by Bruno Noble
Eleanor and Deborah spoke to their dolls in exactly the same manner, in the same tone and with the same gentle admonishments, as those with which their mother spoke to them. Their dolls were all assigned throaty, gravelly voices, spoke slowly to one another and, when one had to tell the other off, did so in a voice heavy with disappointment. When I heard a new tone of voice or a grown-up’s clever remark for the first time, I would store it mentally and try it out with my dolls at the first opportunity.
‘Have some more crisps,’ said the biggest doll in a circle of dolls on my bedroom floor, to no doll in particular.
‘A, B, C, D and because E, F, G,’ said a doll.
‘Don’t be silly!’ scolded a second doll.
‘Do you have a body?’ asked a third.
‘What are you playing, Liebchen?’ enquired Mama gently. She stood contentedly in the doorway, leaning against the door jamb and cupping her bloated belly with both hands.
I smiled.
‘Come.’ Mama stretched out a hand. ‘Come and keep me company. I’ll tell you if the baby starts kicking and you’ll be able to feel it. Come and read to me while I get dinner ready. I’m out again this evening and I won’t see you after dinner.’
*
Things lose their detail and their colour at night. I fall asleep and wake to shades of grey.
My curtained window formed a black rectangle framed with a pale contour and a faint bisecting furrow where the curtains met. My dolls, books and clothes and the items of bedroom furniture they rested on were featureless two-dimensional ashen shapes distinguishable from each other by only the barest of outlines.
‘Mama,’ I said to the form above my bed, unsure if I were awake or dreaming.
‘It’s Papa,’ said Papa, faceless in the absence of a strong light. ‘Mama’s gone out, remember?’
I must have been awake and fallen asleep again because I later woke distinctly, my legs cool and bare, exposed to the night air and a moist sheet. ‘What is it, Papa?’
‘Isabella,’ said Papa’s silhouette with a shaking voice, ‘you’ve wet the bed.’
I thought again that I might be dreaming; I hadn’t wet the bed in a very long time, not in years – in fact, maybe not at all: I had never had an accident that I could remember.
‘You’ve been a very naughty girl,’ scolded Papa, speaking hesitantly and slowly from a mouthless oval outline above me. His voice frightened me. I feared he might be right. I must have kicked my bed covers to one side of the bed and now lay still, aware of a damp sheet and of a nightie wet in patches, of moisture cooling my legs as it evaporated from them. Struggling to wake fully, I apologised repeatedly, ‘I’m sorry, Papa, I’m sorry.’
‘There, there,’ said Papa, leaning over me to stroke my hair. ‘You were asleep. You couldn’t help it. But Mama will be upset.’
In reply, I could only turn and press my face to the pillow.
Papa tucked my hair behind an ear. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll help you clean up and we won’t breathe a word to Mama. Shall we do that, Isabella? Shall we do that?’
Not trusting myself to speak, grateful to Papa for his offer of assistance and complicity so as to spare my embarrassment before my dear mother, I nodded and wept into the pillow.
Papa leant further and fumbled for the switch to my bedside lamp, the light from which breathed warmth, colour and definition into my room. I saw Papa’s empty beer glass on my chest of drawers, nestled between the legs of my big doll that sat upright, arms outstretched as though reaching for it. I saw Papa who had sat down beside me, his hands shaking despite being clasped firmly on one knee, his eyes wide and blinking in the light’s sudden assault. He turned and, deliberately and ever so gently, he raised my bottom and pulled my nightie from under it, raised my arms, one by one, and pulled my nightie off over my head and, leaning, having turned it the right way out, lay it over the back of my chair. ‘It will be dry by morning,’ he said. Naked, the chill only a minor penance for my misdemeanour, I lay on my back, the tears trickling down either side of my face, wetting my ears, the back of my neck and my pillow. Tenderly, parting my legs, he cleaned me, thoroughly, lifting each leg and resting it on each of his shoulders in turn, softly with balls of cotton wool, meticulously, taking great care to dry, after, the parts he had cleaned before. ‘There,’ he said, ‘there,’ and stood, trembling, saying nothing more, as though not trusting himself to speak.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, for the twin humiliations I had subjected him to of having to clean his daughter and of having to witness her humiliate herself, for the trouble I had put him to, for the imposition of a secret he could not share with his wife.
