‘Where does it all go?’ I said.
‘The sea,’ he said.
‘I’ve never seen the sea.’
‘Nor’ve I. But I reckon I will,’ he said proudly. ‘When I go away from here.’
‘You’d think the sea would fill up and flood over,’ I said.
‘Perhaps it will,’ he replied.
‘But where does all the new water come from?’
He looked frowningly along the flow of the dyke. He never liked to admit to not knowing anything. ‘You’re daft you are,’ he said.
‘I never am.’
He looked at me speculatively. ‘You are an odd bod. Sort of different. That must be funny, having no mam.’
‘It was at first,’ I said, ‘but not now, not any more. I can’t imagine having one now. That would be odd. But nice.’
‘She went mad my mam says.’
‘She never did!’
He shrugged. Sometimes he was wise, Isaac. Sometimes he let things be. A pair of grebes bobbed past. ‘Let’s swim,’ he said.
‘No!’ I jumped back. This was the water that had taken Mother.
‘Come on, cowardy!’ He pulled off his shirt and trousers. White he was and long. I giggled, surprised by his thing, a little pale sausage. But then he jumped and I was gripped with fear. I saw his buttocks flash, blue white, and then I couldn’t look.
Mother was in there. And now he thrashed his eel-like body, his long toes, into the depths. He might tread on her face. I turned my back, trembling, biting my lip. I wouldn’t let him see my fear.
‘Come on,’ he called, ‘it’s not cold. I won’t let you drown.’
‘No!’ I said.
I looked across the dyke to the silvergreen tremble of the willows that grew on a far-away river bank. In the distance some people were working in a field. Small stooping figures. That was where the train ran over there, somewhere over there, the train to Ely, the train perhaps to London. The place where Mother belonged.
They dragged this dyke but they could not find her. It was only that someone saw her stumbling forward one terrible night. He shouted but she did not hear. It was only that they found the flower from her hat, from her lovely hat, all wet and muddy near the edge.
‘Come on, we must get back,’ I said. ‘They’ll see that we’re gone.’
Eventually he scrambled out, shivering, muddy from the bank. He pulled his clothes on over his damp skin and I noticed how black his feet were compared with the whiteness of his legs. His soles were hard as leather for he only wore boots in the winter. We did not talk as we walked back. He went before me, trying to whistle through chattering teeth. My mind was a tangle of different strings pulling all ways. I felt angry, almost jealous that Isaac had been in Mother’s Dyke: I did not want to speak to him any more today. I also thought he was brave, because I was scared of that water. I also felt lonely already because I knew that soon he would go and then there would just be Aggie and Ellenanesther and me. And everything would be dull.
Aggie is nodding now, hands loosened on her knitting. It drops into her lap, her face sags. She snores softly. I can hear the twins in the kitchen; a moan from the cellar. What is the matter? He is dealt with for tonight. The moaning wakes Aggie. She jerks and then picks up her knitting, thinks I haven’t noticed that there is a thin line of saliva on her chin, a dark spot of it on her chest.
‘You’ve been dribbling,’ I say, and she gives me her darkest look.
‘Last night I had a dream,’ she said. ‘I dreamt about Father. Mother wasn’t there, just Father. He was staring straight through me. I wasn’t there at all.’
She goes back to her knitting. She’s doing a complicated lacy pattern, like sea-shells, cockleshells. When we were girls we would dig shells up sometimes in the yard to give to Mother.
‘I never dream of Father,’ I say. ‘But Mother is there, often. Not doing anything. Just there.’
I look at Aggie for a long time. Just an old woman, really a quite filthy old woman. Her grey hair is flat against her head with grease and the pink of her scalp gleams through. The deep lines on her face are filled with grime; her finger ends are brownish, the nails curved over like yellow claws.
‘What are you staring at?’ she says. I look away.
The pile of cats heaves and sighs as one extracts itself and goes towards the door. It stretches and sighs, yawns, and then looks at me expectantly. Me, though they are Agatha’s cats, nothing to do with me. It gives me an insolent look. It is almost black in this shadowy gloom, its eyes are slits of light. I will not move, not for a cat, not to save Agatha the trouble. It goes behind Agatha’s chair and I hear the dark hiss of its pee. The creature swaggers out, wiping its feet on the floor, and then relaxes into the furry pile, becomes indistinguishable among the tabby limbs.
