by Tim Pears
Only Simon was at the table in plenty of time to consume his breakfast calmly, and digest it properly, because eating was his number-one priority.
At the age of six and a half Alice declared one morning in the middle of that chaos that she was a vegetarian. She addressed it to no one in particular, in a tone less of conviction than surprise – ‘I’m a vegetarian now, you know,’ she said, as if it were something obvious she’d only just noticed, or else the first half of a joke whose punchline she neither remembered nor fully grasped the need for, a habit Alice had that drove her older brothers insane.
‘What do you get if you cross an elephant with a telephone?’ she’d asked Robert the day before.
‘I don’t know,’ he responded. ‘What do you get if you cross an elephant with a telephone?’
Alice merely shrugged her shoulders.
‘But what’s the answer?’ he demanded.
‘I don’t know, Robert,’ Alice replied.
‘But you must know,’ he complained. ‘What’s the point of asking if you don’t know?’
Alice looked at him sadly. ‘Well,’ she improvised, frowning, ‘you get a telephone with big ears.’ And she walked off, her mind drifting onto other things already, as Robert clenched his fists in exasperation and yelled: ‘I’m not stupid, you know!’
So when Alice quietly announced that she was a vegetarian no one took any notice in the hubbub of half-asleep brains and panicking gulpers, of crackling, crunching cereal, sizzling eggs and bacon and spilt tea. It was only afterwards, when adults had disappeared and children had run cursing late for school, after the kitchen had ceased to shudder with the echoes of raucous voices, that Edna, clearing away the table, found an untouched sausage and a rasher of limp bacon pushed tidily to the side of Alice’s plate. And later that morning, when she made herself a mug of milky coffee for elevenses, Edna began copying out vegetarian recipes from her shelf-ful of cookery books, with each quantity of ingredients amended so that they made up single portions.
That evening at supper the rest of the family tucked in to a steaming steak-and-kidney pie, while Alice had her own small dish of mushroom croustade. Robbie couldn’t quite understand what was happening: she could only stare at Alice’s plate with a look of stupefied consternation. It was one of the first signs that Robbie was getting old.
‘I’m not sure we should indulge Alice,’ Mary ventured to Edna afterwards. ‘It’s only a child’s fad; the sooner she snaps out of it the better, instead of wasting your valuable time.’
‘It doesn’t take me a moment,’ Edna assured her. ‘The child’s got to have her protein. She won’t get it from vegetables and pie-crust.’
Over the following days what was, at first, greeted as a joke soon drew other responses.
‘Who’s been putting these ideas in your head, young lady?’ Charles demanded at dinner. ‘Have you been listening to your cousin Zoe and her father’s crackpot eastern theories? She’s perfectly happy to eat our Sunday roast, Mary, and then I suppose she goes upstairs and tells our children to eat nuts and lettuce!’
‘No one’s told me anything, Daddy,’ Alice told him calmly. ‘I’m just a vegetarian now, that’s all.’
‘She’s so soppy her guts can’t cope with real food,’ said Robert.
‘I suppose you think you’re better than we are, Ali,’ Laura said, offended.
‘There’s Bushmen, I believe, in the Kalahari,’ old Alfred ruminated, ‘who live like beachcombers in the sands of the desert on dried fruit and roots and groundnuts …’
‘Really?’ Alice asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ he continued, ‘and bulbs of plants and wild berries; and caterpillars and grubs …’
‘Oh, no,’ she retreated.
‘And tortoises and ostrich eggs and snakes. And then they go hunting.’
‘She’s right in a way,’ James opined. ‘Maybe we should only eat meat from animals we’ve killed ourselves.’
‘We can soon fix that, lad,’ Stanley told him. ‘I’ll tell you next time I go shooting.’
‘Thanks, Stanley,’ James whispered, aware that Stanley could discern his squeamishness.
‘Mmmm,’ Simon murmured, polishing off his own plate of shepherd’s pie, and then, seeing there were still some leeks in cheese sauce on Alice’s dish: ‘Are you full up, Alice? Do you want me to finish yours off?’
