‘Apple sauce?’ asked Shirley, who was dishing up, with her back to the table, from a hotplate on a trolley.
‘It all depends what you mean by family,’ said Dora’s Uncle Fred, who tended to pedantry. He looked round, moved his fork cautiously to a different angle on the best embroidered cloth. ‘I’m not family, strictly speaking. Here courtesy of Dora. And of our charming hostess, of course.’
‘Gravy?’ asked Shirley, and poured it on without waiting for an answer. Family. She had lacked family as a child: had missed it. And now she’d got it with a vengeance. The source of murder, battering, violence. However had it happened?
‘Red cabbage?’ asked Shirley.
‘Red cabbage? Red cabbage? I thought it was sprouts. We always have sprouts.’ An angry interjection from the oldest Mrs Harper.
‘It’s sprouts as well,’ said Shirley. ‘I thought I’d do some red cabbage too. As a change.’
‘He won’t like it. He won’t want any. He likes his red cabbage pickled.’ So pursued the oldest Mrs Harper. Her husband smiled and nodded.
‘Yes,’ mused Uncle Fred, ‘families aren’t what they were. It’s all this moving around the country. Thank you, Shirley, that’s grand. By the way, Brian asked me to London again, but I thought I’d wait till the weather’s better.’
‘All what moving about the country?’ asked Cliff, largely to avert further discussion of sprouts and red cabbage, which he could see was imminent from the suspicious manner in which his mother was turning over the vegetables on her heaped plate.
‘Oh, all this moving around for work.’
‘Go on,’ said Steve. ‘No one moves round here. They stick fast, round here. Never been south of Nottingham, half the folks round here.’
‘I think it’s nice for the young folks to get out,’ said Fred. ‘I always encouraged my Brian. I didn’t want to stand in his way.’
Shirley smiled sourly to herself as she poured gravy. Somebody was going to have to ask after Brian soon, ask what he was up to, how he was getting on, but nobody wanted to. They resented Brian. He had got away. They hadn’t even the satisfaction of knowing that he treated his poor old Dad badly, because all things considered, he didn’t. It was probably true that he’d asked him down to London.
‘Is that a clove?’ asked Mrs Harper, triumphant.
‘Yes,’ said Shirley.
‘The cabbage is delicious,’ said Dora, quickly. She and Shirley exchanged glances.
‘And how’s your mother, Shirley?’ asked Mrs Harper, carefully and conspicuously laying her clove on the side of her plate; taking the offensive.
‘She’s much the same as ever,’ said Shirley. ‘Thanks.’
‘Pity she couldn’t be with us,’ said Mrs Harper, dangerously: but Shirley hadn’t the energy to fight back, she helped herself to a spoonful of sage and onion stuffing and sat down to begin her meal. Those served earlier had nearly finished: they didn’t believe in standing on ceremony, in the family. They ate what was in front of them. While it was hot.
‘She doesn’t get out much,’ said Shirley flatly: a statement at once accurate and wonderfully, gloriously misleading: ‘she doesn’t get out much’, an acceptable phrase, a dull little coin, an everyday coin, suggesting a mild, an ordinary, a commonplace disinclination, for in Northam ‘getting out’ was in many circles regarded as suspect, as improper, as leading to no good (those making merry in Breasbrough, for example, were undoubtedly up to no good) – a freak tolerated in the young, though with much grumbling, but considered dissolute, wayward, against nature in their elders. ‘She doesn’t get out much’, a phrase that Shirley had learned to use of her mother to forestall inquiry, impertinence, sympathy: a middle-aged phrase that she heard in her own voice as parody – indeed, she had noticed that when ‘the family’ gathered together all of them spoke in parodies of clichés, and some of them knew quite well that they were doing it. Dora knew, Cliff knew, Fred knew. And everybody there at that table knew that in the case of Shirley Harper’s mother, the phrase ‘she doesn’t get out much’ conveyed the distilled essence of a withdrawal so extreme that the term agoraphobia would hardly do it justice.
