The White Family

by Maggie Gee

  ‘Yes,’ said May. ‘But –’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Dirk said, head down. His new blond crewcut stared her in the face.

  And that was that. May had tried to understand it. People kept things in their brains in tight little boxes … Because Dirk like Kojo, Kojo stopped being black. And so Dirk could go right on hating blackness.

  Dirk wouldn’t talk to Shirley, either. ‘I can’t understand him,’ Shirley said. He hadn’t talked to her, except to say ‘Hello’, for years. Which was a sadness to May and Alfred, who had always liked the two kids being close, and hoped it might last them all their lives, so the family wouldn’t end with the parents.

  But things didn’t last. Why hadn’t she realized? The years like water washed them away, the things of beauty, the things you loved, dipping and glinting away into the distance. The only constants were bills, and getting older, and the pain in her knees, and the ache in her neck.

  And the house, the bloomin’ house where they’d lived forever. With its creaks, and its knockings, and its leaky gutters –

  And its whitewashed front in the morning sun. And the smell of apples from the fruit-bowl in the living-room. And that dot of gold dancing about off the mirror. He would catch it on one finger, on his free afternoon, and point at her like a magician. His chair, her chair. With Shirley’s cushions, easing their bones as they sank down. Their little house, with its steamy kitchen, smelling of washing and hot Ribena. Its warmth, its sheen, its – familiarness. Was that the word? Their family home.

  Alfred, pet.

  She would take him home.

  12 • Dirk

  ‘Here’s Dirk,’ said Alfred abruptly. ‘Look.’

  You couldn’t miss him. That ash-white hair, and something jerky about his walk, as if he was head-butting a low brick wall. As if this habit had injured his brain … Dirk hadn’t had an easy time in life.

  ‘I wonder if he met his sister on the stairs.’

  As he got nearer, you could see the boy was small. His head slightly bowed, he nodded on forward, blinking and grinning, glad to see his father.

  May thought, he almost worships his father.

  ‘Is that your boy?’ It was a woman’s voice. May turned to look at her, surprised. The body in the next bed was female. She was sixty-ish – maybe seventy-ish – with a plump red face, powdered in patches, and a swatch of red hair pulled back in a bun. Alfred must have been encouraging her. May didn’t approve of these mixed wards.

  Alfred had pulled himself virtually erect (he’s certainly thinner – they aren’t feeding him) and was grinning at the woman, a mask on a stick – if he knew what he looked like he wouldn’t do it. ‘No, this is Dirk.’

  The woman smiled and nodded.

  Dirk stood there, doggedly ignoring her. ‘Dad,’ he said. ‘How goes it, then?’

  Dirk had always lacked social graces. Once May had worried about his shyness because she thought it would stop him getting on with girls. But as Dirk grew up, there never were any girls, and sometimes she thought that he hated women. Then she’d started wondering if he liked boys, because May had read Oscar Wilde, and Thom Gunn. Once she’d found a strange magazine in his room, with photographs of black men without any clothes, but he got very cross, and said it was disgusting, he’d just brought it home to get rid of it. There were no other signs that he liked anyone at all.

  ‘This is Dirk,’ said May, to the painted woman. She used the most educated voice she had. ‘I am his mother. I didn’t catch your name.’

  ‘I think Alfred has forgotten it,’ the woman chirped, raising one eyebrow at him. ‘He hasn’t got much memory for names.’

  May looked at her resentfully. Why is she gazing at my husband?

  ‘This is Pamela,’ Alfred said rather gruffly, with the hint of a smirk. ‘Dirk, say hallo to Pamela.’

  ‘So this is the famous journalist.’ Her smile was smarmy, lipsticky.

  ‘Oh no,’ Alfred corrected her, dismayed. ‘This is Dirk, the other one. I probably didn’t mention him … Darren’s flying in from Spain today.’

  ‘Lovely,’ said Pamela, vaguely, grandly (but she’s not a lady, with that dyed hair). ‘We had a château in Spain you know. We always wintered in Andalusia. Olives, oranges, wonderful light … it was almost like a religion, with us.’

  ‘Why did you come back then?’ May asked coolly.

  ‘That is a very long story, my dear. One I may well tell Alfred one day.’ The woman winked, elaborately. May stared open-mouthed at her turquoise eyelids.

