Whatever Happened to Margo?

by Margaret Durrell

  Mother, momentarily satisfied with my meek acquiesence, expanded generally – she was never ruffled for very long. ‘I’m so glad you are going to take a sensible view of the matter, and deal with it accordingly. It only needs a little courage.’ There was a long hopeful pause. ‘But I still have a premonition, dear, that Leslie needs me.’ She spoke as kindly as she could, breaking the news of her intended departure tactfully but firmly, and she went to pack.

  Harriet Amelia Greenfield stayed – for the moment.

  Gerald returned to compete with Harriet for pride of ownership, and added his views to the general clamour to rehabilitate Harriet. He brought several technical books, which we all studied, on problems of the brain, deciding eventually that as Harriet didn’t fit into any special category she must be ‘on the change’; but Jane disputed the fact. ‘She’s too old for such capers,’ she said. The knobkerrie proved nothing – it was either stolen or a much-loved relic of her past.

  Nelson developed chickenpox which swept the house in an epidemic, taking the stage from Harriet’s involvements; only Jane, Harriet and I survived. Jane, once again delighted at the scope for her talents, arranged wards, hung sheets solid with disinfectant at all the doors to stop the spreading of germs. Nelson and the children, recovering first, played a game called the Great Plague, until every nerve in the house was reduced to an irreparable shred and I longed for the peaceful, bygone days when I roamed the empty building and looked forward to the future and the fortune I was going to make, as I waited for the incubation period to reveal yet another spotty face.

  A baby-sized knitted bear, strangled in a life-like way, hanging limply from the first floor had upset Olwen and Paula, rising from their sickbeds. Harriet was blamed for the scene of destruction, but it was, after all, the work of the children. Reports filtered through that Leslie and Doris were wed at last, much to Mother’s delight.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The epidemic over, we hardened, quickly, back into our various grooves, as Jane removed all traces of chickenpox and exchanged disinfectant odours for more palatable scents.

  The hint of coldness in the air and the leaves turning the colour of toast, warned us that summer was finally over. The visitors had already left, filtering home to their first fires, and the locals, sighing with relief, spread their elbows in a gesture of release and prepared to enjoy the deserted town.

  After the first upheaval of Harriet’s accusations which nominated each one of us in turn, and sent us oscillating between anger and amusement, we fell into a state of acceptance, sometimes uneasily, as we reflected a trifle sardonically that ‘it was only Harriet having one of her turns’ to acrimonious announcements, angry gestures and accepted with grace the electric lightbulbs that vanished without trace from vulnerable parts of the house.

  Even Mother, recuperating quietly at Leslie’s, took courage as if by telepathy and telephoned to say that she had quite recovered her nerve and she now felt that she would be able to call again without feeling her blood pressure rising to dangerous heights. Taking stock in quiet retrospect of Harriet who, in spite of her outrageous behaviour, seemed to be harmless after all, she had decided that ‘we must all do our best to help her over an obviously difficult period, poor soul.’ Then, showing a streak of her old fighting spirit, she announced that on no account could she accept inhumane behaviour and never before had she felt so uncharitable towards a human being.

  Chuckling at Mother’s righteous indignation, I carefully glossed over the latest episodes, as if describing a light farce at the local theatre, for I did not wish to destroy her tide of rising courage. I refrained from illuminating the now obvious fact that it seemed to be only her presence that inflamed Harriet to an abusive literary career: for with Mother’s exit at least the pointed incriminating notes had stopped, and the knobkerrie, too, seemed to have momentarily disappeared.

  Mother, still further reassured by my obvious good humour, giving her the feeling that things weren’t so bad after all, promised again to return at an opportune moment and finish tidying the garden.

