“Honestly, Paul . . . For goodness’ sake! I’ve been writing you cards and leaving messages for weeks. It’s our anniversary. Silver wedding. Twenty-five years!” Alison is indignant, though indulgently so.
“Sorry, sorry . . .” Paul stares at his mother. “Congratulations. Twenty-five years . . .” He appears to reflect on this. “So that makes me twenty-four, right?”
“Well, of course,” says Alison brightly.
“And I am twenty-two,” says Gina in a rush. “And so forth and so on right down to Clare, who is all of . . . ten, is it, Clare?” And don’t let us get into exactly when Paul’s birthday is, just don’t let’s go there, time-honored no-go area. “And here we all are gathered together to celebrate Mum and Dad and all of us and here’s to the next twenty-five years.” She raises her glass. So do others. So does Paul.
He says, “I want some more wine.”
Gina says sotto voce, “I want doesn’t get. Just cool it, right?”
Corinna is wearing a speculative look. Martin is pursuing the Italian theme. He tells Charles that he and Corinna are looking for a permanent pied-à-terre over there. Corinna interrupts to say, well, maybe, but there’s also the Dordogne, our French is better than our Italian. Charles stares at them as though wondering who they are. Alison says, “Of course there’s a lot to be said for abroad but we always loved Cornwall when the children were young, we had such a nice house at Crackington Haven, several summers, it was there Paul climbed the cliff and got stuck, such a panic, we thought he’d fall, oh dear—do you remember, Charles?”
“All too vividly.”
There is a brief hiatus, into which Paul speaks, looking at his mother. “Which of us was your favorite? Who did you love best?”
All know that they should not look at Alison, and most do so. Clare drops her fork. Sandra takes a deep and audible breath. Gina kicks Paul in the shin. Charles gazes down the table, impassive.
“Really, dear! What a silly question!” says Alison merrily. She gets up. “Now, who’s for seconds? There’s plenty of vegetables, and I think Charles can squeeze out a bit more pheasant. Martin? Corinna?”
Seconds are had, by those who wish. Paul declines, and stares moodily at the empty glass in front of him. He mutters to Gina. “You kicked me.”
Gina murmurs back that indeed she did. “Could you, do you think, cool it? Just do me a favor and shut up until the booze or whatever has worn off. Incidentally, where are you hanging out at the moment? Do you have such a thing as an address?”
Paul’s reply is indistinct.
“And work?”
“Bit of a problem there,” mutters Paul. “Got the sack from Star-bucks.”
“Ah. Cash-flow difficulty?”
Paul grunts.
“Here’s a deal. Keep your head down for the rest of the evening and I’ll give you a tenner as an advance Christmas present.”
The pudding is one of Alison’s signature confections, a raspberry cream meringue. “Frozen raspberries, of course, but our own, we had a wonderful crop this summer. Ingrid’s doing so much gardening these days, now we haven’t got small people running us off our feet, she planted new canes a couple of years ago and they’re doing wonderfully.”
Clare declines the meringue, with a sigh; cream is a no-no. Roger says in that case he’ll have hers, please. Martin seems to have driven Italian retreats into the ground and is sitting silent. Corinna is recalling her parents’ practice of games after a family meal: “Remember, Charles? Pencil and paper games and at Christmas always charades. Dressing up and acting. It seems weird now but of course very much what some people still did then—a Victorian/Edwardian survival, the last gasp of home entertainment. Charles, I distinctly remember you in a tablecloth, aged about ten, being a Roman emperor.”
There are giggles around the table. “Can we have a repeat performance?” says Roger.
Charles smiles blandly, and addresses Corinna. “And I remember you as Titania, in a net curtain.”
This image reduces Clare to suppressed hysteria. She has to bite on her napkin.
Paul speaks. “I think we should play a game after dinner. We should play the cellar game.”
Silence.
“No way,” says Clare.
“Wrap up, Paul, OK?” says Roger.
