“Yeah. But. You’re his son?”
Dad remained frozen in time, saggy-gobbed.
“Where is she now?”
“Might be upstairs.”
“Upstairs? In this pub?”
“Didn’t he tell you?” said the landlord. “They couldn’t afford the rent on the old place so I let them use our spare room.”
“How long ago was that?”
He shrugged. “Three years? Maybe a bit less?”
Hang on. “So you’re saying that Mrs Dextrose didn’t travel with him, on his last ‘expedition’?” I couldn’t help the quote marks.
“Like I said, they moved in upstairs, then he left soon after without a word to anyone. She was hopping mad! We started to wonder whether he’d died, but she wasn’t having any of it. You are in for an earful when she gets hold of you, Harry!”
I pushed Dad with the palm of my hand. “You bloody old fool. You never lost her! She never even went with you!” I was laughing despite myself.
He winced.
“So she’s here now?” I asked the landlord.
“Hang on, I’ll call up…”
He went out back and I heard: “Mrs Dex-trose? Mrs Dextrose?”
I could barely contain my excitement and trepidation. I was to be reunited with my mother!
Robin Botham reappeared. “Not there,” he said. “Must be out at the parade.”
Dad and I exchanged glances.
“You lads care for a quick one, then?” said the landlord. “On the house!”
We didn’t look back. Not even Dad.
The melee in the lane outside the pub had calmed down. As I sought my bearings I noticed for the first time the sign hanging up on the wall: The Dog and Duck, featuring a painting of a brown-and-white hunting dog and a duck, craning its neck. Something clicked in my mind’s eye.
That wasn’t a cow and the moon – it was a dog and a zero. The cricket version of zero: a duck. The Dog and Duck!
So the demon juice had worked after all. Somewhere, way at the back of Dextrose’s mind, among the stacks of detritus, the empty bottles and the used prophylactics, he’d been aware of his wife’s situation all along. If only his drawing skills had been better, we might have made the connections.
But this was no time for recriminations. They could come later, at the reunion.
Grabbing Dad’s hand, I pulled him along with me in the direction the crowd had been heading, trying to force some impetus into his frustrating gait.
We emerged shortly into a square, humming with massed, expectant voices and lit up on all sides by the orange caress of flickering flames. The torchlight parade was starting. A clock struck eight.
How the hell were we going to spot one particular old lady among this mess of people?
“Dad, what does Mum look like?” It seemed an odd question to be asking.
“Long silver hair,” he offered. “And a woman’s face.”
Heart racing, I scanned the crowd seeking out women of a certain age. It was all I had. Mostly there were families with children in tow, whom I could discount, though there were sufficient oldies milling about to make the task a nightmare.
The flaming torches comprised long, pus-coloured wax candles, held in a cardboard tube with a circular hand-guard, so they looked like toy swords. Indeed, some of the children were using them as such, play-fighting with siblings and friends, while parents tried to wrestle the weapons off them, citing health-and-safety. I could sense the St John’s Ambulance folk licking their lips.
In the back of my mind was the knowledge that, if we did fail, we could track Mrs Dextrose to the pub later. But I wanted to find her now. I had to. Already I could imagine the warmth and amazement of a reunion among those tiny real fires.
As we turned a corner of the square the crowd was funnelling down one particular street, presumably heading for the sea to confront the Moren.
“Anything?” I asked Dad.
He shook his head.
“What about her?” I asked, pointing towards a nearby bent old lady wearing a bobble-hat, whose face resembled a sultana.
“Minking cheek!” he shot back.
We followed the flow out of the square, shuffling along the edge of the parade, as the river of contented souls in rainwear and thick jumpers, revelling in the community vibe, made its way towards the ocean. I was too tense to share their enjoyment.
As we crossed one junction Dad suddenly gripped my arm.
“Mink!” he hissed through clenched teeth.
I followed his gaze, my pupils flitting over the scene, taking snapshots then moving on, until they alighted upon the likeliest candidate.
