The White Family

by Maggie Gee

  ‘I taught them to read,’ May said, pleased. ‘All three of them could read before they went to school, though I had the devil of a job with Dirk. I helped all three of them with their homework.’

  ‘So did I,’ said Alfred, untruthfully, and waited for her to contradict him, but she looked at him indulgently, said nothing, and so he was able to continue, ashamed, ‘Although it was mostly you, I admit.’

  ‘There’s Thomas,’ she hissed, ‘coming back again. He’s a good boy. Let him have a word.’

  ‘We’ve had our chat,’ Alfred said, briskly. ‘I feel a lot better for it, duck.’

  ‘Would you like a paper? I’ll get you one. I’ll go and have a cup of tea while you two talk.’

  And things seemed almost normal again, hearing her comfortable, ordinary voice talking of comfortable, ordinary things, and the stone in his heart was manageable. Thank you, May, he said to himself, watching her familiar figure tack off down the ward like a brave little tug boat, her thick grey hair, her rounded back, her determined set against the tide of blue nurses, thank you, God, for a wife like May.

  29 • May

  May managed to keep the smile on her face until she was halfway down the stairs. If she showed her grief, the whole ward would know … Perhaps the rumour was already out. She knew how hospitals preyed on death. When she had gone for her hysterectomy after the problems that followed Dirk’s birth, there was always whispering, when people were goners –

  (Alfred’s a goner. No, not possible.)

  – the ones whose cancer had gone too far, the ones whose operations had gone badly –

  (They won’t even operate. He does deserve that. He deserves a chance, but he isn’t going to get it. Because we’re too old, so they think we’re no good.)

  Her face twitched and writhed with the urge to weep, but she forced the tears back, made herself smile.

  (Alfred is dying. No, never.)

  For May had always tried to be brave. She wasn’t self-pitying, or self-indulgent … They made her wince still, the cruel long words her father had used against her mother, her father who had educated himself enough to use long words like wooden paddles … Mum who had no learning at all. She washed for thirteen children by hand …

  (Alfred, Alfred. I’ll be alone … Alfred, my darling. Alfred, duck.)

  I was the youngest. Then the only one left. How can they be gone, my big laughing sisters?

  (Just me and Alfred. Alfred and me. I suppose we thought we would go on forever.)

  (Without Alfred I – No, don’t think it.)

  I mustn’t complain, I’ve been very lucky.

  My father criticized. My clothes, my hair. ‘You’re a pretty girl. Why must you look so scruffy? Can’t you make something of yourself?’ I didn’t know how to answer him. I suppose my mother never taught me to dress. She didn’t give a moment’s thought to her looks. How could she, poor woman, with thirteen children? And I’ve never known how to get myself up. I try for Alfred, but I never get it right. Except when Shirley buys me something.

  (Will Shirley forgive him … when she knows he’s dying? The final lap. The final slope.)

  It was sinking in in a different way from the conversation she had had with the doctor. On her own, it had all seemed dream-like, wrong.

  But as soon as I saw his face today. As soon as our eyes met, we knew. We shared it, didn’t we? We shared the fear. And after that it will always be true –

  May pushed it away. She could not bear it.

  It didn’t do to dwell on the bad things, did it?

  My father was sometimes very sweet to me. Softer on me than all the others, my mother told me, when she was dying. I was the youngest, his baby girl, and he loved me helping him in the shop, and was proud of me for being clever at school, though it never occurred to him I could go further. Of course it didn’t; he had raised thirteen, and he’d paid for the boys’ apprenticeships, so the girls had to marry, and that was that, yet he wasn’t happy about losing me to Alfred.

  I hear him still. Angry, cold. He read all the papers, he had opinions, he’d hoped his daughter would find someone better. I cried when I told him. I knew Alfred wouldn’t suit.

  Yet he is a better man than my father.

  May held her face on red alert, smile against sorrow, smile at the world, an effort of will all down the ward.

  Halfway down the stairs, which were cold grey stone, she found that she had sunk to her knees, on the first-floor landing, clutching the wall, hands held flat against cracked cold plaster. Tears came flooding down her cheeks.

  She didn’t care what people thought. She – didn’t give a curse about her father. Damn him, damn him, we hated him.

