‘I could tell,’ Charles Henderson said. ‘They must have heard him yawning in Birkenhead.’
‘It’s one of his signs,’ defended Moira. ‘Yawning. He always yawns when he’s engrossed.’ She herself was enjoying it very much, though she hadn’t understood at first what Mr Darling was doing dressed up as Captain Hook.
‘It’s traditional,’ Alec told her.
‘What are you on about?’ asked Charles Henderson. ‘That pirate chappie was never Mr Darling.’
‘Yes it was, Dad,’ said Moira. ‘I didn’t cotton on myself at first, but it was the same man.’
‘I suppose it saves on wages,’ Charles Henderson said. Alec explained it was symbolic. The kindly Mr Darling and the brutal Captain Hook were two halves of the same man.
‘There wasn’t more than a quarter of Mr Darling,’ cried Charles Henderson, heatedly. ‘That pirate was waving his cutlass about every time I opened my eyes. I can’t see the point of it, can you, Moira?’
Moira said nothing, but her mouth drooped at the corners. She was probably thinking about her husband who had run off and left her with two kiddies and a gas bill for twenty-seven quid.
‘The point,’ said Alec, ‘is obvious. Mr Darling longs to murder his offspring.’ He was shouting quite loudly. ‘Like fathers in real life. They’re always out to destroy their children.’
‘What’s up with you?’ asked Mrs Henderson, when her husband had returned to his seat.
‘That Alec,’ hissed Charles Henderson. ‘He talks a load of codswallop. I’d like to throttle him.’
During Act Four Charles Henderson asked his wife for a peppermint. His indigestion was fearsome. Mrs Henderson told him to shush. She too seemed engrossed in the pantomime. Wayne was sitting bolt upright. Charles Henderson tried to concentrate. He heard some words but not others. The lost boys were going back to their Mums, that much he gathered. Somebody called Tiger Lily had come into it. And Indians were beating tom-toms. His heart was beating so loudly that it was a wonder Alec didn’t fly off the handle and order him to keep quiet. Wendy had flown off with the boys, jerkily, and Peter was asleep. It was odd how it was all to do with flying. That Tinkerbell person was flashing about among the cloth trees. He had the curious delusion that if he stood up on his seat, he too might soar up into the gallery. It was a daft notion because when he tried to shift his legs they were as heavy as lead. Mrs Darling would be pleased to see the kiddies again. She must have gone through hell. He remembered the time Alec had come home half an hour late from the Cubs – the length of those minutes, the depth of that fear. It didn’t matter what his feelings had been towards Alec for the last ten years. He didn’t think you were supposed to feel much for grown-up children. He had loved little Alec, now a lost boy, and that was enough.
Something dramatic was happening on stage. Peter had woken up and was having a disjointed conversation with Tinkerbell, something to do with cough mixture and poison. Tink, you have drunk my medicine … it was poisoned and you drank it to save my life … Tink dear, are you dying? … The tiny star that was Tinkerbell began to flicker. Charles Henderson could hear somebody sobbing. He craned sideways to look down the row and was astonished to see that his grandson was wiping at his eyes with the back of his sleeve. Fancy Wayne, a lad who last year had been caught dangling a hamster on a piece of string from a window on the fourteenth floor of the flats, crying about a light going out. Peter Pan was advancing towards the audience, his arms flung wide. Her voice is so low I can hardly hear what she is saying. She says … she says she thinks she could get well again if children believed in fairies. Say quick that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands. Clap your hands and Tinkerbell will live.
At first the clapping was muted, apologetic. Tinkerbell was reduced to a dying spark quivering on the dusty floorboards of the stage. Charles Henderson’s own hands were clasped to his chest. There was a pain inside him as though somebody had slung a hook through his heart. The clapping increased in volume. The feeble Tinkerbell began to glow. She sailed triumphantly up the trunk of a painted tree. She grew so dazzling that Charles Henderson was blinded. She blazed above him in the skies of Never-Never land.
‘Help me,’ he said, using his last breath.
‘Shut up, Charlie,’ shouted Mrs Henderson, and she clapped and clapped until the palms of her hands were stinging.