“The cellar game?” says Alison. She looks around, brightly. “What was the cellar game? You all used to troop off and I’d worry that you’d hurt yourselves on the junk there is down there.”
“Since you’re asking,” says Paul, “the cellar game . . .”
Gina cuts him off. “Nobody wants to play anything after dinner, we’re going to help clear up and then have coffee or whatever and those who wish will be allowed to slump in front of the telly. Is there any more of this yummy pud, Mum?”
Paul has been sidelined. The raspberry meringue is finished off and then there is much pushing back of chairs and gathering up of plates and glasses. Alison tells Charles, Corinna, and Martin to go through to the sitting room: “Make yourselves comfortable—Charles dear, see to the fire, would you. Sandra, the glasses can go straight into the dishwasher. Someone pass me those plates.” She waves at the pile of Limoges dessert plates on the table.
Paul picks up the plates. He lurches in Alison’s direction. He stumbles. The plates slither from his hands and smash upon the floor.
At midnight, in the privacy of the matrimonial bathroom, Alison mops tears from her face, for the second time that day. The first occasion had been to do with frustration over Paul’s failure to say whether he would turn up or not, with irritation because her favorite kitchen knife had gone missing, and the accumulated stress of preparation. Now, she is mourning the Limoges china, she has just realized that Paul was drunk or something, and a great suppressed stew of aggravation and discontent simmers within. She scrubs her face with a towel and returns to the bedroom; her long-sleeved nightie with ruffled neck and the unpinned hair around her shoulders make her seem faintly girlish.
Charles, in maroon pajamas, is sitting on the edge of the bed, hunting through the pile of books on the bedside table.
Alison goes to the dressing table and brushes her hair. “We could have done with an extra pheasant,” she says. “But the pudding went down well and Corinna wants the recipe for the salmon pâté.”
“Your usual gastronomic triumph,” says Charles, selecting a book and getting into bed.
Alison turns around. “And Paul was drunk and most of the Limoges dessert plates are smashed and Corinna is so patronizing and we have been married for twenty-five years.”
“Indeed yes,” says Charles. “To all of that, I suppose.”
“Why?”
He looks at her over his glasses, finger in the book. “Why what?”
“Why did we get married?”
A brief silence.
“I seem to recall you were pregnant.”
“Oh, of course,” says Alison. “I knew there was something.”
She gets into bed, the tears rolling once more.
THE CELLAR GAME
The house hears everything. The house knows. It knows all that has been said, all that has been done. Silent speech hangs in the air, and repeats the words that hang in people’s heads: “I am a servant,” “I seem to recall that you were pregnant,” “Who did you love best?” The house stows away this inaccessible archive; people store also, because they cannot help it. They hear the same things said, time and again. They take this personal cargo away from Allersmead, to wherever they go next, they cannot relinquish it. Past and future become one—what has been said, what will be said, the silent witness of this place.
Gina sits in a television studio, waiting for her moment, and for no reason at all Paul speaks, his voice invades the present, comes swimming up from another day, another world: “Eat a spider,” he orders.
The cellar is not a cellar at all. It is, variously, the Pacific Ocean, the Antarctic, the open prairie, and much else. When they go down there it undergoes a metam
orphosis—the damp Edwardian brick walls dissolve, the cindery floor melts away. The packing cases, the broken Ping-Pong table, the doorless cupboard all become habitations; the old lawn mower is a sled, a horse, a ship. They are adrift on a raft, they sled to the South Pole, they fight off Indians from their covered wagon—for this is 1979, cowboys and Indians are still around. As are other things. The far end of the cellar, the dark end, the end that the light from the windows does not penetrate, that end is Dalek country, the Daleks are there, lurking invisible in the gloom; they may come out, if provoked. James Bond owns the stone stairway; from the top step he guns down the enemy, and then leaps to safety with one practiced bound.
Paul is always James Bond. Until . . . until the day Sandra says, “I’m going to be James Bond this time.”