  But I can’t go and sit in the café like this. I can’t go and sit there with everyone gawping –

  So perhaps she did still care, a little. Scrubbing her handkerchief over her face. She had never worn make-up, and now she never would.

  (Will anyone ever think me pretty again? No one could be as blind as Alfred. I asked him a few weeks ago if he thought that film star Sharon Stone was pretty. We were watching her in a telly thing. He said, ‘Not half so pretty as you. Anyway, she’s a bit past it, isn’t she?’ – Sharon Stone’s thirty years younger than me!)

  His kind of love. His kind of fondness. He was slow with words, but his eyes said it, and the way he patted me, and held my hand, and the way he looked when I wore the blue dress he likes so much, that matches my eyes … I never doubted that he loved me.

  How many people can say as much?

  It can’t be over. Alfred, Alfred.

  She had wandered down the steps to the corner of the corridor that would have taken her down to the café. She stood there, sniffing and trying to breathe normally, clutching her wet hanky in her hand so tight that by the time she noticed it her fingers were numb.

  A glass door led out into a little wild garden in the middle of the block. It would be locked, of course; it was a rule of life that all doors were locked, the ones you wanted to go through, at any rate. She turned the handle; it grated, refused. She started to cry again with frustration. Oh all her life the doors had been locked, her mother was weeping, May could never not hear it, her father was storming, she couldn’t get away, and then there was Alfred, shouting at table when she’d forced herself to make a nice lunch, and the children screaming when she tried to read, or Dirk, once, sobbing in that animal way because she had forgotten his birthday (but she’d had Asian flu, she’d been in bed, Dirk’s grief wasn’t reasonable, was it? No) –

  She had never been able to slip out into the open, the quiet, clear space where happiness was. Not joy so much as an end to sorrow, a rest from anger and fear and resentment.

  She pushed, a last angry, hopeful little push –

  The door opened, and she was in the garden.

  30 • Alfred

  ‘I went in the Park a few days ago,’ said Thomas. ‘I wanted to tell you that everything was ship-shape. Bulbs looking good. Willow turning yellow.’

  ‘Was the mesh cover over the pond?’ Alfred asked, anxious, focusing.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Thomas. ‘That was all fine.’ (He hadn’t looked; he hadn’t noticed, distracted by the woman stealing bulbs.)

  ‘Otherwise it gets choked up with leaves … The teenagers. They take it off. If no one stops them. Then they throw things in the water.’

  ‘No, it was fine, honestly.’ (Darren had said: ‘I’m not bloody fine.’ And there had been the van with the chap from the council, the one who had spoken slightingly of Alfred.) ‘Everything was fine. Don’t worry.’

  ‘That pond … It’s a special place, that pond.’

  Alfred saw it almost hourly still in the hospital, a picture window in the ward’s dull paint. It was a water-lily pond, with fat Koi carp winding in and out of the lily roots, leaves like green plates, reflected clouds. Behind it a terraced rockery with bonsai trees and dwarf rhododendrons. Flanking the rockery, dark cypresses, a magnolia tree which was one of Al
fred’s favourites, and the trailing yellow of the tall weeping willow. Once there had been two, but one was cracked apart in the great storm of 1987, and the head gardener had wanted to save it, but the council decreed it had to come down, Health and Safety, rules and regulations, it was simpler and cheaper to take it down, though it would take a hundred years to grow another one.

  ‘I count the beginning of spring from that pond. Every March for the last ten years or so a pair of ducks have come and settled there. They only stay a couple of weeks but I always say to myself, spring’s here. One year they raised a brood on the pond. I had to stop the children chasing the ducklings. Lovely little things. Like a picture in a book. Comic, really. Going too fast. Always falling over. Just like kids … You don’t have children, do you Thomas?’

  ‘No,’ said Thomas. ‘I’d like to, one day.’

  ‘Don’t leave it too late. But of course you’ve got your job. You’ve got your library to think about.’ Alfred was afraid of having hurt Thomas’s feelings. All men wanted children, didn’t they? (And then once they’d got them, they longed to escape. From the mess and the fuss and the bickering.) So he added, ‘You’ve got to keep the books coming, too. May looks forward to you writing another one.’