  Brother Gerald said that during his lying in state with chickenpox, listening for hours to the strange inhuman noises of my lodgers, he too, like Mother in semi-retirement, had found plenty of time for reflection. In his opinion the sounds were equivalent to any Brazilian jungle – though he admitted honestly to my retaliatory attack that he had yet to see such a place but the simile was beside the point; any halfwit could see that what my boarding house needed was not, as he first suspected, the firm hand of a landlord, but the rather more subtle influences of Freud’s or Groddeck’s theories. He thought the next few months of living in their midst was going to be an interesting experience, parallel to the anthropological study of a rare tribe, which would probably make any future safari look like a church outing by comparison and I could now consider we had a resident psychiatrist, free of charge, in our midst. A hollow laugh was all I could produce, but at least, so far, we were still free of animals.

  With the change of weather and the consequent kindling of fires all over the house, Edward had disclosed a new trait in his character – the haunting fear of a blazing house and the slightest suspicious whiff of an acrid smell would send him careering madly to investigate the cause, which usually happened to be behind a locked door with the occupant out. After the second door had collapsed, under force, in the first week of fires, I felt it necessary to lodge a firm but friendly complaint and hand excuses over for Gerald’s analysis. Our analyst, happy to oblige, reading from the pages of a four-inch Groddeck, gave no mercy: the diagnosis was quite unrepeatable and it sent a sheepish Edward to his room for solitude, swearing that when the next fire occurred he would let the house go to blazes.

  Nelson, too, astonished us all by insisting on going to the local church one Sunday, and marshalling the boys to follow – upsetting his mother who felt she was now under an obligation to the vicar and had nothing to wear for such an occasion. He came home bulging with reforms and the attitude of a saint, and the silence from his natterings became as alarming as Harriet’s threats had been. Finding him sitting alone in the summerhouse, amidst the remnants of monkey droppings one chilly evening soon after, his chubby chin tucked in chubby hands, gazing after a salmon-pink sunset belted in silver cloud with an expression touching his eyes which I had never seen there before, I was reduced immediately to one of my usual apprehensive investigations. From the closed window above came the smothered sound of a gramophone and the familiar Negro call pleading for Bill Bailey to return home.

  ‘Why don’t she wrap up – it’s ruinin’ me thoughts,’ he remarked plaintively, referring to the singer and aware of my close inspection.

  ‘What’s up, Nelson?’ I enquired with concern, noting the new furrows creasing the normally smooth plump cushion between his eyes. Could his mother have deprived him of something important? Perhaps there was bad news from the jail – if so, which one?

  ‘Something worrying you?’ I asked heartily, hoping to lift the atmosphere with a boisterous appeal.

  ‘Them colours,’ he spoke softly, ‘sheer ’ideous beauty of them bleedin’ colours. Couldn’t ’ave done a better job meself – I wonder ’ow he did it …’

  ‘Who?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘God, o’ course!’ he said, surprised, throwing me a pained look as if I should have known the answer. ‘Yer know – what that ol’ geezer stands up in that ol’ box an’ spouts about. The Almightily: surely you’ve ’eard ’bout ’im – does good, gives the ol’ lolly away to the poor, and lots of other good things besides – does magic too, changes things. And they crucified ’im for that – just fancy ’orror – those nails …’

  ‘Nelson! Are you sickening for another illness?’ I asked, concerned, touching his arm. It was a solid arm, and no amount of dieting, I reflected, would make the slightest difference. Measles, perhaps? I felt his forehead for signs of a temperature.

  ‘Nope!’ He was scornful. ‘It’s them ’orrors I keep thinkin
’ about …’

  ‘How many children’s diseases have you had?’ I was insistent.

  ‘Only venereal,’ he answered. I refrained from pursuing the subject further. Nelson would go to his grave with a lie on his lips I felt sure, however reformed.

  ‘Listen to that music,’ I said, trying to break this depressing spell of religion, to Nelson’s further declaration of an early childhood spent in twisted agonies in a hospital bed with every childhood disease ending with more of his observations in the last pew of a cold church.

  ‘Doesn’t it make you want to dance, be gay, laugh, make money?’ I paused, wondering what else I could suggest to tempt.

  ‘And cry, maybe?’

  The question was penetratingly grown-up and, shocked, I watched him turn away with a kindly smile as he looked back in the direction of the softening sky, deepening gently to night.