“You can’t. You’re a girl.”
Sandra retorts, “If we can pretend someone’s James Bond, then we can pretend I’m a boy.”
Paul is silenced, trying to ferret a way around the logic of this. At last he says, grudgingly, “All right. Just this time.” He is struck by a dismaying thought. “But I’m not being James Bond’s girl.”
There can be arguments, there can be dissent, but at the moment they all pile down the steps to play the game there is united purpose. Somehow, a collective decision has been made: today it is the cowboys and Indians game, today it is the ship game.
And there is another game. This is a more low-key game, but it is an abiding game, they come back to it time and again. It does not have a name, it is simply an arrangement into which they slip, almost without discussion. The packing case becomes a house, the home. Paul is always the father. Gina, usually, is the mother but sometimes Sandra wants the role. More often, Sandra prefers to be a child—one of the children, and usually a subversive child, who answers back, who disobeys. It is Sandra, more often than not, who has to pay a forfeit. Clare is the baby; sometimes she has to submit to being wrapped up in a piece of damp sacking and placed in the orange-box cot. Actually, she does not too much mind; she lies there smiling peacefully, even sucking her thumb. Katie and Roger are simply children, they bulk out the family.
Family life is not particularly tranquil. Paul is a Victorian paterfamilias. He demands absolute obedience, absolute compliance. There is a draconian education system in force: people have to learn bits of a tattered telephone directory by heart, they have to add up columns of figures. But there is a certain tacit agreement here; protest is ritual, it is stylized. Children sigh and groan and roll their eyes. Only when things go too far—Sandra—is a price exacted.
Gina is a peculiar sort of mother. She does not cook; meals are conjured from the air, and eaten with relish—it is always bangers and mash with tomato ketchup. She is interested in storytelling; people have to sit in a circle and now the story will begin, and it will go on at some length, sometimes incorporating themselves—themselves in that other, aboveground, Allersmead life—so that things become interestingly confused, they do not know quite who or where they are.
It is Gina, on the whole, who devises the cellar games, whether it is home life in the packing case or a bout on the high seas. She directs the narrative, such as it is, and proposes who does what and when, though others have an input here. Paul requires plenty of action, while both Katie and Roger have been known to object if their roles are too insignificant or too challenging.
“I don’t want to play,” says Katie.
“You have to,” says Paul kindly. “Everyone has to. You know that.”
“I’m not going to be the one who gets eaten by the sharks.”
Gina intervenes. “She can get rescued. We throw her a rope.”
Paul frowns. This spoils things. He does not have an anticlimax in mind. “Clare, then.”
Clare beams. She is not sure what a shark is.
Actually, Clare can be a problem. She is inclined to start doing her own thing, to introduce an element of four-year-old mayhem. She has only recently been included at all, and has not yet grasped the imperative requirement for teamwork. There is a form of democracy in operation—people can raise objections about what is demanded of them personally, they can make suggestions and proposals, but nobody may go off on a tangent, introducing their own subplot or, indeed, engaging in some completely different operation. They may not—Clare may not—start to play with the stack of jam jars on the shelf of the broken bookcase, or go off to jump on the mattress that is not a mattress but a boat or a covered wagon or a sled. It is just as well that the cellar has its own hidden malevolence, and Clare is aware of this; she does not like spiders and wood lice, still less does she fancy the snakes that she has been told lurk in dark places, let alone the invisible Daleks. Clare has to hide behind the sofa during Doctor Who. So, on the whole, Clare stays close to everyone else and does what she is told, frequently bemused about what is going on.
Sometimes visiting children are obliged to play the cellar game. Usually, they do not enjoy it. There is the feeling that you are on the edge of things, you do not quite understand, you are inadequate, you are an outsider. And when it comes to forfeits they find that they would like to go home.