To the universal jeers of those around him Simon exclaimed: ‘Well, I don’t see why someone shouldn’t be half-carnivore, half-vegetarian, actually.’
‘Half-gannet, half-pig, more like,’ Robert replied. ‘Half-fat, half-lard,’ Laura laughed.
‘There’s no need to be cruel, children,’ Charles declared, grinning widely himself.
There were various responses to Alice’s meat-free diet, but the one thing they all had in common was that it took everyone years to fully appreciate that Alice’s vegetarianism was more than a passing whim. Everyone, that is, except Edna, who alone – and from Alice’s first proclamation – took her seriously, somehow perceiving that that enigmatic, elusive child had meant what she said. No one else took her seriously because there was nothing obstinate or stubborn in her nature, and in a household of powerful personalities Alice made her own way among them like a benevolent elf. But Edna alone was right: at the age of six and a half Alice had acquired a moral conviction as naturally as a new tooth, and it was one she would stick to for the rest of her life.
Alfred the gardener rarely joined the family for supper, and then only in the depths of winter. He couldn’t bear to come inside when there was still daylight outside and still things to be done. He could be seen in the garden after darkness had fallen, working by the somewhat erratic light of a bulb Stanley had connected to a lawnmower for him.
During school holidays, when James was at home in the middle of the day Edna gave him a plate of sandwiches to take out to Alfred for lunch, since he usually forgot to come and collect them himself. James crept between the flower beds and approached Alfred from behind, hearing his mellifluous voice as he drew closer.
‘Now you get your roots down well, my lovely,’ he heard. ‘I’ll just nip these shoots off here, don’t fret now, you’ll flourish all the better without them.’
As well as talking to his flowers Alfred also sang to them. Or rather he sang, quietly, of his own accord and they, perhaps, heard him; whether they reacted in the same way as human beings, who can say? His repertoire was limited in genre, alternating between torchsongs and patriotic ditties. ‘Easy come, easy go,’ Alfred sang, and ‘Cocktails and laughter, but what comes after?’
Or else: ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary,’ and ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag’. Alfred’s problem (a problem too for anyone within earshot) was that he didn’t know all the words to a single song in the history of music: he crooned little snatches of songs (and even the snatches were wrong) as he worked, with the briefest of pauses in between.
There’ll be blue crows over
The white cliffs of Dover …
It won’t be a stylish marriage
You can’t afford a carriage
But we’ll look sweet
Upon …
I get a kick from cocaine
That kind of thing doesn’t thrill me at all …
But smoke gets in your eyes.
The other thing about Alfred’s horrendous medleys was that he was unaware he was performing them. Edna would hear him near the back door and say: ‘Oh, go on, how does that tune go?’
‘What tune?’
‘You know, that one you were just singing.’
‘Me? Singing?’ Alfred asked.
It was an unbearable habit, and what made it worse was that it was compulsive listening. Members of the household who wandered unsuspecting into the garden found themselves hypnotized and waiting for the next strain of music to emerge from Alfred’s mouth, to see what it would be and whether he could finish it this time. He never did, but stopped short (unaware of someone not far away unable to
tear themselves out of earshot) before starting on another one:
Give me the moonlight
Give me the …
But much, much more than this
He did it my way.
And when they did finally manage to wrench themselves away it was only to find the same tunes stuck in their heads for the rest of the day.
Alfred spoke to his plants years before the practice came into common use because he liked talking, and there were no people to speak to. He liked people, and he liked talking, but for some years he’d refused to take on an assistant because, he claimed, he couldn’t stand to see a job done cack-handed.
‘There’s perfectionists and bodgers in this life,’ he told James. ‘If a job’s worth doing, and all that, that’s what I say.’ He worked all day long every single day of the week. When he was forced, by an unavoidable social occasion, to take time off he enjoyed himself more than anyone; Alfred was a naturally gregarious man. But then he went straight back to work, because there were always a hundred things that needed doing before the weather changed. ‘Time and tide, and all that,’ he said, taking his leave.