  ‘He probably won’t be here,’ she said. ‘We don’t expect him to be here very long.’

  ‘Really?’ Pamela said, her voice almost pitying, then turned away in her bed, and read, and May wanted to say, I’m a reader too, I read the works of Alfred Tennyson, but she knew the woman thought she was stupid.

  Alfred was looking very put out. Perhaps the family had let him down. Dirk wore scruffy denims and a studded leather jacket and his face was reddened by the wind. It somehow made his nose look bigger.

  ‘Why do you keep on talking to her?’ Alfred hissed at May, furious. ‘Can’t you see she’s trying to read?’

  Ignore the injustice, May told herself. Don’t argue with him. He’s not a well man. ‘Dirk, your father’s feeling much better –’

  ‘I never said I was feeling better.’

  ‘What did you say then?’ She wanted to weep.

  ‘Dad, I brought you some treacle toffees –’ Dirk stood there, clumsy, at the foot of the bed, left out of the quarrel as he usually was. They both turned to stare. The boy was giving them a present!

  ‘Thank you, son,’ said Alfred, startled. ‘I appreciate that. I hope you didn’t nick them –’ But Dirk’s hurt face was an annoyance when it was Darren he wanted to see. ‘Sit down, sit down, you’re blocking the light.’

  Dirk sat down swiftly, patting at his hair, though bristles like that could never be untidy. May realized that he felt in the wrong. He was patting at himself to put himself right. It’s the parents’ fault if they feel like that. Yet May felt nothing could ever have been different. Do your best, she had told herself day after day, struggling to deal with her growing kids, but her best had never been good enough, and now they had come to this strange place, one by one, to be inspected.

  ‘How’s work?’ asked Alfred.

  ‘Same as usual,’ said Dirk. And that was the trouble, his mother thought. The newsagent he worked in was on Hillesden Gardens, only two hundred yards away from home. Their friend George Millington, the owner, was an asthmatic smoker with gammy legs. He had taken Dirk on for ‘work experience’ nine years ago, when Dirk was sixteen, when it wasn’t yet completely impossible to hope that he’d scrape enough GCSEs to go to college. May had stopped hoping before Alfred did.

  ‘How’s St George?’ Alfred asked. It was a very old joke.

  ‘All right. He had a turn today.’

  ‘You’re a good boy to look after him,’ May said quickly, comfortingly.

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ said Dirk. ‘He goes this horrible colour. Like he was dying, or something.’

  ‘You’re a good boy.’

  ‘He’s too old to work.’

  ‘He’s my age,’ said Alfred, affronted.

  ‘It’s different,’ said Dirk. ‘You’re not dying, are you.’ There was an uncertain silence, then he carried on. ‘I’m worried he’s going to peg out in my arms.’

  ‘George has been good to you, young man.’

  ‘Has he, Dad?’ Dirk went white around the nostrils. ‘You don’t know what it’s like in that shop. He smokes non-stop. I mean non-stop. I come out of there, I stink of smoke. Every time he coughs, he starts sicking up his guts. And when he’s not smoking, he’s bloody wheezing. He doesn’t do a shagging stroke –’

  ‘Language,’ said May. ‘George is fond of you,’ she added, suddenly afraid that Pamela was listening. ‘He must have got fond of you, I’m sure. Not having any sons of his own.’ (She dreamed tha
t George would leave Dirk the shop, and he’d be all right for the rest of his life. Plus Dirk could afford to leave home, at last. They’d be left in peace, her and Alfred – Not that she wanted to get rid of him, of course.)

  ‘He hates me,’ said Dirk, simply. ‘He couldn’t manage without me, that’s all. I do all the work. He gets all the money.’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t hate you,’ said Alfred sternly. ‘Course he doesn’t. He’s my oldest friend.’

  ‘Have you managed to get rid of the Christmas stock?’ May was determined to turn the conversation.

  ‘The charity ones were rubbish, this year. No one round our way wants fancy things with otters on, they look at them and think they’re rats –’

  ‘Well I’m quite ecological,’ May interrupted him, indignant. ‘I bought two boxes of otters, dear.’

  ‘We still got lumbered with twenty-three boxes. Chocolates were quite good this year though. No thanks to George. He can’t think beyond Cadbury’s –’

  ‘Cadbury’s were always good enough for us,’ said Alfred.

  ‘Point I’m making is, people want Belgian.’

