The White Family

by Maggie Gee

  ‘He was born in Peckham!’ Now they were both shouting.

  ‘Will you leave it?’ said May. ‘People are looking at us.’ This wasn’t true, but it had an effect. ‘Can you stop upsetting your father?’

  ‘Thinks she knows it all,’ said Alfred, subsiding, suddenly tired, smaller, paler.

  Shirley sat and stared at the floor. ‘I’ll fetch a vase, then I have to be going,’ she said, standing up, not looking at them, flouncing down the pale clinging hem of her skirt.

  They watched her swaying down the ward again. Now most of the beds had collected visitors, clustered round the bedheads, helpless, eager. Amateurs at this, all of them.

  May and Alfred looked at each other. Neither had meant to quarrel with Shirley. They needed them now, their large, strong children, now they were growing older, weaker. ‘You didn’t have to go and upset her –’ he muttered.

  ‘You’re the one who riled her. Saying Elroy isn’t British.’

  ‘I don’t intend to waste time talking about Elroy.’

  ‘You’ve only got one daughter,’ said May.

  Her mild voice sparked him off again. ‘I know that. Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t want to see my grandchildren? No chance of that, till she settles down.’

  Alfred was deluding himself, as usual. All through Shirley’s marriage he had pretended that Kojo was a temporary fling. May had never told him about Shirley’s miscarriages, had begged her daughter not to talk about them. Partly to protect him from pain. Partly to protect herself from his reaction, for May had longed for Shirley and Kojo to have children, no matter if they were black or white or striped, she knew she would love her daughter’s children and hoped that Alfred would have loved them too, it would have mended everything, brought them all together … But the babies had died. Two in a row. In Shirley’s well-fed, healthy body.

  Shirley reappeared with a fountain of white lilies that turned her into a goddess from May’s childhood encyclopedia … Newnes’ Encyclopedia, was that it? Straight out of one of those shiny pictures where all the gods were blond and tall. Shirley was a goddess of fruit and flowers – Ceres? Or was that fertility? Goddess of spring, Proserpina. How could they not be proud of her, and yet she still wouldn’t meet their eyes, lowering the shining lilies down on the grey Formica of his bedside table among the dim clutter of water, clock, glasses –

  Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost

  And like a ghost she glimmers on to me …

  Now folds the lily all her sweetness up

  And slips into the bosom of the lake …

  May gazed at her, half-hypnotized.

  ‘Help her, then,’ said Alfred, testily. ‘Can’t you see she can’t do it on her own?’ May heaved herself round in the chair. ‘You could get up,’ he harried his wife. ‘You could do something. I can’t get up.’

  ‘It’s all right, Dad.’ Shirley couldn’t bear them arguing. ‘I’ve got to go, in any case. Enjoy the chocs.’

  ‘You shouldn’t spend your money on me.’

  ‘I like to spend money on my parents.’

  ‘You don’t want to go short.’ He always worried.

  ‘Dad, I’m all right. I – was left well looked after.’

  He knew she was avoiding saying Kojo’s name. ‘You’re a good girl, coming to see me.’

  ‘Don’t give the nurses a hard time.’

  ‘Me?’ He winked, looking suddenly youthful. ‘I’m the perfect patient. You ask Sister.’

  ‘I’ll come and see you again tomorrow.’

  ‘Darren might have got here by tomorrow –’

  ‘Well … I’ll believe it when I see it.’

  ‘Of course he’s coming,’ said Alfred. ‘He’s been talking about coming for over a year … It’s his work. The pressure. Pressure of work.’

  ‘But now you’re ill –’ said May.

  ‘Now I’ve had this spot of trouble, he’ll come.’

  Shirley took pity. ‘Of course he’ll come.’ She touched May’s hand, bent heavily to pick up her coat (and May suddenly saw she was middle-aged, that stately slowness as she stooped, then wrapped herself round in the pale wool as if she were hurt, as if she were damaged, and blew a grand stage kiss at them, a kiss for onlookers to see, and was gone, sailing off down the ward again, wind in her sails, unstoppable. At the end she turned and raised her hand, a flag of truce, a flag of forgiveness.)

  She’s middle-aged, our Shirley Temple.