‘People are either fixers or prevaricators, doers or meddlers,’ Stanley, on the other hand, declared. ‘Me, I’m a fixer. There’s too much needs doing around here to hang about. Make it work and move on.’
Robert, standing close by, nodded in silent agreement. ‘Look at it this way,’ Stanley concluded: ‘Would you rather have a car up on a ramp being tuned like a bloody piano, or out on the road, taking you from A to B?’
James wondered which he’d turn out to be when he grew up. Perfectionist or fixer? The fact was he already knew: he was a bodger, because he was basically lazy; and it bothered him only because he had no wish to align himself alongside Stanley, at least not opposite Alfred.
When Alfred mowed the lawns James gave a helping hand, despite Alfred’s making it clear that James was a lot more trouble than he was worth. Alfred used a wide, ancient roller mower that cut the grass, ‘closer than the centre court of Wimbledon’, according to his boast. He steered the mower to and fro in unnervingly straight lines, pausing at each end to empty the bin into a wheelbarrow. When the barrows were full he – or James, shakily returning bits of grass to the perfectly cut lawn on the way – pushed them to the compost heaps in a corner of the vegetable garden: piles of new-mown grass, their fresh, zestful smell, heady with petrol, intoxicating; tiny stalks of grass stuck to sweaty skin; older grass beneath, sometimes slipped into, mulchy rank and yellow.
Alfred mowed the lawns with particular concentration one Thursday in July 1966. ‘That’s a damn sight better turf than Wembley, that is,’ he told Charles, as the marquee arrived.
It was the first wedding James and his brothers and sister had ever been to and was the last of their parents’ generation.
Jack and Aunt Clare, Mary’s sister, had certainly taken their time, having been engaged for many years, but they were both cautious people who didn’t want to be rushed into anything. Jack Smith had inherited his family’s farm to the west of the city, where the river valley began to slope up into the wolds. It was a farm composed almost entirely of stock: mostly sheep, and a small herd of Jersey cows.
‘I can’t be doing with this grain and beet and barley and what have you,’ Jack, a big, bluff man, told Stanley, who was a distant cousin of his, at the stag party Charles threw for him. ‘They’re all too unpredictable. No, you give me animals, I can understand them all right.’
Jack finally decided to press ahead with the wedding only when someone pointed out to him that until he did so there’d be no sons to inherit the farm – it would pass directly to his younger brother’s daughters – and it was a good thing he did because Clare could have gone on for ever without making up her mind. Her younger sister Mary had got married to the man-in-charge almost as soon as she was legally allowed to, while Margaret, the eldest, disdained the institution.
Neither Jack nor Clare was a believer, but they agreed that only a church service represented a proper wedding, and they took advantage of Clare’s church-going sister and brother-in-law’s good offices to get married in their church.
The parish priest was a young man with a righteous air and a propensity for giggling. Old ladies – widows and spinsters and women who’d found themselves wedded to heathens – made up the majority of the congregation, and they thought the vicar a man of rare and enchanting spirituality. Of the rest, even the children, who had to go to Sunday school each week and rejoin the adult congregation for the end of the family service, found it difficult to take him seriously.
It was a High Anglican church, a Victorian Gothic building, where the churchwardens, the sacristan and the choirmaster together ensured that the young priest did things the way they’d always done them, which seemed to suit him anyway. They waved incense and rang bells of various sizes and sounds, sung the responses and recited prayers in Latin. Different verses of each hymn were sung without warning in completely different ways: men abstained from a verse; then the women sang descant; and in another the entire congregation refrained, leaving it to the choir alone, according to a complex formula people could only grasp if they’d been worshipping at that same church since childhood, and which caught out unwitting visitors.