“Eat a spider!” orders Paul. There are gasps. This is new, and harsh. Everyone looks at Sandra. Will she decide to take a penalty? Evidently not: “OK,” she says calmly. She goes over to the cobwebby place under the window. She searches.
Forfeits are not quite the whole point of the cellar game. On some occasions, no forfeits arise. Rather, they are a kind of embellishment, a peak of creativity and excitement that things attain from time to time. Someone will overstep the mark—deliberately as often as not, provocatively—and there will be no alternative. In the house game, one of the children will be subversive, disobedient, and must be brought to heel. Or there will be mutiny on the ship, or someone fails a test of bravery. Some forfeits are mild enough; sit blindfolded for ten minutes, squat for five minutes, walk right around the house in nothing but your knickers, sing “God Save the Queen.” Others are more demanding: go into the back garden and dig up a worm and bring it back, steal one of Mum’s hairpins, stay in the Dalek corner for five minutes. Forfeits are both challenge and entertainment. The challenged will win status by accepting and successfully carrying out the forfeit; the spectators will be diverted but also titillated by the thought that next time it might be them.
There is an escape route. Anyone can refuse to accept a forfeit, but in that case they must take a penalty. They lose face, and their penalty mark is chalked up on the board, to be there in perpetuity. Clare has never really understood about this, and her penalty marks are in double figures, despite the fact that her penalties are customized. “No,” she says. “I don’t want to do a somersault. Not now.”
There is a continual search for new forfeits. Paul’s various proposals involving matches and lighters have been vetoed; some primitive instinct about health and safety seems to operate.
“Show us!”
“It’s in my hand,” says Sandra. “If I show you it’ll get away.”
“How big is it?” demands Roger.
Katie is worried. “I think this is cruel. It’s really cruel to the spider.”
Paul says, “I don’t believe you’ve got one at all.”
Sandra eyes him coolly. “Suit yourself,” she says. She raises her hand to her mouth, opens it. She swallows, gags dramatically, stares at them in triumph.
Gina realizes that they will never know. Did she or didn’t she?
The appeal of the cellar game is privacy and secrecy; it is never mentioned aboveground, no grown-up knows what goes on. If it has been noticed that they have gone down there, Paul, or Gina, or Sandra will say airily, Oh, we go down there and read to the little ones. Reading always earns brownie points at Allersmead. Or, We’re making a museum down there (creative, cultural, good). Or, We thought we’d tidy it up a bit (positively virtuous). Alison does not care for the cellar and virtually never visits it. Charles is perhaps barely aware that it exists.
The cellar is their territory. And the cellar game is an alternative universe into which, occasionally, they withdraw. It has nothing to do with real life; they are licensed to become other people, though their aboveground status and personalities continue to direct and inform the game. Paul is still the eldest, and thus entitled to pull rank. Gina supplies the most productive ideas, and devises story lines and props. Katie and Roger remain something of a unit, and like to have roles that reflect this. Sandra is wayward and independent; if she feels like rocking the boat, she will. And Clare is occasionally a liability, an uncontrollable element.
Today it is the family game. Gina is mother. Paul has shot a bison, so Gina has served bison bangers and mash, and now it is storytime. “Are you sitting comfortably?” she says.
Sandra groans, and gets a look to kill.
The story begins. It is a story about six children, who sound eerily familiar. There are smiles and nudges. There is an episode in which they swim the Channel; Clare is nearly drowned, Roger carries out a valiant rescue. And then the story veers in an unexpected direction. Everyone has grown up. Katie has eight children. Roger is a British Airways pilot. Clare is a pop star. Paul is prime minister (much hilarity at this point). Sandra . . . Sandra is a head teacher.
“I absolutely am not,” says Sandra. “Absolutely no way.”
Gina is firm. “In the story you are.”
“Then I’m not in the story,” says Sandra.
Paul says that she has to be. Paul is inflexible, when it comes to rules.
Sandra shrugs. “You can have this head teacher if you want to, but she’s not me. And anyway, what are you?”
Family Album Page 8