Enchantment

by Monica Dickens

‘If you want. Tell me what happened.’

  He sighed. ‘I clobbered Lilian.’ He had not told anybody that, although he thought that Jack might know, from store gossip.

  ‘Oh well,’ Helen said briskly, and got up. ‘I daresay she asked for it.’

  Dribbling and waving his arms, Julian came over to Tim and climbed painfully on to his lap, kicking his shin with his shoes. He leaned against Tim’s chest, breathing heavily, forced open his lips and tried to pull out his teeth. When Tim pretended to bite, Julian screamed and clutched a handful of Tim’s hair, jerking his head sideways. Tim screamed too.

  ‘Here.’ Helen put down plates with slices of cake. ‘This should keep you both quiet. He usually behaves better at the table. The school’s strict about that.’

  Julian would not touch the cake until Helen had also put down a banana which he moved to a certain precise spot, touching it again and again until he was satisfied it was exactly right.

  He grabbed for Tim’s cup of tea, and Helen said sternly, ‘No. If you want a drink, you must ask for it.’

  ‘How, if he doesn’t talk?’

  ‘Talk,’ Julian echoed obediently.

  ‘At school, they teach them signs for things like please and thank you, and I’m supposed to make him use them. Drink.’ She raised a cupped hand to her mouth. ‘Julian – look. Drink.’ The child kept on grabbing and whining.

  Feeling self-conscious, Tim made the ‘drink’ gesture. He and Helen must have looked like a couple of pantomime fools.

  ‘He’ll never sign for me,’ Helen said. ‘I’m a failure. Shall I give him his tea anyway?’

  ‘Yes.’ Tim felt in control. ‘Look, Prince Julian,’ he said. ‘I brought a picture for you.’

  It was a magazine colour photograph of a swan reflected in a lake, steering a gliding course among flowing white water lilies. Tim had taken an old photograph out of its frame, and fitted the swan picture into it. He held it up, moving it as Julian moved his eyes sideways away from it. ‘It’s yours.’ He put it on the table.

  ‘Make the sign for thank you,’ Helen said hopefully.

  ‘Listen.’ Tim sat opposite the beautiful boy, who was picking his piece of cake into its component parts of raisins and cherries and crumbs. ‘I’ll tell you a story.’ He looked fixedly at Julian, as he had looked at Norman to hypnotize him, and pretended that Julian was looking at him.

  ‘There was this prince, you see …’

  On the journey to Helen’s flat, with its irritating wait and change of buses, he had thought about the legend of the Sleeping Beauty, and the kiss that broke the spell.

  ‘This prince, he’d, like, been asleep for a hundred years. Lovely dreams, he had, of rivers and swans, and about how one day he would be a king with his own golden boat, and be the most clever and important and best-loved person in the whole land.’

  The dreams were Tim’s. He could see them pass behind his eyes. What hidden dreams flickered behind the child’s averted eyes?

  ‘They wanted him to wake up and be the king, only nobody could budge him. Want to know how they got him to wake up in the end?’

  Julian pressed his wet finger on to the last crumb of cake, then hammered the edge of the plate on to the swan picture, breaking the glass.

  Tim did not know whether Helen wanted to go to bed with him again or not. She did not say anything about meeting during the week when Julian was away at school, so Tim did not suggest it. He did not think his wobbly confidence could stand up to hearing her say no.

  Quite suddenly, Tim’s father became ill. He was in a bed in the hospital, and the doctor told Annie that it might be lung cancer and that he needed an operation.

  ‘Does he know, Mum?’

  ‘No, dear. Better he doesn’t.’

  But was it better to rob Little Hitler of the triumph of knowing that he was right and they were wrong about his chest?

  Tim went to the hospital with his mother. He did not want to go alone, and have nothing to say.

  ‘Shall I pretend I’ve found a job?’ he asked his mother, while they were waiting outside the ward for visiting time to start.

  She smiled. ‘It would please him.’ (Tim had thought of it as a defence, not an offering.) ‘What shall it be, then? Computer firm, local paper, school caretaker, secretary to a rich old lady?’ Annie plunged into the game. ‘No.’ She dropped her smile. ‘He’s very ill, but I’m afraid he’d still see through you.’

