The White Family

by Maggie Gee

  Rules and regulations. There were always rules. Their life at home was a mosaic of rules, mostly made by Alfred, but at least she knew them … Now they were on unfamiliar ground.

  His body slipped very slightly askew as her weight changed the camber of the bed. He looked frail enough for a movement of the bedclothes to snuff him out, but she knew he was not. His bony strength would endure forever. Come rain, come shine he had gone to the Park and done his day’s work. Dawn till dusk. Summer and winter. Uncomplaining.

  And many’s the time he should have complained, for they let him down often enough. But we didn’t complain. Not our generation.

  Now Darren railed and complained for a living, writing pieces for the papers about ‘injustice’ and ‘corruption’. The real world seemed to astonish her son, which May could never understand. Of course life was unjust. Of course people were corrupt. She had known that ever since she was six and her teacher made a pet of a school governor’s daughter, although poor Elspeth was sour and plain. Of course the poor suffered and the rich flourished.

  In any case, Darren was rich himself … but perhaps he wasn’t really indignant; perhaps he pretended, to make his articles more exciting. In which case it hadn’t worked, for her, for she no longer bothered to read the cuttings which arrived in bundles from all over the world. Alfred did, though. He read them, faithfully, and told Darren so in the curly-scrolled postscripts he added to her letters. His pride in their elder son was almost painful.

  She gazed at his cheeks, which had sunken in as his jaw dropped with sleep, or was he getting thinner, was it happening already, the thing she dreaded? His beloved, angular, big-bridged nose on which he had perched his gold-rimmed glasses. Gently and fondly, she slipped them off, as she did at home when he dozed off in his chair. He couldn’t have meant to fall asleep, it must have sneaked up on him unawares …

  All of it catches us unawares. What if he never wrote letters again, sitting in his waistcoat underneath the bright light in the living-room after tea and his nap, reading aloud the few short phrases he had written and asking her anxiously ‘Is that all right, May? Will it do?’ ‘Of course it’s all right. Put what you want to.’ Why did he need her reassurance so much? Men pretended to be strong, but really they were babies.

  ‘Mrs Um …’

  ‘Sorry?’

  The nurse was freckled, pink, red-haired. ‘You might be more comfortable in this chair.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be sitting on the bed.’ May was mortified; told off by a teenager.

  ‘Oh no, it doesn’t matter, but the chairs are meant for visitors.’ The girl dragged the great heavy thing across, with a long squeal of chair-legs on polished lino.

  ‘Thank you.’ May felt her deep, hot blush, but the nurse skipped away with the sweetest of smiles.

  How did they keep it up, with all these to look after? How did they manage to be so kind?

  The armchair was a disaster, though. Its brown plastic seat didn’t yield at all, and its back was completely straight, tipping her chin forward, straining her neck. The unpadded wood hurt her elbows and wrists.

  She felt a wave of longing for her normal comforts. Buttering the bread with the radio on, getting the tea-things out of the cupboard … But home wasn’t home with just her and Dirk. The boy hadn’t really talked to her for years.

  All the same, she knew her youngest cared. He’d noticed last night that she wasn’t eating. ‘Mum. You haven’t touched your food.’

  ‘No … I suppose I’m not hungry.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. This tuna is disgusting. I never liked tuna. Cat food, isn’t it?’

  May had been touched. He was a good boy. Alfred had always been hard on Dirk, but she saw his good side. She was his mother. Mothers were naturally soft on sons.

  Whereas fathers weren’t always easy on daughters. Of course Alfred had doted on Shirley as a baby. And she was a darling, sweet-natured and biddable, with yellow curls and a smiling mouth; people always smiled back at her in the street, and then approvingly up at May, as if she’d done well, to produce such a paragon. Shirley, in her way, was a good girl still, a girl in her thirties now, of course, a thing that May could scarcely believe.

  But Alfred had had no time for his daughter ever since she’d taken up with Kojo.

  ‘My own daughter. Taking up with a black man.’