SOMEWHERE MORE CENTRAL
I never took all that much notice of Grandma when she was alive. She was just there. I mean, I saw her at Christmas and things – I played cards with her to keep her occupied, and sometimes I let her take me out to tea in a cafe. She had a certain style, but the trouble was that she didn’t look old enough to be downright eccentric. She wore fur coats mostly and a lot of jewelry, and hats with flowers flopping over the brim; she even painted her fingernails red. I was surprised that she’d died and even more surprised to hear that she was over seventy. I didn’t cry or anything. My mother made enough fuss for both of us, moaning and pulling weird faces. I hadn’t realised she was all that attached to her either. Whenever that advert came on the telly, the one about ‘Make someone happy this weekend – give them a telephone call’, Mother rolled her eyes and said ‘My God!’ When she rang Grandma, Grandma picked up the receiver and said ‘Hallo, stranger.’
The night before the funeral there were the usual threats about how I needn’t think I was going to wear my jeans and duffle coat. I didn’t argue. My Mum knew perfectly well that I was going to wear them. I don’t know why she wastes her breath. In the morning we had to get up at six o’clock, because we were travelling on the early train from Euston. It was February and mild, but just as we were sitting down to breakfast Mother said ‘Oh, look Alice,’ and outside the window snow was falling on the privet hedge.
When we set off for the station, the pavements were covered over. Mother had to cling onto the railings in case she slipped going down the steps. The bottoms of my jeans were all slushy in no time, so it was just as well she hadn’t succeeded in making me wear those ghastly tights and high-heeled shoes. I thought maybe the trains would be delayed by the snow, but almost before we reached the station it was melting, and when we left London and the suburbs behind the snow had gone, even from the hedges and the trees. The sky turned blue. I was sorry on Mother’s behalf. You can’t really have a sad funeral with the sun shining. She looked terrible. She looked like that poster for ‘Keep death off the roads’. She’d borrowed a black coat with a fur collar from the woman next door. She had black stockings and shoes to match. She doesn’t wear make-up, and her mouth seemed to have been cut out of white paper. She never said much either. She didn’t keep pointing things out as if I was still at primary school, like she usually does – ‘Oh look, Alice, cows … Oh, Alice, look at the baa lambs.’ She just stared out at the flying fields with a forlorn droop to her mouth.
Just as I’m a disappointment to Mother, she’d been a disappointment to Grandma. Only difference is, I couldn’t care less. Whenever I have what they call ‘problems’ at school, I’m sent to the clinic to be understood by some psychologist with a nervous twitch, and he tells me it’s perfectly natural to steal from the cloakroom and to cheat at French, and anyway it’s all my mother’s fault. They didn’t have a clinic in Mother’s day, so she’s riddled with guilt. Apparently Grandma was very hurt when Mother got married and even more hurt when she got divorced. First Grandma had to go round pretending I was a premature baby and then later she had to keep her mouth shut about my father running off with another woman. She didn’t tell anyone about the divorce for three years, not until everybody started doing the same thing, even the people in Grandma’s road. Actually I don’t think Grandma minded, not deep down; it was more likely that she just didn’t care for the sound of it. There were a lot of things Grandma didn’t like the sound of: my record player for one, and the mattress in the spare room for another. If we went down town for tea, she used to peer at the menu outside the cafe for ages before making up her mind. It drove Mother w
ild. ‘I don’t think we’ll stop,’ Grandma would say, and Mother would ask irritably, ‘Why ever not, Grandma?’ and Grandma would toss her head and say firmly, ‘I don’t like the sound of it.’ And off she’d trot down the road, swaying a little under the weight of her fur coat, the rain pattering on the cloth roses on her hat, with me and Mother trailing behind.