  Tim was at 23 The Avenue with his mother and Sarah (she had gone back to that name when she started drinking again), when the hospital rang to say that his father had not survived the operation.

  Tim stayed the night in his old room with the spooky trap door, while Sarah slept in the big Hitler bed with their mother. In the kitchen next morning, Sarah, looking ghastly, as she did these days without make-up, said, through her first cigarette, ‘How awful to die being someone that nobody liked.’

  ‘Mum liked him.’

  ‘Do her a favour.’ Sarah pushed back her sleep-tangled hair. ‘She’s got better taste than that.’

  Tim got home to find one of Harold’s little cards on the mat. ‘I got my i on U,’ and a crude drawing of an eye.

  Leave me alone. Tim threw the card into the waste-bin. I’m busy. I’m upset.

  He was surprised by the effect of his father’s death. He felt absolutely rotten for a few days. Now that it was too late, he liked his father better, and the sadness was for all the wasted time when they might have been friends. He unlocked Wallace’s workshop, and helped himself to a couple of the small woodworking tools, which were to be sold as a set, and put them criss-cross on the shelf over his bed at the flat. He began to build a little fantasy around the phantom of Wallace Kendall as a dependable father-figure, and himself as a deprived and grieving orphan.

  Brian and Jack sent Tim a sympathy card. ‘Through the post,’ Jack said, ‘will look more sincere than me just carrying it upstairs and shoving it through the slot.’

  ‘Especially dressed like that.’

  ‘He wouldn’t mind. Actually, he’s seen me cross-dressed.’

  ‘Oh, look, the boy’s as mad as a hatter already,’ Brian said. ‘Do you want to send him completely round the bend?’

  ‘Reality never hurt anyone.’

  ‘How did he take it?’ Brian asked, with a curious delight.

  ‘Like a man.’

  The grieving orphan was surprised by a belated answer to a job application, asking him to turn up for an interview at a fabric shop in Walker’s Piece, the pedestrian precinct that joined two of the town’s main streets.

  It was his first offer of an interview. Why wasn’t he jumping at the chance? Because I’m bereaved, he was able to tell himself, to disguise the truth that he was scared. Getting no answers to applications was damaging enough. Failing at an interview would undo him.

  For the decision, he turned once again to his oracle, the dictionary. The shop was called Sew What, so he opened the book at se, closed his eyes and let his finger fall on ‘seal’. Your fate is sealed, quoth the oracle.

  Yes, but which way? He tried j for ‘job’, and got ‘joyous’. Too good to be true. Just to make sure, he opened the book at f for ‘fabric’. His finger fell on ‘foothold’. His fate was sealed. He was about to get a foothold in the world of commerce again.

  The manageress of Sew What was brisk and spiky, with close-cut black hair decorated with a silver streak from brow to crown. The shop sold dress and curtain fabrics, and also patterns and dressmaking accessories of all kinds.

  ‘As an assistant, you would have to be familiar with all those lines.’ Mrs Barber eyed Tim narrowly.

  ‘Oh, I – I am.’ He could learn them up.

  ‘What’s this, then, Mr Kendall?’ She held out a small instrument with a spiked wheel, that looked like the gadget his mother used to cut pastry.

  He could not say, ‘My mother’s pastry cutter,’ so he said, ‘You got me there,’ with a wide-open smile to disarm her.

  After wa
rning him that the first person who had been hired for the job had lost it in a week for slack practices, she sent him away, with no sign in her face or voice of what his chances were.

  Nil. She might as well have said it then and there, instead of, ‘We’ll let you know.’

  Save the stamp. Depressed, Tim walked slowly past the narrow shop front to assure himself that the pitiful display of fanned-out fabric lengths could not be mentioned in the same breath as Webster’s windows.

  The letter from Sew What told him to turn up for work the following Monday. He took the dark suit to his mother to be sponged and pressed. She was doing well, her usual optimistic self, but she remembered to bring her husband into the conversation from time to time.

  ‘Your father would be proud of you,’ she told Tim.

  ‘Yeah, he would.’

  They both believed that it was true.

  Mrs Barber, the hedgehog manager – all smooth and serene one minute, and prickles up the next – told Tim that he had got a fair reference from Webster’s. ‘The termination of his employment was mutual,’ they had written (God bless them). ‘An enthusiastic worker, but a bit of a dreamer.’

