Our father, by necessity, often ate in the school dining-hall, enduring, maybe even enjoying, the pomp and the gowns and the Latin grace – Omo Lux Domestos Brobat, as Liddie and I had sometimes chanted – but we tried, when we came home to him, during our half-terms and holidays, to do our best over the catering for his sake. We were, I think, unique in being able to make lumps even in instant mashed potatoes and gravy mix and powdered custard. Usually we gave up and opened tins of beans and soup and delicious Patak’s Kashmiri Lamb Curry. We saved our creativity for making him fudge and cocoa and peppermint creams.
Liddie had a project for us to work our way through all the ‘serving suggestions’ that we saw on the tins and boxes from the supermarket. The cracker boxes had illustrations labelled ‘serving suggestions’ that showed a row of four savoury biscuits, the first with a sliver of cheese, topped with a small stick of celery.
‘Now that’s a good idea,’ Lydia said. The next picture depicted an identical biscuit decorated with a small, half-moon shrimp on a blodge of cottage cheese. Once we found a box of Tesco’s Coconut Cakes where the ‘serving suggestion’ invited us to place the cakes on a silver platter daintily laid with a doily.
‘Let’s do it, Ellie,’ Lydia said. ‘Only we don’t know how to make doilies.’
‘Yes we do,’ I said. ‘You fold up a sheet of paper into quarters and cut bits out of the sides. It’s like making snowflakes at playschool.’
‘Brilliant,’ Liddie said. ‘Get the scissors there, Ellie.’
If we weren’t floating on ‘serving suggestions’ we immersed ourselves in the ‘perfection recipe’ that adorned the label of an old cocoa tin we had found at the back of the larder. I expect our mother had banished it there in her time. It not only told you how to make cocoa boringly everyday wise, but it offered a de luxe alternative; it offered perfection. For this, one mixed the cocoa with a modicum of cold milk, then turned the blend of both into a saucepan containing the bulk of the milk before heating through. The method was intended to produce the sort of cocoa that didn’t leave your teeth on edge, and it allowed Liddie and me to feel like connoisseurs for having chosen it – though Father, who is from an old army family, is always happy to eat and drink almost anything, including the sort of cocoa in which the spoon will stand up in a half-inch of silt on the bottom of the mug.
Only once did we have a go at a seriously ambitious pudding: an Austrian torte, which we tried to make shortly after my return from the Hubert-und-Norbert experience. The recipe called for fifteen eggs and a whole pint of cream. There were only two eggs in the larder, but Lydia had once read, in a wartime cookbook of her godmother’s, that a tablespoon of vinegar could deputize for an egg, so we made the Austrian torte with two eggs and thirteen spoons of vinegar. I must admit that not even our father could be prevailed upon to believe that the resulting mess was how the Viennese liked their cakes.
During term-time weekends, when we were swept off to stay with our mother and her new man in Cambridge – and where we were expected to pull our weight in the kitchen with regard to a daunting range of distinctly unskilled chores – our sessions never took on this dotty, Blue Peter-ish quality. We were always much too subdued to fool about in the male usurper’s house and we felt not a little like Cinderella girls, or perhaps like sorcerer’s apprentices, left to peel potatoes and wash down surfaces, as we watched our mother, through the wide glass door, with her Garbo-like aura and her distinctly more townish clothes, making languid eyes at the incumbent.
My mother’s new husband was one Hugo Campbell, a person who, to Liddie’s eyes and mine, was a somewhat precious and foppish scholar, not notable for his emotional warmth or easy humanity. He and my mother had fallen precipitously in love – or had, at least, been precipitously enchanted by each other’s air of calm, egotistical detachment. From that moment on, her life with us in the Worcestershire countryside had simply become a closed chapter; a thing that ceased to exist.
Her going had occurred when Liddie and I were twelve and thirteen, a time when one tends to change schools, and our father – perhaps typically of him – arranged, in response to this distressing new development, for us to be placed in a boarding school some ten miles from our mother’s new domicile. His action was, I think, built on the assumption that girl children had a greater need of their mothers, though, at the same time, he was adamant that he would not have us as day-to-day residents in Hugo Campbell’s house. My mother had us for weekends only and, during the holidays, we returned home to him.