  The distraction of a window opening made us both look skywards. Harriet swung above in leisurely sinister greeting; her hair loose, swept wildly down towards us and if she had flown out on a broomstick I would not have been surprised. Our eyes met.

  ‘Nobody bothers about me,’ she moaned, giving us a frown of unjustified hatred. How long, I wondered, would it be before Harriet qualified for medical attention? She stepped back, and disappeared: the window fell with a heavy thud and I awaited Nelson’s reprisal of derisive remarks – a perfectly normal procedure.

  ‘Poor soul,’ he spouted piously. ‘She must be on the change.’ He sounded so like an imitation of my mother that I looked at him intently to see if he was having one of his little jokes, but there were no wrinkles about the eyes, no half-moon grin. I felt a chill – this, then, was serious. Nelson would be taking Holy Orders next and life would be deprived of an old world jester: so this was what bereavement was, I thought, as I stood in the twilight and contemplated the calamity that had befallen our peak of healthy comedy.

  An owl hooted, circled noiselessly and melted into the blackening trees behind the house. It was a bad omen, I felt, and tried to ignore it.

  ‘Ah well!’ Nelson rose with the tremulous sigh of his mother. ‘I’d better get in an’ give me Ma an ’elping ’and – and you’d best get in too, yer might catch yer death – poor ol’ soul.’

  I felt decrepit, a hundred years old.

  ‘Yes, all right Nelson,’ I acquiesced meekly, deflated and, walking as if I was already on a stick, I made my way indoors. If this was the result of Nelson going to church – away with it!

  My children, it seemed, had come out unscathed: I found them squatting before their uncle listening with avid delight to a descriptive dissection of Mr Budden’s anatomy.

  The drawing room was light, with a blazing fire and, through the round of the window outside stood black and shadowless. I drew to the warmth of the glowing coals listening to Gerald, engrossed in his conversation with Jane before an admiring audience of two boys and a dog. They were sitting under the hard, public bar glow of an unshaded light of maximum strength – Gerald deplored what he called dismal hooded contraptions so that even lifting a glass of spirits became a battle of wits. They were now discussing the domestic life of the gorilla as compared to human environment.

  ‘How right you are, my dear.’ Jane was agreeing that Mr Budden was the nearest thing to a missing link in our circle. She was hanging grimly on Gerald’s every word, her narrow body posed in a sexy way, trying to reveal a saucy bosom, as she twisted her small mouth in a babyish pout. Any minute now, I decided, Jane, under Gerald’s influence, would be sitting in a frosty garden with a magnifying glass examining nature. In some ways, I mused, this might be a restraining influence for since the night of the party and her unfortunate encounter with the debauchee, she considered herself not only a connoisseur of the physical arts, but a woman of great experience. She had become a little blasé, hinted at affairs of the heart, dropping a Freudian phrase here and there with a tragic little droop of skinny shoulder, giving a cynical laugh – carefully adjusted when men were mentioned – mourning her lot in incessant dark colours, accentuating her thin features with long swinging earrings.

  I squatted down now beside Jane, feeling that we might just as well be sitting in the local pub as far as the lights were concerned, for I preferred soft lights to lounge in; and waited for a lapse in the conversation to put my worldly word in. But I waited in vain for my chance, for we were interrupted by the absorbing spectacle of a displaced Barry hugging a newspaper to his bosom and demanding attention.

  He had been in this collapsed state for a few days now, submerged in a mood of desperate despair. The season over, Barry’s beach job had automatically ended and, once again, he had taken temporary employment at a baker’s until the day when his searching brought him that remunerative post with dazzling prospects: very gallantly, I thought, for a baker’s round now became the source of daily bread, much to Paula’s shame. But Barry’s destiny did not include a baker’s round, for after a momentous week he collapsed under the strain and disappeared into the protective cover of a brown blanket, as a tortoise would hide on sensing danger.

  We had rallied forward to console the forlorn apparition and finally managed to persuade him to telephone the bakery and explain that he was temperamentally unsuited to the monotonies of a bread round, but would finish his term of office – ‘with honesty and dignity’ as Gerald put it – and collect any money due.