  May stared after her, uncomprehending. One final flash of her curls in the light. Our golden girl. Our pretty baby. Soon she’ll be too old to have children … But how can our children be too old for anything?

  I haven’t been a good mother to her. I didn’t stand up for her enough over Kojo. I didn’t tell Alfred he was being a fool.

  But why has she turned out so different from us? Why does she want such different things? And Darren – he lives in hotels and planes, and has huttuttupp thingies, and dotcoms, and divorces – (Shirley had a point. Darren did let them down. Those last-minute phone calls, to say he wasn’t coming, when she’d cleaned the house from top to bottom and his dad had turned the mattress in the spare room. He’d be off to Hawaii, or Bali, or Greenland. Of course he couldn’t come, but all the same they felt it. ‘Enjoy yourself, lad,’ was all Alfred ever said.)

  But where does it all come from? Lap-tops, jacuzzis? Out of the future. The glittering future. And we two are slipping back into the past.

  I shall go with him, if Alfred goes.

  That thought brought May a queer kind of comfort. The new things were probably not meant for them. It would be too much, too fast, too loud.

  Probably it’s rich people live long lives.

  10 • Shirley

  Shirley was halfway down the corridor, a glaze of smile still fixing her features, before she remembered to stop trying to please.

  I hate my family. Ignorant bigots. Mum thinks she’s broad-minded, but she’s bad as him, she almost fainted when she thought she saw Elroy.

  Why do I have to put up with their nonsense? I’m thirty-seven years old, I’ve been married and widowed – They’ve never been anywhere. They don’t know anything. All Mum knows she gets from books. She’s only been with one man all her life. She can’t see what a – pig Dad is, she dotes on him, he’s the world to her.

  Ignorant. Pig ignorant. That’s what I say to Elroy; take no notice.

  The truth was, Elroy got less angry than she did. Or showed less anger, which wasn’t the same thing. Sometimes she thought he bottled up his feelings because it was so humiliating, admitting other people thought you were dirt. Better to say nothing, to ignore the pain. And he had low expectations, of course. To him, that was just the way white people were.

  Kojo, older, richer, more confident, had found them comic, and slightly pathetic. ‘It’s because they have no education,’ he said. ‘They’re afraid of us because they know nothing about us. I’ll ask them out to Ghana as my guests, and then they will see another world.’ ‘I can’t imagine it, though.’ And of course it never happened.

  The two men coped in their different ways, while Shirley was left mortified, speechless, furious. She sometimes wanted to kill her parents. Because they were hers. In case she was like them. To prove all white people weren’t the same.

  But Shirley’s anger was playing itself out as she walked down the echoing yellow stairs. The lift had been broken for the last two weeks … Peeling paint, a smell of damp. She would have liked to get going on this hospital. Shirley had always been good at mending, painting, polishing, making good. I need a job, she thought, as so often. I could do something. I’ve got lots to offer.

  But Elroy preferred her not to work, and Kojo had expected her to be a mother, as she had expected to be a mother.

  She wasn’t a mother. She would never be a mother. Unless there was a miracle. Very soon.

  Maybe mothering Dirk when he was little is the nearest I’ll ever get to it.

  Jus
t then she saw him, one flight down, that completely unmistakable pale stubble which filled her, at that moment, with fear and loathing, for Dirk was even worse than her dad.

  But he caught it from Dad. Ranting on about ‘the coloureds’.

  I can’t see him. I can’t bear it.

  She walked silently down the ward that opened to her right, and skulked by some curtains till his boots had gone by, clicking fast upstairs.

  11 • May

  ‘I wonder if Dirk will ever leave home?’

  They held hands again, now Shirley was gone, and with her any tension between them. It was always the kids who made trouble; together they were comfortable.

  ‘He’s not very old,’ observed Alfred, judiciously. Which seemed to prove he himself wasn’t old.

  ‘Twenty-five is quite old enough to leave home,’ said May, mildly. ‘He could get a little room. We don’t want to baby him.’

  ‘What he gets from George wouldn’t pay for much.’ Dirk had a ‘little job’ at the local newsagent, fixed up as a favour by Alfred’s oldest friend. ‘He can’t leave home till he gets a real job. I mean, it was different in our day. I’d been working ten years already, at his age. But that’s not his fault. Is it?’

