Charles munched. ‘Excellent,’ said Charles.
Alix and Brian were not returning to Leeds that night, to Alix’s parents: they were spending the night in Fred’s old flat, in Chay Bank. Sorting things out. Throwing things out. Parcelling things up. The cremation was arranged for the next day. ‘Could I give you some of the pot plants, perhaps?’ Alix was saying to Shirley, looking round the long lounge, taking in a forced white cyclamen, a forced pink azalea, a scarlet poinsettia, all Christmas-new: and, more promisingly, a well-established begonia, a climbing vine. ‘It would be nice to find them a good home.’
‘Aren’t there people in the flats who would have them?’ said Shirley. ‘He had a lot of friends, in the flats.’
‘We must be off,’ said Liz for the third time. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, in Abercorn Avenue, Shirley. Come on Alix, come on Brian.’
They were giving the Bowens a lift, to Chay Bank: the Bowens were without a car, the Renault 4 still stood in the garage in Croydon. Cliff, Shirley and Celia Harper politely waved goodbye beside their privet hedge. ‘It’s out of your way,’ said Alix, apologetically, as Charles drove back towards the City Centre: ‘Never mind,’ said Liz, briskly, on Charles’s behalf. Chay Bank loomed illumined, visible for miles around, on the opposite hillside. Like a liner, moored in the night. ‘Fred used to say it was like a liner,’ said Alix.
‘Christ,’ said Charles, as he drove up the steep back approach road, ‘what a wilderness.’
‘But I think it’s beautiful,’ said Alix.
‘Alix, you’re barmy,’ said Charles, quite warmly.
‘Jesus,’ said Charles, as the four of them stood in the dank, graffiti-scarred urine-soaked lift, on their way up to Fred’s flat: ‘And you say he chose to move up here?’
‘Look,’ said Liz, pointing to a message on the grey-blue wall, written in yellow in a childish hand. ‘I WANT TO FUCK MR LAMB,’ it read, mildly, innocently, a schoolgirl’s appeal.
They made their way along the high skywalk towards Number 412. Charles gazed downwards at the lonely, conspicuous parked hired Ford Sierra. ‘They’ll strip it,’ he said, ‘they’ll syphon off the petrol and nick the tyres.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Alix, bracingly. ‘This is Northam, not the Harrow Road. They haven’t learnt bad habits yet, up here.’
‘Ah,’ said Charles, ‘so you admit things are bad on the Harrow Road?’
‘Well, sort of,’ said Alix, as Brian opened the door of his dead father’s flat.
‘But it’s very nice,’ said Liz, looking round appreciatively, admiring pot plants and bookshelves, a three-piece suite covered in brown corduroy, a nest of tables, a Doulton vase, a Wedgwood biscuit barrel. ‘And look at the view!’
Brian was pouring whisky. Charles could still see the Ford Sierra, alone, far, far below. ‘Why aren’t there any other cars?’ he asked, with not-quite-mock paranoia: ‘I don’t like this sinister absence of cars.’
‘Do you want the good answer, or the bad answer?’ asked Brian. ‘The good answer is that people don’t need cars because public transport is so cheap in Northam. The bad answer is that unemployment in these flats is something like eighty-five per cent. My father would have given you the good answer, Cliff would have given you the bad answer. You can take your pick. The statistics inform us that only eight per cent of households in this block have a car. That’s why you don’t see any cars.’
‘They didn’t like the old estate, after Kathie died,’ said Alix, sitting back, tucking her feet up under her. ‘That’s why they asked to be moved. Fred was on the housing committee. They liked it up here, didn’t they, Brian?’
‘I’m sure there are worse places than this in New York,’ said Liz, ‘it’s just that you don’t visit them, Charles. What’s that on the wall there, Brian?’
‘It’s a circular saw. Well, it’s a fake circular saw. In silver. It was his retirement present. Instead of a gold watch. It’s got his name on it, and his years of service.’
‘The Good Old Days,’ said Liz.
‘Well,’ said Brian, ‘at least he worked out his time. He wasn’t made redundant.’
‘Small mercies,’ said Charles, who had just been made redundant, with the accompaniment of a golden handshake worth more than Fred Bowen had earned in his entire working life.
‘Yes,’ said Brian, who was not at all clear about his own pension rights, and who occasionally found himself thinking glumly of Gloseley.