‘No, she doesn’t get out much,’ she repeated, almost defiantly, wondering if her sister Liz would bother to ring their mother that night, and if she didn’t, if it mattered. What an extraordinary childhood they had survived. Odd that both of them had turned out almost normal. ‘Her eyesight’s not too good now,’ she continued, as though that might somehow render her mother’s behaviour less odd, as though by mere words she could be converted into a harmless, ordinary, ageing old lady, just like other people’s mothers. And indeed, with old age, Rita Ablewhite was beginning to appear slightly less abnormal: behaviour strange in a healthy thirty-five-year-old was more acceptable at seventy. ‘She’s even agreed to have Meals On Wheels,’ Shirley volunteered, as nobody else was saying anything.
‘That must take a bit of the burden off you,’ said Mrs Harper, lining up a peppercorn by the clove.
‘Oh yes it does,’ said Shirley. ‘It’s a wonderful service, you know.’
This innocent remark, which Shirley had injudiciously thought platitudinous enough to pass without comment, stirred her brother-in-law Steve to speech: he launched into an attack upon the City Council and the high rates, an attack guaranteed to annoy Uncle Fred, upset his mild dumb father, and plunge his brother Cliff into the deepest financial anxiety. It had been a bad year for Cliff, and it was as easy to blame the Council as anyone. On they went, the men, talking men’s talk of rates and the threatened steel strike and the Marxist lunatics at the Town Hall; of the closure of the Timperley works, of the three hundred made redundant at Brook and Partridge, of the folly of running courses of lectures at public expense in the Hartley Library on Nuclear Disarmament and Feminist Opportunities in Local Government. ‘It’s disgusting,’ contributed Mrs Harper from time to time, presenting her flat, mean, worthless little counter simply because she could not bear to remain silent, to sit back while others played, although she recognized herself temporarily outnumbered, ‘disgusting, I call it,’ and Shirley, hearing this phrase for the millionth time, had a vision of households all over Britain in which censorious, ignorant old bags like her mother-in-law, who had never done anything for the public good, who had nothing positive ever to contribute to any argument, passed judgement on others while stuffing themselves with goose and roast potatoes and sprouts and apple sauce. The backbone of the nation, the salt of the earth. And there was poor Fred, speaking up for the reviled council block in which he, unlike any of the others, lived: ‘Nay, it’s not that bad, it’s a lot of it exaggeration,’ he interposed mildly, as Steve repeated the time-worn allegation that it wasn’t safe to walk under the deck walkways for fear of having a television set or an old mattress chucked on your head: ‘Nay, it’s not that bad at all.’
‘You’d have thought your Brian could have found you somewhere a bit more comfortable,’ interposed Mrs Harper, seeing her opportunity of introducing Brian to his disadvantage, ‘he must know a few folk, it’s not only money that counts. . . .’ and her voice trailed away, as she simultaneously managed to imply that Brian had the Town Hall in the palm of his hand, and that he had enough money to buy his father a comfortable bungalow in a nice suburb whenever he felt like it. Shirley watched Fred return Mrs Harper’s grease-smeared, red-nosed gaze: affable, broad, patient, he stared at her, and wiped his mouth on his table napkin. She could see his decision not to bother to try to explain that Brian hardly knew anybody in Northam Town Hall, and that Brian’s salary as Head of Humanities at an Adult Education College hardly rose to paying his own mortgage, let alone to buying a house for his ageing father. She applauded this decision. It was not worth presenting reasoned arguments to Mrs Harper. When they appeared before her, she shifted her ground, with an agility that occasionally suggested to Shirley that perhaps she was not after all impenetrably stupid, but on some dismal level quite intelligent. ‘Nay,’ said Fred, ‘I like it where
I am, it suits me where I am, I wouldn’t want to be moving at my age. I’ve been in that block since it was built, it suits me fine. There’s a grand view, you know.’ He looked at his niece Dora. ‘Your auntie loved it. We used to sit in the evenings and watch the lights come on.’ He looked back at Mrs Harper. ‘You ought to come and visit me one day. You’d be surprised.’ Mrs Harper sniffed and moved her clove half an inch.
You could see she thought Fred had cheated by mentioning his dead wife: any minute now if she didn’t watch her step he might drag in his dead daughter too. The conventions prevented her from heaping any further abuse on Chay Bank, a housing project which she had frequently and loudly denounced, but near which she had never set foot: the precariousness of her own social position would forever prevent her from visiting Fred Bowen, and this yearly ritual meeting on neutral ground was as much as she would ever dare risk.
