Suzie shook his hand and was about to speak, but she hesitated that micro-second too long.
“This is Elizabeth, my wife,” he said, presenting via a gesture of the left arm a large, confident, upright, and obviously decisive woman. Fools would not be suffered, and certainly not gladly. She was conservatively dressed, rather like the wife of a country squire in one of those BBC comedies where everyone has plummy accents, the audience laughter is overdone and the scene changes are accompanied by schmaltzy clarinet cadences.
“How do you do?” she asked, enunciating every slow syllable like it came from an elocution course. She didn’t get that accent in Kiddington, I thought.
“Let me introduce you to Pedro,” said George, indicating that we should both follow him without delay across the vast expanse of Mick Watson’s living room. “Pedro is a local mayor,” he said as he turned. The backside I followed was ample, its left and right spheres apparently clumsily competing for space inside the pinstripe trousers. George had no jacket, but wore a satin-backed waistcoat and formal, highly polished shoes that made metallic taps on the tiles at every footfall. He had the air of a barrister on his day off.
Pedro proved to be a rather quiet, even reticent character, his manner suggesting that every word might be a considered choice. Even when I opened our acquaintance with an inquiry after his current well-being, he seemed to think long and hard about his answer. He spoke perfect, unaccented English, considerably better than the rest of us native speakers. He was neither big nor small, neither dark nor fair, wore Mr Average clothes, the colour and style of which now evades me. But there was one thing that surprised, and so much so that I will record collective reaction here.
It was when we were talking about local issues that George came into his own. We’d covered markets, beaches, one hundred and twenty-six tapas recipes, eight different ways to make a fortune in Spain, plus the usual slagging off of Old Albion and the simultaneous condemnation of its newer manifestation, a social necessity amongst expatriates that I have already come to expect. George seemed a fountain of knowledge on every subject under the sun, the sort of man my dad might have called a ‘barrack room lawyer’. In fact, I learned later, he was a lawyer and had never been in the army, let alone slept in a barrack. But it was when the conversation turned to environmental matters that the assembled guests seriously began to compete.
“At least we don’t have any of those great big windmills round here,” said Mil, her associated grimace suggesting more fish entrails than power generation. “There’s nothing to spoil the views.”
“I think they’re quite graceful, actually,” said Elizabeth, the lightly raised eyebrows accompanied by repeated prolonged blinks registering the self-evident superiority of her middle-class opinion. “And just think how environmentally responsible we are being when we generate electricity from the wind!”
“And Spain generates more of its electricity from renewables than anywhere else in Europe,” said George with authority.
“I wish I had a few renewables,” said Suzie, pointedly reaching across her front to pat her left shoulder.
“And it depends on how much wind you generate,” I suggested.
Mick looked embarrassed for once. He tried to hide it by offering to speak and then fumbled with his words, thus drawing more attention to himself and thereby achieving the exact opposite of his intention. At the time I thought my intended jest might have gone too far in mixed company. Perhaps Mick was trying to salvage the situation. But I’ve known Mick for years and I’ve never known him embarrassed. Somewhere, somehow, someone had touched a different nerve. “But there are some,” he said. “Well not yet, perhaps, but I have been told on very good authority that a large wind farm is planned for the top of the Aitana.”
It was as if Pedro had suddenly stepped out of the Don Martin brain operation cartoon, the one where the surgeon lops off the top of the bloke’s head and finds a light bulb with a pull switch. Mick’s words pulled Pedro’s switch and he awoke as current began to flow.
“Nothing is certain at the moment,” he said. “There’s a proposal and it is currently under consideration by the relevant authorities. I must stress that considerations of principle are what concern us at present. No detailed plans exist. I would refute any suggestion to the contrary. Details of the consultation process are on display in the town hall and are available for public scrutiny. There will be an independent inquiry as part of the consultation process and, thus far, the panel members have not even been suggested, let alone identified. No date for that hearing is as yet on the table.”
“Don’t he speak good English, Johnny?” said Mil.
“Yes,” Johnny chirped after his now anticipated video-conferencing delay.