The arrangement did not suit any of us terribly well. Lydia and I missed our home at a time when our lives had been turned upside down, and we resented the way we were coerced into spending weekends in Hugo’s house when what we wanted, if we couldn’t be at home, was to party with our new school-friends. And our mother, who had, I think, never really adjusted to life in the country after her life in Paris, had by now returned to work with gusto. Her mindset had reverted to that of a full-time professional woman, and Lydia and I sensed her impatience at the weekly prospect of having to play mother to us on her precious days off.
Meanwhile, for us, it was positively unnerving to watch her negotiate a different kitchen in order to serve up our food on different plates. It was as though we’d landed ourselves in some ghoulish self-catering holiday house where, by horrible oversight, the landlord was permanently in residence as part of the package. And I think it was in order to reassure Hugo that she did not come trailing two great parasitical appendages, that our mother went in for such a rigorous show of delegation and insisted on our exhibiting company manners, especially at mealtimes.
Hugo was evidently quite freaked by children and engaged with us only to fire the same round of dead-end questions at us across the table about our ‘O level’ subjects – an examination system that was, by then, already two years defunct.
‘Speak clearly, Ellen. Don’t mumble,’ Mother would say and she’d pull us up for not eating with sufficient enthusiasm. She was going in for a different style of cuisine, now that she was no longer in the house in which we had started out as little girls. The message we read from this was that she was cooking, not for us, but for Hugo, who evidently had a more sophisticated and adventurous palate than our father. I admit that we were probably silly and bigoted, but our altered situation made us wish to regress at weekends, not advance, and what we longed for, in place of all the monkfish and okra and whiffy foreign cheeses, was roast chicken and gravy, and apple crumble for pudding.
In front of Hugo, our mother always referred to our father as ‘the Headmaster’ – a mannerism that we found both belittling and weird. And, when we balked at eating anything we’d deemed a touch wayout, she’d say to him, ‘You see. The Headmaster’s children.’
It was shortly before the advent of the Stepmother that Lydia and I had conceived the idea that Father needed a dog. The truth is that, having gone to the dog rescue bent upon any sort of puppy just as long as it was fluffy, we had quickly been persuaded that what our father needed was a retired racing greyhound. It was our good luck that, in the event, Father and the greyhound bitch fell in love at first sight – though, of the two, Father was the less demonstrative.
‘Dear girls,’ he said, ‘you bad, unforgivable girls. How could you have taken a decision like this without consulting me?’ The greyhound merely watched him fixedly. Every time he opened his mouth to speak she dived in with her tongue and gave him sexy, wet French kisses.
‘Her name’s Dilly,’ we lied, because her registered name was Lady and we didn’t like it. It lifted our hearts to watch Father take off across the fields in his green wellies with the greyhound running in huge wide circles as though programmed by the racetrack to proceed in spiral movements. Sometimes, as she got scent of a rabbit, she would break her pattern and zigzag wildly, bringing all four feet together in the air.
The following year we chanced our arm still further and found the greyhound a husband. The result was eight greyhound puppies, most of who
se infancy I missed through my being away at university, but Lydia told me that they made it their business to bite the heads off all the wallflowers and to see to it that not a lupin was left standing. After that, she said, they had uprooted all the climbing plants and piddled on the grass until it yellowed. Our grandmother had then recommended the placing of a notice in the pages of Horse and Hound, which had resulted in queues of sensible country types – exactly Father’s sort of people – who turned up in Range Rovers and talked with Father about the escalating price of gundogs.
And then the puppies were gone – all but one, whose home had fallen through in the last minute. Another home was found, but the delay, in the event, proved vital. Four weeks passed before the family concerned were scheduled to return from a holiday and collect her. This meant that the puppy was still at home on the evening I was suddenly summoned from Edinburgh. It meant that the puppy never left us. It meant that the puppy was still with us on the day that my sister died.