She was wearing a blue, rubbery-looking mackintosh, and a bright-yellow waterproof hat, such as trawlermen wore. Hanging down over the back of the mac was a ponytail of silvery-blonde hair. She was shorter than the average promenader, and I had only glimpsed her briefly when the people around her shifted positions.
“Blue mac, yellow hat?” I asked.
“Think so. Me eyes…”
When I looked back among the crowd, she had disappeared. I scanned for the yellow hat, but it had become submerged among the flesh and clothing.
On impulse I threw myself into the throng, leaving Dad behind, and spent several minutes pleading, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” pushing people aside and spinning frantically, searching for that hat. Hemmed in and pestered along I became disorientated and lost any sense of where I was in relation to where the woman in the sou’wester had been.
One man, old enough to know better, actively pushed against me to block my route, as if getting to the front of the parade might be some badge of honour.
“I’m looking for my mother!” I told him.
“Aren’t we all,” he snapped back.
Frustrated, I headed once again for the sidelines, where I found Dad looking distressed. “Where’d yer go?” he demanded.
“Where do you think I went?”
I pulled him along until we neared a junction where the parade had stopped, giving me a chance to rediscover my bearings. As I once again flitted my gaze over the sea of heads, there, at the front of the queue, I spotted the yellow hat.
Its owner was no more than ten yards away, but with a sardine-packed scrum of people between us.
I shook my Dad’s arm, pointing. “Look, there she is! There she is! Call to her!”
He did not. Guilt and fear had visibly gripped his troubled mind and though his mouth opened and shut it made no sound. He shook his head.
So it was down to me. I wondered whether it would always be thus.
“Mrs Dextrose! Mrs Dextrose!” I called out, waving my arms.
The people nearest me turned to stare; the woman in the yellow hat did not. The background burble must have drowned out my calls.
I tried again, louder.
“MRS DEXTROSE! MRS DEXTROSE!”
No reaction from her, though people further into the crowd glanced at me curiously. It crossed my mind that the woman in the yellow hat might not even be Mrs Dextrose.
“MRS DEXTROSE!”
The yellow hat turned. It turned towards me and I saw its owner’s face for the first time. Keen-eyed and small, fresh complexion, little or no make-up. Vibrant-looking. The sort of face that enjoys watching trees in a storm.
I heard Dad say, “Mink,” just above a whisper.
That was her.
My mother’s face. My mother’s face. Younger than I had expected, certainly plenty younger than Dad. Mid-fifties?
Her gaze alighted just to my right. She had spotted him. Her eyes widened and narrowed in a moment, her lips pursed and she shouted something that I could not hear but which caused those around her to see where she was looking, while one parent covered her daughter’s ears.
I watched as she pushed aside the few people in front of her and started moving quickly – in the opposite direction from us. Mrs Dextrose was getting away.
I couldn’t let that happen. Whatever she thought of he
r feckless husband, I was sure she would want to see me.
“MUM! MUM!” I began pushing my way through the crowd. This time they pressed themselves aside.
The yellow hat stopped moving.
Once again her head turned, but this time her eyes rested on mine.
That was when I heard it. ‘Ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting!’ So much more urgently than the previous time I’d heard that little bell ring.
I read my mother’s lips – “Pilsbury?” – that was what she said – as the tram came into view from behind the buildings on the far side of the road. It caught her a glancing blow on her shoulder, spinning her round and sending the yellow hat flying into the air. A gasp rose from the crowd. I saw the tram driver’s face, inches from his windscreen as he stood up and leaned forward, screaming silently, arm still pumping the bell-pull as he drove on past.
‘Ting-ting-ting-ting-ting-ting!’
I lost sight of her when she went down.
People had gathered around, encircling her, like children do at a playground fight. But there was no chanting, only an eerie hush. I broke through them.
One man was placing a rolled up coat under her head; a woman standing above him was speaking urgently on a mobile telephone. Everyone else just watched.
There was so much blood on the road.