‘I don’t suppose anyone will ever give me a gold watch for long service,’ said Alix. ‘Or a silver saw. But if Polly and I get closed down, we’ve agreed to treat ourselves to lunch at Langan’s.’
Liz yawned.
‘In my business,’ she said, ‘I don’t think one has to retire. One gets wiser and wiser all the time. Until one dies. Dies into full knowledge.’
‘Is that how it will be?’ asked Alix.
‘I don’t see what else,’ said Liz.
When Liz and Charles descended, they discovered that the offside wing mirror had been nicked from the Ford Sierra. ‘I told you so,’ said Charles, as he drove towards the Open Hearth Hotel. Both of them were amused, companionably amused, old comrades in mirth and crime again. ‘But Cliff has got thousands and thousands of wing mirrors,’ said Liz. ‘Thousands and thousands, a whole factory full of wing mirrors, tomorrow we can go and take our pick.’
They staggered into the fervid foyer, worn out by the day’s exertions, the day’s emotions, warm with Brian’s father’s whisky. ‘Plastic,’ said Charles, waiting for their keys, picking discreetly at the bamboo trim of the Reception Desk. The thick-carpeted lift took them swiftly upwards. With no words spoken, they had agreed to spend the night together. Liz opened her arms to Charles, in the narrow bed. It was the beginning of nothing, the end of nothing: it was a night out of time, in a different sequence, in the sequence of the past, in the sequence of eternity. It meant nothing. It signified nothing. Charles entered her body, came instantly, as she came to meet him, and they both fell instantly asleep.
Henrietta Headleand lies under a mosquito net. She cannot believe that the Frenches do not have proper air-conditioning. Zambia is not what she had expected, not what she remembered from a visit twenty years ago with some great white hunter friends and her ex-husband, Peter Latchett. She had been looking forward to getting away from England for Christmas, for she dislikes Christmas, but here in Lusaka, at the Frenches’, there is more of an English Christmas than ever, a parody of an English Christmas, with a Christmas tree and crackers and cocktails, and a red-faced, sweating, drunken Father Christmas, and a lot of foolishly smiling black faces queuing up for silly gifts. The Frenches indulge their workforce. Henrietta disapproves.
At least the weather is too hot and wet for polo. That is a small mercy. Henrietta is deeply bored by polo. The Frenches are keen polo players.
She is bored by her new grandchild. She does not like babies. They make her feel old.
She is bored by the thought of Charles Headleand. He too makes her feel old. Charles is not what she expected.
Henrietta Latchett lies under her mosquito net, and tries to remember her trip into the bush, all those years ago, with Peter Latchett and Guy Hestercombe and Wally Lansdowne. She has lost something, some memory, some part of herself: what is it, where has it gone? She hears talk, now, at the Frenches’, from her earnest son-in-law, of the dwindling of the elephant population, of the massacre of the rhinoceros. All the hunters have turned gamekeepers, or at least in the circle in which she now finds herself stranded. They speak censoriously of hunting, of poaching.
It had not been like this with Peter, Guy and Wally, in the old days. They had sat in the evenings, by the blazing fire, drinking whisky and hearing the hyenas howl, telling stories of dangers survived, of risks run, of trophies snatched from nature. They had risen early, in the high bright light exuberant dawn. Henrietta had held her breath in the hide, as the shy antelope grazed and skipped, unconcerned, in the wet grass.
Henrietta tries to remember. The wild creatures have gone, have left her, she cannot summon them back.
And as she lies there under her net, far away, herds and herds of black lechwe graze, thousands and thousands of them, further than the eye can see, were there any eye to watch them. Zebras smartly kick their heels, elephants walk slowly in single file, impala leap and skitter and run, and the emerald-spotted wood dove cries its heart-breaking, melancholy cry.
I lost my mother, I lost my father, and I am alo-one, alo-one, alo-one, flutes the dove, mourns the dove, in some dim recess of Henrietta’s memory, while the heartless elegant little impala leap and jump and play.
Nothing had changed in the kitchen at Abercorn Avenue: there Liz and Shirley had once sat, at the white wooden kitchen table, doing their homework, and there they sat now, middle-aged women, with mugs of instant coffee in their hands. The Ideal Boiler was still warm: ‘But what can I do?’ Shirley had asked. ‘I can’t keep on stoking it, just in case. What can I do?’