  ‘That’s very kind of her,’ said Thomas. He blushed to think of May reading it. He’d tried to explain the title, once, but she’d patted his hand and said ‘not to worry.’ An old woman screamed, suddenly, painfully, far down the ward, too far to see, behind one of the drawn green curtains, and twenty heads looked up, nervous.

  Pamela had made it back to her bed. She collapsed on to it, pulled herself up, then swung up her legs, one by one, an endless process of sighing effort, but once she was settled, hands clutching her bedhead, she turned on Alfred a glittering smile. Very brightly coloured – a touch on the puce side. She had taken a detour to do her make-up.

  ‘Helloo there, Alfred. Is that the famous son?’

  ‘Wrong again,’ he said, and winked at her, surprising himself with this moment of gaiety. ‘He is a writer though. Thomas, this is Pamela.’

  ‘Hello, Thomas.’ She waved a clawed hand. ‘I could have been a writer, you know.’

  ‘Oh really,’ said Thomas, not sounding impressed. Then he tried again, politely: ‘Really?’

  ‘Novels, poems, I could do them all. My husband said I was a born writer.’

  But Alfred had picked up Thomas’s boredom. Women could be boring, it couldn’t be denied. Always butting in when men were talking. When men were talking about serious things. ‘You’ll excuse me if I talk to my friend,’ he said to the woman, with the bluff manner he’d used to get rid of people in the Park. ‘Thomas and I are talking over old times.’

  She gazed at him, indignant, then gave a short laugh like a dog barking, and sank back on her bed, where she rummaged noisily in her bag until she produced a radio and head-phones which she jammed on her head and turned up the volume until it was distantly, annoyingly audible.

  ‘We never allowed transistors in the Park,’ Alfred said quite loudly to Thomas, who smiled, but Alfred could see the noise annoyed him. That was writers for you. Sensitive. Perceptive.

  ‘How many years have you been there, Alfred?’ Thomas asked. ‘Of course I remember you when I was a boy –’

  ‘It was different then. There were six of us then. Six of us, with dogs and uniforms.’

  ‘Why did you need dogs? Was there a lot of trouble?’

  ‘There’s never been a major crime in that Park.’ Alfred had said it many times, and he said it now, heavily, proudly. ‘No violence, except the odd ruck when the alcoholics fight over a bottle, or two kids have a go at one another. No rape. No murder. No … There’s never been a death in the Park. It’s a record to be proud of. And a lot of it is down to the Park Keepers. I mean the whole lot of us, over the years.’ He could feel his strength coming back as he said it; he was proud of himself; he was Alfred, the Park Keeper.

  ‘I’ve always had a thing about parks,’ said Thomas. ‘Places where everybody can go. And people usually look happy. Don’t they? Probably because they’re not working.’

  ‘Too many people not working nowadays. But you’re right, Thomas. It’s a happy place. Did you know there was dancing, after the war?’

  And Alfred began to talk to Thomas, seeing genuine interest in his eyes (he was a nice boy, though perhaps a touch soft), remembering things he hadn’t thought of for years, talking as if there were no tomorrow.

  ‘Did you know I was born twelve yards from the Park? So it really has been my life, in a way. Of course that house was bombed flat in the war.’

  He told Thomas how he’d played in the Park as a boy, when all the shrubberies were ringed with railings and the Park Keepers seemed like gods to Alfred. ‘P’raps I got an inkling even then that that was what I’d like to be. But they were so tall, like men from Mars.’ The boys never bothered with the grown-ups’ end, where the flower-beds were, where people sat on seats. You had to behave, up there, which was boring. Instead they made a den down the very far end, in the middle of the shrubbery, where there was a path that led along by the wall behind the railings to a wonderful-smelling tower of grass-clippings, it seemed like years of grass-clippings, hidden in the middle of the laurel-bushes where no one could see them if they didn’t know (though of course they had to try not to laugh when the Park Keepers happened to patrol nearby, and once Alfred had wet his pants though he wasn’t going to tell Thomas that). They had hollowed out a den like a mouse’s nest. Deep down the clippings were warm, fermenting. ‘The Park seemed like heaven to us in those days. You see the best of people in parks …’

  And he was off again among happy memories. The cards and presents he got at Christmas. A ham, mince pies, the odd bottle of spirits which people probably imagined he took a nip of in his little hut, though he never touched a drop till he was off duty … (well hardly ever, he thought to himself). Letters from America, Malaya, South Africa, wherever folk from Hillesden went. Scarves and gloves and cardigans, knitted by some of his married ladies, for he did have a following among the ladies, all perfectly innocent, he assured Thomas, perfectly innocent on his part at least.