  ‘What does that mean, I wonder, Mr Kendall?’

  It did not look as if she would ever call him Timothy or Tim.

  ‘I couldn’t say.’

  ‘Does it mean you are vague and lazy?’

  ‘No, it – it means – er, creative. That’s it. An idealist.’

  Compared to the lost splendours of Webster’s huge Fabric and Soft Furnishings, Sew What was nothing to write home about. The shop was long and narrow, like a coffin, and some of the goods, and the customers who looked, fingered, bought or did not buy, Webster’s would not have been seen dead with.

  A lot of the colours and patterns were very harsh. ‘Modern,’ Mrs Barber called them. ‘This is a very modern design, madam,’ to an old lady with a leather shopping-bag on wheels who was giving the suspicious finger to a zigzag of black and white stripes with silver threads.

  Tim’s special hates were the hideous rolls of ugliness called waterproof tabletop vinyl, disfigured with patterns of ladies in violet crinolines and sunshades, and bright pink gambolling babies.

  Heaving the roll of naked babies back on the stand after a moronic mother had parted with three pound twenty for a metre and a half, Tim could not help reminiscing about the fabulous goods he had handled at Webster’s. ‘The velvets alone, Mrs Barber, were like a fairy-tale.’

  ‘Don’t chatter.’ Mrs Barber was not impressed. ‘Keep quiet, Mr Kendall, and sell the tabletop vinyl.’

  When Tim got his first money, he paid off some of his back rent, and rang Helen from a phone-box to tell her about the job. They arranged to meet in a café after he got out of work.

  Helen had got a new wool tunic for the autumn. It was oatmeal – how she loved those non-colours – and hung straight down in a way that improved her waist and hips.

  ‘What do you think about coming back to my place?’ Tim had rehearsed all afternoon how he would say that. He had not minded a long, argumentative session with a bullying customer who wanted to exchange a length of material into which she had already put pin marks, followed by a stiff session explaining it to Mrs Barber when she came back from lunch, because he was going to say to Helen, ‘What do you think about coming back to my place?’

  Inside the flat, she saw the woodworking tools displayed, in memoriam, over the couch.

  ‘My Dad died.’

  ‘Oh, Tim, I am sorry. You must miss him.’

  ‘Oh, I do. I’ve been quite cut up.’

  ‘Poor Tim.’

  They sat on the couch and she kissed him gently, and put her short soft arms round him in a comfortable, motherly way. They lay down together, but she was still being soothing and motherly, and that would not do now.

  ‘Helen, I’ – if only you could just do sex, and never have to talk about it – ‘it won’t work this way.’

  ‘What way, then?’

  ‘I, you know, need to be – well, not like a kid, but – well, remember the cammo? Like, the master.’

  ‘Oh, so you do, that’s right. What shall we do, then?’

  ‘I’ll be the man coming home from work, or a war, or something.’

  Tim got up and went to the door, but did not go out and come in again, in case anyone might see from downstairs. He wiped his feet on the rubber mat tyrannically, like a dog after it has peed. Helen was standing up, smiling, with clasped hands. She had put on Tim’s frying apron, to look submissive.

  The conversation went something like, ‘On the bed, woman!’

  ‘Oh, goodness.’

  He stripped off the apron, pushed her down on the bed, and stripped off a few other things. She giggled and said, ‘Ooh,’ and he growled a war lord’s growl, and took a few nips at her.

  Afterwards, Tim took Helen home, because it was getting dark, and because he wanted to, although she had said, ‘I can look after myself.’

  When she asked, ‘Why don’t you come upstairs?’, Tim said, ‘You don’t have to ask me, if you – I mean, I don’t want you to think–’

  ‘Oh, I don’t.’

  What didn’t he want her to think?

  Helen’s bed was wider than Tim’s couch, and softer. They both disappeared into the middle of it, and sank through into the place where words did not matter any more.

  Chapter Thirteen

  One slack day when only Tim and Mrs Barber were in the shop, he put some dress patterns away into the bottom drawer, and stood up to look through the window straight into the bulging eyes of Harold Trotman.

