Girl With Dove

by Sally Bayley

  ‘That must be a bit tricky if they ever had an accident,’ said Maze.

  ‘Perverts poo all over themselves,’ said my younger brother Michael.

  ‘I meant if they ever dropped any food over themselves. Hot soup wouldn’t be very nice, never mind corn flakes,’ said Maze.

  When Aunt Jayne took us to the beach we had to make sure that nobody thought we were perverts. This was difficult for me, because my swimming costume was made from crochet. Anybody and everybody, if they wanted to, could see right through it, right through to everything!

  Crochet is a kind of knitting, but with lots of holes. Crochet is French and means ‘hook’. To crochet you need a sharp needle with a hook at the top. To crochet is to thread one stitch through another. When you crochet you pass one stitch across, back and through and behind another. When you crochet you create gaps big enough to poke your fingers through.

  Crochet lets in a lot of air, and that’s why Mum liked it so much. Mum was fond of aired bodies.

  ‘Nicely aired now, nice and open. You want everything open to the air, in the summer. Toes and tummies!’

  ‘But not fannies,’ my brother said. ‘Never ever show your fanny.’

  Mum liked us to wear open-toed sandals to the beach. Jesus-creepers we called them, horrible, embarrassing Jesus-creepers. No one wore Jesus-creepers, only people with coloured clothes and long hair, people who sang about Jesus with stars in their eyes.

  Nobody wore Jesus-creepers. Nobody! Nobody! Nobody! We told Mum this but she wouldn’t listen. Everyone wore trainers except us. Everyone, everyone, everyone!

  Aunt Jayne didn’t wear Jesus-creepers; she wore silvery sandals that dipped down towards the ground. Above her ankles sat a pretty hem. Aunt Jayne sailed out of our house with her cotton hem rippling across her calves. Aunt Jayne billowed. She set sail.

  And she kept us out all day. The minute Aunt Jayne put a cardigan over her sundress we knew it was time to go home.

  And when we got home, Mum was always there, sounding cross. ‘Get back outside right now and hose yourselves down. I don’t want you walking any more sand through the house.’

  Sand always put Mum in a bad mood. She didn’t seem to mind the rest: the layers and layers of carpet fluff or thick grease building up around the tiles; or the green mould lining the edges of the bath, so thick it resembled a pond; or the mildew hanging from the ceiling of the hallway; or the rotting wood along the windowpanes; or the rust stuck to the front-door latch, the rust around the lock, the rust that meant that several times a week we couldn’t open the back garden gate and run down the twitten, the twitten where we were never really allowed.

  A twitten, by the way, is an alleyway. Mum loved the word ‘twitten’. If you went down the twitten you were likely to turn into a ‘twit’, another of Mum’s favourite words. To be a twit was to behave as though your brain was switched off; a twit was someone who wasn’t thinking; a twit was a twig and a twig could be blown away on a puff of wind; a twig would get stuck in your hair and you’d end up walking around with it in the back of your head all day without you knowing it was there. When that happened you really were a twit, and everyone could see it. To be honest, Jane Eyre is a bit of a twit when she leaves her bag behind in the carriage. Aunt Jayne was never a twit because she was slim and stylish and people looked at her when she passed by; Aunt Jayne lived in London and in London people had jobs and earned money. People who lived in London were rarely destitute and alone.

  ——————————

  But Aunt Jayne wasn’t always in the good books. She had a boyfriend and a boyfriend might lead to marriage and that was terrible. Look what happened to Betsey Trotwood – she married and it was a disaster. The handsome husband ran off to India and dragged her name through the mud. He was probably wearing a dhoti over there just to shame her. A dhoti, Mum said, was a cotton nappy, ‘a very peculiar way to go on … practically savage’.

  Marriage was the worst thing anyone could ever do. To be married was to be inside Mr Brocklehurst’s burning pit. To be married was to be eaten alive by hot flames; flames licking up the flesh on your calves, your thighs, your arms, your neck, your hair. To be married was to be immolated, to be swallowed up whole by fire. This happens to widows in India after their husbands die. Women in India throw themselves on a bonfire after their husbands die. Of course Betsey Trotwood didn’t do this. She had more sense.

