliza it was meaningless. She was everything – their safety (even when she was angry), their entertainment (even when she was bored), their bread and meat and milk. They carried her around like an ache inside, somewhere in the regions of the heart. ‘Perhaps Mummy’s not allowed to talk,’ Charles speculated as they played Snakes and Ladders in their attic prison one gloomy Saturday. The cause of their imprisonment was unsure but might have had something to do with the large scratch on the Widow’s dining-table and its relation to the penknife in Charles’ pocket. ‘Perhaps it’s bad for her throat or something,’ he pursued. Isobel was caught up in the coils of a particularly long snake and didn’t notice that Charles had started to cry until it was brought to her attention by a big crystal tear – almost as big as the pear-drops on the Widow’s chandelier – splashing on the board between them.

  They were used to each other crying, their waiting was seasoned and watered with tears. (‘One or other of you always has the waterworks turned on,’ Vinny chided raggedly one morning as Charles started hyperventilating on the way to school and had to be thumped hard by Vinny between the shoulder blades – a remedy on the kill rather than cure side of things.) ‘Cheer up,’ Isobel urged him now – but in such a melancholic tone that it only made him worse. She passed him the dice-shaker but it was a long time before either of them could make another move.

  They were sitting by the fire, listening to Children’s Hour, Vinny (in the armchair she’d claimed as hers) darning her thick stockings. Vinny was not a needlewoman – the darn she was labouring over looked like a piece of wattle fencing – and the Widow tut-tutted loudly at Vinny’s botched handicraft.

  Vera clattered in the background, setting the table in the dining-room. The Widow looked at Vinny and Vinny put her darning down. Then the Widow took a deep breath and leant over and turned the radio off. They looked at her expectantly. ‘Children,’ she said gravely, ‘I’m afraid I have some very sad news for you. Your mummy isn’t coming home. She’s gone away.’

  ‘Gone away? Where?’ Charles shouted, leaping to his feet and adopting an aggressive, pugilistic stance.

  ‘Calm down, Ch
arles,’ the Widow said. ‘She was never what you’d call very reliable.’ Unreliable? This hardly seemed an adequate explanation of Eliza’s disappearance. ‘I don’t believe you, you’re lying!’ Charles yelled at her. ‘She wouldn’t leave us!’

  ‘Well, she has, I’m afraid, Charles,’ the Widow said dispassionately. Was she telling the truth? It didn’t feel like it, but how could they tell when they were so helpless? The Widow signalled to Vera in the doorway and said, ‘Come along now, dry those tears, Isobel – there’s a nice cottage pie for tea. And a raspberry shape for pudding, Charles, you know how you like that,’ and Charles looked at her with incredulous eyes. Could she possibly believe that a pink blancmange, no sooner seen than eaten, could possibly compensate for the loss of a mother?

  It was already nearly two months since Gordon had driven away into the night with only the moon for company. One morning, the Widow received a letter in the post – a flimsy blue bit of paper with foreign stamps. She opened it and as she read it her eyes filled with tears. ‘Well, it’s not as if he’s dead,’ Vinny muttered crossly to the teapot. ‘Who?’ Charles asked eagerly. ‘Nobody you know!’ Vinny snapped.

  Before bedtime that same night, the Widow said she had some sad news to tell them. Charles’ face was a picture of misery, ‘Daddy’s not left us as well?’ he whispered to the Widow, who nodded sadly and said, ‘Yes, I’m afraid so, Charles.’

  ‘He’ll come back,’ Charles resisted stoutly. ‘Daddy’s going to come back.’

  Vinny dipped a Rich Tea biscuit into her tea and nibbled it like a large rodent. The Widow’s old liverspotted hand trembled and her cup rattled on its saucer as she said, ‘Daddy can’t come back, Charles.’

  ‘Why not?’ Charles knocked his cup of cocoa over in his agitation. ‘Cloth, Vinny,’ the Widow said in a tone that suggested she was warning Vinny about the cloth rather than asking her to go and get one. They could hear Vinny saying, ‘Clothvinnyclothvinny,’ once she got into the hallway.