“Don’t talk to me about wind farms,” said Suzie meaning, of course, that we should. “My Donkey has been one of those environmental protagonists...”
“Protesters, Suzie, protesters,” I said. I have lived with my wife’s habit of employing the wrong word for two thirds of a lifetime, but I have never learned either to predict it or to cope with it.
“Protesters, protagonists, preservatives...” said Suzie with a dismissive wave of the hand, before an occasional thought crossed her mind. “Maybe I should leave politics out of this... But there’s this place in east Yorkshire where it’s really flat all around and there’s this one hill, just a low one, nothing mountainous like around here. Anyway planning applications went in to put a wind farm on top and Donkey, along with a few hundred others, formed the YAWN Action Group.”
“Yorkshire Against Windfarms Now,” I qualified.
“Well, anyway, they went and formed a cordon bleu around the hilltop. If you ask me, if you keep your mouth shut you can’t put your foot in it. But that’s not how my Donkey works. They took it in shifts to link arms around the proposed site to protect it from the developers. They were accused of being nimbys and it didn’t do a scrap of good.”
“It didn’t get built.” I said, with self-congratulation reducing my usual tempo.
“But that was because the developer went bust. It’s still on the cards. They even built some of the nylons.”
“Pylons, Suzie.”
“The procedure in Spain is clear, transparent and fully accountable,” said Pedro, launching into his words like someone had put a tanner into the slot. “There will be an inquiry at the regional level where the environmental, economic and even aesthetic impacts will be evaluated. The report will be publicly available for further consultation and work will only go ahead when all that is completed.”
“So it will go ahead?” asked George, his interest clearly stirred.
And Pedro was suddenly silent again, his tape run through.
“I’ll put the ribs on the Barbie,” said Mick, as he crossed the vast expanse of the living room. I include the capital letter because he waved an hour-glass woman with his hands as he spoke. “Olga and Alicia pre-cooked them earlier so they will only take a few minutes. Let’s eat,” he said, addressing me. “How did you like the tour of the house?”
“Very impressive - especially the old Jag. I remember it cruising round the council estate in Kiddington about thirty-five years ago. Them quad bikes were a bit tasty as well. I’ve always fancied a quad bike, especially now that we live in a hot country like Spain.”
“Then take one.”
The silence seemed oppressive. “Pardon?”
“Take one. I don’t use them any more. I used to ride them a lot, but nowadays I never seem to have the time. They’re insured for anyone. Take one.”
“Are you serious?” I asked, but Mick did not even acknowledge the question. “Well thank you very much. I’ll have that Yamaha Raptor, if that’s all right with you.”
“He’s been crowing on about getting one ever since we came here,” said Suzie.
“Donkey, just read my li
ps. No more taxes. The keys are in the ignition. The latch key on the ring opens the gates and the garage door. Take it.”
The afternoon and then evening progressed. I achieved and stayed on cloud nine and, at the end, Suzie and I rode home on a quad bike rather than in a taxi. Mountain tracks, here I come!
Thirteen
Palindromic years are infrequent... - Donald prepares for his trip. Suzie leaves hospital. Donald discusses domestic bathing facilities and Suzie takes a bath. Donald discovers Mrs Mullins and through this is properly reunited with Suzie.
Palindromic years are infrequent but not so special. In the twentieth century, we had to wait until 1991, but 2002 followed soon after and 2112 is to be anticipated, if not experienced by any of us. God knows what we might expect in 2222, 2332 and the rest. Years with rotational symmetry, however, are to be prized. They are few and far between. That’s probably why 1961 was such a momentous year. The next candidate doesn’t appear until 6009. There’s speculation for you.
It was during M243, Mathematical Modelling Games For Cold Winter Evenings that I did my research on the symmetry of the centuries. But it was on the back of a beer mat in The Castle that I finally established that there had only been twenty-one rotational symmetry years in the Christian era until that fateful twenty-second. There were three in the first eleven years, of course, 1, 8 and 11, but only four since the turn of the millennium - the first one, that is! I can even remember Korky The Cat having an adventure on the front page of The Dandy just because the date swivelled round.
