Mary George of Allnorthover

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  Mary hesitated, Daniel looked away and the wind prodded at the carriages on the ferris wheel, making them swing and clank.

  ‘Oh, a ghost train!’ Mary had only just noticed it.

  ‘Come on, then!’ Daniel sprung into action.

  The man sidled his cigarette to one corner of his mouth and spoke out of the other, ‘That’ll be two bob apiece.’ He took their money and shouted, ‘Wayne! Two for the train!’

  A chubby boy’s face blinked out from behind the crumbling entrance, an arch caked with papier-mâché painted black and studded with crumbling rubber Hallowe’en masks. ‘Shall I wait for it to fill up a bit?’

  The man jerked his lip in a sneer and the last half-inch of his cigarette toppled to the ground. ‘Don’t be fucking daft!’ He turned his back on Daniel and Mary and returned to his booth, grumbling and blowing on his hands.

  The ghost train trundled into a tunnel that smelt of stale hot-dogs mixed with the tang of fried onions and pickled shellfish. As they rounded the first corner, Daniel and Mary could hear Wayne and half-see his shadow keeping up with them on the other side of the papier-mâché wall. He desperately wound something which gave a wild mechanical whoop. Then a spotlight came on, revealing an elongated and flattened ghost painted on the tunnel roof. They moved slowly through a curtain of shredded black rubber, while Wayne waved things about that cackled and hissed. A red bulb lit up the inside of a plastic skull and Wayne squirted water through a cobwebby mesh. There were more ghosts and skeletons and dangling rubber creepy-crawlies.

  When Wayne appeared to let them out of their carriage at the end, he was purple-cheeked and exhausted and looked upset. Neither Mary nor Daniel had moved or made a sound during the ride. They thanked him and turned round to find the man from the booth observing them balefully.

  ‘Something else?’ he called out.

  ‘I don’t think, I mean thanks, and we, you know …’ Mary faltered.

  ‘Have you got a hall of mirrors?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘The Hall of Mirrors is shut.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’ Daniel took Mary’s arm.

  ‘Two bob each!’ he called after them.

  ‘What for?’ Daniel countered.

  ‘The Hall of Mirrors.’ They started back towards him. ‘Only, if I’m to get the keys and all, you may as well see the Crooked House.’ They looked at each other and nodded. ‘And that’ll be another two bob. Each.’

  The man took a padlock off a plywood door and ushered Mary and Daniel through into the dark. He fumbled on the ground and flicked a number of switches. With each switch, another part of the room was lit, and the darkness filled up with mirrors that came closer and closer until they had Mary and Daniel surrounded. ‘Off you go then.’ The man gave Mary a nudge and she looked down to see a strip of carpet, a kind of path. She took Daniel’s hand and led him towards the first mirror only to find that it wasn’t one, just a frame, beyond which was a real one. They stepped through and went right up to the glass and traced their reflections as if they couldn’t see at all and were trying to make out a shape. There were no reflections to either side, so Mary decided to turn left and bumped hard up against blank glass. They turned a corner to the right, and now there were reflections on every side, bounced back and forth like a trapped echo and then frittering away, getting infinitely smaller. It took a long time to find a way through the maze as each step became more tentative and although they could see, it was only their hands that told them which way to go. They came out looking as shaken and impressed as Wayne might have hoped they would be after their train ride.

  The man noticed the swelling on Mary’s cheekbone and looked proud. ‘That’s shop-front glass that is, near enough unbreakable.’ He had already taken the padlock off the Crooked House and turned on its lights, but these were only strings of small bulbs that drooped along the walls. After the multiple brightnesses of the Hall of Mirrors, it took some time for their eyes to adjust. Mary liked this best of all. It was like being at sea, or how she imagined it would be to be at sea. The staircase forced them to stumble and stretch as if it were rolling over high waves. The tilted floors threw them from one side to another. There was a mirror that made you tall and thin, one that made you short and fat, and another, the best, in which your body was bent wildly out of shape into a drawn-out serpentine ‘S’.