  No. After her husband died, Betsey Trotwood moved to a little village by the sea and began to keep donkeys. She took up with a man called Mr Dick, who, by the way, was never her boyfriend. Boyfriends and husbands are nothing but trouble, Mum says, it’s bound to lead to a sticky end.

  14

  The Silver Jubilee

  Aunt Jayne was down the year of the Silver Jubilee. That was 1977, the year the queen sat in St Paul’s Cathedral and lifted a golden sceptre up towards the sky. That summer, Aunt Jayne was wearing a pretty sundress and she was sitting close to the queen. I could hear them speaking.

  Queen: Hello, dear, how are you? I do like your sundress, such a pretty pattern. Is it poppies? Yes, red poppies on a blue and white background. How refreshing! I can’t get away with such a thing. They like me to cover my arms, you know. It’s more refined. A queen isn’t supposed to show off her arms.

  Aunt Jayne: You could always try a shawl, a nice lacy one. Ange – she’s my sister – makes a lovely bit of crochet. She could come up with something, quick as a flash, and then you wouldn’t need to worry about your arms. You’re still young, Your Majesty. And you have a lovely smile. That’s all we’ll be looking at, your beautiful, beaming, royal smile!

  Then the queen looked at Aunt Jayne and smiled one of her bright-as-a-torch-at-midnight smiles. This young woman would make a very good lady-in-waiting, thought the queen.

  ‘Now, Your Royal Highness, I do think this pale mauve might do you very well for your going-away dress.’

  ‘But my dear, I’m not getting married. This is my Jubilee!’

  ‘But Your Highness, it’s nice to have something you can move well in. You don’t want to be tripping over your own hem. It’s better to have the hem sitting on the top of your ankles rather than on the bottom. And you want a little heel … Nothing too much, just enough to pick you up off those hard paving stones. They’re so chilly on the bones.’

  ——————————

  Jubilee month was hot and sunny and people were eating strawberries at Wimbledon. Aunt Jayne was down and the front door sat on the latch.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, leave the door on the latch.’ Mum was anxious. She was expecting a delivery. Ding dong!

  The bell rang and we ran downstairs. Outside, a large cardboard box was sitting next to our lion. My brothers carried it upstairs.

  ‘A television,’ Mum said solemnly. We’d never seen a television before. It was small and black and grey and made of plastic. It didn’t look like anything at all.

  ‘I wanted the larger one, but it was out of our range. This is the best we can do,’ Mum said.

  We perched the black-and-grey square on an old coffee table in my aunt’s room and fiddled with the aerial to try and tune it. But the channels kept fizzing in and out.

  ‘Poor reception,’ said Mum. ‘We’ve got poor reception. I told the man in Curry’s we needed a bigger aerial. There are a lot of us. I told him that. There are a lot of us to fit around and pass through. We need a bigger aerial. But they never listen, those men in those shops. You tell them what you want and they never, ever listen.’

  We lay on the carpet in front of the small square box and waited for the fizzing to stop. Every time a breeze ran through the room the aerial flopped over and hung like a dead bird across the screen.

  ‘For goodness’ sake! Someone sit that thing down properly. Get some tape … use your brain … Tape it down to the back! It’ll snap in two. It’s all cheap plastic … nothing is ever properly made these days … everything Made in China, as if the Chinese have any idea what we
in England require in our front room!’

  ——————————

  That June we lay like lizards with our stomachs pressed close to the floor and watched the queen glide down the nave of Westminster Abbey: the queen in black and white, the queen in 1953, the queen twenty-five years before, the queen going to get her crown.

  All day long the queen was in black and white. I can’t remember her in colour. I see her moving like a pretty ghost down a long, endless nave, with a smile fixed to her face as if it might fall off. Behind us I can hear my aunt’s voice blaring out.

  ‘Well, she’s got her life set out for now, Ange, hasn’t she? And she’ll outlive Charles. Women always do. That woman will keep going until she’s ninety … a hundred. You’ll see. She looks like a sylph but she’s built like an ox. That woman’s going nowhere. Charles doesn’t stand a chance. He’s stiff as a ramrod. Look at him! I can’t imagine him catching a girl, can you? Someone must have put him up to taking her on. There’s not much natural passion there. They’re all stiff in that family – stiff as a doorpost. No life in them except when they drink, I bet. But the queen’s got her smile on right, you have to give her that. She’s got that smile worked out, and that smile’s going nowhere!’