The hospital had been vague in its prognosis. They never like to commit themselves, said Liz. It would be months, said Liz. She might even get better.
Was there a will? Shirley assumed there was, assumed it was in the desk in the front room. But the desk was locked, and she could not find the keys. She had only the house keys. ‘They must be somewhere,’ she said, vaguely, from time to time, gazing around as though they might discover themselves on a shelf, or hanging from a cupboard handle.
Neither of them wanted to go and look in the front room. Somewhere, in that front room, or in a wardrobe drawer upstairs, they might find knowledge they did not wish to possess. They both knew this. They said nothing: there was no need to speak.
‘How is it kept so clean?’ asked Liz, looking round at the old-fashioned white tiles, the exposed pipes, the well-dusted sideboards, the shoe-rack with their father’s polished shoes, the thick panes of frosted 1920s patterned glass in the window, at which she had so patiently gazed for so many years: a pattern of stars, or snowflakes? As a child, she had wondered: and wondered idly, now.
‘She couldn’t have kept it like this herself, surely?’
There was a Home Help, said Shirley. A nice woman. Three mornings a week.
‘I suppose I’ll have to let the boiler go out,’ said Shirley. ‘But I somehow feel that if I do, it’ll never start again.’
Liz got up, crossed over to the boiler, lifted the hood, took off the metal plate with the metal handle, gazed into its glowing, fading crater. ‘It was always a bloody good boiler,’ she said, ‘you have to agree. All these years. Do they still make things like this? It used to burn anything, didn’t it? Bones, banana skins, potato peelings, any old rubbish? Amazing.’
She dropped in her cigarette end, dropped the lid.
‘Sanitary towels,’ said Shirley, surprisingly, with a note of provocative elegy.
‘Yes,’ Liz said to Shirley, ‘you’ll just have to let it go out.’
They sat in silence, for a while. Oppressed.
‘If she were dead,’ said Shirley, ‘it would be different. If she were dead, we could get on with it.’
Sell it, get rid of it, cut it out.
‘I suppose I’d better have one more look for the keys,’ said Shirley, rising heavily to her feet. Liz followed her, slowly, into the narrow hall, into the back dining-room: the air was stiff with their reluctance. Perfunctorily, they looked in vases, under mats, under the silent clock. There was nowhere to look, really. The objects were like funerary objects, dead for decades, the companions of the dead. Liz followed Shirley into the front room. They stood on the threshold, on the beige rose-patterned carpet, trespassers. In the corner stood the locked, roll-top desk. On top of the mushroom-tiled fireplace stood two Christmas cards: Shirley crossed, looked at them, passed them silently to Liz. One from Stella, one from Celia. To Grandma, with love.
Love. The word crackled, spluttered, died.
‘I can’t bear it,’ said Liz, wandering around the room, touching surfaces, fingering curtains, stroking the back of the settee. ‘No, I can’t bear it.’
Shirley felt under cushions, put her hand down the side of the armchair, came up with a thimble.
Liz paused in her prowling, by the strange silver and wooden object, which she had polished for so many years, so many years ago. There it was, with its device of a mailed fist uplifted, with its monogram entwining an S, an H, an O. She ran her finger round its rim. ‘But of course,’ she said, ‘of course. It’s a wine cooler. A wine cooler. Wouldn’t you say, Shirley?’
Shirley, tapping her front teeth with the thimble on her middle finger, contemplated the object.
‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I suppose it is. I’ve never thought of it as being anything in particular before. But yes, I suppose it is.’
Liz offered to stay, but there was no point, really. She sat for twenty minutes by her mother’s side, but her mother did not know her. Go, said Shirley. I will ring when I need you. And Liz went, back down the M1, with her estranged husband Charles: a heavy, physical, solid peace possessed them both, as though something serious had been settled. A bond: a non-sexual bond? A trans-sexual bond? Reaffirmed through sex? Liz wondered, as the car sped southwards. It was over now: she resigned Charles, willingly, to Henrietta. She had guessed it all, from the mutterings, from the ejaculations; she had guessed the delicate state of play with Henrietta: she had no wish to interfere. She no longer needed Charles. She would continue as she was, alone. With her tabby cat. A smile rose irrepressibly, at the thought of the tabby cat. The cat would be watching for her return, from her seat on the window-sill, her lookout place: she would run, eagerly, to the front door. Charles, I supposed, was the love of my life, thought Liz: and that is that. Love, sexuality, orgasm. I am monogamous at heart, thought Liz Headleand. I remain married to Charles. And as the curiosity of this notion struck her, she recalled, suddenly, the wild and handsome Dutchman, with whom she spent a night of sexual passion on a ferry on the North Sea in a Force Nine Gale: where was he, did he recall that stormy passage?