  Unfortunately the bakery foreman, faced with Barry’s problems at the wrong moment, did not take a lenient or sympathetic view; rude words were exchanged, and a heated discussion started which aggravated a trivial situation to such vast proportions that Barry’s temper, already simmering unpleasantly, broke out in a trembling rage. He threw off his blanket, dressed feverishly in his best suit, swallowed a handful of tranquillizers, and cramming his trilby on at a wolfish angle, with a forced gaiety which rang hollow, he had marched out to the bakery to resume his job, spite the unfeeling foreman, and claim the week’s wages he was convinced he was owed – with our encouraging cheers behind him and a rabbit’s paw in his pocket.

  But Barry had never made the bakery, how, he still doesn’t know. But some hours later, he told us, in a frightened voice, he found himself idling down on the promenade beside an empty beach, the sea pondering sullenly at his feet as he waited patiently for the other Corporation workers to arrive. He didn’t know, he said, just how the realization came, but suddenly, like the breaking of a bad dream, he had remembered with horror that he should be at the bakery, not the beach. Fumbling for a cigarette to soothe his nerves, unable to steady his shaking body, he returned home a frightened man, desperate to discuss the strange occurrence with everybody.

  Tucking him cosily into bed, with genuine sympathy mixed with laughter, and accompanied by Nelson’s uproarious sniggers (he had yet to experience his reforming visits to church), we telephoned Paula, who was not a bit amused. I summoned the doctor, a long-suffering, pale-looking man whose professional touch was tinged with wry humour as he gently told anecdotes, a twinkle lighting the keen blue eyes behind their spectacles, of other victims of tranquillizers – train journeys completed without knowledge, patients in wakeful comas. Surely this would shake Barry’s unquenchable faith in pills, we asked ourselves? The prostrate Barry, delighted at the doctor’s full attention, rallied sufficiently to bandy medical terms with knowledgeable abandon, prescribed his own treatment before the unsuspecting medico could get his second wind, and generally felt a lot better for the encounter.

  After the doctor’s departure I had telephoned the bakery with a murmur of helpful suggestions from the rear and explained the situation to the foreman as best I could. ‘Blimey, I always thought ’e wasn’t right in the ’ead,’ the foreman said rudely, ‘if yer ask me.’

  I wasn’t asking him, so I rang off equally rudely and put the finishing touches to Barry’s career in the bread trade. Barry had now lapsed back, inconsolable again not at the loss of the unpalatable job, but at the indignity of the whole situation. He la
y huddled, Red Indian fashion, surrounded by detective novels, pored for hours over his football coupons as a possible way of escape, and muddled out his troubles to unsatisfactory conclusions. Paula saw her ultimate ambition of being the wife of a business magnate, entertaining at glittering tables, lighted by crystal chandeliers, diminishing, with certainty, to a life spent in one room with the everlasting worry of bills to pay and not enough money to pay with, let alone to squander on luxuries.

  When Barry had recovered enough to descend the stairs we all welcomed him affectionately. His face was rather drawn, and his suntan turning a bilious yellow gave him a melancholy jaundiced appearance, which concerned Jane and gave her the solace of being needed yet again and made me feel that, in spite of everything, Barry’s need was perhaps the most urgent in the house.

  Gerald, welcoming yet another interesting specimen, attacked Barry’s problems in a way he never attacked his own, as though partaking of one of Mother’s most delicious curries. This brought out Edward, who would never miss an evening of idle gossip – he was never far away. He was mellowed at this precise moment, not only by a glow of self-appreciation at the final achievement – a real alcoholic mess contrived by his own hands – but by the gentle sippings which he had revelled in all day, unable to leave the satisfying results of his own labour. Olwen followed reprovingly, her face impassive as a slab of marble.

  We were a small band of Salvation Army strength, drawn together in one cause, to thrash out the important problem of Barry’s career in the unfolding Times before us, as he pointed with a hand that still shook to columns of opportunity that could be his with a bit of luck.