‘Here,’ said Papa, his voice choking a little so he repeated himself. ‘Here, move to where it’s a little less damp and make sure you pull the bedroom covers well back in the morning so the sheet can dry. These,’ he said as he tucked the bed covers around my chin, ‘have stayed dry, fortunately.’
I turned my pillow over so as to sleep on its dry side. ‘I’m sorry, Papa,’ I said, overcome with a desire to take refuge in sleep.
‘Well,’ said Papa, ‘at least we’ve got you cleaned up.’ He took his empty glass in one hand and reached for the light switch with the other. I was asleep before he had switched the light off.
Sharon
We were a sporty family. Mum and Dad had met on a charity run. Dad loved telling the story of their meeting. ‘So, when I run, I always select someone who’s going to be my pacemaker, you know, someone I’m going to overtake going into the last straight. So, I thought to myself, well, I’ll happily follow that bum around five Ks! But, wouldn’t you know it, try as I might, I just couldn’t overtake her! And I thought, you know, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, so here we are, joined at the hip! Well, in unholy matrimony, anyway!’
Mum was a runner and a tennis player. Dad had tried his hand at every sport and settled on squash and tennis. This allowed him to complain that the one messed up the other and bemoan the fact that his generation’s sporting prowess had been handicapped by the transition from wooden to metal squash and tennis racquets. ‘You grow up with one grip and then it’s all change; you have to learn another.’
Sherah had a good eye for a ball, as Dad would put it; she was a hockey and a tennis player. As for Seamus, he was ball mad: irrespective of a ball’s size or shape, he’d want to throw it, kick it or hit it.
‘What sport will you want to do, Sharon?’ asked Mum, when we were considering my transition from gym and rounders to other sports in the final year of my primary school.
‘Rowing,’ I replied.
‘Rowing? Trust you,’ said Dad. ‘Always looking for a place to hide. What’s wrong with tennis and hockey? There’s nowhere to hide when it’s one on one and nowhere to hide on a hockey pitch when you receive the ball.’ He swung his arm in a poor imitation of forehands and backhands before bending his knees to wave an imaginary hockey stick around.
‘Rowing and tennis,’ I said.
‘Do hockey and tennis instead,’ insisted Dad, bored with make-believe hockey-ball dribbling. ‘You can have Sherah’s old hockey stick and kit – it’ll save on buying new rowing gear. Besides, have you seen the time you’d have to get to the boathouses in the morning? There’s no way I’m getting up that early to drive you there.’
*
On Saturday mornings we would play tennis on one of the municipal tennis courts on the other side of the railway line from where we lived. Dad would ask, ‘Anyone for tennis?’ I would never answer first because if it were just me, Dad would either find a reason to change his mind about playing – ‘It looks like rain!’ – or would play so aggressively against me that it would knock my confidence. However, if he needed a fourth, he’d cajole me into playing – ‘Come on, Sharon! A little bit of rain never hurt anybody!’
I best liked the days when four of us wanted to play – they were typically sunny Saturday mornings in which the greens of the Astroturf tennis courts and of
the surrounding lawns and trees, the cries of tennis players and children in neighbouring playgrounds and the sound of passing District Line trains formed a shiny bubble in which we lost ourselves in pursuit of balls, victory, love and self-esteem. The last was hard to come by when we all five turned up, racquets swinging, as Dad, more often than not, would say, ‘Okay, Sharon, you be ball girl.’
‘But Dad!’ I would remonstrate.
‘Go on Sharon, be a sport.’
‘But why does it always have to be me?’
‘Seamus has got to get as good as you and Sherah’s trying for the first team. She’s got an important match coming up. Come on, think of others for a change.’
