Goodness

by Tim Parks

  Grandfather was furious when I told him and there was the most almighty row. She was putting her prayer rubbish before the welfare of her bloody family. Wasn’t it enough that her husband had been killed by a bunch of nignogs? Wasn’t it enough that she lived on the social, that we couldn’t afford decent clothes? Mother said Eddie had been divorced, she could never marry a man who had broken a solemn vow to someone else. Otherwise what did promises mean? Grandfather was livid. He spat. Peggy said everybody got divorced and she couldn’t, see the problem, especially seeing as they liked each other. Eddie was fab. Mother didn’t cry; Mother only cried when she was afraid for your soul. ‘Maybe if I stayed at home and did nothin’ all day I’d ‘ave more of a chance of getting married,’ Mavis said.

  It was a nasty scene and partly my fault, since I had hoped the others would be able to change her mind and we could move into Eddie’s big house over in Ealing. Also I honestly believed it would be the best thing for my mother. Grandfather raved on and on. I seem to remember it was on this occasion that he hit her. When the whole thing got too painful I went out the back and kicked a ball against the wall. I decided that after I had escaped my family and was in control of my life, I would never be gratuitously mean or violent, as Grandfather was, but then nor would I ever put up with anybody or any situation that made life unbearable, as Mother did. I would be honest and reasonable, generous where generosity was due, and I would always always choose the road that led to a happy, healthy, normal life.

  Wasn’t that a fair stab at a moral code? For a fourteen-year-old. And one I honestly do believe I’ve stuck to.

  Although only a month or so ago, when she found my scrapbook, Shirley said: ‘You are aware you’re not human, aren’t you? You are aware of that? Because I know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Only too human,’ I replied, ‘to go by what’s in those papers.’

  But Shirley had become one of the walking wounded herself by this time.

  A Certain Grace

  Aunt Mavis finally found her Mr Right. Bob Hare was about ten years her younger, unemployed, slim to the point of frail and a Mormon. When he spoke it was with the extreme and unfriendly caution of somebody who is not expecting a fair trial. Oh, God,’ Grandad announced after his first visit, ‘a turd on two legs. And I thought I’d seen it all.’

  Bob spent his days proselytising on doorsteps in Shepherd’s Bush and Holland Park. Although timid, he was obviously grimly determined, constantly summoning up all his courage to get a foot in the door and jabber out his lines: the Book of Mormon, the moral decay of our society, the only road to salvation, the importance of the family, what have you. Naturally the reaction he was most at home with was rebuff. He drew the dole and rent relief, which disgusted my grandfather, and was unhealthily pale and sickly-looking in a pinched, persecuted way. If he had any attraction at all it was that haunted and haunting, thin-boned, soft-eyed passion you often find in black-and-white photos of refugees and general strikers. Mother saw red, though she was careful to call him ‘Poor dear Bob’. Aunt Mavis was having none of it and after only a couple of months married him without telling any of us, so that late one Saturday afternoon, there she was, tubby in tight slacks, gathering her clobber together and setting off for a bedsit in Haringey.

  Where very soon she miscarried. Not once but twice. This much I learnt from Peggy who had overheard a conversation between Mother and Grandfather. Mother, who blamed herself terribly for this injudicious marriage and visited regularly, asked me to come with her to cheer Mavis up, telling me only that she was depressed. I refused. My mother insisted. Why should I? I asked. Had Mavis ever come to see me? Perhaps I was just annoyed that at sixteen or seventeen, or whatever I now was, I still wasn’t to be let in on the serious and intimate information in the family, I was being treated like a child, my opinion wasn’t required. I told her I wouldn’t go unless Mavis asked me herself. Mother said this attitude was unchristian of me and selfish. I pointed out that no one else was being asked to go, not Peggy, not Grandfather. ‘We can go into town afterwards,’ she pleaded, ‘perhaps treat you to something you want to see.’ For it was and still is so important to Mother that an appearance of family solidarity be kept up.

  We took two long London bus-rides through depressing streets, the new estates that were already slums. There was a terraced house, four flights of uncarpeted stairs, a dingy yellow door where a rag did for a doormat and a note said: ‘Bell don’t work. Knock.’