The year began, of course, with Suzie’s defection confirmed and then the accident, her long convalescence, her grudging, parent-driven return to me, and then continued into a summer when we had our first holiday together. It’s apt that Elvis sang Surrender at the start of that year. Suzie was a fan, and she did.
I started saving my pocket money the day Mrs Mullins asked me to go with them. I was still a junior apprentice, but somehow I always managed to have a little spare cash each week after paying my board to my mother. I cut out everything apart from essential bus fares. I had no sweets, went to no dances or parties, ignored football and even stayed away from Bromaton Quartet’s home games, despite their good cup run that season. I correctly assumed that this was my big chance in life and I was not going to let it pass me by.
Months made their transition and each one saw my tea-caddy-bound savings grow. Mrs Mullins told me not to worry, that she and Mr Mullins would be paying for everything anyway because they could afford it and because they had invited me, but still I wanted to claim the dignity of whatever independence I could muster. The airfare, of course, was way beyond my means, in itself several times what I might save in an entire year, even if I hibernated.
And there was also a passport to arrange, plus some new clothes. Very few Kiddingtonians had a passport, so when I got mine, by recorded delivery from an office in London, I took it to work to show it off. When I told people in the village how much it had cost, a few of them said I could have had a week at the coast north of Jest for less. Mr Mullins helped me with the passport, since my own parents had no idea even where to go to get a form, let alone what to do with it. On the subject of clothes, however, my mother came into her own. She could not bear to think of me looking scruffy alongside the elegant, publicly moneyed Mullins, so she marched me off to Bromaton and even as far as Punslet in the June - better not do it too early with a lad growing up and filling out at the rate of Donald Cottee - to try on this and that. By the end of the month she had bought me exactly two suitcases full of new clothes, twice the amount I was destined to take.
The news had already gone round Kiddington, of course. Keeping a secret in our village was not a near impossibility: it was total. “Have you heard,” my imagination could construct, “that young Don Cottee is getting taken abroad? He’s off to Spain with them Mullins that own the hat shop in Bromaton. Isn’t he the lucky one?” or words to that effect. They were words that seemed to precede me, whispered loudly enough for me to catch a hint as I walked down the street, travelled on the wind as I waited for a bus, followed me when I left the butcher, the fish shop or the co-op. I once called their bluff and, having walked out of the off-licence in whose confines the swinging of cats would be difficult, I went straight back in. The shop was in the last occupied house along a derelict row and stocked general foods and sweets as well as booze. I claimed that I’d forgotten my dad’s beer. The place fell suddenly and eerily silent, the two purchasers apparently ceasing their requests across the beaten aluminium counter mid-stream. The bare floorboards creaked on their loose fixing nails as stances were adjusted to better view my reappearance. Mutterings of, “He’s off abroad, you know”, drifted audibly above quietened conversation. Ernie, the small, spiky, pin-striped and turn-upped attendant with the charcoal line moustache that peaked towards each hairy nostril, brilliantined hair slick-back beside his bald patch, froze on his ladder, his hand dangling between the soap and the fire lighters, the tight, wire-bound bundle of kindling sticks he was about to claim momentarily spared from its incendiary fate. “And a bottle of Mackeson for my dad,” I said. You can always tell when a room has been talking about you.
“He’s taken up with the Mullins girl again,” was the phrase that echoed behind me as I walked home across the back of the new council houses, along the path that meandered through the half bricks, flagstones and rubble, a path that crossed all that remained of the now demolished parallel terraces, a path that I had helped to establish by selective removal of re-usable debris over the previous years. I found it reassuring rather than threatening, because it confirmed publicly what Suzie still refused to admit even in private - that we were publicly back together.
She finally left hospital in the May with her arm in plaster and still under instruction to rest it completely. In June the cast came off but she still needed the support of a sling. It was mid-July before her arm could hang free of all restriction, so that she could, in a carefully controlled way, try to use it again, albeit under the advice of a physio.