* * *
When Lydia died, my father and the Stepmother had been married for only twenty-five months. They were in many ways an incongruous couple. She was tiny and more than twenty years his junior, and, to us countrified, boarding-school types, she seemed quite a radical progressive. Having got herself a degree and a teacher’s qualification, the Stepmother had pointedly acquired her first teaching job in a large urban comprehensive school in an area of social disadvantage.
Every morning, before anyone else got up, the Stepmother, sluiced, dressed and ready for work, would leave the house with its tall chimneys and its two wide staircases, its inlaid clocks and polished brass and whatnots and tallboys, and she would tiptoe through the vines of the kitchen garden to where she kept her rusty little VW Beetle. Then she would head out for what Father, somewhat archaically, called ‘the Smoke’.
Nonetheless, because, as was evident to Lydia and me, she loved him dearly, she had very soon got pregnant, at a time that must have been most inconvenient to her as a determined and energetic young teacher wanting to make a career for herself. Father’s somewhat fuddy-duddy reasoning was that he did not wish to deny her the experience of motherhood, even if at her age the matter did not seem pressing. By the time she had reached an age to be afflicted with maternal longings, he argued, he would be so advanced in years that the child would have an old age pensioner for a male parent.
When Father said ‘the child’, Lydia and I were fairly sure that, in his heart, he meant boy child. He meant a person who would depend upon him to assist with the construction of model aeroplanes and to guide his bowler’s arm. Admittedly, he has a stepson, Peter, who is the child of Liddie’s and my mother by her first marriage – a boy who was four years old when our parents met and who is almost six years my senior.
But Peter does not exactly meet my father’s case. Peter is a strange, dreamy type of whom, throughout our early childhood, Lydia and I made nothing, but we gradually came to admire and love him devotedly. He is a small, blond, balding homosexual who runs a dog rescue centre in Sussex. He runs it with his beautiful, crop-haired French lover, who is an undisputed Übermensch. The Übermensch is almost perpetually in waistcoat and designer stubble and grandad shirt. He stands six foot two in his socks and has alluring dimples that play around his mouth. Sometimes, if he wears braces or dungarees, and if he leans on a baling fork, he looks exactly like one of those hunky, dancing wife-abductors in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. And how fervently Liddie and I longed to be abducted by the Übermensch.
Once, when Peter and the Übermensch had first asked us to spend a half-term holiday, Lydia and I had come upon an unexpected barrage of resistance from both our parents; on Father’s part, a po-faced, unexplained reluctance that I see, with hindsight, had to do with our half-brother’s sexual orientation and, on our mother’s, with an unambiguously expressed sniffy conviction that we would come back flea-ridden and probably afflicted with rabies, tick-bite fever and mange.
In the event, they let us go: two little girls and a quorum of love-starved canines. The holiday was bliss. Our best thing, however, and one we never disclosed, was that from our bedroom, adjoining the men’s, we were able to lend an ear to the sounds of our half-brother’s sexual activities. These were nothing like the smoochy gasps and groanings we had occasionally overheard from adult heteros – noises that we always found embarrassing and invasive. These were far more like the noises of two boys fighting. Not gutter stuff; not flick-knife and broken bottle stuff; just the sort of thumping and wrestling entanglements that schoolboys enter into among friends and that always look so alarmingly physical and violent to uninitiated members of the female sex. Peter and the Übermensch made those POW! BASH! BAM! noises that emanate from Asterix and Obelix in uppercase balloons. (Or, as they say in the original French, TCHAC! PAFF! CLONC!) To us, with our background in a boys’ school, these were undisturbing and manly sounds; not groping but jousting. They were easier on the ear than the hetero stuff.
It was Peter whom Lydia and I had approached in the matter of Father’s ‘puppy’, and Peter who had instead steered us towards the greyhound bitch. She was a dog in a million, Peter said, and if our father didn’t like her, he would personally eat his hat. Peter’s hat was one of those panamas that you can roll up and put in a tube. He had even been able to piece together bits of the greyhound’s biography, since she had been quite a winner in her day, before she – and presumably her owner – had fallen on hard times. All Peter knew was that, at some point, the greyhound had fallen into the hands of a party of New Age travellers, because she’d been reported, abandoned and tethered among the burnt-out debris of a summer camp in Hove, where all she had found to eat were plastic bags that had blown her way in the wind. For her first days in Peter’s care she had passed sections of soiled plastic bag bearing vestiges of the exhortation to ‘Collect a Sainsbury’s Reward Card from the Homestore in Truro’. Yet here she was – confident, elegant, sociable and infinitely capable of love.
