Victoria at the Falklands

by Jack Tollers

  Chapter One

  Love at first sight

  Nobody remembers when Victoria started with this quaint habit of hers of talking to herself. Sometimes she contrived to do it in very low tones, conferring with herself barely moving her lips. But most of the time people could actually hear her soliloquizing, talking quite freely to apparently no one. This of course, brought some chaff on her. But as it happened in Victoria's world with so many other things, she just didn't care. And then, if someone picked up the thread of her voiced reflections she was prone to express wonder at her interlocutor's omniscience.

  Which is what happened when her father barged into the kitchen that Saturday morning when she was finishing her breakfast. He had heard her musing on the lyrics of a certain song they had been listening to on the wireless the night before.

  ‘Well, my girl, happy birthday and all that,’ he lightly kissed his eldest daughter on the forehead, turned round and shuffled towards the fridge, ‘But I think you’ve got it wrong... err... Tell you what, “Linen Flower” isn’t a story about unrequited love, you know, absolutely not.’

  He was a bulky man. As a youngster he had played football rugby in the local club and had made quite a name for himself as 8-man, and now he was only a bespectacled half bald professor whom her daughters referred to as “the old chump”. Apparently, he couldn´t care less, unvariably answering with his favourite diktat: “We’re coming on”. On this occasion he was sporting a tattered dark brown dressing gown which no amount of objections from the whole family could make him surrender.

  He opened the fridge hummming to himself, took out two baby bottles and put them in an enormous kettle with water, which he used to warm the things à la bain-marie. ‘As a matter of fact, I think the opposite is more like it.’ Professor Wade laughed at his own words.

  Victoria frowned. She found it rather early in the morning for fatherly guffaws. ‘The opposite?’

  ‘Yes, well... As it happens with any narrative, you have to decide who’s telling the story, right?’

  Victoria nodded from her table while munching a piece of toast.

  ‘So it’s quite clear from the beginning that it’s the boy, not the girl who’s telling it.’ He started to sing out of tune, a thing her daughter found even more distasteful than his bouts of laughter.

  Presently the dreadful tone-deaf sounds came to an end. ‘Excuse me a sec, I’m coming back in no time’. The old man took the bottles, wrapped them up in a dishcloth and left the kitchen.

  There was silence for a while, while Victoria had some more toast, looking reflectively through the kitchen window at the back garden. Its outlines were gradually appearing with the first morning lights.

  Eighteen! She suddenly remembered again. The Wade’s didn’t make much of birthdays—no presents for one thing. But eighteen seemed to be an important affair and this time she had organised quite a party. She checked the weather through the window. It looked quite promising. That night’s barbecue was to be quite a big gathering of school friends, relatives, neighbours and what not, and it would’ve been quite impossible to have them all indoors.

  On Saturday mornings the house was haunted by an eerie hush. You could, as it were, feel the silent walls impregnated with the echo of many voices, the faint ringing of music, of endless talks and arguments, the dances and parties, the poker games and the door bells, the vacuum cleaner in the mornings, dogs barking at night and children crying. Every wall, each sofa, each bookshelf silently echoed the usual din of the house. Naturally, the living room was always in a mess—a sock lying on the carpet, an open book on the stove, half a glass of wine on a window sill—it all told about a very forceful life-temperature that seemed to reverberate all over the place. But on Saturday mornings one could only surmise what sort of a noisy house it habitually was by the pointed grumble of the old fridge in the kitchen.

  Victoria had been an early riser ever since she could remember, partly to avoid what in her family was referred to as the ‘bathroom battles’ because the house’s two toilets were usually very much in dispute after seven in the morning. As a result, these morning exchanges with her father in the kitchen were not unusual. He appeared again at the doorway with a resolute smile on his red face.

  ‘I tell you what, dear, the whole story told in Flor de Lino hangs from those first lines.’

  He hummed another bit, took a cup and saucer from a cupboard, sat down heavily in front of Victoria and asked unnecessarily, ‘Is that tea, do you think?’ An enormous earthenware pot could be nothing else. Victoria reflected for the first time that his father sometimes sounded rather like Lord Emsworth, and couldn't refrain a smile. The man rambled on while serving himself a cup. ‘Er... you see? As I was saying, the story revolves around those first lines, I don’t know if you follow...

  Victoria shook her shapely head, her black flocks following suit.

  ‘Well, I mean, life can be just like that,’ he sighed. ‘You happen to want something very much, something wonderful... I don’t know... Let’s put it this way: you want to go right to the top of the ladder, right?’ Professor Wade frowned, concentrating on his trail of thought while Victoria poured some tea for him, ‘Well then, you're so intent on that, that you don't even imagine going up step by step... Now, my girl, pay attention here! This is the photograph: the girl is waiting for a simple kiss, and he’s thinking of uh.... What the devil?’ Victoria’s father shrugged and raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, ‘He’s thinking of the whole world bidding him with earnest solicitousness... With “jealous zeal” as the song has it,’ he paused for a sip of tea. ‘This, my dear girl, keeps him dreaming with great expectations—that’s a Dickens’s title by the way—and because of this, oh dear, this gets a bit tragic I’m afraid, he never even sees that little girl that was “stripping evenings”, he doesn’t realize she's there, if you see what I mean.’

  Victoria nodded silently while buttering a toast for her father.

  ‘Maybe he actually looked at her once or twice, but, you see, he never saw her, never heeded her... not really, poor fool.’ He sighed with a characteristic frown.

  Victoria looked out through the window and saw a couple of red-bellied thrushes in the kitchen garden. She opened the window and threw some crumbs at them.

  ‘But why is this youngster “embarrassed”?’

  ‘Well, bless you, a sort of shame, you know, typically found in those farm boys,’ he munched at his toast, ‘I mean that very special modesty that those diffident boys from the countryside tend to display when they appear at a village dance with their new clothes which they find extremely uncomfortable—you know, just feeling clumsy,’ he paused in search of words, ‘I don’t know, they just don’t know what to do with their rugged hands, they try to hide their new shoes under the table, they’re unable to leave their ties alone... Well all that is signified in this song.’

  ‘Oh yes! I know what you mean, they feel awkward. It makes them rather lovable I find...’

  Her father laughed at that.

  ‘But I do. I've seen that somewhere.’

  She hadn't. Everyone imagines Argentina as an enormous countryside place, even Argentines do. The Pampas would be most of the show. But very few people have actually been there; a simple glance at any map shows that a great percentage of Argentines actually live in cities and towns. All the same, it works as another national delusion made up of bits and pieces of literature, comics and paintings as well as folk music lyrics like Flor de Lino, the waltz Victoria was trying to figure out. But, despite being eighteen, Victoria had never been there.

  ‘You visiting Mum?’ her father enquired, changing the subject abruptly while rising from his chair.

  Victoria nodded. ‘As usual—and going to the Guides in the afternoon.’

  He didn’t seem to be much interested and soon enough was humming again to himself while filling the kettle with more water.