I threw myself down beside her prone form. “This is my mother,” I told anyone listening.
This wasn’t how it was meant to happen.
She must have gone down on the back of her head, because her ponytail was engorged with blood, unrecognisable as hair. It looked like a trail of gore. Her blue mackintosh had fallen open. She wore a tatty old striped V-neck jumper – red, black and blue horizontal stripes – over a lacy white collared shirt. A silver locket hanging from a fine chain rested at the base of the V of the jumper.
Her eyes were closed.
Beauty and grace, dressed for comfort not for effect.
Was this how I was to remember her?
As I gazed at her face, I felt for her hand and found it. It was small and warm. I closed my fingers around hers and gave them a squeeze. She did not respond.
This is your mother, I told myself.
So how had it come to this?
I studied the lines and contours of her face. Delicate crows’ feet around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. Her cheekbones were high and her chin narrow, she had small, pouty lips, unpainted. Elfin. Her eyebrows were very dark, in contrast to her silvery hair, and she had a small, dark mole above her left eyebrow.
Although I’d tried to picture her recently, many times, I had never arrived at an image I was happy with, which I felt might tally reasonably with the reality. What I had expected was a careworn woman, tired, with shadows under her eyes. Bitter and abandoned.
I had been wrong.
“Mum?” I whispered. “Mum?”
A splatter of blood marred one of her cheeks and I wiped it away. As I was doing so, someone arrived beside me on their knees, put their arms beneath her and lifted her torso off the ground.
Harrison Dextrose.
Her arms and head flopped backwards as he did so.
As he cradled her limp form against his chest, burying his head into the crook of her neck, he kept repeating over and over: “Frankie. Frankie. Frankie. Frankie…”
She looked so fragile there.
*****
Francesca Dextrose’s funeral was so well-attended that the little crematorium outside Dritt-on-Sea had a speaker in the grounds, with seats arranged so that those who could not fit inside could listen to the service. To do so they had braved a chill northerly wind. I’d been asked whether I wanted to say a few words by the lady in charge, but had declined.
I mean, what would I have said? Nothing I could think of would have suited the occasion.
Dad spruced himself up and it was quite a transformation. He lived out of a metal trunk at the end of his bed, from which he’d dug out an old suit. Although it was khaki-coloured and creased in all the wrong places it showed willing, with a nod to his personality. He cut chunks off his beard, slicked down his hair and donned what I imagined was his one and only tie (brown).
Most of those who turned up seemed to know him – once they’d seen past the cleanliness and sobriety – and offered condolences; however, he courted few conversations, preferring to remain in his seat up front with his head lowered. I left him to his thoughts and hung around on the periphery, wondering what I had lost, secretly, guiltily grateful that I did not know. All I had was what might have been, a series of ifs and buts, intangibles, as impossible to grasp as a shadowplay in mist.
What if she had been – as her appearance had suggested – a sprightly, effervescent, joyful woman, who grabbed every one of life’s opportunities? Perhaps her husband’s lengthy absences were a relief to her, rather than the burden I had imagined? Would she have loved her son, had circumstance not dragged him away from her?
And what was that circumstance? Why had they abandoned me?
I had never known my birth mother and now she was in a wooden box. A waxwork, a puppet separated from its puppeteer. A cadaver.
I thought – feared – I might remember her face in death, that immobile expression, captured forever in my mind’s eye. But I didn’t. By the morning after her accident, it was like a half-completed jigsaw puzzle, and the pieces only disappeared, leaving me with a mere photofit. Mrs Dextrose had left me with more questions than answers, and I could not help but wonder whether I would be better off trying to forget her, as if I had never chased that yellow hat that awful night.
No one at the funeral asked who I was or why I was there, and Dad can’t have mentioned me to anyone. I doubt he could have coped with the complication. There was no wake, everyone simply drifted away.
Although I had worried that he would hit the bottle immediately after his wife’s death, he had proven me wrong. Instead, he had spent the four days prior to the funeral sitting on her bed in their twin room above the Dog & Duck, sifting through her effects, stopping often and staring into space. (I supposed it was inevitable they would have slept in separate beds, although the circumstances above the pub had left them no choice.)