  Afterwards, they walked along the pier. It looked solid and straight from a distance, when in fact it had given way in places to the sea. A smashed strut dragged one side downwards; a missing plank left a sudden gap underfoot through which you could see slack, colourless waves jostling around slimy foundations. Thende Pier was, famously, the longest in Europe. There was a train that ran along it, but only in summer. It took forty-five minutes to walk to the end and when you got there, there was nothing much to see or do, just a flat view in which you might make out the smudge of a freighter, ferry, trawler or aeroplane. There was a penny arcade and a bandstand that was rarely used now, except by sheltering seagulls and fishermen wanting to eat their sandwiches out of the rain.

  The wind hurtled inland. Mary’s head ached with cold, her eyes and nose ran, and she pulled the sleeves of her jersey over her hands and buried them in the deep pockets of her coat. It was a leather flying coat that had belonged to one of Matthew’s uncles, so seasoned and worn that it draped softly around little Mary and rumpled on the toes of her boots. Daniel kept one arm round her and clutched the collar of his coat with the other.

  They reached the end of the pier, where they crouched on the wet bandstand step and huddled together. Mary tipped her head against Daniel’s chest and listened to the wind rattle a loose pane in the arcade window. A door slammed shut, then flew open again. The wires that anchored the bandstand’s awning in summer were singing.

  Clara came into the salon the next Saturday. She marched up to Mary who was trying to keep in order the three sizes of perm curlers and the tissue squares she was alternately handing to Felicity. ‘You and D weren’t at The Stands last night.’

  ‘No, we went for a drink.’ Mary almost went on to apologise but Clara was rearranging her fringe in the mirror, leaning over Felicity’s customer’s head. Felicity raised an eyebrow and continued her work.

  ‘Come over later?’

  Mary stopped herself asking why. ‘Sure, I finish at three.’

  ‘See you then.’ Clara stalked out.

  ‘Lovely hair, your friend’s got,’ Suze murmured dreamily. ‘Really, really lovely.’

  ‘Looked brittle to me,’ Felicity snapped. ‘Come on, Mary, concentrate. You’re not taking tea with Little Miss Whatsername yet, you know.’

  ‘Madame Whatsername,’ put in Jeanette, striking a pose that was just like Clara’s haughty slouch.

  ‘Mademoiselle, actually,’ Mary dared. Felicity raised another eyebrow.

  As Mary started down the Clock House drive, it began to rain hard. The tall trees that met over her head dripped heavily. The house looked even more dank and the front lawn had been churned to mud around Tobias’s heaps of machinery. Mary was shivering as Clara let her in. They passed the kitchen, where Mary glimpsed Tobias sitting at the table with Billy. She was going to stop and say hello, she was certainly curious, but Clara swept on down the corridor. They came to another set of stairs, narrower and plainer than the ones that led up from the hall with their elegantly curved banister.

  Clara’s big bedroom was a mess. Clothes spilt off the brass bed and out of cupboards onto the floor, a tangle of orange, pink, red, purple and black. Mary trailed her hand through one heap and found a feather boa, something studded, silk and then fur, which wriggled and mewed and revealed itself to be a spitting Persian cat, a white and fluffy creature missing half an ear and most of one back leg. The cat limped out, ignoring Clara’s call: ‘Lucretia! You old bruiser! She was only making friends! Sorry, Mary. She loves a spat!’

  Clara’s dressing table had a gilt-framed vanity mirror, a smaller oval mirror on a stand and three hand mirrors of different sizes.
A powder compact stood open and it, too, had a dusty mirror. Scattered among this were lipsticks, perfumes, mascara wands and cakes of eyeshadow, all left open or undone.

  ‘Where are your paints?’ There were no pictures on the walls, just another, full-length, mirror.

  ‘In my studio.’ Clara drew out the word into a long pout.

  ‘At college?’

  ‘I have a studio here, too, in one of the attics.’ It was the first time Mary had thought of Clara as a painter, perhaps because today she was wearing splattered dungarees and her hands were filthy.

  There were three cups next to the bed and another three on the floor. Mary peered into the one nearest her and at its bottom was a curdy blue mould. The record-player, a sleek chrome stereo with enormous speakers, was surrounded by records, empty record sleeves and full ashtrays. Mary picked out a cover, ‘Oh, you’ve got this! I love this!’