  ‘She’s still your daughter,’ May had said, after Shirley for the first time brought Kojo to visit and Alfred had sat at the head of the table ignoring them, mouth compressed. He had avoided shaking Kojo’s hand, when they left, and shouted at their backs as they went down the passageway ‘You watch out for yourself, Shirley. You be careful.’ And Kojo had turned round with that gleaming smile and said, ‘It’s all right, Mr White, I’ll take care of her,’ and Alfred had been gobsmacked, speechless. Then when he got inside, ‘Cheeky black bastard! I know what he’s after. Why can’t she find herself a normal fellow?’ May was a bit upset herself, but Kojo had such lovely manners. ‘Well you can’t really say he’s not normal, can you?’ she tried, but tentatively, not wanting to annoy. ‘You bloody women,’ he’d raged at her, Alfred who hardly ever swore. ‘First performing monkey turns up in a suit, you’re practically begging him to take our daughter –’ ‘No,’ she had said. ‘But I liked his suit. I always did like men in suits.’ ‘I’ve never been good enough for you, have I …?’

  He went to their wedding because May said she would never forgive him if he didn’t, and sat in a corner, he and Dirk, only talking to each other, morosely drunk. He never visited when Kojo got ill; she went alone even when Kojo was dying. Alfred only cheered up when he found out about the will, and she’d thought that then he would acknowledge at last that Kojo was responsible, a good provider, but he just said, ‘Well that explains it, doesn’t it. That’s why Shirley married him.’ And he’d softened to his daughter, briefly. And then she had taken up with Elroy, and May knew Shirley would never be forgiven.

  But I’m her mother, and there’s nothing to forgive. I’ve read James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King …

  I loved Kojo. And I like Elroy. They’re not so different, when you get to know them. I don’t care what colour people are, thought May, looking at the glorious red of some enormous daisy-like flowers on a bedside table far down the ward. Flown in from unimaginably far away. Some beautiful, amazing part of the world I never knew existed then, when I was young, when Alfred was courting. He would have felt embarrassed, bringing flowers.

  Though he did have nice manners. Which she liked, in a man.

  She had tried to teach her sons nice manners.

  7 • Dirk

  Dirk stared out of the window of the bus at the windows of the big houses by the Park, very nice houses owned by people with money, white people, nearly all of them, though a few Paki twockers had wormed their way in … One day he, Dirk, would make money.

  He would raise himself. He would better himself. He would prove to his father that he had backbone. He would be … someone … a gentleman … like some of the officers were in the war, though Dad said most of them were donkeys … he would make his father proud of him. One day he would own a house like that. The sunset light on the window-panes winked back at him, encouraging him.

  He would go far. Farther than the others. Then he could do something for the family. First he’d make Darren and Shirley look small. Then he’d be kind to them. Give ’em a leg-up. Maybe he would, if she changed her ways.

  He would be … an international businessman. The net was the answer. He would do it that way. And buy a mansion for his father and mother. And they would be grateful. Fucking grateful. And Mum would have to be nice to him, not laughing at him because of his crewcut, not sneering at him because of his friends. Head in a book, what did she know? Did she notice anything about what was going on? Did she know that a battle was being fought, on the streets of London, Liverpool, et cetera? – Bristol. That was the other one. The other spot where they’d gone in force. According to Spearhead.
(Dirk had never been to Bristol.)

  One day he’d travel. He’d like to travel. To parts of the world where things were still all right. Not that there were so many of them left. South Africa had fallen. Had been sold out. It was a black day for whites, when they sold out. It used to be paradise. He’d read about it. He tried to imagine it. Fucking paradise. He closed his eyes. Lions, tigers. Sort of pink blossoms, lots of them. Boogie-something. Boogie blossoms. And – swimming pools. And strong white men. Muscular. Toned. Working out in the sunlight. Short haircuts and – brick-hard buttocks. Press-ups flipping over into sit-ups, and fuck, they all had enormous hard-ons, and most of the men round the pool were black …

  He jerked awake in a sudden panic to find he had been carried past his stop, tried to get up before the bus moved again, and was blocked by the old woman beside him, gasping and moaning in her scarecrow get-up, muttering in some horrible lingo, wailing as if he had hurt her foot when he only trod on the side of it, and only because she was in his way – He shoved her, hard, and was out in the gangway, pushing his way to the front of the bus, and the driver must have heard him coming, he closed the doors and began to drive off.

  ‘Oi!’ shouted Dirk. ‘I want to get off!’

  ‘Next stop Hillesden Turn,’ said the driver.

  ‘OPEN THE DOORS! FUCKING LET ME OFF!’

