In a Good Light

by Clare Chambers

  ‘No.’

  Of course it wasn’t. On the rare occasions our kitchen was filled with appetising smells, the end product of all this baking, bottling and preserving never ended up in our stomachs. Cakes, chutney and jam were packed up and handed over to the church fête or the Scouts’ bazaar, and sold in aid of the Less Fortunate.

  A week after this conversation I walked into Cindy’s room uninvited early one Sunday morning and found a strange man lying in her bed. I made the mistake of mentioning him to my parents over porridge, and that was the end of Cindy’s sojourn in the Old Schoolhouse and the end of my introduction to the cosmetic arts. Having taken to heart Mother’s advice about using her talents, and decided that casual sex was their natural outlet, she was now sent packing for her trouble.

  ‘Where’s Cindy?’ I asked, when I came in from school to find her room bare and abandoned, and Mother stripping the bed. The chair was no longer draped with clothes, and all the colourful lotions and potions had vanished. Only a few traces of her presence remained: a talc footprint on the carpet, the stencilled outline of her bottles picked out on the dressing table in loose powder, and the fairy-dust glitter of crumbled eyeshadow.

  ‘She’s gone to stay with relatives,’ said Mother, peeling the undersheet away from the mattress and tossing it downstairs.

  ‘Is she coming back?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’ Mother folded the blanket into a neat square, hesitated a moment, and then chucked that over the banisters too.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, it didn’t really work out,’ she replied evasively.

  ‘Was it because of that man?’ I asked, drawing an E in the fluff on the bedpost.

  ‘Partly. We couldn’t have her bringing people back to the house.’ Mother held the eiderdown out of the window and gave it a good, hard shake.

  ‘You have friends back,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Yes, but that’s different. This man could have been anybody.’

  ‘Do you mean a burglar?’ I said, suddenly full of fear and excitement.

  ‘No, not a burglar,’ said Mother, who was beginning to tire of this line of questioning. ‘Go and bring me a clean pillowcase from the trunk.’

  ‘Will we be getting someone else?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Oh, I expect so,’ Mother sighed. ‘Sooner or later.’

  4

  OUR FATHER WAS the only person we knew who went to work on a Sunday, apart from the man in the newsagent’s on the green.

  He took two services at the prison every Sunday – Holy Communion and Evensong. Attendance was voluntary, and sometimes the homicidal altar boy would be the only person to turn up. ‘God was there,’ Father used to say.

  If we were very lucky he would bring home stories from work. One thing he told us, which made my scalp tingle, was that you could never let a prisoner so much as glimpse a key. Some of the young men in there were so desperate and so cunning that they could memorise the exact shape and dimensions of any key in the blink of an eye, and reproduce a perfect replica when it was their turn in the workshop.

  But our favourite was the one about the prisoner who took a warder hostage in his cell. Father was the only person who had been able to talk him into releasing the warder and giving up. He had succeeded where the trained negotiator had failed, because months earlier he had given the prisoner, who was going out of his mind in solitary confinement, a pack of cards. The moral of this story, Father said, was that even the most hardened criminal could be moved by a small act of kindness. ‘No,’ said Christian. ‘The moral of this story is: never let a prisoner get between you and the door.’

  We liked to imagine our father as a hero. Chaplaincy didn’t generally offer much scope for heroics, so those few incidents that qualified tended to be somewhat exaggerated. By the time Christian and I had retold the story a few times we had managed to convince ourselves as well as our audience that it had been Father himself who had been taken hostage and very nearly murdered.

  I don’t think Mother would have made a good chaplain. She wouldn’t give a man a pack of cards even if he was on Death Row: she’d have him knitting blankets for earthquake victims. She refused to go to our local church, saying that it was just a club for middle class people who liked singing hymns. Instead she had a very intense and personal relationship with God that didn’t require her attendance at acts of public worship. She was happy rattling collecting tins or knocking on doors for a good cause, but you wouldn’t get her within half a mile of the Young Wives or the Mothers’ Union. Not that they were exactly clamouring to have her.