  ‘What’s that?’ Clara was rolling a joint. She glanced at the cover. ‘Oh, I think that’s one of Tobias’s. In fact they’re probably all his, you know, he just passes them on.’ Mary remembered Tobias turning off the water.

  Clara put on the record Mary had found and settled back beside her against the bed, so close that their shoulders and elbows were touching. ‘So …’ Clara drawled. She flexed her toes and inhaled hard, then blew out smoke through her nose, the way Matthew had when Mary had wanted him to be a dragon when she was a child. Clara passed the joint to Mary. ‘Julie Lacey.’

  Clara said her name as a statement but Mary knew it was a prompt. She tried to say two things at once. ‘She’s very bright, a bit tacky, a good laugh and can be a complete bitch but means well.’

  ‘Are you two friends?’

  ‘Sometimes. Why?’

  ‘Her brother.’

  ‘Kevin? He’s getting pins in his leg after the –’

  ‘No, no, no! The older one!’

  ‘Trevor?’ Mary passed the joint back. She was enjoying herself.

  Clara winced. ‘Trevor?’

  ‘Well, he’s the eldest. Runs some kind of business: reproduction furniture, I think he calls it. He must be pushing thirty now.’

  ‘He didn’t look that old at the disco!’

  ‘The disco? Trev wouldn’t be seen dead at any village disco!’

  ‘Then it wasn’t him who …’ She looked directly at Mary who leant her head back and shut her eyes. For some time neither of them spoke, then Clara stubbed out the end of the joint. ‘You’re quite a story around here, aren’t you?’ Mary gave no response. ‘Something to do with that lovely man I see walking up and down all the time, limping up and down since those yobs almost bumped him off!’ She sniffed. ‘Something to do with your father, isn’t it? Did he try to bump off the lovely lunatic as well?’ She was laughing rather messily. ‘Doesn’t he tell everyone you walked on water or something and something to do with his old house? It’s positively gothic!’ She slung an arm round Mary’s shoulders.

  Mary shifted forward. ‘He doesn’t tell “everyone” anything. As far as I know, he keeps himself to himself.’

  ‘In a place like this, you don’t have to tell anyone anything. They tell each other.’ Clara wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve, and was fumbling around for her dope, papers and cigarettes when the loud clackety-clack of a football rattle came from downstairs. Clara stood up: ‘That’s Mama calling us for tea.’

  The kitchen table was covered with plates of cakes and biscuits, cheese, chopped white cabbage, sliced oranges, and seeds and nuts Mary couldn’t put names to. The whole Clough family was there, except little Freddie: the doctor, the doctor’s wife, Clara, Tobias, Juliette and Bobo. Mary couldn’t put them in any obvious order. Tobias was taller than Clara; fourteen-year-old Juliette’s spectacles gave her great poise (Mary wished she’d chosen heavy frames like hers); and Bobo was a beaming bun of a boy whose plump cheeks made him look younger than Freddie, an angular and serious-faced child of eight, three years his brother’s junior. Clara was the boss, Tobias the mender, Juliette the brains, Freddie the wise child and eleven-year-old Bobo, everyone’s doll.

  Billy was ensconced between Tobias and Juliette, sifting through the biscuit tin, wondering where to start. Francesca Clough, pouring tea, waved Mary towards the table, where she took a chair. It gave way beneath her, folding and collapsing. She landed hard on her bottom and found herself holding an arm-rest in the air, and looking up into mildly concerned faces.

  Billy was shaking his head in admiration. ‘Good one, George.’

  Freddie appeared through the door that gave onto the garden, wearing a dripping mackintosh and sou’wester. ‘If I’d known you wanted to sit in my chair,’ he said slowly and clearly, ‘I’d have explained. You need to approach it from a certain angle, you see, and not disturb the string.’

  Mary nodded seriously. Clara threw a chocolate biscuit fast, hard and accurately at Freddie’s head. ‘Don’t be a creep, bambino. He refused to let Ma replace that chair when she got these others. No one else knows how to deal with it. Come by me.’ She nudged Juliette, who sighed and rose.