Dad had to be on the winning team, which he nearly always was so long as he played against Seamus rather than with him. As I grew older, I realised that Dad was neither as good as I had thought he was, nor as good as he’d pretended to be. When he started losing and saw that he was going to lose, his tactic would be to clown around so that he could claim he hadn’t lost really, as he had only been having a bit of fun. This involved accidentally hitting the ball across several courts in all directions and then telling me off when I didn’t fetch it quickly enough.
‘No! Don’t just chuck them at me! Stand feet together and put your hand with the ball up. Straight arms! Don’t slouch! One bounce only. Come on, do it properly!’
After the first set, Mum would hand me her racquet and say, ‘I’ll sit the next one out,’ and she’d wander over to the café to read a newspaper in the sun.
If Dad had lost the set, he’d say, ‘Right! New teams! Let’s start again.’ If he’d won, he’d say, ‘A substitution for the losing team – they must be feeling the pressure!’
On one occasion, Dad said, ‘You three play, I’m going to join Mum for a coffee.’ He slung his racquet over his shoulder and followed her.
Seamus practised cricket strokes with his tennis racquet.
‘Stop messing about, Seamus,’ said Sherah. ‘Come on, let’s have a game.’
‘How can we have a game when there are only three of us?’ asked Seamus.
‘Easy,’ replied Sherah. ‘Come around here to my side. Right, so it’s us against Sharon. That’s only fair, isn’t it, Sharon, as, on average, the two of us are your age?’
I supposed that it was.
‘Right,’ said Sherah. ‘Sharon, we have to hit into the doubles court and you have to hit into the singles court, all right?’
I thought about this. ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t I be hitting into the doubles court?’
‘No,’ said Sherah, ‘because there’s only one of you, right, so you get to hit in the singles.’
‘Yeah,’ added Seamus, ‘and there’s two of us and when there’s two you hit in the doubles.’
‘Besides,’ said Sherah, ‘Seamus has never played singles before so he’s never hit into a singles court.’
‘There’s something wrong about this,’ I said in between games, panting.
‘You’re doing fine,’ said Sherah, who had got something in her eye and had to keep turning away from me.
Isabella
The absence of a garden shed and conservatory at the far end of the Baldocks’ garden made it appear longer than ours. Eleanor, Deborah and I were using the extra space to ferry their dolls from one imaginary world to another on the backs of two bicycles and a tricycle. A dolls’ house by the dining room’s French doors was Earth, a late-blooming Madame Alfred Carrière rose that was halfway down the garden (and that Mrs Baldock amused me by referring to as either ‘Madame’ or ‘Alfred’, depending on her mood) was Limbo and the cotoneaster evergreen hedge that marked the garden’s far boundary and that still retained its red berries (that the sisters had been forbidden from eating for as long as I could remember) was Heaven. Eleanor had been learning about different religions at school and the game had been her idea. She stood by Heaven and admired the dolls at our feet. We had garlanded them with the rose’s pale petals and had scattered red berries about the dolls; to me, they seemed no happier than on Earth.
‘Mummy!’ Eleanor had to shout.
Mrs Baldock, standing framed by the doorway to the garden, raised one hand to her brow in signal that she’d heard her daughter or, maybe, just to shield her eyes from the day’s bright light.
‘Do Catholics go to heaven?’
Mrs Baldock shouted, ‘Yes!’
‘I told you,’ said Eleanor to Deborah.
‘Mummy!’ cried Deborah.
Mrs Baldock raised her other hand to provide shade for her eyes with both hands.
‘Do prostitutes go to heaven, too?’
‘Protestants, you idiot,’ snorted Eleanor.
‘Protestants!’ shouted Mrs Baldock. ‘Protestants!’
‘Do they?’
‘Yes!’ came the reply.
‘But they don’t go to limbo,’ said Eleanor decisively, as if ready to win that argument too.
Deborah opened and closed her mouth and thought for a moment before saying, as though casually just checking, ‘So, we won’t go to limbo?’