  ‘He still goes for interviews, you know. Even if he doesn’t tell us any more. I find the papers from the Job Centre. Do you think he’d have more chance if his hair was different?’

  Alfred had never thought about Dirk’s hair. It was Darren who’d been trouble in that department, growing it long, looking namby-pamby. ‘Are you saying it’s old-fashioned?’ he asked, doubtfully. ‘I suppose he looks a bit like a GI –’

  ‘Skinhead,’ May corrected him briefly. ‘They look like Nazis, but I suppose they’re not … It is in fashion, with some people.’

  ‘On the other hand, it’s clean, it’s tidy. He’s quite a good boy, in some ways. He’s good company for his old dad.’

  ‘You mean, he goes down the pub with you.’

  ‘Why are you being so hard on the boy? It’s not like you. My duck, my darling.’ He squeezed her hand, gentle, affectionate.

  She knew Alfred was trying to tell her he loved her, and also asking her to spare him home truths, but she had to get it off her chest. ‘He gets on my nerves, with you not there.’

  ‘Maybe he could go and live with his sister.’

  ‘The last place he could go is Shirley’s.’

  ‘In my day family looked out for each other. Do you think they’ll look out for him, after we’re gone? Darren hardly knows Dirk, does he?’

  ‘They’ll get to know each other while Darren’s here.’ May tried her best to sound confident. Would Darren like Dirk, if he got to know him? Her youngest son was hard to like. And he wasn’t bright like Darren was. He wasn’t interested in anything except computers. Well, and his peculiar new friends.

  ‘I’m so glad Darren is coming home,’ said Alfred, and a real smile, a smile of tenderness, lit up his face, making it seem less bony, younger, and she thought, he’ll live, and things will go right, Alfred will get better, we’ll all love each other … Alfred will never be angry again.

  And Alfred Tennyson was ready, as always:

  Beat, happy stars, timing with things below,

  Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell,

  Blest, but for some dark undercurrent woe

  That seems to draw – but it shall not be so:

  Let all be well, be well.

  They sat in silence for a while, contented, as the life of the ward washed round them. Draggles of people spilled out from the bedheads and blocked the central channel down the ward, until nurses came, smiling but firm, and shepherded the overflow away. ‘It’s really only supposed to be two visitors per patient –’

  One Asian family arrived in strength; around twenty people, from pensioners to babies. The old and the young both wore brilliant colours, the grandmother’s white head wrapped in a marigold-orange headscarf, the little girls in frilly western party frocks, the middle-aged conventionally smart, men in pin-striped suits, women in chic tailored dresses.

  ‘Lovely family,’ May whispered to herself, quieting the tiny voice that said, they’re doing very well for themselves.

  ‘Too many of ’em,’ said Alfred.

  She didn’t have to listen to what he said. It was just his noise, the stutter of an engine far away across the bay. ‘Lovely family,’ she repeated, contented. Families ought to be like that, all coming round when there was trouble.

  She wished the boys were here tonight. In fact, they had hardly been boys together, for Darren was fifteen years older than Dirk … Dirk had always needed looking after. Darren was successful, Dirk was not.

  Though Alfred wasn’t the gentlest of men she knew he felt sorry for their youngest son. And in his way, he’d been a very good father (but had he? she wondered, suddenly unsure). He’d tried to teach Dirk football, rugger, cricket – Dirk was useless at all of them. He’d tried to teach Dirk right from wrong. He was a man of principle. A man with backbone. Sometimes he talked too much about backbone, and he never thought Dirk had much of it.

  Dirk was so much slower than the other two kids. Not tall like Darren, nor good-looking like Shirley. He was skinny, painfully so. And he’d inherited Alfred’s great beak of a nose – a nose of pride, of character, May tried to tell Dirk when he was thirteen and she caught him crying in his bedroom mirror – together with a bony jaw that had suddenly grown heavier in his late teens. Between the two outcrops, his mouth seemed to shrink.