Once I went on my own with Grandma to a restaurant on the top floor of a large shopping store. We were going to have a proper meal with chips and bread and butter. The manager came forward to show us where to sit and we began to walk across this huge room to the far side, towards a table half-hidden behind a pillar. My mother always moves as if she’s anxious to catch a bus, but Grandma took her time. She walked as if she was coming down a flight of stairs in one of those old movies. She looked to right and left, one hand raised slightly and arched at the wrist, as though she dangled a fan. I always felt she was waiting to be recognised by somebody or expecting to be asked to dance. She went slowly past all these tables, and then suddenly she stopped and said quite loudly, ‘I don’t like the sound of it.’ She turned and looked at me; her mouth wobbled the way it did when she’d run out of peppermints or I’d beaten her at cards. I was sure everybody was looking at us, but I wasn’t too embarrassed, not the way I am when Mother shows herself up – after all Grandma had nothing to do with me. The manager stopped too and came back to ask what was wrong. ‘You’re never putting me there?’ said Grandma, as though he’d intended sending her to Siberia. She got her own way of course, ‘somewhere more central’, as she put it. Before we had tea she smoked a cigarette. When she flipped her lighter it played a little tune. ‘I don’t like being shoved into a corner,’ she said. ‘There’s no point my light being hid under a bushel.’
I wasn’t really looking forward to the funeral. I’d been in a church once before and I didn’t think much of it. I couldn’t have been the only one either, because the next time I passed it they’d turned it into a Bingo hall.
When we were nearly at Liverpool my mother said if I behaved myself I could go to the graveside. ‘You mustn’t ask damn fool questions,’ she warned. ‘And you mustn’t laugh at the vicar.’
‘Are they going to put Grandma in with Grandpa?’ I asked. I knew Grandma hadn’t liked him when he was alive. They hadn’t slept in the same bed.
My mother said, Yes, they were. They had to – there was a shortage of space.
‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘your Grandma was madly in love with a man called Walter. He played tennis on the Isle of Wight. He married somebody else.’
I wanted to know more about Walter, but the train was coming into Lime Street Station and Mother was doing her usual business of jumping round like a ferret in a box and telling me to comb my hair and pull myself together. She led me at a run up the platform because she said we had to be first in the queue for a taxi. We had a connection to catch at another station.
It turned out that there was a new one-way system for traffic that Mother hadn’t known about. If we’d walked, all we’d have had to do, she said, was to sprint past Blacklers and through Williamson Square, and then up Stanley Street and we’d have been there. As it was we went on a sort of flyover and then a motorway and it took twenty minutes to reach Exchange Station. She was breathless with anxiety when she paid the cab driver. We hadn’t bought tickets for the next train and the man at the barrier wouldn’t let us through without them.
‘But they’re burying my flesh and blood,’ shouted Mother, ‘at this very moment,’ as though she could hear in her head the sound of spades digging into the earth.
‘Can’t help that, luv,’ said the porter, waving her aside.
Then Mother did a frantic little tap-dance on the spot and screamed out, ‘God damn you, may you roast in hell’, and on the platform, echoing Mother’s thin blast of malice, the guard blew a shrill note on his whistle, and the train went. I kept well out of it. The only good it did, Mother making such a spectacle of herself, was to bring some colour back to her cheeks. When the next train came we had to slink through the barrier without looking at the porter. On the journey Mother never opened her mouth, not even to tell me to sit up straight.
We weren’t really late. My Uncle George was waiting for us at the other end, in his new Rover, and he said the cars weren’t due for another half hour. ‘Mildred’s done all the sandwiches for after,’ he said, ‘and the sausage rolls are ready to pop into the oven.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Mother, in a subdued tone of voice, and she leaned against me in the back of the car and held on to my arm, as if she was desperately ill. I couldn’t very well shake her off, but it made me feel a bit stupid.
My Uncle George is an idiot. He said I was a bonny girl and hadn’t I grown. The last time he’d seen me I was only six so you can tell he isn’t exactly Brain of Britain.
It was funny being in Grandma’s house without her there. She was very house-proud and usually she made you take your shoes off in the hall so as not to mess the carpet. My Auntie Mildred was dropping crumbs all over the place and she’d put a milk bottle on the dining-room table. There was dust on the face of the grandfather clock. Grandma was a great one for dusting and polishing. She wore a turban to do it, and an old satin slip with a cardigan over. She never wore her good clothes when she was in the house. My mother and her used to have arguments about it. Mother said it wasn’t right to look slovenly just because one was indoors, and Grandma said Mother was a fine one to talk. She said Mother looked a mess whether she was indoors or out.