‘I run the dog rescue,’ Peter once said to the Stepmother in my hearing, ‘because every day I’m reminded that characters like me can land with their bums in the butter.’ By then I was just old enough to understand that dearest Peter might not have been speaking exclusively in metaphor.
As my sister and I had left to return to school after that glorious half-term holiday, Lydia had extracted a promise from the Übermensch.
‘When you and Peter get married,’ she said, ‘can Ellie and I please be your bridesmaids?’
‘Mais oui,’ said the Übermensch. ‘One of you the bridesmaid and one the best woman.’ He had declared Lydia and me to be the finest entertainment in England; better than those stupid comedy shows on the television. He slung our bags into the car and settled us inside. Then he blew us several saucy kisses as Peter drove us off.
And then my life, our lives, everything, went black. Not black like not remembering. Black like being lost in a dark place very far from home. I regret bitterly that I never saw my sister dead, but when my father left to identify her body, I was not at home. At the time I felt relieved. I was struggling to blink away an image that had kept recurring as my friend Pen had driven with me to the airport that night so that I could board the last plane out of Edinburgh; an image of Lydia’s face, like that of a cat she and I had once seen, struck by a car and lying dead in a gutter. All the planes of its face had been pushed sideways into stiff, ghoulish parallelograms.
At home, I pleaded for my sister not to be cremated and I begged to be allowed to take the greyhounds to her funeral. Strange priorities, perhaps, but Father conceded both. Lydia and I, having all too recently attended the funeral service of poor old Mr Kethley in the chapel of what was locally known as ‘the Crem’, had watched the box containing the remains of Mr Kethley slide – presumably at the touch of an invisible button under the clergyman’s foot – through a chute in the apse behind where the altar ought to have been.
The building had appeared to us until that moment much like any ot
her rather boringly modern church, but there, where one might have expected a depiction of Christ in Glory, was a dumb waiter’s hatch, an automated conveyor belt, a railway line for the ghost train to the burning fiery furnace. We thought it a trompe l’œil of bad taste; the ultimate last laugh. So I could not cope with the idea of Lydia entering that furnace – and yet in the event, I think that the grave was just as difficult.
The Stepmother reacted differently. She was disproportionately upset by the hideousness of all the coffins that the undertaker had on offer and thought them a violation. In these ways – while my father appeared bleakly, miserably undemonstrative – did we two women process the first stages of our shock and grief. We wept and screamed about cremations and coffins.
‘It’s an outrage,’ the Stepmother said. ‘An OUTRAGE! I don’t believe it. They’re all plastic mahogany veneer. They’re like those horrible seventies kitchen units.’ Lydia, she said, could not possibly be nailed up in any monstrosity of formica and polished brass like that.
The Stepmother threw herself into a frenzy of specialist consumer activity, until she discovered the Green Burial Service, which provided my sister with a beautiful, understated, manila cardboard coffin, its shape mercifully cuboid, like a large croquet box. It came with undyed hemp ropes made by a fair-trade collective in the Philippines and, with these ropes, my father and Peter performed the appalling task of lowering Lydia into the ground.
It feels to me still as if that lowering happened in slow motion. So too the throwing of earth and flowers. And all the time I felt myself drawn to the idea of jumping into the grave. I wanted the inexorable event to stop rolling. Had I been brave enough and expressive enough – had I perhaps been more genuinely like Lydia – I might have done what I felt impelled to do. Instead, I stood there, staring and staring into the hole, with the greyhounds beside me on their leads. Curious how, until that time, Hamlet had seemed to the two of us such a melodrama. In the event, jumping into the grave was exactly what I most wanted to do. Would I or would I not have gone crashing through the sturdy manila card to clutch at my sister in a last embrace? Would I have raised her? Would I at least have seen her face?
The Travelling Hornplayer Page 3