I had seen a lot of her, but nothing like as much as before we finished six months earlier. All we used to do was sit in the Mullins’s front room and watch television. It was like we were rehearsing, successfully, the miscommunication of marriage for a lifetime, a marriage that we eventually created. Her right arm was fine, of course, and it found plenty to do when Mr and Mrs Mullins went off to their country club for their meals out with their social and economic, equals. Getting Suzie to respond, however, seemed to be impossible. At least we didn’t argue. I still worshipped her, as I had always done, but on the altar of life, from her perspective, I was a vase of flowers, a public nicety, not an object of devotion. There remained something else at the core, some focus she did not publicly declare. As time passed, I eventually concluded that this was not me, or even Mick, but herself. She had become both object and subject of her own intent.
A recurring problem was washing. Even the Mullins, local leaders of fashion in 1961, didn’t have a shower installed. Their bathroom was precisely a room with a bath, and a bog, of course. The bath was a large, iron avocado enamelled contraption abutting two outside walls, one north-facing, the other east. It had matching panelled side and end, and a half-tiled surround beneath vertically striped bobbly anaglypta, painted with a gloss finish down which condensation from the steamy contents below ran in branching rivulets. Getting in and out of that monstrosity of a bath was always something of a clamber, even with two usable arms. For Suzie, baths now took a considerable time, especially when her frame, her plaster, her sling, depending on the week, had to stay dry. But she wouldn’t have help, despite the fact that she insisted on having a bath every evening, a habit to which surely only people on television aspired. In our house, where we didn’t have a bathroom, we were still limited to one a week, a partial dip in a galvanised tub in front of the kitchen fire, a tub that usually hung on a nail at the top of the cellar st
eps. We filled it with pan-fulls of boiling water from the stove, water that was used by all of us in the household from larger to smaller, which meant that I was last into its soapy musk. We had hot water on tap, but it was a back boiler behind the coal fire. The heat could be let in by opening a damper that dangled sooted at the start of the chimney. You had to spear its terminal ring with the poker and tug. But of course, unless you had a fire in all day, there wasn’t time for the water to heat up for the evening bath.
It was in the June of that rotationally symmetric year - an evening I remember well, quite close to the longest day, since it was still perfectly light outside when Suzie was finishing her bath - that I was watching Rawhide in the living room. “Oh fiddlesticks,” said Suzie, echoing loud enough down the stairs to drown out ‘Keep Them Dawgies Rollin’. “Donkey,” came the shout from on high. “Don, can you get my cotton wool? I’ve left it on top of the bureau in the dining room.”
I knew how much things still had to be dabbed and swabbed. I knew that she still pushed a wad of cotton wool on the end of a stick down her new bandage to make sure the wound wasn’t weeping. So I responded immediately, with just a quick, “I’ll get it,” shouted up the stairs as I turned to the left to leave the living room.
Mr Mullins did his accounts, letter writing and general household business on the surface of a leather-inlayed draw-down desk that rested on a pair of manually extractable supports. It was in the corner of the dining room, far enough away from the table, chairs and sideboard to sit mostly unnoticed in its corner. There was a copper desk lamp above, angled so its light fell perfectly on the extended top, always leaving the slotted interior in shade. The desk ought to have been closed. Mr Mullins rarely left it open, rarely left it unlocked, except when he was called away from it in the middle of a job.
The space on top next to the lamp, however, was one of the house’s neutral zones, an area not claimed by Mr Mullins since he was always too neat and tidy ever to want to leave anything unfiled. Thus Suzie and her mother used it as a kind of domestic in-tray, a holding area for anything that was not yet put away, anything whose place in the house might still be negotiable. The new bag of cotton wool had found its way there as a first stage of its transit upstairs to the bathroom. The rest of the things from Mrs Mullins bag needed to go to the larder, but the soft bag of dressing was on top and had to be unloaded first. The top of her husband’s desk was the obvious area for its future transit. And there it still lay, forgotten after the bread, milk, sugar and tins had found their place.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 14