  For years they told themselves there was a temporary blockage. They had flashes of hope; he could add up in a trice, could price a load of shopping before she reached the till. But his English essays were short and abysmal. ‘No imagination,’ the teacher had said. ‘His basic trouble is no imagination.’ She hoped he was wrong. Dirk just lacked words. But there came a time when you had to give up.

  He did have nice hair. Unusual hair. Hair like May’s when she was a girl. (May had been grey for thirty years, though until she was sixty she always dyed it, and Alfred, bless him, never knew. Even in marriage, there had to be secrets.)

  Mr Punch. That was her youngest son. She made herself face it, finally. Overshot, underhung. And that shining blond head made folks look at him, which wasn’t a kindness when you weren’t a film star.

  Shirley had always been kind to Dirk, and he had hero-worshipped his sister, saved his pocket-money to buy her sweets, which he ate himself, but the thought was there.

  It was over now. They weren’t close any more.

  He just couldn’t stomach her marrying Kojo.

  ‘She can’t love him. You’ve seen him, haven’t you. I mean, he’s not half-caste, or something like that. He’s black as black. He’s a fucking gorilla.’

  ‘I saw him,’ said May, coolly, calmly. ‘He’s a human being like anyone else. I talked to him. And I quite liked him.’

  ‘You crept around him,’ said Dirk, disgusted. ‘You acted like he was the bee’s knees.’

  May wouldn’t let him get away with that. ‘I’m polite to everyone who comes to this house,’ she said, turning to look him in the eye, putting down her tea-cloth, drawing herself up. ‘You mind your manners with your sister’s friends, while you’re still living under our roof.’

  She rarely spoke to him like that. She was the angrier because he had expressed her own feelings, the ones she had almost completely suppressed – why did Shirley have to go the whole hog? Did she have to choose one as black as that?

  Dirk never discussed it with Shirley. Instead, he withdrew from her altogether. The women retreated to a knot in the kitchen whenever they wanted to talk about the wedding, planning the guest list, dreaming of the cake.

  ‘We can pay up to two thousand pounds,’ May had said, hot with fear as she spoke the words. Spinning noughts, whirling, disappearing … It was her own money, a savings plan she had put aside for over twenty years, cheating on the housekeeping, stinting herself.

 
But Shirley said, ‘Don’t be silly. Kojo wouldn’t dream of accepting any money. His family were paramount chiefs, in Ghana. He’s going to pay for everything, including a new outfit for you, if you want one. You could do with one. You know you could.’

  On the day Dirk turned up at the very last moment, wearing a dark jacket he had borrowed from someone, not the sort of jacket that teenagers wore, and a bright pink tie, entirely surprising. He looked almost handsome, with his yellow-white hair, but he spoke to no one, stood open-eyed and furious throughout the ceremony, never kneeling down to pray, then afterwards retreated to a corner of the beautiful apricot hotel lounge and sat with his father, backs to the wall, drinking beer, not wine, and refusing to eat. They wove away together at the very end, self-righteous and sullen, looking neither left nor right, as if they alone had behaved irreproachably, as if they had won a great victory, between them.

  Yet only a year after the wedding, Dirk had started going round to Shirley and Kojo’s house. When Shirley told her mother, May couldn’t believe it. ‘He’s not coming round to make trouble, is he? His dad’s put some strange ideas in his head.’

  ‘He said he missed me,’ Shirley told her. ‘I don’t mind. Forgive and forget. He’s found out Kojo likes football too.’

  And so they had seemed to get over it, and be close again, like when they were children. Dirk didn’t know what to say to Kojo after they had totted up the football scores, so he told him the plot of television films he’d seen, and Kojo sat and nodded, patiently, though he hardly ever watched TV.

  Then Kojo got ill with lung cancer and Dirk was nearly as upset as May. He had kept his sister company when things were bad. He visited right up to the end. The night Kojo died and the phone call came he sat in May’s kitchen, shaking his head, and after the funeral he went home with Shirley.

  But eighteen months later she took up with Elroy, and to May’s astonishment they started again, Dirk and his father, as if they’d learned nothing.

  ‘Kojo was different,’ Dirk insisted. ‘Kojo wasn’t like the others. You know he wasn’t. You liked him too.’