  I blame my mother really for never finding out more about Mavis and what was wrong with her. I mean, it’s one thing being good and generous to all and sundry, but my own feeling is that we have certain strategic responsibilities to the members of our family that are far more important. Mavis was obviously not quite right in the head. One knew that if only from the way people instinctively treated her with condescension, not unkindly, but with indulgence rather, the way you treat animals, half-wits, tiny babies. Yet my mother never enquired into what might lie behind this. I have no memory of any doctor ever being invited to pronounce on her odd facial features or retarded mental development. She was just accepted from the start for what she was, dumb, childish, ugly. And while it’s all very well saying we’re all God’s creatures whatever’s the matter with us, I do believe that Mother failed in her duty here.

  Bob was out to see the social security people. Mavis was in bed, eating sweets, smoking. Fishing for a piece of toffee stuck to her teeth, she talked about her miscarriages quite openly in my presence, despite initial frowns and signs of discouragement from my mother. Mother asked had the doctors said anything about why, and Mavis laughed and said, nothing that made any sense. She blew out smoke through one nostril and then the other. She and Bob were determined she said. They had mostly got married for the kids. He was mad about them.

  I wanted to go because of the smell, the unpleasantness, and then the embarrassing inanity of my aunt’s twitter. She was showing some baby clothes she had bought now. She was sure it was going to be a boy. She giggled. When it finally decided to turn up. I remember her big pear-shaped body heaving from one side of the bed to another to pick things up off the floor; she let out grunts, her cigarette flecking the blankets with ash. I was desperate to go, I get quite frantic sometimes when I find myself in unpleasant situations, I simply can’t bear it, I feel I will die of unpleasantness; but Mother of course felt duty bound to wash the dishes, hoover the carpet, save the unsaveable. I offered to help, to speed things up, but was told to keep Mavis company, drink my tea.

  I stood by the bed with my hands in my pockets. I didn’t want any tea and I had spent my whole childhood in the same house as Mavis without ever talking to her. Was it likely we would find anything to say to each other now? I told her we were going into town afterwards to see the Queen’s stamp collection. I told her Peggy had got herself a dog but then never bothered to look after it, she was so busy playing the drums in a rock group all the time. Grandfather loathed the thing. I told her I was going to university in a year or two so as to be able to leave home. Mavis licked a thumb. I asked her if she liked being married, and she said it was all right and stopping work was the best thing that could ever have happened to her, not having to get up so early and have your hands ruined by those hot machines. ‘Which reminds me,’ she said. ‘Where’s me lipstick?’

  Bob came back. He stood frail and knotty-haired in the doorway watching my mother down on her knees having a go at crud on the carpet. The room was quite big, maybe fifteen by fifteen, but it had everything, kitchenette, bed, table, chairs, sofa, so it was cluttered, with just the one orange-curtained window and a busy road behind to rattle it.

  ‘No need to do that,’ he said brusquely. ‘I’d have done that.’

  When he got closer to us you couldn’t not be aware he’d been drinking. He looked belligerent, ready to snap.

  ‘We clean the place every day,’ he insisted. His eyes were pink.

  Preparing to leave, Mother made a whole pantomine of signs with he
r eyes for him to come outside and have a word about Mavis. A rock would have understood, but Bob’s strained face merely filled with puzzlement. I was tugging at Mother’s coat cuff to be gone. Mavis was propped up in bed staring chinlessly. How old must she have been? Thirty-six? Thirty-eight? Mother made her signs again. Perhaps half understanding, Bob said: ‘We’re okay. We don’t need help from no one.’ He was tense.

  ‘Cheerie bye,’ Mother called past him to her sister. At the corner of the stairs we heard raised voices above us. Shouting. Mother hesitated one short second in mid step, then quickened her pace.

  With what relief I let myself out into the street and took a breath of fresh air! I had hurried on ahead. For life, as I have so often insisted to Shirley of late, should have a certain grace, shouldn’t it? A certain grace. Please. Otherwise I do believe one might as well be dead.

  A Classic Case

  The first time I threw in my weight in an attempt to tip the scales toward sanity and common sense was on the occasion of Peggy’s first pregnancy. I would have been living in Leicester by then. Shirley and I had moved in together, having found ourselves quite a decent semi some miles from the university; it was pricey, but we shared with a couple of other students and Mr Harcourt, her father, unwittingly provided what I couldn’t always afford.