‘What are you smiling about?’ asked Charles, as he overtook a red Golf GTI convertible.
‘You,’ said Liz. ‘You, and my tabby cat.’
‘Thank you,’ said Charles.
On Eleventh Night, Otto rang Alix Bowen, back from Brian’s father’s funeral, for help. ‘Help, Alix,’ said Otto. ‘Help, I’m in the most terrible pickle.’
Otto, a domesticated foreigner, often used words like ‘pickle’: they fell oddly, quaintly (in Alix’s view, charmingly) from his lips.
‘What kind of pickle?’
‘It’s Caroline’s mother. She’s had a fall, she’s broken her hip. Caroline’s had to go to Wolverhampton. She’s left me with this shopping list. I don’t know what it means.’
‘But you can’t have a party, if Caroline’s away?’
‘She says she’ll be back. She may be back. We can’t stop everybody, we’ve forgotten who we invited. She left me this shopping list.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Alix.
‘Yes, oh dear,’ said Otto, plaintively.
‘All right,’ said Alix.
Otto and Alix stood with a trolley in Waitrose, talking about George Orwell, 1984, and the totalitarian state. Shoppers surged round them, collided with them, rebounded from them. Otto and Alix talked on, engrossed, as they drifted, shopping list in hand, to the Tinned Goods, then on to the Soft Drinks: their trolley filled, as they spoke of self-fulfilling and self-defeating prophecies, of the concept of ‘freedom’, of the New Right’s definition of freedom, of the difference between freedom and choice. Alix hesitated, before a dizzy range of packets of orange juice: which brand did Caroline favour, she asked Otto, but he reached for the nearest, he did not know, they were all the same, surely, he said. Otto, the new Otto upheld, these days, in theory, the advantages of competition in a free market (at least in nonessential commodities and services) but he was not, Alix pointed out, much of an advertisement for his ow
n faith. ‘You would be quite happy,’ she told him, severely, ‘if orange juice came in cartons marked Orange Juice, and salt in packets marked Salt, and coffee in jars marked Coffee. You wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.’
‘ “Produce of Several Lands” it says,’ said Otto, staring thus prompted at the small print. ‘What can that mean?’
‘Engraved on my milk bottles this morning,’ said Alix, as they made their way towards the girl at the till, ‘there was an advertisement for the Sunday Post. In red lettering, on the glass of my milk bottle. What can that mean? Does the dairy belong to a newspaper consortium? Does the newspaper consortium belong to the dairy? Does everything belong to something else? Is nothing what it is?’
‘This is purgatory,’ said Otto, as someone in a hurry rammed, annoyed by their conversation, angrily into their trolley. ‘Is it always like this?’
Slicing cucumber, mixing yoghurt and mayonnaise, Alix described Brian’s father’s cremation.
‘We sang “The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended”,’ said Alix, ‘but it was eleven thirty in the morning. I don’t know if I’m doing this right, Otto, I’m sure this isn’t what it looks like when Caroline does it.’
Otto peered into the yellow pudding bowl.
‘It looks all right to me,’ he said.
‘I’m nervous in other people’s kitchens,’ said Alix, squeezing lemons: an understatement, a polite generalization, for of course she was particularly nervous in Caroline’s, which was full of equipment Alix did not know how to use.
Would Caroline come home and reprimand her for doing everything wrong? No, of course she would not, she would be grateful: but nevertheless, Alix felt herself to be an incompetent usurper.
‘You’re doing a wonderful job,’ said Otto, absently, as he dusted glasses, arranged them on a tray.
‘You don’t know where she keeps the grater?’ asked Alix.
‘The point is,’ said Otto, ‘that if they privatize British Gas as well as British Telecom, there’s no logical reason why they shouldn’t privatize the lot. Water. Trains. Hospitals.’
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