  The next half hour was a whirl of eating, talking, teasing and argument. Everyone chattered at once, getting their conversations so confused that Tobias would find his question about the relative merits of different stroke engines answered by Juliette’s retort to Clara’s insistence that it was still radical to wear black. ‘But it’s such old hat, so Left Bank!’ (Clara, not getting it, ‘You mean left wing, Jules.’)

  Dr Clough joined in with a dry aside (‘Jules should know, being named after La Greco.’) and caught hold of his fluttering wife as she jumped up to boil another kettle, fetch more fruit or open more biscuits, ‘Francesca, darling, sit and drink your tea.’

  Suddenly, everyone was getting up. Dr Clough returned to the surgery and the children dispersed, leaving their arguments in mid-air. Only Mary said thank you to Francesca Clough and nobody stayed to help her clear up.

  This time Clara led Mary to the other stairs and along the corridor to Tobias’s room. Late afternoon sun exposed the house as more neglected than it had seemed the night of the swimming-pool dinner. Mary ran her finger through the dust on a side table and across a mirror. The parquet floor was dull, and the rugs were thin and torn (but real, thought Mary, lived with and passed down!).

  Clara didn’t knock. Tobias was bent over another large record-player, the workings of which had been added to and exposed. Billy was stretched out on the floor among heaps of tools, lighting a joint. ‘Just in time!’ Clara flung herself on the bed.

  ‘Smoke your own.’ Tobias didn’t bother to turn round. Clara dangled her hand over the side of the bed, and Billy passed her the joint. Tobias relented, turned round and gestured to Mary, still hovering in the doorway: ‘Sit down. Listen to this.’ Clara passed her the joint and Mary, already lightheaded from what she’d smoked earlier, took a deep drag. Tobias lowered the needle onto the record and settled himself on the floor. ‘Concentrate,’ he said, and they did. The music began with a sparse melody then broadened with a lilting bass, a full horn section and tantalising fragments of voice, the whole spinning itself out and out, and bursting into wild over-embellishments. It went on and on building up, and took as long to die down. By the time the last whoops and twiddles faded, Mary was lying back against the wall, her eyes closed, smiling at the sheer, ridiculous delight of it.

  ‘Wow …’ Billy exhaled.

  ‘Earth, Wind & Fire,’ Mary murmured. She waited for Clara to make some cutting remark but it didn’t come. All they heard from her was a deep snore. Tobias played a Bob Dylan duet with Johnny Cash, then Joe Cocker, The Cars, Can and the Velvet Underground’s endless ‘Sister Ray’. In that white room with the rain coming down, all this sounded wonderful to Mary, both for being familiar and for being heard as if for the first time.

  III

  In October, as the first days of real cold arrived, the village returned to loving the insides of its houses. People put eiderdowns and counterpanes back on their beds, root
ed out hot-water bottles, and hugged the dry warmth of the kitchen. They had afternoon tea in front of a coal, gas or electric fire. Clothes now had to be dried indoors, on a wooden horse.

  Petrol was unrationed but three times as expensive as it had been at the start of the year. People would grumble and skimp, and then get used to it. Now the villagers hoarded candles, matches, paraffin and oil. Talk of power cuts spread – something else that Allnorthover was used to. Overhead lines were regularly blown down by winter gales so strong, they could uproot the hollow oaks marooned in the enlarged fields. One of these old trees had caught in the lines as it fell and had crashed to the ground in a haze of sparks. Telegraph poles lurched in the unsettled earth. Only the pylons, which crested the view like steel models of a more efficient kind of tree, remained unmoved. Every house that could afford them, had lamps and torches laid within sight and reach.

  Valerie Eyre was worried about Tom. He hadn’t been into The Arms for a week, nor had she seen him walking out of the village in the mornings, or nipping into the Post Office, or coming up Back Lane from Christie’s. After three days of waking to a frost, she packed her father’s old kitbag with clothes and food and set off for the Chapel.

  It was freezing. Bitter air gusted below the door, lifting drifts of paper. Odd sheets flapped against the wall and fell back. There were two large paraffin heaters, each of which Valerie weighed in her hands. They were full but cold.