  ‘Good English chocolates. That’s what you want.’

  ‘What are you doing with these, then?’ asked Dirk, triumphant, pointing to the giant white-and-gold box that Shirley had left on the bedside table. “Best Belgian Chocolates”, it says, look, there.’

  ‘That’s Shirley, that is,’ said Alfred. ‘I can’t stop her wasting her money.’

  ‘She was looking very smart. She always does.’ May couldn’t resist a glance at Dirk’s dirty jeans.

  ‘These are my work clothes,’ he said, flushing. ‘I had to come here straight from work. We have to stay open late because the frigging Pakis do.’

  ‘Will you shush,’ May hissed, one eye on Pamela. ‘Shirley asked after you. She always does.’ (Then she thought about it, and realized she didn’t.)

  Alfred’s voice got that preachy sound. ‘You always used to be so close to your sister.’

  Dirk glowered at him. ‘You know what happened. It was you that said it, we had to make a stand.’

  In a small clear voice that seemed to come from a dream in which she was someone stronger and braver, May said, ‘I liked Kojo. And I like Elroy. And Kojo was very good to you. You forget how many times you got your tea round at their house.’ She ran out of steam, surprised at herself.

  ‘I never denied I got my tea.’

  ‘She’ll meet someone soon, and settle down,’ said Alfred. ‘Everything’s going to turn out for the best.’

  May thought, let all be well, be well … Tennyson was hopeful rather than certain:

  Oh yet we trust that somehow good

  Will be the final goal of ill

  To pangs of nature, sins of will,

  Defects of doubt, and taints of blood …

  And what did he mean by ‘taints of blood’?

  13 • The White Family

  Seeing Dirk had shaken Shirley. The hospital foyer was huge and cold.

  I used to love him. I adored that boy. But what’s he turned into? A thug. A – fascist. Worse than Dad, without Dad’s excuses.

  She wasn’t quite ready to go out into the dark and struggle through the wind across the wild black car park. She sank down on to an empty seat, picked up a magazine and stared at it blindly.

  When her focus returned, she was looking at furs. Two pages of red and blond winter furs. ‘There are the whingers and the whiners, yes. There are the dowdies, the dated, the dull … And there’s you. Daring to be a babe. Ready for fun. Purring for fur … You, babelicious in the new seal-skin …’ The heart-shaped face of the journalist looked all of seventeen years old, and brainless.

  Still the furs were pretty, thought Shirley. Soft. Elroy might like to see me in furs … But she knew it was just a fantasy.

  No one wore furs. It just wasn’t done. No one, that is, except rich foreign women you saw getting out of cabs with dark glasses and fussy expensive designer handbags. Arab men’s women, she thought, contemptuously, then caught herself thinking it and was ashamed.

  So she was a bigot like the rest of her family.

  We all like to think we’re better than someone.

  She knew what people said about her. ‘Shirley White goes with black men.’ They never got over their excitement about it, though she’d been married to Kojo for nearly eight years. As if a marriage was just about sex.

  I liked being married. I liked the comfort.

  Her parents had been married for over forty years. What would her mother do if Dad died? Shirley remembered all too clearly the blank exhaustion when Kojo was dying. The sense that part of her body was missing.

  But they’ve been lucky. They’ve had nearly half a century.

  She slapped the magazine shut with a sigh.

  As she focused on the big automatic doors that would let her out into the night again, they opened, as if by the power of thought. A man came in and blinked at the light.

  Suddenly familiar. White, thickset, with golden skin and dark wavy hair. Handsome in a rugged, crumpled sort of way. Heavy eyebrows, frowning towards her.

  ‘Isn’t it – Shirley? It’s Thomas Lovell. ‘Do you remember me …?’

  It was Darren’s friend.

  ‘Have you come to see Dad? That’s very kind. I saw you on the television, you know. When your book came out. Some time ago.’ Of course, it was Thomas who saw Dad fall. Used to be a writer. Then he became – What? – something sensible. Yes, a librarian.

  ‘It must be ten years since we met.’

  ‘Probably Darren’s second wedding.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Simultaneously, they both remembered that they had got drunk and flirted with each other. They had possibly kissed. They had certainly danced. Shirley’s spirits began to rise.