‘You’d be surprised,’ Fred insensitively urged. ‘My Brian’s Alix thinks it’s lovely. She invited her Mum and Dad over from Leeds specially to have a look last time they were up here. We had a very nice tea.’
Now that was almost cruel, thought Shirley, as she offered second helpings. Fred had gone too far, had widened the discourse unfairly. Alix, whom Brian had so unexpectedly married, represented a world beyond articulate resentment, too remote to attack. Brian they could get at, but not Alix. They didn’t understand her well enough. They didn’t like her, but they didn’t know why.
Celia Harper, youngest child of Shirley and Cliff, too young to be allowed to escape to the disco, sat silent throughout the meal. She ate minimally. Sometimes her lips would move slightly, as though she were repeating something to herself. Nobody paid her any attention at all.
Shirley began to stack the plates. Nobody wanted any more, which was just as well, as there wasn’t much left and she couldn’t face hacking at the carcase.
Cliff would never carve. His father hadn’t carved before him, so Cliff wouldn’t carve. Fatherless Shirley knew perfectly well that most British men carved, and that it was a bit of bad luck that she happened to have married into a family where the women were expected to wield the knife. She wondered if her sister Liz carved. Probably not. That dreadful Charles would be brilliant at the job. She wheeled the trolley into the kitchen, and took the plum tart out of the oven. The oven clock said it was only five to eight. It felt like midnight, and they’d have to sit up till midnight. She’d persuaded the old folk to eat far later than usual anyway and it was still only five to eight. She wondered if there was any hope of getting them to play cards after supper instead of watching telly. She herself would much, much rather play cards. In the old days they all played cards. They’d enjoyed a game of snap or whist or gin rummy. But gradually, over the years, they had defected, as weak as the teenagers they so relentlessly criticized: they’d let the old ways lapse in order to slump like dummies in front of appalling chat shows and glimpses of the Sugar Plum Fairy and obsequious shots of the Royal Family and its corgis and babies, to goggle at old movies and new dance routines and to sit back sucking sweeties while sneering at pop stars and newscasters making fools of themselves at televised parties. The medium had been too strong for them, they had taken to it like aborigines to the bottle. Only her mother had resisted. But her mother, of course, was mad.
Two hours later, as they sat watching an Irish comedian telling jokes that she herself considered quite unsuitable for family viewing, jokes that she hoped were incomprehensible to Celia and her grandparents, the telephone rang: it was her mother, to report that Liz had not telephoned. ‘Maybe she’s waiting to ring later,’ Shirley said feebly, as a tide of rage with Liz, far away in distant London, washed through her: too absorbed in her own life, too selfish even to spend five minutes talking to her own mother.
‘She knows I don’t stay up,’ said Rita Ablewhite.
‘She may ring later,’ repeated Shirley. ‘How was your chicken?’
A short silence ensued. ‘I said, how was your chicken?’ Shirley repeated. She could hear the drone of the television from the sitting-room, the snores of her father-in-law, and her mother’s deliberate silence at the other end of the line. She could have murdered the lot of them, Irish comedian included. ‘Look, I’ve got to go now, I’ve got the kettle on for coffee,’ said Shirley. ‘The chicken was very nice,’ said her mother.
Half an hour later, the telephone went again. It was for Fred, Fred’s Brian.
‘Hello Brian,’ said Shirley, who was feeling marginally more cheerful, having managed to bring out the card-table in the midst of an argument about the relative demerits of the offerings on BBC and ITV.
‘Happy New Year, when it comes.’
‘And to you, Shirley,’ said Brian. ‘I’m not ringing too late, am I? I thought you’d still be up. Is Dad there?’
‘Yes, he is, I’ll get him for you.’ She could hear a lot of background noise, the noise of life. ‘Are you having a party?’
‘No,’ said Brian, ‘we’re not having a party, but I’m at one, I’m at your sister’s.’ He laughed his big, round, comfortable but oddly high-pitched laugh: his inoffensive laugh, defusing the reference to Liz: the soul of tact, as ever, Brian: ‘I’m at Liz’s, Alix would come. Funny world, isn’t it? You’re very good to my Dad, Shirley.’
‘Is it a good party?’
‘It’s a very up-market party. Champagne flows.’
‘How’s Alix?’
‘She’s fine. And Cliff?’