  The driver stopped the bus, with a hiss of the brakes. Dirk felt good about that. So they still obeyed orders. Then the driver got up, and Dirk saw with a start that he was eight feet tall. A fucking giant. A great woolly-haired coloured bloke eight feet tall. And there were all the others on the bus to help him. Dirk wasn’t a coward, but the odds were hopeless.

  The driver got Dirk by the sleeve of his jean jacket. ‘You are bothering me,’ he said, smiling. ‘I say when this bus stops and when it doesn’t.’

  The doors swung open, Dirk fell out and skidded on his bum on the slimy pavement. It felt very cold; the damp soaked through.

  Fuck

  Fuck

  Fucking coloureds

  Dad always told us. Always warned us.

  8 • Thomas

  In dirty Hillesden, the Park seemed miraculous. Just past the notice-boards, life came back.

  The sky poured in through the gap in the roof-tops. Thousands of miles of cloud and sunlight, tethered to the neat square mile of grass. Pale paths gently traced the contours of the small hillside and rounded the lake. There were only a few figures walking today, a mother with a baby, a mother with a child, a man in a tracksuit with a giant poodle, a teenager (a truant?) on rollerblades doing showy arabesques at the foot of the hill, and there by the aviary surely Alfred – wasn’t that Alfred, back where he should be? – Thomas’s spirits leapt up for a moment before he saw it was an older man, bending stiffly to peer at the birds inside.

  You would never catch Alfred doing that. Thomas had bumped into him one day near the dark wood hut with its chicken-wire windows, in which some dishevelled-looking, startlingly yellow foreign birds had just appeared. ‘Aren’t these wonderful?’ Thomas had asked him, more for something to say than from real enthusiasm. ‘Matter of opinion,’ Alfred said. ‘Lots of us think it’s a mistake.’ ‘But you always had an aviary here.’ ‘Ah yes, but before, we had British birds. Normal birds. Birds that would be happy.’ ‘I can’t remember what you had before.’ ‘Budgerigars. Pheasants. British birds.’ ‘Actually, I’m not sure that budgerigars are British.’ And Alfred replied, quite patiently, ‘Of course they’re British. They’ve always been here. My mum and dad kept budgerigars. It’s natural, having budgerigars. Whereas foreign birds – It’s not going to suit them. First touch of frost, this lot’ll be goners.’

  Now Thomas went to see if Alfred had been right, but the birds were still there, perhaps more than before, shivering at the back of the wooden hut, their tail-feathers long saffron flashes of satin that flickered against the drab colours of the background. The old man was trying to talk to them. ‘Pretty birds, pretty birds,’ he said. ‘Pretty boy, pretty boy,’ but they ignored him. Inside his brown coat was tucked a mauve silk scarf, surprising, beautiful, feminine.

  The flower-beds, so bright in summer, were drabber now, flowers-in-waiting, wallflowers, polyanthus, winter pansies, each species set in its separate bed, with a few fierce blazes of tulips and daffodils, straight as soldiers, guarding the path. Thomas walked up to the top of the hill. Reaching the crown, he saw the children’s playground, raw reds and yellows, against the far fence, and next to it brown hills of leaf-mould dwarfing the figure of a stooped Asian woman loading something into a child’s push-chair (loading compost … why was that?), then beyond the Park, the cemetery, stretching away like a petrified forest, acres of quiet white and cream, then behind it the gleaming ranks of roofs, tiling the earth to the smudged horizon, greying to nothing, becoming invisible, dimming away into a pall of fumes.

  He drew a deep breath, and the sun came out, very low and golden, tinged with red, skimming across the rows of houses, the factory roofs, the city windows, gilding, illuminating, planting shadows, burnishing cars and panes of glass, giving depth and life to the distant city.

  The wind knocked him, spun him round, and the Park was suddenly a thing of glory, radiant in the last of the sunshine, a green field lifted towards the sky, the black branches of the cherry-trees waving thick soft flurries of pale pink petals, the weeping willows whipping threaded beads of gold against the coming evening, the boy on rollerblades swooping like an angel, arms uplifted, down the hill, the poodle rocketing, mad with joy, after a lolloping yellow cocker-spaniel … All shall be well, a voice told Thomas. His flesh prickled with icy pleasure.