  Tim retreated, as Harold burst through the glass door with a roar and came at him, knocking over everything in his path. The big cutting scissors were on the counter. Harold seized them and raised them high, like a dagger.

  ‘Oh, give me those, you stupid man.’ Mrs Barber grabbed his arm with both hands, but Harold shook her off, and she gave a gasp, and brought her hands away, bleeding.

  Tim had backed against the shelves, but when he saw the blood, he picked up the nearest bolt of cloth and, using it as a battering ram, charged into the great expanse of Harold’s stomach, hanging over his belt.

  The scissors fell to the floor against Tim’s foot. The howls and gurgles of the toppling giant were like Wurmagh the terrible sea python, pierced in the livid underbelly by the halberd-carrying figurehead of Varth’s brigantine. Harold went down, winded, and Tim held him pinned by the neck under the heavy roll of tabletop vinyl, with the naked pink babies.

  That was how the police found them: Tim kneeling on the heaving stomach of Harold, who stared at the ceiling as if it were a horror film, snoring strangled breaths through his furred snout, the two ginger hairs in the middle of his nose waving for help.

  Mrs Barber, her hand wrapped in a piece of bloody seersucker from the remnant bin, did not scold Tim for having such undesirable friends. She thanked him, and told the police, ‘This young man saved me.’

  ‘It was nothing.’ Tim sat down on the floor to take off his shoe and sock and inspect the small cut where the scissors had nicked his ankle. And to keep his head down, to hide the glow.

  He had rescued a maiden – at last, at last! No matter that it was only Mrs Barber.

  Tim was a local hero. The story was in the papers, with a picture of him, holding the roll of tabletop vinyl and grinning like a hobgoblin.

  ‘Local man defeats attacker. “I’m proud of him,” Walker’s Piece manager says.’

  The police had praised him, right there in the shop, in front of the small crowd of sightseers who had materialized from nowhere in the empty precinct.

  After Harold had been trundled away, the one who was in charge said, ‘The Chief Constable may want to talk to you.’

  ‘As long as you didn’t dweam this up too,’ the other one said, and winked. It was Constable Somebody, who couldn’t pronounce his r’s.

  Tim’s family were hugely proud. His mother became famous in the neigh
bourhood. Sarah wept a tear or two over her little Timmy, who might have been killed. Even Valerie told him, ‘I don’t care what anyone says. You did the right thing.’

  Tim felt as if all the mistakes of his dodgy past life had been washed away, and he had come into his own, like a conqueror.

  Valiant Varth, mighty Warlord Blch, imperishable Tohubo – the victory is ours!

  ‘We knew it all along,’ Jack and Brian told Tim. ‘We knew you had it in you.’

  ‘Oh – it was nothing.’

  ‘We’re going to nominate you for the Queen’s commendation for bravery,’ Brian said. ‘Our tenant, our good old boy.’

  More people came into the shop, to stare, and ask questions, and look to see if there was any blood on the floor, but after a while, things were back to normal. Harold had appeared briefly in the magistrate’s court, and been remanded for ‘social and psychiatric reports’. That should make hot reading.

  Sarah had left 23 The Avenue and moved back in with the man from Barbados who was one of the reasons she had run away to Australia. Tim was troubled by the guilty feeling that he ought to go and live with his mother.

  ‘I could take care of you, Mum. Look after the place, keep you company.’

  ‘And I would cook you wonderful meals, keep your clothes nice, play cards like we used to. We could re-decorate your old room …’

  ‘I’ll paint the kitchen for you.’

  ‘We’ll have parties.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a pretty dress.’

  ‘“Tim and Annie,” they’ll say, “Aren’t they a pair?”’

  ‘Take you on a cruise.’

  ‘Never a cross word.’

  ‘Mum.’ Tim suddenly plummeted down. ‘It wouldn’t be like that.’

  ‘I know.’ She followed him down at once. ‘I couldn’t let you live here with me anyway. Too big a burden for you.’

  ‘No, that’s all right, really.’ Here came guilt again. ‘I’d like it.’ Sacrifice his freedom. The hero with a heart of gold.

  ‘Too late.’ His mother told him that she had already decided to sell the inconvenient house and live in a flat.

  ‘Well, don’t worry. I’ll come round a lot.’