  It would be difficult to exaggerate what a release this change of scene was, how wonderful at last, at last, not to have to worry that Mother would find out what one was up to, not to have to face her silent and suffering reproach, her insistent, if never spoken, ‘Be thou me! Be thou me!’ I didn’t go back home from one end of term to the other and certainly not for such minor events as Grandfather’s prostectomy or Aunt Mavis’s suicide attempt. Mother wrote asking me to come and I wrote back asking what possible help could I be, and explaining that the important thing for me surely was to get the best degree possible and so escape the poverty trap that in the future world of high technology and high unemployment people from my sort of unskilled lower middle-class background were in every danger of falling into.

  Mother wrote to say she understood, though it would be nice if I could make it home just sometimes, and she kept me up to date on such events as the death of Peggy’s dog Jagger (fed chicken bones by Grandfather), the church meetings she spoke at, what she had cooked when so and so and so and so, who were missionaries in Borneo or clergymen from Nigeria, had come to lunch, her contacts with Peggy (scrubbing clean some slum my sister was squatting in, lending her ten pounds she would never see again), stories of a stray cat she had taken in, a tramp she had fed who had walked off with Grandfather’s favourite lighter, so and so who had been converted when so and so came to speak to the youth fellowship, conversations with the next door neighbours about the state of the sewage pipes under the garden, our sycamore that took light from their front room, the rotting fence they wanted to fix and Mother couldn’t afford to, etc. etc.

  I didn’t go home. I was happy as I had never been before: work, play, parties, independence, self-indulgence, Shirley. Until mid way through the third year Mother sent a telegram: ‘Peggy in family way, please please come.’

  It was a classic case of people not doing what was most sensible and convenient for everybody concerned, and thus a forerunner of events to come. Worth dwelling on. Mavis, I discovered on arrival home (Mother’s letters were clearly rather less informative than they liked to present themselves), had come back to live in Gorst Road after swallowing a half bottle of bleach. Her second attempt. Bringing only the minimum dole with her, she spent her days listening to old Elvis Presley records in her room and whining about Bob who had now left the Mormons and joined some Eastern fringe religion based in Indonesia and run by a charismatic figure known as the Bapi. This had disorientated Mavis. The Bapi had ordered Bob, as he did all his converts, to take a new name. So Bob was now Raschid. The root cause of their break-up had apparently been that Mavis, in a surprising show of independence, had infuriated Bob by refusing to call him Raschid or to contemplate changing her own name. She was Mavis and she liked to be called Mavis. I suppose the only positive thing about all this was that it was a good story to tell at dinner parties. Financially it was a disaster.

  Peggy meanwhile had been squatting in Islington playing drums in a small folk group and helping in a War on Want shop on Camden High Street which had been raided for drugs on three occasions. Thrown out of the squat a few days before, she had temporarily returned home, more to make a visit than out of any real need for refuge, since Peggy could have found a bed at a moment’s notice almost anywhere in the city, so extensive was and is her network of friends, or rather of those people who immediately recognise in her one of their own subculture.

  She came home and over tea quite by the way and without the slightest sense of momentousness, told Mother that she was pregnant. Later in the same conversation, throughout which Mother had with her customary infinite caution been trying to find out more, Peggy asked her for a large, indeed by our family standards huge, sum of money, without specifying why she needed it. At which Mother had quickly put an old-fashioned two and two together and telegrammed me.

  I arrived in the afternoon towards three. In a clearly agitated state, so unlike the serene air of wisdom she would offer her walking wounded, Mother caught me at the door before I could ring the bell, so as to grab a private word: she had stalled Peggy over the issue of the money, she said, though in reality she could never afford such a sum. She had stalled her to prevent her from going elsewhere before I arrived. She wanted me to talk to her rather than doing it herself because she knew Peggy considered her something of a religious fuddy duddy whereas coming from me the advice would have much more authority. Peggy respected me. She was always saying how much common sense I had and how well I was doing. And of course I was young. Everybody set so much store by what generation you belonged to these days. I must tell her that it was wrong to have an abortion. Quite wrong. It was killing a child. It was murder. There was nothing more one could say about it and all the modern arguments in its favour were just unadulterated institutionalised selfishness. How could they be anything but? A child was alive and you killed it, and it was so shameful that something that called itself the women’s movement supported such carnage. Peggy must have the baby. She must. If she didn’t want it afterwards, Mother herself would keep it. Something somehow could always be arranged. There were so many people wanted babies and couldn’t have them.