  Albion Park. It was a hundred years old, built in the spate of philanthropy that heralded the end of the nineteenth century, when the local hospital was built, and the library, both of them by the same local builder, who had a deft hand with stone and red brick and a love of detail; pediments, cornices. The drinking-fountain was a marvel, a spired, four-sided, stone creation modelled like a miniature Gothic cathedral. It was the focal point to which all paths led. Not far away the Park Keeper’s lodge was a solidly impressive Victorian pile, two-storey, detached, with fine large windows.

  I wonder why Alfred never lived there? I’m sure he’d have jumped at it, given the chance. Sold off, probably. Some shoddy deal. In the same way they tried to sell off the Rise’s branch libraries. But people wouldn’t have it. The public said ‘No’.

  They’d sell the Park too, given the chance. Build it all over with shops and offices. Then none of us would be able to breathe.

  Alfred had stood here most of his life. Or marched like the soldier he had once been, left-right, left-right, patrolling his fiefdom. Every so often he would pause for a second to gaze across the flower-beds at some offender.

  Here he had stood, and here he fell. ‘They get abusive when he catches them at it.’ That was May, grey-lipped, as she sat and cried, though Thomas said the black family weren’t to blame. ‘You have no idea what he puts up with,’ she insisted. At any rate, the row had done for Alfred. Thomas briefly saw him stretched flat on the ground. His cap had come off. It was horrible. Thin hanks of white hair flapping back from his bald patch … helpless, naked, pink with hurt life …

  Thomas had come to the Park since he was a child. He put out his hand and touched the drinking-fountain, the rough pores of the weathered white stone. It had stood there through rain and frost and pollution and been ready every summer to give water to the kids, some of them too small to reach the basins unaided, clutching their lollies, balls, sweets, clinging to the arms of their brothers or sisters.

  Thomas was glad to see a gardener stooping dutifully over the bed by the fountain, trowel glinting in the sun as he dug. She dug, he corrected himself; a middle-aged woman in a navy mack he had mistaken for overalls, digging the crescent-shaped bed which was already a riot of tulips and daffodils.

  ‘Cold, isn’t it?’ he greeted her, passing close by, a semi-automatic courtesy
, one human being acknowledging another, together in the struggle against dark and disorder.

  She whirled round instantly, craned anxiously upwards. He saw she held a bulb in her trowel. It had already sprouted a tight pink bud and a trailing beard of root-hairs, black with earth. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘did I startle you?’ Three others lay on the path beside her. ‘Are you just putting those in? Isn’t it rather late?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, in a strange, throttled voice. Her cheeks were netted with purple veins, but her eyes were vacant, large, frightened.

  ‘I don’t mean to criticize,’ he said.

  There was a silence. She stayed crouched, frozen. Thomas couldn’t fathom how he had upset her.

  ‘I’m just going to visit Alfred,’ he said. ‘The Park Keeper. Did you know he’s ill?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and to his horror the tears began trickling down her cheeks. ‘Don’t tell him,’ she sobbed, ‘please don’t tell him …’

  And then he realized. She wasn’t a gardener. She was just a woman stealing flowers. She was digging them up, not planting them. An oil-cloth bag was waiting to be loaded, an old woman’s bag, a poor person’s bag. And then he remembered the Asian woman, loading compost into her push-chair. They were all at it, with Alfred away.

  ‘I won’t tell him,’ he muttered. ‘But do you think – should you be doing that?’ He left her kneeling there, as if praying.

  Alfred, of course, would have sorted her out. He probably knew her, and her habits. He would have done it quietly, with no fuss. He might have taken her round to his shed at the back of the toilets for a cup of tea. Or perhaps he wouldn’t; she seemed slightly barmy. But he would have known. This is his patch. Like he knew the drinkers and the meths addicts. But he isn’t here, and there’s no one to help her, or to protect her from herself.

  The sun had slipped behind the crest of the hill, and the Park dipped slowly down towards night. Thomas sat on the bench, with his back to the pond where Asian wedding photos were taken in summer. He thought about Alfred as the light lessened, the wonderful afterglow of lemon-gold light pouring up from the horizon, drenching half the sky, imperceptibly thinning to early evening blue. Which is how it is with us, he thought. In the afterglow of the last century, when the money from the empire was used for public works … But the ideals are fading. And the cash is nearly gone.