I wasn’t sure where Grandma was, and I didn’t like to ask. When the cars came I was amazed to find that Grandma had come in one of them and was waiting outside. There were only two bunches of flowers on the coffin lid.
‘Why aren’t there more flowers?’ asked my mother. ‘Surely everyone sent flowers?’
‘I thought it best,’ explained my Uncle George, ‘to request no flowers but donations instead to the Heart Diseases Foundation. Mother would have preferred that, I think. She always said flowers at a funeral were a waste of good money.’
Mother didn’t say anything, but her lips tightened. She knew that Grandma would be livid at so few flowers in the hearse. Grandma did say that flowers were a waste of money, but she’d been talking about other people’s funerals, not her own.
I don’t remember much about the service, except that there were a lot of people in the church. I thought only old ladies went to church, but there were a dozen men as well. At the back of the pews there was an odd-looking bloke with a grey beard, holding a spotted handkerchief in his hand. He seemed quite upset and emotional. He kept trying to sing the hymns and swallowing and going quiet. I know because I turned round several times to stare at him. I kept wondering if it was Walter from the Isle of Wight.
For some reason they weren’t burying Grandma at that church. There wasn’t the soil. Instead we followed her to another place at the other end of the village. The vicar had to get there first to meet Grandma, so we went a longer route round by the coal yards and the Council offices.
It was a big graveyard. There were trees, black ones without leaves, and holly bushes, and marble angels set on plinths overgrown with ivy. Four men carried Grandma to her resting place. Ahead of her went some little choirboys in knee-socks and white frilly smocks. They sang a very sad song about fast falls the eventide. It wasn’t even late afternoon, but the sky was grey now and nothing moved, not a branch, not a fold of material, not a leaf on the holly bushes.
The vicar followed directly behind Grandma, and after him came my Uncle George, supporting Mother at the elbow, and lastly me and my Auntie Mildred. We went up the path from the gate and round the side of the church and up another path through a great field of grey stones and tablets and those angels with marble wings. But we didn’t stop. The small boys went on singing and the men went on carrying Grandma and we reached a hedge and turned right and then left, until we came to a new plot of ground, so out of the way and unimportant that they’d
left bricks and rubble lying on the path. And still we kept on walking. I don’t know why someone didn’t cry out ‘Wait’, why some great voice from out of the pale sky didn’t tell us to stop. I thought of Grandma in the restaurant, standing her ground, refusing to budge from her central position.
After she was put in the earth, before they hid her light under a bushel, we threw bits of soil on top of the coffin.
I didn’t like the sound of it.
THE WORST POLICY
Sarah made up her mind during Sunday lunch, after watching John help himself to his sixth roast potato. ‘You shouldn’t do that,’ she said, as he poured yet more salt onto his plate.
‘Hang it all, woman,’ he complained. ‘I’ve a big frame.’
As soon as he had gone out into the garden she telephoned her best friend, Penny. ‘I’ve decided to go ahead,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d like to know.’
‘Oh, Sarah,’ said Penny. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we could all drop dead at any time.’
‘You won’t,’ objected Penny. ‘It’s only John that’s at risk.’
‘My mind’s made up,’ said Sarah, and she replaced the receiver.
After tea she telephoned Penny again. John had gone into the living room to watch television with the children. ‘What if he drops dead,’ she asked, ‘while we’re in the middle of it?’
‘It would be a bit awkward,’ Penny agreed.
‘If he actually went,’ said Sarah, ‘I mean actually in the middle I’d pull him off the bed and roll him under it until it got dark.’
‘How would you be sure?’ asked Penny. ‘I mean, what would I do if he came to in the night and started moaning? How would I explain it to Roy?’
‘I’ve read about it,’ Sarah said. ‘There are certain signs. It’s not just a question of holding a mirror to the lips.’
Collected Stories Page 9