  ‘It’s a pity it’s in black and white,’ said Mum. ‘Takes away from the dress.’

  ‘Twenty-six-inch waist. Small. Tiny really, a will-o’-the-wisp … nipped in. Well, they don’t have time to eat, do they? It’s all for show. Banquets and dinners. Nobody eats at those. They just pick at it. You raise your fork at the right moment and nod and smile.’

  The queen wasn’t doing much nodding today. She was perfectly still, like a statue, except when she was gliding and raising her rod. ‘There she goes … up with the orb and sceptre, down with the crown. They must have to practise that a few times. That would take some doing. She must have some steel in her, that woman.’

  The queen was one of those ships in the harbour with buoys hanging off her to keep her moored. Today, her crown was a bobbing buoy. I watched the crown lower slowly over her head. It took forever to reach the tip of her hair. It didn’t look as if it would fit. It was too big. A puff of wind and it would blow right off out to sea.

  ‘Must take hours of practice to sit that still,’ said Mum.

  ‘Deportment, Ange. All the Royals have deportment lessons. She’ll have practised this countless times before. They’d have had several run-throughs … nothing is left to chance. That’s what being a Royal is all about. After all, you can’t afford to get anything wrong for the telly, can you?’

  Poor queen! She existed only for the telly. The queen was a tiny girl in black and white inside a small plastic box. I felt sorry for her. She looked very lonely sitting in Westminster Abbey with only old men around her, droopy old men who kept dropping things on her head.

  ‘She must be very stiff now. She hasn’t moved for hours,’ I said.

  ‘She goes right back to the Tudors and Plantagenets,’ announced my aunt with her ‘all of history’ voice on. She was wrong: the queen went back to the House of Hanover in Germany. We’d done it at school with Mr Drake.

  ‘The Tudors were the first great kings and queens of England. Henry VIII is in her blood. You can see it around the eyes. See, Ange – they’re just a little piggy. The Tudors have small, piggy eyes … mean eyes, red around the rim.’

  I peered closely at the queen. I couldn’t see any signs of a red beard or a bulging belly. Her eyes weren’t small and piggy. The queen was small and pretty – petite, my grandmother said. The queen was petite. Her face was neat and pretty and tidied away like Miss Marple’s best silver. The queen was definitely pretty. But it was a sensible sort of pretty. She didn’t have time to spend in front of the mirror. The queen had to get on with things. Spit-spot. If you were the queen it didn’t really matter how pretty you were, only how well you smiled and shook hands, and how well you could remember names. ‘His Royal Highness of Eurasia’. That sort of thing. You probably had to remember huge long lists of names, names of people you’d never see again.

  But you had to greet them well, shake their hand firmly but graciously and ask them how their trip had been across the Indian Ocean. Had they managed to catch forty winks? Except you wouldn’t put it like that. You’d ask His Royal Highness of Eurasia if he was well rested and then you’d ask after his family, whose names you’d also have to know. Then you’d wish you’d written them all down. The queen must carry bits of paper in her handbag with lists of names written on them. She must have a special names-only notebook which her ladies-in-waiting keep up to date like Mum’s Special Numbers at the back of her diary.

  Finally, after an age, the queen went out into the crowds to wave.

  ‘Why doesn’t she walk about a bit?’ said my cousin. ‘Isn’t she allowed?’

  ‘She might get shot,’ said my brother Michael. ‘Then there’d be blood everywhere and the police would have to come with guns and there’d be more shooting and the queen would have to throw herself into a bush, and then we’d see up her dress, and all the camera men would be snooping around taking pictures up the queen’s dress, and the next day the newspapers would be full of pictures of the queen’s knickers and the queen’s bum stuck inside a bush.’

  ‘And she’d miss lunch,’ piped up my cousin.

  ‘Pack it in, you lot, we can’t hear the commentary. There’ll be no such thing! The queen has bodyguards, hired guards. They’ll be swarming all over the place like ants.’