‘Filthy beasts,’ I say to Agatha. I don’t hold with animals in the house. ‘Why don’t you at least care for them properly, Agatha? Why don’t you drown them?’
Agatha pretends not to hear. ‘Such a terrible stench,’ I add, though in truth it makes little difference. Agatha pulls a biscuit packet out from the side of her chair, a pink wafer packet. There are no more wafers left but she tips the crumbs into the palm of her hand, and licks them off. Disgusting.
‘Imagine if we were to go into town,’ she says, suddenly, dropping her knitting on the floor. ‘Would you come? We could buy some new things. I could buy a new frock.’ She stands up. She runs her hands over her scrawny body as if there is something worth showing off inside that old thing she wears, the colour of which is long forgotten beneath the splashes and stains of food and the cat hairs. Her hands rest on her hips. ‘Blue has always suited me best,’ she says. ‘Of course on some it looks insipid. It takes a complexion to wear a proper blue.’ She gives me a pitying look. ‘And I will have my hair curled,’ her hands describe a froth of curls around her head, ‘and paint my nails. And shoes. Shoes with heels and pointed toes.’ She tiptoes across the room, creaking and scattering biscuit crumbs, a stupid flirting look upon her face.
‘And then we could go out to dinner. To a restaurant.’ She sits down again. ‘Imagine, Milly, a restaurant! With waiters, handsome waiters to wait on us hand and foot. What would we have, Milly?’ she said.
‘Oysters and beef,’ I say, straining my memory for the details of luxury that mother taught us. ‘And red wine and creme caramel.’
‘And coffee with brandy!’ she remembers. ‘And chocolates!’
‘And a swan carved out of ice. Mother told me about the swan carved out of ice, on a sea of violet petals.’
‘Just to look at, not to eat,’ adds Aggie. ‘She told me, too.’
‘She was out in a restaurant, eating dinner, with a man. Not Father.’
‘Before she knew Father.’
‘Swans of ice were not Father’s sort of thing.’
‘No,’ says Aggie. She finishes licking between her fingers for the crumbs and picks up her knitting, but it has grown too dark to knit. In the kitchen Ellenanesther are muttering. I should go and see what they are doing, see that they are not playing with anything sharp. No. They’re all right. They’re fine. It does not do to meddle and I don’t want to move, not quite yet. It’s comfortable. It’s growing chilly but I have made this chair warm and I do not want to leave the warmth, not just yet. It feels almost normal here. Two sisters, sitting of an evening, just talking, just reminiscing, like sisters do. Oh but it is such a mess! What ever would Mother have said?
‘Perhaps, tomorrow, we should clear up?’ I suggest, for I could not tackle it myself. She looks around the room and I follow her eyes. The corners have vanished now in shadows, but even so it is obvious that it is a hopeless task. The cats cover most of the floor and their hairs coat the carpet so that it is as soft and tabby as themselves. The hairs seem to float a little above the carpet, they sway as we move, they catch in the cobwebs, they are warm to walk in as warm water. Rubbish is everywhere. Mother’s old piano is open and its keys are clogged with foo
d and dust. They stay down if you press them. Sometimes, when the stove is lit we burn things, but more often, nowadays, they just stay where they are dropped. There are biscuit wrappers and paperbags and gin bottles and saucers encrusted with cat meat and cups clogged up with mould. We keep four cups clean, four plates, the cutlery and George’s dish. That is sufficient. There are crumpled handkerchiefs and things the cats bring in and envelopes and, in here, there are the clothes left around my trunk. They have been on the floor since … since I decided to stay. That’s when I stopped clearing up, when we all did. We just left everything, everything but the things we actually needed to use, just where it fell. It was a decision. Impressive. It was hard to stick to at first although it soon became a way of life. I cannot even tell what those things are now, the things it seemed so important for me, once, to take away from here. They are just lumps of soft grey dusty cloth. The only things that shine in this house are the mirrors. I rub them sometimes, just in the centre, to see my face, to see that I’m still here. Aggie looks more often. She preens like she’s always done, always vain, though little good it’s done her. I wonder what she sees. I do not think that it can be the truth.