At night I tucked myself into her bed and he into his own. I don’t think I could have done that had I known her. Her smell lingered on the pillows, a floral aroma I matched to a perfume on the dressing table. I sprayed a little onto the back of my hand and, having checked that Dad wasn’t looking, dabbed some of the evaporating liquid onto my neck. Immediately afterwards I felt weird and rushed to the bathroom to wash it off, fighting off nausea. That was the last time I touched her perfume.
It was a very old room, with a wooden floor so solid it made no sound when trodden upon, and beams in the ceiling, all original features. (Robin the landlord told me the Dog & Duck had been built during the late-16th century, back when Dritt-on-Sea had been a haven for sea-faring folk and their whores.) A two-bar heater plugged into the mains provided the only heat. We existed with both bars on.
A sewing machine had been left out on her bedside table, which she must have worked at while sitting on her bed, as there was no chair; a pair of trousers she had been mending were folded beside it. Her bedspread was very colourful and patchwork, and I felt certain she had made it herself.
Her bookshelf was so crammed with books that others had had to be piled in front of it. Historical biographies, of politicians, writers, poets, artists, warmongers, peacemakers, romances and the classics, plays and plenty of detective fiction, and, I suppose inevitably, explorers – but no copy of The Lost Incompetent (though there were a couple of dozen pristine copies stacked beside Dad’s bed). She seemed to have a thing for Inspector Morse.
What little wall space there was, not obscured by shelving, the dresser or the wardrobe, she had filled with pictures, photographs and postcards. The pictures and photographs were of fishing vessels, tall ships, lobster pots set at arty angles, salty types with pipes and nets, as if she had tak
en a keen interest in the local area and its erstwhile industry.
It was the postcards that intrigued me the most – three of them, picturing ‘Sunny Barbados’, ‘Weaving in Lanarkshire’ and ‘Welcome to Basingstoke’ – and I peeled off the Sellotape attaching them to the wall to read the backs when Dad had excused himself one time. Had I been expecting anything from him to her, I was to be disappointed. Auntie Milly, Cedric and Lilith, respectively, had signed those cards. I wondered who they were, but did not ask.
There was no clock, or timepiece of any description, in the room. That had surprised me.
Only on the afternoon before the funeral, when Dad had left to buy some provisions, did I pluck up the courage to look in the wardrobe and drawers. Despite my misgivings, I had longed to look through her private things. She was dead, so what harm could it do? Besides, perhaps, to myself? In the end I could not help it; I had to satisfy my curiosity.
The large drawers at the bottom of the wardrobe were a disappointment: just some sheets, blankets and bulky woollens. I flicked through the clothing hanging up: a modest collection. It was all functional wear, suited to days out rambling or chilly evenings in the open, bar one slinky, sequined dress tucked right at the back. I tried to imagine her in it, but failed. Likewise, the footwear on the shelf below: two pairs of clumpy shoes, one pair of wellies, and a delicate pair of patent leather strapless high-heels with golden buckles. When had she last been treated to a night out, I wondered?
The four small drawers in the dressing table contained underwear – I opened and closed that one quickly – skirts and shirts, a plastic carton containing make-up and a cheap velvet box of jewellery. The make-up collection was small but the items were well-used. Two lipsticks, a box of eyeshadows (beige tones), tube of foundation, some blusher and an eyebrow pencil. I opened one of the lipsticks, a shade of pink, and saw the indentation her lip had worn into its edge.
It didn’t require an expert to know that there was nothing worth stealing from the jewellery box. Beads and brooches, a couple of silver rings, a silver locket, oval-shaped… I realised – at least, I was fairly certain – it was the one that had been hanging around her neck. Should I open it? I sat staring at it for many minutes, until I became convinced that Dad would return any moment and that he would not like what he saw.
Looking for Mrs Dextrose Page 24