  ‘They should be disguised as birds,’ said my middle brother. ‘Or bats.’

  ‘Bats and mice,’ I said. ‘Voles.’

  ‘Big black crows,’ said my brother.

  ‘Shh! Pack it in! We can’t hear a thing!’

  ‘There’s nothing to hear,’ I said. ‘Only the crowd cheering.’

  ‘Shh! I want to hear the commentary. They might read some poetry or something in the Poets’ Corner. William Wordsworth is buried there, you know, Dice. Oh, I do hope someone does a nice “Daffodils”.’

  ‘If the queen got shot, who would take over?’ asked my brother.

  ‘Shh! The queen is not going to get shot. Pack it in and listen. They’re about to start. I want to hear the words – “Beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze … when all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils.” Look, the archbishop is getting up to read. He’s got a lovely reading voice … chocolatey, like Sinatra.’

  15

  The Beach Hotel

  I haven’t said much about men so far because men never stayed very long in our house. Men came and went, came and went, like gadflies, but when Mum said Sinatra she meant the man we called Laurie.

  What do I know about Laurie? Well, that Laurie is short for Laurence. Maze told me that. And Laurie is the man standing at the back door the day David went missing. Laurie is the man going away in the ambulance. Laurie is the man with a pink bleary face; Laurie is the man going bald; Laurie is the man in the photo with my pink sausage dog between his legs. Laurie is the man with long gangly legs and arms and a thick Scottish accent. Laurie is the man who says ‘pet’ a lot, and Laurie is my dad.

  Laurie had another wife once called Nadine. That was before all this. Nadine liked to shout and scream and I think she liked to drink. Sometimes she ran around with a knife and that’s when the real trouble began.

  According to my aunt, Laurie and Nadine used to row all the time. Night after night the saucepan went flying, and then one night, a very bad night, Laurie ended up with a knife in his back. It was because of that knife that Dad ran away from Eastbourne and his grotty flat to find Zion.

  It was Maze who first told him about Zion: Zion, she said, meaning ‘pure in heart’. Zion: those waiting for the Kingdom of God to come; those people who came to Lancing on Sea in 1969 looking for The Lady Who Knew God. It was in Zion that Mum met Dad sitting cross-legged on the carpet with his mouth wide open and his hands in the air.

  ————�
�—————

  But once upon a time, before I was born, things were very different between Mum and Dad. Once upon a time, Dad was in love with Mum, and this is the story Maze told me in between the washing up.

  It is Saturday night in 1969 and Mum is dressed up to go out. She’s been getting ready for hours. Her blonde hair sits in neat circles on the top of her lacy dress; her pink frilly shoes sit close together. Clutching her black leather handbag close to her waist, Mum trembles and lifts the curtain.

  The occasional car goes by. She’d better stay here, she thinks. She might miss him if she stands by the door. Her shoes pinch. She should sit down for as long as she can; fold her legs beneath her and hold in the fright.

  A car hoots and Mum jumps. She opens her bag to check for her purse. Snap. She checks for the note. Just about enough. Snap. She stands up and smooths down her skirt. She knows a lady never wears creases. She will be home by ten thirty.

  ‘Laurie,’ she said to Maze. ‘He’s called Laurie.’

  ‘Laurence with a “u” or a “w”?’ Maze asks.

  ‘With a “u”.’

  ‘With a “u”. Friendlier. Not a Lawrence of Arabia.’

  Hoot. Hoot. Mum runs out. Inside the car she remembers she has forgotten her scarf.

  ‘It’ll be cold along the pier. You’ll get a chill.’

  Never mind. They can go inside for a coffee. Mum likes coffee, coffee with cream. She likes to watch it pour.

  ‘Marilyn Monroe,’ he said. ‘You look like Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot.’

  ——————————

  There is another story about Mum and Dad, less sweet; for a tiny while Mum thought about marriage. The evening on the pier had turned serious; the man from Glasgow had won her heart. Mum had on her dress, her frilly white heels, her Bo-peep handbag, her special Lancôme scent. On the morning of her wedding she clutched a posy of pink roses to her breast.