The curtains reek of mould. You cannot touch them for they disintegrate at the slightest pull, showering mould spores in the air. It is all right in the summer. We want the light, and there is no need for privacy here. It will be cold in winter though. I do not want another winter.
‘Remember Mrs Howgego,’ I say, for tonight the past is on my mind more than ever.
‘Remember Isaac, you really mean, dear.’
‘Isaac too,’ I agree.
‘Oh Isaac,’ she says, and sighs. I look at her sharply. ‘He took a fancy to me, you know,’ she says. Evil old bitch. Well I won’t have it, not that, she’s not poaching Isaac.
‘Isaac was mine,’ I say firmly, ‘as you well know. Or have you gone completely doolally?’
‘Only because he couldn’t have me. I was far superior, he could see that, but I only had to snap my fingers, like so,’ she snaps the bones of her old finger ends, ‘and he would have come running.’
‘Liar!’ I say. ‘Isaac would never have touched you, not with a bargepole he wouldn’t. Not in a thousand years. He would never have touched you – because he knew.’
There is a gasp of cold silence, like the backwash of a wave. In all the time that has passed this has never been spoken. I watch Aggie’s old face working, thinking, shrivelling. Despite the dark, she pretends to apply herself to her tight nylon shells. ‘Yes, he did,’ I continue, the urge to hurt her unbearable, irresistible, like an itch that will be scratched. ‘He told me he knew. He asked me if it was true.’
‘Whatever do you mean, dear? It’s you that’s doolally,’ she says. She has made a decision. It will not come out. Well she hasn’t got all the power.
‘He said it was against the law. He said they would come and take you away, if they knew, to prison. He said it made him feel ill, you made him feel ill.’ Aggie is trembling too much even to pretend to knit. ‘I hate you Agatha!’ I say. ‘If it wasn’t for you he would have married me. We would have got away …’ I cannot prevent my voice rising to a wail. ‘Away! I might have been away, far away. I might have been in London. I would have been Mrs Howgego … a grandmother by now perhaps. It was you Agatha. You ruined everything!’
My heart is beating hard; like a rat in a box it thumps, a strong thing, and I am breathless. I control my breathing and I close my eyes and only when I am calmer can I bear to look at Agatha again. I cannot see her expression because of the dark, but she is looking straight at me and she is calm. When she speaks there is relief in her voice.
‘You lie,’ she says. ‘You are a liar. Isaac died before all that.’
She thinks she’s got me. But I have tricked her.
‘Before what then?’ I say. ‘Before what?’
She begins to hum in a cracked voice. I have never known anyone who could lie to herself like Agatha. I have hardly known anybody.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ she says, in her important voice, ‘Mark is bringing something new next time. Something new to try.’
She waits for me to ask – and I cannot help it. ‘What sort of something new?’
‘It’s a special sort of food. Modern food. In a plastic pot. You pour water in and you get – oh all manner of things! Chinese food even! Rice and … oh all sorts. Dumplings I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘He’s taken you for a fool, Agatha!’
‘No. He told me all about them. You don’t need a pan or a plate or anything. You just eat them from the pot.’
‘Can’t be much good.’
‘They’re delicious, he says. He practically lives on them, he says.’
‘Anyway he will come tomorrow and we shall see.’ Well, I am willing to try anything. You can’t accuse me of narrow-mindedness.
Ellenanesther come through to say goodnight. They are old women, would seem old women to others, but to us they are still young. Still the babies. Their hair is grey now, long down their backs, cut in straight fringes like iron bars across their brows, but their faces are like children’s faces, old and wrinkled dolls’ faces. Flat, bland faces with big round eyes.
‘Night night,’ they say.
‘Sleep tight, dears,’ says Agatha.
‘Watch that the bugs don’t bite,’ I say. Have said, for ever. Nonsense though, for the house is a swarm of bugs and fleas, the carpet jumping with them. Well, who’s to say they haven’t as much right here as ourselves? They’ll be here long after we’ve gone. I read in a book that Mother gave me once, for Christmas, a natural history book, that there are insects, some insects, stag beetles or earwigs, perhaps, that can survive ice and fire. They’ll be here long after we’re gone, that’s for sure.