‘Not so bad. I’ll get your Dad, shall I?’
‘Thanks a lot, Shirley. I just thought I’d have a word with him. The silly old bugger still won’t have a telephone installed, you know. Barmy, that’s what he is. That’s what I tell him.’ Brian spoke with affection. She heard its authentic note. Brian could afford to be affectionate, from over a hundred miles away. She went to get Fred, who was overcome with nervous confusion and pleasure. He hated the telephone, it frightened him. ‘That you, Brian? How are you, Brian?’ he shouted. ‘What’s that? What was that?’ Technological alarm deafened him. ‘What was that? You spoke to Barbara? What’s that? Did she really? Happy New Year to you, love to Alix and Sammy. Yes, I’ll tell Dora. What was that? What was that? What?’
Triumphant, he returned to the card-table. ‘That was my Brian,’ he announced, unnecessarily. ‘Fancy that. He had a phone call from our Barbara in Australia. Fancy that. She told him to tell Dora she’d written to Auntie Flo to thank her for the cake She says why don’t I go out there on a visit. And I don’t know that I won’t. You get that, Dora? Barbara’s written to Auntie Flo about the cake.’
And he picked up his hand of cards, and surveyed it with a bewildered distracted satisfaction.
‘Whose turn is it?’ he said.
‘Yours, of course,’ said Mrs Harper, grimly: so grimly that her reply seemed like wit.
‘Sorry all,’ said Fred, and threw away a club.
‘I don’t fancy Australia, myself,’ said Dora. ‘My trick, I think. They say it’s very rough, Australia.’ She gathered in the cards, laid them neatly, criss-cross, upon her last gain.
‘It is a country with opportunities,’ said Steve: and off they went again, with their second-hand opinions, their echoes of overheard conversations, their phrases from advertisements and tabloid newspapers: and yet to Shirley there was perhaps something comfortable, despite all, something reassuring about the hands of cards, the button and matchstick money, the green baize of the table, the predictable, ancient jokes, the cigarette ends in the big red ashtray: there was safety here, of a sort, safety in repetition, safety in familiar faces and frustrations, and warmth of a sort, warmth and communion of a sort, society of a sort: the society she had discovered as a teenager, when she would slip surreptitiously out of the icy silence of Abercorn Avenue, where the clock ticked relentlessly on the kitchen wall, where Liz propped her textbooks against the Peak Freen biscuit tin on the kitchen table, where her mother sat in the front room listening to the radio, cutting up newspapers; she wo
uld let herself quietly out of the back door and creep down the passage, past the outside lav, through the back gate, round the corner, and then she would run for it, along Hilldrop Crescent, down The Grove, up Brindleford Drive, and across the main road at the lights to Victoria Street, where Cliff and Steve and their sister Marge lived. Cliff and Steve and Marge were allowed to have friends in. They even had a playroom of their own, an attic under the eaves. A gang of them would meet there, graduating from Meccano and toy farms to risqué games of Dare, illicit cigarettes, speculation about sex. Wildness and safety combined, Shirley had discovered there: they had made her welcome, they called her Shirl. Spirited she was, in those days, and she played one boy off against another, teasing, bold, louche, at times wildly immodest, shocking, provoking, drooping a ciggy from her wide wicked lip, dropping her blouse from bare shoulders, playing cards for forfeits, egging them on to experiment with Ouija, inventing naughty messages from the spirit world: how had she known these things, what models had she copied from films she had never seen, what spirit spoke through her, informing her impatient flesh?
Safety and danger, danger and safety. ‘A bad girl, that Shirley Ablewhite.’ Nobody ever said this, but she half hoped they would. She had longed to be a bad girl in those post-war years, those austerity years. But she couldn’t quite manage it: she remained a nice girl, just this side of safety. A nice girl. A small, suspicious caution held her back: a small caution teased Cliff, teased Steve, teased her friends, kept them on a hook, watching, waiting, to see how far she dared go. She was deceitful, was Shirley: downstairs, with Mr and Mrs Harper, she would be another girl, helpful, quiet, obsequious, prim, in her neat, absurdly old-fashioned blouses and skirts, her hair tied neatly back in bunches. She liked her downstairs self too, she liked the unfamiliar familiarity, the bickerings and grievances, the small change of domestic life.
The Radiant Way Page 7