  ‘I’ve dreamed about the place, since I’ve been stuck in here. You’d think I’d be glad of a break, wouldn’t you? I mean, it’s not a cushy job. Cleaning out the aviary I never liked. I’d give that away, any day. It’s not the little birds like the budgies, they’re child’s play, but the pheasants were always that bit aggressive, and I don’t know what to make of the new foreign birds. Too bright, aren’t they. Too bright for the Park. They don’t look right in an English park –’

  ‘I like them,’ Thomas put in, mildly.

  ‘– I don’t trust ’em. They put their heads down and look at me and I think they’re going to rush me. So now I always use my broom. I open the door of their shelter at the back and the little ones fly up into the enclosure and then I get my broom and bash on the door and the big ones scuttle out pretty quick. You have to show them who’s boss,’ said Alfred. ‘With all these things. Show ’em who’s boss.’ Something about Thomas’s face stopped him. He felt less certain. He thought about it. Why did he hate those big yellow birds? At first it was only because they were foreign. But now it was worse, somehow worse. I hate them because they’re afraid of me.

  ‘Tell me about the dancing,’ said Thomas, swiftly. ‘Was there really dancing in the Park?’

  ‘It was where the kids all ride their bikes. The big ring of tarmac. We used to have a bandstand. A proper bandstand. Thatched, like the café. Lovely. But took an awful lot of maintenance. Anyway, it started after the war. I loved dancing. Still like to watch it. Still jiggle my feet when they dance on the telly.

  ‘But I was in Palestine, you see. I was out there doing my National Service. Nineteen forty-seven to forty-nine. I used to think about the Park. Out there in the desert. It was like a bloomin’ oven. Nothing growing for miles and miles.’

  (It looked white, in the
heat, Alfred remembered. No colour at all. And the sky was so hot that was white as well. I used to remember the Park, and the dancing. I tried to imagine the colour green. You start to appreciate it then. It’s better than anywhere, really, England, although I had a lot of fun in the army, they made a man of me, Dad said.)

  ‘I’d met May, by then. I was sixteen when I met her. Nineteen forty-three, I think it was. She was just the girl who matched the shoes to the tickets in the shop where we took our shoes to be soled. She had just left school. She never looked at me. She just took the ticket, and her head went down. But she had big blue eyes. I expect you’ve noticed. And she wore blue ribbon in her hair. I took her dancing once before they called me up.’ (We were shy with each other, Alfred remembered. I had the wrong shoes, she stared at them, and I thought, she’ll want someone better than me, but the music was lovely, romantic, wonderful, and there was a moon behind the trees, and even though in the end it started to drizzle and the band gave up and we had to go home, the memory somehow lasted me, out in the desert, those two dry years.)

  ‘The day I got demobbed, I was with Reggie, wasn’t I. The two of us had travelled back together. We hadn’t any English money on us, so we walked all the way home from Victoria Station to Hillesden, in the middle of the night. Knocked on the door and my mum stuck her head out of the bedroom window and started to cry. She got up and cooked me a gigantic fry-up which must have used every bit of food in the house, and I didn’t sleep a wink all night, I felt crazy, and I couldn’t get used to not being shot at, I couldn’t sleep in a bed for months … We’d always had to sleep on the floor, you see.’

  ‘PTSD,’ Thomas nodded, sagely.

  Then wished he hadn’t.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘What they call post-traumatic stress disorder.’

  ‘Nothing like that. I wasn’t mental,’ said Alfred, annoyed to be interrupted. There was a pause; he sucked his teeth. Mum, he thought. She was a good soul. I wonder if she’s up there waiting for me. As long as Dad isn’t waiting for me – Let’s face it, Dad was a holy terror. Took a leather strap to all of us … I never did that; I would never do that. ‘Am I boring you?’ he asked. ‘I’m talking too much.’