  I remember one incident in particular. It was the year after the headlice and the departure of Cindy, so I would have been six. Christian had been dragooned into the church pantomime owing to a desperate shortage of males, and we went along to watch his performance as 1st Footman in Cinderella. We were sitting near the back of the hall, and even perched on top of my folded coat I could only see the actors if they advanced to the very edge of the stage. Just before the interval I had begun to weary of my obscured view, and the elderly lady in front had twice turned round and asked me not to kick her in the back, so my parents allowed me to slip around to the back to see Christian. It was coming up to the big chorus number at the end of Act One, so most of the cast were on stage or in the wings. There was no one in the dressing room except the women who were helping with wardrobe and make-up. They were whisking between the rails of costumes, picking up discarded clothes and putting them back on hangers. Before I had a chance to make my presence known one of them held up a limp, grey rag.

  ‘Look at Christian’s shirt!’ she said, holding it up, to display its many rends and missing buttons and dark tide-mark around the collar and cuffs. ‘Did you ever see anything like it?’ Her companions laughed and shook their heads.

  ‘He must have had it on all week. Do you think she ever does the laundry?’ one of them said.

  ‘Too busy worrying about the ragged urchins of Timbuktu to notice the ragged urchin under her own roof,’ the first woman replied.

  ‘Such a nice boy,’ said the third woman, who had not so far contributed. ‘But, oh those shoes! It wouldn’t surprise me if they’d never been polished since the day he got them.’

  I didn’t hear any more on the subject, because at that moment there was a loud burst of applause from the auditorium and the three women looked up and flinched violently when they saw me.

  ‘Esther!’ said the first to recover. ‘Why aren’t you watching the show?’

  ‘I can’t see over people. I’m looking for Christian.’

  ‘He’ll be out in a minute. It’s the interval now.’ One of them fetched me a drink of squash from the cast’s tray of refreshments, and they all said wasn’t I getting tall, and how nice my hair was looking now that it had grown back, until Christian came out and told me I wasn’t supposed to be backstage.

  ‘Did you see my bit?’ he asked.

  ‘No, but I heard it.’ I glanced down and noticed for the first time that his shoes were rather bald and tatty, and that mine were just the same. For the rest of the interval I kept my eyes fixed on people’s feet, counting the shiny shoes as they passed, until at last I saw a pair of scuffed and gaping pumps more disreputable even than ours, and I looked up with a belated jolt of recognition into Mother’s smiling face.

  5

  ON SUNDAY EVENINGS mum and dad went down the lane to Mrs Tapley’s to watch the Classic Serial, leaving Christian and me alone in the house. We took this opportunity to stay up late and play Monopoly and pontoon, and other games regarded by Mother as liable to encourage the sin of avarice. We didn’t have any money of our own so we gambled with the bag of silver milk bottle tops that mum was collecting for the blind. I loved the feel of them, and the noise they made, shimmering together in the bag.

  ‘What do blind people need milk bottle tops for?’ I wondered aloud.

  ‘They hang bunches of them in their doorways,’ Christian said confidently, ‘so they
can hear them rattling when anyone comes in.’

  He had broached the subject of pocket money once, without success. Instead of agreeing to hand over ten pence every Friday, mother proposed delegating a quarter of the family budget to Christian. He would, of course, be responsible for his share of the food bills, rates, gas and electricity, not to mention clothing and household repairs. They sat down together with pen and paper to calculate how much change he might look forward to at the end of each week: the result was a deficit of £3.75 and the idea was shelved.

  These Sunday evenings were especially precious because so much of Christian’s time was taken up with matters more important than Monopoly or me. It was his final year at Junior School, and he seemed to spend every waking moment being drilled by Mother in Maths and English in preparation for some great test. After school, instead of tearing around the garden with me or practising new ways of getting from the attic to the cellar without touching the floor, he would sit in the dining room, chewing his pencil over Fletcher Book Three, and More Verbal Reasoning. At first I was allowed to be present at these lessons, in the hope that I might pick up some crumbs of knowledge as they fell. I would sit next to Christian while he wrestled with sets and sequences, and dash off crayon drawings one after another. In half an hour I might have produced twenty pictures, and Mother would be muttering about paper not growing on trees. Eventually I was expelled from the sessions for disruptive behaviour. My habit of clamping my tongue between my teeth and humming while I drew was too much of a distraction to the would-be scholar.