It was 1966, and the Parochial Church Council had recently acknowledged the fact that they’d entered the twentieth century by voting by a majority of one to admit females to the choir, a local schism being averted only through the young vicar’s charm in placating the irate old ladies. Alice was the youngest among the first intake of girls and Simon was one of the servers, dressed in a ruff-collared surplice, with a special responsibility to ring a bell during prayers.
James was going through that stage of a boy’s development when his parents fear their son’s some kind of idiot savant: he was obsessed with statistics, and could reel them off like the memory man on TV. In James’ case they were ones related to football; far from being the irrelevant arcana they appeared to others, however, they actually broadened his mind and enlivened his interest in the subjects at school that had bored him. Aided by the supernatural memory of a ten-year-old English schoolboy, James developed an awareness of his country’s geography by mentally dotting the map with the ninety-two Football League grounds; he began to discern the significance of history through memorizing the dates of each club’s foundation; and he understood the different populations of towns and cities, and their demographic shifts, by studying ground capacities and crowd attendances.
When the date for the wedding was fixed – for 30 July – the previous winter, it had occurred to no one to check the date of the World Cup final, to be held in England for the first time, nor indeed that England’s own team might reach the final. But they had. James and Lewis (whose family had also been invited) had been trying all week to work out how to slip away from the reception at the big house just for a moment – well, just for two hours. Robert regarded their fearful planning with scorn.
‘Just go ahead and do it,’ he sneered. ‘The worst you’ll get’s a whack from Dad.’
‘That’s easy for you to say,’ James replied. ‘You don’t like football.’
‘Yeah, but if I did, I’d have the guts to take it. And you know I would, too.’
The boys got no sympathy from their parents. Charles dismissed sport. ‘Life’s a game,’ he told James. ‘Life is competition. You’re a winner or a loser in life. Competition’s too important to play games with. Don’t waste your ruddy energy on sport, James.’
Lewis’s father was no more helpful. ‘This here’s your mother’s second cousin gettin’ married, boy. It’s about time you knew: family is more important than sport and all that.’
‘What if it was the final day of the fifth Test between England and the Windies?’ Lewis demanded of his father.
‘And don’t be talking to your elders in that tone of voice, boy,’ Garfield told him.
Mary saw that James was becoming obsessed with missing wh
at even she could appreciate was a special event, and it increased her own anxiety. One of the few responsibilities she embraced was the behaviour of the children in public.
‘Imagine you’re watching a film,’ she told James on the morning itself. ‘Imagine you’re in the cinema.’ It crossed her mind to ask the vicar if Agatha could come and distribute ice-cream and popcorn during one of the hymns.
It must have been the idea of the cinema that gave Mary the inspiration of a camera. She rushed someone off to buy one and showed James how to use it in the middle of getting dressed herself. ‘Whenever you feel yourself getting bored,’ she advised him, ‘just think about taking a picture of Jack and Aunt Clare up at the altar with the vicar and Daddy, who’s giving Clare away, and Ben, Jack’s best man. But only click it,’ she added hastily, ‘in the middle of a hymn.’
The house was full at that moment of an extraordinary hustle and bustle. Guests from out of town dumped their suitcases and changed their clothes in the spare bedrooms, Edna supervised a team of caterers in the kitchen, Stanley and Alfred set up chairs and tables in the voluminous marquee that had blown up like a balloon on the lawn the day before.
Charles was striding around bellowing at people in a good-natured way. He came into Mary’s dressing-room, said: ‘My God, you’re going to upstage the poor bride, darling,’ and had his hand on her bottom before noticing James fiddling with the camera on the floor. ‘I hope you’re ready, James,’ Charles told him. ‘Don’t distract your mother,’ he ordered, and left the room.
James practised clicking the camera, taking pretend pictures of his mother putting on mascara at her dressing-table mirror. ‘Is this going to be like your wedding was?’ he asked her.
‘You’re not like him at all, are you?’
‘Who?’
‘Ours was a mistake,’ she said distractedly.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘I mean ours was much bigger, James,’ Mary said. ‘We had hundreds of guests. Run along now; make sure the others are ready.’