  ‘He’s on his third marriage by now, you know. None of us got invited to the last one. They ran off to Bali. Very glamorous … You didn’t come to my wedding, did you? I can’t remember if I asked you.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But didn’t I hear –?’

  ‘My husband died three years ago. Cancer.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ He really looked sorry.

  ‘My little brother’s just gone up to the ward.’

  ‘I’d better give them some time together.’

  On impulse Shirley said, ‘Good idea. Come and have a cup of tea in the café.’

  Two bored black women were standing by the till, which was full of ravenous young doctors in white coats, furiously feeding haunted faces. It was a banqueting hall for ghosts. The tables and chairs were of royal blue plastic, which made chill reflections on their skin.

  ‘Hot meal arl finish,’ one of the black women told them. There remained some cupcakes, two squashed jam-tarts, some ginger biscuits and some cling-wrapped salads, half-decomposed, like overcooked spinach.

  ‘Just tea, I think,’ said Thomas. ‘Can’t say I fancy anything else.’

  They sat down at the only table free of white-coated inmates stripping their plates. ‘They’re like a plague of locusts,’ she said.

  ‘Stress,’ he said. ‘Exhaustion. They’ve probably been working twenty hours already.’

  ‘I suppose you just expect them to have good manners. Seeing as they’re professionals.’ She saw on his face a kind of disappointment.

  ‘Professionals are the rudest of all. In fact, they have qualifications in rudeness.’

  ‘I haven’t got any qualifications.’ (Why did I have to tell him that?)

  ‘I’ve got lots but I don’t really use them.’

  ‘I’d have thought you’d need them, to look after books. And to write a book, like you did.’

  ‘Oh, any fool can be a writer.’

  ‘Lots of people would love to be in your shoes,’ she said. ‘People admire writers.’

  ‘Do they, still?’

  ‘Well our house is crammed wall to wall with books’ – (Kojo’s books, if she was honest. Why was she
trying to impress him? But Shirley herself had once been a reader, when she was young, doing teacher training.) Thomas was looking inside her coat, his eyes slipping down the cream silk of her blouse. His kind of woman would be thin and sharp.

  ‘Is Darren coming home?’ he asked.

  ‘Well he doesn’t exactly keep in touch with me. Of course he doesn’t, with his high-powered lifestyle.’ She made herself smile, to cover her chagrin.

  ‘I never hear from him, either.’

  On the other side of the canteen, there was something going on. The voice of one of the attendants was becoming steadily shriller. ‘Because it gone six o’clock already and dis kitchen not doin’ any more cookin’ –’

  A man with his back to them was making a scene. ‘You’re supposed to serve cooked meals between five and seven. Which means there should be an hour to go –’ A slim blond woman dressed in pink was plucking ineffectually at his shoulder.

  The black woman jabbed the air with her finger. ‘I can’t help what nonsense de notice say. The doctors come eat the lot. And that’s that.’

  It struck Shirley and Thomas at the same moment, and their eyes met, briefly, apprehensive, as the man snatched up his bleak tray in disgust and turned, with a little flounce of anger and tiredness – It was Darren, of course. Darren’s tanned face, which gaped and grew pinker the moment he saw them. He had come after all, the prodigal son. ‘Darren White, Voice of the Left, Man of the People’, as the papers called him. A jet-lagged man with an American twang, making a mean little scene in a café.

  He swept up to them in a gale of tension, handsome from a distance, gaunt close up. His hair had subtly changed colour, Shirley realized; the grey in his curls had disappeared. His face underneath was tighter, older, the lines set hard in a mask of tan. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Hi everyone,’ as if there were too many of them to manage individually. ‘I’m just trying to get some morsel of sustenance out of the bloody NHS.’ His wife hovered behind him, pretty, uncertain, her pink suit fitting like an elegant glove, her hair hanging bobbed, healthy, expensive. ‘This is Susie,’ he said, gesturing angrily. ‘My new wife. She couldn’t eat a thing on the plane. Of course neither of us eats red meat, and the veggie stuff was drowning in saturated fat. We made a special effort to get here today – I had an interview to do in Madrid. Mum sounded so damn frightened last time we spoke. Then two minutes after we get to the bedside the consultant turfs us out –’ He was plainly trying to get a grip on himself. ‘Sit down,’ he ordered his wife over his shoulder. ‘This is Shirley, my sister. And Thomas Lovell. I’d forgotten you two knew each other.’