  On Saturdays Mum would put on the newest of her nearly-new dresses and drag Christian off to various open days run by local schools. On her return she and Dad would withdraw to the dining room to confer, while Christian tore off his shirt and tie and joined me in the garden. The few free hours remaining to Christian during this period were spent outdoors, practising one or other of the sports at which he excelled. He was the sort of boy who could spend hours quite happily chucking a tennis ball against a wall, or bouncing a football on his head. He even took his cricket bat to bed with him and hugged it while he slept. He couldn’t stand still for a minute without his arms wheeling around in a burst of imaginary spin-bowling, or walk down the street without dribbling a pebble along at his feet. On one occasion we rigged up a badminton net in the garden using two bamboo canes from the runner beans and a gooseberry net. Dad chewed a rectangular court out of the long grass with the rotary mower and for weeks we did nothing but chase shuttlecocks as the wind sent them swooping into the rough. Then the birds started eating the gooseberries, and that was that. Instead we put a wellington boot on the end of the bamboo poles and used them for jousting on our rickety bicycles. We faced each other at opposite ends of the garden, lances balanced on handlebars, and rode like the wind, until – Whump! – I’d feel the impact of a boot in my chest and I’d be on my back in the grass, gazing at the sky through a spinning pattern of oakleaves.

  The letter offering Christian a scholarship to the best boys’ school in the area arrived on a Saturday morning in spring. Having exerted themselves for some months with just this end in mind, Mum and Dad were oddly subdued. Success, of the sort that comes in envelopes, was always to be treated with caution, it seemed. They sat Christian down to break the good news.

  ‘Well done, son. You’ve got a scholarship to Turton’s,’ Dad began, offering him a hand to shake.

  ‘Was that the one with the pool and the squash courts?’ Christian asked, punching the air when Dad confirmed that it was. ‘Magic.’ He mimed a forehand smash.

  Mum, already totting up the cost of another variety of racket, not to mention the uniform, smiled bravely. ‘It’s a great opportunity for you, Christian,’ she said. ‘You’re very fortunate.’

  Having dispensed with the congratulations, Dad launched into the first of their reservations. ‘The thing is,’ he said, folding and unfolding the letter mechanically, ‘if you do go to Turton’s, you’ll be mixing with boys from much wealthier families.’

  ‘So?’ To Christian, other boys’ families were a matter of complete indifference, wealthy or not. ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘What we’re trying to say is that the friends you make there will be able to afford things that we can’t,’ Mum explained.

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Well, pocket money, television, new bicycles, expensive toys, parties, foreign holidays.’ Mum got quite carried away counting off potential areas of deprivation on her fingers until Dad interrupted.

  ‘These are unimportant material things, of course, we all know that,’ he put in hastily. ‘The point is, if you go to Turton’s you’ll have to accept that there will be times when you feel left out. And we won’t be able to buy you back in.’

  ‘Doesn’t bother me. If people like me, they’ll like me, won’t they?’

  ‘Exactly. That’s just the right attitude. Good lad,’ said Dad, hoping to wrap up the discussion and post off the acceptance slip before Mum had a crisis of conscience and changed her mind.

  ‘The other problem with schools like Turton’s,’ she said, stalling, ‘is that they tend to give the boys who go there the idea that they’re a cut above.’

  ‘Is that bad?’ asked Christian. He had, after all, spent the last six months hunched over those test papers trying to ensure he was a cut above the other three hundred or so applicants.

  ‘In the eyes of God everyone is special,’ Dad said.

  ‘But not boys at Turton’s?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Dad, conscious of having muddied the waters. ‘You’d be special whichever school you went to. And children who don’t go to Turton’s are no less special than anyone else.’

  ‘Can I go to Turton’s one day?’ I asked.