Once Ellenanesther are safely upstairs I heave myself out of my chair, just to check the knives. They have polished them themselves. That is my job. They should not have done that. They should not play with the knives. However, they are all there, every one in its place. Neat. The knife drawer is the only neat place in the house, the knives and the mirrors the only things that shine.
Mother’s kitchen is a terrible mess, a filthy mess. One day I’ll clean it. I’ll ask Mark to bring us scouring powder and if I search I’ll find a brush and then I’ll scrub the dirt away. Or perhaps I won’t. Mark would be impressed if the kitchen was cleaned. I’ve seen the way he doesn’t look at the awfulness, polite boy. His name is Mark Gotobed. He is the great-grandson of Sarah Gotobed who used to bring our groceries. I never liked her, but Mark, he is a fine boy. Mother would have approved, for he has manners.
Next time Mr Whitton brought his bull to serve Barley, I hung around. I didn’t want to see – and I did. I wanted to know what Isaac knew. I tried chatting to Mr Whitton, not a chatty man, and certainly not bothered about passing the time of day with a little girl. He seemed uneasy, told me to run along. I went round the other side of Barley’s stall and pretended I was not there.
‘If there was any little girls in here, I’d tell them to buzz off,’ said Mr Whitton, as if to the bull. ‘Because I don’t reckon they’d like seeing it. Not if they was good little girls they wouldn’t.’ I crouched silently down in the straw, my nose tickled and I was frightened I would sneeze. Mr Whitton muttered something more and then sighed. ‘All right then,’ he said. He dragged the hulk of a creature by the rope through the ring in its leathery nostrils into the stall. He goaded it a bit with a stick and pushed the gate shut behind it. I watched from behind my fingers, my eyes watering from the effort of not sneezing, the animal lump itself up onto poor old Barley’s back. I could not breathe. I was sure that the weight of the brute would break her spine. I saw the wild look upon Barley’s face, the way her eyes showed white and her tongue flickered sideways. The face of the bull was thick and expressionless. There was a hot meatish smell from it. I saw with horror the thick red rod of its thing.
My eyes were streaming and then it burst from me,
a terrible noise half-way between a sneeze and a retch. I scrambled up out of the straw and bolted from the barn. I was thinking of Father and Mother. Imagining Father on Mother’s back grunting and snorting, imagining Mother’s frightened face and the awful thing going into her. I pelted out of the barn in an agony of embarrassment and revulsion.
‘What’s up with you?’ Mr Whitton bellowed after me. ‘Didn’t you like it then?’ I knew that he was laughing at my fear and I ran and ran from the barn, ran round the back of the house to the orchard and I was sick in the grass. Poor Mother. Poor poor Mother. And she had had to do it four times to get her children. Or three. Was it twice for twins? It was hateful and ugly and disgusting.
I climbed the apple tree, my special tree, and thought of Isaac, how I hated Isaac for knowing such a horrible disgusting thing all the time, and how he laughed as if it was some sort of joke. He laughed in the same way that Mr Whitton laughed, a man’s way of laughing about a horrible man’s thing. If staying nice meant not doing that then there was no danger for me. I thought that I would rather die.
I stayed in the apple tree a long time. I heard Mr Whitton and the beast leaving; I heard Aggie calling me once or twice and giving up. I sat still in the tree. I watched a kitten stalking in the grass; birds landed in the tree with me, so still was I; I saw a frog flopping in the grass towards the pond. Of course I didn’t hate Isaac. But Mrs Howgego was right to call it not nice. But then if it was not nice, how did being married make it any nicer?
Ellenanesther came round the side of the house into the orchard. They were carrying something in a basket. They looked tiny from my perch in the tree, and charming really, a picture from a nursery rhyme with the sun shining on their brown hair, with their rosy faces and lashes that curved on their cheeks. They sat down close to my tree. They were muttering their own words, their funeral words: and the sonantheghost ohmothero anwaterandearth omotheromothero. They called the kitten that was playing in the grass, rustled their fingers at it, and it came to them, pink nose inquisitive, whiskers twitching. Then quickly, one of them snatched it up, and pushed it in the basket, and the other snapped down the lid. They went back round the house, out of sight, holding the basket between them, engrossed in their game.
Honour Thy Father Page 4