‘No,’ confirmed Eleanor and the three of us, she standing and Deborah and I squatting in shaded heaven, looked halfway down the garden to the sunlit, sparkling, creamy white-dotted rosebush that was limbo and that appeared more appealing and pleasant than both heaven and earth. ‘Well,’ she said, in an attempt to ameliorate our situation, ‘it’s only our souls that go to limbo, anyway.’
‘How do you know if you have a soul?’ asked Deborah quickly.
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ I said brightly. ‘It’s when you, you know, you see yourself from the outside.’ I faltered. I hadn’t tried to explain this before and found myself trying to put an intuition to words for the first time. ‘When you see yourself from the outside, it’s your soul that’s doing the seeing.’ The dolls at our feet, it was clear to me, had no souls.
Eleanor and Deborah looked at me, then at each other and then back at me impassively or maybe a little forbearingly.
‘I mean, how do you know if you have a body?’ I added helpfully.
‘That’s silly!’ said Deborah, laughing, and Eleanor joined her in her laughter and I joined them in theirs and we all delighted in the absurdity of my joke.
We cycled up and down the garden either clutching dolls in one hand while we steered our bikes, or filling the barrow attachment to Deborah’s tricycle with them. Mrs Baldock, who had asked Eleanor if her curriculum included Buddhism, informed us gravely that she was contemplating conversion to it and encouraged us, in this game at least, to embrace the spirit of reincarnation lest the heaven-bound dolls leave earth unpopulated. While we turned this idea over in our minds, while we pretended to give this metaphysical notion serious consideration, when, I suspect, we had simply tired of the game or, at least, of the hejira from and back to earth and heaven, a butterfly flew by, doubly surprising for its appearance in the relative lateness of the year and for the speed at which it flew. It landed on the dolls’ house and graced it momentarily with an unfolding and folding of its grey-brown hind wings and its black-spotted orange-brown forewings before disappearing over the garden fence.
Eleanor and Deborah looked at each other and then at their mother and said with one excited voice, ‘Can we visit Isabella’s butterfly house?’ and looked from her to me slyly and, as their mother replied and they protested, increasingly knowingly.
‘No,’ said Mrs Baldock.
‘Why not?’ asked Eleanor.
‘Mrs Bicourt is out and we don’t want to disturb Professor Bicourt.’
‘I don’t think there are many butterflies left to see now,’ I said.
‘Oh, please!’ begged Deborah.
‘I don’t really want to, anyway,’ said Eleanor.
‘Besides,’ said Mrs Baldock, indicating the garden with a sweep of her loose-sleeved, colourful blouse and a thudding tinkling of wooden-beaded necklaces, ‘look at your dolls out in the garden. You can’t leave them in limbo for ever, you kn
ow.’
*
Mama picked me up on her way home. She didn’t stop for tea, and frowned when Mrs Baldock told her I hadn’t had a drink once that afternoon, not even of lemonade. She waddled slowly beside me, the two of us hand in hand, and told me that, while she would be out this evening for the last of her German conversation classes, she had no further commitments and she looked forward to the next few days and maybe even weeks with me, just me, before we’d be joined by my baby sister or brother, when family life would get even better.
Papa saw Mama to the taxi and instructed the driver to be solicitous of her. No sooner had he shut the front door after her than he said, ‘Come on, my hostess!’ which he considered a joke of sorts. ‘My guests are asking after you.’ We entered the study in single file, the space between the edge of the bookcase and one end of the Chesterfield sofa being too small for two abreast, even though one of us was a slight girl.
Papa said, ‘Will you offer the crisps?’
Professor Rennet said, ‘Ah! The empiricist!’ He took a crisp and then drank from his glass that he replaced to one side of the family photograph. Grandfather looked on approvingly.
Dr Dearman said, ‘Isabella, you are the single best profferer of crisps ever!’ and patted his lap so that I might sit on it and he empty the bowl of crisps while making piggy noises to amuse me.
‘Dr Faben,’ said Papa, ‘has a glass that needs refreshing, I see.’ I assisted Papa briskly and willingly, so eager was I to make up for the inexplicable increase in my embarrassing bed-wetting.