  I was a shade overwhelmed. Every day, or at least every month of her life in her role as self-appointed social worker Mother must have dealt with more or less similar situations; she’d had plenty of girls from the church come to her pregnant by the wrong man, or by the right man at the wrong time. Yet her sense of urgency now, her determination to persuade, was extraordinary. The wrinkled corners of her soft mouth trembled. Her hands were clasped together with unnatural force. Her living soul-self seemed to be concentrated in the fluttering, watering eyes looking at me so intensely. You could see how for her, for my mother, a simple suburban abortion was raised to the level of a vast metaphysical showdown between good and evil. There were angels and demons perched all over the furniture.

  ‘Please, George,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  Fresh, or rather stale, from coach and tube, still struggling a little to reaccustom myself to the prayer-meeting rhetoric, I pointed out that Peggy could hardly want the money for an abortion, since abortions, like it or not, were now free on the health service. Mother stopped. She was breathing quickly: ‘Oh, of course. Of course. How stupid of me. How stupid!’ And she asked: ‘Is there any chance she doesn’t know?’

  Peggy apparently was out the back soaking up the year’s first sunshine. I said I would go and talk to her, get to the bottom of it at once. ‘Please,’ Mother said again. ‘Okay,’ I said.

  So far we had talked in undertones amidst the pungent shoe and old geranium smells of the porch, but now, crossing living room and kitchen to reach the back, I was struck as never before by t
he dinginess of my old home. The wallpaper was a glazed yellow brown, the carpet threadbare – a rug aslant, itself badly worn, rather obviously covering the hole by the passage door. Sofa and armchair with their washed out once elastic covers were more than ever tattered and shapeless.

  I looked, and found it desperately poignant to think of my dear mother wasted in that unpromising environment. I felt a surge of moral energy. I was the success of the house. I was about to graduate. These people needed help and it was up to me to give it to them. Rather than staying away, I should be making regular visits to check the situation out, see what ought to be done.

  I opened the back door. Outside was a twice folded handkerchief of lawn surrounded by rosebushes and other, for me nameless, flowers which my mother somehow found time to cultivate and water and worry about. They about half-hid the black creosoted fence that sagged behind. I stepped out, ducked under a line straining with damp washing, and found Peggy sprawled on a patch of dandelions in bra and pants, exposing her chunky pale body to sunshine that seemed barely warm. A scruffy little dog nobody had told me about was idly licking her ribs.

  ‘Peggy.’

  She sat up and broadly smiled surprise. ‘You too!’ she said. ‘Quite a reunion. How nice.’ Falling forward as her body came up, her breasts were plump. She stroked the little dog. ‘Do you like Theo? He waylaid me on the Heath and refuses to go away.’

  I pushed aside a damp green nylon sheet and squatted down. I paused. I said: ‘Mother tells me you’re pregnant.’

  She was squinting still to adjust her eyes. ‘Oh you’ve grown a moustache.’ She burst out into one of her laughs. ‘Makes you look a bit AC/DC.’

  In a low voice, I explained that Mother had telegrammed for me to come down to persuade her not to have an abortion, but that in fact I was entirely on her side. Entirely. So not to worry. Of course she should have an abortion. The feminists were perfectly right. It was her body to do what she wanted with. It was her decision. If she went and had a baby now what kind of career could she ever expect to have? Not to mention the poor child growing up in these slummy surroundings, with not even much prospect of work at the end of the day, and then the present international climate, the threat of nuclear war and so on. Was it a world to bring kids into? I’d support her one hundred per cent if Mother started putting on any pressure, in fact I felt just about ready for a showdown, let her know what I thought about her repressive religious ideas, though seeing as it was really none of her business the best thing would be simply not to say anything and then to present her with a fait accompli. If she . . .