  ‘No, darling,’ said Dad, patting my hand. ‘It’s a boys’ school.’

  ‘Are boys specialler than girls?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Mum.

  ‘So can I go there or not?’ Christian wanted to know.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Dad said, uncapping his pen.

  ‘Now that we’ve ironed out those few little worries,’ Mum added. We all watched as Dad drew a squiggle on the dotted line. It was Christian who broke the silence of this solemn moment.

  ‘Can I have a squash racket?’ he said.

  The evening before the first day of term, Christian was made to parade in front of us in his school uniform. Grandpa Percy – Mum’s dad – had sent a cheque for the whole kit: even the socks were new. Christian stood scowling in the middle of the sitting room, a cardboard doll, hung with his press-out clothes. The blazer sat stiffly on his shoulders; his trousers held twin creases like the blade of a sword. He held his head awkwardly as though wearing an orthopaedic neck brace. On closer inspection it was discovered that he had failed to remove the cardboard packaging from the shirt collar.

  A flash cube splintered and popped as Dad took a photo to send to Grandpa Percy, as proof that his funds had been properly deployed and not diverted to the Less Fortunate, as had sometimes been known to happen.

  ‘Right, that’s enough preening,’ said Mother, giving Christian a gentle push. ‘Off to bed.’

  I was the only one who remembered his shoes. Mum found me ten minutes later in the cupboard under the stairs, picking through a box of rags. ‘What on earth are you doing in here?’ she asked.

  ‘Looking for shoe polish,’ I replied, still rummaging. ‘Have we got some?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She looked helpless. ‘It would be here if anywhere, I suppose. What do you want it for?’

  ‘To clean Christian’s shoes for school,’ I explained, hoping she might take over.

  ‘That’s a nice thought, dear,’ she said, and left me to it.

  Eventually, after further ransacking, I turned up a dented tin of black Tuxan containing a couple of fossilised pellets of polish. I carried it into the kitchen along with one of the fresher rags, and set to work.

  So it was that Christian began his c
areer at Turton’s with shiny shoes, and I went into the top infants with black fingernails and was called a dirty little tinker by the dinner-lady.

  6

  OUR SUMMER HOLIDAYS were spent at the same place every year – a caravan on the Pembrokeshire coast, just upstream from Milford Haven. The owner was a friend of Dad’s from his college days who had disgraced himself by abandoning his wife and young son for another woman. My parents, who strongly disapproved of his behaviour, had allowed the friendship to lapse, but his ex-wife, Barbara, still maintained irregular contact by letter, and insisted we continue to use the caravan. They evidently shared my parents’ horror of anywhere ‘commercialised’ – a term whose broad sweep took in everything from the Blackpool illuminations to a solitary gift shop – as the caravan was parked, by arrangement with the farmer, at the edge of a field on a river estuary, several miles from the nearest settlement. It was reached by a rutted clay track full of deep potholes, filled in wet weather with tea-coloured water. The car would often get bogged down, its trapped wheels spinning helplessly, and we would have to fetch stones and slates to build up the collapsed path beneath the tyres. In dry weather the car crunched over sharp chippings and sagged onto punctured rubber. Dad would say, ‘Hey-ho,’ and reach for the jack, while we unloaded the luggage onto the side of the path to dig out the spare wheel. None of this ruffled Mum and Dad, who accepted all such minor inconveniences with perfect serenity. Holidays were not an opportunity to wallow in luxury, but a chance to renew our appreciation for the comforts of home.

  We bought milk and eggs daily from the farm and filled our giant canisters with drinking water from the outside tap. Every morning we would hike across country, over stiles and streams to the village shop and return carrying bread and fresh meat and vegetables. The round trip took most of the morning; the rest of the time Christian and I spent mudcombing along the shoreline at low tide, or fooling around in our rubber dinghy when the water was high, trying to stop the outboard motor snagging the reeds. Dad, safely upstream of our splashing, dozed over his fishing rod, while Mum sat on a canvas deckchair peeling through a pile of library books, or knitting six inch squares for an aid project known as The Universal Quilt.